John McEnroe: still seriously competitive McEnroe passed by me as I was led into the office suites, a thunderous look on his face. I was shown into a conference room, where our meeting was to take place. At one end of the room was a large TV screen broadcasting the final of the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals in London between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic. Through the open door, I could hear a familiar voice in the next room, screaming down the telephone: 'I thought I told you..." This went on for two or three minutes, then stopped. McEnroe came into the room, arranging his features into a tight, perfunctory smile. And you are...? McEnroe is 53, lean and sinewy, with close-cropped grey hair, and a face that is gathering lines. He was wearing a red printed short-sleeve shirt outside his jeans, a thin silver chain threaded with a ring around his neck. How are things, I asked. He sucked in his breath. 'It's all good... John McEnroe playing in an exhibition match in Stuttgart, April 2012 (GETTY IMAGES) McEnroe has something of the coiled energy of a spring. He sat down at the head of the table so he could keep an eye on the TV screen as we talked. He got up to turn down the volume; sat down again, swinging his feet up on to the table - Converse trainers without laces - then put them down again when he realised they would, effectively, be in my face. In his autobiography, McEnroe writes that he once told himself that when his playing career was over the two things he would never do were work as a commentator and play tennis on the seniors circuit. But, as he would say, what else are you going to do? As it is, his appearances for the BBC during Wimbledon fortnight have become as notable and as eagerly anticipated as they were when he was a player, albeit for different reasons: he is far and away the most astute, insightful and entertaining commentator on the modern game. It seems somehow characteristic of his ongoing tendency to take offence - the 'You Cannot Be Serious" McEnroe - that he admits to having been annoyed when people started telling him how good they thought he was at commentating. 'At first people would come up to me and say, "Oh, you're really good at this." And somehow I would take that as a negative - what, you didn't think I was going to be good? Part of why I was good on the court was because I could figure people out. Why wouldn't you think I'd be good? And if they came out and said, "You're better at commentating than tennis," that would really piss me off. Now I would say that's a really good thing. If they think I'm better at commentating than I was as a player, then I must be pretty darned good at commentating. This week he will be in Britain again, not as a commentator but as a player, at the Statoil Masters Winter Whites Gala at the Royal Albert Hall, where he will be matched against his old adversary Ivan Lendl, a player whom McEnroe, always refreshingly candid, once described as 'the sort of guy people just could not like... I could have my personality up my arse and still be more popular than him. The Statoil Masters may not be Wimbledon or the US Open, but for McEnroe the seniors circuit is more than a mere circus. 'I wouldn't be playing if it was a circus. You hope that at the end of the day you put on some kind of good show, but it's definitely a competition. I don't come to these places to lose - that would be ludicrous. So the sting of losing is still there? The sting of losing is bad. It doesn't last as long. But still there's a sting. It's a terrible feeling. I'm sure a lot of players say it, but winning is almost so you don't lose. The thrill of winning is not as great as the pain of losing. Simon Briggs, the Telegraph's tennis correspondent, describes McEnroe as possibly the last of the great tennis romantics. Nobody has ever been quite as pure in their technique," he says. He had an arrogance melded with perfectionism - this idea that a single missed shot was a terrible indignity for him to have committed. McEnroe beats Bjorn Borg in the Wimbledon men's singles final, 1981 (GETTY IMAGES) From an early age, McEnroe approached tennis as much as an art as a game. In his autobiography, he describes first picking up a tennis racket at the age of seven, at the sports club in Queens, New York, where his father, a lawyer, was a member, and, in a way he couldn't totally explain, being able to 'feel the ball through the strings. He became fascinated by the different ways you could hit a ball - flat, topspin, slice; the way you could hit a topspin lob that would sail over an opponent's head and drop just inside the baseline, or bring back the racket as if to hit a hard forehand and instead feather the ball over the net with an angled drop-shot that would leave your opponent flat-footed and open-mouthed. His speciality was the serve and volley. He had a highly unorthodox sideways stance when serving, which disarmed opponents; his speed of reaction, intuition and anticipation meant that he rarely seemed to be chasing the ball. 