John Patrick McEnroe, Jr., turns 53 today. There was a brief period—or maybe it was a single year, 1984—when he was widely considered the greatest tennis player of all time. He’s not at, or even all that near, the top of that list anymore, mainly because he never won another Grand Slam after ’84. But that doesn’t mean his game itself is any less revered than it was. McEnroe’s unique talent, with its instinctive mix of the delicate and the vicious, remains a kind of outlier in tennis history—incomparable. While that game didn’t keep him at the top of the sport past age 25, it shouldn’t be surprising that it has made him one of the great 40-and-over, and now 50-and-over, players in history.
McEnroe may not be the Goat, but he has been the sport’s most visible personality for the last three decades. In the early 80s, in the heyday of Johnny Mac, I can remember walking back from the tennis courts through the streets of my town, with a single wooden Wilson Pro Staff in my left hand. An older gentleman, sitting on his front stoop with a friend, said, as I somehow knew he was going to say, “Hey, McEnroe.” What I didn’t expect was that people would still be saying the same thing 30 years later. A couple of summers ago, I was late getting across a street in Brooklyn and a truck had to slow down to let me pass. I had my tennis racquet bag slung over my shoulder, so naturally, the driver yelled out as he passed, “Move it, McEnroe!” Not move it, Federer, or Rafa, or Sampras, or Agassi, or Borg. Move it, McEnroe. Twenty years after you’ve retired and you’re still the de facto name for all people carrying tennis racquets in the streets of America. That’s fame.
Here are a few of the moments that made Johnny Mac’s name.