'Hardcourt Confidential' by Patrick McEnroe

Read an excerpt from Patrick McEnroe's book 'Hardcourt Confidential'

ByABC News via logo
June 4, 2010, 1:13 PM

June 7, 2010— -- In "Hardcourt Confidential," Patrick McEnroe tells what the world of tennis is like, on and off the court.

Read an excerpt of the book below, and then head to the "GMA" Library to find more good reads.

The Genius and the PluggerDad had always pushed hard for John and me to play doubles together. Part of it was that family pride, but his hope was grounded in sound logic, too. I was a solid doubles guy, and it was Peter Fleming who had famously said, upon being asked to name the best doubles team he'd ever seen, "John McEnroe and anyone." So why not me, John's flesh and blood?

Well, there were a few good reasons for John and me to resist playing together, starting with the fact that in some places it was bound to be interpreted as a form of nepotism; some people inevitably would snicker and suggest that John was carrying me, as a blood favor. Neither John nor I needed that. And brothers, with a few exceptions, don't always make the best doubles partners because of the familiar sibling rivalry issues.

It was even more awkward in our case, because John and I were doing the same thing, careerwise, and at the same level if not with the same degree of success. We always had to navigate around that, and it did create problems between us from time to time, going all the way back. But there was pressure, and not just to play together. If Dad thought I wasn't representing the McEnroe name adequately, he'd remind me that other people are always watching extra hard. For my part, I learned to tell early on whether people judged or related to me as John McEnroe's brother rather than as an individual who happened to be a brother of tennis's most notorious hellion.

At times, though, the situation bordered on the absurd. Dad would say, "You've got to act like you're proud to be a McEnroe," and I would roll my eyes and think, Did you see what John just did at this or that tournament? That wasn't very cool. Is that what it means to be a...McEnroe? But on the whole, none of this was really a burden for me; it was more like an occasional irritant.

John also felt unwanted pressure thanks to Dad's lobbying. He bridled against the implication that he had to play with me, and he always did worry about overshadowing me. He almost went too far in the other direction, he was going to beat me as soundly as he could, just to prove that he was giving nothing away. No one was going to even suspect that there was nepotism or empathy in play.

But...overshadowing? I was used to it. What tennis player wouldn't be overshadowed by John? Undue credit? I knew in my heart that I'd earned every W on my record. In tennis, you always do. Nepotism? Any player in his right mind would give his eye teeth for a chance to call John his doubles partner. Winning is a powerful pleasure that makes it pretty easy not to sweat the details, or gossip.

Once in a while, just to keep Dad off our backs, we played as a team. It wasn't always pretty. We played the US Open in 1991 and got cold-cocked by the illustrious Swedish team of Ronnie Bathman and Rikard Bergh. Who was I going to blame, my useless partner, and hold a press conference to say Peter Fleming was full of it?

Of course playing against John was no picnic for either of us. He took no joy out of beating me, even if he refused to let up. I only played John in singles three times, and lost each match; the good news for me was that one of those matches (Chicago) was a tournament final—a big week for me, no matter what happened in the championship match.But I had pretty good success against John in doubles. We had some good matches that went either way. One of the more memorable matches we played was in Madrid, which at the time—spring of 1992—was outdoors on clay. I was partnered with Patrick Galbraith, and in the quarters we met John and Javier Frana, an Argentinian lefty who really ripped the ball.

Altitude is an issue in Madrid, so the conditions were pretty quick. Galby was similar to me, in terms of strengths and weaknesses, but a lefty. He needed a solid power player for a partner to put his skills to best use. He was a very good returner, but his serve was shaky. His lack of power kept him from exploiting the natural advantage of a lefty. Galby basically had one serve—he'd kind of slide the ball into your body. It was effective, as such things go, but even back then you could rarely get away with being a one-trick pony.

In our match, Frana kept teeing off on Galby's serve from his deuce court post, setting up John with break point after break point. In one game there must have been six, seven ad-points for them. I'd ask Galby, "Where are you going with the serve?" and he'd hiss, time and again, "Body...the body."

