 "The joys of being a McEnroe and Federer fan")
A routine workday afternoon in London a decade ago was disrupted by the arrival of an email in my inbox. I stared in disbelief at the name of the sender, John P McEnroe, as if it were an invitation to Skype with God. In the minute it took to gather the courage to click on it, in my mind’s eye I was watching the unforgettable Wimbledon finals McEnroe had played in the early 1980s against Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors. Listening to the BBC radio commentary as a teenager at our family dining table in Calcutta, I had begun the see-saw 1980 McEnroe-Borg final in which McEnroe saved 7 match points as an ardent supporter of the Swede. At some point in that heart-stopping tie-breaker that the American won 18-16, his courage and artistry made me switch sides.
A few years later, McEnroe beat Connors 6-1, 6-1, 6-2. He was taking service returns so early that he appeared to be a mind-reader. The New Yorker’s delicate volleys, never recommended to club players because he dropped his wrist so low, seemed as if he were caressing the ball. By now in college in Delhi, I watched a video replay of the 1984 final three times, trying to understand such languid, even lazy tennis. (McEnroe famously didn’t practise much, relying on doubles to keep him match-ready and won several Grand Slam titles doing so.) Tennis pros refer to rare matches like the one McEnroe had played as being “in the zone”: the ball seems as large as a football, and they know what their opponent is about to do before he does it. McEnroe spent almost all of 1984 in that hallowed state. By the end of that year, he had won 82 of 85 matches, a record of dictatorial domination that stands to this day, unsurpassed even by Roger Federer or Novak Djokovic.
Also Read: Quite a business at Wimbledon
That year, I was preparing to apply to universities in the United States for a scholarship for a master’s in journalism. I did not mention McEnroe in my application essays of course, but, to tell the truth, I was leaving one country for another for the chance to watch McEnroe play live. Sadly, my arrival in the US coincided with McEnroe taking a sabbatical from the game because the pressures of celebrityhood after his marriage to the actress, Tatum O’Neal, were taking their toll. He returned to the circuit while I was working in New York, but his best years were over. I had arrived too late. Still, a childhood friend and I would go to his late night matches at the US Open, and shout down the annoying band of McEnroe baiters, never more vociferously than during a five-setter in the 1991 Championships that McEnroe lost to Michael Chang.
The arrival of this email 20 years later thus prompted both anticipation and trepidation. It turned out to be a letter from McEnroe’s father who shares the same name. By then, I had moved to London and was working for the Financial Times as one of its weekend editors. In a column for the Saturday paper, I had confessed that earlier that year when I had spotted McEnroe’s father and his mother, with her distinctively elegant page-boy haircut, sitting in a box at the US Open not far from where I was seated, my childhood friend and I wanted to stand up and applaud them. In his email, McEnroe’s father said that if such an occasion arose again, I should come by and say hello.
A few weeks later, I was at the US Open and had the chance to do just that. I had by then fallen so completely under the spell of Roger Federer that I organised my year around watching him at Wimbledon, the US Open, the year-end World Tour Finals (then in Shanghai) and in Dubai. I found myself being ushered into the United States Tennis Association president’s box as a guest of John P McEnroe Sr and his wife, Kay. I was filled with such inexpressible gratitude for those years of watching their son play and, by extension, to his parents for supporting him that I got choked up. For a few minutes, I had almost nothing to say.
For many of us who are fanatical about tennis, to have experienced the joys of watching McEnroe and Federer a couple of decades apart has seemed like being invited to paradise twice in a lifetime. One year at Wimbledon, the church closest to the All England Club saw a chance to enlarge its flock. The church proclaimed on its billboard, “God made Roger Federer.” I texted this to my father who instantly replied, “Of course he did.” I do not believe in God, but watching McEnroe or Federer confuses me. Their talent has seemed so abundant, the angles they devised on court so implausible that only divine intervention could explain how the ball stayed in. And their tennis is so beautiful that it seems like ballet — look at the way Federer moves his back foot before he serves, like a dancer preparing to pirouette — that I concede that God made them. Practice alone could not have made them this perfect.
Obsession has something of the pathological about it, but sports fascinations are mostly healthy. William Skidelsky, a British journalist, in the just published Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession confesses to turning to televised Federer matches around the globe as a calming influence amid a storm of breakups with girlfriends.
After I had watched a TV broadcast of the 2005 Wimbledon final in which Federer fed off Andy Roddick’s huge power, blocking service returns to the American’s feet and setting up one backhand pass after another at absurd angles, I was determined to write a profile of him. The weekend magazine editor of the FT at the time was a Scot passionate about Blairite Labour politics and Russia where he had been the paper’s Moscow bureau chief. Colleagues scoffed at my chances of convincing him. I consequently stammered through my pitch: We might never see such a complete player again who could trade huge groundstrokes from the baseline and still have such delicate touch. The editor’s face creased into a smile of benediction: “You’re essentially making the Francis Fukuyama ‘End of History’ argument for tennis,” a reference to the political theorist’s book that suggested that with the fall of Communism, the great ideological battles were over and liberal democracy had won. Indeed, a year later, the late American novelist David Foster Wallace’s superb article on Federer would argue that he represented a one-man revolution against monotonous power tennis.
I nodded mutely in reply. Minutes later, I had the commission of a lifetime. Having made one unlikely pitch, I made another. Emailing Mirka Vavrinec, Federer’s girlfriend and now wife who then managed his interviews, I asked for time not just with Federer, but with his coach and his mother. She replied to say I could do a half-hour phone interview with Federer. A month later, she wrote to say I should come to Dubai, where Federer has a home, and interview him and Tony Roche, the Australian leftie who was coaching him then. Presumptuously, I stuck with my original request. Tennis champions face a press conference of astonishingly dull questions after every match they play; consequently, they agree to very few interviews. I was risking a lot by holding out for more, but I felt I needed to for a 4,500-word article.
Federer, wearing jeans and padding around his suite without shoes on, let me in. When he discovered I was in Shanghai for 10 days, he cancelled my next interview with his trainer, Pierre Paganini, so that we would have an hour to chat. He was so natural and so direct that I was emboldened to ask even about the death of his childhood coach, Peter Carter. Carter was killed in a car accident while on honeymoon in Kruger National Park in South Africa in 2001. On the cusp of turning 20, Federer had been devastated, but the tragedy made a man of him. Erratic until then, Federer had begun to feel he was being seen as an underachiever. “People were starting to ask, ‘Is this one of those talents who will never achieve something?’” he recalled. After Carter’s death, he dedicated himself anew to tennis. By the time of the interview with him in Shanghai, he had already won three Wimbledons and two US Opens. By odd coincidence, he was also chasing McEnroe’s record of 82 wins from 85 matches in 1984.
Given these accomplishments, I said I was surprised to hear that Federer was training harder than ever. (This was one reason I wanted to speak to Paganini who favoured keeping Federer lithe to the point of being skinny to keep him injury-free, concentrating on agility training over lifting heavy weights.) “The funny thing is finally I’ve made the big breakthrough and now people are asking me, ‘Are you still motivated,’” he replied. “This is where it starts really, where the dream comes true. You can go two ways: you can say, ‘OK, I’m going to be a party animal,’ or you can say, ‘I want more of this.’ I decided to have more of it. It’s very simple. I feel a great pride in being number one in the world and representing my sport.” That answer says a lot about why Federer is still in the sport, even though he will be 34 in August. He has not retired also because he wants the elder of his two pairs of twins, Myla and Charlene, who will be six this year, to remember him as a top player.
