Less fun when you’re in it, though, says McEnroe. Not that you mind, given what fun it all is to watch: all that terry-towelling, and the racquet-bashing, and the short shorts, and the clouds and waves (or in Connors’ case, helmets) of hair. And he’s happy to re-tread the story of his tennis breakthrough, which, to anyone who knows anything about the sport, is all quite familiar stuff – the outbursts, the rivalries (notably Jimmy Connors, from whom, McEnroe says, he learned that sometimes, “you’ve got to be a prick out there”), and of course the exquisite and dynamic serve-and-volley game. McEnroe, who is interviewed for the film in what appears to be a high-end holding cell, and filmed walking – apparently all night long – through the streets of Douglaston and beyond, looks unbelievably fresh at 63 years old, with silver hair and a peak of silver chain to rival Connell’s. Tennis, as archive footage of Borg, but also of Romania’s Ilie Nastase and America’s Jimmy Connors and Vitas Gerulaitis shows, was a time of strong characters (or in Borg’s case, a quiet character but a very strong look) and experiencing something of a boom.
Born into a military family – his father, also John, was in the US Air Force and later became his son’s manager – McEnroe, the eldest of three boys, was raised in Douglaston, Queens, where both his talent and his temper were apparent early on. In fact, as director Barney Douglas’s glossy documentary reveals, McEnroe’s ascendancy in the world of tennis in the late 1970s and early 1980s was both a glorious and also a troubled time (weird! And he seemed like such a happy guy). Wait? John McEnroe, the same guy who, in 1979 at the age of 20, became the youngest male player ever to win the US Open, and would do so a further three times? Whose head-to-heads with his idol, Sweden’s Björn Borg, from whom he eventually took the Wimbledon title in 1981, are now considered some of the greatest tennis matches ever played? Whose record of 155 combined men’s singles and doubles titles has yet to be broken? Yep. “I felt like I was doomed,” says the familiar voice of John McEnroe in the opening minutes of McEnroe, a new feature-length documentary about the New York tennis legend – and more recently, commentator – which is out in cinemas today.
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