One downside of playing professional tennis in the modern era (or so I am told) is that lapses of judgement are recorded and amplified on social media for posterity. This site regularly highlights instances of players that don’t have a firm grasp of the rules of the game. Today we are traveling back to 1990 to revisit a time when John McEnroe was defaulted out of the Australian Open. It was due to a combination of reprehensible behavior and a fundamental misunderstanding of one of the rules.
McEnroe wrote about the episode in his autobiography, You Cannot Be Serious. It was only the second time that he had played that tournament. That fact illustrates how many of the top players rarely played down under due to unfortunate scheduling over the holidays as well as the lengthy travel time. In fact, McEnroe only played the Australian Open a total of three times in his career.
In 1990, McEnroe was defaulted out of the singles draw of the tournament for incurring three code violations. In You Cannot Be Serious, he revealed that he was unaware of a recent rule change that effectively reduced the number of violations for disqualification from 4 to 3.
The Australian Open posted a video of the incident on YouTube in 2014. It includes footage of the three violations which were intimidating a lineswoman, smashing a racquet, and swearing at the tournament referee. The video narrative from the Australian Open charitably indicates that McEnroe was winning the match, but for all intents and purposes it looked to be headed to a 5th set.
If it seems like I am picking on current players for these lapses of rules awareness, that is exactly right. It probably comes off as implying that back in the day the players knew the rules. There was plenty time to study the rulebook while traveling to the Australian Open, uphill, both ways, through the snow. You kids, get off my lawn.
The reality is that there simply isn’t enough archival footage of matches to capture those inopportune moments. That’s why it is delightful to come across well packaged video of those vintage events. (Thanks, Tennis Australia!)
Whilst appreciating John McEnroe’s undoubted talent, he was a very poor example for tennis players. I would recommend John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7966920/). The film shows just how he manipulated situations to both motivate himself and subjugate his opponents.