John McEnroe: Highly strung lifestyle

By DEBORAH ROSS

I meet John McEnroe at the bookshop Hatchards in Piccadilly, where he is due to sign copies of his autobiography, Serious. We meet upstairs, in the manager's office, which is leathery and full of old books, rather like a traditional psychiatrist's office which, I'm thinking, might make John feel at home as he's had a lot of therapy over the years to deal with his various issues.

Ah, here comes John, who, in his playing days, was sometimes quite the porker. He used to look rather like an improbably athletic salami, with something of a bird's nest mounted on top. Now, though, at 43, he is slim-hipped and closely shorn, which I guess is his gain and ornithology's loss. He is wearing tight jeans, shades, a black shirt open at the throat and a single silver earring.

Do you, I later ask, think of yourself as something of a sexy beast? "I'd pass the audition," he says. "But sexy? No. Now, Pat Cash, there's a sexy guy. I think I've got better as I've got older, though. I'm like a fine wine."

"Best locked in a cellar for 20 years? You could go off, you know?"

"No. I improve with age," he says, rather irritably.

"John," I say, "you cannot be imperious." Actually, I don't. I wouldn't dare. Whatever, he isn't pleased to see our photographer. "I wasn't told there would be a photographer," he says.

"Do you mind?" asks the photographer.

"I don't have much choice, do I?" he says.

"Do you mind if I take pictures while you are talking?" asks the photographer.

"I don't think you have much choice, do you?" he says.

Gulp. Truly, I want to love John like his fans who, I can see from up here, are already queuing round the block for a signed copy of his book.

I want to love him like all those people who say that he was not only a beautiful tennis player, but also had "personality" whereas now it's all boring power serves and big hitters and blah-de-blah-de-blah.

But, at this stage, I'm struggling to connect with his lovability. He has quite a tight little face and a tight little mouth. I would like to see him smile. I can't, actually, ever recall him properly smiling.

I finally get something close to a smile when I ask him if he enjoys the irony of being hailed as the saviour of the Wimbledon commentary box by a BBC that once had to muffle the courtside microphones when he played.

"Sure!" he says. And there is the smile ... now it's gone. John's smile is also quite a tight little number. John's smile is like a rubber band, the smallest in the bag, being stretched to its limits before quickly twanging back. John's smile seems, on the whole, to be an astonishingly big effort.

We are seated opposite each other, across a leather-topped table, while John's agent, Gary, sits on a straight-backed chair by the door.

Gary is in Serious. When Gary first started working for John in 1981, John told him that he needed sawdust before every match, "because I liked to keep it in the pocket of my tennis shorts, to absorb the perspiration on my hand".

But, you know what? Gary turned up with the wrong kind of sawdust. Still, John was understanding, said it was a mistake that anyone could make, that he'd know for next time. Only teasing! John screamed at him. John screamed: "You call this sawdust? It's too fine! It looks like rat poison. Can't you get anything right?"

This, I guess, is "personality" in spades. And Gary? I try, later, to engage Gary in conversation. Can John be half-hearted about anything, Gary? "No." Does he ever get fed up with signing books, Gary? "No." When it comes to the women players, is he a fan of the big tennis knickers? "No." Small tennis knickers? "No." I think that Gary might still be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

All in all, it feels, at least initially, rather like a gruesomely formal prison visit, with the table between us, and Gary at the door. I tell him I enjoyed his book, as there is nothing like a vast amount of sucking up to relax an interviewee and introduce some kind of warmth into the atmosphere.

"I'm glad about that," he says, coolly. He's described the book as "open therapy" although I'm not sure that he's sufficiently introspective or reflective for this to be entirely true.

John, I ask at one point, do you ever wonder what you might have become if, say, you hadn't had such a miraculous gift for tennis?

"No," he says. "I've never wondered that."

Still, he's a publisher's dream. He is totally out there pushing the book. The thing about John, I guess, is that if he decides to do something, he will put everything into it. That intensity. That drive. That sheer competitiveness. I guess these are part of the "personality".

I ask him, if he came to the book as someone else, as just a reader, what would he think of John McEnroe? His answer is less an answer, more a sales pitch.

"I sort of like reading these types of books, so hopefully, at the end of the day, people will feel they've got their money's worth."

John, what would you think of yourself?

"An interesting character, someone who has had a hard look at himself. I think there are lots of problems people will relate to. And once I'd committed to doing it, I wanted to do it right. I wanted to write a good book. I wanted to write the best book possible. I put a lot of time and effort into it and I hope people ... a book is like going to watch a tennis match. Hopefully, people will spend the £17 ($53) or whatever it is and they'll feel it's worth it. That's what it boils down to."

I change tack: if, say, the John McEnroe of today could give advice to the little John McEnroe who first picked up a tennis racket at his father's country club, what would it be?

"I'd say to him ... I'm not sure what I'd want to say to him ... um ... um ... hopefully, enjoy the ride at least."

Enjoy the ride? At least? John did not enjoy the ride. But, then, who does?

Tennis, at the top level, oozes with obscene amounts of money, but doesn't allow for much enjoyment. This is the main thing you take from the book: how utterly joyless it all is. The jealousies. The hatred. How can tennis stars be friends when they are all "chasing the same dollar". The travel. The hotels. The boredom. The loneliness. The constant dissatisfaction.

