One on One

by John Feinstein

  I wasn’t really paying much attention until the men’s final, which for a second straight year was delayed until Monday because of rain. CBS opted to start the match at four o’clock even though with Nadal playing Novak Djokovic (both back courters) there was an excellent chance the match would end up going head-to-head with the opening Monday Night Football game of the season at seven o’clock and a reasonable chance it would bleed over into prime time.

  That had happened the year before and had brought about the embarrassing sight of newly crowned champion Juan Del Potro asking Dick Enberg during the awards ceremony if he could address the crowd in Spanish for a moment and initially being told no by Enberg because the truck was barking in his ear to get the car presented and get off the air.

  Not having learned its lesson, CBS got burned again. There was a rain delay in the second set, meaning there was no way the match would end before eight o’clock. CBS decided during the delay to give up on the match rather than lose prime-time advertising for a tiny tennis audience, and they turned the match over to ESPN—actually ESPN2, because the football was on ESPN—when the match was resumed.

  Shortly before play was to start again, CBS producer Bob Mansbach let his “talent”—Carillo, Enberg, and John McEnroe—know that the match would be on ESPN2 when play resumed.

  “Manzy, I can’t go on ESPN,” Carillo told him from the booth. “I don’t work for them anymore.”

  “That’s right,” Mansbach said. There was a pause. “Mary, you’re excused for the night.”

  When the match came back on air I was flipping back and forth between it and the Ravens-Jets football game (in spite of what Peter Bodo thinks, I do still like to watch the game). Almost right away I noticed that Mary wasn’t there. My first thought, knowing her, was that she had to be somewhere Tuesday and the rain delay had forced her to leave early. I already knew that the delay was making Enberg crazy because he was doing play-by-play for the San Diego Padres and the team had gone into a swoon as soon as he left town for the Open and he had to get to St. Louis to meet them there as soon as possible.

  The next day I called Carillo and asked her if she had a plane to catch. That was when she told me the Serena story. It certainly wasn’t the first time she had fought with ESPN over the difference between doing journalism and doing public relations for athletes. It was just the final straw.

  “No one’s called you?” I asked.

  “Not a soul.”

  It wasn’t until just before the Australian Open that ESPN finally announced that Mary was no longer working for them. It put out the usual statement about how great Mary was and how much the network valued her contributions. The only person in the media who smelled the ESPN rat was SI.com media reporter Richard Deitsch. Although Mary wouldn’t comment, Deitsch, with the help of SI’s talented tennis reporter Jon Wertheim, pieced the story together.

  “It’s well known,” Deitsch wrote, “that Carillo thought most of ESPN’s coverage of tennis came a lot closer to cheerleading than reporting.”

  What was upsetting to Carillo was to read quotes from an ESPN suit named Norby Williamson, who had gotten together with Sandy Montag to create a mythical story about Mary leaving because she wanted to branch out and do other things. He claimed—and Montag went along—that during the summer he and Montag had started discussing Mary leaving a year before her contract was up (yeah, right smack in the middle of the U.S. Open). ESPN, according to this fable, had magnanimously allowed Carillo to leave because of all she had done for the network.

  Please.

  Anyone with an IQ over 50 wasn’t going to buy that story.

  Through it all, Carillo remains Carillo. She’s a star on NBC and CBS and a star on HBO. Tennis Channel signed her up about thirty seconds after learning she had left ESPN. She hardly needs ESPN, which is a nice place for someone in sports television to be in life.

  And she still loves, as she puts it, “my damn sport.”

  “Sometimes I feel like such an apologist,” she said. “I tell people I know there are problems, and I wish people would acknowledge them and work to make them better. But the fact is, and I know a lot of people don’t want to hear this, the guys are in better shape—much better shape—than the women right now. You have real stars and they do play one another.

