One on One

by John Feinstein

  “To make a long story short, I told him that if you missed the flight we would consider it a diplomatic incident,” he said. “I told him there wasn’t a thing wrong with your visa and he knew it. He said you’d violated the visa by going to Kladno.”

  “He knew?” I said.

  Westgate gave me an “are you kidding me?” look.

  Passport control was empty by now. There weren’t a lot of international flights outgoing from Prague. We got through and sprinted—as best we could with the crystal banging against our legs—through the long, curving hallway. Naturally, the plane was at the far end of the terminal.

  We finally got to the gate. There was no jetway. I showed my ticket to the agent, who shook his head and said something to Westgate in Czech.

  “What’d he say?” I asked.

  “That you won’t make it,” Westgate told him. “The stairs are still there. Run for it.”

  I took the bag of crystal from him and tried to say thank you. He was waving me out the door. I could see a flight attendant in the doorway as I ran toward the stairs. I made the stairs and, completely out of breath, made it onto the plane.

  “Don’t worry,” the flight attendant said. “We were waiting for you.”

  I was baffled. Then I saw Martina Navratilova, who was sitting in the first row. “The guys [the other Americans] told me what was happening,” she said. “I asked the pilots to stall a few minutes.”

  If anyone understood dealing with the Czech government, it was Martina. “Thank you,” I said, which was about all I could say at that moment. I made my way back to my seat to a round of applause from my colleagues.

  “Well,” Mark McDonald said as I put on my seat belt. “That’s one you can tell your grandchildren about someday.”

  12

  Around the World and Beyond

  WHICH BRINGS ME BACK to Ivan Lendl.

  After I finally got home from Prague, I wrote a piece in the Outlook section of the Post detailing some of my adventures and misadventures behind the Iron Curtain. News didn’t travel the way it does now, but by the time the U.S. Open rolled around, most people in tennis had heard about my being detained by the Czech KGB and my mad dash through the airport.

  Including Lendl.

  After he played his first-round match in that year’s Open, I went to the interview room and sat in the back. I hadn’t seen him since the “I don’t deserve the shit you write about me” speech, and I figured I should show up just so he knew I hadn’t been bothered by the incident.

  Lendl didn’t say much during the press conference, and I wasn’t paying much attention when he got up to leave. Most of the time players entered and exited the interview room in the bowels of Louis Armstrong Stadium through a door that was next to the podium. There was also a door in the back of the room, but players almost never used it because it led to a public hallway, meaning one would have to fight through a crowded hallway en route to the locker room. Most players would walk out the front door and stop in the CBS production area either to do an interview or to grab some of the CBS food.

  I was talking to Pete Alfano in the back of the room when suddenly I became aware of Lendl standing over me. As always, his agent, Jerry Solomon (who later married Nancy Kerrigan), was right behind him along with a couple of USTA types. When I saw Lendl I prepared for another confrontation.

  “So I hear you have a message for me from back home,” Lendl said, a huge smile on his face.

  At first I missed the joke completely. “A message?” I said.

  “From my friends in the Czech KGB. I hear you spent some time with them.” Now I got it. “Yeah, friendly guys,” I said. “We had a lot of laughs together.”

  Lendl was cracking up. “Yeah, they are very funny guys,” he said. “Funny like a heart attack. At least you were interviewing hockey player’s mother—doing something worthwhile, not wasting your time on tennis.”

  Lendl loves hockey; in fact, for a while he was part-owner of the Hartford Whalers.

  “You’ve got that right,” I said.

  “Someday we should talk about hockey,” he said. “I’ll teach you a few things.”

  “Anytime, Ivan.”

  At that moment he did something that truly surprised me. He leaned down, put a hand on my shoulder, and said quietly, “Was it okay? Were you scared?”

  “To death,” I said.

  He stood up and smiled. “You’re smarter than I thought you were.”

  With that he and his little entourage marched out.

