He keeps admitting that he regretted it the moment the words came out of his mouth, but he also felt he simply couldn’t help himself. Add to that the fact that he couldn’t stand losing because it made him feel like a failure, and his on-court misbehaviour suddenly makes a lot of sense. He didn’t have a coach, he wasn’t very serious about practising a lot (playing matches was enough practice, he thought, especially because he relied on his talents rather than his training schedule), and he didn’t have a real girlfriend. It becomes quite clear from the beginning that John McEnroe was absolutely clueless when he first became famous.

He didn’t know how to cope with being famous, with the constant pressure, and with the drugs that were widely available. Anyhow, Serious is such a good read because it showed how McEnroe became famous against his will.

Granted, reading about these matches is quite fun, especially because he remembers them so well (he knows who he played in which round, who the umpire was, and how he lost or won). If you want to hear about which tournaments he won, you should just read his Wikipedia page – that’s not what I liked about this biography. I started reading Serious because I wanted to find out a bit more about his early years, and I’m glad to report I wasn’t disappointed. It’s such a huge difference to who he is now, always polite and quite eloquent when he’s doing the match commentary at Wimbledon. He’s such a character, and even though I’m too young to have watched him play, back in the eighties, I’ve seen many of his outbursts on YouTube. Since I am a huge tennis fan, though, (you wouldn’t have guessed, would you?) I was quite eager to read McEnroe’s memoir. To be honest, I’m not that keen on (auto)biographies, since I prefer the escapism that good fiction offers. McEnroe, in his biography Serious (guess how he came up with that title!), tries to explain how he came to be the enfant terrible of his generation. His most famous line, “You cannot be serious!”, screamed at the chair umpire during a tennis match at Wimbledon, has gone on to live a life of its own, inspiring T-shirts, songs, and movies – but unfortunately for him that’s just one of his many phrases that have been adopted into popular culture. John McEnroe, apart from being one of the most successful tennis players ever, is most famous for his appalling behaviour.

Mcenroe serious