Milos Raonic and John McEnroe – mind meld, or mismatch?

PARIS – The general reaction to the news that Milos Raonic is adding tennis legend like John McEnroe to his team on a short-term basis has been that it’s a great move that can only help as the ambitious Canadian tries to put the final pieces of the puzzle together and reach the very top of the game.
But is it? Maybe.

It could also be overkill.

How many coaches – how many voices – are too many?

This is a player who, not long ago, praised his coaching tandem of Riccardo Piatti and Ivan Ljubicic for being two parts of the same whole. This was a big thing for Raonic at the time: that the team, the message and the routine be seamless regardless of which coach was on duty that particular week.

It’s not as though the Canadian was in a far different position then. He was a consistent top-10 player throughout that period and was for the most part losing only to the very best. He was a French Open quarter-finalist, losing to Novak Djokovic and a Wimbledon semi-finalist, losing to Roger Federer in 2014.

Now, that coherent symphony has given way to a cacophony. It’s as if Raonic has the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Nirvana and a smooth jazz station all playing at once. Adding Nirvana to the mix in McEnroe, notwithstanding the American’s playing resumé and obvious skill set, suddenly makes it a pretty noisy place.

It was the first match McEnroe had watched as a member of Team Raonic, sitting next to current coaching consultant Carlos Moyá. Or is that “co-coaching super-coach/consultant?” Piatti had left Roland Garros earlier in the week.

McEnroe stayed two sets before leaving for a TV commitment. They were not pretty sets and McEnroe, in sharp contrast to Moyá and Ljubicic before him, was not a particularly calm presence.

“Any time you work with somebody who has achieved the amount that John McEnroe has – especially on a surface that you want to do well on, and he’s one of the greats of all time – I think if you can afford to do that, why not? It can only help; it’s just more wisdom,” Raonic’s countryman Vasek Pospisil told Eh Game. “I don’t know what he can bring, but I think it makes complete sense and if I were in a position to do it, I’d do the exact same thing.”

The arrangement is supposed to be for the grass-court season leading up to Wimbledon – but likely not at Wimbledon, where McEnroe has multiple media commitments. Since Raonic is only playing the Queen’s Club tournament, which begins in a week, that’s a week of tournament play and two weeks of practice before the main event.

The Canadian emphasized this wasn’t just a “grass-court improvement” crash course, more part of an overall, ongoing effort to get better. “I was sort of just looking for another set of eyes to be a bit more efficient on grass … It’s about generally improving,” Raonic said.

McEnroe obviously was a master at that during his career. Whether he can teach it is a question that will be answered.

“John was one of the best ever at knowing when to come forward, how to move, how to cut the ball off, how to anticipate where the volley’s going to come,” McEnroe’s brother Patrick said Monday morning on TSN sports radio in Toronto.

Raonic’s forward progress, so to speak, stalled a little during the clay-court season. “I feel like I was a lot more efficient at the beginning of the year coming forward, and it’s something that I would like to put a lot of attention to and find a way,” he said.

Except … Raonic was doing all those things brilliantly at the beginning of the season, when he won the Australian Open tune-up event in Brisbane and reached the Australian Open semi-final. And he did them without McEnroe, with his “day-to-day” coach Piatti during the off-season and, later, Moyá.

Even the man himself agrees that Raonic was playing great tennis in January. “The best I’ve ever seen Milos play was this year at the Australian. I really felt he was playing the style of play in order to get into these top guys’ heads and potentially take it to that next level,” he told the New York Times.

From what both McEnroe brothers said this week, and reading between the lines, it’s not a reach to think that John hopes this gig leads to something more permanent. He has put out feelers about coaching for several years now and nothing has quite panned out – no doubt due in part to his television commitments. But his earlier attempts – with Boris Becker, Sergi Bruguera, as captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team – were nasty, brutish and short.

Here's what he said on Eurosport.

Patrick McEnroe said that his big brother could help Raonic with the mental side. “The ‘Hey, I’ve got a big-name player, one who’s been there, done that before as part of my entourage, part of my team’ part. It’s certainly paid off for some of these other top players.”

But wait – didn’t Raonic already have that in Moyá? The Spaniard is a former world No. 1 and a former Grand Slam champion. If anything has held Raonic back the last 12 months or so it has been his body, not his tennis.

McEnroe already has shaken things up a little in Raonicland. The Canadian had wanted to break the news of this addition to his coaching board of directors after his run at the French Open was done, wanting to keep the focus on the job at hand. But McEnroe decided to jump the gun and announce it himself on the European sports network he’s working for here.

“I thought that was a different way to announce it, because I don’t do social media; don’t Tweet, do Facebook, any of it,” he told the Times about his guitar-strumming scoop. “I actually prefer talking to people.”

He also told the New York Times he hoped he could sublimate his ego in the pursuit of glory for someone else. This wasn’t exactly a shining example of it.

The following day the two, along with Moyá, were out on Court 13 for a practice session that had a much brighter spotlight shining on it than Raonic would prefer on a non-match day. McEnroe, of course, sort of made a grand, solo entrance.

The upheaval in the ritual and routine likely had little to do with Raonic’s desultory loss to Ramos-Viñolas, ranked No. 55 in the world. But it was undoubtedly a taste of what’s to come as he hops aboard the Johnny Mac bus.

Raonic’s Davis Cup teammate Daniel Nestor, a veteran who’s seen it all, is of two minds about it.

"John can definitely help in different situations – especially coming onto the grass, and with Milos trying to win more at the net. It can only help his game," he added.

Only time will tell if McEnroe is just a passing fad, eventually to be consigned to the heap of discarded great ideas that includes the sleeve and the tappety-tapping on changeovers, among others. There has been a fair amount of this, and it makes you wonder if Raonic is looking for some sort of potion, secret ingredient, that will magically bring him where he wants to go in an instant.

Only time will tell if Raonic and McEnroe can find common ground to mesh two contrasting personalities. It’s a risk, because if it goes up in flames, there is a Wimbledon effort that could be affected.

In the meantime, the Canadian is going to get a whole lot more attention than he’s used to leading up to the next Grand Slam, just because of the company he’s keeping.