Thursday, January 21, 2010

This Day in Tennis History (McEnroe Expelled From Grand Slam Event)


January 21, 1990—Nobody gets through organized baseball without knowing, “Three strikes and you’re out”—but John McEnroe, not realizing that this was a new rule in professional tennis, ended up being ejected from the Australian Open, the first player to be disqualified from a Grand Slam event in more than a quarter century.

The player, heading into the twilight of a great career, was actually ahead of opponent Mikael Pernfors in the fourth round when his on-court slide into insanity began. When it was over, a crowd of 150,000 in Melbourne booed at the astonishing results—McEnroe disqualified after scores of 1-6, 6-4, 5-7, 4-2—but he had only himself to blame.

When I began college, rumor had it that my school was one of McEnroe’s choices after he graduated from Manhattan’s Trinity School. (He ended up accepting an offer at Stamford before touring pro.) Given the publicity already circulating about his career, several of us in my freshman class decided that tennis’ loss was Columbia’s gain.

(Sometimes, in my more fanciful moments, I imagine McEnroe confronting one of our Contemporary Civilization instructors about an assigned text. Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents seems appropriate, I think, don’t you? “Where does this jerk come up with the idiotic ideas about the ego and superego?” I imagine him saying, then, leaving classmates with jaws agape, turning on the instructor himself: “And where do you get off, assigning this shit?”)

By the time the young player had gotten to Wimbledon, the British tabs were all over him, calling him “Super Brat” and—it’s hard to shake the implication of a jibe at his ethnicity—“McNasty.”

I can’t say that I am an inveterate tennis watcher, but it seemed that every time I watched Wimbledon or the U.S. Open from about 1974 to 1984, either McEnroe or Jimmy Connors was competing in the finals—attacking the net, grunting loudly as they chased balls all over the place, leaving themselves utterly spent at the end of their games. I marveled at the skill and never-say-die spirit they brought to the game. Well, all but one aspect of it, anyway.

Every time McEnroe turned on an umpire—which seemed to happen more and more as the years went on—I shook my head. I had that same feeling I would get just while watching Earl Weaver (or, just a few years later, his brother in spirit, Lou Piniella) go toe to toe with a baseball ump—spewing curses and spittle, circling his quarry, turning his cap completely around so he could go eyeball to eyeball, kicking dirt everywhere, even, in moments of most sublime madness, throwing an offending base into the outfield.

One of McEnroe’s classic moments came at Wimbledon, when he berated one ump as “the pits of the world.” But this incident could easily be multiplied.

The following are the three strikes that led to McEnroe’s epic Blunder Down Under:

* glaring at a lineswoman for making a bad call, all the while bouncing his ball meaningfully—and perhaps menacingly—on his racket;


* smashing his racquet—twice—after two wide forehands; and


* complaining about chair umpire Gerry Armstrong for citing him for racquet abuse, then, after calling for the Grand Slam chief of supervisors, Ken Ferrar, swearing at him, loud enough so fans courtside and on TV could hear.

Suddenly, McEnroe heard the unexpected—and dread—words from Armstrong: “"Default Mr. McEnroe. Game, set, match."

In a way, this epic cranial meltdown had been coming for more than the last several minutes. I’d say the road that took McEnroe to this point began six years earlier, when Bjorn Borg withdrew from active participation in tennis.

Suddenly, the person who had forced McEnroe to raise the level of his game—to be Bill Russell against Wilt Chamberlain—was gone. With it went motivation. A volatile marriage to actress Tatum O’Neal didn’t help keep his head straight, either.

In the press conference after the Australian Open catastrophe, McEnroe admitted he had had made a mistake, not realizing that under the new Code of Conduct, the path to disqualification was shortened by a step: first a warning, then a point penalty, then a default.


"I can't say I'm surprised," said McEnroe. "It was bound to happen."

An interesting remark, if you stop to think about it. McEnroe had been gambling that he had, in effect, one more professional chance of winning through intimidation. He miscalculated, ending up losing his first chance at a major in six years.

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