The Outsider: A Memoir

by Jimmy Connors

  I called Johnny. “You’d better come over right away, because Mom is failing quickly.” I then called Patti and told her to come to Belleville.

  Johnny arrived. We sat on either side of Mom’s bed and held her hands, just the way we had done with Dad. She had a fixed gaze almost like she was staring at a light.

  My buddy Lelly showed up and remembered that Mom had said she wanted to have the priest there with her. At 12:30 a.m., Lelly pounded on Monsignor McKevely’s door, woke him up, and brought him back to Mom.

  After Monsignor McKevely administered the last rites, Mom took her final breath and died peacefully.

  Mom was gone, but I knew that, wherever she was, she was going to be working on her backhand and enjoying a martini with Dad, Two-Mom, Pop, and my puppies.

  After Mom passed, I wanted to bring her back with us to California to be near the family. I knew she would have left me instructions on how she wanted her funeral service conducted, and I had a good idea where I would find it.

  Patti and I were leafing through her Bible, maybe her most precious possession. Mom used to put letters in there, things that mattered to her, and I thought maybe she would have left one for me. We read through all of her treasured notes and checked the backs of photographs and prayer cards, looking for a message, but there was nothing there.

  I go through the pages one more time. Something catches my eye, a scribbled message in the margins of a page, Mom’s handwriting.

  “Jimbo, when the time comes, make sure I am buried next to your dad.”

  Next to it is a small slip of paper that we missed the first time around. I open the folded note, read it, and hand it to Patti. She studies Mom’s words for a moment, then shows it to me.

  “Stay with Patti, Jimbo,” it reads. “She genuinely loves you.”

  23

  MY VISIT TO THE BIG HOUSE

  After Mom’s passing, my life was relatively quiet. I wasn’t hanging around the game much, and I’d finished coaching Andy Roddick. I was staying at home, laying low and playing golf with my buddies.

  In November of 2008, Jerry, one of my golfing friends and a local commentator for the University of California at Santa Barbara college basketball team, invited Brett and me to the UCSB Thunderdome to watch the game with top-ranked North Carolina. Brett, who was living in LA at the time, got caught in the evening rush-hour traffic after a late start, and it took him a good four hours to get to the house. Running late, we decided to take a taxi to the game to avoid the hassle of parking.

  At the Thunderdome, we went to pick up our tickets. There was a guy in line behind us who didn’t look happy to see me. Maybe he lost some wagers on me in the past. All I know is that suddenly he bumps me and gets right in my face.

  “Excuse me,” I say and turn back around and don’t think anything else about it. As Brett and I are walking toward the entrance, the guy follows and bumps me again. I turn around.

  “What the hell?”

  “You’re a fucking loser,” the guy tells me.

  “I’m not denying that, but that’s not what your wife said when I was on top of her,” I fire back. I know, I know, lay off the wives, but not bad under the circumstances, huh?

  Of course, one thing leads to another and finally Brett, who stands 6'4" and weighs about 210 pounds, has had enough and steps in to confront the guy.

  “C’mon, Brett, let’s just go watch the game,” I tell him.

  The guy’s first mistake is that he’s tubby. The second is that he reaches out and shoves me in the chest. You know enough about me at this point to know that I don’t go looking for trouble, but sometimes it just finds me. Pop always told me, “Don’t touch ’em first,” so I figure the guy is fair game. I grab him by the throat to keep him off of me. (How are those anger-management classes working out for you, Jimmy?) The guy is making those “ack-ack” sounds and spitting all over me. I let go, push him away, and Brett and I head over to the stadium entrance.

  I thought the whole incident was over until we start to hand over our tickets at the front door. That’s when five UCSB campus cops approach me. Apparently, after I walked away from the guy, he went running to the campus cops and told them I had assaulted him.

  “I’m sorry, you can’t go into the game. You’ll have to leave now,” says the largest of the cops.

  “Why?” I ask. “I’ve got a ticket.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You have to leave the campus.”

