TV View: Reasonably enough, John McEnroe blamed the BBC weatherman for the rain that had blighted Wimbledon for much of the week and wiped out Saturday's programme of matches. "Look, I'm only the messenger," said Philip Avery.
"But why can't you be more like an umpire and get it all wrong," said McEnroe.
"You're in danger of getting a code violation here, Mr McEnroe, and it wouldn't be the first, would it?" Avery replied.
"That's impossible, a weatherman with a sense of humour? Get outta here," giggled Mac, impressed.
He'd opened the day's BBC coverage as a stand-in for Sue Barker, who was off on a special assignment. When she returned, she told him she'd been conducting a "very special" interview. "With who?" he asked.
"Jimmy Connors," she grinned.
McEnroe feigned outrage and dusted down "you cannot be serious" once more.
It was a rare enough interview, too, with McEnroe's old foe, who has kept a low profile since retiring from the tour in 1992. Last year, he said, he hadn't watched five minutes of tennis in the past 10 years, his preference these days "a good game of golf".
Legend has it that Connors is an embittered man, for an assortment of reasons, among them the decision of the "establishment" to name the new stadium at New York's Flushing Meadow after Arthur Ashe, and not him, and McEnroe's cornering of the role of the media voice of tennis.
Ironic, then, that McEnroe, after watching the interview, should reflect on the nature of their rivalry thus: "Why the rivalry? He felt I was invading his turf, which I was trying to do. His mom and grandmom had an 'us against the world' mentality, a bit like the Williams sisters, he felt people were out to get him. That chip on the shoulder fuelled him, so when this brash but nice young guy from Queens came along to try and steal some of his thunder, he did everything he could to try and stop me."
It's 30 years since the first of Connors' two Wimbledon successes, but, he said, "so much has happened since then it almost seems like I never played".
He hasn't been back at Wimbledon since he last played there, in 1992, because "I'm not one to sit in the stands, have a camera come on me, just wave, and have them saying 'he used to be a good player' - it's not my style."
He didn't, though, come across as an embittered man, maybe just a restless one who has never found anything to replace tennis in his life.
"The challenge of bettering a guy as good as you," he purred, "all those matches, the real, real tough ones, fighting the outside elements and the inside demons - that I miss, I don't get that in business, on the golf course, or in any walk of life. It was lonely at the top, very lonely, but it had the best view."
The best he ever played? If Ille Nastase, his closest friend, "had been a little more serious he'd have been the best of all time", he said, but he gave the honour to Pancho Gonzalez, Bjorn Borg and . . . John McEnroe.
"I'm starting to like him," beamed McEnroe back in the studio, "he's getting back on my good side."
Just as well. Next year the pair will team up for a doubles match against Pete Sampras and, possibly, Andre Agassi in a million-dollar challenge to be staged at a Las Vegas hotel. "We butted heads from the beginning," said Connors, now 51, "we were bad enough at 90 feet apart, how are we going to be at five?"
"We'll be like the Gallagher brothers in Oasis," said McEnroe, "we may not talk a whole lot, but we'll try to get the job done." A silent McEnroe? Get outta here.
"I remember playing a doubles match with him in Davis Cup, we're talking about Jekyll and Hyde here," said Sampras in another of the day's interviews.
"He was so emotional, I was drained just sitting next to him, 'Jesus, just shut up there for a minute'. He was complaining about line calls from 10 minutes ago. I said, 'John, what are you doing here?' I was exhausted, I couldn't imagine playing my career like that."
"Yeah, but he did say he loved me after we won that match," said McEnroe. "He probably won't admit that now, but at that moment he loved me."
How could you not?
