The Outsider: A Memoir (10 page)

Throughout the fall of 1973, Pancho had been bombarded with requests—there was even talk of possible inducements such as first-class airline tickets—for me to enter the Australian Open, in December. Frank Sedgman, who played out of Melbourne and had been one of the world’s greatest players in the late 1940s and early 1950s, even lobbied his old buddy Pancho to try to persuade me to go Down Under. With their crazy scheduling—a tournament on the other side of the world over Christmas and New Year’s—the organizers struggled to attract top-class players and had identified me as a valuable draw.

Of course they had. I had 11 titles to my name for the year, I was one half of the most famous couple in tennis, and I was about to be named the number three player in the world, based on the new ATP computer-ranking system. When Pancho explained how much they wanted me there, I thought, why not? Especially since I knew Chrissie had already entered. Christmas in the sunshine with my new fiancée sounded like a good deal.

Australia in December is stupid hot and at times the weather matched my mood. The facilities were basic, to say the least—the Kooyong Stadium had a tiny locker room with a single shower and one toilet cubicle—but that didn’t bother me. I’d been in worse places on the Riordan circuit. No, what pissed me off was the partisan crowd, screaming approval at every hometown player and abuse at every foreigner. Guess who was their main target?

I took the brunt of it; three of the five matches I played to reach my first Grand Slam final were against Aussies. Every time I beat a local hero, the fans roared their disapproval. Who was this upstart American brat hell-bent on ruining their party? Hearing the crowd booing was one thing, but what the hell was the deal with those flies? Where were they breeding those things anyway? They looked like B-52s coming down on me.

Spencer and Chrissie did their best to calm me down, and I know that without them I would have imploded and been on my way home long before I met another Australian, Phil Dent, in the finals. But even Chrissie was getting on my nerves. Nobody was safe. With the organizers usually scheduling me on the court after Chrissie, I would go along to support her, sometimes bringing a sandwich and Pepsi for my lunch. Chrissie didn’t like that one little bit. If she noticed me eating and not paying attention during her match, she would throw me a look, which wasn’t hard to read: “If you’re not going to watch me play, then get out of here.” That pissed me off even more than the hostile Australian fans, because it was embarrassing; everyone in the stadium could see what was going on. Run along, Jimmy, do what you’re told.

We were not even married yet and the tension was already building. I was in Chrissie’s corner, rooting for her, and she was treating me like some sort of, well, househusband. You know how it is, guys: You can’t do anything right. I needed to eat before my matches and I wanted to see her play. What was I supposed to do? Stay back at the hotel and miss her match altogether? I’m sure that would have gone down really well.

Chrissie’s mood swings could drive anyone crazy, but that didn’t change the fact that I loved her. No one is perfect, I told myself. I was no prize, either; she had to put up with a lot, too. Did I just say that? The question was, could my patience, which was thin at the best of times, cope with so much drama? I convinced myself it could.

Phil Dent took the full force of the frustration and aggression that had been building in me from the first day of the tournament. Fortunately, I managed to channel it into my game. The super-dry, well-worn grass of Kooyong reminded me of the armory floorboards, and I adopted the approach Mom had taught me back in St. Louis, moving forward, taking the ball early, blasting it down the lines and across the court. Even with the crowd cheering their countryman on, he didn’t stand a chance. I took the first two sets, and although he managed to rally in the third set, taking it 6-4 and putting on a show for his fans, it was just a momentary setback. I regrouped, ignored the lynch mob in the stands, and won the fourth, 6-3, to capture my first Grand Slam title.

I was ecstatic, even if, to be brutally honest, the Australian Open in the 1970s didn’t draw the number of top players that it should have. The long flight and the unfortunate timing of the tournament limited the field. But it was still a Grand Slam and an important win in anybody’s book.

If the scheduling had been like it is today, I would have gone to Australia more often. But I played the Australian Open only twice in my career, winning it in 1974 and losing to John Newcombe in the finals the following year, and I thought that was good enough. I don’t regret any of the decisions I made, but who knows; if I had played the Australian a few more times, would I have won more majors? Your guess is as good as mine.

Between 1974 and 1979, I also didn’t play in the French Open—we’ll come to that in a minute—so there was a long period of time when I was competing only in Wimbledon and the US Open. So get this—in my career I won eight Slams and was in the finals of seven others, basically playing only two majors a year. Take it for what it’s worth.

