Early in December, I flew to Florida to spend an evening with Courier, getting what I call the “tell me your life story” interview out of the way before everyone headed to Australia to start the season. Courier and Sampras were practicing together at Nick Bollettieri’s academy in Bradenton and sharing a condo. When I went to meet Courier, Sampras was there. The three of us sat and talked for a while, and I asked Pete if he’d be willing to take part in the book too.
“I’d love to,” he said. “It sounds like fun.”
As tough as it is to cover tennis—because of the access issues and the dominance of the agents—I enjoyed a lot of the people I spent time with in 1990. Some were non-stars like Elise Burgin, Shaun Stafford, Glenn Layendecker, and Bud Schultz, who I latched onto because I remembered his five-day victory at Wimbledon five years earlier.
Others were the big names like Lendl and McEnroe and Connors and Boris Becker, in addition to Graf, Navratilova, Monica Seles, and Zina Garrison, who emerged that year by upsetting Seles and reaching the Wimbledon final. Chris Evert had retired at the end of 1989 but was still a major factor in the game, doing TV for NBC and being an unofficial mentor to, as she was introduced in Rome, “the future of the game,” Jennifer Capriati.
No pressure there for a fourteen-year-old kid, huh?
Capriati’s arrival on tour was considered only slightly more important than the discovery of fire. The buildup to her debut in Boca Raton, at what my friend Sally Jenkins called “the Virginia Slims of Capriati,” was almost Super Bowl–like. I knew Capriati and her family were going to be an important part of the book one way or the other, so I set up a meeting with her father, Stefano.
This was one of those rare cases where an agent was helpful. I couldn’t help but like John Evert, not because he was Chris’s younger brother, but because he was one of the few agents I’d met who didn’t take himself seriously. When I started calling him “Colonel Parker” (Elvis reference for those born after 1977), he not only didn’t mind, he took to calling me and saying, “Hey, it’s the Colonel.”
He set up a breakfast meeting for me with Stefano—just the two of us, no babysitting. I explained to Stefano what I was doing, that I was chronicling a year in the sport, that I was working with a number of players, and that I would love for Jennifer to be part of it.
Capriati asked me if I was paying any of the players involved, clearly wanting to know if he would get paid for cooperating. I explained I didn’t work that way, but that I understood that in Italy, where he had grown up, it was not uncommon to pay sources. We went back and forth for a while before he shook his head.
“I am planning to write my own book on how I did this,” he said. (Yes, he said, “how I did this.” Jennifer, apparently, was along for the ride. Shades of Earl Woods circa 1996.) “If I like what you write, maybe I will let you write the book for me.”
I took a deep breath, both to choose my next words carefully and to make sure I didn’t start to laugh. This was during the Virginia Slims of Capriati and his daughter had won one professional tennis match at that moment. And yet here sat her father telling me with a straight face that he was going to do a book on how he had created Jennifer.
Oy vey.
“Well I wish you the best with it,” I finally said. “I think, to be honest, you’re getting ahead of yourself, but that’s your call, not mine.”
At that moment Bud Collins walked into the hotel restaurant where we were sitting. “Stay fano,” Bud said, always using an Italian accent because he liked to speak Italian and, in fact, had a very good accent. “Complimenti!” he added, referring to Jennifer’s win the day before.
“Grazie,” Capriati said. Then he looked back at me. “Maybe I let him write the book.”
“Be my guest.”
CAPRIATI ACTUALLY MADE IT to the final that first week before losing to Gabriela Sabatini. She was a big strong kid, still a month away from turning fourteen. Sports Illustrated put her on the cover the following week. She had an infectious enthusiasm and was still innocent enough to say things like, “Wow, playing Martina will be so cool. I mean, she’s like a lege.” (That would be legend.)
After she won her opening match at the VSOC in Boca, Ted Tinling sat in the back of the interview room with a huge grin on his face. “Well, now I can die,” he said. “I’ve seen all the great ones: Lenglen, Connolly, Mrs. King, Virginia, Margaret, Bueno, Chrissy, Martina, Miss Graf, and Seles. She [Capriati] is wonderful. Spectacular. I absolutely love her.”
Sadly, Ted wasn’t kidding about dying. He clearly wasn’t well and hadn’t been for a while. Walking had become a challenge for him. He had trouble breathing if he had to walk more than ten or twenty yards to get anywhere (he’d had respiratory problems his entire life and, just shy of eighty, they were finally catching up to him). But he was still very much Ted. If someone asked him how he was feeling, his answer was always the same: “Dying, thank you!” In Australia, Wendy Turnbull, who had once been ranked in the top ten, was doing TV for Channel 7, which televised virtually every tennis match played in Australia from the warm-up tournaments through the Australian Open. Ted didn’t think much of Turnbull’s work and told people just that.
Early one morning, Turnbull stormed into the media room looking for Ted. “I understand, Ted, that you’ve been quite critical of my commentary,” she said.
“Of course I have,” Ted said. “It’s awful. Commentary for the blind! I don’t need you to tell me someone hit a crosscourt backhand, I need you to tell me why they hit it or why they can’t hit it. I need you to tell me what it feels like to be out there trying to return Steffi’s forehand because you’ve been out there trying to do it in the past. That’s why you’ve been hired, because you’re Miss Turnbull. I’m almost dead and I can sit there and tell you when I see a crosscourt backhand.”
Turnbull was clearly unprepared for that answer. She turned on her heel and walked out of the room.
Ted, being Ted, didn’t worry about whether his advice was wanted or not and had jumped into Wimbledon’s stiff-necked boardroom with the enthusiasm of a twenty-five-year-old. Among other things, he insisted that the club stop treating the American media like second-class citizens. He was the person most responsible for the club finally building a decent-size writing room for us. He also told the members it was outrageous—one of his favorite words—that the club traditionally invited a member of the English media to its morning meeting but never anyone from overseas. Grudgingly, the club finally began inviting us occasionally to sit in on the meetings.
I was first invited to a meeting one morning in 1986. I think I had about three glasses of sherry at eight o’clock in the morning (talk about commentary for the blind) when Barry Weatherill, the chairman of the media committee, asked me if “everything is all right with you chaps.” The correct answer, or so I’d been told, was “Oh yes, Barry, quite well. Thank you so much.” Then you asked for more sherry.
As usual, I flunked the etiquette test. After saying something about how much we appreciated all the club did, I launched into a list of complaints: press conferences were cut much too short, why did we have zero access to the tea room when the English media was allowed in there at any time, and thanks for the new writing room, but did anyone notice there wasn’t a single bathroom on that floor or anywhere in the same zip code (postal code in Great Britain)?
The bathroom issue seriously concerned them. Something, they agreed, must be done. But the access issues… well, this was Wimbledon. When I talked about our need to get more access to the players, Weatherill—a genuinely nice man—turned to Ted and said, “Surely, Ted, you can’t agree with any of this.”
“I only agree with all of it!” Ted, who hadn’t had any sherry and didn’t need it, yelled. “Of course there should be more access. These players aren’t the bloody royal family. The media should be allowed into the locker rooms too!”
That set off a round of serious choking on the sherry as it went down. I was trying not to laugh. This had cl
early been a setup. Ted knew I’d bring up access and when I did he pounced.
By the end of that day—seriously—the American media had tea room access, although we had to go and request a pass as opposed to the Brits, who had one with them at all times, and Richard Berens, who ran the media room, had pointed out a secret, off-limits bathroom to me in the club offices.
“Use it whenever you want,” he whispered. “Anyone gives you a hard time, tell them I authorized it.”
Sure enough, one day in the middle of a match, I raced from my seat at Centre Court to the secret bathroom, which was only a few steps from the court and remarkably convenient.
As I was getting rid of all the coffee I’d had in the morning—when you drink coffee in England it is very strong because they don’t make that much of it—I heard a voice behind me say, “You there, who authorized you to be in here?”
It was one of the security guards.
“Richard Berens,” I said.
“I don’t believe you. No member of the media is allowed in here.”
“I am.”
“No, you’re not, come with me right now.”
“Not a good idea.”
He was now standing right behind me. He grabbed my arm and spun me around.
An even worse idea.
“How dare you!” he screamed.
“How dare I?” I said. “How about how dare you! What, are you crazy?”
The fact that I was also laughing at the sight of his spotless uniform no longer being spotless probably didn’t help.
“You come with me right now!” he screamed even louder, his face quite red.
“Okay if I zip up?”
“Now!” he screamed as I zipped up.
He took me down to Berens’s office ranting about how I had claimed that Berens had authorized me to use the super-secret bathroom.
“That’s right,” Berens said.
“But, but, that’s an off-limits area. Strictly off-limits.”
“Unless someone in authority says it’s not,” Berens said. “I’m in authority. When you were told I had given permission you should have come and seen me before…”
He nodded his head toward the guard’s pants. The guard stormed off in a fury.
“John, I’m terribly sorry about this,” Berens said.
“Oh no, Richard, please don’t apologize. I’ll tell that story forever.”
“I imagine you will.”
Of course the great Dan Jenkins beat me to it. Told the story by his daughter, my friend Sally, he repeated it almost word-for-word in his book You Gotta Play Hurt.
The book is fiction. Dan’s depiction of the incident is not.
13
Dream Season
TED TINLING DIDN’T LIVE to see Hard Courts published. He was hospitalized shortly after Capriati’s debut and died early in May 1990 after his doctors had let him briefly leave the hospital to attend a reunion of his old bowling team. Ted had also been a champion bowler once upon a time.
I dedicated Hard Courts to Ted and to Bud Collins, both of whom had taught me more about the game and covering the game than anyone. The book sold extremely well, getting as high as number four on the New York Times bestseller list and staying on the list for four months.
Some of the reviews were very good. Others weren’t as good, especially those from “serious” tennis fans who were appalled by my views on how poorly the game was being run and how spoiled and difficult to deal with many of the players were. Agassi and Chang, both fan favorites, didn’t fare very well in the book. Neither did most agents—or anyone in tennis management.
One reviewer in Time magazine really let me have it, saying I simply didn’t understand the beauty of the game (oh, please). In fact, he said, if you really want to read a book in which the author appreciates the wonders of the sport and the genius of the players, you should read Bud Collins’s autobiography, My Life with the Pros. (For the record, Bud wanted to call it What a Sweet Racquet, but his publishers, showing all the imagination of an NCAA bureaucrat, turned him down.)
I had, of course, read Bud’s book and loved it. There were two major differences between the books: Much of Bud’s story was about his early days in the game in the ’50s and ’60s and into the ’70s, before big money and agents had taken it over. Back then, someone like Bud had total access to the players, and the players were a lot easier to deal with because no one was treating them like royalty at the age of fourteen—or, in the case of Jennifer Capriati, at the age of nine, when her father started making deals on her behalf.
The second difference, to be honest, was the difference in our personalities. Bud, much like my mother, can find the good in anyone. Dick Enberg, his longtime colleague at NBC, once said to him, “I just don’t know how you find it in yourself to love a sport this much when it has so many bad people in it.” Dick isn’t exactly a guy who is hard on people either.
I think I find the good in people, but I recognize the bad. I also, like my mother, can’t stand phonies. That’s why I wasn’t kind to Agassi or Chang. It is also why I haven’t exactly been best friends with Tiger Woods through the years.
The Time review did do one thing that looked as if it was going to help the book. Someone at Nightline read the review and thought it would be fun during U.S. Open week to do a tennis segment and have Bud and me—whose views were so completely different—come on and argue about tennis: he who saw beauty versus he who saw phonies. Someone called and asked if I would do the show.
You bet.
Then they called Bud, who also said yes.
Network talk shows, whether they be “news” shows like Nightline or the morning shows like Today, tend to do what they call preinterviews. At best, they are a complete waste of time. At worst, they can cause serious problems. Twice during the 1991 U.S. Open, preinterviews created major issues for me.
The first happened when Nightline talked to Bud prior to our joint appearance. Wanting to set up the adversarial relationship between Bud and me, the pre-interviewer kept asking him about things in my book.
“Feinstein says appearance fees are a pox that’s killing the game.”
“He’s one hundred percent right.”
“He also says that agents have far too much control and can’t be trusted to tell you the correct time of day.”
“Couldn’t agree more.”
“He’s pretty tough on Jennifer Capriati’s father and on Andre Agassi.”
“He should be.”
Exasperated, the interviewer finally said, “Well, what do you disagree with Feinstein on?”
“I like the Red Sox. He likes the Mets.”
Shortly thereafter I got another call. Our appearance had been canceled. “We thought you and Mr. Collins disagreed on the sport, but you seem to agree on everything,” the guy said.
“Did you happen to read the book dedication?” I said. “Who do you think taught me most of this stuff in the first place?”
As soon as I hung up the phone I stormed over to Bud. “Couldn’t you have faked it?” I said. “Couldn’t you have just said you think Agassi’s the greatest guy who ever lived?”
I thought I was going to get another Nightline shot the next week. This was the year Jimmy Connors made his final melodramatic run to the semifinals at the age of thirty-nine, winning one five-set match after another. Connors had been one of tennis’s first real bad boys in the ’70s—along with Ilie Nastase—and had been wildly unpopular with tennis fans. Until John McEnroe came along. Then Connors became the loveable old man, the guy who had grown up, gotten married, had kids, the whole thing.
The image change made the McEnroe family crazy. “Jimmy has done things that make John look like Little Lord Fauntleroy,” John McEnroe Sr. said to me once. “This notion that he’s the good guy and John’s the bad guy is a joke.”
Connors and McEnroe simply didn’t like each other. The one time they agreed to play Davis Cup together—in the 1984 finals against Sweden—they refused to speak all we
ek and both played lousy because most of their animosity was directed at each other rather than at the Swedes.
Now Connors was in his glory one last time and everyone was falling all over themselves to capture the moment. After Connors had come from behind to beat Aaron Krickstein in the fourth round on Labor Day afternoon, I got another call from Nightline. They again wanted to do a Friday tennis segment—if Connors won his quarterfinal against Paul Haarhuis. When he did, the booker called and said, “Okay, we’re on.”
Then he wanted to do another pre-interview. One of his questions was this: Why are people so in love with Jimmy Connors at this point?
I can tell you my answer almost word-for-word. “What he’s doing by still winning at thirty-nine is defying mortality. You’re not supposed to be able to play at this level at his age. Who among us can’t identify with defying mortality?”
The guy thanked me and said he’d call me Friday to confirm that the segment was going to go forward. I was going to be on with Arthur Ashe, who had beaten Connors in the 1975 Wimbledon final and then spent many years as Davis Cup captain trying to convince Connors to play Davis Cup more often. Arthur was not only a friend, he was (and is) the one and only person I have ever used a blurb from on a book. He had offered it after reading Hard Courts, and I had, of course, taken him up on it.
Perfect.
Friday afternoon, during the men’s doubles final, I got a call. For years I remembered this guy’s name, but now I’ve forgotten it. “Hey, John,” he said. “Really sorry to have to tell you, but you didn’t make the cut.”
I looked at the phone. “Cut? What cut?”
“Oh, we always have several candidates for the show. We decided to go with Ashe and Robert Lipsyte.”
I looked at the phone again, still disbelieving. I know Bob Lipsyte well, like him, and have always enjoyed his work. At the time he was a highly-respected columnist at the New York Times. He lives on Shelter Island and we sometimes run into each other there. Although I knew he had covered a good deal of tennis during his first incarnation at the Times (he had just returned after leaving for a while), I couldn’t remember seeing him at a tournament in seven years of covering tennis. He had written a Connors column that week, sort of the predictable aging hero/lion in winter type of column.
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