!JmacHere's my latest No Mas column. The Deep Tennis concept: They ask me a question, generally about the good old days; I answer it to the best of my memory.
Steve,
“I was noticing at the U.S. Open that the challenge system has done away with any need to argue with the ump. Is this good for tennis? Was there something to be said for the golden era of ump-arguing? Who was the best at it? Johnny Mac?”
It’s hard to believe how quickly the instant-replay system has established itself as the norm in the sport. I didn’t realize it myself until a month ago, at the U.S. Open. I was walking out of Ashe Stadium after watching Tommy Haas beat James Blake in a fifth-set tiebreaker. Behind me, my fellow writer/blogger Peter Bodo mentioned that the match had been a major validation for replay. He was right: The final two points had been decided on close calls that had been challenged and confirmed by the computer system. If the opportunity to make those challenges hadn’t been available to the players, the match would have ended in a cloud of uncertainty and perhaps anger. As it happened, Blake and Haas smiled at each other as they waited for the replay’s verdict on the final point. Then they shook hands knowing they had gotten a fair shake (or as fair as possible). None of that seemed unusual to me, or even worth noting, until I remembered that the replay system had made its Grand Slam debut just last year at the Open.
That’s not to say it has eliminated arguments. Replay isn’t perfect; it has a margin for error of 3 mm, and sometimes the call shown on the screen appears to be nowhere near where the ball landed. Roger Federer, arguably the system’s most important constituent, isn’t sold on it. In the Wimbledon final this year, he had a mini-meltdown after it ruled against him for a second straight time. Beyond that, even without disputed line calls the pros find ways to vent their anger. One target has been the chair umpires, who many pros now feel leave too many of the calls up to the replay. (Austrian player Stefan Koubek was defaulted from a match just last week for somethig he said to a linesperson.) But whether or not the system is 100 percent accurate isn’t the most important issue. What does matter is that it’s accurate enough to be universally agreed upon—the players see evidence on a screen, instead of having to trust the judgment of a linesperson.
Is this good for the sport? Do we miss the tirades of McEnroe and Connors? It wouldn’t be surprising: Misplaced nostalgia is a common theme in tennis. During the heyday of Jimbo and Johnny Mac, the consensus was that the game needed to return to its gentlemanly roots and the sportsmanship of the great Australians like Rod Laver. Twenty years later, in the peaceful era of Pete Sampras, a man who modeled himself on Laver, tennis was widely criticized for having no “personalities”—as Martin Amis said, the word was really just code for “a—holes.” The consensus in the 1990s was that we needed Jimbo and Johnny Mac back.
I don’t miss the meltdowns, personally: They brought a nasty vibe to a match and made the players look like prima donnas; they prolonged the proceedings unnecessarily; and they often led to one guy losing focus and not playing his best. But now that replay has cut off one angle of argument for good, maybe we can look back a little nostalgically at the tennis “personalities” of yore.
Along with big money and new racquet technology, it was the Open era that helped usher in the age of the brat. Not that there weren’t angry tennis players before—nobody could hold a candle to Pancho Gonzalez’s rage (not that anyone wanted to; they would have gone up in flames). But the prospect of playing for serious cash, and the subsequent influx in the 1970s of players from all over the world, diluted the original Anglo concept of tennis as rich man’s recreation. Here’s an honor roll of the men who happily took the sport down a notch or two.
Ion Tiriac
The wolf in the fold, Tiriac came from the grimy depths of communist Romania and began his athletic career as a hockey player. He wasn’t so much an arguer as an orchestrator. His masterpiece came in Bucharest in 1972, when he and his fellow Romanians nearly stole the Davis Cup from the U.S. squad. In the crucial match, against Mr. Upstanding himself, Stan Smith, the linesmen were robbing the American of everything they could, to the point where Smith intentionally kept the ball as far inside the lines as possible. Meanwhile, between points Tiriac was using the linesmen’s chairs to sit and take a rest. It almost worked, but Smith took over in the fifth set to clinch the tie for the U.S. Needless to say, Smith wouldn’t have had to deal with that in the age of instant replay.
Tiriac would never be deterred, though. After mentoring Ilie Nastase and Boris Becker and running various tournaments, he has become tennis’ first billionaire.
