Throwback Thursday: John McEnroe Loses His Cool, Seriously

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It was the rant that launched a thousand newspaper headlines, the rant that would so come to define John McEnroe that he would wind up titling his autobiography with its key phrase. It was 35 years ago, June 22, 1981, at Wimbledon, and McEnroe was in the midst of a first-round match against Tom Gullickson when he lost his shit in such a creative fashion—in those four words, YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS—that it will forever be woven into the iconography of tennis.

This wasn't the first time McEnroe had offended the delicate sensibilities of Great Britain, and it would not be the last. Back in 1977, while playing in a qualifying tournament for Wimbledon, McEnroe grew so frustrated during a quarterfinal match that he began to bend his wooden racket under his feet. When the crowd began to boo, McEnroe, a native New Yorker, took it further and kicked the racket across the court. That earned him the nickname SUPER BRAT in the British tabloids, and part of what motivated McEnroe from then on out was a desire to push the limits of what a buttoned-up sport could tolerate.

"I grew up in New York," McEnroe told The New York Times Magazine in 2000. "You go from the airport to your house and you're lucky if ten people don't call you an asshole. Look at hockey players — put a mike on them, or put a mike on the football field. I'm just like those guys, but they made it look like it was all different."

"The game was so stiff," he went on. "It felt like everybody's collar was starched, like the next thing they were going to do was ask me to wear long pants. So if there was one thing I wanted to change that was it. It became like this cause for me."

That cause reached its apex in 1981 against Gullickson, when McEnroe, then 22 years old, hit a shot that was called out by umpire Edward James, a dignified-looking fellow with wispy white hair and wire-rimmed glasses who could have emerged straight from an episode of Masterpiece Classic. McEnroe had already been issued a penalty point in the match for an earlier confrontation with the referee; now, wearing a headband, his hair frizzed out to the max, he turned around and rather calmly began by saying, "Chalk came up all over the place."

After James told him that perhaps he might be incorrect, addressing him as "Mr. McEnroe," McEnroe approached the umpire's chair. "You can't be serious," he said, his voice rising. And then, in full rage: "YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS."

On McEnroe went, with James clutching his glasses as if attempting to cling to his dignity. "You've got to be absolutely the pits of the world, you know that?" McEnroe concluded, and James responded by noting, "I'm going to award a point against you, Mr. McEnroe."

It could have been far worse. The All-England Club was reportedly prepared to default McEnroe for his outburst. "They were prepared to throw the book at John," Earl Buchholz, executive director of the Association of Tennis Professionals, told the Times. Instead, McEnroe was fined $1,500 and threatened with the possibility of a future suspension; it was believed to be the first time Wimbledon's management committee had fined a player during the tournament. The British tabloids, of course, jumped all over the brash American, with headlines like "DISGRACE OF SUPER BRAT." One tabloid consulted a clinical psychologist, who referred to McEnroe as a "hysterical extrovert."

In the immediate aftermath, McEnroe expressed regret. "It was my fault because I was feeling jittery," he said. His girlfriend at the time, Stacy Margolin, said it was up to McEnroe whether he chose to control his temper, but that he "was pretty upset by it." But by then, the whole thing had already become part of Wimbledon lore; Roger Moore, on the verge of retiring in his role as James Bond, even suggested that McEnroe could take his place. "He would be great," Moore said. "He would tell the Chief of Staff where to get off."

Yet even as McEnroe was shrouded in controversy, he kept winning. After beating unseeded Australian Rod Frawley in straight sets in the semifinals (and again being penalized a point for unsportsmanlike conduct), McEnroe walked out of a post-match news conference when a British journalist asked him if he had split up with Margolin. In the final, he kept a lid on his anger and managed to end placid Swede Bjorn Borg's five-year, 41-match winning streak at Wimbledon, defeating him in four sets. Asked if he had managed to conquer his own temperament, McEnroe said, "This is a triumph of McEnroe over Borg."

Still, the rant and its implications would affect McEnroe throughout his tennis career, and beyond. McEnroe became a pop-cultural phenomenon largely because you never knew when another of those rants might be coming. As Julian Rubinstein wrote in his 2000 profile, "he seems to get some pleasure, if not a psychic release, from acting out from time to time."

Even today, that phrase—YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS—attends McEnroe whenever he finds himself in the headlines again. Those are, the U.K. newspaper The Independent once wrote, the four most famous words ever uttered by a tennis player. And perhaps the most fascinating part of it of all is that, in the end, for all his unnecessary bluster and arrogance, McEnroe may have been right about the ball.

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