Jimmy Connors: still angry after all these years - Telegraph
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Jimmy Connors: still angry after all these years
Tennis legend Jimmy Connors on his new memoir and the shocking revelation    about an abortion that has so upset his former girlfriend Chris Evert
Jimmy Connors says rage has been a motivating emotion in his life Photo: Getty Images
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'Get those tiger juices flowing,” Gloria Connors would urge her young son before a game. The shaggy-haired, working-class boy from Illinois would do as he was told, harnessing the rage built up during a tough childhood and unleashing it on his unsuspecting opponent.
It was that rage, he says now, that won him his first major tennis title in the men’s doubles with Ilie Nastase at Wimbledon in 1973. That rage went on to win him eight Grand Slam singles titles, including Wimbledon in 1982, beating John McEnroe in an epic final. That rage, he claims in his new autobiography, The Outsider, won him a record 109 tournaments over the course of his career, propelled him to world Number One for 268 weeks, and allowed him to play at the highest level well into his forties.
“What was I angry about?” he muses today, a solid, California-tanned figure in a baby-blue golfing sweater and jeans, the unruly hair now tamed into a salt and pepper slick. “Sometimes I was just angry about the morning. It was all there inside.”
Connors had plenty to feel cross about. As an eight-year-old playing on the public courts in East St Louis, he witnessed his mother, grandfather and grandmother being savagely beaten by two local punks. His mother had more than 100 stitches to her mouth and struggled with her injuries until the day she died. Connors was also scarred for life.
“When I needed something to push me to another level during matches, I would remember that day. I needed something extra a lot of the time. Looking back, I can see why I played with so much rage.”
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Still now, over a decade after Connors gave up professional tennis, the 60-year-old is a tightly wound, uncompromising figure, his controlled speech belying the fraught character beneath. He may be remembered as one of the “Brat Pack” of tennis – a foul-mouthed tennis genius who was mentored on and off the court by his pal, “Nasty” Nastase and took the game from the back pages to the front with his off-court antics – but to him, the title of his autobiography was obvious.
“I always felt like an outsider. Then, as I got older, I deliberately kept myself in that same mode because it gave me an edge. I might have dipped a toe on the inside, but really I was always better on my own.”
Much has been made of his feud with McEnroe – a relationship that allegedly remains strained to this day – but Connors insists that it was never personal. “I liked a lot of the guys. Maybe they didn’t like me and the way I played, but that was what it took for me to be what I became.”
When, in the 1970s, television turned tennis from a game of country-club gentility into what Connors calls “a Wild West show” – with characters like Nastase, Bjorn Borg and McEnroe doing for the sport what the Stones had done for music a few years earlier – he was in his element.
“My job was to make the crowd go crazy,” he writes in the book. “Anything else they got was a bonus,” he maintains. “But the tennis was always the show that drew people in.” Connors claims he was prone to shyness off-court, but that did not manifest itself when he gave the finger to a linesman who disagreed with a call or belted out profanities at adversaries.
“We gave them glamour, excitement and controversy and they didn’t want it,” he shrugged. “Now, they’re longing for it and they can’t have it. Tennis is big business these days and the conscious entertainment has gone, but back then we all walked a fine line. Did we overstep it sometimes? Sure, but that’s what drew in the crowds.”
Connors admits that if he watched any of his past tournaments now (he never does), his behaviour “would probably make me blush”. Yet both in the book and in person, he seems reluctant to elaborate on just how far he overstepped the line off-court.
Despite being nicknamed “the George Best of tennis” – a comparison he feels “is actually a pretty big compliment” – Connors insists he was never much of a party boy. “I could go out but it would catch up with me two or three days later,” he frowns. “I kept all that under control, and sometimes that was hard, but I always knew that it shouldn’t interfere with the tennis. And I wasn’t a ladies’ man. I was the shy, laid-back one but I happened to hang around guys who were pretty good with women.”
Despite highly publicised relationships with fellow tennis star Chris Evert – to whom he became engaged when he was 21 and she was 19 – former Miss World Marjorie Wallace and Playboy model Patti McGuire, now his wife, and mother of their two adult children, Connors makes it clear in the book that he found it hard to remain faithful. After he’d cheated on McGuire early in their marriage, she began divorce proceedings, but she later forgave Connors and has been with him ever since. “I consider myself lucky to have ended up with just the one woman,” he smiles. “Tennis gave me everything I became but I needed a woman who could handle all that. I’ve been married to Patti for 35 years, and she’s stayed with me through the ups and the downs.
“I was great at confrontation on the court but not so much off it. Rather than confront issues, I would let things slide and go into the dark place in my head. Now I’m so grateful that my family stuck by me throughout all that.”
There are touching passages in The Outsider about his mother – a former professional tennis player who honed Connors’ skills from a young age, taking him to California as a teenager for tutelage by the Ecuadorian player, Pancho Segura – his grandmother and his wife. But they are largely overshadowed by his unchivalrous portrayal of his former fiancée, Evert, as a controlling, promiscuous young woman who bore little resemblance to the softly spoken all-American girl with whom the world fell in love.
In a passage that made global headlines when the book was published in the US earlier this month, Connors strongly hints – without stating it – that Evert had an abortion, against his wishes, shortly before they were due to be married. Evert responded with the statement: “I am extremely disappointed that he used the book to misrepresent a private matter that took place 40 years ago, and made it public without my knowledge.”
Does he regret the revelation now? “No,” Connors says, his mouth tightening. “It was a part of my life. At the time, a very important part of my life.” And he didn’t feel stung by the subsequent criticism? “I didn’t read any of it,” he shrugs. Has he been in touch with Evert since? “Yes – we spoke.” Did he apologise? “No. We spoke. But it’s a book about my life and it was very subtle. There are 400 other pages in the book, but everyone focuses on that one.”
While it’s tempting to think that Connors became hardened by celebrity and his sporting ambition, it seems more likely that the iron will at the core of him was forged years before, on that bloodied tennis court in East St Louis. His regrets (“there’s always a price to pay: tennis was my mother and my grandmother, but it wasn’t my dad, so I distanced myself from him”) and the pain that the end of his career caused him have done nothing to soften his character.
“There’s no doubt that you go through a depression when it ends,” he says sadly. “I fought it until I was 40 and then did the senior tour until I was 49, just to keep my hand in. It wasn’t the big stage, but it was still a stage…” He goes on: “There’s no replacing the feeling, no replacing the applause and everything that goes along with that.” And boy did he try, he laughs. “I kept trying to find something that could create a little more excitement – even if it was just three seconds’ worth, but there was nothing. When you can’t sell out places any more, you can’t win Wimbledon or the US Open any more…” He looks down at the hands folded in his lap. “What do you do?”
He plays golf, swims and tries to play a little tennis every day, but after three hip operations “it’s more standing than playing; titanium doesn’t move so well.” I ask whether he feels that he’s mellowed – and he doesn’t like it. “I prefer 'matured’.” Has he still got the rage? “I do,” he smiles. “I control it a little better now, but it’s still there.”
'The Outsider: A Memoir’ by Jimmy Connors (Bantam Press, £14.99), is available from Telegraph Books at £12.99, plus £1.35 p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk