The Outsider: A Memoir

by Jimmy Connors

  He’s got a point. You get 20 seconds in between points. You also get three minutes of injury time; the ump was wrong to tell Mac to play on. Mac could have called for a trainer if he wanted to, but the ump didn’t seem to know the rules. When someone is the umpire in a match between Mac and me, he’s sitting on a ticking bomb; in fact, he’s sitting on two ticking bombs. It’s just a matter of time. It’s not if, but when.

  So I’m hanging around on my side, thinking, “Screw him, let him fight his own battle,” even though I know he’s right. I’ve fought enough on my own.

  “It doesn’t have to be continuous if I hurt myself!” Mac yells at the umpire.

  I’m ready to get back on the court, but at the same time I want to stay in my chair and hear the conversation. Hey, what the hell? What’s another 30 seconds when some good insults might be coming from Mac? But I’m disappointed this time, because Mac says nothing as he stalks back on the court.

  I’m ahead in the fifth and serving when Mac hits a backhand passing shot down the line. It’s out, but it’s called in. Here we go again. I’m so close and then this shit happens. I head for the umpire.

  “We’ve been playing over three hours and I know you must be very tired,” I say. “You’ve been doing a lot of running and everything. So just try and pay a little bit of attention.” Sarcasm—the weapon of champions.

  I’m playing well. The match is going my way and I can feel it. The extra work is paying off. I take the next points easily. Connors, 40-love, triple match point. Mac hits a backhand return into the net, and then it’s over. I was down two sets and I battled back to win, 2-6, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-2.

  This is what’s it’s all about. This is boxing at 90 feet. Throwing blows at each other until there’s only one man left standing.

  I’ve always said the next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing, because at least I’m playing tennis, I’m in the game. I could never ask for anything more than that.

  I’ve always gauged the mettle of someone’s character by the way they figure out how to continue a losing fight. I always knew which guys would stay in there and battle to the end, and I knew the guys who wouldn’t, and believe me there were more of those.

  Those three years of criticism—hearing that I was finished, that the game was passing me by, that other players were pushing me aside—gave me a gift: They made me understand that I needed tennis. I needed to go out and win. I needed to see sold-out stadiums—the proof that I was winning. I couldn’t let the critics beat me. Even if what they were saying was “Come on, Jimmy, we expect more of you.” And if some of the fans were actually trying to get rid of me, I needed that motivation as well. It all made me work harder. What they didn’t know was that it was the greatest compliment they could have given me. Those years were hard and frustrating, but I never once, even for a second, lost my love and passion for tennis.

  My grandmother, Two-Mom, always told me to keep a little mystery about myself in life, and that’s what I did during my career. As a result, there was always a lot of speculation from so-called experts and critics who thought they knew me. If they’re reading this, they know what I’m talking about.

  Well, now it’s my turn to tell you about myself. I’m just simply telling my story, and this is the way it is and I accept full responsibility for anything and everything I ever did, have done, will do in the future.

  Are we clear? OK, good. Now turn the page.

  2

  SHAPING AN ATTITUDE

  I’m eight years old and I’m watching a thug beat the shit out of my mother and my grandfather. There’s blood on the court. I can’t help them. I’m powerless. This day will transform me more than any other event in my life.

  My older brother, Johnny, and I are playing tennis on the public courts in Jones Park, in East St. Louis, Illinois, with Mom and my grandmother, whom we call Two-Mom because she’s like our second mom. There are five hard courts in a row and no one else is around. Two guys in their early twenties come over to hang out, and they get on the next court. They place a large transistor radio at the foot of the net post and turn it on full blast. The music is so loud we can’t hear Mom giving us instructions across the net. She asks them politely to turn the music down. They ignore her. They are screwing around, yelling and swearing. Mom asks them, again, to please turn it down or move over a court. They call her a bitch. We keep playing.

  My grandfather, who is chief of the parks police, comes over. Pops, as we call him, likes to watch us practice. He isn’t happy with the guys next to us, but neither is he looking for trouble. We stop and watch as Pop approaches them.