  “The only real stars in the women’s game are Venus and Serena, and they are, at best, part-time players and they’re both getting close to the end. What was it Arthur [Ashe] said about the men’s game in the ’80s? Where are the next Venus and Serena? Or anyone like them or even close to being like them?”

  Of course ESPN wouldn’t want Carillo to say that on the air. She’ll say it though—just not on ESPN. Good for her.

  I FIGURED I SHOULD go back and catch up with John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl for this book because they were such polar opposites when I was covering them.

  McEnroe is now a TV star. You can’t really turn on tennis without seeing John—unless it’s a non-major, in which case you see younger brother Patrick. John is everywhere: he does very good, very funny commercials (most notably the one where he goes to the umpire’s house and hugs him), and he wrote a book called You Cannot Be Serious several years ago that was very well done.

  It was Carillo who first pointed out to John his penchant for using that phrase. She and McEnroe and, as Mary put it, “one of John’s walk-around guys,” were ordering room service in a hotel one night when John was still playing, and the food was slow in arriving.

  “John tells the walk-around guy to call downstairs and find out what’s going on,” Mary explained. “I said to John, ‘Should he give him the “you cannot be serious” line or save that for later?’ He looked at me like he didn’t know what I was talking about. I said, ‘You say that all the time.’ ”

  Now he markets it all the time.

  When I see McEnroe today—the sport’s most visible spokesman and pitchman—working with juniors at a clinic he has started in the shadow of the Triborough Bridge on Randall’s Island, undoubtedly still the best-known person in the game with apologies to Federer and Nadal—I think back to a conversation I had years ago with Arthur Ashe.

  Arthur had been diagnosed with AIDS and knew he was dying. Talking about it seemed to bother others more than it bothered Arthur. There wasn’t any question that Arthur was the most respected person in the game at the time. He symbolized all that could be right about tennis and had worked hard to take the game to the inner city and to keep expanding the sport’s base. He had set up a clinic in Newark, and I went up to watch him work. Afterward, we had lunch.

  He was the one who brought up the fact that he was concerned about who would pick up the mantle when he was gone.

  “Is there anyone who can do it?” I asked.

  Arthur nodded. “Yeah, there is,” he said. “John.”

  I can’t say I was stunned to hear him say that because I knew that Arthur probably knew better than anyone the side of McEnroe he was talking about. McEnroe talked often about the need to get more minorities playing the game. “It’s entirely possible that the greatest player in the history of tennis will never pick up a racquet,” he said, a classic McEnroe sentence. “We’ve got to find a way to get a racquet in that guy’s hands.”

  Don’t misunderstand. Ashe was often horrified by McEnroe’s behavior. He had once told him before a Davis Cup match that he was tired of his acting out while representing the U.S. and if he acted out that weekend he was going to walk to the umpire’s chair and, as captain, say to the umpire, “The United States defaults.”

  McEnroe isn’t Ashe—no one is and no one is likely to ever be Ashe. He was unique: a brilliant, quietly driven man who happened to have a genius for tennis. But McEnroe has tried to pick up the mantle—although he has made very good money along the way while doing it.

  Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf have done good things with the school they started in Las Vegas, and there are others in tennis who have tried to do good things. But Ashe was right all those years a
go. The person with the most potential was—and is—McEnroe.

  Now if he can just get his childhood pal Carillo to control her temper…

  WHILE MCENROE HAS CONTINUED to live a very public life since his retirement, Ivan Lendl went in the opposite direction. He was forced to quit the game after the 1994 U.S. Open because of recurring back problems. He was thirty-four and had won eight major titles and was quite wealthy. He retired to do two things: raise his family and play golf.

  Lendl had become obsessed with golf during his tennis career. He much preferred talking about golf than tennis and would actually play as soon as he got to his home in Greenwich after matches at the U.S. Open.

  “It relaxed me,” he said. “Anything to not think about my next match was a good thing.”

