You Cannot Be Serious Read Online Free Page B

backhand because it was the only way he could lift the racket!
    I started taking group lessons with the club pro, a high-school teacher named Dan Dwyer. The family legend—there might even be some truth to it!—is that at the age of eight, when I’d only been playing for about two weeks, I entered the Douglaston Club’s 12-and-under tournament and got to the semifinals with three other boys, all of them twelve. I lost, but a few weeks later, in another tournament, I was with the same three guys, and this time I won. At a club banquet, Dan Dwyer gave me a special award—a five-dollar gift certificate at the pro shop—saying, “I’m predicting we’re going to see John at Forest Hills someday.”
    After Dwyer left the club, he was replaced by a nice old guy named George Seewagen, whose son Butch actually played on the circuit for a couple of years. I also took some lessons with Warren McGoldrick, a history teacher at Buckley.
    Because I was so small for my age, I wasn’t getting a huge amount of power out of my wooden racket. I was fast on my feet, though, and my vision was good enough that I saw the ball very early: I seemed to have an instinct for where my opponent was going to hit his next shot. Between my fast feet and my sharp eyes, I got almost every ball back. I learned very early on that you don’t have to overpower the ball to win tennis matches—if you get everything back, you’re going to beat just about everybody.
    But there was something else, too. From an early age I had good hand-eye coordination, and as soon as I picked up a tennis racket, there was another dimension: In a way I can’t totally explain, I could feel the ball through the strings. From the beginning, I was fascinated by all the different ways you could hit a tennis ball—flat, topspin, slice. I loved the way a topspin lob would sail over my opponent’s head, dive down just inside the baseline, then go bouncing out of his reach. I loved to take my racket back for a hard forehand or backhand, and then, at the very last millisecond, feather the ball just over the net for an angled drop-shot that would leave the other guy flat-footed and open-mouthed. I hit thousands of practice balls at the Douglaston Club backboard, testing all the possibilities (and sending quite a few balls into the backyard of Dick Lynch, a former defensive back for the New York Giants, who lived right behind the wall).
    My parents were both intense in their own ways, and I guess they transmitted that to me through the genes. As the oldest son of two intensely striving people, I felt right away that a lot was expected of me. In 1969, my fifth-grade teacher wrote to my parents: “Johnny is a gifted child with a tremendous urge to do better work than any of his classmates.” I had a rage not just to succeed, but to compete and win—whether it was tennis, Ping-Pong, or a Latin test at school, I had to come out on top, or I felt crushed. I was one of the best students at Buckley—my mom and dad didn’t disapprove—and now my parents saw a way that I could stand out in sports, too. On George Seewagen’s recommendation, they enrolled me in the Eastern Lawn Tennis Association when I was nine.
    “Lawn tennis” is what they called it back then, when the three or four major tournaments—Wimbledon, the Australian, and Forest Hills—were still played on grass. It sounds fancy and exclusive, and it was. But things were changing fast. The year I joined the ELTA was 1968, a very significant moment for the game, Year One in the history of open tennis. Ever since the sport had been invented, the four Grand Slam tournaments had been closed to professionals. Amateurism (also known as shamateurism) was a typical bit of hypocrisy in a game that prided itself on its genteel trappings and looked down on anyone who didn’t fit in: The top players all made money (though nothing like what they would make later), but the money was under the table. The world changed in a lot of ways