One on One

by John Feinstein

  My dad pulled me back in the seat. “John,” he hissed, “it isn’t real. It’s just an excuse to sing.”

  It felt real to me at that moment.

  More often than not, it was my mom who took me to games when I was young. Dad had given up on baseball completely when the Dodgers left Brooklyn. He still had a passing interest in basketball—he’d gone to City College during the school’s glory days—so every once in a while he’d grudgingly take me to a basketball game. I never got to go to New York Giants games because it was impossible to get tickets, and in the old blackout days, I would listen to the home games on radio, which is why Marty Glickman, then the Giants’ play-by-play man on radio, was one of my early heroes. It was only later that I learned Glickman had been an Olympic sprinter and had been replaced on the U.S. 4×100 relay at the 1936 Games by Olympic Committee chairman Avery Brundage, who didn’t want to offend Hitler by having a Jew running for the U.S. team.

  By the time I was about ten, I could get to games on my own on the subway. Looking at my own children now, I understand why my parents weren’t that thrilled with me riding the subway by myself, but it was a different time then and I knew the subway system cold before I was twelve. I can still remember the ticket prices everywhere: Shea Stadium was $1.30 for general admission, and Yankee Stadium was $1.50. Yankee Stadium was a better buy though because it only had three decks and you were a lot closer to the field. With a student GO Card you could get into Madison Square Garden for Ranger games for $3 and Knicks games for $2. That went up as the teams got better, but not that much. I could buy a standing-room ticket to any Jets game—they went on sale every Monday at the Jets offices at 57th Street and Madison Avenue—for $3.

  That was easily the best bargain because, inevitably, there were no-shows in the downstairs box seats, and since the standing room was right behind those sections, we could usually sneak into good seats by the time the ushers got bored in the second quarter.

  The other fairly easy sneak-down was at the Garden for college basketball doubleheaders. In those days, Manhattan and NYU hosted doubleheaders, usually on Thursdays (tough for me because it was a school night) but also occasionally on weekends. The building was typically about half full, and if you found a section with a friendly usher—not easy in the Garden—you could sneak at least into the orange section, which was one up from courtside.

  The one sport my dad was always willing to go see with me was tennis. He had come to the sport late as a player but loved it. He didn’t play especially well, but the people he played with regularly were all at about his level, so their matches were always competitive. I would frequently go to watch and then hit some balls with my dad when the grownups were finished.

  My first exposure to the pro game was technically not the pro game. Tennis wasn’t an “open” sport until 1968, and those who had declared themselves to be pros were banned from the four major championships until then. The top “amateurs” were all paid under the table. When my parents took me to the Meadow Club in Southampton for the annual summer stop on the amateur circuit that led to the U.S. Championships at Forest Hills, I saw Roy Emerson and Fred Stolle and John Newcombe and Dennis Ralston and Chuck McKinley and Charlie Pasarell play. I still remember being thrilled when a young American named Jerry Cromwell stunned Emerson in, I think, 1966. I remember the score was 9–7, 6–3 in a round of sixteen match. Cromwell went on to become a successful doubles player, but that might have been his highlight in singles.

  My parents took me to tennis all the time, including at Forest Hills, every year. It was an easy subway ride from Manhattan and then a quick walk through the leafy neighborhood. They also took me to see the “pros” when they came to Madison Square Garden: Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Pancho Gonzales, and Lew Hoad were the big stars. Aussies dominated the sport in those days. When Arthur Ashe won the first U.S. Open in 1968, he was the first American to win the U.S. title since 1955.

  Tennis was my connection to my parents—especially my dad. He would actually sit and watch tennis with me on TV once it started to become a TV sport. One of my early thrills was visiting my uncle Peter and aunt Vivian in Boston one summer and going with them to Longwood to see the U.S. Pro final between Laver and Tony Roche, another up-and-coming Aussie. The match was great. What was really great though was seeing Bud Collins in person for the first time; he was wearing the brightest pair of multicolored pants I’d ever seen.

