Documentary follows John McEnroe's journey from tennis brat to modesty

At first, John McEnroe wondered why a documentary filmmaker would want to pursue a 63-year-old former tennis player.

“Why the hell would they want to do something?” he said in an interview with Newsday. “I’m a little bit over the hill, old and gray. I think my expiration date’s a little late for that.”

But eventually, McEnroe was convinced, happy that people still were interested in him.

“They said there's a story to tell, blah, blah, blah,” he said. “You get flattered if people still care. On some level, it's nice to feel relevant a little bit.”

The result is a feature-length film, “McEnroe: The Price of Perfection,” that will be available streaming and on-demand for Showtime subscribers on Sept. 2 and premiere on Showtime at 7 p.m. on Sept. 4.

McEnroe, who grew up in Douglaston, initially asked to what extent director Barney Douglas planned to focus on his tennis prime.

“I don’t want to sit here and talk ad nauseam about the [Bjorn] Borg match [at Wimbledon in 1980], even though it was incredible and I love being part of it,” he said. “The journey that I took to get to where I was when I was 18 to where I am now and the ups and downs of that and sort of coming out hopefully in a better place, that to me was a more interesting story to tell.”

Douglas chose all of the above, going into detail about the tennis game and brash personality that made McEnroe a superstar but also doing a deep dive into his personal life, including his relationship with his late father, his two marriages, his divorce from actress Tatum O’Neal and his now-adult children.

McEnroe always has been an open, public person, so he did not mind the self-analysis on camera. But he said it was difficult to watch his father as he aged and deteriorated, in particular one scene of a late-in-life interview of his father.

“It’s tough just as a son,” he said. “Maybe it was a message to myself not to go down that same path, as much as I loved him. I felt bad for him because he lost his identity when he was sort of forced into retirement. He seemed sort of lost after that.”

McEnroe said he felt an obligation to Douglas to do right by the film and its viewers, including buying into the director’s stylistic filmmaking. The film shows McEnroe visiting various New York-area sites relevant to his life and career over one long night of recording.

McEnroe said he appreciates that younger viewers will get a look at what made him and his contemporaries a big deal in the first place on the court.

“Hopefully it educates people,” he said. “It’s like you're a dinosaur. You know, ‘When you played it was slow motion,’ blah, blah, blah. It gets a little old now.”

McEnroe said people say of current stars: “’They're so athletic, they're so great.’ It gets a little bit frustrating to hear that. Certainly, these three guys [Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal] are the three greatest and taking it to another level. I will absolutely admit that.

“I would have loved to try to play against these guys because I think it would have forced me to get better. And hopefully I would have gotten under their skin a little.”

Although the documentary only briefly references it, McEnroe has fashioned a long career as an elite tennis analyst on television.

“It was the last thing that I wanted to do at first,” he said, “but as it turned out, it was a great thing for me personally because it allowed me to be seen in a different light, that I didn't take myself quite as seriously as I did on the court, that actually maybe I had a sense of humor, that I knew the game, that I was passionate in a different way.

“It bugged me for like 10, 15 years when people would say, ‘You're a better commentator than you are a tennis player.’ Are you kidding me? That really infuriated me. Then I realized that was a great compliment.”

The film includes interviews with Borg, Billie Jean King, Keith Richards, several of McEnroe’s children and his wife, singer-songwriter Patty Smyth.

McEnroe said he hopes viewers will understand him more as a human being who has gone through many of the life experiences they have — always through the lens of a loud and proud New Yorker.

“That's why people related to me in a way where they hopefully respected what I did on the court,” he said, “but they related to me like I was one of their guys.”

By Neil Best

neil.best@newsday.com@sportswatch

Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.