by Alan Davies
As a teenager watching John McEnroe playing tennis at Wimbledon I never found any of his behaviour questionable. His outbursts of rage and frustration, his duelling with authority and with his personal demons. All seemed perfectly understandable to me. He was behaving like a teenage boy. On a bad day.
McEnroe had made an immediate impact at Wimbledon when an actual teenager in 1977 by reaching the semi-finals as an eighteen-year-old newcomer. Bjorn Borg was the champion that year as he had been in 1976 and as he was to be in ’78 and ’79.
Who could stop Borg? The metronomic, ice-cool, unexpressive winning machine from Sweden. No one in sport has ever had greater control over his emotions than Borg. To me this made him soporifically dull. Someone had to beat him, please. Control over your emotions is the very thing an adolescent doesn’t have. Show me a fourteen-year-old Borg fan and I’ll show you a test case for a team of psychiatrists working round the clock.
Borg was admirable but he won Wimbledon five years in a row and that’s a long period for a young fan to endure. Nothing seemed to happen in his matches. He just won and left.
McEnroe, on the other hand, brought an anxious, explosive petulance to the court that was sometimes less teenage and more pre-teen, or even pre-school. This sort of thing would, under no circumstances, be tolerated in the tennis clubs of Southern England. It’s just not on. If you are upset, you jolly well don’t show it and if there’s been an injustice, shame on you for bringing it up. Just carry on and don’t spoil everyone’s day.
My dad had enrolled us all in Woodford Well tennis club and the etiquette of how to behave was as important as how to play. McEnroe drove my dad bonkers. So bonkers that no argument was brooked. He was a bad man, possibly evil. He should be THROWN OUT! The newspapers agreed, calling him ‘superbrat’. McEnroe that is, not my dad.
The view of those fiercely opposed to on-court dissent and the tone of McEnroe’s aggravating attitude was that the chaps in the umpire’s and linesmen’s chairs do a difficult job seriously, diligently and with absolute impartiality. Whether they are correct in their calls or not is, in many ways, irrelevant. They intend to make the right call and that’s the point. No one could do it better than an honest Englishman volunteering from an English tennis club.
For people who are not English harbouring suspicions that the English believe themselves to be infallible, it’s true, they do. For people who are English, who have nagging concerns that the rest of the world hate the English, for the self-regarding certainty of their infallibility, it’s true, they do.
As the linesmen always intended to make the right call, so McEnroe always intended to make the right shot but the benefit of the doubt could hardly go with the player:
‘The ball was out but it was such a good attempt, the crowd went “whoah” and I know you meant it to go in… on reflection, the point’s yours!’
McEnroe’s arguments with officials accelerated the advent of neutral, professional umpires amid efforts to reduce mistakes, not least by changing the line judges every couple of hours. The argument was that mistakes were being made and if they cost matches then, as a professional, that affected your income and livelihood. It had validity in the late ’70s when few players could afford a coach and prize money and sponsorship rewards were less than today.
It was as much the way McEnroe complained, as it was his audacity in complaining at all, that drew the most flak. I empathized though. He was rude and hostile and it was awkward for the umpire, who couldn’t change a call because a player wanted him to, but when McEnroe began to receive catcalls and slow-handclaps, when those middle-class tennis club types yelled, ‘Be quiet, McEnroe’ or ‘Disgraceful’ or ‘Get on with it’, I rooted for him all the more. We played tennis as a family sometimes and my own on-court tantrums, whilst not inspired by McEnroe – they were all my own work – came from the same inability to manage frustration. My brother didn’t speak to me, that was frustrating, my sister was the youngest and so was always right, that was frustrating, and my dad was irritated because I was spoiling the game, so when he came to serve to me, he would invariably hit the ball very hard so I couldn’t hit it back before shouting, ‘Oh come on, that was an easy one!’ That was frustrating.
No surprise then, that when we watched those
Wimbledon arguments, I identified with McEnroe and my dad with the umpire.