You can't be happy as No 2 in the world because you want to be No 1. You can't be happy at No 1 because you are worried about No 2 yapping at your heels. I wonder if a life in tennis, ultimately, limits someone's capacity for joy. Or contentment, even. Can you have moments of contentment, John? "More and more," he says. What about loneliness. Can you ever learn to be un-lonely? "Um ... hmm ... I guess I was lucky in that I always had a good set of friends ... I don't think I'd want to spend a great deal of time by myself." As I say, introspection isn't really his bag.

Most miserably, John didn't enjoy it right from the word go.

"I was never particularly wild about tennis," he says.

He liked other things. He liked baseball. He liked school, where he was smart. He liked rock music. Your first record, John?

"Deep Purple's Machine Head, believe it or not. I was more into heavy metal. Led Zeppelin were my favourite band growing up."

"You weren't into David Cassidy, then?" I ask.

"I wasn't into him, but I liked The Partridge Family."

"I was into Donny Osmond," I continue.

"I can't say I was a major Osmond fan," he says.

Righto. I feel we've yet to get into our conversational swing.

It's just that he was so good at tennis, so fabulously gifted, and his parents pushed, pushed, pushed, as tennis parents tend to do. His father, a lawyer, "lived for my tennis", while his mother, a nurse, once sent him back to complete a game after he'd broken his arm.

Still, his mother is not quite up there with Ivan Lendl's mother, who, apparently, "used to tether Ivan to the fence while she played".

I tell him that I probably found that the most startling line in the book; although my favourite was his description of Ryan O'Neal and Farrah Fawcett, father and stepmother to his then-wife, Tatum O'Neal.

They were, he writes, "so obsessed with their looks they spent most of their time doing fanatical workouts". I say that I laughed at that bit.

He says: "That's sort of typical Hollywood, where looks are everything. And they were the perfect example, two beautiful people in Hollywood in the 70s."

He adds: "When I was growing up, I had a poster of Farrah in my room." John, I say, that's nothing. When I was growing up I had the Farrah hair-do, complete with flick and everything. "You still do," he says. He smiles, and this time the smile doesn't twang back so fast. This time the smile almost makes it to the eyes.

I ask him if he feels any tenderness for Tatum, even after their messy divorce and nasty custody battle. Even though she's been in all the papers lately, claiming that he took steroids and has never been quite the hands-on father he claims.

"No question," he says. "And if people read the book they will see that. We were in over our heads, as it turns out. We didn't know at the time but looking back - it's easier to look back with hindsight - she had three kids in five years and that's not easy in the best of situations. If you add all the complications of our lives and our pasts, it seems like it's impossible it was ever going to work. I didn't do it with the intention - and nor did she - to fail. It seemed like the right thing to do. She was only 20 when we met and I was 25."

Still, it seems he is capable of cruelty at some level. When she said she was pregnant with their third child, his response was: "There goes 1987."

He now lives in Manhattan with his second wife, the singer Patty Smyth, with whom he has two children. He attends weekly therapy sessions to deal with his issues, particularly his explosive temper.

What, John, have you learnt about your anger? Is it, perhaps, the projection of self-hatred? What about when, after missing a shot, you once told spectators: "I'm disgusting. You shouldn't watch. Everyone leave."?

He says: "A good deal of it was ... yeah ... a lot of it was directed at myself. I guess I grew up sort of very competitive, and a perfectionist. No doubt I still am. It's about not being satisfied, I guess." Maybe the therapy has not been that helpful.

Anyway, nearly time to go. I know this because Gary says: "Last question."

I decide to lob in a last, random ball. Okay, John, you love art, and have been an art dealer. So, if you could have any artwork in the world - money no object - what would you have?

"I love some of the Van Gogh pieces. I grew up loving the impressionist stuff. I love Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which was done right at the time Cubism started. Maybe a Pollock, which has got that crazy energy to it. Not that I totally understand abstraction, but there is something about it."

Off to the signing, where he is charming to his fans - "Hope you get better real soon," he says to an elderly lady in a neck brace and madly applied lipstick - and not entirely phoney.

"No, I'm not signing tennis balls. I'm here to sign my book. No, I'm not signing your Wimbledon programme. I'm here to sell books, man."

It occurs to me now that in some ways, he is a sort of prisoner, that he will forever be imprisoned by tennis. He has tried to break out, as art dealer, rock musician and quiz-show host, but has never got very far. He might even, to some extent, be a prisoner of his own caricature.

These days, when he plays on seniors' tours, "I'm fined if I don't have an outburst because the audience expects it."

I ask him to sign a copy of his book for my tennis-mad mother. "Hope you enjoy," he writes in it, which is more than he ever did.

I promise that, in return, when I publish my step-by-step guide to The Farrah Flick, he'll have a signed copy. He laughs. It's not a head-back, full-blown joyous laugh. It's quite a tight little laugh. A long-term prisoner's sort of laugh. But it is a laugh, which is something.

- INDEPENDENT

* Serious will be released in New Zealand on August 12.