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

wasn’t even my fault. One day, Port Washington went to Princeton to play their team. My matches were over, a few were still being played, and the rest of us were standing around by the bus, just looking for something to do. So Peter Rennert and I decided to go down to the Jadwin Gym and play a little basketball. Before we left, I told another Port Washington boy still playing his match, where we were going—I won’t tell you his name. “Just come and get us when the team is finished,” I said.
    Peter and I got into a pickup game and played for a half-hour or so, and eventually the other player came down. He’d been sent by Hy Zausner, the head of the academy, to bring us back to the bus—but the guy didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything.
    Just as he came in, someone else quit the game, and I said to the guy who’d come to get us, “Hey, we need another player.” Now, did he say to me, “Listen, there are people waiting”? No, he just got into the game! So, another ten minutes went by, and in walked Zausner, furious. “How dare you keep everyone waiting?” he screamed at me. Not at anyone else; at me. “I’m sick and tired of your attitude!”
    Not long afterward, my parents got a letter saying I was suspended for six months from the Port Washington Tennis Academy for bad behavior. “We’ve got to set an example,” the letter said.
    After I explained the situation, my parents were furious at Hy Zausner. “How dare he not tell us face-to-face?” they said. “This is totally outrageous.”
    Peter Rennert got the same six-month suspension, but his parents were mad at him, not at Zausner, so they went in and apologized, and Zausner dropped Peter’s suspension. Meanwhile, my parents refused to go in at all.
    It wasn’t until much later that Peter told me about that, and meanwhile I’d gotten a whole theory in my mind that it was me against him, because he hadn’t been suspended and I had. At the Easter Bowl that spring, Peter and I ended up playing each other in the semifinals, which made it a little more interesting: I thought, I’m not going to lose to him. And I swear to God, on the first point of the match—Hy Zausner was sitting right behind Peter—I hit a serve wide, and it went boom right into Zausner’s forehead!
    Anyway, because of the suspension, my parents never looked back to Port Washington. Meanwhile, Harry Hopman had left to go start his own tennis academy in Florida, and Tony Palafox had gone on to become head pro at a club in Glen Cove. So Mom and Dad called Tony up and said, “Listen, John would like to come work with you full-time.”
    Tony took me on full scholarship. I would get the chance to show my gratitude.

3
     
    I N THE ELEVENTH GRADE , I stopped playing basketball. On the face of it, this may not sound like a big deal, but in fact I was extremely disappointed. Basketball had been a part of my life for at least as long as tennis, and it was a chance for me to be part of a team and hang out with friends. I’d always loved the game, and I was pretty good at it. (I remember scoring one-third of my team’s points in an early C.Y.O. game. Never mind that the final score was 3–2!)
    Nor was I any less intense about basketball than about tennis. At Buckley Country Day, my headmaster, Ted Oviatt, who doubled as the basketball coach, once benched me for talking back during one of our most important games. Me! I’ll admit I probably never saw a shot I didn’t like, but I loved to compete. By tenth grade, I was on Trinity’s JV team, but to my dismay I found myself the nonplaying sixth man (shades of my dad at Catholic University). I quit in disgust, but was lured back—it didn’t take much—and, to my surprise, started the final four games.
    Deep down, though, I knew my b-ball days were numbered. I didn’t want to be a varsity benchwarmer, and the coach, Dudley Maxim, didn’t seem to know my name. So I quit for real. The good news was that for the first time, I was