The Outsider: A Memoir (19 page)

Looking at Wimbledon today, it’s almost like a different tournament. They lay a more durable grass now, which allows the ball to bounce up, almost like on a hard court. Even by the finals, the grass looks like it hasn’t even been played on. With players staying back more, it’s now just along the baseline that any damage to the court is noticeable. Actually, it’s more like six feet behind the baseline, where the guys seem to play today.

In my day, the bounces were inconsistent and very low, so taking the ball out of the air was more of a priority. Wimbledon was not accustomed to baseline tennis back then; most past champions were serve-and-volley specialists. Borg–Connors was a different kind of battle.

The other key element behind Borg’s success is that Wimbledon suited his personality. Like Roger Federer in recent years, Borg’s polite demeanor embodied the values the All-England Club considered sacred: tradition and keeping your mouth shut. Apparently, they thought I had a weakness in those areas. I always felt some tension whenever I walked through the gates, knowing I had to temper my behavior. Borg was comfortable there, and it showed in his tennis.

The 1977 final went all the way to the fifth, both of us playing at the top of our games, but not simultaneously. I won the opening set with ease; I couldn’t do a thing wrong. But you could never relax against Borg, especially in the finals. Once he found his stride, I lost my concentration, and Borg won the next two sets easily.

Pancho was watching from the players’ box, and I knew what he was thinking. There’s no point sitting back now. Attack and go for the jugular. I break serve at 6-5 to take the match to the final set.

Then I blink and find myself 0-4 down. How did that happen?

Dig deep. You’re not out of this yet.

I pull it back to 4-4, 15-0 on my serve. The momentum is all with me, and Borg looks shattered. I’m not used to seeing that.

Keep the pressure on, Jimmy
.

I’m getting ready to serve, bouncing the ball, when I hear a shout from the crowd, a wiseass comment I can’t quite make out. It’s followed by some laughter.

Just ignore it, Jimmy, keep concentrating. You are two games away from your second title.

I can’t help it. I look up to where the loudmouth in the stands is sitting and the spell is broken. I double-fault and don’t win another point in the match.

Really? I’m that thin-skinned that I let some idiot get in my head?

I guess so.

I got back to LA after being gone a month, and written in dust across the hoods of my Porsche and my 1968 Ferrari was a welcome-home message:

u fucking loser!

Another fan I didn’t know I had.

Some guy’s calling me a loser and I’ve got a Porsche and Ferrari in my parking space and I’ve just played the Wimbledon final. I had to laugh.

It’s been a month since the final with Borg and I’ve hardly played at all. I had to pull out against Cliff Richey in San Antonio when I couldn’t hold my racquet the way I needed to.

And now I’m sitting in an office in Belleville, talking to a doctor buddy of mine who is looking at my thumb. I knew there was a problem when I took the splint off and my thumb was frozen in place. I guess it didn’t set right.

“Jimmy, hang on a minute, I have to do something. Put your hand on the table and let my nurse take a good look at it,” the doc says.

I lay my right hand down flat, spreading the fingers. The nurse asks me a question but I miss it. I ask her to repeat what she said.

Crack!

I spin around to see my doctor just as he smacks my thumb with a rubber mallet! What the . . . ? I clench my left fist to pop him one, just as the room begins to spin.

I’m only out for a few seconds. When I come around, he’s sitting next to me and my hand is throbbing like crazy.

“Should I be mad at you?” I ask.

“Sorry, Jimmy, but it was the only way. Your thumb needed to be reset, which means it had to be rebroken. I could have put you under first, but I figured if I told you that, you’d never go for it.”

He was probably right. I don’t think I would ever have risked an operation on my hand. I would have just given myself the rest of the year to see if I could work out a way to play with my thumb as it was. So thank God for that rubber mallet; within three weeks I was pretty much back to normal. Just in time for the US Open.

It’s a good thing I’ve never worried about winning any popularity contests, because the New York fans at Forest Hills that year were ruthless. They made the Wimbledon crowd look like a bunch of . . . well, like a bunch of well-behaved Brits.

New Yorkers were in no mood to fool around during that ridiculously hot summer. They were still pissed off about the July 13 blackout, which caused looting in the streets and fires across the city. They were in the middle of electing a new Mayor, Ed Koch or Mario Cuomo, and the choice had polarized the voters. The only good news was that they had finally arrested Son of Sam, the serial killer who had terrorized the city for far too long, and that the Yankees were poised to return to the World Series following their defeat the previous year by the Cincinnati Reds.

