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It was a seismic event
when Mt. McEnroe erupted
of TheColumnists.com
As the Wimbledon action wends toward the weekend’s climaxes of women’s and men’s finals, my mind goes back to 1981 and one of the remarkable Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde performances in any sport.
This was John McEnroe, the First Angry Man, who made an obnoxious fool of himself on the court and then showed tremendous class in showing up at the press conferences afterward and facing a hostile media on the way to stunning the tennis world by upsetting Bjorn Borg’s try for a sixth straight Wimbledon championship.
The hystrionics started with his first match of the tournament against American Tom Gullickson. Though he was ahead two sets to zero and seemed well on the way to winning, Mt. McEnroe erupted.
He told an embattled umpire who wouldn’t overrule a linesman’s call, “You’ve got to be the absolute pits of the world.” He received a penalty point; he ridiculed the referee who told him in a soft voice, “You are abusing me.” In another outburst he shouted at an umpire, “You cannot be serious.” That somehow endeared him to his admirers and he chose that line, “You cannot be serious” as the title of his autobiography.
He would go on to beat Gullickson in straight sets. It was difficult for most observers to understand how he could behave that way when he was so far ahead. It would be understandable, if not excusable, if he behaved badly from the pressure of a close match, but he was breezing when he exploded.
For what it is worth he explained in his autobiography why he behaved like that. He wrote, “My confidence in myself made me nervous deep down in places nobody knew about. One of the hardest things for me has always been to live up to my potential-to beat the guys I shouldn’t lose to in the early rounds, and get to the finals where I was supposed to be…I could be dominating a guy, 6-2, 6-2, 2-0 and 40-love on his serve-but if he somehow got out of that game, the negative thoughts would start creeping in.”
I wrote at the time that, “By any standard of good manners, McEnroe deserved to be thrown off the court and out of the tournament for such asinine, spoiled, pipsqueak tantrums like the one against Gullickson.”
But then there was the McEnroe after the match ended. When Jimmy Connors, another miscreant, had such an outburst or lost a big match, he would go off and hide. Not McEnroe. He came to the BBC radio and TV interviews and met the press after that. He said he didn’t think that he had acted so badly and that he had some issues with the way the officials ran the tournament. But he didn’t duck any questions.
And then, when asked what he hoped to accomplish by such bad behavior, he said, “Nothing, I suppose. I agree that it is wrong and not diplomatic. I know I won’t be a champion in a real sense until I am able to go out and not let it [perceived bad calls] bother me. I haven’t got over that hill, yet, where I should know that an official is going to make six or seven bad calls each match…Maybe someday I will be able to get bad calls and accept that I am a good enough player to win anyway. Maybe someday….”
“Someday’’ never arrived. He was constantly going off the deep end, but the notoriety eventually worked in his favor because he won. He upset Borg in that 1981 Wimbledon, won three Wimbledons in all and three straight U.S. Open titles. He became a commercial war horse for a time, had his autobiography published and has become so desired as a TV analyst that ESPN, CBS and NBC all use him for the grand slam tournaments. I think he makes some perceptive comments, but he is a motormouth, a compulsive talker who often doesn’t give it a rest.
But as Humphrey Bogart said about Paris to Ingrid Bergman in the movie “Casablanca,” McEnroe “will always have” the Wimbledons of 1980 and 1981. In the 1980 final he and Borg played that remarkable 34-game fourth set tiebreaker which he won, 18-16, before losing in the fifth set (though many people have come to think he won that match). And in 1981, despite all the infuriating blow-ups on the way to the final, he calmed down as he always did against Bjorn Borg and won in four sets.
I wrote at the time, “Wimbledon--All the fuss and furor of the past two weeks here culminated for John McEnroe yesterday in an upset victory that put him in the ranks of brash-young-upstarts-turned conquerors like Cassius Clay and Joe Namath. He put all the winds of controversy out of his mind and brought Bjorn Borg, the King of Wimbledon no longer, to his knees….
“Out on the crucible of Centre Court, with 15,000 fans ready to scream on every point, with Princess Grace, Prince Rainier and Lady Diana in the royal enclosure, it was the stunning tennis, the artistic shot making of McEnroe, the devilish serves that he sliced to Borg from the advantage court that prevailed. They both played marvelous shots, but McEnroe’s racket had the English of royalty to it.”
When it was over, McEnroe raised both arms in victory, punched the air with his fist, and paraded around the court with the trophy. He faced the standees on both sides of Centre Court, none of whom applauded louder than the two rogues who had waited on line for the men’s final for a week, one dressed in a jester’s outfit, the other as a clown.
The date was July 4 and McEnroe was dressed in blue and white with a red headband. “Stick a feather in his cap and call him ‘McEnroney,” said the irrepressible sage, Bud Collins.
©2007 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs
caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted
July 3, 2007.
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