All except, that is, for the Beast. Friday night, June 16, should have been Johnny Mac night in New York City. The legendary John McEnroe had walked to the court from his Central Park apartment, Yankees cap pulled down tight. As so often happened throughout his playing days, he had been greeted by enthusiastic cheers from his hometown crowd. Yet a mere 10 points into his match against Frenchman Henri LeConte, there was the graying, 41-year-old McEnroe, a doting father of five plus a stepdaughter, doing something just as inevitable: Turning everyone against him by charging the net -- to question a lines call. "C'mon, Mac, not already!" a spectator called out.

McEnroe turned to the courtside fan, his face suddenly pale with rage. "You got an appointment to get to?" he said, spitting out the words through lips pursed in anger. "What the fuck do you care, asshole?"

The crowd erupted in boos and the umpire administered a code violation for unsportsmanlike conduct, but it was too late: The Beast had been unleashed. For the next two hours, against all his intentions, McEnroe stalked the court, throwing his racket four times, berating a middle-aged linesman and slamming a courtside sign advertising Sector Sport Watches ("Hey! Hit somebody else's sign!" someone yelled from the Sector Sport Watch company box seats) in dangerous proximity to a female tournament official, whom McEnroe then blistered with a series of choice condemnations of the "you fucking asshole" variety when she saw to it that he be penalized. He also, in between such dramatic acts, hit some of the purest and most creative shots a tennis court has ever seen and, once the match was over, refused to shake the umpire's hand, leaving a crowd that came expecting feel-good nostalgia but instead had been treated to the genuine, raw article.

Screw nostalgia, McEnroe seemed to say; just as in the '80s, when his combination of talent and temperament transcended his sport and he attained pop-culture icon status by turning tennis into performance art, McEnroe had yet again provided a voyeuristic glimpse into tortured genius.

It is no accident, after all, that since leaving the tennis tour in 1992, McEnroe has devoted himself to rock music -- writing and performing songs in New York clubs under the moniker the Johnny Smyth Band -- and opened a SoHo art gallery. He has always delighted in being called an artist; his authorized biographer, Richard Evans, once wrote that McEnroe is a "pointillist tennis player," referring to the school of art fathered by Georges Seurat in which the painter uses only the tip of his brush.

Similarly, McEnroe, who was renowned for rarely practicing or watching what he ate, dominated stronger, bigger, more committed players with a wholly instinctive game that was characterized by a feathery touch, a series of jabs and wrist flicks that produced unfathomable, sharply angled shots. "McEnroe saw the court in different geometric dimensions than anyone else," says Eric Riley, a former tour player who has coached Pam Shriver, Lisa Raymond and the Jensen brothers. "On any given volley, the rest of us might choose between two or three shots. But somehow Mac would see all these possibilities that never occurred to anyone else before."

Yet, despite the seven Grand Slam tournament victories, the 77 singles titles (third all-time behind Connors and Ivan Lendl) and the No. 1 ranking from 1981 to 1984, it was the dark side of his artistry for which McEnroe became most widely known, the temperament that led him to be dubbed "McBrat" by the staid English press after he lambasted a stuffy Wimbledon umpire by screaming, "You are the pits of the world!"

It wasn't so much that McEnroe was supercompetitive; his rage for perfection in himself and others was just as likely to explode when he was winning. The tirades would invariably be followed by rambling public soliloquies of introspection ("Why do I let it happen?" he wondered once, after the Beast had run amok) showing both an innate intelligence and a stunning tendency toward self-flagellation. Behind the blowups was a self-loathing narcissism ("I'm so disgusting, you shouldn't watch. Everybody leave!" he screamed between points during the '81 Wimbledon tournament) and a class resentment in reaction to tennis' pretensions. He would rail against the sport's "phonies and elitists," earning him antihero status.

He hung with Jack Nicholson and Mick Jagger, both of whom offered similar advice after he'd been banned from the Davis Cup in 1985 and there were rumors of a yearlong suspension: Don't ever change. ("When you're 26, who are you gonna listen to, Jagger and Nicholson or some old farts in the United States Tennis Association?" McEnroe recalled in Sports Illustrated in 1996.) Nike signed him up (his total career earnings from tennis and endorsements are said to surpass $100 million, well beyond what any other tennis player ever made) and graced Sunset Boulevard with a James Dean-like mural of Johnny Mac on a city street, the collar of his leather jacket turned up. It was a fitting image, because long before Dennis Rodman or Latrell Sprewell, McEnroe was sports' preeminent rebel without a cause.

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