Serious
by John McEnroe
Little, Brown £17.99, pp346
This is an autobiography which paints such an inadvertently unattractive portrait of its author, it might almost be one of Nabokov's blackest novels. McEnroe makes himself look pompous, selfish and self-absorbed. One always wondered why so elegant and skilful a tennis player had never quite commanded widespread admiration, and this book gives the answer: the public sensed there was no great need when McEnroe loved himself so exhaustively.
The startling thing here is that McEnroe, you feel, isn't even that interested in tennis. His comments on the game are simply explorations of the way in which it offered opportunities for McEnroe to display himself. 'People have always talked about what a good volleyer I was, and I'll accept the compliment. However, I think the most under-noticed of my skills was my speed at backing up and covering the overhead.' Or this: 'I loved the way a top-spin lob would sail over my opponent's head... I loved to take my racket back for a hard forehand or backhand.'
McEnroe was not that interested in what he could do for tennis; only in what tennis could do for him.
The egocentricity is unflagging and fairly appalling. From now on, of course, no American celebrity autobiography will be complete without a passage on 'My Feelings about 11 September', but it is still shocking to see so vast an event reduced to an event in John McEnroe's millionaire life.
Everything must revolve around McEnroe. To his astonishment, people in Brazil speak Portuguese, and in Paris they speak French, having inexplicably failed to learn English for the occasion of John's visits. What's the matter with these people? Don't they know who I am?
His fellow players, alas, tragically fail to live up to McEnroe's standards, even when, to the disinterested reader, it seems there is not much to choose between them. Bjorn Borg 'read comic books', which, of course, is much worse than McEnroe's view that Monet's paintings were no better than his baby brother's efforts.
Pancho Gonzalez is sniffy about giving an autograph, which of course is rather mean-spirited, but somehow it's quite OK for McEnroe to say: 'I don't really like giving my autograph to anyone over 11 or 12.'
On the other hand, McEnroe does have an inadvertently amusing line in eyeing up the physical charms of his competitors, which, from anyone less demonstrably heterosexual (six anklebiters and counting) might cause one to raise an eyebrow. 'I remember Vitas bulging out of his clothes, and sweating... and Nastase. Those guys looked incredible... I thought [Borg] was magical - like some kind of Viking god... I can't explain, exactly... the way he looked - long, tan legs, wide shoulders.'
Anyone else? Oh, yes - 'I liked Guillermo Vilas, the Bull of the Pampas, early on. His look was great - the big, hairy chest, the muscular thighs, the flowing hair. There was something beautiful about him.'
Anyway, if the big, hairy chest of the Bull of the Pampas didn't lead to anything much, that might well be because McEnroe was saving himself for Tatum O'Neal. By that point, of course, his career on court was more or less over - 'Where is Borg? I thought. Who in God's name is Anders Jarryd, and what is he doing with a match point against me?'
The traditional and rather moving life of the professional sportsman here fails to affect the reader, because, even if McEnroe has long been history, he had what to him clearly seemed an unassailable consolation: 'I was famous.'
I suppose the stories of sportsmen are always sad - they are over so quickly, and no one remembers them in the end. But McEnroe effectively takes away any kind of sympathy you might be tempted to feel, not so much by his lavish displays of bad behaviour on court but by his whiny self-obsession. This is a book nobody on earth could be expected to care about.