  I followed tennis closely just as I followed the four major team sports. I rooted for the Americans: Ashe, Clark Graebner, McKinley, Ralston, Gene Scott. Later it was Jimmy Connors and then John McEnroe, both of whom I got to know early in my career. I had a huge crush on Chris Evert when she first came on the scene in 1971, making the Open semifinals at the age of sixteen. She was a little bit older than I was and I thought she was it. I remember when she was awash in publicity during that ’71 Open saying something like, “It’s wonderful all these things people are saying about me. I just wish someone would say I’m sexy.”

  Somewhere in Manhattan I was jumping up and down saying, “Me, me, me!”

  Throughout college, I read Barry Lorge in the Washington Post on tennis. I thought his writing was brilliant, his descriptions of the matches and the players and the settings remarkable. I fantasized about someday being Lorge, traveling the world to all the great tennis venues and writing about them. The one thing I didn’t know about Lorge, who died way too young in 2006 at the age of sixty-two after a long fight with cancer, was that the writing he made look so easy was incredibly hard for him.

  No one wrestled with a computer like Lorge—nicknamed “Bear” by Bud because he looked like a large, though extremely gentle, bear. The stories about how long it took him to write are still legendary. The first time I covered Wimbledon, in 1985, Bud convinced me to stay at Dolphin Square, the apartment/hotel complex where he had stayed forever. Lorge, who by then was working for the San Diego Union, also stayed there every year. One morning I set out for Wimbledon at about 8:30, walked out the entrance to the hotel, and bumped smack into Lorge: he was just getting back from Wimbledon, having worked most of the night. He was, as far as I know, the only writer in history to blow a deadline with an eight-hour time difference in his favor.

  I first worked with Lorge during the 1980 U.S. Open—the one where I went and got Bud to take a phone call from Abbie Hoffman—and he went out of his way to help me at every turn. He let me write the men’s semifinals on Saturday (he covered the women’s final), which meant I got to sit practically on the court during a McEnroe-Connors classic that ended with McEnroe winning 7–6 in the fifth set after he and Connors almost went nose-to-nose at one point in the fourth set. He also suggested I try to follow McEnroe back to the locker room after McEnroe had beaten Bjorn Borg in the final in five sets the next day.

  “You never know with John, you might get lucky,” Lorge said. “You’re fast enough that you don’t need to get started writing right away, why don’t you take a shot?”

  The U.S. Open used to be the only tennis tournament that allowed media in the locker room. (Now there are none, one of many reasons tennis is virtually a dead sport in this country.) So I trailed McEnroe and a few of his friends back there after his press conference. The friends couldn’t go in the locker room. I could. Borg was long gone, having gone straight to his car from the awards ceremony. There were two people in the locker room: McEnroe and me.

  McEnroe looked at me as if to say, “Who the hell are you?” I told him. He was unimpressed but sat down in front of his locker. I knew exactly what I wanted to ask him: the crowd had been completely pro-Borg, pulling for a Swede against a New Yorker in New York. Someone had asked John about that in his press conference, and he had just said it was disappointing and left it at that. I suspected there was more to it.

  I stood with my back to the lockers and tried to look casual. “Listen, John, there’s one question I wanted to ask you…” He wasn’t looking at me but was pulling racquets out of his bag. I pushed onward
. “I grew up in New York…”

  Now he stopped. “Oh yeah, where?”

  “Manhattan. West Side.”

  He went back to his racquets.

  “I was wondering, as someone who grew up here, what went through your mind at the end of the fourth set when it seemed as if most of the stadium was on its feet cheering for Borg?”

  He looked up at me. “Most?” he said. “How about all?”

  I’d been trying to make the question softer.

