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

always have mixed feelings about performing in front of an audience, but I knew exactly how I felt about performing in front of nobody: rotten.
    I wouldn’t have to endure much more of it.
     
     
     
    T HAT LEFT TWO WEEKS before Wimbledon, so I went to England, practiced for a week on grass, and then played the qualifying matches for the tournament at Queen’s Club in West London, the most important of the Wimbledon tune-ups. My opponent in the first round was Pat DuPre, from Stanford. We actually played indoors, on wood, because it was raining. Taking the ball early on the boards, I won the first set handily, 6–1. I thought, “This is pretty easy.”
    Then, all of a sudden, a woman in the crowd started yelling at me, riding me, really heckling me. I thought, “What’s going on here?” It turned out to be DuPre’s wife. She was all over me during the last couple of sets, and I lost the match, 7–5, 7–6.
    It turned out that she had been doing it to other players as well—I’m not going to say it’s the reason I lost, but it definitely threw me off. Here was another lesson: As you play better people in different circumstances, more and more things will start to happen that you have never experienced before. You learn to adjust. At the time, I was just flabbergasted.
    My little run at the French had given me enough points to get into the Wimbledon qualifiers, so I figured, What the hell. My loss to DuPre had actually turned out to be a great thing—had I made it in, I don’t think I would have had enough time both to play the tournament and to try to qualify for Wimbledon. So thank you, Mrs. DuPre!
     
     
     
    L ONDON WASN’T as intimidating as Paris—at least the language seemed roughly similar to mine. Once again, I managed to find myself more…economical accomodations: a dilapidated flat in Earl’s Court, four tennis hopefuls to a room, for a couple of pounds a night. I have to say my choice was more out of frugality than necessity—I still had a little bit of my $500 left, and Wimbledon gave players $60 a day in expense money just for being in the qualifiers. So I was loaded!
    The qualies were held at a pleasant but unremarkable club called Roehampton, about a half-hour from Wimbledon—whose organizers, I guess, wanted to keep the riffraff at a safe distance from the hallowed lawns of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club!
    I actually came up against some pretty well-known players in the qualifiers, but they all seemed allergic to grass. For my part, I had a little experience under my belt, having played the National Grass Courts in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a couple of times. The Roehampton courts were in horrible shape, but the organizers threw you out there anyway.
    After beating Christophe Roger-Vasselin handily, and a rugged German named Uli Marten in three very tight sets, in the third round I played Gilles Moretton, my doubles opponent at the Orange Bowl. It was raining hard, but it was sink or swim as far as the organizers were concerned. I swam, winning in three routine sets, and I had qualified for Wimbledon.
    I remember celebrating with a beer afterward, which came out of a wooden cask and was incredibly bad. It tasted like wood, and it was warm. I thought, How in the hell do these people drink this? Where’s my Ballantine? Who are these people?
     
     
     
    N OW THAT I WAS in the main draw, I felt I deserved a proper hotel room, so I moved into the Cunard International, which was so fancy that it had an ice-cube machine—which, in London, at the time, was nothing short of amazing!
    There were still roommates, of course—only now the roommates were better players: Eliot Teltscher, my Orange Bowl finals opponent, who was on his way to UCLA and would eventually become a top-ten pro; and Robert Van’t Hof, who was headed to USC and would win the NCAA singles championship in a couple of years (and who now coaches Lindsay Davenport).
    There was a rigid hierarchy of players at Wimbledon: