You Cannot Be Serious by John McEnroe;James Kaplan Page A

powers-that-be, always condescending to anyone they felt was unimportant (which meant nearly everybody), had finally seen fit to sit up and take notice of John Patrick McEnroe, Jr., of Douglaston, Queens. I was worthy of attention—not Centre Court attention yet, but Court One isn’t chopped liver. And I was also worthy of the toughest opponent I’d faced so far in the tournament.
    His name was Phil Dent, and he had an unblemished record against me.
     
     
     
    Y ES, IT WAS the same Phil Dent who had beaten me in the second round at the French just three weeks before (and had gone on to the semifinals, where he’d lost to Brian Gottfried). This was not the second round at the French, however; it was the quarterfinals at Wimbledon, an entirely different proposition. The stakes were now immeasurably higher. Dent was the first seeded player I’d faced in the tournament, and even though he was only seeded thirteenth, he was seeded, I was nobody, and he was going to defend his position with every ounce of strength in his body and every bit of experience in his brain.
    Strangely enough, though, I wasn’t overwhelmingly nervous, despite my sudden elevation to such august surroundings. I was riding a wave of confidence: I knew I could play with the big boys, and I thought I could beat Dent. Our match in Paris had been close, after all, and from an early age, one of my strengths had been the ability to figure out an opponent’s game after I’d played him once.
    I thought I had Dent figured out. I won the first set fairly handily, 6–4, but in the second set, he dug in, and I lost a tiebreaker. I was mad at myself—and, if the truth be told, I was starting to feel a little nervous, deep down. Even when you’re playing best-of-five-sets, you want to establish momentum, and I’ve never been a great come-from-behind player. When I get behind is when the doubts start to seep in.
    So as we were about to change sides after the tiebreaker, I put my Wilson Pro Staff racket under my sneaker and tried to bend it until it broke.
    And that big, close-in, well-mannered English crowd booed me. Who was this curly-headed upstart, this petulant boy, this nobody, to disturb the decorum of Court One?
    It was the first time I’d ever been booed. I thought, “That’s funny.” So instead of picking my racket up, I kicked it along the grass as I walked toward my chair.
    The boos got louder.
    The English were quite upset with me, but I have to tell you, at that moment I mostly felt amused. As impressed as I may have been with Wimbledon and its tremendous history—and unlike a lot of young players then (and almost all young players now), I really did have respect for tennis history—I found England to be strange and stodgy and quaint.
    When I saw those dozing linesmen, I thought, “This isn’t what Wimbledon should look like.” The club and the tournament were beautiful, but the whole atmosphere was totally set in its ways and self-important beyond belief. I couldn’t help resenting how badly the organizers treated the lesser players and how they genuflected to the stars. I was incredulous at all that bowing and curtsying to royalty and lesser royalty. It felt like the class system at its worst. I was a kid from Queens, a subway rider. How could anybody expect me to take all this strawberries-and-cream malarkey seriously?
    I’d better get to the top, I thought, so I could be treated well, too.
     
     
     
    I STARTED TO GET a few bad line calls in the third set. And so, with Dent’s parting words to me at the French Open still ringing in my ears, I took my complaints straight to the umpire, who was about as receptive as you’d expect. I, in turn, started to get a little hot under the collar (just a little, still, at that early point in my career).
    Now the crowd was really getting worked up. Callow kid that I was, I found the crowd’s extreme investment in the match and its decorum strange and rather comical. In retrospect, though, I