Federer was so informal and friendly that halfway through I stopped treating him like a superstar. I even suggested he should volley more. Federer had served and volleyed throughout his 2001 upset of Pete Sampras at Wimbledon, but had become a baseliner as his groundstrokes became more consistent. He replied that he was re-learning the stroke from his coach, Tony Roche. “It’s a very simple stroke and the more simple it is, the better it is,” he said. In fact, Federer’s improved results in the past 12 months have been on the back of many more sustained forays to the net under the tutelage of the great Swedish serve-and-volleyer, Stefan Edberg. I asked about the “greatest ever” mantle being placed on his shoulders. He shrugged it off, saying Rod Laver and Martina Navratilova (who had spotted Vavrinec’s talent long before she made the Swiss national tennis team) had a far greater claim.
A couple of days later, I was working in the FT’s office in Shanghai when my mobile phone rang: “Rahul, it’s Roger.” I assumed it was an opponent on the squash ladder I was part of in London. Before I could express an inability to play, the call dropped. Federer called again; he was scheduling an interview with his mother, Lynette. When I met her for breakfast, she gave me the most fascinating interview of the week. On one occasion when he was a teenager, she had warned Federer that she was tiring of driving him to junior tournaments only to see him lose his temper. I gasped at discovering an early McEnroe in the younger Federer. At the age of 14, he had told a local tennis magazine that he intended to train at the national tennis academy in the French-speaking part of the country. Federer spoke no French at the time and the transition to living away from home proved rocky.
Lynette spoke emotionally about how her bubbly teenager was suddenly wracked with self-doubt because the national coaches had such a strict regimen. “He said, ‘They seem to be saying I can’t play tennis,’” Lynette Federer said. She and her husband, Robert, sought a meeting with the coaches and told them they didn’t want them riding roughshod over his personality: “‘He is mischievous, but if you give a little, he will give you back so much,’” she told the coaches. I was taken aback that anyone could ever have doubted Federer’s talent. Indeed, as the interview was winding down, Lynette showed me a photograph of Federer aged three and scarcely able to see over a table-tennis table, but blessed with such uncanny hand-eye coordination that he was able to play.
Looking back at this adolescent-like passion for two very different players, I feel as if I won the lottery — twice. Admittedly, I saw McEnroe in person only at the end of his career, but especially in doubles, he could still produce sublime tennis. I was once lucky enough to be at the US Open watching him and Mark Woodforde on their way to a doubles title. In one point, they had their opponents in complete disarray with both at the net but huddled in the ad court. McEnroe had the whole court open before him. Befitting someone who saw tennis as geometry, however, he chose to hit a forehand that somehow ran almost parallel along the width of the net and landed in the tramlines of the ad court, wrong-footing his opponents completely. I fought back tears; it was the cleverest shot I had ever seen.
I never did manage to interview McEnroe, however. His father intervened on my behalf with McEnroe’s agent at the International Management Group, but I got no further with the agent, who appeared not to know what the FT was. At Wimbledon a few years ago, I waited till the security guards were distracted. I dashed into the TV broadcasting centre and left a long letter requesting a “lunch-with-FT” interview at the booth for NBC for whom McEnroe has commentated for years. Alas, my only brush with McEnroe remained approaching him for an autograph for a friend in Hong Kong after a seniors match at London’s Royal Albert Hall a decade before I met his parents. I was in my thirties and looked ridiculous amid the children pushing forward. McEnroe snapped, “I’ve only got two hands and I’m using both.” It was a moment so true, so shot through with the witty, irascible New Yorker’s personality that I almost don’t regret not getting the interview I chased for years.
Curiously, after those encounters with Federer and McEnroe, my most vivid memories are as much of conversations with their incredibly loving parents as of the two players themselves. Lynette, for instance, standing up for her son to the coaches at the Swiss tennis centre and predicting he would give them “back so much,” and turning emotionally protective again talking about it long after her son had become a legend. And, Kay McEnroe joking that she felt like a “queen bee” as the mother of three sons till her daughters-in-law arrived. McEnroe Sr. kept in touch for years afterward asking for articles I wrote that quoted his youngest son, Patrick, then US Davis Cup captain and a superb TV commentator. A few years ago, he emailed me again: “Kay and I are about to board Air France to watch John and Patrick in the over-45 doubles at Roland Garros (in Paris). Will you be there?” His assumption that this was just the sort of thing I would do made me smile for days afterward. I should have gone. John, 53, and Patrick, 45, won the French Open legends doubles that year.