When McEnroe beat Borg the following year, I watched the climax alone. As it became clear who was going to win, Dad stood up and left the room, followed, inevitably, by my brother, and dutifully by my sister. But he won, they couldn’t stop him winning, and he was the most thrillingly gifted player to play on the centre court for years. When Federer played Nadal in 2008 it was the first time that the heights of the Borg v McEnroe finals in 1980 and ’81 had been reached since.
I considered McEnroe to be like me. I saw bad behaviour and found solace in it, as I skulked around a school I wanted to burn down, on and off of buses I wrote on and in and out of shops I stole from.
The thieving was a thrill but also a way to impress at school. I’d go out nicking every week, usually staying on the bus down into Loughton after school and filling a bag (with a jumper in the bottom for silent depositing of the goods) with whatever I’d taken an order for. Initially, the theft was kleptomaniacal, taking things I didn’t want or that had no monetary value and then hoarding them. Later though, when my peers found out how good I was at it (because I told them), it was entrepreneurial. O Level study cards were easy to steal and to sell. Bigger items were trickier but worth more. I grabbed a big book about the Lake District as a present for one posh boy’s mum at Christmas.
Eventually I was caught, in a newsagent’s, trying to get away with a magazine placed inside another, for a kid waiting outside. The game was up when the manager came to serve me. I should have left then but went through with it and then offered a 50p bribe once the second magazine had been revealed.
‘Bribery as well,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I should tell the police.’ I was revealed as a hopeless criminal, panicked and afraid after this pettiest of thefts. I waited in the manager’s office for someone from the school to arrive. They wrote a letter that I had to give to my dad.
‘What am I going to tell Uncle Pat?’ said my dad. I liked Uncle Pat. One time Uncle Pat was cutting some cake and asked if anyone would like a finger – meaning a thin slice – the next thing was, he’d actually cut his finger. That was the funniest thing that had happened in my life since I was put in the bath by my mum, as a toddler, with my socks on.
‘You don’t have to tell Uncle Pat!’ I said.
‘Of course I do, I have to tell everybody.’
I’m sure they all found it a gripping anecdote. The key thing was that everybody should have a low opinion of me.
That was frustrating
I had to go back to the shop on a Saturday afternoon, missing a game at White Hart Lane that my dad had tickets for, in order to clear up their back yard. I quite enjoyed it, the first work I’d done in ages.
It turned out I wasn’t like McEnroe at all. I was a petty thief and a liar with behavioural problems who was driving his family to distraction. McEnroe was a gifted athlete with a fierce will to, not so much win, as to avoid the crushing feeling of defeat.
His outbursts on the court were better controlled than I realized. He was remorseful and apologetic afterwards and never let loose in matches against Borg because he respected him too much. In fact, as McEnroe himself says in his autobiography Serious, he had idolized Borg from his teens.
He idolized Borg!
That feels like a betrayal to me. A code violation for disappointing teenagers, Mr McEnroe.
1981
Chrissie Hynde
I was The Dead Beats’ biggest fan. Never missed a gig. In fact I was almost part of the band. At one gig the bass drum kept edging forward during the set and I would be alerted by the drummer’s facial tics and jerks of the head in my direction before heading onstage, in the roadie crouc
h, to push it into place. The roadie crouch came to me instinctively, uncoached. Something about being on someone else’s stage, obscuring their audience’s view, had me bending as if under fire.
It is so unnatural to walk with your hands nearer to the ground than your knees that, in itself, it is an argument against theories of evolution. There cannot have been a gradual transition for primates from four legs to two. It’s so slow and ponderous to walk in a crouch, slower than both a four-legged and an upright two-legged animal. Why would there have been a phase where the primate began to move more slowly and vulnerably? That would threaten the survival of the species. Roadies, however, do it all the time.
An alternative argument in favour of evolutionary theory is that the roadies are an unusual sub-sect of the primates. Hunched over as they scuttle around the stage, closer to the apes’ four-legged lifestyle (sometimes eating food that has dropped to the floor), but also able to stand on two legs, provided they are leaning on a bar.