  “Why?” I ask again, still not getting it. “You mean it’s fine for the other guy to go in but I can’t? Sorry, but I can’t leave. I came here in a cab.”

  “You still have to leave the campus immediately,” he insists. OK, now the guy is just showing off for his buddies.

  I can’t seem to make him understand that leaving would be no problem if I had a car. I have no way to leave unless they want me to hoof it off that large campus with my bum hip.

  After the fourth time he asks me to get off the campus, I have only one answer.

  “Look, I have no way to get home right now unless you want to take me, so fuck it, just arrest me.” And he did! All 320 brave pounds of him and his four friends. I didn’t know I could still command such an audience.

  They put me in handcuffs.

  “Dad,” asks Brett, “what should I do?”

  “Enjoy your evening, son. I’ll see you later.”

  At some point, the campus cops have called the Santa Barbara County Sheriff, and they arrive, search me, and put me in the squad car, taking me to the Santa Barbara County Jail, where I’m fingerprinted and mug-shot (quite a good photo, by the way, better than Nick Nolte’s, that’s for sure). Then it’s off to my single cell for the night. All I need is a harmonica. Although the UCSB campus cops are not my favorite, the Santa Barbara County Sheriffs are good guys and take it easy on me.

  After an hour in my cell, I’m taken to make my one phone call. I have to ask one of the guys for a quarter to drop in the box.

  At home, the phone rings and Patti sees SANTA BARBARA SHERIFF on the caller ID.

  She picks up the phone, laughing, and doesn’t even bother to say hello.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says. “It’s about time you called.” I start to explain the situation to her, but she cuts me off. “I already heard. Brett called me.”

  “Will you pick me up?” I ask.

  After Brett’s call, she had phoned the jail and asked what the charge was.

  “Failure to leave campus,” they said.

  Patti couldn’t help herself: “Wow, you guys have got to be joking. If that’s all we’ve got to worry about in this county, I feel really safe.”

  I was out in a couple of hours, but not before my arrest had hit the news wires and gone viral. “Tennis Great Jimmy Connors Arrested.” Nice.

  When Patti picked me up, she was still laughing.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, “they don’t feed you too well in the big house.”

  We stopped at In-N-Out Burger and then, on our way home, we drove by our local restaurant and saw some of my friends I was supposed to have met at the game. We stopped and had a few drinks.

  Let me tell you, getting arrested is instant celebrity. By the next morning, the media was banging on my door and blowing up my phone. I had friends calling me from all over the world, wanting to know what had happened. Jeez, if I’d known all it took to get famous was getting arrested, I might not have wasted my time winning 109 titles.

  The case never went to court. The guy didn’t press charges (but he got to see the game), and the whole thing ended up being a big waste of time. But for a moment I thought I might get to be on the Investigation Discovery channel. It never happened, just like my singing career.

  24

  PASSION PLAY

  Writing this book almost pisses me off, because I have to go back and remember how I spent my life doing something that I genuinely loved, and now it’s over. But I will tell you this: The desire to p
lay and compete has NEVER left me, but when your body says stop, what can you do? You stop. If I could have my 25-year-old body with my 60-year-old mind, would I still want to play again?

  Hell, yes!

  In fact, if my body would cooperate, I’d be out on the court competing right now. But that’s just not the way life worked out for me.

  As I sit here today, almost back to normal after my third hip replacement, I’m thinking that maybe tennis should have come with the warning label MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH. But if it had, would I have listened? Would I have done something else?

  Hell, no!

  I make no apologies for the way I played tennis. I wasn’t out there to win a popularity contest—I was out there to win—and entertain at the same time. The thing is, I was good at being a bad boy, a real one. Not like some of the pretend bad boys who said sorry after every little incident. Face up to it or don’t do it. I always accepted the fines, suspensions, and screaming headlines that followed my spontaneous assholery. That is a word, right? Well, it is now.

