You Cannot Be Serious by John McEnroe;James Kaplan Read Free Book Online

out, and other kids thought I was some kind of wimp. In the years since, people have stopped seeing tennis (and soccer, for that matter) as a sissy game—though what hasn’t changed is the sense that it’s still too inaccessible and expensive. Something needs to be done about that.
    In the ninth grade, I left Buckley and started making my commute to Trinity, and practically as soon as I arrived, I became known as “the tennis guy.” It was an extremely minor distinction: people didn’t exactly come out of the woodwork to watch my high-school matches. The fact that I lived in Queens, while virtually everyone else in the school was from Manhattan, also made me kind of an outsider.
    Remember my saying I was a top student at Buckley? Trinity was where I discovered mediocrity, at least academically. Tennis and soccer became increasingly distracting—and so did girls.
    Up to that point, my love life, if you want to call it that, had been a bit of a comedy of errors. I take the blame. I was shy and a little arrogant at the same time. I had plenty of athletic confidence, but I certainly didn’t think of myself as God’s gift to girls. As a result, I made a lot of fairly clumsy moves.
    The first girl I ever kissed was Jeannie Gengler, behind the tennis bubble at Port Washington, in the seventh grade. It felt like a very big deal—to me, at least. After all, Jeannie was in the eighth grade! She was also from a big tennis family—her sister Margie was a player, too, who later married Stan Smith. And Jeannie really liked me. I don’t know why, but she did.
    So what did I do next? Not more than a couple of days after that kiss, I asked another girl in my class, Susan Weinstein, to go steady! I never said a word about it to Jeannie. Susan said she’d think it over.
    This happened on a Friday, and I thought I was all set. Then Monday came along, I walked into class, and Susan gave me the big freeze-out: She was already going steady with someone else, she said. What had happened, of course, was that Susan and Jeannie had talked to each other. By Monday, it seemed as if everyone in the class knew what a jerk I’d been. I felt terrible about what I’d done to Jeannie and mortified about what Susan had done to me. It was awful.
    By the time I got to Trinity, nothing had happened to bolster my sexual self-confidence (and it didn’t help matters that I was one of the smallest kids, boy or girl, in the ninth grade.) I did like a few girls in my class—one, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, now runs the political magazine The Nation. I would stare at her, and try to talk to her, but when I opened my mouth to ask her on a date, nothing came out. The humiliation from seventh grade still felt fresh.
    Miraculously enough, though, I found my first real girlfriend in tenth grade. Jean Malhame was a Douglaston girl, the younger sister of my buddy Jim Malhame. She was dark-haired and pretty, and she played a very decent game of tennis. God knows why she liked me, but God bless her.
     
     
     
    I N M AY OF MY TENTH-GRADE YEAR —this was now 1975—I took my first solo trip, to a resort called Walden on Lake Conroe, outside of Houston, to try to qualify for the Junior Davis Cup team. It would be a tremendous honor to make the team—not to mention the fact that if I did, all my expenses would be covered for the ten weeks I’d play over the summer. My parents had been shelling out a lot of money to take me to tournaments: I wanted to help out, and to feel a bit more independent, too.
    There were twelve spots on the team, and most of the guys going out for them were a year or two older than I was, bigger and stronger and more accomplished. Nobody in the 16-and-unders had ever qualified for JDC before.
    I was in Texas for a week and a half, and it was unbelievably hot and humid. I’d never felt heat like that before. Primarily because of my light skin, heat has always been my worst enemy on a tennis court. My nerve endings frazzle, my concentration