'Against [Jimmy] Connors and [Björn] Borg," the 1975 Wimbledon champion Arthur Ashe once remarked, 'you feel like you're being hit by a sledgehammer. But McEnroe uses a stiletto. He just slices you up; a nick here, a cut there, pretty soon you've got blood all over and you're bleeding to death. McEnroe played his first Wimbledon semi-final in 1977, at the age of 17. He would go on to win three men's singles finals at Wimbledon, and four at the US Open, as well as nine Grand Slam men's doubles titles, and one Grand Slam mixed doubles title. Watching those games on YouTube today - McEnroe in his too-short shorts, his Tacchini shirt, his unruly pineapple crest of hair sprouting from a headband - is to realise just how much tennis has changed since the years he was in his prime. This looks less like tennis as we know it today than some rarefied combination of fencing and ballet - the darting movements to the net, the deft slices and topspins imparted by wooden rackets, a completely different kind of combat from the baseline nuclear warhead delivery that comes with today's bigger, more powerful graphite rackets. McEnroe was the last player to win a major tournament with a wooden racket, the 1981 US Open. 'In the old days, you didn't have the power necessarily to hit the ball hard enough to hit outright winners," he says, gesturing to the screen. In a lot of cases these people are better returners than servers, and they count more on returning. More than we did. If you'd said to me 10 years ago that I'd be watching the male game and everyone would be serving and staying back, I'd have said you were out of your mind and that would never happen. And now you're seeing pretty much every player doing that. What made my matches against Borg and Connors interesting was, comparing it to boxing, it was like a puncher and a counter-puncher. Now you have bigger, stronger guys playing with rackets that have 30 per cent more power than we had. It doesn't make sense. If anything you should be making the rackets smaller and harder for these guys. That's what I would do. And bring back wooden rackets? 'Well, that's not going to happen because the racket companies would be up in arms. But, yeah, I would bring them back. Perhaps you could reintroduce them for the seniors. McEnroe laughed. 'We don't want to be completely in slow motion. McEnroe playing at Wimbledon in 1980 (GETTY IMAGES) As a junior player, McEnroe was always able to keep his temper in check - or at least internalised. In his autobiography he writes that his usual reaction on losing a match, 'until an embarrassingly late age," was to burst into tears. His first recorded public outburst came at his first Wimbledon appearance in 1977, during a quarter-final against Phil Dent. Disgusted at himself for losing a first-set tie-break, he put the head of his racket under his shoe and started to bend it. The crowd - 'that big, close-in, well-mannered English crowd" - started booing. He had never been booed before. Instead of picking up his racket, McEnroe kicked it away. I have to tell you, at that moment I mostly felt amused," he writes. Superbrat" was born. The idea of tennis as the last repository of restraint, good manners, sportsmanship and deference to authority had been already been dealt a death-blow by Jimmy Connors crudely feigning masturbation with his racket, and Ilie Nastase's petulance and argumentativeness. But McEnroe's on-court meltdowns - abusing umpires, line judges and sometimes spectators, demolishing a drinks cart, hurling rackets, screaming obscenities - seemed to be less outbursts of common-or-garden loutishness than the terrifying spectacle of a man for whom winning - or rather not losing - was everything, aghast that for all his Herculean endeavours his fate ultimately rested in the hands of middle-aged men dressed in blazers and ties, whom he despised. There seemed to be a particular honesty - almost an integrity - in his indignation. He may have been boorish, but at least he was authentic. McEnroe affects a world-weary attitude towards any conversation about his on-court tantrums. The occasions when he genuinely lost control of himself - 'the ones that are on YouTube, or maybe a couple of them" - were few and far between, he says. He may still hold the record for the number of fines in professional tennis (including £6,000 for using a world-beating six swear words in 10 seconds), but he was suspended from the tour only once, following the Australian Open in 1985, and that, he suggested, was the result of a misunderstanding. It used to be like a four-step warning thing, then it became a three-step. And I didn't know that. So when I had a choice thing to say to the umpire, that put me over the limit before I realised it. I think the exact phrase you used was, 'Go f*** your mother. Words to that effect, yeah. Over the years, McEnroe has developed a rationale for his behaviour. These were not the meltdowns of a man out of control, but protests against the desperately inadequate standards among umpires and line judges. They were cries against injustice. Exactly. That's true. You could always have waited until after the match and written a letter. He laughed. What does that do? Actually, probably about the same as when I complained at the time... I don't know - it seemed like the thing to do. Connors and Nastase were obviously two of the best players in the game, and they weren't putting up with it, so I thought, "Why should I put up with it?" It was pitiful basically; [the tennis authorities] wanted to treat us like, "Oh no, tennis players don't do that." But to me tennis players should be treated the same way as players in other sports. If you take American football as an example, or English soccer, they're not saying, "Hello, how are you?" out there. Why, whatever happened, were we supposed to just smile and say, "Great!"