He contrasts that with today’s top players, many of whom “seem like unbelievably nice people. “Connors isn’t that big a guy, I’m not that big a guy, you have to come at your opponents with an intensity that radiates off your body,” McEnroe says.
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Watching Connors, who cold-shouldered him before one of their early matches, helped him to learn how to be a “prick” to opponents. McEnroe with wife Patty Smyth and daughter from first marriage, Emily | Getty Images I was, like, ‘They don’t understand me, I’m a nice guy.’ But of course I wasn’t real nice on the court at times.” People started to recognise me-‘Are you that brat guy?’-and it completely changed my life. “You sort of feed into this villain thing, maybe unbeknown to yourself, and then it becomes this out-of-control monster. He accepts, though, that he exacerbated the situation. “I was, like, ‘Oh my God, these people are so polite.
And it seemed normal.” When he first played Wimbledon in 1977 it was his first time overseas. “I grew up in Queens in New York, and there were people yelling and screaming all the time,” he says. A big reason why he became a bête noire at Wimbledon, he agrees, was because he was such a bad fit with the All England Club, then one of the stuffier corners of the British establishment. People got me all wrong,” he says, looking lean and hip in a black jacket over a white T-shirt. “I didn’t think I was that bad a boy in the first place. And we find him now in a state of relative harmony, hanging out with Smyth and his five children, aged between 23 and 36.Ī stirring tale of redemption? This being McEnroe, it is not quite that simple. We revisit his demons, his rivalries with Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors and his tempestuous, drug-addled first marriage to actress Tatum O’Neal. We see him combine flair, nous and stroppiness to win three Wimbledon singles titles in 1981, 19, becoming the best player in the world.
McEnroe’s journey is charted with a refreshing lack of sycophancy in the documentary by Barney Douglas, the director who made The Edge, a similarly clear-eyed film about the England cricket team. His candid and insightful commentary, delivered in that swaggering drawl, is one of the joys of watching Wimbledon. McEnroe has gone through a striking transformation in the past 40 years, from the “you cannot be serious” tantrums that earned him the nickname “superbrat” to his present status as one of sport’s most cherished elder statesmen. “That was really beautiful,” McEnroe, 63, says with a grin via Zoom from his home in New York. Some of them court-appointed-he was ordered to see an anger-management counsellor after his divorce from Tatum O’Neal. McEnroe says he has had plenty of therapists.
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