  “Boys, would you mind turning that down a little?”

  One punk starts to bend down; I think he’s going to turn off the music. Instead he throws himself at my grandfather, catches him off-guard, and tackles him to the concrete.

  The punk straddles Pop, grabs him by the shirt collar, and starts banging his head into the court.

  I don’t even notice my mom run over to help her father. When she goes to grab the young guy by the shoulder, he whirls around and punches her right in the mouth. Her teeth go flying. Two-Mom moves toward Johnny and me, but she can’t shield us from seeing our mother fall bloody onto the tennis court.

  Then the punks just run away. It happens so fast that it feels like a bad dream, but it’s all too real.

  Two-Mom shoos everyone into the car and drives us home. Mom’s friend, Booth, takes Mom into the bathroom and puts a towel on her face. At one point Mom pulls the towel away. What teeth she has left in her mouth are shoved through her lips and gums. Johnny screams, “Put it back! Put it back!” Booth gets mad and pushes Johnny out of the bathroom. Dad arrives and we take Mom and Pop to the hospital.

  In the emergency room, the doctors treat Pop’s head wound. Then it’s Mom’s turn. They pull out her last remaining teeth and she gets hundreds of stitches in her mouth.

  That night we try and make Mom comfortable on the couch. Then Dad, Johnny, and I go back to the courts and search for Mom’s teeth. We think maybe we should save them because they might be able to put them back or something. We just didn’t know.

  The next morning, Mom is resting on the couch when Johnny and I ask if she wants to go hit some tennis balls. We’re too young to realize how injured she is. Yet Mom gets up and goes out into the backyard and hits balls with us. Nothing would ever keep her from playing tennis with her boys. She won’t be able to pronounce any words for a month. She literally has to learn how to talk again. My mother will struggle with the injuries to her mouth until the day she dies, but she never complains or makes a big deal out of it. She never brings up the beating or uses it as an excuse.

  Johnny and I talked about that day for years after it happened. We’d ask each other: Who does that? How does that even happen? How do we let something like that pass? There’s no question it had a lasting psychological effect on both of us, but eventually we came to grips with it the best we could. I took my anger and used it in my tennis. Johnny dealt with it by channeling his rage in another way—by taking it to the streets.

  After watching my mom get battered, the need for revenge ran strong in me, and I found I could use that emotion to achieve it. If she could hit balls the very next day after getting beat up, then I could play for one hour or five hours, no matter how bad my body ached. There’s a line that Patrick Swayze has in the movie Road House. After he gets stabbed, the doctor, played by Kelly Lynch, asks Swayze if he enjoys pain, and he says, “Pain don’t hurt.” I understood that.

  I could always find something to drive me, and most of the time it was those feelings of anger and rage that bubbled up from the past. My mother taught me how to harness those emotions. She called them Tiger Juices.

  “Get those Tiger Juices flowing, Jimmy,” she’d say to me.

  Al Lynch “Pop” Thompson had been a lifeguard before he became chief of the parks police, and he was pretty famous around East St. Louis. There are still people in the area who tal
k about him from his police days, when he would ride around town on a huge white Harley. People knew him to be a fair man, and he wouldn’t hesitate to help you if you needed it. Pop wasn’t big, but he was wiry and guys knew not to mess with him, because in his younger days Pop had been a Golden Gloves middleweight boxer. He had his own style and attitude, and he built up a reputation good enough to be able to get in the ring with Joe Louis. Exhibition or not, it was still a great honor to fight the Champ.

  In 1975, when I played Rod Laver in a Challenge Match at Caesars Palace, in Las Vegas, I flew Pop out to watch. This was the first time Pop was ever on an airplane. (He used to work for the railroad, so he always took the train.) I knew from my many visits to Caesars Palace that Joe Louis was a member of the “Caesars family.” He had value as a sports personality and people loved being around him, so Caesars Palace made him an official greeter. It was good for business. He would socialize with the guests, and they, in turn, would spend more time in the casinos.

  After the match, Pop accompanied me to the post-match festivities. Try to imagine how proud I was when I saw Joe Louis at the cocktail party, knowing that Pop had been in the ring with him. I took Pop up to say hello to him.

  “Mr. Louis, this is my grandfather, Al Lynch. He trained me, and, at one time, he boxed with you.”

  Mr. Louis looked at Pop and said, “And I knocked you out, right?”

  Pop grinned, “Yeah, but you knocked everybody out.”

  Years later, my grandmother, Bertha, Two-Mom, told me that the first moment she hit a tennis ball, she fell in love with the sport. She couldn’t afford lessons, but because she was a natural athlete, she was able to teach herself how to play, figuring out on her own how to improve her strokes and her footwork. Soon Two-Mom became an established player in East St. Louis and the surrounding areas. She and Pop then made a deal: He would teach her how to swim and she would teach him how to play tennis. They went on to win several local mixed-doubles titles, and by the late thirties and early forties Two-Mom was one of the top-ranked women in the St. Louis district. She had a calm temperament and, like a human backboard, she returned everything.

  Two-Mom gave my mom, Gloria, her game. When my mom was a teenager, she played the Missouri Valley circuit and won district and municipal titles indoors and out. She and Two-Mom would often play doubles. In 1939, they played each other in the semifinals of the Heart of America invitational tournament, in Kansas City. Mom was 15 years old and lost 6-0, 6-0 to Two-Mom—her mother. Pretty tough lesson to learn, right?

  That was the thing about growing up with these two women who loved tennis. There was no sentimentality involved. It was all about the game.

  When I was old enough to play her, Mom didn’t take it easy on me, either—she’d hit that ball right down my throat.

  “See,” she’d say. “If your own mother can do that, imagine what others will do to you.”

  In 1940, at 16, Mom was the youngest player in the women’s Western Open tournament, in Indianapolis. By the time she was 19, she had competed twice in the US National Championships, at Forest Hills. She moved to Los Angeles, where she lived with her best friend, Pauline Betz, the great champion of her time, and played on the professional circuit. When Mom wasn’t playing, she was teaching tennis to kids and coaching Hollywood celebrities like Mickey Rooney, Gilbert Roland, and Errol Flynn.

  For Pop, however, and the majority of fathers in the forties, a daughter was not meant to travel all around the country playing tennis. She was supposed to get married and start a family. When he told her it was time to come home, Mom, an obedient Midwest girl with a Catholic upbringing, did just that.

  Back in East St. Louis, Mom met my dad, “Big Jim” Connors, whose father, John T. Connors, was the mayor of East St. Louis. My dad had gone to Notre Dame and then served as a US Air Force second lieutenant in the Second World War, working as a bomber instructor. When he didn’t return to finish his education, his father arranged for him to manage the tollbooths on the Veterans Bridge, which crossed the Mississippi River between St. Louis, Missouri, and East St. Louis, Illinois. He kept that job until the day he died, in January 1977.

  After the war, Dad just wanted to have fun. He was a snappy dresser, good-looking, well built, cultured, and an all-around class act. When he proposed to Mom, she said yes immediately. The first years of their marriage were good, with a lot of friends in the area and a great social life. When my brother, Johnny, was born, in April 1951, Mom understood it was time to stay home and devote herself to the new baby, but Dad didn’t see any reason to change his routine much. He liked hanging out with his friends; it was his life and he was going to live it the way he wanted.

  I wasn’t born to play tennis. In fact, I wasn’t supposed to be born at all. (All right, I know what some of you are thinking; maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t made it. Too bad.) After my mother had Johnny, she had a tubal pregnancy and a series of miscarriages and was told she couldn’t—and shouldn’t—get pregnant again. But she did and I was born, fragile and small. Mom said I was a little dishrag.

  When Mom was pregnant with me, the family moved into a newly built house on 68th Street. A tall chain-link fence enclosed the backyard, and the whole yard was littered with debris from an ongoing construction project nearby. Mom convinced some of the workers to clean out and level the backyard for her. Then she got them to spread out a layer of concrete gravel. Two-Mom helped Mom paint white lines on the court, and they built a backboard out of two pieces of plywood. We even had a pile of gravel left over to patch up the court after it rained or after we’d used it as a bike track. People in East St. Louis didn’t have tennis courts in their backyards, not even one that was makeshift, rough, uneven . . . and perfect.

