THE WEDNESDAY BOOK
SHOULD things go according to plan tonight, Celtic supporters will for the rest of their days recall exactly where they were when their team lifted the Uefa Cup in Seville. Momentous sporting moments are indelibly stamped in the memory of the true supporter.
Thus, every tennis fan of a certain age remembers the events of Sunday, July 5, 1980. Nelson Mandela had managed to persuade his guards on Robben Island to provide a radio so that he could listen to the BBC World Service commentary. Andy Warhol had risen early in his mother's Manhattan home to catch the match on the local sports network. Teenager Tim Adams was struggling with the aerial on an old portable telly in a caravan overlooking the grey sea on the coast of west Wales.
The Wimbledon Men's final between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe was the kind of match which beggars the term classic. In a mesmerising four-hour epic, the 21-year-old New Yorker, dubbed Superbrat by the British press, captivated fans with his never-say-die determination. In the end Borg prevailed, winning his fifth Wimbledon title in a row. But it was McEnroe's performance which provides the most enduring memory. He had proved his talent was as big as his mouth. Suddenly he was regarded with the respect only the best can garner.
Tim Adams, now a writer and journalist, has penned a book which captures the excitement of that great match. But it does much more than that. In under 150 pages, it provides a fascinating glimpse into the mind of McEnroe and his improvised quest for tennis perfection.
Adams argues that great tennis players, like great chess players and great boxers, cannot exist in isolation. They require rivals of equal skill to discover their own capabilities and potential. After Borg's retirement McEnroe tried, every time he met him, to persuade him to return. He failed.
The author asked McEnroe how he thought their matches would have gone if Borg had kept playing. The American reckoned that they'd both have got better and better as players and probably as people, too. ''As it was, I found myself lost a bit. I pulled it together and played probably my greatest tennis in 1984 (the year he systematically destroyed Jimmy Connors in the Wimbledon final), but even at the end of that year I felt not at all happy. There was this void and I always felt it was up to me in a sense to manufacture my own intensity thereafter,'' he told Adams.
The book provides lengthy comparisons between Borg and McEnroe as they each prepared for that 1980 duel. How one seemed to see in the other qualities and philosophies they themselves lacked. For McEnroe, Borg had patience and calmness and something akin to grace. For Borg, McEnroe possessed spontaneity, instinct, and the ability to surprise.
After their careers were over, the contrasts were even starker, and bitterly ironic. Superbrat grew up and settled down, while Borg's fall from grace was spectacular. He split from his wife, had a relationship and a child with a 17-year-old he'd met while judging a Miss Wet T-shirt contest, and remarried, briefly. In 1989, less than a decade after his last Wimbledon win, he was taken to hospital after a drugs overdose.
On Being John McEnroe, by Tim Adams, is published on June 10 by Yellow Jersey Press, (pounds) 10.
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