The great tennis player, John McEnroe, was as combative as gladiators come. Even if you were just a so-so club player who was following events on the professional circuit, McEnroes’s were very interesting times.
Bjorn Borg. Jimmy Connors. Yannick Noah…and so on. Their birthdays and their retirement from the professional tour separated by only a few years, they represented a transitional period when wooden and metal rackets were being replaced by space technology composite frames.
When you are used to hitting tennis balls with a fairly good modern racket, and you take for granted the power you can generate without too much effort, you marvel how these and earlier players hit with the pace and precision that they did using the old equipment.
But they did. And McEnroe had such perfect timing (of ball and string contact) that he seemed not to be hitting hard, yet the ball returned to his opponent at very high speed.
McEnroe could battle his opponent from the baseline, but he just as easily played attacking tennis and dictated events from the net.
A natural player, McEnroe did not train or practice as hard as most of his peers, but a combination of talent and very hard work is generally essential for players at the highest level of the game.
Qualifying to play in professional tournaments is hard enough, not to mention winning just one match in the actual tournament. At every round, exactly half of the remaining scalps must fall.
To conquer seven times and claim a grand slam title brings you to the level of a Greek god.
Every great player loves winning, and McEnroe enjoyed every moment of his many conquests. The sheer commitment and the huge investment in time and money that go into the development of top players are such that you cannot really play(!) with their game.
Rigorous standards
The infrastructure at professional tournaments must meet rigorous standards, and the opposing players share them and the variable conditions as equally as practically possible.
Changing sides after just one game, and then every two games thereafter in a set, even the background and the vagaries of wind and sun are shared fairly.
Although errors are inevitable, the integrity of the match officials is constantly under scrutiny. Regardless of their favourite player, they must not show any bias during the match.
McEnroe had no patience with officials who were not absolutely up to scratch, and his noisy confrontations with umpires were part of this exciting phenomenon called John McEnroe.
In the fast-moving game, his eye for line and near-line balls was often sharper than that of the officials. It was just that in those circumstances he protested more frequently and more loudly than other players.
Like virtually every great player, he wanted his victory or his defeat to be fair and square. Indeed, match analyses show that when an umpire made a clearly erroneous call in McEnroe’s favour, McEnroe sometimes deliberately botched the next shot to compensate his opponent.
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