The Outsider: A Memoir

by Jimmy Connors

  Seattle, Friday, September 16, 1994. It’s eight o’clock at night and I’m with my family in my hotel room. I get a knock on the door and it’s Vitas. He wants a quick word.

  “Jimmy, would you mind if I take off.”

  “Where you going?”

  “I’m going to fly back to New York because I’ve got a charity event on Saturday. I’ll fly overnight, stop off and see my mom and change my clothes, then go out to Long Island to do the event.”

  I’d played doubles with Vitas on Wednesday. He was scheduled to play golf with the sponsors the next day, but he had strained his back during his match with me, and it was still bothering him. “I’ll be OK to knock a few balls around, Jimmy,” he had told me. “I just can’t manage a full match. Or 18 holes.” That was fine by me. I knew Vitas would never try and get out of his obligations. If he said his back was causing him problems, then it was. There was nobody better at taking care of business than Vitas.

  “Listen, son, it’s too late to head east now. You’ll be exhausted. Why don’t you hang here a bit? I could use your help, and then you can leave early tomorrow after a good night’s sleep.”

  That’s what I wish I’d said. If I had, maybe my friend would still be alive today.

  21

  A FRIEND REMEMBERED

  Vitas Gerulaitis was 17 and I was 19 when we first met, after he joined the Riordan circuit.

  We hung out a lot together through the ’70s and ’80s. When I won the US Open in 1978, I went out for a celebration dinner at Maxwell’s Plum, in Manhattan. Vitas drove up and parked right in front of the restaurant, and let me tell you, he was hard to miss: Vitas was the only guy around tennis—or around most places—who drove a yellow Rolls-Royce. He got out of the car with two cute young girls who couldn’t have been a day over 18, waltzed in, and sat down to congratulate me. He was the only one who did that. He was all class.

  What the public saw was the real Vitas: the dazzling smile, the free-spirited guitar-playing rocker, the over-the-top playboy lifestyle. Yet he was also one of the most decent guys I’ve ever known, and everyone liked him.

  Although he had his own crowd that included Borg and Mac, Vitas and I were close, and it was a no-bullshit friendship. It was an open secret that Vitas had a big problem with cocaine, and it led to his retirement from the game at the end of 1985. Without the discipline of tennis to hold him in check, Vitas’s habit intensified dramatically. It’s the reason I asked him in 1989 to travel with me to Europe for five months. I might not have been his closest buddy, but you don’t abandon people when the going gets tough. As much as I hated drugs, we were buddies throughout the good, the bad, and the ugly of it all.

  While we were in Europe, we were basically together from the time we woke up in the morning to the time we went to bed at night. He was rarely out of my sight. I wanted to do everything I could to help him kick the drugs and get back to tennis. We hit balls together during the day, and he was slowly getting back in shape. He took a lot of criticism from the press about his weight during this time, and they ran cruel stories about how he wasn’t in decent enough shape to practice with me. That’s why he came up with the idea of coming out on crutches when we played at Roland Garros, as a response to everyone who saw us as long past our prime.

  Being together in Europe helped both of us, even though I knew how tough it was for him. He was an addict, but he battled it. He was never a quitter. That’s another reason I liked him so much.

  I used to say, “Vitas, I can’t babysit you for 24 hours. We’re friends and I’m trusting you.” It worked, because during those months he was clean, to the best of my knowledge, and it looked like he was getting back on track.

  Back in the States, it was a different story.

  It’s the early 1990s and I’m waiting for Vitas to come to Santa Barbara to join me at a Pebble Beach golf tournament when my phone rings.

  “Vitas, where are you?”

  “Oh, I just landed in LA.”

  “How you getting up to Santa Barbara?” I ask. “You can take a plane or drive or I’ll come down and get you, whatever.”

  “Wait, wait a minute,” Vitas tells me, and then I can hear him asking someone for directions to Santa Barbara.

  “Pal, you’re in Dallas, Texas.”

  I start laughing. “Vitas,” I say, “you’re a long way from Santa Barbara, son.”

  “Oh, my God,” he says. “It’s all right. I’ll just hop a plane and come on in.”

  Even though it was funny, I was afraid to ask if he was wasted.

  It turned out that he was back in deep. Most of the “hangers-on” had deserted him in 1992, and when things started to spiral out of control, I was one of his friends who got the call.

  Vitas had been on a coke binge while staying in a condominium at Turnberry Isle, in Miami. Donny Soffer (who owned Turnberry), Vitas’s friend Stanley Ross, and Janet Jones Gretzky (Wayne’s wife) had called in an intervention doctor to try and get Vitas into rehab before he did some real damage to himself. Vitas had once been engaged to Janet, and they were still good friends. She had given him an ultimatum: “Our friendship or the coke.”

  Patti and I were just coming off a boat from the Bahamas when we got the call.

  “Jimmy, we need help with Vitas.”

  Patti and I went to the hotel suite where Donny, Janet, Stanley, and the rehab doctor were waiting.

  “Where is he?” I asked

  “He’s over in his apartment in Tower 2.”

  When he opened the door a crack, I could see that his curtains were closed and the lights were off. Vitas looked like he’d been run over by a tractor-trailer.

  “Hey, Jimmy.”

  “Let me in,” I said as I pushed my way into the apartment.

  The place was a mess. He had Styrofoam boxes of takeout food that looked like they’d been rotting in there for days. Janet, Stanley, Donny, and the rehab doc wandered in right behind us, and Vitas became a little defensive.

  “Well, to what do I owe this honor?”

  “Listen,” I said, “we’re all here, because we love you. And I don’t want to pick up the paper one day and find your name in the obituaries. So sit down and listen.”

  Vitas heard everyone out about how concerned they were and after a couple of hours he just said, “OK. I’m ready to go.” All of us admired how brave he was and what it took for him to stand up in that moment and recognize that it was time to get help. He had a strong support system and he understood that taking that first step, hard as it was, could save his life.

  Janet called Wayne and told him she was going to go with Vitas to the rehab facility, and he said, “You go down there, Janet, and take care of him.”

  Vitas stayed in rehab for six months, and while he was there, both of my kids wrote him letters and cards every week. He always wrote them back and thanked them for their encouragement, telling them how he was doing and how much he missed seeing them.

  Vitas came out of rehab—clean, sober, and looking good—and right into the 1993 Champions Tour. Vitas and Borg had been my first two phone calls when the Champions Tour began to take shape. I knew how important they would be to making the tour successful, and they were.

  For the two years that he played on the Champions Tour, Vitas was clear-eyed, and back to his old charismatic self. Golf—a game he loved playing and excelled at—became his new addiction. He was also pursuing a broadcast career that could easily have launched him as one of the country’s top TV tennis commentators. He was a natural. For the first time in many years, Vitas Gerulaitis’s future looked very bright.

  Then that night in Seattle in 1994, I let him go back to New York.

  Vitas did just as he said he would after leaving the Champions Tour cocktail party. He flew overnight to New York, arrived home early the next day, dumped his bags, packed another one, said “hi” to his mom, got in his car, and drove to Southampton, Long Island, to attend a charity event. Then, because he was exhausted, he went back to the home of
his friend Marty Raines, where he was staying. He told Marty that he was too tired to go out to dinner and needed to take a nap.

  “I think I’m just going to stay in,” he said. “I’m going to watch some football and take it easy.” He asked Marty if he wouldn’t mind sending over a sandwich to the pool house where he was resting.

  The next day he was supposed to participate in the charity event. He never showed up.

  I’ve asked myself too many times to count, “What would have happened if I had just said, ‘No, Vitas, I want you to stay in Seattle until Saturday. I need you to play a few holes with the sponsors. You’re the only one I can count on.”

  I was in the finals of the Champions Tour on Sunday, and afterward Patti and I took Aubree and Brett to a nearby theme park. When we returned to the stadium to pick up my tennis bag, a young woman approached.

  “Jimmy, I need to talk to you,” she said.