? 'What I do find ironic is that after all this time, those things that people were saying I should get suspended for - if I don't say them when they go to the Albert Hall they'll be disappointed. I was playing a tournament the other day, and people were screaming, "Are you kidding!" the second a line-call was made. Before I could even have said it myself, they were saying it! He smiled, and gestured towards the TV screen, where Federer and Djokovic were wrapping up the first set. I think these guys handle themselves unbelievably well. I don't know how they have this incredible control. I'm not going to sit here and pretend I had the same control they did, and to some degree I wish they'd let it out a bit more. They'll probably have ulcers when they're 35. I don't know how they can shrug it off. Maybe they look at their bank balances at the end of the year and that helps. McEnroe with his wife, the rock singer Patty Smyth (REX FEATURES) Following his retirement from the professional tour in 1992, McEnroe underwent therapy intermittently on his own initiative and as part of the on-going legal battles with his first wife, the actress Tatum O'Neal, whom he divorced in acrimonious circumstances in 1992, over custody of their three children. Kevin is now 26, Sean 25 and Emily 21. When I asked what was the single most important thing he learnt from therapy, McEnroe hummed and hawed for a few moments before saying that he didn't think there was one. 'I'm not saying I didn't learn something, but I can't say it was one specific thing where a lightbulb went on. It was just the process. I don't regret going, whether it was court-ordered or whether it wasn't. Every time I did something along those lines it perhaps could have helped me. If anything, I learnt that I was open enough to try to make myself a better person if that's what it took. 'I like to think that as I've gotten older I've become a better person; I don't think I was a bad person before - in my opinion. I definitely had some edge to me. But it's hard to know what to do when you're thrust into a situation like I was, and some people handle it better than others. I think all in all I didn't handle it that badly; I think I handled it pretty damn well. McEnroe was the world's top-ranked player on 14 separate occasions between 1980 and 1985, spending a total of 170 weeks at the top of the pile. But it was a position that he never seemed particularly comfortable with. You struggle to win, but being number one, he once said, was always 'a hollow" feeling. 'You hear that saying, it's lonely at the top," he told me. 'And I think there's some truth in that; you're out there on your own island, and you feel like you're disengaged, not only with the rest of the world, but the rest of your competitors, some of them friends. In his autobiography, he writes how his close friendships with Vitas Gerulaitis and his long-time doubles partner Peter Fleming both suffered from the simple fact that he was a better player than they were, and from his drive to prove it. I always wanted my family and friends to do well," he writes. 'I just didn't want them to do as well as I did. 'Well, that's what I believed," he told me with a shrug. Tennis is an extremely selfish game. But I don't think I was as selfish as some other people. I'm not saying I wasn't selfish, but to have won more majors I would have needed to be more selfish than I was. I mean, I think I did pretty well. He smiled. 'I'm trying to look on the bright side here. If I'd been more ruthless, I believe I could have won more. But to me, some friendships would matter on a level, and you'd want some of that; you'd want a life and a girlfriend or a wife. Other people were more successfully able to navigate [that situation]. His first marriage, children... life - all these things, he says, put the brakes on him. Maybe I lost a little bit of hunger. Federer's still hungry, he's got twins and he looks like he still wants it all, which is amazing - the guy's won 17 majors! To me, I lost a little bit; you need that killer instinct. He once confessed that it was largely the financial rewards that kept him in the game. I chose world-class mediocrity for the last five or six years of my career," he writes in his autobiography. 'I just couldn't walk away from that kind of money. There are few things more poignant than the champion in decline, looking over his shoulder at the younger players who are overtaking him. 