You Cannot Be Serious by John McEnroe;James Kaplan

points that matches can hang on, and it had wrongfully gone against us; Peter and I went to the umpire and proceeded to have a joint meltdown. We got so upset that that was effectively the end of the match—we just couldn’t play worth a damn afterward.
    Peter had always had a temper, especially when he played singles, and mine was just starting to come out of the bottle at that point. However, what Peter learned that day, he later told me, was that he couldn’t let it go anymore, not in doubles. You can’t have two loose cannons out there at the same time: Someone has to be the emotional anchor, and that day Peter realized that it was going to have to be him.
     
     
     
    T HERE WAS ANOTHER instructive incident in San Francisco that September: I was playing Cliff Richey, one of the circuit’s great characters of the ’60s and ’70s, a former Davis Cup stalwart. Cliff was a truly fine tennis player, and he was also never the least bit shy about telling anyone, anytime, exactly what was on his mind. Because an earlier match had run long, we didn’t begin playing until about eleven-thirty P.M ., and by the time we got to the third set, at around one-thirty A.M ., there were maybe fifty fans left in the 10,000-seat Cow Palace.
    I won’t lie to you—I was doing a lot of bitching and moaning about line calls during the match. I know that won’t come as a huge shock, but the fact is, I’d really never done much of it before, especially during my junior career. There was just something about the incessant grind of the summer that was starting to wear me down. I also think I was feeling the pressure of performing, solo, on the pro circuit.
    Now, there was a rule in the pros that said you could question calls, and I was beginning to feel out the possibilities of that a little bit, but frankly, I was probably over the edge that night. Cliff Richey certainly thought so. After I’d gone off one more time, he stopped play, put his hands on his hips, and proceeded to address the fifty people in the stands.
    “I’ve been a professional tennis player for ten years, I’ve been the number-one player in the United States, and I refuse to sit back and not say anything about what this kid is doing out here,” he said—and then went on for five minutes more about what a disgrace I was, to the game.
    I ended up winning the match, but I was incredibly embarrassed—as I should have been. I was totally spent, and showing the strain: I needed to go to college and take a break from the tour. I had learned a lesson that night, but it was a lesson I would periodically forget over the coming years, whenever fatigue got to me.
     
     
     
    F ROM S AN F RANCISCO , it was just down the pike to Stanford, the next and last stop on my summer-of-’77 tour. It had been a long ride, and a successful one; the paradox of that summer, though, was that I’d been playing enough to make inroads into the big time, but it also felt like just too much. By the time I got to Stanford at the end of September, I didn’t even want to look at a tennis court.
    Coach Gould was great, though. At the first team meeting, he said, “I know some of you guys have played a lot, and you just come back when you’re ready.” And so I didn’t go to practice from October 1 to December 13, and Dick never said a word about it. The only reason I even went to that December practice was to get ready for a tournament in the Bahamas that my friend Gene Scott was running!
    I only spent one year at Stanford, but going there was one of the greatest decisions I ever made. It allowed me to be around intelligent people, and it forced me to be responsible. Now I really was a team player, exactly the way I’d always wanted to be: I had to try to blend in, not just be a star. At the same time, since I was number one on the team, the pressure was on me to win all my matches.
    The atmosphere couldn’t have been more supportive, however. My close friend from Port Washington, Peter