JOHN McEnroe called me a jerk once but he is a lot more complimentary about Australian tennis stalwart Paul McNamee.Mind you, McNamee never had to chase down the Super Brat at Sydney Airport in the days when tennis reporters were armed with cloves of garlic and crucifixes and when McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Ilie Nastase and Fritz Buehning were likely to turn into werewolves at an unwelcome line call or an undesirable line of questioning.
McNamee always knew how to put McEnroe on the back foot.
He counts as one of the greatest wins of his 15-year career the one he posted over McEnroe in the third round in the French Open at Roland Garros in 1980 when the volatile New Yorker was No.2 in the world and heir apparent to Bjorn Borg.
Harry Hopman, the taciturn Australian who had coached both McNamee and McEnroe and a gathering of greats stretching all the way back to the days of John Bromwich playing in long pants, was in the stands watching his two pupils.
McNamee kept McEnroe guessing for four hours by hitting high bouncing balls off the red clay to the backhand and closed out the match with a series of top-spin lobs over McEnroe's woolly fire-red hair.
'Even now I can't describe the euphoria of that moment,'' McNamee told me this week. 'The crowd of 14,000 was right behind me. John wasn't popular then. He was considered something of an American upstart and here's an Aussie getting the better of him.
'The cheering was enormous. John later told me it took him two days to recover from that match and it was a defining moment in our friendship.''
McNamee's victory was not just about a big scalp on a resume that would eventually see him win five Grand Slam doubles titles and become Australia's top singles player of the early 1980s.
'That win in Paris was my graduation as a player,'' McNamee said. 'Clay became my surface because I saw it as a rite of passage. It was almost like a sense of enlightenment in that until you really understand the nuance of clay I don't think you've really broken through as a tennis player.''
McNamee and McEnroe continued their rivalry for years. On another centre court, this time at Wimbledon in 1982, the Aussie had the last word, the final pulsating point of his doubles victory with Peter McNamara over McEnroe and Peter Fleming being recently voted the most exciting point in the 136-year history of The Championships
In the forward to McNamee's wonderful new book Game Changer, McEnroe said the two players were similar in many ways - intense, loads of nervous energy, annoying and brilliant, extremely competitive and above all, with an undeniable love for tennis.
McNamee became a major administrator in Australian sport and a driving force behind much of the tennis we will watch this summer.
His passion for the game was nurtured playing sport on weekends at Bridgewater on the Loddon River near Bendigo.
Sport was in his DNA. One uncle, Dick Reynolds, won three Brownlow medals. Another, Jack McNamee, held the Australian welterweight boxing title. He hada handshake so fierce you had to brace yourself when you met him.
McNamee started playing tennis in 1962 when he was seven, listening intently to the radio during the night as Rockhampton's Rod Laver won the Wimbledon singles on his way to his two Grand Slams. Fifty-one years later, McNamee coached Taiwan's Hsieh Su-wei to this years women's doubles title in London, teaming with with Peng Shuai to beat Australia's Ash Barty and Casey Dellacqua.
As a young man, McNamee played against 47-year-old Frank Sedgman and he considers among the greatest events in his life, even surpassing the 2007 Cox Plate win of his horse El Segundo, the way he was able to honour Aussie tennis icons Hopman and Laver.
He was behind the naming of Rod Laver Arena and building the international profile of the Australian Open. As the co-founder of the Hopman Cup, alongside Brisbane's Charlie Fancutt, he not only honours a great Australian but also a great Australian attitude to sport.
'Mr Hopman always took an interest in my matches,'' McNamee said. 'I wasn't a great player but the fact he was taking such an interest really motivated me.
'The Hopman Cup was not just a way to say thank you to him on behalf of all Australians but it was a tournament that reflected the sheer joy of tennis.
'There's so much doom and gloom and scandal around sport these days but the Hopman Cup harks back to the days when tennis wasn't about computer ranking points or big prizemoney.
'It's a tournament where some of the best players in the world take part because it's such great fun.''
0 comments:
Post a Comment