Free You Cannot Be Serious by John McEnroe;James Kaplan

that somebody in the place speak English? I didn’t have a travel alarm with me. “Could I be awakened?” I asked the man at the front desk. He answered me in French—“Screw you,” probably.
    Now I was panicking, because while my first two matches had been at five in the afternoon, the last round of qualifying was set for 8:45 in the morning. I was still jet-lagged, even after a couple of days in Paris—I’d been sleeping to noon or one o’clock—and I thought the desk clerk had understood that I needed a wake-up call, but I wasn’t sure. I thought, How in God’s name am I going to get up in time? My solution: I didn’t sleep a wink the entire night. Just stayed up.
    I went to play on zero hours’ sleep, and somehow (it helps to be young!) I managed to beat my opponent, a typical clay-courter from Spain. I was in the main draw! Suddenly, a lightbulb went on over my head: If you made it into the main draw, you received sixty dollars a day in expense money. I went right back to that three-dollars-a-night hotel and checked out and checked back into the Sofitel.
     
     
     
    I HAD A VERY LUCKY first-round draw—Alvin Gardiner, an Aussie journeyman—and won easily, 6–4, 6–2, and 6–0. Now I was cooking. I’d piled up six more ATP points—one point for qualifying, another five for winning a round. That’s when I went up against Phil Dent.
    Dent was an Aussie, an ancient twenty-seven years old, a seasoned Davis Cup player, and an extremely tough competitor. Current fans will know him better as Taylor Dent’s father. He had a reputation for playing every point to the utmost, even if he was hopelessly down in a match. He came from that true Australian mold: Harry Hopman had driven his players mercilessly, demanding total physical fitness and mental toughness, pitilessly casting aside anyone who didn’t measure up. It seemed, to me at least, that Phil Dent measured up.
    From the moment our match began, the line calls were abysmal. Dent would hit a shot that was in by six inches, and the linesman would call it out. Every time it happened, I would tell Dent, “I can’t take this point, we’ve got to play a let.” I was used to the juniors, where you call your own lines.
    All along, though, I kept noticing that no matter what happened on his side, Dent never once asked to play a let. True to form, he was one of the toughest opponents I’d ever faced, and after five hard-fought sets, he was the victor. And when we came to net to shake hands, he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Sonny, this is the pros now. You play the calls, and if you have something to say, you tell the umpires.”
    Many people would say I learned that lesson a little too well in the years to come.
     
     
     
    I MET UP WITH S TACY , and between matches and practice, we got to see a little bit of each other. On the courts, I also bumped into my old Port Washington buddy Peter Fleming, who was in the main draw. Peter had just graduated from UCLA and was out on the tour, doing pretty well. We’d only seen each other a couple of times since he’d gone away to school—one of them was at the 1974 U.S. Open, where he and Vitas Gerulaitis had beaten Tony Palafox and me in doubles—and it was good to come across a familiar face in foreign surroundings on my first trip overseas.
    The French juniors started in the second week of the tournament, and Stacy and I both began our rounds. When she was eliminated from the singles, however, she suddenly told me she had to go back to California. Family matters, she said vaguely. Figuring it was something sensitive, I didn’t push the subject.
    Meanwhile, a piece of luck came my way.
    I ran into Mary Carillo, an old friend from Douglaston, who was actually playing in the main women’s tournament. Two years older than I was, she had grown up just a couple of blocks away, on Knollwood Avenue, in the Manor. When I think about the odds of three world-class tennis players—myself, my brother