A few years later, McEnroe beat Connors 6-1, 6-1, 6-2. He was taking service returns so early that he appeared to be a mind-reader. The New Yorker’s delicate volleys, never recommended to club players because he dropped his wrist so low, seemed as if he were caressing the ball. By now in college in Delhi, I watched a video replay of the 1984 final three times, trying to understand such languid, even lazy tennis. (McEnroe famously didn’t practise much, relying on doubles to keep him match-ready and won several Grand Slam titles doing so.) Tennis pros refer to rare matches like the one McEnroe had played as being “in the zone”: the ball seems as large as a football, and they know what their opponent is about to do before he does it. McEnroe spent almost all of 1984 in that hallowed state. By the end of that year, he had won 82 of 85 matches, a record of dictatorial domination that stands to this day, unsurpassed even by Roger Federer or Novak Djokovic.
Also Read: Quite a business at Wimbledon
That year, I was preparing to apply to universities in the United States for a scholarship for a master’s in journalism. I did not mention McEnroe in my application essays of course, but, to tell the truth, I was leaving one country for another for the chance to watch McEnroe play live. Sadly, my arrival in the US coincided with McEnroe taking a sabbatical from the game because the pressures of celebrityhood after his marriage to the actress, Tatum O’Neal, were taking their toll. He returned to the circuit while I was working in New York, but his best years were over. I had arrived too late. Still, a childhood friend and I would go to his late night matches at the US Open, and shout down the annoying band of McEnroe baiters, never more vociferously than during a five-setter in the 1991 Championships that McEnroe lost to Michael Chang.
The arrival of this email 20 years later thus prompted both anticipation and trepidation. It turned out to be a letter from McEnroe’s father who shares the same name. By then, I had moved to London and was working for the Financial Times as one of its weekend editors. In a column for the Saturday paper, I had confessed that earlier that year when I had spotted McEnroe’s father and his mother, with her distinctively elegant page-boy haircut, sitting in a box at the US Open not far from where I was seated, my childhood friend and I wanted to stand up and applaud them. In his email, McEnroe’s father said that if such an occasion arose again, I should come by and say hello.
A few weeks later, I was at the US Open and had the chance to do just that. I had by then fallen so completely under the spell of Roger Federer that I organised my year around watching him at Wimbledon, the US Open, the year-end World Tour Finals (then in Shanghai) and in Dubai. I found myself being ushered into the United States Tennis Association president’s box as a guest of John P McEnroe Sr and his wife, Kay. I was filled with such inexpressible gratitude for those years of watching their son play and, by extension, to his parents for supporting him that I got choked up. For a few minutes, I had almost nothing to say.
Roger Federer hits a return during the men’s singles semi-final at Wimbledon in 2014
For many of us who are fanatical about tennis, to have experienced the joys of watching McEnroe and Federer a couple of decades apart has seemed like being invited to paradise twice in a lifetime. One year at Wimbledon, the church closest to the All England Club saw a chance to enlarge its flock. The church proclaimed on its billboard, “God made Roger Federer.” I texted this to my father who instantly replied, “Of course he did.” I do not believe in God, but watching McEnroe or Federer confuses me. Their talent has seemed so abundant, the angles they devised on court so implausible that only divine intervention could explain how the ball stayed in. And their tennis is so beautiful that it seems like ballet — look at the way Federer moves his back foot before he serves, like a dancer preparing to pirouette — that I concede that God made them. Practice alone could not have made them this perfect.
Obsession has something of the pathological about it, but sports fascinations are mostly healthy. William Skidelsky, a British journalist, in the just published Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession confesses to turning to televised Federer matches around the globe as a calming influence amid a storm of breakups with girlfriends.
