The American, frowning in accordance with the quality of each question, seemed irritated and impatient, venting his anger on an unfortunate German reporter who had come badly prepared. “It has been said that players have admitted fixing matches. What’s your opinion on this?” the reporter asked.

“What? Who? Do you have any names? Proof?” McEnroe snapped.

“They’re rumours that I’ve heard about or read,” the reporter blushed.

“You’re joking!” McEnroe erupted. “You should get your facts right before asking the question. And why tennis? What about football? Are there no matches sold in the Bundesliga?”

– Vers l’Avenir, November 9, 2007

This is the sound. “NNNNNNNO!” The sound of the angst. “WHAAAAT!” The sound of the torment. “COMEOOONNNNNN!” The sound of the genius at work. “AAAAAAAAAGH!” The madness of King John. Has anyone ever truly explained it?

It is almost half past eight on a wet Friday evening when he enters the court for the Legends Cup, but already the demons are swarming like wasps. He thought they were playing in Brussels – they drove him to Liege! He thought they’d be staying at a nice hotel beside the tournament venue – they drove him halfway to Luxembourg! He’s jet-lagged; his back aches; he’s picked up an anger-rash from the press conference and just when he thought his head was going to explode, just when he thought things couldn’t get much worse, they’ve sent him out to play the lovable Frenchman, Henri Leconte.

Leconte with the sweet disposition. Leconte with the permanent smile. Leconte charming the umpire and throwing water and cola to the crowd. Leconte.

Within four games of the opening set, Mac has had his fill . . .

“FFFUUCCCKKKKKK!” In the fifth, he savages the umpire. In the sixth, he flings his racket to the ground. He loses the set, fights his way back and then loses the match in a tie-break. Boy, is he pissed off.

You watch, waiting for the storm to abate, but there’s no handshake. They exchange heated abuse at the net and Mac storms from the court without granting an interview or an autograph. King John, the triple Wimbledon singles champion. King John, one of the finest we’ve ever seen. King John, the outstanding broadcaster. King John, mad as hell.

We meet the following morning at a splendid hotel in Durbuy, the self-styled smallest city in the world. He arrives for the interview with slightly bloodshot eyes and explains that he’s not long out of bed. You wonder about his mood. It’s time to roll the dice. This could be the shortest Big Interview in history. King John. How do you engage him?

“Okay, I know you like art,” I announce, “so allow me to paint this little portrait for you: the date is October 1, 1984. John McEnroe is about to board a flight to Los Angeles from Portland. He is 25 years old, a multi-millionaire, and has won practically everything in tennis, but he is not enjoying the game. He’s not happy. He is haunted by demons. He’s thinking, ‘I’m the greatest player who ever lived. Why do I feel so empty inside?’ As he is about to board the flight a guy he has never met before pulls him to one side and says, ‘John, if you think that’s bad, watch this.’ He produces a portable DVD player and shows McEnroe a terrifying vision of the future . . . a Masters event in Liege in the year 2007 . . . ” (He coughs and almost chokes on his coffee) “ . . . John McEnroe is 48 years old and still playing tennis; he looks miserable, he’s still swearing and throwing his racket and fighting with his opponent, the genial Henri Leconte. The DVD comes to an end and McEnroe staggers and almost faints in disbelief, ‘You cannot be f***ing serious’.”

He fixes me with a gaze and an uneasy pause ensues. “Is there a question?” he asks.

“Yes,” I reply. “What if that had really happened? Is that how you’d have reacted?”

“Absolutely,” he replies. “I would have said – and probably did say publicly – that there were three things I would never do: commentary work, seniors tennis and, I can’t think of it now, but there was something else. Why am I doing pretty much everything I said I wouldn’t? Well, some of it is due to some level of maturation and some of it is just a recognition of practicality. At 25, you think you have a world of options but later you realise that they aren’t all necessarily available and as I got older it [playing] seemed a good option financially and in terms of keeping fit.”

“What was the problem with Leconte last night?” I enquire.

“Well, that’s something between the two of us that I would rather not get into right now.”

“He was hamming it up and you don’t like that,” I suggest.

“I don’t like that,” he concurs, “I’ve never liked that. It’s disconcerting to have to play matches and have a guy clowning around like that but you know people expect a show – I don’t have a problem with that. This isn’t like . . . Wimbledon where all I was thinking about was the next round or how to win the tournament. You hope people will walk out of there thinking, ‘Hey, we got entertained’. And so I try to keep myself in shape and play the best that I can play. But there are other elements – people expect me to get pissed off. They are more concerned about me throwing my racket or yelling at an official than the quality of my tennis, and that creates this weird thing in my mind. On the one hand it’s absurd, but on the other it’s sort of funny.”

“So how much of the anguish last night was you giving them what they want and how much of it was genuine?”

“Well, it’s difficult to come up with an exact percentage,” he says, “but I would say that I was genuinely pissed off. He [Leconte] brings out the worst in me. But there are demons. There have always been questions on my mind on the tennis court. Off the court I’m way better able to keep things under control than on the court. When I get on the court it is unpredictable; I don’t even know myself what’s going to happen. You ask, ‘What percentage of you is actually pissed off?’ I’m not sure. And when people ask I always say, ‘Look, did you want me to be pissed off? Or do you want me to say I’m pretending?’ I just go along with whatever one they say just for lack of having to discuss it at any serious level, because ultimately it’s all superficial anyway. What! Are they going to be my analyst?”

“Leconte said after the match that he plays because he enjoys it,” I announce. “You don’t seem to enjoy it; you didn’t enjoy last night; and I watched you playing Pat Cash in Vale do Lobo [Portugal] last year and you didn’t seem to enjoy that either.”

“Well, there’s some validity to what you are saying,” he replies, “but it’s not true for every match. It varies from match to match. Fatigue is usually the problem and I’ve been travelling more than I want to be travelling [of late]. I went to LA to see my wife [the singer Patty Smyth] perform and check on the fires and arrived here a day later then I would [normally] have. It gets harder as you get older. I’ve been struggling with my back and felt like I couldn’t move, which is frustrating. And then you play a guy like Leconte and he’s swinging for the fences [playing to the crowd] and clowning around and all of the expectations are on me. But that’s why they pay me the big bucks, right? I’ve got to try and deal with that.”

“Why?” I ask. “Why are you doing it? Let me remind you of something you said nine years ago.”

“Okay.” “You’ve just played Jimmy Connors in Dallas and you’re reflecting on some of the frustrations of playing the Champions Tour, ‘When you put together a tour, everyone is obviously not going to be on the same level, and I found myself playing a lot of matches against guys I should beat – and who didn’t really seem to care. More and more, I’d find myself losing my temper and not knowing if I was doing it because it was expected of me, or because I was really mad. There were times when I felt like an old circus act in a show that was attracting less and less interest. I wanted something more’.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” he concurs.

“But that was nine years ago.”

“Yeah, and it’s no different now but . . . ”

“The question is why?”

“Yeah, well . . . ”

“You’ve mentioned the big bucks,” I interrupt, “but didn’t you once say to your mother: ‘How much is enough?’ [In his compelling autobiography, Serious, McEnroe tells a story about an argument he had with his mother in 1986 after announcing that he was returning to the game after a six-month sabbatical.

‘When I told my parents about it, I could hear in their voices, right away, that they were relieved. I think they really believed I was going to quit. My mom said to me, ‘Now you can buy some diapers for [son] Kevin’. I snapped at her. I said, ‘Mom, how much is enough? Tell me? How much money do I have to make before you don’t have to say things like that? Is it $5m? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty?]

I’m asking the same question: how much is enough?”

“That’s a great question; I don’t know the answer to that,” he replies, “but I’m sure you have also heard of the line, ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’. And to some extent, while I’m still wandering, for want of a better word, and trying to find something that will really fulfil me in a genuine way, why should I throw that away? To do what? What are the options? They [the tournament organisers] want me to play and it’s nice to be wanted. It’s like the actors; I saw Anthony Hopkins on the Jonathan Ross Show, he is 70 years old in a few days and working seemingly more than ever. Well, he doesn’t need it! Okay, actors can do incredible work at 70 but every now and then I can get hot and bring back some memories, and there is an addiction to chasing that elusive, ‘Hey, I can still play!’ ”

“Isn’t there enough fulfilment with your TV career?” I ask.

“Well, you know, I’ve been pretty lucky actually. In addition to the commentary I’ve hosted a game show and a talk show – learning experiences – and it was pretty interesting to see the other side. I had an all-new respect for people like David Letterman and . . . I don’t know who the people are [in Britain] who do it every day. Michael Parkinson, I believe, does it once a week, but if you’re doing four shows a week for one hour, it’s incredibly mentally straining and tiring.”

“Is that what you were doing?” “Yeah, mine was four days a week and I’m like, ‘God almighty!’ I cut way back during that six-month period and even attempting to play a couple of tennis events was [hard] . . . I said to myself, ‘Would I want to do it where, if you became a big star, they would ask you to do 50 weeks a year?’ All of a sudden Liege doesn’t seem that bad.”

QUESTION: What if the abuse sometimes hurled at him – “Hey, there’s that asshole John McEnroe!” – when he’s driving between his downtown art gallery and his uptown apartment in New York is justified? But what if it’s not? What if the madness was a distortion? What if his genius was misunderstood? What if those tired, bloodshot eyes that greeted you this morning were the result, not of a night spent spitting blood over Henri Leconte but from a night at the hotel bar with Bjorn Borg, singing songs and strumming his guitar? What if he is actually brilliant company?

The conversation has shifted to his other great rival, Jimmy Connors. “I interviewed him in Phoenix two years ago,” I announce, “and showed him a copy of your book.”

“He said, ‘I haven’t read it’,” McEnroe laughs.

“How did you guess?” “He wouldn’t admit it, even if he had read it.”

“So that doesn’t surprise you?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me that he said that, no.”

“Did you read his book? The biography [Jimmy Connors Saved My Life] by Joel Drucker?”

“No, not when he didn’t endorse it. Why would I want to read a book by a guy who is annoying to the point of . . . you know, a pest.”

“Are you talking about Connors or the writer?” I inquire, confused.

“I’m talking about the writer,” he laughs. “I have way more respect for Connors, are you kidding? We definitely went a little crazy with each other but it made us both better players and brought us to new heights.”

“I’m still surprised you didn’t read the book,” I reply. “It’s tremendous, a brilliant insight into Jimmy’s life. I thought you’d be curious about that.”

“Well, maybe I’ll have to reconsider,” he concedes, before a thought enters his head. “Hey! What about him?” he says. “You’ve made a . . . I don’t want to say mockery, but you’ve questioned why I’m doing what I’m doing but you could ask the same questions of him. How do you think he’s doing having to deal with coaching [Andy Roddick]? You don’t think he’s tearing his hair out? Since the [US] Open he [Roddick] has played Davis Cup, pulled out of Madrid, lost first round in Basle, pulled out of Paris and I think he’s in China. I’m sure Jimmy is like, ‘Come on’, trying to say the right things. But it’s a tough position. What? Do you want me to coach!”

“You wouldn’t consider it?” I ask. “I’ve coached three people since I left the Tour,” he says. “There was Boris [Becker], Sergi Bruguera and [Mark] Philippoussis a couple of years ago. Now all of this was brief, and I sort of walked away from it too soon, and I don’t want to say that I’m not taking some of the blame for this because with Boris, for example, I think I was going through my divorce [from Tatum O’Neal] and I was not in a very good state, I was struggling.

“But I could safely say with all three of them that they did not listen to a single word I said. If I said ‘Run’ they would walk. It was unbelievable. With Boris it was like, ‘Boris, you need to play some matches’. And he’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, arrange that’, and I’d arrange it and then he’d say, ‘No, no, I’m going to Germany’, and I’d say, ‘Wait a minute!’, but he is ultimately making the decision. To Philippoussis, I’d say, ‘You got to work harder than this, Mark, you’re a good guy’. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’. ‘Mark, you’ve got to serve hard’. ‘Yeah, but my shoulder hurts’. What do you say? So it’s not an easy thing to go into and it requires even more travelling than it would by playing this, so that seems like a crazy idea.”

“What about Borg?” I ask. “You stayed with him at this hotel last night. How well do you know him?”

“That’s an unanswerable question. I mean, how well do I know myself? I know him better than most people but I’m not quite sure exactly how well that is. He’s a tremendously unique person in a lot of ways. He’s an unbelievable physical specimen and mentally he’s as tough as they have ever come. He has also got much more of a sense of humour when you get to know him than you might expect.”

“Do you ever pick his brains about what he was feeling during those great matches you played?”

“Not really, because I don’t find it that interesting. I’d rather talk about politics.”

“I was just wondering if you were as interested in what makes him tick, as I am in what makes you tick, and what made Connors tick?”

“Well, yeah, that’s a good question and I definitely would be interested in that, and I’ve been around him enough to know what makes him tick. But some of it, a lot of it, is this guy is just a physical freak of nature. When you look at Connors you see intense will and desire – I’ve never, ever, played against a guy who tried as hard as him. I kept digging in and saying, ‘I’m going to try even harder and show this guy’, but no matter how hard I dug, it seemed he dug deeper, which I found absolutely amazing.”

“Borg, Connors, Gerulaitis; what fascinating people you were,” I observe.

“Well, thank you,” he says. “It was a tremendous time to be in tennis, an incredible time to be around the sport.”

“And that was a huge part of the draw, wasn’t it?” I suggest. “You were such interesting people?”

“That’s what the sport didn’t realise, or maybe they did, when they changed all of the rules and tightened it up on me and Jimmy. It was, ‘Let’s drain as much personality out of the sport as possible’. And I give them credit, they blew everything else but got the one thing they shouldn’t have gotten right, right . . . I mean, you talk about a horrendously marketed sport. The good news is that there seems to be some hope; [Novak] Djokovic has got some personality; [Roger] Federer plays with a wonderful grace, à la Borg, and [Rafael] Nadal, though I’m concerned about his physical ability to keep this up.”

“But they don’t have the demons that you guys had,” I suggest. “Yeah, I don’t know why that is,” he agrees. “We had a different . . . we came at a time when the money was just coming into the sport but there was still a sense of . . . You still enjoyed yourself and went out and had fun.

“You weren’t sitting around counting the chocolates on your pillow at the hotel. These guys . . . I don’t get a sense they are doing anything but watching pay-per-view movies at the hotel or playing video games. That, to them, is fun.”

“So is genius a blessing or a curse?” “It’s both, probably. There’s no doubt Roger Federer is a genius and he actually seems to enjoy it. I’m amazed at that. How the hell is this guy enjoying this so much? I really respect that. Unlike Pete [Sampras] for example, who didn’t want to be around anybody or talk to anybody and who walked around between points like this [he stands and walks across the floor staring at his shoes], Federer is around the locker rooms for hours talking to everybody. He’s in the NBC production truck and there’s a special on. ‘Oh, can I see it?’ I don’t know how you do that, but it’s very impressive. And some of these other guys, they all seem to get along with each other, which I guess is okay on one level, but there’s demons developing. You look at Roddick and he is getting some scarring and even Nadal with his injury stuff, it’s not going to be easy.”

“And what of your own demons?” I ask. “You described yourself as ‘a work in progress’ five years ago. Is it still?”

“Oh yeah.” “Are you still in love with Patty?” “I am . . . I find it frustrating when it’s not great all the time. I’d like it to be like it was in the beginning, you know, when you are really in love, but she says, ‘Hey, listen, come on, we’ve been together 13 years!’ And she’s right but I guess I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I shoot for something almost unimaginably high, which is probably not a good thing, so that, I guess, is kind of a work in progress.

“I always want it to be like it was in the beginning and she’s like, ‘Hey John! You’ve just come back from Liege – ‘Here I am!’ – and I’m exhausted because I’ve been up with all the kids and haven’t slept for five days’.”

“So you’re looking for magic,” I observe, “and she needs sleep?”

“Yeah, she’s like, ‘Are you kidding?’ ” “I loved that quote in your book when you’re nagging her to go on stage together and she says, ‘Look John, you can’t expect to be the greatest tennis player who ever lived and Keith Richards’.”

“Yeah, we have this ongoing conflict,” he smiles. “Recently Patty has started to get out there and perform more and the truth is she is a great performer. I didn’t really see her perform when she was at her peak, other than in videos and stuff, and I’m like, ‘Jesus! She sings better than 99% of the people out there’. And so I try to recognise the frustration that perhaps she has gone through, and what she has had to give up potentially by being with me and the insanity that she walked into with my ex-wife and the other kids [his divorce from O’Neal, with whom he had three kids, was protracted and bitter]. But I’m not real good at understanding. I’m like, ‘Hey! You’re better off, right? I’m a good guy and I’ve gotten to be a better guy, so why isn’t it just amazing?’ And as miserable as this [his appearance in Liege] may appear to you, it’s way easier to do something like this where I can get up at 12 because I’m jet-lagged and play a few matches than it is to deal with six kids – talk about tiring and unfulfilling, even though it is also the ultimate in fulfilment. So getting away allows me to breathe and rejuvenate and come back and feel good about it.”

GARY SWAIN, his agent at IMG and a friend of long standing, reminds him of another appointment. My request for another five minutes is granted and I read him a newspaper report of his fit of pique at the press conference the day before.

“Is that an accurate depiction of what happened?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he replies. “The observation of one writer who witnessed the exchange was, ‘McEnroe responded in the manner of an Eddy Merckx, defending a sport hammered by doping scandals’.”

McEnroe shakes his head: “That’s beyond superficial. I’m not sure how to respond to that. I’m not sure what your question is.”

“I’m just curious about your response to the German reporter,” I reply. “This match-fixing stuff has been a running news story for some time. It is being investigated by the ATP; Tim Henman has commented on it; Andy Murray has commented on it; isn’t it a legitimate question to ask John McEnroe?”

“Well, first of all I have been asked, on a number of occasions, many times already so if anyone did any homework they would know that. He obviously was someone who was looking for trouble as far as I was concerned. He said he had names of players who admitted they took money. Is that what Henman said?”

“No,” I reply.

“Is that what Murray said?”

“No”

“I said, ‘Give me the names of the players that took the money’, but he didn’t have an answer for that. A couple of weeks ago I was told by a German guy that some supposedly German player went on German TV with his face covered up and his voice changed, alleging that he knew of six or seven players that had taken some money to throw a match. Now I don’t know that to be true but that’s what I was told. I shudder to think of the ramifications if it is true in tennis. If [Nikolay] Davydenko was stupid enough – and I’ve said this publicly – if he was stupid enough at No 4 in the world to throw a match in Sopot so he could win some money, he deserves to be thrown out of the game.

“But I can’t believe that someone could be that stupid. Now the other side of the coin to me is this: What if the Russian mafia – and I don’t know this to be true – has a gun to his mom’s head, ‘He’s going to lose this match in Sopot’. It’s a rough place over there. There could be something really dark and scary going on. But I don’t think reporters are thinking that way. They’re just trying to nail him.”

“Fair point,” I observe, “but what about the [Martina] Hingis case and her positive test for cocaine? Wimbledon was four months ago! It all seems covert. In your book, you talk about the arrival of steroids and amphetamines in tennis but the sport seems very reluctant to address it.”

“You are talking about two different things,” he says. “Insofar as the testing goes, I would prefer to see the testing done before the tournament – for example, two years ago Mariano Puerta tested positive for some type of steroid but the guy got to the final of the French Open! Why aren’t they doing it before the tournament starts? If you’re talking about the Hingis situation, that’s different – it’s pretty much common knowledge that cocaine is not performance-enhancing. If you watched her play – if it is true – it sure as hell didn’t help her performance. And it’s not going to.”

“How do you know?” I ask. “I don’t mean this to be a leading question, but don’t they say that it improves sexual performance?”

He senses the headline immediately. The interview has reached its close. King John shakes his head and cracks a grin: “I’m not going to get into the specifics of that.”