Connors has no apologies, for his career or book
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Connors has no apologies, for his career or book
During his playing days Jimmy Connors was never one for pulling punches, and even though the American tennis icon is now in the business of writing books, his pugilistic side is still front and center.
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Connors has no apologies, for his career or book During his playing days Jimmy Connors was never one for pulling punches, and even though the American tennis icon is now in the business of writing books, his pugilistic side is still front and center. Check out this story on USATODAY.com: http://usat.ly/165k9KB
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Connors has no apologies, for his career or book
Chris Oddo, Special for USA TODAY Sports Published 8:03 a.m. ET May 13, 2013 | Updated 6:08 p.m. ET May 13, 2013
Jimmy Connors, shown here at the U.S. Open in 2012, speaks his mind in a controversial book that arrives in bookstores this week.
(Photo: Dan Istitene, Getty Images)
Story Highlights
Jimmy Connors shows the same in-your-face personality in his new book that he showed as a player
"I've got scars on the outside and scars on the inside"
Connors' book 'The Outsider' arrives in stores this week
During his playing days Jimmy Connors was never one for pulling punches, and even though the American tennis icon is now in the business of writing books, his pugilistic side is still front and center.
Connors' controversial memoir The Outsider, which will be released this week, is written with the same tough-as-nails edginess that defined the eight-time Grand Slam winner during 2½  decades of hair-raising, in-your-face tennis.
As it turns out, the man who won more titles (109) and compiled more wins (1,237) than any other male player in tennis history can also spin an entertaining tale.
The 401-page romp takes readers on a roller-coaster ride from Connors' formative years through an era of professional tennis in the 1970s that was part circus, part wild west and part gladiator pit, but always it reinforces the notion that Connors was a man who loved tennis and wanted desperately to win at all costs.
Now 60, Connors freely admits that he misses the big stage.
"There's no doubt," he told USA TODAY Sports in a phone interview last week. "To have been able to play at the level that I was able to play at and to go through all of that for such a long period of time, to all of the sudden wake up one day and not have that is a bit of shock."
Always eager to leave the tennis court awash in his own blood, sweat and tears, Connors has approached his first book with the same vitality, choosing to unearth personal demons, lurid infidelities and old secrets for all the world to read. He writes of his own struggles with a gambling addiction and obsessive compulsive disorder. He airs out intimate details of his romance with Chris Evert, which ended with a terminated pregnancy, and vilifies legends Arthur Ashe and Andre Agassi, all the while being unafraid to take a self-deprecating tone.
And, true to form, he makes no apologies.
"Tennis gave Agassi everything — his fame, his money, his reputation, even his current wife — and he went on to knock it in his book," writes Connors.
Connors and Ashe had a strained relationship, which Connors attributed to Ashe's resentment of all the money he was making on non-sanctioned challenge matches at the time. These matches diminished the prestige of the ATP tour in Ashe's view, and Ashe also had a beef with Connors' lack of enthusiasm for Davis Cup competition.
"All he had to do was come up and talk to me face to face, man to man, but he chose not to," Connors writes of the time that Ashe left a note in his locker at Wimbledon outlining his views. "It annoyed me, but not so much as when he walked out on Centre Court wearing his Davis Cup jacket, with U.S.A. emblazoned across his chest."
But these quips and quarrels pale in comparison to the startling revelation that Chris Evert had become pregnant during her much publicized relationship with Connors in 1974. The fallout ended up breaking up their engagement.
"That was a part of my life, and a very big part of my life at the time," he said of his relationship with Evert. "It was not labored on and it was said as a matter of fact."
 (Photo: File)
"All these questions come up," says Tennis Channel commentator Justin Gimelstob, on what might have spurred Connors to dredge up some sensitive issues from his past.  "What's his motivation? Why? Nobody could truly know those, it's just people speculating. At the end of the day he knows why he did what he did, and why he does what he does."
Connors believes he owed it to his readers to give them everything he had.
"People, when they watched me play tennis, saw what I was able to give them, and that's what I tried to do with the book," he said. "I guess it would have been very easy to sit down and just write only the good things, right?"
If Connors had chosen to write only the good things, there would have been no shortage of material to draw from. Trained by his mother Gloria and his grandmother, affectionately called "Two-Mom," the Belleville, Ill., native embarked on a wild ride that eventually landed him in southern California where his mother would deliver him to the venerable touring pro Pancho Segura, one of the top male pros in the 1950's, for further priming.
When asked what he saw in him, Segura told Connors, "I loved your pride. You were born to be a champion."