After I had watched a TV broadcast of the 2005 Wimbledon final in which Federer fed off Andy Roddick’s huge power, blocking service returns to the American’s feet and setting up one backhand pass after another at absurd angles, I was determined to write a profile of him. The weekend magazine editor of the FT at the time was a Scot passionate about Blairite Labour politics and Russia where he had been the paper’s Moscow bureau chief. Colleagues scoffed at my chances of convincing him. I consequently stammered through my pitch: We might never see such a complete player again who could trade huge groundstrokes from the baseline and still have such delicate touch. The editor’s face creased into a smile of benediction: “You’re essentially making the Francis Fukuyama ‘End of History’ argument for tennis,” a reference to the political theorist’s book that suggested that with the fall of Communism, the great ideological battles were over and liberal democracy had won. Indeed, a year later, the late American novelist David Foster Wallace’s superb article on Federer would argue that he represented a one-man revolution against monotonous power tennis.
I nodded mutely in reply. Minutes later, I had the commission of a lifetime. Having made one unlikely pitch, I made another. Emailing Mirka Vavrinec, Federer’s girlfriend and now wife who then managed his interviews, I asked for time not just with Federer, but with his coach and his mother. She replied to say I could do a half-hour phone interview with Federer. A month later, she wrote to say I should come to Dubai, where Federer has a home, and interview him and Tony Roche, the Australian leftie who was coaching him then. Presumptuously, I stuck with my original request. Tennis champions face a press conference of astonishingly dull questions after every match they play; consequently, they agree to very few interviews. I was risking a lot by holding out for more, but I felt I needed to for a 4,500-word article.
A 1979 picture of McEnroe
Federer, wearing jeans and padding around his suite without shoes on, let me in. When he discovered I was in Shanghai for 10 days, he cancelled my next interview with his trainer, Pierre Paganini, so that we would have an hour to chat. He was so natural and so direct that I was emboldened to ask even about the death of his childhood coach, Peter Carter. Carter was killed in a car accident while on honeymoon in Kruger National Park in South Africa in 2001. On the cusp of turning 20, Federer had been devastated, but the tragedy made a man of him. Erratic until then, Federer had begun to feel he was being seen as an underachiever. “People were starting to ask, ‘Is this one of those talents who will never achieve something?’” he recalled. After Carter’s death, he dedicated himself anew to tennis. By the time of the interview with him in Shanghai, he had already won three Wimbledons and two US Opens. By odd coincidence, he was also chasing McEnroe’s record of 82 wins from 85 matches in 1984.
Given these accomplishments, I said I was surprised to hear that Federer was training harder than ever. (This was one reason I wanted to speak to Paganini who favoured keeping Federer lithe to the point of being skinny to keep him injury-free, concentrating on agility training over lifting heavy weights.) “The funny thing is finally I’ve made the big breakthrough and now people are asking me, ‘Are you still motivated,’” he replied. “This is where it starts really, where the dream comes true. You can go two ways: you can say, ‘OK, I’m going to be a party animal,’ or you can say, ‘I want more of this.’ I decided to have more of it. It’s very simple. I feel a great pride in being number one in the world and representing my sport.” That answer says a lot about why Federer is still in the sport, even though he will be 34 in August. He has not retired also because he wants the elder of his two pairs of twins, Myla and Charlene, who will be six this year, to remember him as a top player.
Federer was so informal and friendly that halfway through I stopped treating him like a superstar. I even suggested he should volley more. Federer had served and volleyed throughout his 2001 upset of Pete Sampras at Wimbledon, but had become a baseliner as his groundstrokes became more consistent. He replied that he was re-learning the stroke from his coach, Tony Roche. “It’s a very simple stroke and the more simple it is, the better it is,” he said. In fact, Federer’s improved results in the past 12 months have been on the back of many more sustained forays to the net under the tutelage of the great Swedish serve-and-volleyer, Stefan Edberg. I asked about the “greatest ever” mantle being placed on his shoulders. He shrugged it off, saying Rod Laver and Martina Navratilova (who had spotted Vavrinec’s talent long before she made the Swiss national tennis team) had a far greater claim.
Roger Federer’s mother, Lynette (left), and wife, Mirka, with their twins Charlene Riva and Myla Rose, watch him play at Wimbledon in 2012
A couple of days later, I was working in the FT’s office in Shanghai when my mobile phone rang: “Rahul, it’s Roger.” I assumed it was an opponent on the squash ladder I was part of in London. Before I could express an inability to play, the call dropped. Federer called again; he was scheduling an interview with his mother, Lynette. When I met her for breakfast, she gave me the most fascinating interview of the week. On one occasion when he was a teenager, she had warned Federer that she was tiring of driving him to junior tournaments only to see him lose his temper. I gasped at discovering an early McEnroe in the younger Federer. At the age of 14, he had told a local tennis magazine that he intended to train at the national tennis academy in the French-speaking part of the country. Federer spoke no French at the time and the transition to living away from home proved rocky.
Lynette spoke emotionally about how her bubbly teenager was suddenly wracked with self-doubt because the national coaches had such a strict regimen. “He said, ‘They seem to be saying I can’t play tennis,’” Lynette Federer said. She and her husband, Robert, sought a meeting with the coaches and told them they didn’t want them riding roughshod over his personality: “‘He is mischievous, but if you give a little, he will give you back so much,’” she told the coaches. I was taken aback that anyone could ever have doubted Federer’s talent. Indeed, as the interview was winding down, Lynette showed me a photograph of Federer aged three and scarcely able to see over a table-tennis table, but blessed with such uncanny hand-eye coordination that he was able to play.
Looking back at this adolescent-like passion for two very different players, I feel as if I won the lottery — twice. Admittedly, I saw McEnroe in person only at the end of his career, but especially in doubles, he could still produce sublime tennis. I was once lucky enough to be at the US Open watching him and Mark Woodforde on their way to a doubles title. In one point, they had their opponents in complete disarray with both at the net but huddled in the ad court. McEnroe had the whole court open before him. Befitting someone who saw tennis as geometry, however, he chose to hit a forehand that somehow ran almost parallel along the width of the net and landed in the tramlines of the ad court, wrong-footing his opponents completely. I fought back tears; it was the cleverest shot I had ever seen.
I never did manage to interview McEnroe, however. His father intervened on my behalf with McEnroe’s agent at the International Management Group, but I got no further with the agent, who appeared not to know what the FT was. At Wimbledon a few years ago, I waited till the security guards were distracted. I dashed into the TV broadcasting centre and left a long letter requesting a “lunch-with-FT” interview at the booth for NBC for whom McEnroe has commentated for years. Alas, my only brush with McEnroe remained approaching him for an autograph for a friend in Hong Kong after a seniors match at London’s Royal Albert Hall a decade before I met his parents. I was in my thirties and looked ridiculous amid the children pushing forward. McEnroe snapped, “I’ve only got two hands and I’m using both.” It was a moment so true, so shot through with the witty, irascible New Yorker’s personality that I almost don’t regret not getting the interview I chased for years.
Curiously, after those encounters with Federer and McEnroe, my most vivid memories are as much of conversations with their incredibly loving parents as of the two players themselves. Lynette, for instance, standing up for her son to the coaches at the Swiss tennis centre and predicting he would give them “back so much,” and turning emotionally protective again talking about it long after her son had become a legend. And, Kay McEnroe joking that she felt like a “queen bee” as the mother of three sons till her daughters-in-law arrived. McEnroe Sr. kept in touch for years afterward asking for articles I wrote that quoted his youngest son, Patrick, then US Davis Cup captain and a superb TV commentator. A few years ago, he emailed me again: “Kay and I are about to board Air France to watch John and Patrick in the over-45 doubles at Roland Garros (in Paris). Will you be there?” His assumption that this was just the sort of thing I would do made me smile for days afterward. I should have gone. John, 53, and Patrick, 45, won the French Open legends doubles that year.