Arriving at the venue first, humping and dumping several tonnes of equipment, waiting through the sound check and gig, before packing up again in the small hours. It is arduous work, with eighteen-hour days and little time to wash, shave, or take an interest in nutrition. It would come as no surprise to hear that roadies were offered artificial stimulants to help them through a tour, but with responsibilities to audiences, as well as their paymasters, they would never indulge in narcotic abuse and it would be wrong to suggest otherwise.
The Dead Beats gigged all around the Woodford area in the late ’70s. It would not be entirely true to say I was their roadie. I was more their classmate. The road part of the ‘loose drum gig’ was actually the road on which the 20 or 20a bus travelled, which took me to school to see them play that night in the Great Hall. That may sound like an impressive venue but it was only where we normally had assemblies, prize-giving and the inter-house drama performances (which no one as cool as would be interested in, or indeed, considered for).
On guitar for The Dead Beats was Bev. Bev was a boy who took no pleasure in reminders that he had a girl’s name. We sat next to each other in geography, which I was taking for A Level, with history and economics.
My dad persuaded me to take economics instead of English on the basis that it was ‘much more interesting’ than Chaucer and Milton, who were ‘boring’. I was easily swayed as I had no intention of lifting a finger anyway.
There seemed no alternative to two more years at school, which had become more bearable now girls were admitted (co-ed began in the year below, the year I should have been in…). We also had a school skiing trip in my lower sixth year, during which some of the benefits of attending a Minor Public School finally became apparent. Sliding down an Austrian mountain, everyone tipsy on Glühwein, before spending the evening trying to get off with Julia Bradley, was one of the best weeks of my life. The laughter reached hysteria every day. I even found the confidence to conduct a survey of the entire group (best fall of the week, best zits etc), the results of which I delivered as part of a last-night party organized by the staff, who even performed sketches lampooning themselves. ‘Al’s Survey’ went down well, and with hindsight, was a first taste of the joy of stand-up comedy.
Geography with Bev next to me was more fun than any other lesson. We had a nice beardy teacher called Mr O’Connor-Thompson who even let us hold a debate in one class. I forget the topic but Bev and I dominated proceedings on our team and this led to the first positive comments on a report card that I’d had in an eternity.
Bev also gave me access to a whole new peer group of punky gig-goers, including his older brother Nige, who had been among the gang protecting our classmate from the homophobic pursuit by my peers.
I was happy listening to The Dead Beats’ version of ‘All Day and All of the Night’ by The Kinks but Nige and co. introduced me to venues in London I’d never previously heard of. We went to the Hope & Anchor to see The Little Roosters, to the Lyceum to see U2, the Rainbow to see The Stranglers and also a CND benefit with Gang of Four and Wasted Youth that featured a surprise appearance by The Jam. The Rainbow was a converted cinema in Finsbury Park that hasn’t staged gigs for years but the Hope & Anchor in Islington still survives. The Lyceum was closed for a while before re-opening and immediately being hidden under a multi-layered Disney paint job in the guise of the musical The Lion King.
In December 1981 the chance came to see The Pretenders at the Lyceum. I had both their albums and Chrissie Hynde’s picture was on my wall. They were one of the best bands around and I knew all the songs.
Chrissie Hynde fronted the group and was hypnotically alluring with dark hair nearly over her eyes and tight-fitting leather trousers clinging to her slender legs. On some songs she’d sling a guitar over her shoulder, or she’d lean in to the microphone and huskily purr her way through the band’s pre-indy post-punk repertoire. This included their number one, ‘Brass in Pocket’, which she sang so seductively it’s possible that, as a minor, I shouldn’t have been admitted to the venue.