Connors, 5-9 and 155 pounds, didn't cut an intimidating figure, but his tenacity more than made up for anything that he might have lacked in size.
"The guy personified leaving it all on the court," says Gimelstob, who credits Connors with inspiring his love for tennis when he was a youth. "He symbolized maximizing effort and getting every ounce of talent out of your body. He was the ultimate competitor."
"You felt like he gave you such a gigantic effort every time he stepped on the court," says Steve Flink, a notable tennis historian and author. "He was a singularly compelling player."
He was ornery, too.
Defiant, anti-establishment and obstinate, Connors clashed with tennis' powers that be, turning fans and fellow players against him at the beginning of his career.
"That was more or less my upbringing," Connors told USA TODAY Sports. "It was well documented that it was me and my mom and my family against the world."
It didn't help that he was aligned with a salty promoter by the name of Bill Riordan who brought lawsuits against ATP bigwigs and created an air of contempt around Connors even as he took his place at the pinnacle of the sport in 1974.
"I was simply in the middle of a nasty power struggle and being cast as the villain," Connors writes in his memoir. "Well, screw you, I'll use the aggravation to motivate myself."
It would take a while, but eventually Connors would shed some of his defiance and let the crowds join him in his no-holds-barred quest for glory.
"What he learned to do over time was to enjoy himself more and he didn't have to stop being who he was but he could find a way to win the fans over," Flink says. "He found a way to embrace them."
But Connors never dropped the ferocity that made him such a terror to play against. Nor did he ever let go of his belief that tennis was meant to be a form of entertainment as much as it was meant to be a competition.
"The fans that came to watch us play, they weren't there just to see the tennis," he says. "We had to be the fight on the hockey arena, we had to be the walk-off home run in the seventh game of the World Series, we had to be the 100-yard kickoff return on the gridiron. We had to do that to get those sports fans to come in and be a part of us."
Bad behavior was what the fans craved in those days, and the marquee players of that era — Ile Nastase, John McEnroe and Connors, to name a few — gave them what they wanted. Crotch-grabbing, bird-flipping, name-calling, in a time before political correctness and smartphones, anything went. "What we were able to do and get by with, I don't know if that would be acceptable today," Connors says. "It was a wild west show back when we were playing, and shooting from the hip and the lip wasn't a bad thing."
It may not have been a bad thing for Connors and other greats at the top of the tennis food chain, but for players looking to make their mark, it could be tricky.
"Sometimes they were above the game," says ESPN commentator Brad Gilbert, a former pro. "Jimmy could bring the crowd into it. It took a lot to beat him tennis-wise, let alone he could get away with a lot more than any of the players can today."
Connors would whip the crowd into a frenzy one last time when he reached the U.S. Open semifinals in 1991 at the age of 39, an age when all of his contemporaries had been long retired. Connors remembers those two weeks as the best of his career.
"Being able to play that kind of tennis at 39 was pretty spectacular," he says. "I'd spent my whole career trying to get the fans involved like that and to get that kind of a reaction. We always had the tennis fan. But the real sports fan coming in and being a part of what we were doing, that was the best ever."
In the stands for every one of Connors' matches that year in New York, Gimelstob remembers it well. "You felt his will," he said. "Tennis is a blood sport, and he personified that."
"Connors was regarded differently and his image changed," Flink says. "He had learned to enjoy the public arena more than he ever had and he found a way to not have to play against the crowds but to play for them. That was the key, now he played for them, and now he didn't see them as enemies any more either. He realized that he could win them over and that they could help him."
More than 20 years later, Connors has elected to share the inside stories of a life spent in the tennis trenches with those fans who helped him take his tennis to the highest level. From first-hand accounts of his intense rivalry with John McEnroe ("Mac is the one player I can watch limping around the court and feel good about saying 'F--- that guy.' ") to placing big wagers on himself to win Wimbledon at a London betting house, it's all there in black and white.
Connors has turned back the clock and come out swinging, using words on the printed page like weapons, deploying them in the same fashion that he used to deploy his legendary two-handed backhand. With Connors, there is only one endgame. He plays to win, and he knows we want to see him lay it on the line.
"Playing in front of 25,000 people and millions more on television, and performing and doing what I worked so hard to try to accomplish was, in my opinion, the ultimate," Connors says. "Do I miss it? Of course I do. I've got scars on the outside and scars on the inside, but it's been 60 years of good living."
Follow Chris Oddo on Twitter, @TheFanChild .