  “To be honest,” he said, “it sucked. Can you imagine anyone in Sweden rooting against Borg? I mean anyone in the entire country? I know we’re different, and I know some people don’t like me because of the way I behave…”

  And he was off. I’m not sure he took a breath the next five minutes. I didn’t even need to ask follow-up questions. He asked and answered them himself.

  “How did I get myself together in the fifth set?” he asked himself. “It wasn’t easy. But I told myself you are not losing another five-setter to Borg [who had won their classic Wimbledon final earlier that summer, 8–6 in the fifth]. At the beginning of the set I felt like my whole body was going to fall off. Holding serve at the beginning was big. It gave me a chance to catch my breath…”

  When he was finished, I thanked him and we shook hands. I was surprised when he said, “What’s your name again?” only because I didn’t think who I was would interest him. I told him, thanked him, and ran back across the almost empty grounds to the press box. When the elevator—built in about 1890, I think—finally got me back upstairs, I walked to the Post seats, where Lorge was listening to his tape of the postmatch press conference.

  “Any luck?” he asked, pulling off his headphones for a moment.

  “A lot of it,” I said.

  “Tell the desk,” he said. “Maybe they can give you some extra space.”

  My sidebar was supposed to be twenty inches long. The desk thought they could give me twenty-four. I wrote forty. They used it all and moved the sidebar from inside to the front, twinning it with Lorge’s lead. That night had two long-term implications in my life: one good, one not so good.

  The not so good happened when I got back to the Post late the next morning. I was, as they say in the newsroom, taking bows for the McEnroe story. A number of people were standing around talking about how great it was that I’d gotten him one on one and that he’d talked so candidly (McEnroe talking candidly is hardly a big deal; he always talks candidly). As the discussion went on, Tony Kornheiser joined the group.

  Tony had come to the Post that spring. His arrival was a big deal to me because I loved reading him in the New York Times. We’d quickly become friends—more of a big brother/little brother relationship than anything else. We were both insecure smart-ass New Yorkers. Tony had covered a lot of tennis at the Times and knew most of the top players, including McEnroe.

  “So you got Junior to talk to you, huh?” he said, walking up. McEnroe’s nickname was “Junior” because his full name is John Patrick McEnroe Jr. and because when he first came on tour he was younger than almost all the other players.

  “Yeah, I got lucky,” I said.

  “You didn’t get lucky,” Tony said. “He talked to you because you’re the same person. It was Junior talking to Junior.”

  Okay, so we’re both from New York, we’re both left-handed, and we both have fairly quick tempers. Other than that…

  The nickname stuck instantly. Back then I didn’t mind it that much because I was still one of the youngest guys at the Post. I didn’t especially like it when I got older and guys at the paper younger than me who didn’t even know why I had the nickname used it. And I really can’t stand it when a complete stranger comes up and uses it. I try to be polite, but I’m not great at it:

  “Hey, it’s John Junior Feinstein.”

  “It’s John. What’s your name?”

  On the other hand, I’ve been called worse—by a lot of people.

  The better outcome of my McEnroe encounter was that it was the beginning of a relationship with John. I wouldn’t call it a friendship, but we certainly were friendly. More important, he almost always cooperated with me when I asked him for time. He and I did a long sit-down interview during the French Open in 1985, when I first began covering tennis regularly that summer. That was the story that Katharine Graham liked so much.

  Early in my season with Bob Knight—late October—I got a call from George Solomon. McEnroe and Borg were playing an exhibition in St. Louis on Friday night. Borg had walked away from tennis in 1981 after losing both the Wimbledon and U.S. Open finals to McEnroe, but he had come back to play a series of big-bucks exhibitions with McEnroe as part of what was called the “McEnroe Over America Tour.”

  Borg had never said very much to the media when he was playing, and once he retired from playing in real tournaments, he had pretty much stopped talking altogether. One of the things he liked about playing McEnroe on “his” tour was that John did all the media stuff. Borg just showed up and played.