  Lendl and his wife, Samantha, had their first daughter in May of 1990—just prior to Lendl’s last all-out attempt to win Wimbledon. They went on to have four more children—all girls, a twist not without irony. When McEnroe returned to the tour after his six month hiatus brought on by losing to Brad Gilbert in January of 1986, he ran into Lendl who congratulated him on the birth of his first child, a boy named Kevin.

  “It is good that you had a boy,” Lendl told McEnroe. “You aren’t really a man until you have a boy.”

  Lendl laughs at that memory now. “I guess God proved to me that she has sense of humor,” he said.

  When Lendl left tennis he really left it. His back problems made it hard to play, so he didn’t play at all. He focused on golf and became very good—a plus-two handicap. He played in a lot of celebrity events but also in regional professional events in the Northeast in the summertime and in Florida during the winter. Turning fifty in the summer of 2010 was a joy for him. “I get to play senior tees,” he said. “Gives me fifty extra yards. That helps a lot.”

  I went to meet Lendl on an August afternoon at a tennis club he owns in Connecticut. He also has a tennis academy in Florida. In yet another twist, all his daughters are golfers—very good ones, in fact, among the top juniors in the country. The two oldest girls now play at the University of Florida and number three is a freshman at Alabama.

  The club was empty when I pulled up at about five o’clock because it was only open until three o’clock on weekday afternoons. There were indoor and outdoor courts, and Lendl was on one of the outdoor courts playing with a kid who looked to me like a college player. I was half right. His name was Christian Coley and he had just graduated from Marist, where he had played for four years.

  “You’re early,” Lendl said, which was true. I had left myself extra time figuring to get lost, but his directions had been so pinpoint I had found the place with ease. “We’re going to play one more set. That okay?”

  “Fine with me,” I said. “I’ll just sit here and take notes like I used to.”

  Lendl was playing for the first time in years, getting in shape to play some exhibition matches overseas against Bjorn Borg, but also to play an exhibition against McEnroe in Madison Square Garden in February. Sampras and Agassi were going to play the feature match, with McEnroe and Lendl, the old men, playing a pro set—first player to eight games wins—as a warm-up.

  “If I’m going to play John in public, I want to play well,” Lendl said. “I don’t care how old we are.”

  Sitting and watching Lendl, I felt like I had slipped into a time warp. He was a little heavier—“Actually, I’ve lost forty pounds since I started working out again,” he told me later—but all the strokes and movement and quirks were still there. The pre-serve routine, minus the sawdust he always kept in his pocket to keep his hands dry, was the same. The little twitches were all there, and so was the heavy topspin forehand that had been his trademark.

  There may not have been anyone watching the way there would be at the Garden in February, but this was a long way from hit-and-giggle tennis. Both players were trying, running down balls, getting frustrated by missed shots. Lendl won both sets they played. When they were done, the two made plans to play again on Sunday. Lendl’s family had headed back to Florida earlier in the week, so he was alone for a few days and wanted to play as much as possible before loading up his SUV—which was filled with golf clubs for his girls and for him—and heading south.

  “When I wasn’t playing because of my back, I didn’t miss it,” he said. “Golf gave me competition I wanted and needed. I do need to compete. I think we all do in one way or another. But now that my back is good [he finally found a doctor who helped him ease the pain], it is fun to play again. I’m much better now than I was two months ago. I hope by February I’ll be a lot better than this.”

  I asked him if he and McEnroe had ever developed any kind of friendship after their years of intense competition had ended. The two had never gotten along when they were at the top of the game, in part because that’s the nature of competition, but also because they were so different. Lendl planned every minute of every day from wake-up until he went to bed. He had strict training regimens and diets and grinded as hard to get better as anyone who has ever played.

  McEnroe was The Natural. He had a feel for the game no one has ever had, and he never had to work very hard at it. One year, during the season-ending championships in New York, Lendl spent twenty minutes explaining to the media postmatch how going on the Haas Diet had changed his game and his life. When McEnroe came in later he was asked if he would ever consider a special diet to get into better shape.

