You Cannot Be Serious (42 page)

I’m totally serious.

John McEnroe’s Top Ten Recommendations for Improving Tennis in the 21st Century

1. Tennis should have a commissioner. Baseball, football, and basketball all do; why not our sport? (I’m available….)

2. This country should have a National Tennis Academy. Flushing Meadows would be a natural site, but if the logistics there are too daunting, there are many other possibilities. Kids with potential should be brought in from all over the country, on scholarship if necessary, and they could be developed in much the same way I was by Tony Palafox and Harry Hopman at the Port Washington Academy. (I’m available here, too….)

3. Players need to be more accessible to fans and the media (did I really say that?), the way NASCAR drivers are.

4. A return to wooden rackets would be a huge improvement for professional tennis. The biggest change in the game in the last twenty-five years—the replacement of wood by graphite—has been a bad one. I happen to think that wooden rackets are beautiful aesthetically and purer for the game. Look at baseball: Kids start with aluminum bats in Little League, then move on to graphite or Kevlar or whatever in college, and then—and only then—if they make it to the majors, do they get to use these beautiful wooden bats that require greater expertise for success. Why not do the same thing in tennis? I think it looks great to have a little wand in your hand, instead of some ultra-thick club big enough to kill somebody with! Wood, to me, has glamour. You need strategy and technique. Tennis, these days, is sadly lacking in all those things: It’s all (as David Bowie said) Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.

5. Like other sports, tennis should have a season. I’d recommend February to October. For three months every year, there wouldn’t be any tennis. Players could rest and recharge; fans could work up a little hunger to see the game again.

6. The Davis Cup’s schedule also has to be brought into the real world. Should it be held for a week every other year, like golf’s Ryder Cup? Or maybe once a year? Whatever the answer, the powers-that-be need to sit down and decide how to re-interest tennis’s top players in participating in this great event.

7. Only tennis’s top-notch amateurs should be allowed to compete in the Olympics. The lure of a gold medal would encourage young players to stay in college and wait longer to turn pro. The results would be more-mature professionals and a purer Olympics.

8. The service line should be moved three to six inches closer to the net. The serve has become far too important to tennis—especially at Wimbledon, where the best fans in the world sit patiently through long rain delays, only to have to sit through boring serve-a-thons.

9. Let cords should be eliminated. Having to play all let serves would speed up the game and make it more exciting.

10. Tennis players should be far more involved in charity work. The sport should champion a couple of causes as a group and try to make a real difference—the kind of difference that Andre Agassi and Andrea Jaeger have made, Andre with his school for disadvantaged kids in Las Vegas, and Andrea with her Silver Lining Ranch for terminally ill children in Aspen, Colorado.

My Top 25 Rock & Roll Moments: A Personal Outtake Reel

(Some moments are just too great to leave on the cutting-room floor…)

1. 1980 Rolling Stones tour, the Meadowlands: Vitas and I went together, and we soon found ourselves partying heartily with Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards, just the four of us. We then proceeded to hold up the show while we lit up with Mick Jagger just before the band went on-stage. The boys performed incredibly well—that’s rock and roll!

2. 1980 TV special with Luciano Pavarotti: After he heard me sing, he decided we should do our comedy bit on the tennis court instead. He tried to jump the net and fell on his face.

3. Forest Hills tennis/rock charity event, 1982: During the tennis portion, in the afternoon, I played Meat Loaf—who also tried to jump over the net and fell on his face. (Moral: Fat singers shouldn’t try to jump the net.) At night, as I stood onstage in front of 15,000 fans with Carlos Santana, Joe Cocker, and others, Santana started going around the horn—pointing at people to play a lead. “Please don’t point to me,” I thought. (I only knew three chords at that point.) He pointed to me. I just kept playing rhythm.

4. In between rounds at Wimbledon in 1982, I struggled to learn David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” and “Rebel, Rebel” in my hotel flat. I heard a knock on my door. It was David Bowie. “Come up and have a drink,” he told me. “Just don’t bring your guitar.”

5. A 1982 Allman Brothers concert at the old Palladium in New York: After the show, I went backstage, and Dickie Betts said, “Hey, we saw you on TV!” Then Greg Allman said, “You must be the golfer.” Paul Lynde had said the same thing to me on
Hollywood Squares
in 1979.

6. 1983: Another tennis/rock charity event, on a pier on the Hudson River, hosted by Vitas Gerulaitis and me. In front of 5,000 people, I jammed with the likes of Clarence Clemmons of the E Street Band, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, and Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee of Rush. Later that night, I jammed—or attempted to—at a studio with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Buddy Guy.

7. August 1, 1986: I and a bunch of fellow musical neophytes played with my buddy Mick Jones of Foreigner, who was holding down the fort at my wedding party.

8. February 16, 1991: On my thirty-second birthday, I was playing Pete Sampras in the semifinals at Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Tatum had planned a party at my home in Malibu, where a stage had been set up on the beach, and I was to jam with Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Willis, and Stephen Stills, among others. Tatum phoned me and said, “You’re not going to miss this party, are you?” I didn’t miss it.

9. July 1991: Pat Cash and I recorded, if you could call it that, a rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll,” for the American Earthquake Fund, on which we were actually able to convince Roger Daltrey to sing. We were billed as Full Metal Racket. We subsequently played the song with Roger at the Limelight, a club in London. Needless to say, the single didn’t make number one on the charts, but we did raise a little money and have some fun.

10. As I sat in the broadcast booth at Wimbledon in 1993 going through a pile of otherwise forgettable letters from old people asking for my autograph, I found a note saying, “Call George Harrison.” Could this be real? I wondered. I called the number on the note, and it was George. He invited me to his castle in Henley the next day. I played tennis with his son and toured the premises, and then George took me over to a nearby studio, where I jammed with him and Gary Moore, the blues musician.

