Editor's note: ESPN.com is publishing an excerpt from John McEnroe's new book, "You Cannot Be Serious."

I felt that if I could just get in a good two hours of tennis, I could beat him. My body was saying, "That's enough," but in some weird way, the fatigue worked for me that afternoon. The fact that I was tired made me concentrate better; the more tired I felt, the better I seemed to hit the ball. It was a purely mental thing-push, push-and I didn't get angry at anything because I needed every ounce of energy I had.

I won the first set, 6-3. At one juncture, after I double-faulted in the second game of the second set, he had a break point. I came to net on a first serve at 30-40, hit the volley, and Lendl uncorked a huge forehand to try to pass me on my backhand side. The ball hit the tape and caromed up at a weird angle, and I swung around in a full circle and hit the forehand volley for a winner. Sometimes it helps to be unconscious!

Second set, 6-4.

That was when visions of the French final flickered through my head. However, I knew I couldn't-and wouldn't-choke this one away. I gave the third set everything I had: When I broke his serve once, that wasn't enough for me. I wanted to drive a stake through this guy's heart. I got the second break, went to 4-0, and even though Lendl never stopped trying (the way it seemed he had the previous year, in the final against Connors), I had too much momentum. Final set, 6-1.

I had my fourth Open.

It was the last Grand Slam title I would ever win.

At the end of September, we played Australia in the Davis Cup semifinals, in Portland, Oregon. Connors was there, and we still weren't speaking. Peter and I took our doubles match handily, and we won the tie, 4-1. I should have been on top of the world.

But on October 1, 1984, I was standing in the Portland airport, waiting to board a flight to L.A. for a week off, and suddenly I thought, I'm the greatest tennis player who ever lived-why am I so empty inside?

Except for the French, and one tournament just before the Open in which I had been basically over-tennised, I won every tournament I played in 1984: thirteen out of fifteen. Eighty-two out of eighty-five matches. No one had ever had a year like that in tennis before. No one has since.

It wasn't enough.

The feeling had been building up for a while. I'd been number one for four years, and I'd never felt especially happy. I had written it off to the fact that Borg had stopped playing, and that my relationships weren't going well. Now the year was winding down, and it was nearly six months since I'd last lived with Stella. It was hard for me to pull away from that-from having someone to live with. I was comfortable traveling without a coach, just hooking up with tennis friends on the road and with non-playing friends in New York and L.A. At the same time, both of my two closest friendships, with Peter Fleming and Peter Rennert, had taken turns for the worse. Both guys were trying to make their way on the singles tour, and they were having a tough time. I knew they felt in my shadow, which didn't help matters. Nor did the fact that Peter Fleming had gotten married.

I wasn't comfortable being totally alone. But what were the alternatives?

Stella and I had gotten together again, very briefly, around the time of the Open, but she still wanted a commitment. I'd made an offer to her: "Why don't we just have a baby? That's a commitment, isn't it?" To my twenty-five-year-old mind, that seemed like a good idea: I needed a change. For some odd reason, though, Stella still wanted to get married, and that was that.

I would meet girls on the road: It didn't take a whole lot. Friends of mine would bring them. If I went to a restaurant, they'd be there. I'd go to a nightclub; they'd be there. There were always girls around the tennis matches. Were they out-and-out groupies, the kind they had in rock-and-roll? I wouldn't go quite that far. However, Borg had certainly opened the floodgates, and I reaped a few of the benefits. Girl tennis players were also an option. I never had to try too hard, wherever I was.

When you're number one, everything comes to you.

But I wasn't very happy.

Vitas happened to be in L.A. that week, too, and one day he told me, "You've got to come to this party!" Richard Perry was a friend of his, a music producer who threw legendary parties at his place in the Hollywood Hills. It sounded too good to pass up, so I went.

It was a warm October night in Los Angeles, one of those L.A. nights when the air smells like orange blossoms and feels like silk on your skin. I walked into the party and almost had to laugh-there wasn't anyone in sight who wasn't famous. However, my eyes went right across the room to an intense, sharp-featured girl with dyed red hair, and then her eyes locked with mine.

I went over and introduced myself, even though no introductions were needed. I knew very well that Tatum O'Neal had been the youngest person ever to win an Oscar, in 1974, for Paper Moon. I knew she'd starred with Walter Matthau in The Bad News Bears, which I'd thought was an excellent movie as well. I was all too aware that her father was Ryan O'Neal, the Tom Cruise of his day.

Was I overly impressed? A bit starstruck? Maybe.

Maybe Tatum was, too. It's a funny thing when two well-known people meet: There's an immediate magnetism, because you seem to have so many things in common-not the least of which is that you both instantly feel liberated from what the rest of the world usually demands. After all, someone else who's famous would never act like a fan.

However, as I'd learned way back when I started going to Richard Weisman's amazing Manhattan parties, famous people are fans, too. They're just more sophisticated about hiding it-and hiding things and assuming you have a lot in common without looking too far underneath isn't a great way to begin when you're trying to get to know someone.

Of course, Tatum and I didn't know any of that then. Our eyes had locked, we were physically attracted, and we each knew and liked what the other had done. And we were both searching for something. Maybe my fiery spirit reminded her of her father's own famous temper. For my part, I liked her confidence, her total ease in the midst of this star-studded evening. She wasn't even twenty-one yet, but she had the poise of an experienced woman. While the party boomed and buzzed and milled around us, we sat in a corner, talking and talking and talking. From time to time, she leaned over and whispered something funny about this person or that person around the room. The conspiracy was sexy, the whispering was sexy, and the way she smelled when she leaned close was sexy, too.

And so at a certain point it felt quite natural to kiss her. She smiled. I kissed her again.

That was as far as it went that evening. But as I drove back down through the purple hills after the party, Tatum's phone number scribbled on a scrap of paper in my pocket, my heart felt full for the first time in a long while.

From YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS. Copyright ® 2002 by John McEnroe and James Kapland. All rights reserved. Posted with permission of Putnam Publishers.