You Cannot Be Serious by John McEnroe;James Kaplan

able to play tennis more than two days a week during the winter. My game started showing it right away. Getting taller didn’t hurt, either—by the time I turned seventeen, in February of 1976, I had almost reached my full height of five-eleven and three-quarters (which I round off to six feet).
    Seventeen was also the blessed age when I got my driver’s license, and just a couple of months later came that other huge rite of passage, getting my first car. It was—are you ready?—a secondhand 1972 Ford Pinto, the infamous burst-into-flames-on-contact model, in a color that had once been white. I loved it anyway. My parents bought it for me, for the grand sum of $100, from one of my dad’s law partners, Don Moore; Dad and Mr. Moore used to drive it to work. But something definitely had to be done about that crummy exterior, and so Dad very generously took the Pinto to Earl Scheib in Long Island City and had it painted a very snappy shade of red, or at least that’s what it was supposed to be. Actually, it came out orange.
    An orange ’72 Pinto! Add the Pioneer car-stereo system I’d won in a tournament (amateurs could take home prizes, but not cash) and I was all set.
    I was also now out of the 16-and-unders and into the 18’s—a big step up in terms of competition. I was mostly up to the task. I made the Junior Davis Cup team again, and was inspired once more by the coaching of Bill McGowan. Bill was twenty-four, a former player for Trinity University’s national-championship team, and a great, no-nonsense guy. The previous summer, at the National Hardcourts, in Burlingame, California, I’d come down to breakfast one morning and ordered pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon—and a hot-fudge sundae. Bill took one look at my chunky sixteen-year-old body and told me that henceforth I would be limited to one hot-fudge sundae a day, not three!
    I had dropped more than ten pounds in the year since then, and had grown more mature physically and mentally. But Bill was still keeping a close eye on me. In my second summer of JDC, I was in a clay-court event in St. Louis, and the gray-haired, bespectacled umpire in my final match was a little slower with his decisions than I would have liked. I started to make my feelings known—loudly—and Bill called me over to the fence. “John,” he said. “If you don’t shut up right now, I won’t hesitate to yank you out of this match and send you straight home.” I shut up.
    The other big thing that summer was that at a tournament at Kutscher’s, the old Catskills resort, I met Stacy Margolin, a young Californian starting to make her mark on the junior circuit. Stacy was small, cute, athletic, and blond, and we were immediately attracted to each other. Over the next couple of years, we would get together at events around the country; in between, we talked on the phone and exchanged letters.
     
     
     
    T HAT BICENTENNIAL SUMMER , I was able to win the National Clay Courts, in Louisville, once again. At that point in my career, I was still very much a clay-court player. I’d always been able to get everything back from the baseline. Yet even though I had grown quite a bit, my serve was still suspect, and although I could volley, I wasn’t quick or strong enough yet to take advantage of my net play. My doubles results were consistently better back then, and that’s why: With only half the court to cover, I got to the ball more often.
    Where I differed from most other baseliners was in the shortness of my backswing: Since I hit the ball on the rise, constantly moving forward, I could—theoretically—get to the net more easily and end the point with a volley or an overhead, instead of standing out there all day trading moonballs. Now if I could just get faster, fitter, and stronger!
    A parenthetical note: People have always talked about what a good volleyer I was, and I’ll accept the compliment. However, I think the most undernoticed of my skills was my speed at backing up and