Ilie Nastase
“Nasty” also came out of communist-controlled Romania, a place where you took what you could get, any way you could get it. Nastase wasn’t an angry man so much as a theatrical one—he could be funny or utterly exasperating depending on his mood. I have two favorite memories of him, both when he was past his prime:
—In a meaningless indoor match against Borg, Nasty lost the first set badly but made a run in the second. Each time he hit a winner, he would stop in his tracks and stare at Borg’s coach, Lennart Bergelin, who was sitting in the second row, as if to ask, “How could that happen to your Mr. Perfect over there?” The fans loved it. The third time he did it, even Borg cracked a smile.
—On a hot day in Hawaii, Nastase’s opponent, Peter Fleming, became dizzy. He took long, circular strolls around the court in between points. Rather than try to win the match as quickly as he could, Nastase toyed with Fleming. When he would get an easy ball, he would place it just within his opponent’s reach. You could see Fleming stopping and starting, trying to decide whether to run after the ball or not. Cruel, but funny.
Nastase’s umpire-baiting took two forms. It could be fun—nobody got as much comedy out of a blank stare—or nonsensical. In a night-session match at Flushing Meadows against John McEnroe in 1979, the umpire, Frank Hammond, Jr., defaulted Nastase for his bizarre ranting and stalling, but was forced to reinstate him when the crowd littered the court with beer cups in protest. Sounds like the good old days, right? I remember watching the match, which wasn’t half as amusing as it sounds now.
Jimmy Connors
Tiriac begat Nastase, who in turn begat Jimbo. The Romanian wild man taught the American mama’s boy about life on tour—the two were partners in mischief through the mid-70s. But where Nastase was a clown at heart and an erratic competitor, Connors had an American-style obsession with being No. 1. He was a politician’s son and knew how to put an audience in the palm of his hands; with that in mind, his early arguments could have an impish quality—he continued in the Nastase tradition of taking a seat and chatting with linesmen (in those days the players didn’t exclusively deal with the chair umpire; perhaps it’s another sign of the growing practicality in the sport—the chair ump is the only person with any power to change a call).
Connors’ late-career tirades were nastier, and if anything, more adolescent. He was defaulted in the final set of a match in Key Biscayne after an extended hissy-fit, and his legendary U.S. Open 4th-rounder with Aaron Krickstein featured this charming remark directed at the umpire: “You’re an abortion.” At the same time, that umpire helped motivate Connors to come back and turn the match into a classic. Jimbo loved to have someone to go to war against. We’ll never know who or what he would have found to be his adversary in the age of computer line-calling, but he would have found something.
John McEnroe
What may have most original about Johnny Mac’s arguing style was its lack of humor. It had none of Nastase’s or Connors’ theatricality. As I recall, this was considered a little weird and scary at the time—“What is this guy’s problem?” seemed to be the common reaction to a McEnroe tirade. Few people had ever taken the game so seriously.
McEnroe never matched his arguing performance at Wimbledon in 1981, when he brought New York prep-school punk to the All England Club. It was his word choice as much as his rage that made his rants memorable. “You cannot be serious!” obviously—but when you think about it, it’s still a hilariously literate snap reaction to a bad call. “This guy’s the pits of the world”; and my favorite, “You’re a disgrace to mankind.” What makes the last one even better is that Superbrat directed it at a chair umpire who also happened to be a former World War II RAF wing commander.
What wasn’t mentioned at the time was that McEnroe didn’t curse in 1981—in some strange way, he was too young for that. So it was always a drag in later years to hear him berate a linesmen as “f---ing” this or “f---ing” that. McEnroe reached his low point along those lines at the Australian Open in 1990, when he was defaulted by the tournament referee for telling him to . . . well, let’s just say it made “pits of the world” sound like the words of an overpolite child.
What would Mac have done in the replay era? I saw him play a senior event last year with the system in place. When the computer contradicted his famous eyesight, he didn’t argue. But he did give the screen his famous look: You know, hands on hips, held tilted, lips pursed, brow furrowed. He clearly thought the machine could not be serious, but he would have looked a little crazy telling it that.