  Did I step over the line a few times? Well, yeah, but that just made my job more exciting. I was letting the 25,000 people in the stands and millions more watching on TV into my office, to see, feel, and be touched by the pressures I experienced. (How many CEOs of big companies would allow that to happen? Bill Gates? Anyone? Raise your hand.) Did I make it harder on myself? Yeah, I could be a prick. I had to be one. Because when I was good, I was merely good, but when I was bad, I was great.

  My grandmother Two-Mom understood the reality. She said to me, “You can get away with almost anything if you win.” No one was going to fault a winner. I listened to Two-Mom, only I ignored the “almost.” I honestly don’t believe the guys today could carry the same load, whereas for me it was all part of the game; I craved the responsibility, loved it, and fed off it.

  But I have to say that if I had come along on my own, it would have been a tough sell. I stood out and I was good, but my co-stars were great. With the Open Era, tennis entered a new world, one that was already crammed with professional sports—football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer—all vying for attention. To survive, tennis had to drag itself out of its comfortable little corner. It needed a facelift. The guys of my generation provided it. Suddenly there we were, a group of rebellious bandits, shooting from the hip—and the lip—with different styles, personalities, and attitudes. We were our parents’ children, not willing to settle for the life we had been given. We were ready to break out, make some noise, and pay the price—good and bad. And we knew exactly what we were doing. None of it happened by accident. We recognized the show we had to provide, and we understood why we were doing it. Fighting, always fighting—for more than a column inch of coverage, for recognition, and, sure, for money.

  What was the result? We moved tennis from those gated country clubs to the streets. We sparked the revolution that opened the doors to the people who loved sports, drank beer, ate hot dogs, and wanted to be a part of the spectacle—to see it, smell it, and, most important, let their feelings be known loud and clear. Back then, you could reach out and touch the players; that’s how close the stands were. I didn’t need to try hard to be heard, because they caught it all.

  I appealed to a different crowd. The old-school fans hated what I was doing, of course; they were horrified by what they saw as a crude upstart trampling their precious traditions. But the new breed of fan, those who before had never considered watching a tennis match, suddenly had someone they could relate to. They saw themselves in what we were doing and liked what they saw.

  If it weren’t for the fans, we’d have played anyway, but I have to tell you, the fans made every broken bone, every knee operation, every wrist operation, every torn muscle, every aching back, and all three hip operations worth it. The fans won me more matches than I won myself. I fed off their energy, and I never for a moment took them for granted. I knew who I was playing for, and what I miss most is the appreciation and applause from the fans. It was my healthiest addiction.

  How did the media react? Well, they sure wrote about me enough, so I must have been doing something right. Like me or not, I was good copy. They weren’t afraid to hook onto me to further their careers. I even let one of them into my house. After that, the media and I had trust issues. They weren’t all bad. There were some that I wouldn’t mind sitting down with today for a beer.

  The more the media criticized, the more I gave them to write about. They motivated me—that’s the thing they never got—even though I knew the ongoing battle with the press was one I was ultimately going to lose. You can’t stay at the top forever, and when you slip, they will always be there to have the last word.

  I’d say there are plenty of players out there who have regrets over not achieving everything they wanted to in their career. I’m not one of them. I’m one of those fortunate people who got to spend his life doing what he loved to do and came away without even one “What If.”

  I just hope that if you take anything at all away from this book, it’s that it’s possible to keep doing what you love to do far beyond the age when others may be telling you to quit. That was a big motivation behind my run in 1991—all of a sudden age became irrelevant, 40 became the new 30.

  Something still drove me to push even when I was past my prime. I played injured, dehydrated, hallucinating, and delusional. It’s not what you accomplish; it’s what you overcome to accomplish it that sets you apart. I wanted the responsibility of being the best and every pressure that went along with it. I walked away from the game not once, not twice, but three times. When I had no more to offer, I moved over and made room for a new era of tennis players.

  What has the game done for me? Everything. I’ve played for royalty, for presidents, and for millions of people. I won and lost against some of the most talented athletes in the world. Me, a kid from East St. Louis.

  I was lucky enough to be in a generation of guys who gave it their all. I don’t have time for the other guys, the half-assed athletes who coast along with their eyes on nothing but the paycheck. I respect guys like Larry Byrd, Magic Johnson, Wayne Gretzky, Muhammad Ali, and Joe Montana, guys who laid it on the line, no excuses. For them, what mattered were the old-school values of pride and performance. Like Pancho said, “It’s not your bank balance but what you feel about yourself.”

  One of the questions I hear most now is “What are you doing these days?”

  I’ve got a lot of of projects that interest me, and some of them are in areas that you wouldn’t expect. One thing that won’t surprise you is that, even though I’m 60 and have been retired from the game for 12 years, I think it’s time to get back to work. My hips are feeling pretty good, as long as I use a little WD-40 on them every morning, and I’m wondering if tennis is in my future.

  Come on. Admit it. You’d love to see me come back . . . Wouldn’t you?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To my wife, Patti, without whose love, encouragement, patience, and forgiveness I don’t think I could have made it. You allowed me to be who I was, not who I became. You’ve kept me aware of what is important, what is lasting, and what, in reality, life is all about.

  To my son, Brett, and my daughter, Aubree. You have shown me that there is more to life than just playing tennis; the pleasures one has don’t always have to be on a grand stage, and being a dad is the greatest gift I’ve ever been given.

  To Mom, Dad, Two-Mom, Pop, Gramps, Grandma Mary: I owe you everything and I miss you every day.

  To my brother, Johnny, for the life we had and the lessons we learned that were taught to us in a most unusual way. Thanks for helping me remember and for adding your feelings to my book. We’ve been through it all, good times and tough times, and in the end you are and will always be my big brother.

  To my co-conspirator, Casey DeFranco. In the 30 years we’ve been friends, I had no idea your knowledge of sports was so deep. If I’d known that, I’d have been coming to you for my bets. Thanks for filling me
in and coming out of the tennis closet for me, Casey. Your friendship and understanding of me, and all that I’m about, made it easy for me to express my feelings. You made the hard work fun, to say the least.

  To David Hirshey, my brilliant editor. You covered me back in the day as a sportswriter for the New York Daily News, and, as far as I can remember, you didn’t write anything that pissed me off, which is more than I can say for 99 percent of the press corps. Five years ago you said to me, “I will chase you to the ends of the earth to get your book.” And you did, tearing your meniscus along the way and putting off your knee surgery until you were screaming from a different kind of pain. Thank you for your tenacity in convincing me to write my story and for allowing me the freedom of expression.

  Also, I need to thank Richard Rosen at HarperCollins for his help polishing the final draft, William Ruoto for making me look so young in the photo sections, and Barry Harbaugh for making sure David didn’t leap off the ledge before the book was finished.

  To my UK publisher, Giles Elliott at Transworld, thanks for staying the course and not making me sound too British.

  To my agents, Maggie Hanbury and Robin Straus, thanks for your patience, understanding, and support. It’s been a real pleasure and an experience I’ll never forget.

  To Pancho Segura, whose wisdom and guidance gave me so much more. Your attitude fit my mold, and you were able to bring out the best in me. Your passion for tennis was infectious, and I couldn’t help grabbing onto what you had to offer. Hard work, tenacity, pride, and personality. Lessons learned, Pancho.

  To all my buddies: Spencer Segura, Ilie Nastase, David Schneider, Gerry Goldberg, John Lloyd, Bob Adler, Joel Pashcow, Lornie Kuhle, Bill Lelly (if I’ve forgotten anybody, I told you I’ve got amnesia). You guys have run me ragged, boggled my mind, and helped break down my body. But through it all, I wouldn’t have missed one minute. Thanks for keeping me grounded (some of you) when it was needed, lifting my spirits when necessary, and throwing me under the bus . . . again, when required. Hopefully, we have a long life ahead of us to continue our friendships. But maybe we can tone it down a little. Nah!