You Cannot Be Serious by John McEnroe;James Kaplan Page A

Rennert, was there, and the other members of the squad—Jim Hodges, Bill Maze, Matt Mitchell, John Rast, and Perry Wright, among others—were great guys, too. Bill, a senior and the number-two player, was my doubles partner at Stanford that year, and he also became a friend.
    I’ll freely admit that academics weren’t my forte. My first mistake was in taking the guidance of my advisor, who recommended such courses as anthropology, economics, and calculus. By the time the first semester was well under way, I was already struggling. I said to myself, “I’ve got to find out what the athletes take,” so I asked a couple of football players, and a few of the veterans on the tennis team, and second semester was a big improvement. I tried to take “Parapsychology and Psychic Phenomena” seriously, but I couldn’t. In “Sleep, Narcolepsy, and Politics,” I was actually able to get an A by playing a charity tennis exhibition. The most memorable was my exposition course: The teacher walked in, stared at us wordlessly for fifteen minutes—it felt like an eternity—and finally said, “I’ll bet you’re wondering what the requirements for this course are. There’s no midterm, no final exam, and there are no papers. Now we’re ready to begin the class.”
    This was more like it!
    Meanwhile, there were recreational activities—another important part of college life. There were parties; there were road trips. One of them was with my new friend Doug Simon, to his grandfather’s house in Carbon Beach in Malibu—just three houses north of the beach house I would buy seven years later. Doug’s grandfather was Norton Simon, the great art collector, and his place was magnificent—full of Picassos and Matisses, among others; and the view of the Pacific was just as impressive. It was my second look at great art, and at Malibu, and both began to get their hooks in me. I’ll never forget my first trip with the Stanford tennis team, to Madison, Wisconsin, in February of ’78. Bill Maze’s birthday came on that trip, and a bunch of us drove out to a bar to try to find Bill, so we could all celebrate. It was like a scene from a movie—we drove up, and suddenly Bill was being thrown out of the bar because he’d thrown a beer in the bouncer’s face, and everybody from the bar was running after him. We shouted, “Hey, Willie!” and he dove into the car….
    We all stayed up pretty late that first night. There were sleds in the dorm where we were staying, and an incredible sledding hill outside, and a big party going on. We were drinking and doing a few other things, both outdoors and indoors, and not being especially quiet about it! Finally, Dick Gould came in—it had to have been three or four in the morning, and our match was set for eleven A . M .—and said, “Hey, guys, can you keep it down?” And walked out. That was it.
    Could Dick possibly not have not noticed that the room was—shall we say—pungent? Maybe he’d noticed, maybe he hadn’t. I just remember thinking, “I’ve got to play my heart out for this guy.” This was my kind of coach.
    We won that match in Madison, as we won all the rest of our meets in that undefeated year for Stanford. The most thrilling of all was a weekend away match in April, against an extremely tough UCLA team. The stands were packed; people were literally standing in the trees to get a good view. All the matches during that meet, including my victory over Eliot Teltscher (after being down match point), were well-played and close: It was just an exciting event to be part of, one that made me glad to be a member of the team, and that reaffirmed my decision to spend a year in college.
    While the team was undefeated, however, Mr. Number One was not: I lost two singles matches, one of them an embarrassing rout by Eddie Edwards of Pepperdine, who completely outplayed me in front of a home crowd. Coach Gould had called me up at the last minute. The other came when I played with a high