He was as good as McEnroe, but it didn't help beat mental illness, drug use.(Originated from Knight-Ridder Newspapers)

HIALEAH, Fla. _ Howard Schoenfield can come and go as he pleases, but what he likes to do most is barricade himself in his room, close the windows and keep the heat company. He eats in here. He drinks in here. He believes he will die in here. That thought bothers him less and less as time passes.

Schoenfield lives in what used to be a bed and breakfast in Hialeah. Now it is a halfway house offering supervised living for adults with mental problems. The building has a bright coat of orange paint and an equally optimistic name: Happy Home.

Doctors have diagnosed Schoenfield as a type one paranoid schizophrenic. ``The most severe kind,'' says Happy Home manager Marco Guim. ``He hears voices. He's delusional. He's paranoid.''

He's standing in his room now, giving a brief tour. Schoenfield's 13-inch television is near the aluminum wardrobe where a handful of shirts hang. The walls are white and barren. It smells like bleach here.

``This is my home,'' Schoenfield says, eyeing his belongings with pride.

Schoenfield is standing next to his unmade bed. Behind him, leaning in the corner, is evidence of the life Schoenfield once lived, the life that might have made him rich and famous _ if it hadn't led him into a place like this.

It is a tennis racket.

Howard Schoenfield's story is one of enormous talent and an equally enormous descent. It is a story of money and drugs and mental illness and death. It is a story of a teen-ager living in a doctor's home in Beverly Hills, Calif., and a story of a 37-year-old man with a beard to his belly, living in a bleach-smelling room in a Hialeah halfway house.

And it is a story of tennis.

Schoenfield was one of …