  Thinking it had something to do with the tour, I told Patti to take the kids and go on back to the hotel.

  “What’s going on?” I asked the young woman.

  “Look, Vitas is dead.”

  “What?” I said, refusing to believe what I’d just heard. I asked her to repeat it.

  “He’s dead, Jimmy,” I couldn’t move. I just stared into space, trying to comprehend the news.

  “Come on . . . ,” I said.

  She just nodded her head.

  “Was it drugs?” I asked.

  It wasn’t. What none of us knew at the time was that a pool mechanic had failed to install an extra $1.44 worth of plastic exhaust pipe on the swimming pool’s new heater. Vitas had died from breathing carbon-monoxide fumes.

  I felt like I was in a bad movie. I leaned against the wall, slid down to the ground in disbelief. We’d been together less than 48 hours ago. It was like someone had just kicked me in the nuts.

  At one time I might have been expecting a call like that about Vitas, but not now. He had really beat it. He fought through everything to get clean from the drugs. If you put it in tennis terms, Vitas had come from two sets down and a break in the third to make his way back.

  My friend Vitas was only 40 years old when he died. He was very close to his mom and his sister, he was a good son and brother and always looked after his family. Patti and I went to his funeral, at St. Dominic Church, in Oyster Bay, Long Island, and joined 500 other people—including Mac, Borg, Billie Jean King, Tony Trabert, Jack Kramer, Bill Talbert, Fred Stolle, and Mary Carillo—to mourn our friend. Out of respect for Vitas, the governor closed the Long Island Expressway when they took his casket from the church to the cemetery.

  Vitas brought a lot to tennis—not just his athletic style of play but also his rock-star sex appeal, which added a new dimension to the tour. He was wild and flamboyant but also a great champion, winning the Australian Open in 1977 and reaching the finals of the French Open and the US Open. He was a Davis Cup participant and winner of 25 Grand Prix tournaments. Is any of that recognized by the tennis establishment? No. Vitas had a Hall of Fame career, but apparently he didn’t have a Hall of Virtue career, but who does? It shouldn’t be the case but his outstanding record and major contribution to the sport have, sadly, been overshadowed by his issues off the court.

  I miss him still.

  22

  OPEN HEART

  In 1997, the committee of the Tennis Hall of Fame, in Newport, Rhode Island, approached me about becoming an inductee. I turned them down.

  “I appreciate the offer, but the thing is, I’m not done playing yet.”

  And I wasn’t. I was still active on the Champions Tour, and I’d agreed to sign up for Team Tennis with Kansas City for the next year. Retirement was a long way off.

  The committee kept after me for several months. I appreciated their gesture—becoming a Hall of Famer was a huge honor—but I didn’t seek the accolade, and I’m not the kind of guy who wants to stand around and relive my past glories. I was either out there to play tennis, because I had something left to give, or I was finished. However, the more I thought about it the more I realized that accepting my place in the Tennis Hall of Fame would give me a chance to publicly recognize all those people who had made my career possible.

  So in 1998 I accepted the committee’s invitation. I wrote my speech on a flight from Kansas City to Newport on Saturday, July 11, 1998. Everything I said then continues to be true to this day, and parts of it are worth repeating now:

  As everyone probably knows, because it has been written about far more than I would like, I was quite a loner over the course of my career. But standing here alone is not right. If I could, I would put some seats to my left and to my right. In the seats on my left, I would put my mother and my grandmother. They taught me the game, allowed me to play, and gave me the opportunity to reach for my dreams.

  My grandmother was around for all the hard work of the first 15 years, but then left us when I turned pro at 19, in 1972. I know she’s looking down, and I hope I’ve made her proud. Her seat is next to me. My mother was left to take over the task of furthering my career. I don’t know if she always liked her inheritance, but she was able to wear three hats over the course of my life—as a coach, as my mother, and as my friend. For her to be able to balance all that, and still, after almost 46 years, for us to be able to sit down and talk to each other, is quite something.

