Mac is still a big cheese in tennis

For years, tennis purists saw John McEnroe as the sport’s ultimate left-handed complement.

He won lots, but also loudly. He was the king of the code violation. He was sent packing from the Australian Open, not by an opponent but a chair umpire. He could serve and volley only slightly better than he could yell and scream.

He was the ultimate New Yorker. His city never kept pushing and yelling and working the angles, and neither did he. His edges had sharp corners. He was laid-back only when he slept.

To some, his three Wimbledon and four U.S. Open titles came with an asterisk of bad behavior. To those, he would now respond, as he did to a chair umpire during a Wimbledon match in 1981:

“YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS.”

McEnroe turned 50 on Feb. 16. When McEnroe was in his playing prime, Roger Federer was in diapers and Rafael Nadal wasn’t Rafael Nadal.

Nevertheless, in many instances, McEnroe remains as big a part of tennis’ success as today’s marquee stars.

“Fifty is the new 40,” says McEnroe, who goes at the pace of a 30-year-old.

McEnroe is everywhere: movies, commercials; he has an art gallery; he was Davis Cup captain for a few years, before his brother, Patrick, took that over.

But his broadcasting career has been his trademark. When there is a major tennis tournament, he is part of it. He will do the French Open this month for NBC, but he will also show up, on somebody’s air, at every major tournament. Look for him on the Tennis Channel, and also on ESPN for its portion of Grand Slam telecasts. He will even be on the BBC from Wimbledon.

“Love the BBC,” he says. “They do the whole thing without commercials.”

His appearances on USA Network, which used to have weekday and weeknight U.S. Open broadcast rights, were matches made in heaven. Warm September nights, 20,000 New Yorkers on hand after pushing their way off the packed and sweaty subway train, two players equally adept at tennis and street fighting -- and McEnroe to describe it all.

“It’s time for this guy to start showing me some guts,” he would say. And every cabby from the Bronx with a TV set and a night off would clench his fist and respond: “You tell ‘em, Mac.”

He says now that his broadcasting career, something he didn’t aspire to, has helped change his image.

“People see a side of me they didn’t see as a player,” he says. “They see a guy who had kids, who got a divorce. They see a sense of humor, somebody who can be self-deprecating.”

McEnroe, who still lives in New York but spends between three and six weeks a year at his home in Malibu, says the broadcasting takes only eight weeks a year, and he thinks that is enough.

“Less is more,” he says.

That leaves time for tennis of his own, including a dozen appearances on the sport’s Champions Tour -- he won a tournament in March and still plays tough against the likes of Pete Sampras, Jim Courier and Stefan Edberg -- and an annual summer commitment to Billie Jean King’s Team Tennis.

“I still play on a high level,” he says. “I need to keep the fire burning. I have to compete.”

He also has causes, and was in town recently for some TV appearances as spokesman for a prostate health campaign called the “50 Over 50 Challenge.” His father, John Patrick, 74, fought prostate cancer with radiation and is now in fine health, McEnroe says.

“We’re not promoting a product,” he says. “We’re promoting a lifestyle. Go see a doctor. Get a checkup.

“I make better decisions with my life now. I’m in better shape than [Ivan] Lendl. Did you ever think you’d see that?”

He says he got a good dose of what the tour is like now when he warmed up Nadal last summer before his Wimbledon semifinal. That was the round before Nadal beat Federer in a match so classic it is now considered on the same level as the benchmark of such things, the 1980 Bjorn Borg-McEnroe final at Wimbledon.

“We hit for about 45 minutes,” McEnroe says, “and it felt like a couple of hours. I have seen the best of things in tennis over the years, like Sampras’ serve, but the spin Nadal puts on the ball, well . . .

“I finished and had half an hour before I had to be in the broadcast booth. I was sweating and I kept thinking about the heavy ball he hit and thinking, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”

McEnroe says he thinks Federer will get the record-tying 14th Grand Slam title, although he worries that a tennis player’s prime is “age 19 to 27 and Roger is already there.”

McEnroe says that Federer may be at the stage of his career where he needs a coach, and that McEnroe might be open to that, “if he’d listen to me. Boris Becker asked me to coach him one time and he didn’t listen to a word I said for six weeks.”

Whatever McEnroe is doing, and wherever he is headed, he will do so at the pace of a much younger man. He has no low gear in his transmission.

He did, however, reveal one tendency toward acute dinosaur-ism.

“I’ve got six kids,” he says. “None of them read a newspaper. I gotta have one. I don’t get what they don’t get.”

He could not be more serious, and we thank him for that.

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bill.dwyre@latimes.com