  “I am on a special diet right now,” he answered.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, it’s called the Häagen-Dazs diet.”

  “It isn’t that we’re enemies or anything,” Lendl said. “I just don’t see him very often. I haven’t been around tennis. He is. I did run into him last year at Madison Square Garden though, when I was there with my youngest daughter.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “Great, actually. We were getting off the elevator and John was getting on. I stopped and introduced her to John, and I said, ‘Nikola, before you were born, Mr. McEnroe and I played against each other many times.’ Nikola looked at John and her eyes went wide. She said to him, ‘I know you. I saw my daddy hit you with a tennis ball on a video!’

  “John just looked at her and said, ‘Which time?’ ”

  Years ago that wouldn’t have been so funny. Now though, everyone can laugh about it. But some things never change. Lendl still looks like he’s on the Haas Diet and McEnroe is probably still on the Häagen-Dazs diet.

  Technically, Lendl won their match in New York. Leading 6–3, McEnroe, who had hurt himself warming up earlier in the day with Sampras, had to retire from the match. That didn’t make him happy. It didn’t make Lendl happy either.

  “Too bad,” Lendl wrote me in an e-mail. “We had a great crowd—sellout. I think it was good for tennis.”

  No doubt he was glad so many people showed up, but he would have preferred kicking McEnroe’s butt.

  Like I said, some things never change.

  23

  The Existentialist and the Buddhist

  ON A PERFECT FALL evening in 2010, I walked into the clubhouse at the Seaside Course on Sea Island, Georgia, and found David Duval waiting for me. We had made plans a few weeks earlier to get together for dinner, and Duval was sitting in the dining area of the clubhouse, having arrived early, watching the start of what would turn out to be Roy Halladay’s National League Division Series no-hitter on a large-screen TV.

  “Didn’t want to be late,” he said when I walked up. “I know that makes you a little bit cranky.”

  “A little late is fine,” I said, smiling. “Twenty-four hours late makes me cranky.”

  Actually, walking into the clubhouse that October evening was both difficult and emotional for me. No more than a few feet from where Duval sat was the bar where I had last seen Bruce Edwards alive, in November of 2003. I glanced over there as I walked to where Duval was sitting, and in my mind’s eye I saw Bruce and Tom Watson sitting there, drinking a beer after what tur
ned out to be the final round of golf in which Bruce would caddy for Watson.

  That had been at a long-gone event called the UBS Cup, a pseudo–Ryder Cup knockoff put together by IMG for players over forty. It shocked me to think it had been almost seven years since that melancholy afternoon. I had only been to Sea Island once since then, to give a speech, and that dinner had been on the other side of the island. This was the first time I’d been back inside the clubhouse, and I had been steeling myself for the feelings I knew would wash over me when I walked inside.

  It had been a long time since Duval and I had sat down and talked at any length. He had been an important character in The Majors, and just before its publication in April of 1999, he had ascended to the number one ranking in the world, not long after shooting his historic 59 (13 under par) on the final day of the Bob Hope Desert Classic. He’d hit a five-iron second shot to within five feet on the par-5 eighteenth hole to set up a closing eagle.

  At that moment it seemed likely that the next great rivalry in golf would be Duval and Tiger Woods. Duval was four years older, but he had just won for the ninth time on tour and had been achingly close to winning the Masters a year earlier. Woods had won the Masters in 1997 but hadn’t won a major since then and Duval had wrested the number one ranking away from him.

  “At that point in my life, I was completely convinced I could be a better player than Tiger,” Duval said, sipping a glass of red wine that night on Sea Island. (He had suggested we eat there in the clubhouse. “Food’s good, prices are okay, and no one will bother us,” he reasoned—correctly.) “I thought my game was good enough physically and good enough mentally that I could beat him under the gun and over the long term.

  “I wasn’t thinking I would always beat him when we went head to head. But I thought I was good enough to compete with him on a regular basis.”