Getting that first win in the Australian Open was huge. That victory did set me up perfectly for what was to become the most extraordinary single year of my career: I would win 15 tournaments and lose only four matches out of 103. I also saw it as a launchpad that would catapult me toward the French Open and Wimbledon.

I was partially correct.

8

TWIN PEAKS

N
othing could stop me in 1974. My body finally filled out, the last of my puppy fat disappeared, and I felt stronger than ever. I had the confidence of a first-time Grand Slam winner and I was ready to rip the heart out of anyone who stood in my way.

After a run of seven tournament wins through March—in Roanoke, Little Rock, Birmingham, Salisbury, Hampton (Virginia), Salt Lake City, and Tempe—I was steaming toward the remaining three Slams of the year. Throw in a couple of doubles victories (one with Frew McMillan, one with Vitas Gerulaitis) and it seemed like I couldn’t lose.

As I made my way across the country, from big cities to small towns, I would walk into restaurants with Nasty and it was like a couple of movie stars had entered the room. Television had made us more recognizable, and the popularity of tennis was hitting new heights. One evening, people even started clapping as soon as we came through the doors. Thinking the applause was for Nasty, I waited for him to pass in front of me, but he held back.

“No, Connors boy,” he said fondly, “this is for you.”

Just as American tennis, and tennis in general, was on the rise, along came the French Tennis Federation and its president, Philippe Chatrier, to pull a power play.

But first another history lesson. World Team Tennis, created in 1973 by Jordan Kaiser, Dennis Murphy, Fred Barman, and Larry King (Billie Jean’s husband at the time), took its cue from football, baseball, and basketball. They aligned a sports team with a major city and franchised it, just when tennis was becoming more and more accessible to regular sports fans. The WTT was innovative; it allowed on-court coaching, substitutions, and featured mixed male and female teams. There was crowd participation, guaranteed payments to players, and deep-rooted interstate rivalries. Matches were decided on the basis of total number of games won during one set each of men’s singles, women’s singles, men’s doubles, women’s doubles, and mixed doubles. Were these guys crazy? No way; it was a shot in tennis’s arm. I was all for it and I signed with the Baltimore Banners for the 1974 season. This was going to be both fun and profitable.

The establishment (the ILTF, in essence) was spooked by the WTT organization, because they thought its version of the sport was too extreme. I’ve always suspected that the single element that riled the establishment the most was the salaries over and above prize money, because that was something really out of the ordinary. Why they couldn’t work together, I’ll never know. The ILTF feared the WTT would undermine the privileged position of their major tournaments. The U.S.-based Team Tennis was obviously a threat to the European tour, I guess because of the summer schedule and the French Open in particular—and the WTT had to be dealt a blow.

Chatrier decided that anyone who signed with WTT would be denied access to Roland Garros, the site of the French Open, and the ATP supported that decision. That left Evonne Goolagong and me, both winners of the Australian Open earlier in the year, dripping wet and hung out to dry. Paris at the very end of May is beautiful, and I should’ve been in a good mood despite my less-than-stunning results at Roland Garros over the past two years. The problem was I was in a court, not on one.

Bill Riordan had filed a claim to have my ban from the French Open overturned, and although this was the last place I wanted to be (you know how I feel about lawyers), I knew this was important. Fair enough, I thought. As Bill saw it, the establishment was unlawfully standing in the way of my opportunity to have a crack at the calendar Grand Slam. In doing so, it was depriving me of the chance to collect an incentive payment that I had been offered by a perfume company, if I managed to win all four majors in a single season—a sum equal to my Baltimore Banners salary. The judge wasn’t impressed, and our action was dismissed.

Fuck it. Move on.

That was the end of the dispute, as far as I was concerned. I wasn’t bitter. I was disappointed, especially since Chrissie had been allowed to play in Paris, beating Olga Morozova in the finals to win her first major. But would I make the long trip to Australia a second time to give myself another chance at a Slam? That’s what I was thinking about as I made my way to London and on up to Manchester for a grass-court warm-up tournament—and another victory. Back to business.

