You Cannot Be Serious (8 page)

I
WON MY SECOND-ROUND
qualifying match. All the while, though, I kept thinking,
I’ve got to find a cheaper hotel.
I knew a player named Lucia Romanova, one of the tennis-playing Romanov twins from Romania, who spoke some French, and I asked her if she could help me.

God bless her, she went all-out and found a hotel for about three bucks a night. The amenities were roughly what you’d expect, but was it too much to ask that the room have an alarm clock, and 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 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 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: From the stars down to the qualifiers, guys tended to mix with their own kind. But when I ran into a guy named Jim Delaney—he was seven or eight years older than I was, and around 100 in the world to my 233—he was surprisingly friendly.

Jim had graduated from Stanford a couple of years before, and, unbeknownst to me, Dick Gould, the Stanford tennis coach, had asked him to do anything he could for me while I was at Wimbledon. I didn’t find out about this until years later—thank you, Dick. At the time, Jim just seemed like a terrifically nice fellow, which he genuinely was.

He showed me the ropes around London. For a young player, one of the most important things to know is where to get good, cheap food—which, in London in those days, basically meant pizza and pasta. I had a blast. I enjoyed the city so much—more than I’ve ever enjoyed it since, even though I still love going there now—because it was the last time I was totally anonymous. I was also slightly clueless. There was a custom there: If the restaurant was crowded, someone you didn’t know could just sit down at your table. One night, a strange guy sat down in our booth, and I said, “Who the hell are
you
?”

Delaney also did something else for me, something that really made a difference. Since he’d been on the tour a couple of years already, he knew the players—he could tell me about the strengths and weaknesses of the guys I’d be coming up against in the opening rounds. It was like having a coach for free.

But I still had to play the matches.

It was strange. As I rose through the juniors, I’d always had the idea that the main tour was something special—that those guys were the best of the best. But now here I was at Wimbledon, the main tournament, my first time, winning in the first round (Ismail El Shafei), the second (Colin Dowdeswell), and the third (Karl Meiler). And then in the round of 16, I beat Sandy Mayer, whose game Jim Delaney knew well from their time together at Stanford. That’s when I started to believe that I really could be a professional tennis player. I remember thinking, “Either these guys are a lot worse than I thought, or I’m a whole lot better.” The level that I’d thought existed between the juniors and pros—the Triple–A League of tennis—was simply not there for me.