The altitude helped the ball hop around, and it made Galby's serve better than it was. Whatever the case, John had a lot of trouble returning and closing the deal in the ad-court. It was driving him nuts, but Galby kept sliding in that serve, and we kept dodging bullets until we won that match.

John was livid; this guy Galby (he might have been thinking of me, too, for all I know), who from a talent standpoint shouldn't even have been on the same court, had put up a W at his expense. John wouldn't even talk to me after that match. He held a grudge about it for a couple of weeks. Not that I cared about any of that; after beating those guys, Galby and I knew we might win the tournament, and that's just what we did.

John and I also faced each other in the doubles final of Basel in 1991. His partner was the mercurial Czech Petr Korda. I played with Jakob Hlasek of Switzerland. We had some success as a team, and we both had been coached at different times by Gunther Bresnick. Jakob and I had no illusions about what we were in for that day, because just hours before the doubles final, Jakob had beaten John in a thrilling five-set singles final. The big question was which of those two singles finalists would have more gas left in his tank.

As it turned out, both of them had plenty. Jakob and I lost the first set, 6–3. We won the second in a tiebreaker. The third and final set also went the distance. Jakob and I reached match point at 5–6 in the 'breaker, with Korda serving to me.

Korda had a slick lefty slider, but he couldn't really hit it too well up the T. Knowing he'd still try to squeeze it in there to my forehand, I slid over a little—just enough to allow me to step around and hit the return with my backhand. The return went straight down the middle, between them. Game, set, match, Hlasek and Patrick McEnroe. John was disgusted—totally pissed. But on that occasion he didn't sulk. After a few hours, his sense of humor returned. He laughed as he told me the exact words he had spoken to Korda in their mini-conference at the baseline, right before Korda served that match ball.

"Whatever you do," John had said, "make sure you keep it away from Pat's backhand."

If you look up the last singles title John won on the main tour you'll see it was in Chicago, in February of 1991, and the guy he beat, 6–4, in the third was me. John played with his usual intensity that night; the only thing that made it different from the two previous times we'd played was that it was no beatdown. It was a match I could have won. I can only imagine how John would have reacted had that happened.

John was near the end of his career, and I was playing as well as ever. If ever I had a chance to win a big singles match from him, this was it. But I remember thinking, Shit, if I win this match, he'll never talk to me again. I knew that losing the match would hurt him a lot more than it hurt me. At one point early in the match, I glanced at the courtside boxes, and there sat our father, proud as a peacock. He had flown in from New York, just to be part of this great family event—life as it should be for the McEnroes, the first family of men's tennis. If he only knew—really knew—that it was never quite as joyous an event for us as it was for him.

I took my foot off the gas in that match, just that little bit that made all the difference in the world. I'm not saying I would have won it had I been playing without inhibitions. I can't claim that I should have won it, on form, either. I just know I was thinking, Do I really want to win this? It would be such a hard pill for John to swallow....I don't begrudge John for beating me that night, or spanking the tar out of me in our other two singles matches, at Stratton Mountain, Vermont, and Basel, Switzerland. You play tennis to win; you owe it to yourself, and you also owe it to the paying customers, as well as your support team. John always played to win, and there's a beautiful kind of integrity in that—it's honest. I just didn't have the same degree of ruthless, blind drive. Down deep, I knew I didn't want to beat my brother.

I also learned that night that if I lacked anything in my career as a singles player, it was that extra dose of desire, or maybe it's need. John wanted and needed to win every match. If he lost, it was never because he went soft, or let anything undermine his desire. That night, he flew back to Los Angeles, into a marriage that was beginning to unravel. I flew in the other direction, back to New York, seated next to my dad, who was still feeling euphoric about that great day for the McEnroes.

On the way, we flew through one of the worst storms I ever experienced on an airplane. The plane was pitching and wallowing through the night. I clutched the armrests with both hands, hoping that we'd make it home.

Down and Out in Paris (Bercy)

The middle of 1992 was a very tough, turbulent period for John. He was isolated; his marriage with Tatum O'Neal was on the rocks, and our father was too busy managing the industry called John McEnroe to be emotionally useful to him. At one point, John asked Dad to back off a little bit. He told him, "I need you to be a father, not my lawyer or manager."

