Always an outsider, always a winner

Jimmy Connors is hailed as one of the greatest – and most controversial – tennis players of all time. As his autobiography, The Outsider, is published, he talks about his love for the game, his will to win and his antics on and off the court

There’s no denying Jimmy Connors’s victories are some of the most enduring memories of tennis.

Yet there’s also no denying the era in which he claimed these victories has faded. The technology of court surfaces and rackets has changed the game he knew in the 1980s almost beyond recognition.

So why has Connors decided now is the right time to tell his story, in his new autobiography The Outsider?

“There’s enough distance,” he explains. “I had opportunities to write a book before but I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want to go to a lot of places. I almost had amnesia – tennis and everything that happened had been really put away.”

At first glance, it’s hard to understand why he’d possibly need to ‘put away’ anything.

In a professional career spanning over 20 years, Connors held the world Number One spot for 268 weeks, took eight Grand Slam singles titles, a record 109 singles ATP tour titles, and was honoured in the International Tennis Hall Of Fame.

But then, of course, you remember that riding alongside the success, came problems. Some were confined to tennis, with complicated battles around the newly formed Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), plus his ongoing fight against the old “stuffy” tennis guard who loved rules, and hated the showmanship Connors brought to the sport.

But perhaps the biggest problems Connors had to fight were not those inside the game, but inside himself. In The Outsider, he openly documents his struggle with gambling – like placing a $1million bet on himself to beat Martina Navratilova in 1992.

“I was always looking for that last little bit of something,” he explains. “Tennis should have given me enough excitement, but at times, it didn’t. I was always chasing a feeling that ended up chasing me, to the point where it controlled me, instead of me being in control of it.”

Such lack of control was especially chilling for Connors, who was also haunted by Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) – during his matches. He couldn’t serve unless he’d bounced the ball a certain number of times.

“It wasn’t recognised at the time though, and I only realised what it was, years later, when I saw a programme about OCD and thought, ‘I’ve got that’.”

With typical resilience, Connors doesn’t look for sympathy for the condition.

“It is a big deal; it’s tiring and it wears you out. But I was lucky, I had tennis, which got rid of a lot of anxiety. Tennis allowed me to be successful.”

Another key was, famously, Connors’s mother, Gloria.

Herself a respected tennis player, she encouraged Connors into the sport aged just two, first in their back garden, then on the local courts near the family’s home on “the wrong side of the river” in East St Louis, Illinois.

While Gloria came up for much media criticism over the years for being too pushy, Connors makes it clear this isn’t his view on things.

“Mum was very smart,” he says fondly. “She knew what to do and how to handle me.”

Part of this handling involved her never letting the young Connors “over-practise”, always limiting it to 45 minutes a day.

Another part was her taking Connors, aged 13, to play at the upmarket St Louis Armoury club – on “the right side of the river” – and telling him it didn’t matter if he didn’t fit into the traditional 1960’s upper-class tennis mould — he still deserved to be there.

It was not a lesson that Connors was ready to learn, though.

“Travelling to the club was never a big deal for Mum, but always having to go somewhere else and fit in was hard for me. From that young age, I always felt I had to fight back to get in anywhere.”

However hard that alien feeling was for a teenage boy, it was a feeling that soon became his strongest ally.

“As I got older, it became part of my own attitude. It became an edge on how I played tennis.”

He admits “it might have been a mistake” – Connors was often critiqued for not getting on with other players. But he did have a handful of good friends in the game, memorably the fiery Ilie ‘Nasty’ Nastase (the pair often played doubles together).

He also likens it to being in a normal office – no one is friends with those they work with, so why should he be?

“I just wanted tennis to stay there, and not take it home with me. I wanted to get away and clear my mind of it. It’s important to keep work and play separate.”

It’s a theory that paid off, personally as well as professionally. Connors has been married to former Playboy model Patti, for 34 years, and they have two children, Brett, 33, and Aubree 28.

In his book, he describes Patti as his “life-changer” and even now, after three decades of marriage, there’s a proud glint in his eye whenever he talks about her.

Another relationship he doesn’t shy away from in the book is his engagement to America’s 1970s tennis darling, Chrissie Evert – an engagement he claims was broken when she had an abortion behind his back.

The world’s media have jumped on this claim with glee, accusing Connors of dragging up something personal, painful and that should be kept well in the past.

“To be honest, I never thought it’d be a big deal. The book is 400 pages, this event barely makes up one. It happened, I wrote about it, and then I moved on.”

Drawing such a decisive line under the ordeal is what you’d expect of a man of Connors’ focus; but is he quite so willing to move on with the new world of tennis?

“The size of rackets now, compared to the rackets I played with, makes me wonder how a McEnroe or a Borg would do today. The players now obviously have skill, but the equipment does give them an extra advantage to be better than they are.”

It’s not a criticism – Connors clearly admires Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, and Rafael Nadal (“who fits my mould of a passionate grinder”); it’s simply an observation.

“The guys today play great tennis, but we were fighting for something else; to bring more people into the game, to entertain and to fight for the dollar.”

And there it is; the word Connors stands for more than anything: ‘fight’.

“When I played, I went out every day and gave it everything,” he says, summing up a style that captivated millions.

Is it a game that’s still the same for him, even without the crowds and the glory?

He smiles, instinctively. “Yeah, I missed it; I love it. I missed the exercise.”

But more than anything? “I missed the sweat.”

Maybe there isn’t quite as much distance between Jimmy Connors now, and Jimmy Connors then...

The Outsider by Jimmy Connors is published by Bantam Press (€27.50)