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He’d just stand there with a huge smile on his face—he never seemed to get bored with watching me play tennis. Sometimes (I confess) I’d think, “Come on, take a break, take your wife out to lunch!” But he didn’t seem to want to do anything else.
    I don’t think I ever wanted to quit entirely, but I remember telling my dad that I wasn’t enjoying it. I’d say, “Do you have to come to every match? Do you have to come to this practice? Can’t you take one off?”
    His response would either be to laugh—“Ha-ha! You’re kidding!”—or act hurt. There was never an in-between. He never said, “OK, I’ll go do something else.” It was just, “It’ll be all right.”
    The better I got, the harder it was to think about giving up the game. I know that Harry Hopman—who knew what he was talking about—began to tell people, “This guy could be really good” (interestingly, he even said this to my mom and dad, though he was usually very careful about what he said to parents). I remember when I was thirteen and I lost in the round of 16 at the National Indoors in Chicago, a tennis columnist named George Lott—he’d once been a great doubles player, and had won a couple of Wimbledons back in the ’20s and ’30s—wrote that I was going to be the next Laver. I was amazed, and a little more hopeful. The next Laver!
    My parents were pretty impressed by that! Still, their heads weren’t turned—which impresses me. They had strong ideas about my future, and in their minds, my future was going to be four years of college and a solid profession. (At one point in my teens, my mother said to me, in all seriousness, “John, why don’t you become a dentist? You’re so good with your hands.”)
    Mom and Dad always said, “Get a college scholarship.” And then, once they met Hopman, who told them war stories about Davis Cup and playing for your country, it was, “Get a college scholarship and play Davis Cup.”
    In any case, I didn’t play a great deal during the school year—which saved me, I think, from getting burned out. After that one National Indoors, I didn’t go again. I would usually play the Orange Bowl in Miami over Christmas break. (My baby brother Patrick started his tournament career—at six!—in the 12-and-unders at the Orange Bowl. Mark was more interested in swimming.) The Easter Bowl was played in the New York area. It wasn’t tennis-tennis-tennis. At least I did get breaks from it.
    Meanwhile, though, I was still moving up in the rankings. My dad was so excited. He said, “You can do it, you can be the best. You can do it, you can do it!”
    But I remember saying one smart thing at the time—the most brilliant comment I ever made. I said, “Dad, listen, don’t talk to me about rankings. I don’t want to be number one until I’m eighteen. Don’t ask me to be the best in the fourteens. Just wait ’til the eighteens, because that’s when I’ll get a college scholarship. I’ll work my way up and peak at the right time.”
    Which is exactly what I did.
     
     
     
    I N THE MEANTIME , I got a look at my future when I ballboyed at the U.S. Open, at Forest Hills, for a couple of years, starting when I was twelve. The pay was $1.85 an hour—just minimum wage—but after the paper route, it felt like a major step up. Besides, I loved the work.
    Not that it was a breeze, by any means. In fact, the first match I ever ballboyed in my life, I almost fainted on the court. Raul Ramirez was playing a Venezuelan named Jorge Andrew, the sun was blazing, and I started getting dizzy. They used to have orange juice and water on the courts at Forest Hills, so on a changeover, I dragged my way up to get some orange juice. Even then, I just barely made it through this match—which didn’t even last that long; Ramirez won in straight sets. I thought, “God, best-of-five is intense.”
    I remember ballboying for Arthur Ashe against Nicky Pilic, and Pilic was just brutal. He was all over you: