Just a bad-mouthed, hot-headed brat? You must be joking

Forty players sounds like a lot of mischief. In fact, Rusedski’s decision to go public about test results has led to accusations that the ATP allowed some top-name players to go unpunished, prompting a debate about the tour’s testing procedures. Just what tennis needs.

But it will be McEnroe’s admission of steroid use during a time when he amassed some of his seven major titles that throws tennis into the ugly mix with baseball, track and field and all the other sports where performance-enhancing drugs have changed the game.

Now we know that it wasn’t the inner child that frothed up in McEnroe after all. It wasn’t a self-induced temper tantrum that the tennis champ used to zero himself into his nastiest competitive zone. Who among us did not excuse most or all of McEnroe’s tirades as a form of artistic expression? He was our all-surface Van Gogh, erupting in the heat of the US Open or refusing to go gently into that faded Wimbledon lawn.

Better to curse an umpire as ‘‘the pits of the world’’ than cut off an ear. OK, sometimes McEnroe’s embarrassed parents were shown on camera as their hothead son launched into Vesuvius mode. But wasn’t this necessary? we rationalised. For this artist to attain peak form, didn’t he have to explode in a fit of pique? Turns out it might have been ’roid rage, which makes you wonder what and when Ille Nastase is going to have something to tell us.

‘‘For six years, I was unaware I was being given a form of steroid of the legal kind they used to give horses until they decided it was too strong even for horses,’’ McEnroe told a London newspaper this week. That’s about seven months after ex-wife Tatum O’Neal accused McEnroe of taking steroids.

Clearly, McEnroe was not using steroids to get his serve to Andy Roddick-like velocity. But getting in shape and recovering from injury in order to compete for the big dollars is a good enough reason for some athletes to cheat. McEnroe now concedes he began a six-year stretch starting in 1986 in which he ‘‘unknowingly’’ took steroids — a denial that seems absurd in the face of O’Neal’s assertions.

In a TV interview, O’Neal said McEnroe used steroids when he was coming back after their son Sean was born in 187. O’Neal said she did not know if tennis officials were aware of McEnroe’s steroid use, but said she ‘‘made him stop because he was becoming violent’’. In response, McEnroe issued a statement saying he had hoped ‘‘after all these years she would see things more accurately and that she would share my concern for the welfare of our children’’. Now, however, he’s revising his drug history.

This should make for an interesting Australian Open. Tennis’ first Grand Slam event of the year starts next week. It will now likely draw the kind of smarmy scrutiny usually reserved for the Oakland Raiders, track and field sprinters and any baseball player whose 50-homer season is about 33 more homers than his average.

As for McBrat? Thanks for those colorful Grand Slam memories, but they’re a little less genuine now. McEnroe was the ranting but deft champ an artist whose game was the epitome of great tennis: a game of touch and angles, serve-and-volley, spinning serves and strategy. That it might have been ’roid rage, not creative expression, that juiced him to such greatness changes things a little.

(The Los Angeles Times-Washington Post)