  She took a lot of criticism over the years for how she handled me, but it never really bothered her. She understood what she wanted to do with my career and for that, and for everything she has done for me in my life, there can never be enough thanks. You have all my love. Thank you. Have a seat.

  To my right, I want to put my immediate family—my son, Brett, my daughter, Aubree, and my wife, Patti. My kids do not play tennis. By their choice, and perhaps a bit by my design, they have their own ideals and goals. They have grown up to be the kind of kids that make me, as a father, so proud.

  My wife, Patti, well, I don’t think she knew 20 years ago what she was getting into. It was said and written over and over that Patti Connors was a saint to put up with Jimmy Connors, and that is probably the only darn thing the press got right in all that time.

  The way I played tennis was very selfish. I had one thing on my mind, and that was to try to be the best. For those 20 years, Patti went along and made it possible for me to do so. The way she handled everything when I was gone from the family, taking care of both my children, taking care of the house, and then, after doing all that, finding time to be my wife, is truly amazing.

  In 2005, I gave an interview to the Sunday Times, in the UK, and was accurately described as having “severed all ties” with the sport. The reporter, Paul Kimmage, asked why I’d chosen self-imposed exile, and I told him, “For the last five or six years, the most important thing in my life has been my family. It was nothing against tennis; tennis was my love and passion, but after thirty-odd years of it, I needed a break.”

  That was all true, but not the whole truth.

  I was at home in August 1998, and Patti and the kids and I were having dinner when Patti said, “Jimmy, I think I need to go to the hospital and get an EKG, because my heart is really racing.”

  Patti, Aubree, and I went to the ER, where they saw that Patti’s resting heart rate was 120 and diagnosed her as having atrial fibrillation. They strapped her into a machine that was supposed to put her heartbeat into a regular sinus rhythm. We were there until 3 a.m., when her heartbeat came back down to normal

  In addition, Patti had been losing weight for some time and having episodes of dizziness and nausea. It took a few weeks of anxiety and uncertainty before they identified the source of her problems, and in October she was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease. They found nine good-size nodules on her thyroid. A week before she was to have surgery, we got our little puppy Tobey. Patti underwent the operation to have her thyroid removed, and luckily none of the nodules were cancerous. But she’ll remain on daily medication for the rest of her life.

  The
n, in January 1999, I got a call from Mom’s doctor, and he told me that she needed open-heart surgery.

  “Listen, before you do anything, I need to call some doctor friends of mine to discuss this.”

  “Jimmy, your mother won’t make it until tomorrow night. She needs a triple bypass and it has to happen in the morning.”

  I started to panic. “But I have to make those calls. I’ve got to speak to someone.”

  “Jimmy, you have to understand. Any delay at all and your mother will not live to see the end of tomorrow. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  I did.

  Patti was in LA for the day and I called her.

  “I have to go back to Belleville, Mom’s got to have heart surgery tomorrow morning,” I told her.

  “Well,” said Patti, “you’re not going without me.” I wouldn’t have expected anything less from her.

  Patti raced home from LA to Santa Barbara and we made it just in time to see Mom before they put her under. That would have been impossible if I hadn’t owned a private jet, a Westwind, purchased when I established the Champions Tour. I would have been unable to fulfill my obligations to the sponsors and events without it. But the jet was never more important than on that day in January.

  Mom looked so small and frail when they wheeled her into the operating room. It broke my heart. Then, when I saw her in the recovery room, it was as though she had collapsed in on herself, like all her vitality had escaped with the surgeon’s first incision. Worse, she was so cold. Patti rubbed my mother’s arm as she slowly came to. “Grammy, it’s me, Patti. Can you hear my voice? Are you in pain?” I had to leave the room.

  For the next four months, I slept on the couch next to my mother’s bed in Belleville. She was too weak to feed herself without my help. She’d given me everything. Now it was my turn to be there for her, to do what I could to build up her strength, to do whatever it took for her to recover.

  In time, we tried to get Mom to move to California, but she didn’t want to. We even rented a house for her next door to ours, but still she refused. For her, home was home. She had her friends and her students and it was familiar and safe.