So it came as a huge surprise, the night before Wimbledon began, to read in the newspapers that I had decided to raise the stakes. Apparently, I was taking out a lawsuit against Jack Kramer (the ATP CEO), Donald Dell (the ATP legal counsel), and Commercial Union Assurance (the sponsors of the ILTF’s Grand Prix circuit) for restraint of trade. The lawsuit basically said that Kramer and Dell, supported by Commercial Union, had used their influence to have me banned from the French Open.

For good measure, Riordan also threw in claims that their actions amounted to an unfair monopoly over world tennis, and their insistence on controlling TV deals—plus the balls, towels, and programs used at tournaments—was anti-competitive. This all meant, basically, that I couldn’t pursue my chosen career. The combined total of these claims? A mere $30 million.

The headlines said that Jimmy Connors was suing his fellow players—and Arthur Ashe in particular, in his role as president of the ATP—for the sum of $10 million, the amount allocated to the restraint-of-trade part of the lawsuit, and that was the first I heard of it. I had been completely in the dark. It was Bill Riordan, the ultimate shit-stirrer, up to his old tricks. To make matters worse, when Mom heard the news, she was as surprised as I was. It was one of the very few occasions in my career when she wasn’t in control of what was going on.

Riordan didn’t seem at all concerned or embarrassed when I demanded to know what the hell he’d done. I think it’s fair to say that he had a score to settle with the people he felt were trying to squeeze him out of the game with their scheduling carve-up in 1972.

“Jimmy, leave it to me. Those guys, they’re frauds. You stick to tennis, and I’ll beat the rest. And don’t forget, any publicity is good publicity.”

Despite his assurances, I wasn’t convinced that this was a good move or good publicity. Even though I was being used as a pawn, overnight I became the most hated player on the circuit. The ATP had to use its membership fees to defend the case, which brought a load of antagonism my way. Why weigh yourself down with needless baggage? Why provide your opponents with an added incentive to beat you? Why did I let Bill continue with the lawsuit? I honestly don’t know, because all it was to me was a pain in the ass.

The atmosphere was tense, and it became very personal. During Wimbledon, and throughout the rest of the year, whenever I walked into a locker room, every player would turn his back on me. You can guess how well I reacted to that. They don’t care about me, so I don’t give a fuck about them. Just protecting myself. Even so, it wasn’t exactly comfortable sitting there getting ready to play, knowing that out of the 40 guys in the room, 39 were against you. Arthur Ashe later wrote that whenever he walked past me during Wimbledon in 1974 he wanted to smack me in the mouth. Oh, Arthur, settle down.

In some ways those experiences helped mold my attitude over the rest of my career. I didn’t start the fight, and I couldn’t end the fight. I was simply in the middle of a nasty power struggle and being cast as the villain. Well, screw you. I’ll use the aggravation to motivate myself.

Whenever I was in London, I liked to stay at a hotel called the Inn on the Park, right on Hyde Park Corner, near Downing Street, Buckingham Palace, and the Hard Rock Cafe. I didn’t really care about being close to the All-England Club. After matches, I needed to escape the tennis scene and do my own thing. Plus, at the time, there was only one restaurant in Wimbledon Village, and central London had so much more to offer . . . the Playboy Club, for starters. In 1974, Chrissie was booked into the same hotel, too. (OK, so she was with her mother, but then when wasn’t she?) Mrs. Evert seemed to go everywhere with Chrissie, all summer long, right across Europe, and I guess rightfully so—Chrissie was a teenager, after all. But whenever I turned around, Mrs. Evert was there, watching. It was almost like she didn’t trust me.

Crazy, I know. America’s Sweetheart and the most hated guy in tennis. What could possibly go wrong there?

My mom traveled with me, too, but she wasn’t interested in my nighttime activities. I wasn’t her daughter. She understood that boys would be boys. Provided nothing got in the way of my tennis, she didn’t really mind.

“When you work, you work, Jimmy. When you play, you play. And you should put just as much effort into that as you do your tennis.”

I didn’t disappoint her on the court, so I couldn’t disappoint her off of it.

The situation with Chrissie and her mom was different. I got that. It just meant we had to be a little smarter in order to spend some time alone together.

Some months earlier, I had played against a young South African guy named David Schneider. It was a tight match, and halfway through he started rolling his shoulders to help him relax.

“What’s that you got there—chicken wings?!” I shouted over the net.

“Fuck you, Connors. At least I ain’t some mommy’s boy.”

