In recent years, McEnroe's passion for the business side of art has lessened. First, he shifted his focus to rock music; years ago, friends such as Eric Clapton had tutored him in guitar. He formed a band and began working on an album, but inexplicably quit a couple of years ago. "I think it was a combination of fear of success and fear of failure," the band's manager told the New York Times Magazine earlier this year. His foray into rock 'n' roll did introduce him to his current wife, Patty Smyth, who sang "The Warrior," a top hit in 1984. Together, they have two children of their own, to go with McEnroe's three from his union with O'Neal and Smyth's daughter from her previous marriage. Four years ago, the National Father's Day Committee, a New York nonprofit organization, named McEnroe father of the year. When he's not traveling these days, McEnroe can be found every morning walking his 9-year-old daughter Emily to school. "By having kids, I got my humanity back," he told Sports Illustrated in 1996. "I'd been like some tennis dude, No. 1 in the world and not happy with it."

Most recently, McEnroe has become re-energized about tennis, having been appointed Davis Cup captain, a position for which he's long lobbied. His first act was to convince the top two names in the men's game, Agassi and Sampras, that Davis Cup ought to mean something to them. When the U.S. team beat Zimbabwe in February, there was McEnroe stalking the sidelines, earning a warning for bad language and accusing the judges of holding old grudges against him. And he has been dominating the senior tennis circuit, even if the old demons still surface on court.

His TV commentary during Wimbledon and the U.S. and French Opens has won plaudits for him as the best sports announcer this side of football's John Madden. He's outspoken, smart and funny. But even in the booth he is never too far from controversy. A few years back, he took some shots at his longtime friend Carillo, suggesting that women should not commentate on men's tennis. But he didn't stop there. "I don't know any women who know the men's game," he said at a press conference. "At the same time, I'm not sure men can really know the women's game. I mean, how would they know how women are feeling at a certain time of the month?"

It was further proof of the many contradictions within McEnroe; though he'd long been one of tennis' few progressive thinkers on race -- he refused to play a $1 million exhibition in Sun City in the mid-'80s due to his opposition to apartheid -- he'd often seemed like a Neanderthal when it came to women. For her part, Carillo expressed hurt and disappointment in her friend. "So much of his graceless and disappointing behavior comes from not looking beyond his own feelings," she told the Guardian. "Like many great artists, he has a self-destructive side."

In his biography of McEnroe, Evans reports that the actor Tom Hulce studied the behavior patterns of McEnroe while preparing for his role as Mozart in "Amadeus," as did the great Shakespearean actor Ian McKellen for "Coriolanus." Evans quotes a description of Coriolanus from author Peter Levi's "The Life and Times of William Shakespeare," and, indeed, it could just as easily apply to the tennis great:

The origin of all lay in his unsociable, supercilious and self-willed disposition, which in all cases is offensive to most people; and when combined with a passion for distinction passes into absolute savageness and mercilessness ... Such are the faulty parts of his character, which in all other respects is a noble one.

For more than 20 years on the public stage, John McEnroe has been unafraid, or unable, to keep suppressed the darkness most of us don't even admit to ourselves. It would be nice to believe that, as he is wont to suggest, McEnroe has, in his 40s, taken solace in his family and found peace.

But there is also no denying him a sense of grudging admiration, for it takes something -- a death wish? a kind of courage? -- to so flagrantly parade the inner Beast, as he did June 16 on that Central Park tennis court, while Smyth and 5-year-old daughter Anna looked on. And there he was in the press conference afterward, moaning about how fans at other events across the globe always cheer louder for him than they do in his hometown, conveniently glossing over the fact that, as always, he'd had the crowd -- and promptly lost them by loudly proclaiming some among them to be assholes. "I don't know, maybe it's my fault, I don't know," he mumbled in a monotone. Despite the flatness of tone, you could sense that, somewhere, all the old emotions were in play. Somewhere in there, John McEnroe was beating the hell out of himself.

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