Emma Raducanu, John McEnroe and the human cost of tennis stardom

John McEnroe is one of the great sporting pundits of our time. McEnroe, Boris Becker and Jimmy Connors are the best (and most entertaining) tennis experts; sadly, Connors only joined the BBC for a short time. 

But suddenly McEnroe seems to have landed himself in hot water. The reason is simple. He spoke out passionately when everyone else was tiptoeing on eggshells. The issue was Emma Raducanu, the delightful and very talented new British tennis star, who had to drop out of her match with the very good Australian player, Ajla Tomljanovic. The Australian was leading 6-3, 3-0 and what had started as a superb and combative match was turning into a walkover. 

Raducanu needed medical attention and there was some mystery surrounding the circumstances. Some thought it was stomach cramps or perhaps an abdominal strain, others thought she was hyper-ventilating. After the match, Clare Balding discussed this with McEnroe and Annabel Croft, a former British tennis champion. McEnroe was clearly fired up, possibly because Balding kept talking about “a medical problem”. He was having none of this. 

“I feel bad for Emma, obviously,” said McEnroe. “It appears it just got a little bit too much, as is understandable, particularly with what we’ve been talking about over the last six weeks, with Osaka not even here. How much can players handle? It makes you look at the guys that have been around and the girls for so long – how well they can handle it. Hopefully she’ll learn from this experience.”

The reference to Naomi Osaka, another superb young female tennis player, was about her refusal to take part in post-match press conferences during the French Open, claiming that it was not good for her mental health. She was fined by the French Open, withdrew from the tournament and then also from Wimbledon. 

McEnroe’s comments triggered quite an outcry, presumably because — while, at the time of writing, it is still unclear what caused Raducanu to drop out —commentators and pundits thought it was more polite to explain her withdrawal in terms of “medical issues” rather than anxiety. One doctor tweeted, “I didn’t realise John McEnroe was medically qualified or that he has X-ray vision!” Given the record of doctors about mental health issues over the past 200 years or so, you might have thought an A&E doctor would have been a little more circumspect.

Balding and Croft seemed visibly uncomfortable about McEnroe’s remarks but, interestingly, didn’t choose to take him up on it. Perhaps this was because they knew he was right and perhaps because they thought that, if he was challenged, he might point out the elephant in the room. This was the pernicious role of the BBC in the pressure on Raducanu. 

First, all that endless hype about the remarkable talent of Britain’s new tennis star was just going to add pressure on someone who was just a schoolgirl a few weeks ago. Second, it was the BBC and Wimbledon who were so keen to schedule her match for third on Number One Court, knowing that it would start late (as it did), so the winner would face a quick turnaround before playing the world’s number one, Ashleigh Barty, the next day in the quarter-finals. 

But the BBC and Wimbledon didn’t seem to care about that. Their eyes were on the huge TV primetime audience a late start would bring. Who cares about the pressure this might put on a young woman player when there are all those millions of viewers to think about. The BBC is desperate for such figures. Wimbledon too, it seems. After all, with Andy Murray evidently on the skids, where is the next British star going to come from?  

It’s a shame Balding and Croft didn’t take McEnroe on. It’s about time someone started to talk about the anxiety of young sportsmen and women and the huge pressures they face. This is exactly what Naomi Osaka was talking about. “In her statement,” wrote Tayo Bero in The Guardian, “Osaka explained that she was having to contend with ‘huge waves of anxiety’ before each speaking engagement, and that she’d also struggled with depression following her 2018 US Open win against Serena Williams, where she was booed and jeered by the crowd during the trophy ceremony for defeating the US legend.” And how did the organisers of the French Open respond? Initially, they fined her $15,000 and threatened to suspend her from the tournament. 

McEnroe was not being unkind to Raducanu. He was being sympathetic (“I feel bad for Emma, obviously”) but he was also trying to address something that the media and the tennis authorities, in some unholy alliance, would rather hush up. “How much can players handle?” McEnroe asked. That’s a good question. And it’s time that the BBC and Wimbledon dropped their strawberries and cream image and faced up to the real human costs of competitive sport. After all, it’s not Clare Balding or Annabel Croft who are going to pick up the pieces when some promising new star finds the pressure far too great. Instead of speculating, as Balding did, whether she will take part in the US Open, she could have listened to McEnroe talking about how much better he felt, after his own sensational Wimbledon debut as a teenager, when he dropped out of tennis for a year and went to college at Stanford. 

This is a growing crisis facing tennis. Young players like Naomi Osaka, Coco Gauff and Emma Raducanu are under enormous stress, many players now have a sports psychologist, and yet the reaction of commentators is generally to keep quiet about the human cost and talk about how this or that “rising star” is “a breath of fresh air”. They might do better to recall the 1930s Noël Coward song, as applicable now to tennis as it was then to the stage. Don’t put your daughter on Centre Court, Mrs Worthington.

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