To This Day, Chair Umpire Still Has no Answer for McEnroe

The New York Times

November 5, 2009
To This Day, Chair Umpire Has No Answer for McEnroe
By DAVE SEMINARA

“Answer the question. The question, jerk!

“No mistakes so far in this match, right?”

Twenty-five years ago, John McEnroe stared up at Dr. Leif Ake Nilsson, a Swedish chair umpire, and angrily demanded a response. He never received one. Nilsson, now 66 and living in Malmo, Sweden, still has no answer for McEnroe. “He wanted an answer to his question,” Nilsson recalled, “but I couldn’t find any answers.”

The incident came during McEnroe’s semifinal encounter with Anders Jarryd, then the sixth-ranked tennis player in the world, at the Swedish Open, on Nov. 4, 1984. McEnroe served, ahead by 4-2 in the second set, after losing the first set, 6-1. When a linesman called the first serve long, McEnroe approached Nilsson and glared at him with his trademark scowl.

“He asked me if all Swedish umpires were as good as me,” Nilsson said. “I couldn’t find an answer to that question, either.”

McEnroe then unleashed a sarcastic attack on Nilsson, who sat frozen in his chair.

“No mistakes so far in this match, right?” McEnroe bellowed, as he continued to step ominously closer to the umpire’s chair. “You haven’t overruled anything. No mistakes whatsoever!”

Was Nilsson, a dentist, fantasizing at that moment about giving McEnroe a particularly painful root canal? “No, no, no, never,” he said. “You never think that way.”

Nilsson ignored McEnroe’s barb, and officiously chirped, “Second serve, please.”

The overly polite request incensed McEnroe, who screamed, “Answer my question!” He then summoned even more ferocity, shouting, “The question, jerk!”

“He totally lost his head,” Jarryd recalled. “He was ready to lose the match.”

Nilsson had issued McEnroe a warning in the second game of the match for firing a ball in anger at a spectator, so this second outburst cost him a point penalty. He lost his service game moments later; then steamed over to the sideline and smashed several glasses of ice water with a slice backhand that might have otherwise been a penetrating approach shot. He then sat down for a second before springing back up and taking a forehand swipe at the cups, sort of like a bowler attempting to salvage a spare.

“They were real glasses, not paper cups,” Nilsson said.

Jarryd sat in stunned silence. “I was a bit in shock, but I didn’t do anything,” he said. “Mac was a big star. I couldn’t very well go up to the umpire and ask him to disqualify John.”

Nilsson assessed McEnroe a game penalty, leveling the score at 4-4 in the second set. “He grabbed his bags and was about to walk off the court,” Jarryd said. “He probably thought he was going to be disqualified, but nothing happened,” and the match eventually resumed.

Despite the row, or perhaps because of it, McEnroe won the match, 1-6, 7-6, 6-2.

“When something like this happened, most of the time he’d start to play better, and in this match I got a little nervous,” Jarryd said. “Other players would fall apart. But not him. Never him. He became more dangerous.”

McEnroe was fined $2,100 and ultimately suspended for 21 days for exceeding the $7,500 annual fine cap, a rule instituted expressly for him. After the match, he claimed that he lost his temper because he was “mentally tired,” and Jarryd told reporters that it was “difficult to play someone who behaves like McEnroe.”

In an interview in February with Tennis Week, McEnroe described the incident as his most embarrassing tennis memory.

“There was a line call that didn’t look so great,” he said in the interview. “I went ballistic. Called the umpire a jerk. Whacked a ball into the stands. Then smacked a soda can with my racket, and got soda all over the King of Sweden, who was sitting in the front row.”

Nilsson and Jarryd contended that the King of Sweden was not at the match.

McEnroe went on to beat Mats Wilander in the final of what proved to be the last tournament of his finest season: he was 84-3 that year, and won Wimbledon and the United States Open.

Wilander and the Swedes got a measure of revenge on McEnroe weeks later, however, as Sweden beat the United States, 5-0, in the Davis Cup final in Gothenburg. Nilsson was a linesman at the match, but avoided further confrontation with McEnroe, who never won another Grand Slam after his magical season.

Nilsson bumped into McEnroe in a hotel at a seniors event years ago, but reported that there was no tearful reunion. “We stayed in the same hotel, our sons even played together, but he never even looked at me when we saw each other,” Nilsson said.

The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet recently asked McEnroe if he remembered Nilsson, and he replied, “I don’t remember any particular chair umpire; they were all equally bad.”

Nilsson was asked what he would do differently if he had the opportunity to relive the incident.

“If I could have found an answer to his question, I should have done it, but even today I don’t know what to answer,” he said. “If I had given him a proper answer, maybe he would have accepted it. I just didn’t know what to say. That’s why I said, ‘Second serve, please.’ ”

Jarryd and McEnroe remained friends and doubles partners; they’ve won the 45-and-over doubles title at the French Open three years running.

After 25 years, McEnroe’s moment lives on, registering hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube, placing in dozens of best sports tantrum lists, and even serving as the inspiration for the name of a Swedish tennis Web site, answermyquestionjerk.se In the pantheon of McEnroe eruptions, the match ranks alongside his “You cannot be serious” tirade, in which he called the chair umpire Ted James “the pits of the world.”

But who had the call right, Nilsson or McEnroe? Jarryd did not remember if the ball was in or out.

“The linesman saw it correct, and I saw it correct,” Nilsson said. “We were concentrating on the line, and he’s on the baseline on the other side of the net. Who had the ability to see it best, us or him? It doesn’t matter if it was in or out, it’s the umpire’s opinion that counts.”