I knew right then he was my kind of guy. I liked the way he played and I liked his attitude. I thought he was an asshole and he thought I was a prick. We were perfect for each other. As we were walking to the locker room after the match, I asked David if he would practice with me the next day.

“Yeah, sure. Give me a call.”

“Bring your chicken wings. We’ll give it a go.”

At five o’clock the next morning I called him.

“Connors, what the hell are you doing? It’s the middle of the night, man.”

“Come on, get up. You said you’d practice with me. I’ve got a court booked at 6 a.m. Let’s go.”

We’ve been best friends ever since.

David was sharing his room with a bunch of other South African players. They went everywhere together like a unit, which was something that just didn’t happen in US tennis (or maybe it did, just not with me). They had grown up together, traveling across South Africa to tournaments in the backs of trucks and camping out overnight to save money. They watched each other’s backs, supported each other whenever necessary. I liked that. Even though I would have hated living in those conditions, there was something about their loyalty that appealed to me.

Schneider didn’t need me as a friend—he had enough of those already—and he wasn’t looking for anything in return, so I knew he would be someone I could trust. And it’s true; he’s never once let me down. Two-Mom told me when I was growing up that if you could count your good friends on one hand, then you’d be lucky. David Schneider is one of those guys. He was then and he is now.

David was playing at Wimbledon, and was in London with his girlfriend, Laurie, who happened to be friendly with Chrissie. That gave us the perfect cover. Chrissie would tell her mom that she was meeting up with Laurie, who would pick Chrissie up from the hotel. I would be nowhere in sight, usually already sitting with David two blocks away at the bar of the Playboy Club.

As I think I’ve made clear, I loved the Playboy Club, and it was always my first stop the day I arrived in London. You could never tell who would be there, but usually some combination of Nasty, Spencer, John Lloyd, or Gerulaitis would show up. No fun gambling alone.

The club had a carving buffet, where you lined up for thick slices of roast pork, beef, or turkey. That could take you an hour on a busy night, but you didn’t care because the scenery was never boring. After dinner you could either hit the craps or blackjack tables upstairs or the disco in the basement. I didn’t spend every night at the club when I was in town, just most of them, with or without Chrissie. And I would always have a good time in one way or another.

Chrissie and I spent a lot of time together with Schneider and his girlfriend over those two weeks at Wimbledon in 1974, but we also enjoyed the occasional night out on our own. Mrs. Evert was OK with that, as long as Chrissie didn’t have a match the next day. When we were out together, the British tabloid newspapers went into a full-out frenzy, way beyond what had ever happened to us before.

That year’s Wimbledon had been dubbed the Love Double by the press, because Chrissie and I were both strong contenders for the championships, and the media craze about our relationship had long since gone over the top. On our first night out as a couple, we emerged from the Playboy Club to find 40 photographers waiting for us. We felt like the Beatles, having to run through the streets of London to escape the paparazzi. It was nuts, especially when Chrissie outran me! But we didn’t mind; it was all one big adventure.

Even when we didn’t stay out late, neither of us managed to get much rest, particularly during the nights after Chrissie had been playing her singles matches. What can I say? Sometimes passion won out over tennis. We were young and we could cope, although Pancho, seeing me sluggish in the morning, wasn’t very happy. Pancho used to wait for me in the lobby after Laurie had dropped Chrissie off. He would then accompany me to my room to make sure that Chrissie wasn’t waiting for me there. He would even look in on me from time to time during the night just to make sure I was alone and sleeping. I guess Chrissie’s mom probably did the same thing, so there was a lot of hallway sneaking required, and I can tell you we got pretty good at it.

No matter how much sleep I got, if I had a match the next day, I liked to be up at nine in the morning, grab breakfast, and be out of the hotel by 11 for some practice. There were courts available at Wimbledon, but I liked to keep my distance as much as possible. The fact that no one was talking to me didn’t make any difference. Some guys loved being part of that scene, hanging around all day. Not me. If I was supposed to be on court at 2 p.m., I would roll through the gates of the grounds at 1:40. Why be any earlier?

Since I wasn’t using the courts at the All-England Club, I had to find somewhere else to practice in London, and that wasn’t easy. During the two weeks of Wimbledon it seemed as though every single weekend warrior came out to play. The courts were there—London is a big city, after all—but you just had to be Sherlock Holmes to find them.