Creative energy … McEnroe responds to the umpire in his championship days at Wimbledon.
Photo: AFP
John Patrick McEnroe, one of the most brilliant, bad-tempered sportsmen of all time, is in London to commentate on the Wimbledon tennis tournament for the BBC.
But he has something else on his mind. On July 1 he is selling at Sotheby's a rarely seen portrait by Andy Warhol of him with his first wife, the actress Tatum O'Neal. The proceeds, which could be as much as £350,000 ($722,000), are going to charity. Not a lot of people are aware
that the man once known as "superbrat" has a serious interest in art and an impressive collection.
"It all started in the late '70s," McEnroe tells me. "My parents never went to galleries, so it was a bit like the left side of my brain wasn't there."
During the French championships in 1977 his mixed-doubles partner, Mary Carillo, took him to see Claude Monet's Water Lilies paintings at the Jeu de Paume. "I didn't know a Matisse from a Michelangelo, but when I got up close I thought, 'That is incredible.' But it was really my friend Vitas Gerulaitis who got me looking. He was four years older than me, someone I looked up to."
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