  George wanted me to go to St. Louis and see if I could get Borg to talk. “Maybe your pal McEnroe will help you,” he said.

  I was willing (and able) to go because Indiana had an early practice Friday and wasn’t scrimmaging until Saturday afternoon. That left me a window to catch a flight to St. Louis after practice and get back before the scrimmage Saturday. The only downside was that one of the coaches would have to be available to take Knight to dinner on Friday. When I told Knight I was going to St. Louis to see McEnroe and Borg, he thought it was a good idea.

  He repeated what he had said that summer during our postmidnight phone conversation when I was in Stratton Mountain.

  “I like McEnroe. I really like the way he competes.”

  That Knight and McEnroe would be kindred spirits made perfect sense.

  The match was in the old Kiel Auditorium, which still exists to this day, even though the building’s main tenant, the St. Louis Hawks, left for Atlanta forty years ago. As is always the case with these exhibitions, the two players split the first two sets and then played the third set for real—McEnroe winning. McEnroe was brought into some kind of makeshift interview room afterward. Since he hadn’t been playing real tennis, he was relaxed, funny, and charming. When he finished, he walked over to me and said, “What in the world are you doing here?”

  I told him I was spending the winter in Bloomington working on a book on Bob Knight. McEnroe looked at me for a moment and then said, “Bobby Knight? Isn’t he kind of crazy?”

  If he recognized the irony in that comment, he didn’t give it away.

  I told him I had come over, to be honest, to see if there was any way Borg would talk to me.

  “Part of our deal is I do all the media stuff,” John said.

  “I know,” I said.

  He got it—McEnroe always gets it.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  We walked around the building to a small locker room. Borg was in there getting into his street clothes. “Bjorn, I need you to do me a favor,” John said. “This is John Feinstein. He works for the Washington Post. He’s a friend of mine. Can you give him just a couple of minutes?”

  Borg shrugged. “Sure,” he said.

  As different as they were, McEnroe and Borg were always friends. Part of it was the mutual respect that came with playing their sport at the absolute highest level. Part of it was each wishing he could be a little more like the other: Borg admired McEnroe’s unbridled passion; McEnroe wished he could stay as controlled as Borg did in the most tense moments. I think they also shared a mutual dislike of Jimmy Connors. As often as McEnroe and Connors are linked as tennis “bad boys,” they are completely different people.

  McEnroe went to shower while Borg and I sat down to talk. I can’t remember a single word he said that night. I asked him about how much he missed competing (not much, apparently) and being at Wimbledon and Paris every year (same thing). We talked about his friendship with McEnroe. In the end, John saved the
story by talking about Borg. I was able to set the two of them in the tiny locker room in the ancient building on a rainy night in St. Louis. George stripped it in the Sunday paper in large part because there were Borg quotes—boring as they might have been—in the piece. Thanks to McEnroe, I was able to return triumphantly to Bloomington.

  “How’s your boy McEnroe?” Knight asked when I got back.

  “He likes the way you compete,” I answered.

  11

  Hard Times and Hard Courts

  FOR SIX YEARS, BEGINNING in the summer of 1985, I covered tennis on a regular basis. I covered it for the Post for four years and then for Tennis World, Tennis Magazine, and the National Sports Daily, which I worked for during its brief sixteen-month lifespan in 1990 and 1991.

  A Season Inside sold well, but not nearly as well as A Season on the Brink. If Season Inside had been my first book, I would have been thrilled with the sales numbers. But I’d been completely spoiled by Brink and was disappointed the second book hadn’t sold as well as the first. My third book, Forever’s Team, sold a lot less than the first two had, but that had been expected. As Esther put it, “That was the book you got to do as a reward for Season on the Brink.”

  I enjoyed doing Forever’s Team greatly, because it gave me a chance to go back and see old friends from college. The book got very good reviews. But I had now used up my freebie. If I wanted to continue to make a living as an author, the next book had to be what Esther called “a big book.”