'It wasn't the greatest feeling in the world. You know, who the hell are these people? Pete Sampras, although it turns out he was a pretty good player. And Andre Agassi wasn't bad either. The last match I ever played at the US Open I lost to Jim Courier. He won four majors; it's not like he was a bum. McEnroe was ranked 20th in the world when he finally retired from the professional tour at the end of 1992. For top athletes, retirement can sometimes seem like a sort of premature death. But McEnroe had always had interests beyond tennis. He had a passion for art, and when he retired he opened his own gallery in SoHo, New York. It is no longer open to the public, although he still buys and sells paintings. In the past he has owned a Renoir ('admittedly a second-rate one") and a Picasso ('that you wouldn't even know was a Picasso"), both of which he sold. His collection now comprises mostly modern artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Arshile Gorky and a work that was commissioned from Ed Ruscha, You Cannot Be Serious. 'It's a small thing, but it's something that not only I think is very cool, but a lot of people can relate to," he told me. If, God forbid, I had to sell it because I needed the money I think there are a lot of people out there who would like a phrase like that, putting aside that I said it. Part of why I believe people look at me in a slightly favourable way is because they can see my frustrations in themselves, and live it a little, vicariously, if you like. I had the nerve to do it, to confront the boss, even if I did get fined. Of course, I was luckier because when you get really good there's not a whole lot [the boss] can do about it. For a while, he also toyed with his other ambition, to be a rock guitarist. He built a home studio on the top floor of his Manhattan triplex. When he married the rock singer Patty Smyth in 1997 he named his group the Johnny Smyth Band in an attempt to lure her into performing with him. She declined, on the grounds that he wouldn't want her partnering him in mixed doubles at tennis, and wrote a song for him, teasingly entitled I Wish I Were You. McEnroe playing guitar on stage in New York (GETTY IMAGES) McEnroe toured for a year or so with the group, recorded - and abandoned - an album, and was able to indulge his dreams by jamming on stage with Eric Clapton and Carlos Santana. His friend Lars Ulrich, the drummer for Metallica, complimented his 'natural instinct for music. But McEnroe provides what is perhaps a more accurate assessment of the regard in which he was held by professional musicians, jokingly telling the story of how David Bowie once knocked on his hotel room door and invited him upstairs for a drink: 'Just don't bring your guitar. It is a lingering source of frustration, McEnroe told me, that he was not a better guitarist. 'Then again, it's helped me appreciate my tennis playing a bit more; thank God I had at least one thing I was good at. He no longer has the studio upstairs. Patty got rid of that. Together they have six children: the three from his marriage to O'Neal; a daughter from Smyth's previous marriage to the musician Richard Hell; and their two daughters together, Anna, 16, and Ava, 13. The others are in college or have flown the nest. 'Although you never know, these days kids come back because it's so expensive out there. All his children grew up playing tennis, although McEnroe confessed he was probably not the best person to coach them. 'I'm not a very good coach, at least with my kids. Would you let them win? 'I used to get a kick out of my boys - when they were 12 they'd say, "A couple of years and I'm gonna beat you." All right, we'll see. If they had been close enough where I could have bluffed that, I would have let it happen, but I can't give it away that easily, where it's that blatant. Why not? McEnroe shrugged. 'You've got to somewhat keep them in the realm of reality. Did they stop playing against you when they realised they'd never win? He shuffled in his seat and gave a wry smile. 'We don't hit a whole lot now, put it that way. He is no more likely to be kind when he meets Ivan Lendl at the Royal Albert Hall on Friday. It would be fair to say, he agreed, that in the old days they didn't get on. Lendl, the dour, rangy big-hitter was the antithesis of McEnroe, the artist. It was like when Rocky fought Ivan Drago in Rocky IV - the American versus the machine; to me it felt a bit like that," McEnroe said. We definitely saw, and see, things very differently. We can sort of laugh about it now, I think. It's not the same as then, when we did want to wring each other's neck. So do you have dinner together? McEnroe gave an incredulous snort. No! I don't think Ivan's any different now than he was then. The good thing is that I was good enough not to have to listen to his jokes, whereas other guys felt they had to pay their respects, in a way; there's a hierarchy in any sport. I'd think, thank God I don't have to listen to this! But he still does it now. It's amazing. McEnroe was watching the TV screen intently. He had had enough of the conversation. At this point, I think, "Who cares?"" As part of the Statoil Masters Tennis, John McEnroe will play in the Winter Whites Gala on December 8, an evening in aid of the charity Centrepoint. For tickets go to statoilmasterstennis.com/tickets