The tournament directors knew it, the umpires (who got paid by the tournament) knew it, and the linesmen knew it. Had he not been so famous, tennis itself might have put a curb on his outbursts, by defaulting him. That tennis is a game of individuals also didn't help: 'When you can't control yourself, you want someone to do it for you - that's where I acutely missed being part of a team sport.' Throughout the book McEnroe writes longingly and knowledgeably of team sports, in part the source of his attraction to Davis Cup tennis. When he became number one, of course, the problem was that he thought he should beat everyone. Later, playing against top players was okay, but he hated early rounds, against opponents he thought he should beat. when I lost a match, my usual reaction - until an embarrassingly late age - was to burst into tears.' McEnroe also claims never to have liked tennis much: 'I was pushed into something I didn't really want to do.'

Though 'I didn't throw my racket when a kid. From the start young John hated and feared losing, at anything. Mother Mc-Enroe was a hard-driving perfectionist. The McEnroe males 'were vocal about everything. How did McEnroe get this way? Serious (from 'You cannot be serious') offers several answers. As both were about to leave, the journalist approached his hero: 'Hi, John, I'm Sal Palantonio of ESPN.' 'Fuck you,' McEnroe responded, 'and fuck ESPN.' A journalist friend of Mewshaw's found himself alone with McEnroe, whom he had long admired but never met, in the men's room in the press section at Wimbledon. The second story, also two years old, comes from the novelist and tennis writer Michael Mewshaw. 'I was lucky, I didn't clock someone.' Another thrown racket, he writes, came 'this far from nailing someone in the head'.

'I was angry and I meant to throw it,' he writes of a much earlier instance, in which he threw a racquet hard into the stands. McEnroe was 41, and as Serious makes clear, had done this sort of thing before.

John mcenroe you can t be serious