The Outsider: A Memoir (29 page)

Shortly before we went out to play our semi, the concierge delivered a box to my hotel room. Lelly, who was traveling with me, received it and put it aside for me to open later. It was only after I beat Chesnokov in straight sets and Lelly and I returned to the hotel, did either of us notice that the box was supposed to have been delivered to Chesnokov. It was the new pair of tennis shoes that he was supposed to have worn in the match against me. Oops.

After beating Andrei, I played my old nemesis, McEnroe, on Sunday, October 15, in the finals and came away with a 6-3, 6-3 victory—my 108th tournament title.

From Toulouse I went to Tel Aviv, and had one of the most incredible experiences of my life. Gerry Goldberg had arranged another private tour, and we took a helicopter to the Dead Sea, where we ate lunch at a beach resort, then spent a couple of hours floating in the salty water. As we were heading back to Tel Aviv, we spotted a Bedouin tent in the desert and asked the pilot to land. We didn’t know what to expect, so the pilot left the engine running as he approached a Bedouin to ask if we would be welcome.

They treated us to some special hospitality, inviting us into their tent and bringing out some ancient cups that looked like they hadn’t been used for quite some time. They cleaned out the cups and served us tea. I felt like I was an extra in
Lawrence of Arabia
until the Bedouin’s son came into the tent wearing a pair of Jimmy Connors Converse shoes! I really, really didn’t want to leave my new fans but I had a match to play that evening. Always take care of your business, Jimmy.

I beat Israel’s Gilad Bloom 2-6, 6-2, 6-2 to win the Riklis Grand Prix event. The prize money was $20,000, and I donated it all to the Israel Tennis Center, where we were playing and Gerry was on the board. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but that win, my 109th victory on the main tour, was my last.

The discomfort in my left foot didn’t worry me too much at the time, but over the following few weeks, what had started as an ache turned into a sharp pain, which required surgery by November. That left me convalescing for three months, unable to move around very easily and certainly in no condition to accept Merv Griffin’s renewed offer to host
Wheel of Fortune
and tape five shows a day come January. The slot went to Rolf Benirschke, the San Diego Chargers’ kicker, and I was left to imagine how upset poor Vanna must have been to miss out on my suave one-liners.

My foot injury set me back significantly in terms of match fitness. I didn’t return to competitive tennis until early February, when I lost in the second round in Chicago to teenager Michael Chang, quickly followed by a quarterfinal loss to Kevin Curren in Memphis.

To have any prayer of getting back to where I thought I should be, I realized some radical thinking was required. Off-pace and off-target, I needed as many matches as possible to sharpen my game, so I decided to hit the clay circuit of Europe once again, playing both singles and doubles, a tactic I hadn’t employed for years. It was punishing playing on those painfully slow surfaces, which meant grinding out every point. That was the whole idea, I guess, to build fitness and consistency, but it wasn’t a lot of fun.

In Monte Carlo, I fell to Italian Paolo Canè in the second round (Spain’s Sergio Casal and I went out in the first round of the doubles), then performed a similar disappearing act a week later in Munich, this time at the hands of Argentine Martín Jaite, in the singles, and again with Sergio in the second round of the doubles. These defeats took me out of the world’s top 10 for the first time since computer rankings began, in 1973.

OK, this was not going according to plan.

Publicly, I joked about relishing the prospect of becoming a dangerous, unseeded floater in the Slams if my position dropped any further, but privately my form worried me. With no disrespect to Canè or Jaite, it was clear I required more than a good workout if I was to save my season; I needed to be battling the best players around and my early exits from tournaments was making that impossible.

Salvation arrived in the form of an exhibition in France, made possible by the fact that I had never signed with the ATP. Directly after my defeat in Munich, Billy Lelly took a call at our hotel, asking if I’d be free to play against Becker and a couple of young Australians in a bullring in Lille, France. For any ATP member, the answer would have had to be no, because of a rule prohibiting players from participating in two events in a week. No such restriction applied to me. Give me a day to fulfill my obligations to the organizers in Munich, glad-handing a few corporate sponsors, that sort of thing, and I’m there.

Turned out to be a good call. The arena they’d constructed suited my game far better than the clay in the previous two tournaments, and Becker pushed me hard. My game improved almost immediately, resulting in a better showing in Hamburg a week later, where I made it through to the quarters.

I wasn’t the most popular guy in town that week, although that was hardly new territory for me. Some of the players were pissed at me for managing to squeeze in the extra, well-paid event that they had to refuse.

“But guys,” I would explain, “I’ve always said there’s a big bonus in being independent.”

“Screw you, Connors,” they’d reply sweetly.

My trek across Europe continued in Rome with the Italian Open, which I’d never won and hadn’t participated in since Nasty and I lost in the doubles final of 1975. There was a reason I hadn’t been back.

Once, Nasty and I were playing a pair of young Italians in one of the early round doubles matches on an outside show court, the crowds were giving us some trouble while they rooted for the hometown favorites. Nasty, who speaks fluent Italian, wasn’t taking it lightly. He was giving back better than he got. The match was close, and as we took the lead in the third set the crowd’s abuse turned ugly. They started throwing coins, drinks, food, shoes, babies—everything they could at us in an attempt to spur on their countrymen. It didn’t happen.

Now, knowing that things were going to be tense, I had moved my bag to the other side of the court so I could make a quick getaway, if necessary. Nasty, on the other hand, thought everything would be fine, so he left his bag near the crowd. As soon as we won the match, the angry fans stormed the court, and headed directly for us. I grabbed my bag and took off running. I’m pretty fast when I need to be, and I thought Nasty was behind me, but just as I turned to look for him, he passed me, the mob hot on his heels. We made it to the locker room just in time and bolted the door. We were held in there until they cleared out not just our court but the whole stadium. We eventually left accompanied by armed guards.

I was always willing to improve myself, and those hot-blooded Italians made an art form out of throwing a tantrum. And to this day it’s one of the things I admire most about them. Rome remains one of my favorite places in the world, even though to this day when I walk down the street I still look over my shoulder for a flying piece of rotten fruit. In addition to their fiery temperament, the Italians also have long memories.

My performance in the singles improved as I reached the third round after a marathon two-and-a-half-hour match with Massimo Cierro, from Naples, played on what I think is best described as thick soup, following heavy rainfall. We eventually finished at 11 o’clock at night with my legs like Jell-O, which showed the next day in my 1-6, 1-6 loss to Sergi Bruguera, a young Spanish kid half my age. Literally. And I felt every one of the 18 years that separated us.

None of this preparation did me much good at either the French or Wimbledon. A kid from New Jersey, Jay Berger, beat me in the second round at Roland Garros, and in London, Iowan Dan Goldie did the same. The only bright spot came in the doubles in Paris, where I was playing with Vitas. Vitas had been on the receiving end of some pretty harsh press concerning the state of his fitness, so he had both of us walk out onto the court for our first-round match on crutches. We won a lot of friends that day. The same couldn’t be said for points. The red clay of Paris took its toll as we fell to our first-round opponents, but this match with Vitas was one I would never forget, because it was the last time that Vitas would have the opportunity to play on such a big stage.

I still had the US Open in my sights; playing well there could salvage my year. I destroyed French and Wimbledon runner-up Stefan Edberg in the fourth round, 6-2, 6-3, 6-1, silencing a lot of people who thought I didn’t have a chance including the moron who a couple of days earlier after my victory over Andrés Gómez shouted out from the stands, “Let’s go, old man!”

Worse, I cramped badly after the Gómez match, requiring two and a half hours of medical attention and intravenous drips before I could even leave the stadium. The smart money next day had me withdrawing. Who were they kidding? Had they forgotten what tournament it was?

Against Edberg, I played some of the best tennis I had in a long time, maintaining a level throughout the match that I’d only been able to reach occasionally over the past couple of years. The New York Mets were playing across the parking lot at Shea Stadium, where they kept flashing my scores against Edberg, and I could hear the cheers every time I was in the lead. Did I just make that up? Doesn’t matter. This was
my
tournament. The fans at the Open demanded more from me than any others in the world.

The previous year, 1988, at the same stage of the tournament, the quarters, I’d been beaten in straight sets by Andre Agassi. Afterward he came out with a smart-ass comment that I didn’t appreciate: “I didn’t think Jimmy had that much in him.”

(Really? You obviously changed your mind a few years later, Andre, when you came asking for coaching assistance. Let me refresh your memory. We met up at Southern California’s Sherwood Country Club and spent a morning hitting balls together with John Lloyd. I’d have been interested in working with you back then. You had bags of talent, but you weren’t making the most of it. So it never panned out. Maybe you didn’t like my price. I don’t know. Remember that, Andre?)

When I heard what the 18-year-old Las Vegas native had said and how he predicted before the match that he’d beat me easily, I just shook my head. Kid, maybe you should have considered winning something bigger than Charleston or Stratton Mountain before running your mouth.

In the press conference, I fired back: “Well, hell, I used to spend a lot of time in Vegas, and I am old enough to be his father. Stranger things have happened.”

Now, in 1989, I wanted to take him down. I almost made it. A combination of flat Coke and Gatorade helped me through the second set, when the heat in the stadium caused me to feel nauseated and dizzy. In the fifth, 20,000 raucous New York fans helped me storm back when I was 0-4 down. I pulled back to 4-5 and sensed him beginning to choke, but I didn’t quite have the legs to finish the job. He held on, no thanks to anything special he came up with. My energy levels just dropped too far for me to push my 37-year-old body over the line. That’s all. Shit happens.

I’d first met Agassi when he was four years old, in Vegas during the Alan King Classic. His father used to string my racquets when I came to town for a tournament. He was one of the best in the business. He loved tennis, and I got to know him pretty well. I liked Mike Agassi, still do, so when he asked me to hit with little Andre, I happily agreed. Even at that age it was clear he had something, and I said so to his father, paying his son an honest compliment. According to Andre, his dad was annoyed because he hadn’t been seeking confirmation of his son’s talent. Funny how he had such a vivid memory of something that happened when he was only four years old . . .

Agassi was never my kind of guy, but why should he be? He was from a different generation. He had that whole “Image Is Everything” approach going on, and it worked for his era, no doubt about it. He brought a lot of people to tennis, which was a good thing, since the sport needed him at that stage in its history. Years later, it turned out that the image was nothing but an act. Tennis gave Agassi everything—his fame, his money, his reputation, even his current wife—and he went on to knock it in his book. All that playing up to the fans who had provided him with an exceptional living—it was a bluff. For me tennis was all about standing out there and being honest, not pretending to be something I wasn’t.

People admire Agassi for fighting his way back after dropping way down the rankings in 1997. I get that, but you can also look at it like this. He should never have let himself sink so low. He had a huge talent but when things got tough for a while, he put his head in his hands and let it beat him

I was there at Flushing Meadows in 2006, coaching Andy Roddick, on the day of Agassi’s last match, when Benjamin Becker ousted him in the third round. Agassi walked into the locker room and everyone stood clapping. Not me, not my style. I wasn’t trying to deliberately disrespect him; I just didn’t care about him, and he didn’t affect my life in any way.

At the 1988 Open, even Donald Trump couldn’t get a ticket to sit in one of the boxes, so Gerry Goldberg invited him into mine to watch my quarterfinal against Agassi. After the second set, it was pretty clear who was going to win. Trump got up, left, and reappeared seconds later in Agassi’s box. I guess he knew where the cameras would be.

19

RESURRECTION

T
he following February, in 1990, I decide to play my first tournament of the year, an indoor event in Milan. In the first round I’m up against Markus Zoecke, a big-serving German guy I’ve never heard of. It’s not a match I like to think about too often. It’s 5-5 in the third when he hits his first serve long. I go to flick the ball away with my racquet and—
snap
—my left hand is flapping as if there’s nothing but skin keeping it attached to my arm.

I shake it off and keep on playing. I’m finally beaten 7-5 in the tiebreaker in the third set.

After the match I was taken to the local hospital to have my wrist checked out. I don’t know where the hell they put me; was it the ER or an operating room? All I know was that over in the corner—now, all you OCD people reading this will surely feel my pain—was a pile of bloody rags. Was someone just shot? Oh, my God. This place isn’t clean. Not only did I lose the match; I was gonna die from some infection. I turned to Lelly: “Get me out of here. We’re going back to Belleville!”

After the match I took the first flight home to start on a round of visits to specialists, trying to work out what was wrong with my wrist and what I could do about it. Rest, rest, rest. All the wrist specialists in New York and everywhere else told me the same thing. No one seemed to have a clear idea what the problem actually was.

In January, Patti and I had moved our family to Connecticut from Santa Ynez. Not one of my smartest decisions. I was 37 and thought it made sense to be within hopping distance of the European tournament circuit. I could take the Concorde back and forth to the US to see my family two days a week—it was all part of the guarantees—and the only thing it cost me was the flight time. I’d uprooted the kids and the dogs and moved into our new house during an East Coast winter. Unlike Patti and me, Brett and Aubree loved the snow, even though they were sick every other weekend (California kids). By June we were back in California.

In the middle of all of this, a multi-year saga with my brother Johnny began. The tangled deals and contracts and, most painfully, the lawyers who became involved are too crazy and complex to go into unless my publisher would like a second volume of my life story. Suffice it to say that I was at the heart of it and I didn’t understand it, and I still don’t. What mattered most were the consequences. They cut deep into my family, opening wounds that took years and lots of heartache to heal.

Through it all, I kept asking myself, “Why didn’t Johnny just ask for the money? Why didn’t he just say, ‘Look, Jimmy, I’m in on a deal. I need funds, do you mind?’ ”

I’d have said yes. He’s my brother, I love him, and he’s the guy I looked up to as a kid, followed around, modeled myself after. Of course I would have agreed.

What matters most is that my brother and I are good friends again, and I enjoy spending time with him, even though sometimes I want to blow my brains out just thinking about what happened over the course of a 17-year period when our relationship was so fractured it appeared impossible to ever rebuild.

The first signs of trouble arose around early 1990. Until that point, Mom had been running my business on her own, but it was getting to be too much for her. She had asked Johnny to step in and help out, an idea I agreed with at the time. Mom didn’t need the hassle of tracking the prize money, endorsements, and guarantees. She’d done more than enough for me over the years, and if she felt the time had come to take a backseat, Johnny was the obvious one to drive the gravy train.

While he was helping Mom, Johnny had the opportunity to launch a riverboat casino in East St. Louis, as part of a package aimed at reenergizing the area and supplementing state finances. The mayor’s office was looking at the possibility of changing the laws to allow no-table-limit gambling on the Mississippi, and it looked like a license would be granted, effective January 1991. Johnny was at the center of the action.

Johnny is smart and streetwise, knows how to hustle and make things happen. So when he left my business to concentrate on this new potentially lucrative venture, I didn’t think anything of it.

Only thing was, I noticed that my bank balance wasn’t going up as much as it should have, considering the amount of money that was coming in. We decided to dig into the accounts to work out what the problem was, and that’s when we discovered that Johnny had been dipping his hand into the cookie jar big-time.

Why didn’t he just ask me for a loan? I think it was pride; he wanted it to look like he could pull off the deal by himself. He needed seed money, which I figure he meant to pay back when the riverboat was up and running and turning a profit. Kind of like he wanted to be able to say, “Hey, Jimmy, Mom, look what I’ve done.” But everything blew up before any of that could happen, and that triggered years of unnecessary upset and pain.

Mom took it hard. She was proud of the way she managed my business, and when all of this came out, she blamed herself for getting Johnny involved in the first place and for not keeping a closer eye on things. No matter how many times I told her that none of it was her fault, she was never able to shake the guilt she felt.

It was an ugly situation that ended up in years of separation from my brother. First, Mom was pissed at Johnny, then he got pissed at her, and when he did that I got pissed at him. Pretty soon everyone was pissing on everybody, including Patti and the kids, who heard all the yelling and screaming on the phone almost every day.

Then I made a disastrous mistake. On Mom’s recommendation, I hired this lawyer from Belleville to sort out the mess. I had too much on my mind, and if my career was going to keep going forward, I had to trust the attorney. (Did I just say that?)

After Patti and I moved back to California from Connecticut, I was feeling restless so I packed my bags and headed to Europe to play a couple of events. Racquets, shoes, shorts, shirts. And a bottle of Novocain and a syringe. If you have enough of that stuff in you, nothing hurts, even a wrist that’s shot to pieces and getting worse the more you play.

I lasted two tournaments, failing to win a single match. Now, I was really mad. Back to moping around, popping painkillers, feeling sorry for myself, and wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life. What was left if tennis abandoned me? I got so caught up in my own misery that I even forgot to pick up Aubree, then five years old, from grade school one afternoon, leaving her waiting and anxious in the schoolyard. And even though she laughs about it to this day, she won’t let me live it down.

Eventually Patti had enough and called our local orthopedist, Dr. Rick Scheinberg, a friend and avid tennis player who had previously performed surgery on my foot.

“You’ve got to come over and take a look at Jimmy. He’s not good.”

Dr. Scheinberg didn’t take long to make up his mind. “You, tomorrow morning, nine o’clock, at my place. Be ready for an operation. I’ll tell you now: If you’re not there, if you wait even a day longer, you’re going to be finished. There’ll be nothing I, or anyone else, can do to save your wrist.”

He performed the operation without general anesthetic, by cutting off the blood supply from my shoulder. It’s called a Bier block. Within seconds my whole arm was dead. It was explained to me that I could only stay like this for an hour and a half without risking permanent damage. The doctor didn’t know exactly what he was going to find when he opened up my wrist, and there wouldn’t be a second chance. Going back in at a later date and poking around would only weaken whatever repair he’d managed the first time. Whether 90 minutes would be enough to save my career, we’d both have to wait and see.

How did I feel? How do you think? Scared shitless. This wasn’t how I wanted it all to end.

With a sheet tented up over my arm, I was unable to watch the doctor operate, but I was alert and talking to the doctor and explaining to him how to do his job. (Yes, you’re right, I took too many pills before I saw him.) Finally, I let him get down to business and do what he had to do. Time was running out.

The damage was worse than we thought. One of the tendons on the inside of my left wrist, which essentially held my entire game together had been frayed bare against the bone and was hanging by a thread, waiting to snap.

My doctor figured I only had days to spare before it blew, taking with it any hope of me ever picking up a racquet again. In the 90 minutes that my arm was numb, he had to reconnect the tendon, rebuild the shattered sheath that protects it, and sew everything back in place in such a way that my wrist would be capable of withstanding the repeated assaults of a five-set tennis match.

I am not a good invalid. I hate hanging around doing nothing. I need to be active, getting things done. But with my arm in a full cast all I could do was sit around and feel sorry for myself. Patti would come home from shopping and find me curled up in a ball on the sofa, staring into space like a zombie. I was in terrible pain, and it wasn’t physical. Dr. Scheinberg came to check up on me, and he wasn’t there to hand out sympathy.

“Jimmy, get your ass out there and start training. I don’t care what everyone else says, I didn’t operate for you to screw it up by not being ready to play. I thought you were a fighter.”

That did it. I’ve never walked away from anything in my life. I didn’t plan on starting now on account of a goddamn cast on my arm.

That’s when David Schneider called to say he was coming for a visit. Actually, I think Patti called him because she was sick of my moping.

I was in the full cast for eight weeks so my wrist would stay immobile, then a half-cast to below my elbow for four more weeks, which allowed me the luxury of squeezing tennis balls in my weakened hand. A couple of weeks of building the muscles back up and the cast was practically just for show, protecting my wrist but allowing me to just about pick up a racquet. Baby steps.

“When that comes off, then we’ll know. If your wrist lasts a month after that, it will last forever.” OK, doc. Thanks.

On my backyard court, I started off almost as a beginner. My kids would come out and gently toss balls to me, and I would gently pat them back. Dink. Dink. Dink. I also started on the backboard for three or four five-minute sessions a day. Slowly, my confidence returned. By early 1991 I knew I had to test myself in match conditions, and do it quickly. The world of tennis has a short memory, and my ATP ranking of 936 suggested I was all but forgotten.

A new generation of sluggers had ridden into town: Agassi, Sampras, Courier. They hadn’t even been in high school when I won my first Wimbledon, and here they were cleaning out what they saw as the old guard: Becker, Lendl, Edberg. Where did I fit in? And the new racquets they used sent balls flying at you harder and faster. Was I too far out of touch already? Clinging desperately to past glories? That’s not how I wanted to be remembered. (By the way, my wrist got hardly any press at all, while today a player gets a hangnail and becomes front-page news.)

For all that I had achieved in the game, I had a sense that the next few months were going to define my career—for better or worse. It was a risk, but I had to find out if I could still cut it.

It’s fall 1990 and I’m throwing up at the side of the Santa Barbara City College track.

It’s not a good look for anyone, but for a 38-year-old man in a rubber sweat suit with his arm in a cast, it doesn’t get much more uncool.

“What the fuck are you doing, Jimbo? Why don’t you just quit? Who needs this at your age? It’s over. You’re finished. Why are you doing this to yourself?”

I look up at Schneider, standing over me. He came out to California a few days ago. I picked him up at the airport in my Porsche and drove with the window down and my cast sticking out, taking a mountain pass one-handed, juggling the steering wheel, the gearshift, and the clutch.

“You’re nuts, Connors. You know that? Bloody nuts.”

I love Schneider. He’s a true friend. I don’t have many, only a small circle of loyal buddies I’ve known for years, and that’s the way I like it. Loyalty is important to me, and it cuts both ways. I don’t want just anyone having a look inside my private life. Too many people have screwed me in the past, but once you’re in with me, you’re in for life. David is one of those guys I can count on one hand.

He’s come all this way from Florida just to help me get into shape. “You’re a loser, Jimbo,” he tells me early one morning when I’m struggling to get out the door and go for a run. He knows the buttons to push. This time, though, I don’t think he’s playing mind games. He’s worried about me.

“David, I can’t quit,” I tell him, catching my breath and feeling the stomach acid burn the back of my throat. “I feel like a warrior with no war. I’ve got to fight one more time.”

That’s what it comes down to, that’s why I’m killing myself out here—to pursue the dream of one last fight, one last heavyweight clash at the US Open. The jogging, the sprint drills, the stamina building and lung-busting runs up the steep hill in the nearby Chumash Indian reservation—all of it is necessary. You see, I’m not finished with tennis, even if it looks as though tennis is finished with me.

My comeback began down in Florida, where I had a few practice matches with some buddies I knew from my time living there. That got me moving on a court again, but I needed tournaments to see exactly how far I’d come and still had to go. You would think I’d have been welcomed with open arms, the old warhorse preparing for one last charge, all that. Come on, that’s got to be an angle for some sharp-eyed promoter to exploit. OK, I admit I was asking for up-front payments because I have never believed in selling myself short, but this was a sure thing! The publicity would be huge!

Nope. Nobody wanted to take a chance on a broken-down tennis player whose best days were so far in the distance you’d need high-powered binoculars to catch sight of them. The Connors show was over. Barnum & Bailey had folded up their tents and moved on to where the younger guys played. I’d been discarded.

The only call I got during that time was from Billie Jean King and her partner, Ilana Kloss, who asked if I was interested in playing Team Tennis.