  I first picked up a racquet when I was three and a half. They didn’t have junior racquets back then, so Pop cut down a couple racquets for Johnny and me. Johnny could just about wrap his hand around his racquet grip, but it was more difficult for me. My racquet was still too heavy, so I picked it up with both hands. Who knew that this would have such an impact on the game of tennis?

  As I got a little older and a little stronger, Mom said, “Maybe we should take that hand off the racquet?” But that didn’t work out, and she figured I’d give it up in a few years anyway. Back then, hardly anybody used a double-handed backhand. Sure, Pancho Segura, the great Ecuadorean tennis champion, had a two-handed forehand, but backhand? When I first started playing, people not only picked apart my style of tennis—“You can’t play like that,” they said—but they also considered me too small to ever make it. Really?

  The two-handed backhand has some obvious downsides: You have to move quicker to get to the ball, because you don’t have as much reach, and your footwork has to be more precise to get in position to use it correctly. The upside is once you get to the ball, you have the extra hand for power and direction. Unwilling to conform to other people’s thinking, I stayed with what I thought could work. When Chris Evert and I came on the scene, the game of tennis changed. We both had two-handed backhands and we were winning everything. The two-handed backhand became the fashion and almost everyone started copying us. And players are still using it today.

  I was the only lefty on either side of my family. When I was five years old, my mom wanted to make sure I was naturally left-handed, because I could play baseball and hit a golf ball right-handed.

  “Let’s try something new,” she said one day. “Put your left hand behind your back and try and play right-handed.”

  I did as I was told, but my left hand immediately shot out without my even thinking about it and grabbed the racquet. Mom looked at me for a moment.

  “OK. I guess that’s the way it’s going to be,” she said.

  In the beginning, Mom and Two-Mom would bounce balls to me and I’d try and hit them back. It was always casual and easy, never forced down my throat. It was good to have that court in the backyard, but make no mistake, it was there for a reason—so my mom could teach lesso
ns for five bucks an hour during the summer and supplement the family income. If I didn’t want to play, I didn’t have to. If I wanted to ride my bike or play baseball, it was no big deal. Mom would say, “Be home by five o’clock.” When I came home she’d ask if I wanted to hit a few balls. If I did, she’d put dinner on the back burner. If I didn’t, we’d sit down to eat. No pressure.

  Of course, back then nothing was ever a big deal. Our every moment wasn’t scheduled like it is with kids today. My Mom, Two-Mom, and Pop had a way of educating me so that I didn’t even realize it was happening. I watched them working hard and taking care of business. I could see, without having them say anything, that you did your job before you did anything else, and sometimes it took sacrifices, but in the end your hard work earned you rewards.

  We weren’t looked after every second of the day; as children we were allowed to make mistakes and take responsibility for ourselves under the guidance of our parents and grandparents. If we wanted to learn to ice-skate, well, there’s the ice. Go skate. If we wanted to shoot BB guns, OK. Pop set up a rifle range in his backyard. Go shoot BB guns. I could play tennis and then grab my dog, Pepper, my miniature schnauzer, to go horse around with my friends. I wasn’t a kid that needed to be entertained all the time. I liked riding my bike to my grandparents’ house, which was about 10 minutes away, having some ice cream, and hanging with Pepper. Back then we had only four channels on TV, and one of the highlights was Friday night at the movies. The movie went on at eight o’clock, and instead of going out, I would stay home, pop some popcorn, lay on the floor with Pepper, and that was my evening.

  But in those early years, it wasn’t really tennis that I took to; it was the time spent with Mom and Two-Mom. Oh, yes, I can hear all the snide comments about my being a mama’s boy, but you know what you can do with that. I learned everything from them and owe all I’ve ever had in my life to their mutual guidance.