The first time the great Billie Jean King saw John McEnroe at the Wimbledon tournament, in 1977, she was first taken by a doubt. Could this skinny 18-year-old with curly hair be this new American prodigy everyone was talking about? Then he started playing, and she understood. The tennis world also discovered his untimely rants at the judges, his outbursts of anger and his racquet-logging sessions that would poison the lives of so many people, including his own.
The documentary McEnroe somewhat awkwardly depicts the former tennis champion, who traces the thread of his own story by wandering at night in the deserted streets of his city, New York. Fortunately, the film is based above all on a mass of archives and testimonies which bring to life this era when tennis entered the sport of entertainment.
It tells the story of a shy and hypersensitive little boy, whose father, a demanding and perfectionist man, was to become the agent. A little boy who, even when he grew up and was at the top of his sport, never knew how not to get carried away by the wave of emotions as it passed.
“To be a champion, you have to be mentally strong, because you are all alone on the pitch,” says his great rival on the courts and great friend in life, the Swede Björn Borg.
John McEnroe won his seventh and final Grand Slam title aged 25. Afterwards, things got complicated in his personal life and on the pitch, but today he says he has found a kind of peace.
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