So emotions were running high, and even today, 35 years later, it’s considered the wildest US Open ever.

Well, to start with, a large crowd of fans staged a sit-in when the officials tried to switch an afternoon match to the evening. They then had to move one of the evening matches forward in order to avoid a riot. Then there was an anti-apartheid protest (against the participation of South African players), and a bomb threat, and someone in the crowd was even shot during the third-round McEnroe–Dibbs match, apparently the result of a stray bullet fired in Queens.

The atmosphere was tense and volatile, but it took me until the semifinals to really blow things up. My back had been giving me trouble, so I’d been pretty quiet, trying to close out my matches as quickly as I could, and I hadn’t dropped a set by the time I met the unseeded Italian Corrado Barazzutti in the semis.

We were 3-3 in the first set. Barazzutti had questioned about nine line calls already, and I was getting ready to lose it.

At break point against me, I passed him with a backhand, right on the line, and it was called in. Barazzutti just stood there and stared down at some imaginary mark in the clay.

“Come on! Not again! The ball was good!” I yelled.

He still didn’t move. So I did. I ran round the net to where he was standing and used my shoe to rub out whatever he was looking at. For a second no one could believe what had just happened. Neither could I. Oops. Even I knew I’d gone too far.

The fans went bat-shit crazy, booing and screaming as though I’d caused another citywide blackout. The umpire tried to maintain some order, but it was useless. The noise level was deafening. Eventually he made himself heard.

“Mr. Connors, I know you did that in fun, right?”

“Oh, yeah. How’d you know?”

“OK, the ball was good. Play on.”

I didn’t think it was possible for the fans to get even louder, but they did, and they called me everything they could think of, and New Yorkers have rich imaginations. Now I was pissed. I’d won the point fairly, I’d done nothing (much) wrong, and I was the only American still standing in our national tournament.

I finally turned to the stands and confronted the hecklers.

“I’m all you’ve got left in this tournament! You should be pulling for me, not him!”

Come on, guys! I’m the defending US Open champion. Work with me here. Cut me some frickin’ slack!

They weren’t listening, and the biggest cheers of the night came whenever I missed a shot. OK, if this is the way it’s going to be, fine. I still like the energy here in New York.

By the end of the match, I still hadn’t dropped a set.

That semi was nothing compared with the final, which was just plain ugly. I took the first set 6-2 against Argentina’s Guillermo Vilas, and it was all downhill from there. I lost the second set 6-3, the third in a tiebreaker. In the fourth, at match point, I hit a forehand down the line, Vilas chipped a return, and I buried the easy volley. It was good, I know it was, but Vilas was glaring at the linesman.
Screw him. I’ve won the point. It’s deuce.

I turn around and walk to my service line. What the hell is going on? Why are the fans pouring onto the court and lifting Vilas onto their shoulders? Then John Corman, the umpire, raises his hand and points.

“Mr. Vilas wins . . .”

More and more people are swarming around, bumping me, pushing me, swearing at me. It’s nuts out here, not to mention dangerous. I pick up my bag and my friend Doug Henderson acts like a blocking back for me on our way off the court. It’s pandemonium, and Vilas is the US Open champion.

How’s my mood? Cranky at best. I was swinging at the onrushing fans just like my brother Johnny taught me. Of course, I would get criticized for not shaking Vilas’s hand, because in case you haven’t heard, tennis is a gentlemen’s game. Are you kidding me?

Within minutes, Pancho, Mom, Doug, and I are in our Ford Pinto and long gone. That was the last time the US Open was played on clay and held at Forest Hills. Well, nothing like going out with a bang.

I might have been down but I wasn’t out. Four months later I was back in New York, playing Vilas in the Masters at Madison Square Garden. It was late at night and fans were hanging from the rafters and cheering the tennis we were playing.

Somehow, something had changed since Forest Hills, and I still don’t know why. The atmosphere in the Garden that night was new to me. I lost the match 7-5 in the third, after making a big comeback, and through it all I could feel that the fans were on my side. It was like they finally got me. I was a fighter, I gave them everything, and now they were taking me in as one of their own.

In my interview on the court at the end of the match, I gave the crowd a message: “Don’t count me out.” They responded with a huge roar, which carried me through the rest of the tournament, including victory in the finals over Borg. From the ovation I received, it was clear that this was the result the New Yorkers had come to see.

13

BJÖRN AGAIN

I
’ll chase that sonuvabitch Borg to the ends of the earth.

Borg has just beaten me 6-2, 6-2, 6-3 in the 1978 Wimbledon final and I’m hot. Losing three finals in four years on those grass courts does that to you, and when asked how I feel about losing, I respond that I’m not about to roll over and accept the result without a fight. It’s intended as a compliment to Borg, but of course the press sees it as being disrespectful to the reigning champion.

Borg had announced he would consider playing the Australian Open at the end of the year if he still had a chance at the Grand Slam. He’d already won the French and now Wimbledon, and he was the only one who
could
win it. I couldn’t let that happen. I wanted to hunt him down and even the score as soon as I could. If that meant flying halfway around the world to Australia, then that’s what I was going to do. Fortunately, I didn’t have to travel that far, because first he had to win the US Open.

I am in the backgammon room at Pips International, in Beverly Hills—one of my favorite places, a restaurant, bar, and disco run by my buddy Joe DeCarlo. I called Joe earlier in the evening to ask if Lornie and I could come over and hang with him, since I just got back from Wimbledon. I walk in and see Joe sitting at the table with Patti McGuire.

I came here for two reasons: to relax and blow off some steam, but that all changes the moment I see Patti.

I hadn’t been looking for love that night at Hef’s mansion, but I found her and then I lost her, and this time I wasn’t going to let her get away.

I’d had a busy year, and at the same time I was trying to find a way to hook up with Patti again. I found out we had a mutual friend in James Caan’s sister Barbara, and whenever I’d see her, I’d ask about Patti. I also tried through Barbara’s other brother, Ronnie. I’d bump into him at parties in LA and ask the same questions. But none of it got me anywhere. And now, here she is, sitting next to me, playing backgammon with Joe. After a little while Joe has to go off and attend to some of his other customers, leaving Patti and me on our own. She asks if I want to play backgammon with her. We play two games and she kicks my ass.

“Jeez,” I say, “this just isn’t my week.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just lost in the finals of a really big tournament.”

Patti doesn’t really know anything about tennis and she doesn’t follow it. She smiles.

“Well, if I would have known that, I would have tanked and let you win to make you feel better.”

We decide to go into the disco, and we’re having a great time dancing and I’m thinking, “Man, this is too good to be true. Something has to go wrong.” Then Patti decides to call it a night. I don’t want her to leave, and I try and stall a little.

“Patti, can I ask you four questions before you leave?”

“Sure.”

“Do you play tennis?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been to a tournament?”

“No.”

“Watched one on TV?”

“No.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, because you were on the cover of
Time
magazine.”

I want to ask her one more question, but think I’ve pushed it far enough for one evening, and getting a no if I ask her out would be devastating.

The next day I call Joe.

“Hey, Joe, I was just wondering, do you know anything about Patti’s social status? I’d like to give her a call.”

“Jimmy, it’s not really my place to say, but I can check to see if it’s OK for you to call her if you want.”

He telephones me an hour later. “I’ve spoken to Patti. Here’s her number. Good luck.”

That was the start. As Joe said to Patti afterward, “Jesus Christ, I give him your number and I don’t hear anything from either of you for a week!” I’m patting myself on the back right now.

Our first date is at Carlos and Charlie’s, the club on Sunset Boulevard. I find out she grew up less than 40 minutes from where I was born, but on the St. Louis side of the river.

Late that night, we go back to my apartment, and I know for sure I’m never going to let her leave. Not in a chain-her-in-the-basement kind of way (although it does cross my mind); I just don’t want to be where she isn’t. Early the next morning, Mom pounds on my door. She’s been staying in my second bedroom, and I guess I forgot to tell Patti about that.

“Jimbo, it’s nine o’clock,” Mom calls out.

Patti bolts up in bed.

“Who the hell is that?”

“Oh, that’s just my mom,” I say.

“Your mom? Are you kidding me?!”

“Jimbo, you up?” calls Mom.

“
Jimbo?
” Patti whispers, looking at me. “I didn’t know anyone was called Jimbo anymore except on
The Waltons
.”

“That’s Jim Bob, you twit,” I say, laughing. “It’s OK, she’s cool.”

“Oh, crap. This really isn’t going to look good.”

Patti jumps out of bed and rushes to get her clothes on. She’s going to try and sneak out before Mom sees her.

“No, come and meet her,” I say.

I introduce Patti to Mom, and Mom looks pleased to meet her, I’m sure figuring she’ll never see her again. Just another one of Jimbo’s girls.

Patti and I only have a few days together before I’m back on the road again, heading for the clay courts of the Washington Star International. I know I’m going to miss her; the past few days have been everything I could ever have hoped for. More, in fact.

While I’m in DC, Patti and Joe call me from a table at Pips, where they’re having dinner.

“Hey, guess what?” says Patti. “We’re just sitting a couple of tables down from one of your old friends, Marjie Wallace, and her new husband, Michael Kline. Would you like to say hi?”

“No,” I say, laughing. I really wouldn’t. Patti and I chat for a moment, and then I make one of the best decisions of my life.

“I want you to come to Washington,” I say. “How does that sound?”

“OK, I’ll get a flight tomorrow.”

Simple as that.

Washington, DC, was a miserable 100 degrees with humidity in the nineties. Playing in that kind of weather is hard work and sucks the life out of you, with the added bonus of making everyone short-tempered. I guess it was a good thing that Patti was getting to see me in that cranky state before she found herself in too deep with me.

In the quarters I faced Hans Gildemeister, of Chile, in a match where he stopped play for almost 10 minutes, arguing a call, and then went on to question every shot that came within three inches of any line. Finally, I’d had enough. The next time he disputed a call, I told him to stop his whining.

“Play the game!” I said. “God darn it. It’s hot out here.” God
darn
it? Yeah, I know it doesn’t sound like me, but Patti was in the stands and I was trying to impress her with my maturity.

When Gildemeister answered me, he didn’t bother toning it down at all. I glanced up at Patti, hoping she’d think I was the gentleman on the court. I don’t think she was fooled for a second.

On the day of the finals, the temperature hit 108 suffocating degrees, and I came up against my buddy, Eddie Dibbs, in the best shape of his life and willing to stay out there all day. He’d already won over $500,000 in prize money that year, more than anyone else on the US circuit. Unfortunately for him, there was no way I was going to lose that match with Patti watching. I had to show her that I could at least earn a living.

It was brutal. Halfway through the match I had to change shoes; the ones I was wearing were soaked with sweat. Nowadays they have what’s called a “comfort break” for the players and the opportunity to leave the court anytime they want. But back then we couldn’t leave the court at all. So what’s a guy to do when he’s gotta, you know, go? I was pouring sweat and soaking wet, and the clay court was already damp, so I took a leak right there. (It wasn’t one of those Secretariat kind of things, but I did hit the service line.) I kept a smile on my face the entire time, and nobody noticed, not even the eagle-eyed members of the press.

The intensity of the heat drained Eddie and me of energy but not determination. It was a war of attrition, and the winner would be the last man standing, but hopefully not in my puddle. Eventually, relying on guts and relentless stubbornness, I was able to outlast Dibbs. Unlike Patti, it wasn’t pretty.

After DC, Patti agreed to come with me to Indianapolis for the national Clay Courts, her second-ever tennis tournament. But before that, we had to fly back to LA so I could pick up some fresh clothes. There wasn’t a dry-cleaner in the world who wanted to touch what I’d been wearing to win that tournament.

In Indianapolis, I wanted Patti to stay, but she had to fly back to LA after my first match for a modeling assignment. Fortunately, Patti returned in time to see me play some of the best clay-court tennis of my career, beating Mac in the quarters, Orantes in the semis, and Spain’s José Higueras in the finals. I realize that it wasn’t simply that I wanted to impress her but that something more important was happening: I was happy.

Patti, an independent woman in every sense, insisted on paying for all her plane tickets. “I’m here because I want to be with you,” she said. “Nothing else.” Even though she didn’t know much about tennis, she enjoyed cheering me on; after the matches were over, she wasn’t interested in them. Which was fine with me. I’ve never wanted to live and breathe tennis after I walked off the court. Tennis was important, it was my business, and it had offered me an escape from East St. Louis, but when it was done, it was done.

I could relax with Patti after my matches. We didn’t need to be seen out and about in public. Pretty quickly I knew she was the person I’d been looking for all my life. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere else, and I hoped she wasn’t either.

My winning streak continued through mid-August at the first-ever Grand Prix tournament staged at the Topnotch Resort, in Stowe, Vermont, where I beat Tim Gullikson in straight sets, my 69th tournament win. By then, the press had noticed Patti but didn’t know who she was. She became the “mystery woman” for the gossip columns, and Patti and I let them keep guessing. We wanted to hold on to our privacy for as long as possible.

Our cover was blown at the US Open in September, the first Open at Flushing Meadows, when photos of us together appeared in various magazines. However, we still managed to keep Patti’s identity secret in the early stages of the tournament. She was watching me practice on the first day she arrived, and during the session I noticed Chrissie approach Lornie. Later, I asked him what they talked about.

“Oh, nothing much. She just asked who the girl was.”

“What did you say?”

“I just said, uh, a new fan.”

“Good.”

The next day at practice, I was hitting with Chico Hagey, a tennis player from San Diego. We were the only ones out there; it was raining and the courts were wet. I was taking it easy, feeling relaxed and not running down every ball. At one point, Chico hit a winner down the line that I, standing like a statue at the net, made no attempt to reach. As I walked back to the baseline, I pulled my sweat pants down and mooned him for just a second to let him know how I felt about his shot. I assure you that, had I noticed the group of spectators who had gathered to watch the session, I would have been more discreet, but the days of keeping a little mystery about myself were apparently over.

It’s two sets all and I’m down 2-5 in the fifth against Adriano Panatta when I climb out of my hole and go up 6-5. Panatta is serving at deuce and I’m about to hit one of the most memorable shots of my career.

Panatta puts his serve wide to my left. I manage to get my racquet on it crosscourt, but shorter than I wanted. The ball lands in Pancho’s “winning zone,” inside the service line. Shit.
Move, Jimmy.

He’s going down the line, but his half-volley isn’t deep enough. I return down the line, but he hasn’t moved, so he’s got the whole court wide open for a crosscourt winner. I’m on a full run, hoping to get there just in time.

The ball is dying. I’m not going to make . . .

Feels like I’m going to hit the wall of spectators courtside.

I swing.

And I watch as the ball
goes around the net-cord judge’s head and . . .

I can’t see what’s happening.

The line judge is keeping his hands down.

Fucking-A! It’s IN?

I’ve seen the footage since that match. The ball flashing over the highest part of the net, past Panatta, who doesn’t move a muscle, the shot clipping the line, me leaping in the air, arms raised in triumph. I knew then that the match was mine. It can destroy you to have a sure winner snatched away like that. Sure enough, Panatta double-faulted the next point, a lucky escape for me, and I moved on to the quarters.

The shot of my life? Panatta said it best after the match.

“In Italy we say he never dies.”

Yeah, that about sums me up.

I liked Borg. Still do. We were acquaintances when we were fighting each other to be the best during the 1970s. Later on, in the 1990s, when the Senior Tour came along, we became closer. But back then he was very quiet and kept himself apart from most of the guys, except his coach, Lennart Bergelin, and Vitas. When he wasn’t on the court he was up in his room reading. Was it comic books or Shakespeare? I don’t know. But he sure wasn’t going to tell anyone.

The press dubbed him “Ice Borg.” He was cool and kept his emotions to himself. I used to throw my best material at him on the court and he never cracked a smile. Jeez, what a waste. The fans saw, and still see, Borg in a different way from, say, Mac, Nasty, Vitas, or me. We were transparent. Fans could relate to us, maybe imagine going out with us for a beer, talking about sports, or girls, but no one knew what to expect from Borg.

However, as he got older it was like he’d been let out of a cage. The trouble is, I didn’t have the stamina to keep up with him, but to be honest with you he was a lot of fun. But more on that later.

When Borg and I played, the tennis felt almost secondary to our battle of wills. His topspin style, speed around the court, and patience went against everything I stood for. I wanted to hit the ball flat, take chances, and be aggressive. Against him, that was a tough task. When Mac and I played we brought the best out in each other, because I played to his strengths and he played to mine. With Borg it was as though we were playing our own game regardless of what the other guy was doing, until one of us came out on top. Seems funny to me that I never beat him at Wimbledon, where I thought I had the advantage, and in turn he never beat me at the US Open, where maybe he had the edge. Go figure.