McEnroe [antikvár]

PROLOGUE What we have here is a hard man, born to achieve, destined to be misunderstood, unable to compromise, driven by an inner rage for perfection the ordinary man cannot comprehend. It is no use, therefore, asking of him the ordinary and the commonplace. For John Patrick McEnroe, Jr., is an original. There has never been a tennis player like him, and in a nomadic career that has brought me into contact with all manner of champions and achievers, I cannot think of anyone who encompasses his strange mix of qualities and faults. There are, of course, faults. This is not a eulogy. Not all of him is good, although much of the character is—often troublingly so. It is the personaUty that is flawed, particularly the one that appears in pubhc. It is the personality—that surly, pouting and often puerile personality—that obscures the character, that screens the substance of the man. And it is the superficial surface of that unfortunate personality that makes him anathema to so many, makes him, among certain sections of the sporting pubhc, the least loved superstar of his era. But as he changes with time, so time will ultimately change the way he is perceived. Had he been born with a shorter lower lip and a less furrowed brow, he would not have so much problem convincing people of his basic decency. Nor would every query and every quite rational question on court come across to his audience as a verbal assault from the original Angry Young Man. But John Osborne was before his time. McEnroe, of course, is a reflection of the present age and, in an unkempt and slightly eccentric way, very much a representative of his generation. He is one of the most visible products of two decades of turmoil and questioning—a phenomenon, of course, that Osborne foresaw—which loosened the Establishment's grip on the convenient theory that elders were betters, and so fostered, especially in America, a generation that accepted authority, but only on merit. Even for the sons and daughters of the sober seventies, a positively benign bunch compared with the fanatical flower children who preceded them, a