You Cannot Be Serious Read Online Free Page A

pitching a Wiffle ball to me, and I was whacking some pretty good line drives with my yellow Wiffle bat. An older lady walked up and said, “Excuse me, is that a little boy, or a midget in disguise?”
    For a long time, I didn’t get much bigger than that—“Runt” was what the big kids at Memorial Field used to call me. But I was good enough that they let me play anyway. Team sports like basketball, football, and baseball were my favorites. In softball games, I learned to hit from both sides of the plate, because of the peculiar configuration of the field at P.S. 98. Soccer came a little later. I always enjoyed the camaraderie of a team. I remember long summer evenings playing stickball out on Rushmore with my good friends Andy Keane, John Martin, and Doug Saputo, evenings that seemed like they’d last forever.
    The McEnroe males were a sports-obsessed group, and we were vocal about it, whether we were rooting or playing. We were vocal about everything. We all loved each other, but we were definitely a family of yellers when I was growing up, my father leading the way, blowing off steam or just making friendly noise. We didn’t hold back in our household.
    At the same time, my parents had a serious and demanding side. They expected achievement.
    One day, I fell off my bike. I told my mom, “My arm hurts.” She was an operating-room nurse at the time, and she knew about hurt arms. She felt the arm, thought it was just a bruise, and said, “Go back to the tennis court.” Three weeks later, it was still hurting, and I was still complaining. Finally my mom took me to the doctor. I had a fractured left arm.
    And on moral matters, there were no gray areas: Everything was black and white, either right or wrong, period. They always drummed it into me: “Tell the truth. Be honest at any cost.”
    My mom and dad knew that education was the ticket to moving up in the world. The public schools in Douglaston were part of the reason a lot of young families moved there from the city, but in my parents’ eyes, public school wasn’t good enough for the McEnroe boys. I started off at St. Anastasia, a Catholic school not far from our house, but when I was in first grade (as Mom tells the story), one of the teachers said, “You should really get him out—he’s much too bright.” And so my parents sent me—on partial scholarship, but at no small financial sacrifice—to Buckley Country Day School, a twenty-five-minute bus ride away in Roslyn, Long Island.
    My mom and dad were strivers in every way; they fully bought into the American Dream. It was a restless dream for them, and a big part of it was about where you lived. We lived in four different places during my Douglaston years: the apartment, then three different houses. Once—I swear—we moved next door. Better house, my mom said. But damn, there was less of a yard to play football in!
    In the summer of 1967, we made a short move that was significant in more ways than one: a mile north, over Northern Boulevard and the Long Island Railroad tracks from Douglaston to Douglaston Manor.
    Just as the name sounds, Douglaston Manor was the right side of the tracks, a step up in the world, and our new house at 252 Beverly Road was also just down the block from a place called the Douglaston Club, which my parents had joined while we still lived on Rushmore.
    The Douglaston Club wasn’t fancy—just a clubhouse, a pool, and five tennis courts—but it was nice, and it meant something to an upwardly mobile young family. Tennis meant something, too. In those days, it was still very much a country-club game that you played in white clothes, exactly the kind of game a young lawyer for a white-shoe Manhattan law firm ought to be playing. And since Dad knew I loved any game that involved a ball, we both started playing it at the same time. Both of my brothers also began tennis in those early Douglaston Club years: Mark at age five, and little Patrick at three, when he used a two-handed