11. Bob Dylan concert in London, 1994: After the concert, I was invited backstage, where I walked into a room that had five people in it: Dylan, Chrissie Hynde, George Harrison and his son Dhani, and one guy I didn’t recognize. I went up to the guy and said, “I’m John McEnroe, who are you?” He said, “I’m Bozo the fucking clown.” It turned out to be Van Morrison. I’ll never forget the first thing Dylan said to me: “I heard you can dunk a basketball, and you play great guitar, and I know Carlos Santana wouldn’t lie.” It pained me to have to disillusion him on both counts.

12. April 1994: I was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, playing a tennis exhibition on the night that Kurt Cobain killed himself. A friend got me on a live radio show, where, at two in the morning, I played the worst rendition ever heard of Cobain’s “Come As You Are.” His death had hit me hard, but at least my heart was in the right place.

13. May 1995: At the Chesterfield Bar in Paris, during the French Open, Patty Smyth came up and sang with me and my band for the first time. The song was her single about me, “Wish I Were You,” which later appeared on the platinum-selling
Armageddon
soundtrack.

14. Halloween Night, 1995. The Johnny Smyth Band played at the annual Maui Halloween Parade on Front Street in Lahaina, the biggest Halloween party in the U.S. As many as four bands were playing at once as 20,000 people went up and down the street: The energy was crazy.

15. December 1995, the Power Station, New York City, the studio where the Stones recorded “Tattoo You.” The Johnny Smyth Band had a recording contract, and our in-house producers Steve Boyer and Tony Bongiovi told me and my bandmates Chris Scianni, John Martarelli, and Rich Novatka that we had a hit single on our hands with “Pressure.” Three days later, the studio was rented to someone else.

16. Philadelphia, 1996: Patty inducted Joan Jett into the Philadelphia Hall of Fame. I played, and Patty sang, on two songs—“I Love Rock and Roll” and “I Hate Myself for Loving You.”

17. A 1996 charity concert at my gallery in SoHo: After the set by Mississippi blues musician Johnny Billington, in walked my friend Lars Ulrich and two of his bandmates from Metallica, Jason Newsted and Kirk Hammett, and we jammed the night away. Needless to say, we took the decibel level up considerably.

18. 1997: I realized that my band’s manager, Peter Gold, was clueless after the two of us heard Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters singing on the Howard Stern show, in one of the most poignant live moments I had ever heard on radio—and Peter told me that I had a better voice than Grohl’s.

19. April 1997: Nike asked me to do an appearance at the Orange Bowl in Miami. I sat on the sideline at the Brazil–Mexico soccer game, and then, afterward, I surprised Carlos Santana by jumping onstage mid-song. At last, I really did play lead with him. To my amazement, Carlos actually asked me to turn my amp up, and to my even greater amazement, I heard myself playing lead in front of 50,000 people.

20. 1997: Paul Allen’s amazing party in Venice, Italy. First came the masquerade ball, an event in itself, and then the concert, where Jimi Hendrix’s bass player, Noel Redding, asked if I would play some Hendrix songs with him. What do you think my answer was? We jammed together on “Purple Haze,” “Foxy Lady,” and “Hey Joe.”

21. 1998, the Hard Rock Café in New York: I played five songs with Billy Squier’s band. Billy’s career was clearly going down the tubes if he was putting me onstage.

22. 1998, Radio City Music Hall: My friend Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders, asked me to sit in on my favorite song of hers, “Precious.” To make sure I knew the song, she had requested that I come to rehearsal—but I couldn’t go. I assumed I wasn’t going to play, and I didn’t bring my guitar to the show. She saw me at the side of the stage during the show and announced to the crowd, “I have a special surprise for you.” So I ended up picking up a right-handed guitar and playing it backwards! I did my best.

23. January 2000: Stephen Stills’s fiftieth-birthday-party gig at the House of Blues in Los Angeles. Stephen asked me to come up and sing the encore with him, and when I got up on stage, the guitar that the tech handed me was totally out of tune. I stalled for time by getting the entire crowd to sing “Happy Birthday” to Stephen, at which point Stephen pulled me aside and said, “You’re good—you’ve got a future in entertainment.”

24. The World Sports Awards Show at the Royal Albert Hall in London, January 2001. I was paid a substantial fee to play guitar with other sports celebrities and Bryan Adams on a performance of his new single “We’re Gonna Win.” As it turned out, they really had hired me for my presence and not my musical expertise: My guitar was plugged in, but they didn’t turn on the amp. Right after the song, I asked the emcee, Roger “007” Moore, if he wanted to hear another song. Apparently he misread the cue card, and said, “Sure.” The producers put on the tape of “We’re Gonna Win” all over again—much to Bryan Adams’s chagrin. Despite this, about fifty people came up to me afterward and said, “Great playing! Incredible!” I guess that says it all.

25. July 2001: Played “No Changes” with Spinal Tap at the Beacon Theater in New York. I seemed to fit right in.

Acknowledgments

There are so many thank-yous to go around that I don’t even know where to begin. They range from the obscure to the obvious. Here’s my best shot:

My kids, who keep me young and make me feel old at the same time: Ruby, Kevin, Sean, Emily, Anna, and Ava. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

Mom and Dad. For the last time, I say thank you for having me, and thanks for making me the person I am today. I think.

My brother Mark. The middle brother, the middle man, and the mediator. You’re always there for me when I need you. Liam, Maria, Ciaran, and Diane, you’ve got a good man.

My brother Patrick. You’re a straight shooter. Just don’t write a book now.

James “Jimbo” Malhame. You’ve been there for me since day one. A true friend and a true believer.