You Cannot Be Serious Read Online Free PDF

weakest players came from nine to eleven. Tony started me out in the middle section.
    My dad wasn’t thrilled about that: What was I doing in the middle when he’d been taking me to all these national tournaments? It didn’t sit well with his McEnroe pride. And Port Washington wasn’t cheap. Was it worth it for me? Did I stand a chance of making it into the top group?
    In his law practice in Manhattan, Dad had met a young Wall Street guy named Chuck McKinley—and it just so happened that McKinley had been one of the best tennis players in the world back in the amateur days of the ’50s and ’60s. Dad asked McKinley to ask his old friend Tony Palafox if I was a real prospect. Tony took another look at me.
    When he looked again, he saw a kid who played very much the way he had played when he’d been at the top of his game: fast feet, good hands, the ability to think a shot or two ahead, and a sense of the court in all its dimensions and angles.
    Port Washington wasn’t all just tennis. A player spent a lot of time on the court, but he also hung around a fair amount between coaching and matches. There was a lounge on the second floor, with windows that looked down on the courts: I remember staring in awe at Port Washington’s star, a blond sixteen-year-old named Vitas Gerulaitis (more about him later)—but you could only spend so much time watching tennis. There was no TV, and the owner, Hy Zausner, wouldn’t allow cards on the premises, so we’d amuse ourselves by playing chess. We’d have marathon games, some of them lasting an hour or more. I was never a great player, but I was pretty good: I liked the strategic element of the game, planning ahead a move or two
    Tony saw me thinking that way on the court—and getting everything back—and so he became my tennis teacher. He took me under his wing. I still play very much the way he taught me, taking every ball on the rise with a short backswing; moving forward, always forward, whenever possible.
    Tony felt that the court wasn’t utilized enough. If you watched the old guys play on tape, he said, it looked like they were just standing there and hitting the ball back to each other. Didn’t they realize the idea was to hit the ball away from the other guy? Maybe it just wasn’t considered proper in those stuffy old days of tennis.
    Not that players like Bill Tilden, Don Budge, and Jack Kramer, or any of the other trailblazers, weren’t great champions in their own right, but the more Tony showed me, the more straight-ahead their strategy seemed to me. I began to look at the court differently—as a mathematical equation, almost. The angles were everything. It wasn’t about just hitting a slice and approaching the net. Sometimes you should slice it deep, but sometimes you could come in and slice it off the court —use the angles.
     
     
     
    A FTER I’ D BEEN at Port Washington for a couple of months, an amazing thing happened: Harry Hopman showed up. Harry was a walking legend of tennis, the great old Aussie coach who’d turned Laver, Roy Emerson, Ken Rosewall, and Lew Hoad, among many others, from raw boys into stars, in the process winning sixteen Davis Cups for Australia between 1939 and 1969. However, once the Open era began in 1968, Hop had a much harder time recruiting young talent, and in 1970, he and the Australian Tennis Federation parted ways. To my eternal benefit: The following year, Mr. H. became tennis director at Port Washington.
    Harry Hopman left technique to others; he was only interested in you if you already knew how to play the game. From that foundation, he went to work on your mind and body. His players were famous for two things: never giving up, and being fitter than anybody. The two went hand in hand, he felt. You’d hear about the old days in Australia—the ten-mile runs, the calisthenics, the two-on-one drills. Harry would just work his players to the bone, and they reaped the benefits. By the time he got to Port Washington,