The rest of the band consisted of three lads from Hereford who seemed happy to provide back-up, although the bassist, Pete Farndon, didn’t mind attention. From the floor in front of the stage, the sight of the backlit Martin Chambers flaying his drum kit was spectacular. He appeared to have one drum that was full of liquid and when he hit that, as he bashed back and forth, an arc of spray would cascade up and in to the bright lights. It looked like milk but I doubt it was. Occasionally, he would allow a drumstick to fly out into the audience, which led to a surging mass of bodies trying to get a hand to it. I touched one as it flew by but couldn’t catch it.
Throughout, James Honeyman-Scott dazzled with his expert guitar work. At least it looked expert to me but then I thought Bev was good in The Dead Beats.
Dead Beats gigs were a different affair, often dominated by Nige and his punk friends pogoing around a church venue like the Memorial Hall in South Woodford while spitting enthusiastically at my classmates on stage, much to Bev’s amusement. Andy, the tall, well-spoken lead guitarist (for whose unwitting mother I had purloined a book about the Lake District), pulled out a handkerchief and wiped phlegm from his fingers as he tried to negotiate a song. Bev found this ridiculous and hilarious. I sympathized with Andy and realized that, for all the fun I had with Bev and Nige, I was never a punk. I failed to join in with a brawl at one gig when Nige, who had refused to be intimidated all night by the presence of the notorious NF-supporting ‘Debden Skins’, eventually went to war with about four of them. The Punks v Skins issue had passed me by. I was neither and didn’t want to be.
Musically, by their standards, I was clueless. I was a big Stranglers fan by now and said that I thought people would jump on the bandwagon when they made it big, unaware that they’d had three top ten singles and five top ten albums by then already. ‘They already are big, Al’ said Bev, quietly.
I’d become an Adam and the Ants fan only after they’d changed line-ups, had commercial success, and Bev and his friends had dropped them. Bev scrawled ‘Adam and the Ants are shit’ on my rough book in geography, leaving me unsure what to do, since I’d bought their Kings of the Wild Frontier album and thought it was brilliant.
One night, a punk friend of theirs, who I’d been getting on well with, took umbrage at something I’d said and kicked me in the leg, as we walked past Snaresbrook Crown Court on the way to another gig. He didn’t say which straw it was that had broken his camel’s back. Months later, I chatted to Bev about it, and he agreed that it was a turning point. That, and the time I’d written a letter to a friend of theirs, Sam, who I’d gone out with for all of two weeks, expressing how upset I was and would she reconsider. Bev and his friends thought that I had only made things difficult for Sam, particularly as I’d written my plea on the wall of the subway between The Garage and The Shop, where half the school could see it.
Bev was unerringly honest. One night in May I went to the FA Cup Final replay between Tottenham and Manchester City dress
ed for a cold night, as was the norm for evening games, but it was a balmy evening that felt more like summer. Packed in amongst thousands of Spurs fans, I sweated profusely all night. There was a high moment, when Steve McKenzie scored with a stunning volley for City, but Ricky Villa set off on a weaving dribble directly towards us to clinch the Cup for Spurs. I travelled home in a pool of perspiration and chagrin. The next morning I was late for school and didn’t wash. Arriving in geography I sat next to Bev and he instantly said: ‘Phew, you pong, Al.’
Talking with Bev, about those days when I used to tag along with his punky brother and their chums, I said I just had the feeling all the time that no one really liked me.
‘They didn’t,’ he said.
The Pretenders put on a great show that night and were wildly appreciated by the crowd. During the intro to one number the stage was flooded with dry ice. Clouds of it spilled out into the audience but it kept coming, filling the stage and enveloping Chrissie Hynde. She looked off to the wing and issued a volley of full-blooded American invective. In the shadows at the side it was possible to make out hurried movement as several homo roadiens scuttled to and fro in a panic, hunched over, trying to find the one pouring the dry ice pellets. The expanding cloud eventually stopped growing, The Pretenders emerged dramatically from the mist, calm was restored to the roadie community, and the gig carried on to even greater heights. Chrissie Hynde’s flash of temper made her even more exciting, to an adolescent.
