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

Patrick, and Mary—all coming from the same little neighborhood, I shake my head. Her tennis career had followed a similar path to mine: She’d learned to play at the Douglaston Club, where we’d hit together now and then, and gone to the Port Washington Tennis Academy—where, just like me, she’d been coached by Tony Palafox and Harry Hopman.
    By the time Mary had graduated from high school, she’d become one of the best women players in the country; instead of going to college, she’d taken a job at Mr. Hopman’s new academy in Florida. Then she’d decided to give the women’s pro tour a try, and now she actually had a pretty high ranking.
    Certainly a lot higher than mine.
    And that day at Stade Roland Garros, we had the following historic conversation:
    “Want to try the mixed?”
    “OK.”
    Thus are great mixed-doubles teams born. Mary and I had hit balls together, but we had literally never set foot on the same side of a court. What did that matter? When you’re a kid, you figure you can do anything.
    More important for us, though, was the fact that the mixed-doubles field was the weakest of all the events at the French—primarily because there wasn’t much money in it. As the top male players finished the tournament, they left Paris, looking for greener pastures (literally: the grass-court tune-ups for Wimbledon were just beginning in England). Between Mary’s ranking and my little handful of ATP points, we were allowed to sign ourselves up.
    At the same time, I began playing the juniors, where, because of my successes over the winter and in early spring, I was a strong favorite. This didn’t make me nervous—if anything, it had the opposite effect. My confidence was up, and I improved from round to round.
    In the meantime, Mary decided that as long as we were in Paris with time on our hands, she’d get a little culture into me. At that point, I didn’t know a Matisse from a Michelangelo. Mary did, though, and she took me out a bit—specifically to the Jeu de Paume, at the time a leading Impressionist museum. I wish I could say I was an eager student, but I remember looking at one of Monet’s water-lily paintings and saying, “My baby brother Patrick has better than that on the refrigerator door at home.”
    Still, my eyes were starting to open just a little, and it was amazing to soak up Paris, although that first time, the art and the architecture looked so magnificent that I felt intimidated. The people also seemed unbearable to me, though we’ve grown to love each other since. I felt as if I was in a National Lampoon Vacation movie—Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo are eating their lunch in a restaurant; he’s saying, “God, honey, aren’t they nice?” and the waiter is saying (in French, with English subtitles), “You stupid American asshole.” That’s exactly how it felt.
    But not on the tennis court. None of my matches in the juniors was as tough as that five-setter with Dent, not even the semifinal against Ivan Lendl, whose number I seemed to have at the time. And amazingly enough, Mary and I were cruising, too: Our roughest match was a three-setter in the semis against Tomas Koch of Brazil and Cynthia Durner of Australia. In the final—which took place just an hour after my victorious juniors final against an Australian named Ray Kelly—we beat Florenta Mihai of Romania and Ivan Molina of Brazil in straight sets. I had to shake my head in disbelief: I was a Grand Slam winner at the age of eighteen.
    I had to shake my head about something else, too. On that last day at the French, I learned another brutal lesson, about tennis as show business. I played my juniors final in front of about three people—the organizers had helpfully scheduled it at the same time as the men’s final, in which Vilas destroyed Brian Gottfried. Then, a little while after most of the Parisians had filed out of Roland Garros, Mary and I won our mixed final in front of a similar-sized gallery.
    I would