On Being John Mcenroe

Chapter One: Perfect Day In the summer of 1983, I queued up for most of a drizzly night in south London to watch John McEnroe play the unseeded American Bill Scanlon in the last sixteen at Wimbledon. To pass the time in the queue I'd brought a couple of books to read. One of them was J. D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. I'd not long before read The Catcher in the Rye, and had developed a carefully worked out theory (I seem to remember) that McEnroe was, in fact, a latter-day Holden Caulfield, unable and unwilling to grow up, full of complicated genius and unresolved conflict, constantly railing against the phoniesdozing linesmen, tournament organisers with walkie-talkiesin authority. I'd brought the novella along therefore, I imagine, in a dubious kind of private homagemy only defence is that I was seventeenor at least in the pretentious belief that it would make an appropriate preface to the next day's match. In any case, when I was reading it in the grey dawn halfway down Somerset Road, a particular passage stuck in my head. Salinger was struggling to describe the idea of perfection in one of his character's lives, and the closest he could get to it was a tennis match. Perfection was, he suggested, a feeling like "someone you love coming up onto the porch, grinning after three hard sets of victorious tennis, to ask you if you saw the last shot he made." It undoubtedly seemed to me then, and it still just about seems to me now, that this was the kind of feeling that John McEnroe was always restless for, and sometimes able to communicate in his game: a kind of instinctive euphoria. He'd found it a few times in his matches against Bjorn Borg, but at the age of twenty-four, after his great rival had retired prematurely, it already looked like he was struggling to summon that kind of heightened sense. As a result he was looking more angry and disconsolate than ever. Certainly that was the case on that heavily clouded afternoon against the prosaic Scanlon. McEnroe won somewhat disdainfully in straight sets, using all the angles, berating himself and the officials, scratching his head, tugging at the shoulders of his shirt, having a great deal of trouble at changeovers with the lacing of his shoes, searching all the time for something like the appropriate sense of occasion. He had never, of course, looked entirely comfortable on a tennis court, constantly vigilant as he was for the one thing that was ruining it all for him that daya spectator with a cough, a television microphonebut all through that year's tournament, which he won by beating the starstruck Kiwi Chris Lewis in a hopelessly one-sided final, he played as if something was absent from his life. I had a sense then, watching him desperately try to find some kind of self-respect, that the thing which was missing, the thing that had been taken away from him, and from the rest of us, was the real shot at perfection or fulfillment which his games against Borg had offered. He had needed something in his rival to make himself feel whole. Nearly twenty years later, when I asked him about this during an interview in Chicago, he agreed with the interpretation. "In 1981 when I beat Borg in the Wimbledon finals and then beat him at the US Open, suddenly, out of nowhere, he stopped playing the major events," he said. "To me it was devastating, if that's the word. . . . I certainly got very empty after that because it had been so very exciting up to that point. Of course, there were other great challengesIvan Lendl and Jimmy Connorsbut it was so natural with Borg. Our personalities were so different, the way we played was so different, nothing ever needed to be said."Adams, Tim is the author of 'On Being John Mcenroe', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400081479 and ISBN 1400081475.