Read Online You Cannot Be Serious by John McEnroe;James Kaplan - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: John McEnroe;James Kaplan
Tags: United States, General, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, tennis, Biography, Sports & Recreation, Sports, McEnroe, John, Tennis players, Tennis players - United States
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to São Paulo, and when nobody showed up to meet me at the airport, I literally couldn’t find anyone who spoke English. I’d been given a couple of phone numbers to call, but no one on the other end could understand me, either. If they’d spoken Spanish instead of Portuguese, I might’ve been able to say or make out a few words, but this might as well have been Chinese.
So I sat by the luggage carousel. And sat. Finally, after about an hour and a half, a fellow saw my rackets and said, “Tennis?”
“Yeah!” I said. He motioned me to follow him. As we walked off, I thought, This guy could be anybody, anybody at all. But what were my other options at the moment?
He drove me to the home of a Brazilian junior player named Cassio Motta, which seemed to be a kind of checkpoint for tournament participants. At least now I knew I wasn’t being abducted. But the tournament itself was a two-hour drive from there, down to Santos, where Pelé had played soccer.
We were driving, it was absolutely pouring rain, and I swear to God, it felt like our driver was going a hundred miles an hour. It was scary how fast it was, and you couldn’t see more than five feet in front of you in the rain. I was sitting in the back, with no seatbelt. Then suddenly, right ahead of us in the fast lane, an orange “Caution” cone appeared, and then another, and another, and then a broken-down car was right in front of us. All this happened in a second or two.
The guy veered right, and we started to skid, and just as we veered, a bus loomed up next to us, going just as fast as we were. We swerved, and skidded, and banged into the bus, but our driver didn’t even slow down—he just took off and passed it! When we got to the end of the highway, the bus caught up and cut us off, and the bus driver began opening his door to try to block us; our guy drove up on the curb to get away from him.
Finally we stopped, the bus stopped, and the two drivers stood screaming at each other in the rain. It was a lovely introduction to Brazil.
There was this, too: Over the next few days, as I started to play my rounds, I noticed—there’s always a lot of free time at tournaments—that the South American players were constantly going up to the fifth floor. I wondered about that for a while, then I found out what was going on. How can I put this delicately? Let’s just say that there were ladies up there, and that money was changing hands. The Banana Bowl indeed! I never visited that fifth floor, however, or any similar establishment.
I won the tournament, by the way, beating a couple of guys named Andrés Gomez and Ivan Lendl in the process. Now no one could challenge my status as the number-one junior in the world.
M EANWHILE I’ D APPLIED to college—Stanford, USC, and UCLA. Stanford was my first choice because UCLA and Stanford were the best teams, but I preferred USC to UCLA—George Tolley was the USC coach at the time, and he seemed a little more laid-back than Glen Bassett at UCLA.
I went on a college visit to Los Angeles; it was my first time there. L.A. was also Stacy’s home town, and so we got to spend a lovely few days together while she showed me the sights, including the USC and UCLA campuses. At UCLA, I asked Glen Bassett, “So how do you run things here? What’s your coaching style?” And he said, “Oh, we work really hard—we practice five hours a day.” I said, “Thank you very much.” That was it for UCLA!
In April, I played in my second Riordan/Scott event, a clay-court tournament in Virginia Beach, Virginia, that featured both Vilas and Connors; they were numbers two and three in the world at the time. I beat Charlie Pasarell, who was number 49, and Bob Lutz, who was around number 30. It’s true that both of them were more comfortable on fast courts than on clay; still, a victory was a victory.
As I was getting ready to play my semifinal against Nastase—again!—I very shyly (or so it seemed to me) walked
So I sat by the luggage carousel. And sat. Finally, after about an hour and a half, a fellow saw my rackets and said, “Tennis?”
“Yeah!” I said. He motioned me to follow him. As we walked off, I thought, This guy could be anybody, anybody at all. But what were my other options at the moment?
He drove me to the home of a Brazilian junior player named Cassio Motta, which seemed to be a kind of checkpoint for tournament participants. At least now I knew I wasn’t being abducted. But the tournament itself was a two-hour drive from there, down to Santos, where Pelé had played soccer.
We were driving, it was absolutely pouring rain, and I swear to God, it felt like our driver was going a hundred miles an hour. It was scary how fast it was, and you couldn’t see more than five feet in front of you in the rain. I was sitting in the back, with no seatbelt. Then suddenly, right ahead of us in the fast lane, an orange “Caution” cone appeared, and then another, and another, and then a broken-down car was right in front of us. All this happened in a second or two.
The guy veered right, and we started to skid, and just as we veered, a bus loomed up next to us, going just as fast as we were. We swerved, and skidded, and banged into the bus, but our driver didn’t even slow down—he just took off and passed it! When we got to the end of the highway, the bus caught up and cut us off, and the bus driver began opening his door to try to block us; our guy drove up on the curb to get away from him.
Finally we stopped, the bus stopped, and the two drivers stood screaming at each other in the rain. It was a lovely introduction to Brazil.
There was this, too: Over the next few days, as I started to play my rounds, I noticed—there’s always a lot of free time at tournaments—that the South American players were constantly going up to the fifth floor. I wondered about that for a while, then I found out what was going on. How can I put this delicately? Let’s just say that there were ladies up there, and that money was changing hands. The Banana Bowl indeed! I never visited that fifth floor, however, or any similar establishment.
I won the tournament, by the way, beating a couple of guys named Andrés Gomez and Ivan Lendl in the process. Now no one could challenge my status as the number-one junior in the world.
M EANWHILE I’ D APPLIED to college—Stanford, USC, and UCLA. Stanford was my first choice because UCLA and Stanford were the best teams, but I preferred USC to UCLA—George Tolley was the USC coach at the time, and he seemed a little more laid-back than Glen Bassett at UCLA.
I went on a college visit to Los Angeles; it was my first time there. L.A. was also Stacy’s home town, and so we got to spend a lovely few days together while she showed me the sights, including the USC and UCLA campuses. At UCLA, I asked Glen Bassett, “So how do you run things here? What’s your coaching style?” And he said, “Oh, we work really hard—we practice five hours a day.” I said, “Thank you very much.” That was it for UCLA!
In April, I played in my second Riordan/Scott event, a clay-court tournament in Virginia Beach, Virginia, that featured both Vilas and Connors; they were numbers two and three in the world at the time. I beat Charlie Pasarell, who was number 49, and Bob Lutz, who was around number 30. It’s true that both of them were more comfortable on fast courts than on clay; still, a victory was a victory.
As I was getting ready to play my semifinal against Nastase—again!—I very shyly (or so it seemed to me) walked
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