Our family circled the wagons and tried to help John work through his difficulties, although that McEnroe ineptness at communication hampered the effort. I offered to fly out to Los Angeles to spend some time with John, but he wasn't the type to unburden himself to anyone. We all knew that the greatest source of his anxiety was the custody of the two children he had with Tatum. Knowing her personality and family history of substance abuse, John feared for the safety of the kids in the event that the courts determined that they ought to be with Tatum.

I got along fine with Tatum, although I knew she had issues. When I brought home my college girlfriend one time, Tatum treated her like shit. Here was someone young, pleasant, eager to please, beautiful, and smart—a coed at Stanford. I guess that was the problem, because Tatum reacted like a child who feels threatened. I guess down deep she was like a child.

I met Tatum's dad, Ryan O'Neal, a few times. I thought he was a son of a bitch but he could be really friendly, too. He seemed very unstable, a real up-and-down guy. One time Ryan and Farrah Fawcett stayed with us in Cove Neck. I walked in to find Ryan in our little TV room. He was watching some news report about suffering children in Africa, and he started crying. He certainly had a tender side, but he also was into boxing and had a temper that made you give him a lot of leeway.

It was probably hard for Tatum to join our family; it's hard for any wife to marry an entire family. We were tight and bound together by tennis, something about which she knew nothing and couldn't care less. I don't think Tatum liked my parents very much. Because of her own family, she knew a lot about alcoholism; I think she felt that our family had that problem as well, but was in denial about it. And she was volatile, much like John.

When John married Tatum, he was seduced by that whole LA thing. It got him away from tennis, and into that celebrity sphere that was Tatum's world. In all fairness, I'm not sure she led him into it by the nose. It was just her life, and he'd fallen in love and started a family with her. It wasn't that different from what Andre Agassi went through when he married Brooke Shields. It's probably a lot more sensible, and certainly a lot easier, for a big-name player to marry a woman who didn't have competing ambitions.

John was a wreck by the fall of 1992, and he expressed what desire he had to connect with his family at a tough time. That meant tennis. He declared that he wanted to play doubles with me in the big Paris Indoors tournament in early November. It started just days after John and Tatum made their final decision to divorce, and he was so devastated that he was barely functioning.

John lost early in the singles in Paris, a particularly cruel blow for someone who always found haven in the game. But he still had doubles, and I was surprised by how well he performed despite his anxieties. Maybe feeling like he was taking care of his little brother took his mind off his own problems. Whatever the case, he took me under his wing to an unusual degree. One night early in the tournament he took me along on a night out with his buddy, the French tennis and pop music superstar Yannick Noah. "Take care of my kid brother," he told Yannick. The next thing, poof, I was surrounded by gorgeous girls, including a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. She and I hit it off and had a great time in Paris; it was certainly good incentive to keep winning that week. The doubles were played at night, so we'd be out until three or four in the morning, I'd sleep until one or two in the afternoon, and then John and I would play our matches at night.

Not bad, I thought, a swimsuit model, Paris, John McEnroe for a doubles partner. Life may suck for John, but at the moment it sure is good for me....

On paper, John and I had the makings of a good doubles team. It was a natural fit: a lefty and a righty, a shotmaker (him) and efficient server with a steady partner who could set him up for the kill with precise returns. But the pressure was too great, because the shadow of our father loomed over the enterprise, no matter how much he tried to downplay the pride he took in seeing us as a team or his expectations.

We did have one significant technical problem. John and I both preferred to play the ad (left) court. Although the steady player usually takes the deuce (right) side to set up opportunities (most of the break points are played in the left, ad court), I preferred the ad side because of my excellent return, especially with the backhand. It was hard to get that wide serve by me, and rule no. 1 on break points is: Make sure you get the return back into play.John groused about my desire to play the ad court, but he grudgingly agreed to move over to play the deuce side on the grounds of his superiority and experience. He was more likely to adapt successfully if forced out of his comfort zone. The alignment worked out well.