  From that day forward my relationship with Lendl changed. In 1990 he not only cooperated with me when I was working on Hard Courts, but he also almost got me arrested in Australia—one of the world’s friendliest countries.

  I was in Sydney the week before the Australian Open began because I had learned enough about tennis by then to know that you don’t try to set up lengthy, sit-down interviews during a major championship. So I had set up a number of interviews during the warm-up event in Sydney—including one with Lendl.

  He wasn’t playing in the tournament, but he was practicing at the tournament site, getting on court with his coach, Tony Roche, early every morning and beating the midday heat of Australian summer, which is right at its height in January. Lendl told me to meet him in the locker room one morning at ten o’clock to talk after he’d worked out and taken a shower.

  That was fine except for the constant nagging fact that, by then, there was no tennis tournament in the world, no matter how minor, that granted the media access to the locker room. Play didn’t begin until eleven o’clock, but I knew even at ten there would be an issue. “No problem,” Lendl said. “I’ll just leave your name with the guy at the door.”

  Lendl is about as efficient as anyone I’ve ever met, so I had no doubt that he would take care of me. He did. It didn’t matter. “No media in here, mate,” the guy on the door, one of the few unpleasant people I encountered during a month in Australia, said as he fingered my media credential.

  “I understand that,” I said, without telling him how ridiculous it was for a fourth-rate tournament to have any rules on media access. “But I believe Ivan Lendl left my name with you or with someone so that I could get in there to see him before play begins.”

  I was doing my most polite “I know you’re just doing your job but…” routine. Before the guy could answer, a second unpleasant guard came up. I had now encountered, I’m guessing, half of the unpleasant people in Australia. “Yes, Mr. Lendl did try to leave your name with us,” he said. “Even if he was playing in the tournament, which he’s not, he wouldn’t be in charge of the rules. Now be on your way.”

  After the obligatory glares back and forth, I left, planning to go into the media room and start screaming at ATP Tour officials about why their stupid rules were making it impossible for me to do my job and someone better damn well walk me in there because Lendl was expecting me. It turned out, though, that there was a back door to the locker room. As I rounded a corner, a couple of players were coming out, heading for practice courts. Before the door closed, I grabbed it and walked inside. Lendl was sitting in a chair reading the newspaper.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he said. I was about three minutes late thanks to my pals on the front door.

  “Put it this way,” I said, “the Czech secret police have nothing on the guys on the front door.”

  He laughed and I told him what had happened. Then we had a long talk during which he told me he was going to skip the French Open that year in order to do everything he could to prepare for Wimbledon. He also told a joke about how stupid Democrats were.

  “I’m a Democrat,” I said.

  “Who did you vote for in ’88?”

  “Dukakis.”

  “In that case you are not Democrat, you are communist.”

  “Well, Ivan, if anyone would know a communist, I guess it would be you.”

  To know Lendl is to like him. His sense of humor, as he would tell you himself, is off-the-wall, b
ut—our different politics aside—he has a good heart. And he forgave me for all the shit I had written about him. I’ve had people stay mad at me for a lot longer than Lendl did for writing things far milder than I wrote about him. I once called him, among other things, a choking dog.

  When we were finished, Lendl said to me, “Come on, you can walk me out to my car and meet Tony [Roche].”

  He stood up and started walking toward the front door.

  “Ivan, how about we go through the back door?”

  “Oh no,” he said. “I want to make sure these guys know you were in here.”

  Okay, I should have just said, “That’s fine, I’ll go out the back and meet you,” but there was part of me that wanted them to know too.

  So I followed him out the door into the hallway and up to where my two friends were standing at the front of the building. Lendl is at least as much of a troublemaker as I am.

  “Thanks for being so nice to my friend,” Lendl said as we were about to go past the guards. “We had great two hour talk in there.”

  The two men turned and saw me.

  “Hey, how did you get in here? You’re not authorized to be here. You’re under arrest!”

  “Really?” I said. “You’re rent-a-cops.”

  I started to walk past them, but one of them grabbed me.

  “Hey,” Lendl said, turning serious. “Let him go.”

  I honestly don’t know if they would have let me go or not. At that moment Larry Scott, who had played at Harvard and then briefly on tour (he’s now commissioner of the new Pac-12) and was then an ATP Tour vice president, walked up and saw the scuffle.

  “Hey, fellas, let him go,” he said. “He’s with a player, he can be inside the building.”

  “That’s not the rule,” one of them said.

  “Yes, it is,” Scott said. “I’m with the ATP Tour. Let him go now.”

  Lendl now had a huge grin on his face, loving, no doubt, the havoc he had wreaked.

  “Is that really the rule?” I asked as we walked away from the (still) angry guards.

  “It is now,” Scott said.

  “Why don’t we do this again tomorrow,” Lendl said. “Same time, same place.”

  “Ivan,” I said. “I’d rather vote Republican.”

  AS IT TURNED OUT, that Australian Open was the last of Lendl’s eight major championship wins. It was also the tournament in which John McEnroe got himself defaulted in midmatch for saying to longtime umpiring supervisor Ken Farrar, “Just go f— your mother.”

  Farrar, who was walking off the court at that moment after trying to mediate a dispute between McEnroe and chair umpire Gerry Armstrong, said later, “When he said it, I thought I’d heard wrong. I’d dealt with John for years and he’d never come close to saying anything like that. I walked back to Gerry and said, ‘Did he say what I think he said?’ He just nodded. At that point, I had no choice.”

  McEnroe had won his first three matches in the tournament so easily people were starting to say he was going to win a major for the first time since 1984. Then he got into a tough match with Mikael Pernfors, a very good player who had been a French Open finalist in 1986, and you could almost see him melting down as the match went on.

  That month in Australia was also the beginning of my friendship with Pete Sampras. I had actually been introduced to Sampras a month earlier in Florida when I had gone down to spend some time with Jim Courier.

  Courier was nineteen, Sampras was eighteen. I liked Courier because he was completely different than the other two rising Americans of that time, Andre Agassi and Michael Chang. The latter two were already stars. Agassi had been to the U.S. Open semifinals two years in a row and the French Open semis in 1988. In 1989 Chang had become the first American in thirty-four years to win the French Open.

  Agassi had an entourage before everyone had an entourage. In later years I would joke that Agassi’s entourage consisted of his agent; his agent’s assistant; two shoe reps; a racquet stringer; a masseuse; his coach, Nick Bollettieri; Nick’s assistant; his personal trainer; and his religious guru—whom he once fired after losing a match to David Wheaton in Stratton Mountain. Oh, and his brother, who as far as I could tell was being paid to be his brother. Agassi was an image back then and little more, thus the famous “image is everything” commercial.

  Chang didn’t really care about his image. But he hated doing interviews, and on the rare occasions that he did one, almost all his answers came back to his relationship with Jesus Christ. In fact, after winning in Paris, he told the media he had won because he had a better relationship with Jesus than Stefan Edberg, the losing finalist. When someone asked him how he could possibly know that he had a better relationship with Jesus than Edberg, Chang shrugged and said, “Because I do.”

  On days he played matches, Chang wouldn’t talk to anyone in the media one on one. He did his press conference and bolted. One day at Wimbledon, Tommy Bonk of the Los Angeles Times and I waited for Chang to come off a practice court a few days before the tournament began. When we asked Chang if he could talk to us for a couple of minutes, he shook his head and said, “I don’t talk on practice days.”

  Unlike me, Bonk is one of the more patient people to ever work in journalism. But at that moment he’d pretty much had it with Chang’s sanctimony and consistent unwillingness to cooperate even a little bit. “Let me see if I have this straight,” he said as Chang started to walk away. “You won’t talk on days you play, you won’t talk on days you practice. Exactly when will you talk?”

  Chang never answered that question. He wasn’t talking on a practice day.

  When I told that story to Peter Lawler, whose company, Advantage International, represented Chang at the time, he shrugged and said, “Don’t worry about Chang. He’ll never win another major.”

  As it turned out Lawler was right about that. But he was wrong about Jim Courier.

  Courier was a kid from Dade City, Florida, whose favorite sport was baseball. For years, you almost never saw him without his beloved Cincinnati Reds cap on. He had a little bit of a Huck Finn look to him: reddish-blond hair and freckles and a knack for looking you right in the eye when you talked to him, even when he was a teenager.

  When I was beginning my research for Hard Courts in the summer of 1989, I was looking for young American players who might be part of the book. I was doing that in part because of Arthur Ashe’s 1985 comment about “where is the next McEnroe, where is the next Connors?” I was also doing it because players like Lendl and Mats Wilander, even while ranked number one and number two in the world, had talked about how important it was for the sport to have Americans competing for major titles.

  “It’s just a fact,” Lendl had said at the U.S. Open in 1986 after beating the last American in the field, Tim Wilkison, in the quarterfinals. “Most of the TV money is in the U.S. Lots of sponsors and the most people. You need Americans competing.”

  By the summer of ’89, Agassi had emerged as a star and Chang had won the French Open. Chang apparently only spoke on February 29 and Agassi already had a posse that was pretty much impenetrable. Plus, I didn’t have much desire to penetrate the posse. The thought of buddying up to Agassi’s brother made me slightly sick to my stomach. There was something completely phony about Agassi that I didn’t like. People who know him now say that he’s done a complete one-eighty. There’s no doubt that he’s done wonderful work for charity along with his wife, Steffi Graf, and I admire that. Hell, I admire him for marrying Graf. But as a young player he reminded me a little of a young Tiger Woods. Everything he said was calculated; everything he did was with one thing in mind: how will this affect my ability to make money.

  After losing badly in the first round at Wimbledon in 1987, he ducked the tournament for the next three years. He had all sorts of excuses: he needed a rest after the grueling clay court season, he didn’t want to wear all white (and upset his sponsors, I guess) as was required at Wimbledon, and the best one of all—Wimbledon isn’t that big a
deal.

  In the spring of 1990, Agassi and McEnroe played an exhibition in Washington. As with McEnroe and Borg (and almost all exhibitions), they agreed to split the first two sets and then play for real in the third. Agassi won. After the match, Harold Solomon, the one-time French Open finalist who was the event promoter, came down on court to “interview” the two players. Agassi was no doubt surprised when in the midst of the “great to have you here, Andre” spiel, Solomon said, “So, Andre, when are we going to see you at Wimbledon again?”

  There was a long pause. Then Agassi said, “Okay, let me put it to the fans. How many of you think Wimbledon is that big a deal, think it’s the most important tournament?”

  Many, if not most, in the crowd clapped and cheered to indicate that they thought Wimbledon was, in fact, the most important event in tennis.

  Undaunted, Agassi plowed ahead. “Okay now, how many of you for America think the U.S. Open is the most important event?” He began waving his arms wildly to get the fans going. Many, if not most, responded. Rah-rah, U.S.A. I was standing with McEnroe at that moment, and he turned to me and said, “Did he really just do that?” Without waiting for an answer, he said, “That may be the single most absurd thing I’ve ever seen.”

  He was absolutely right.

  So neither Agassi nor Chang would be my young American storyline. The previous June, Courier, whacking forehands from all over the court, had upset Agassi at the French. That was when I decided I wanted to try to work with Courier. That was when my friend Lawler told me I was wasting my time, that Courier was a nice player but nothing special. I didn’t care. I wanted Courier.

  At the U.S. Open (for America!) that fall, I also decided I wanted Pete Sampras. He had just turned eighteen and a lot of tennis people thought he was the Next One. Unlike Agassi, Chang, and Courier, he played serve-and-volley, which was becoming a lost art even then in tennis. He beat Wilander late one night in the second round of the tournament, and I was sold. As it turned out, even though I didn’t intend it that way, Courier was my door to Sampras.