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Jimmy Connors, Ladies’ Man

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By JAMES KAPLAN

Published: August 23, 2013

 Technically, Jimmy Connors wasn’t the most overwhelming player. He was on the slight side; his serve was so-so, his forehand questionable. His only truly great stroke was his two-handed backhand. That he managed to win eight Grand Slam events (five U.S. Opens, two Wimbledons and one Australian Open), spend 160 consecutive weeks at No. 1 (1974-77) and rack up a record 109 career singles titles (John McEnroe and Roger Federer each have 77; Rafael Nadal has 58) is a testament, in large part, to a relentless and, at times, all-consuming will. This trait goes a long way toward explaining Connors’s most quietly astounding feat: for 16 years, he held a Top 10 ranking. In an era when tennis careers can flame out over a half-dozen seasons, Connors — who on his 39th birthday won a fourth-round U.S. Open match against the 24-year-old Aaron Krickstein in 4 hours 41 minutes — looks, in retrospect, more and more like a freak of nature or nurture or both.

A blue-collar kid from Belleville, Ill., Connors, who is now 60, joined the men’s tour as the sport was shaking its country-club gentility. He strutted combatively; he pointed fingers. His displays often crossed the bounds of good taste — he knew better than anyone how to exploit the phallic possibilities of a racket — but that was decades ago. Since then, his demons have quieted; what endures is his incomparable tennis intelligence. Last month, Connors, who was mentored on the court by both his mother and grandmother, was hired to pass some of that aptitude to Maria Sharapova, currently the No. 3 women’s player in the world, who seemed to have confronted an impenetrable barrier in the form of her nemesis, Serena Williams. (Williams has won 14 of their 16 matches.)

Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. Sharapova lost her first match as a Connors disciple at the Western & Southern Open, a tuneup for the U.S. Open. Afterward Connors tweeted, “Every good round starts with a bogey — not the start we wanted, so back to work tomorrow.” But by the end of the week, the partnership was over after only 34 days. (As it turns out, Sharapova pulled out of the Open this week.) This article is the result of several conversations, which have been condensed and edited, from before and after the short-lived experiment with Sharapova. Connors, showing a side of himself that no one who watched him in his prime would recognize, tweeted from Santa Barbara, Calif., a few days after the loss: “Back home in SB — family, pups, and home cooking. Oh — I forgot, and a vodka on the rocks.”

Q. Sharapova has achieved a tremendous amount — four Grand Slam victories — and yet appears to have hit a wall with Serena Williams. I guess you wouldn’t have signed on unless you felt that wall was breakable.

A. There comes a point with a lot of top players when they look for someone who can see something that can maybe get them over the hump. I worked with [the former player and coach] Pancho Segura when I was young, then I sought him out again when I had a bit of a career stall in the late ’70s. With somebody who has Maria’s credentials, it’s not major surgery. I guess the challenge is just to find that one little tweak that she grabs onto — that one little extra thing that she’s looking for. Because she’s not missing anything, let’s face it. Coaching her is an opportunity that came along to me when I wasn’t looking to work, really.

Q. How long have you known her?

A. We spent a little time together before she went down to Australia and won in 2008. So we’ve been friends for five, six years. I always enjoyed watching her — I like the way she goes about things. She has that attitude that I like.

Q. What kind of attitude?

A. I like seeing in somebody just what it means to them — what they’re willing to lay out there to try to be the best. Some players have it in practice, but it doesn’t catch. But it catches with Maria. She’s willing to lay it all out there in practice, and she’s not afraid to do that when she plays her matches, too. That’s pretty special to see.

Q. Your partnership ended abruptly after she lost her first match at a U.S. Open tuneup in Cincinnati. What happened?

A. No comment.

Q. Were you surprised?

A. I was just told my services were no longer needed. I wish her all the best, and I’ll always be a fan. Whenever this happens, it’s mutual.

Q. So was this a mutual decision?

A. It’s her decision for sure. She’s the player, not me.

Q. Is this the downside of trying to work with a player who has already accomplished so much?

A. I guess it depends on what you’re looking for. Taking someone from No. 2 to No. 1 — there’s a lot less room.

Q. Do you think what happened reflects the pressure it takes to be No. 1?

A. You’ve just got to do what you think is the best for you, and basically she made that decision. To go out there and grind it out, you’ve got to be good, you have to be healthy, in all ways — mentally, physically and tenniswise. And if there is something that interferes with that, then you have to make a change.

Q. You also coached Andy Roddick from 2006 to 2008. In your new book, “The Outsider,” you said that while Roddick was brilliant in practice, he wasn’t taking the progress into his tournament play. You broke off the coaching relationship. Was he not 100 percent committed?

A. He was committed. But, it’s hard to come in and work with somebody who is a past Grand Slam champion. Andy was a hard worker; I just think he could have used me a lot more in a lot of different ways.

Q. What ways?

A. I think conversation is a big thing in analyzing tennis and situations in games. As a kid, I wore Pancho Segura’s ears out just asking him things about positions and scores and on-court activities — how do you handle this when you’re ahead and that when you’re behind; what did he do and how did he do it and why did he do it that way. When he played Pancho Gonzales, why did he do this; and why did he do that against Jack Kramer. He got tired of me after a while.

Q. Your intense curiosity about tennis was pretty rare.

A. I was curious about everything, but also I was young. I was a kid and looking to grasp onto the top. Andy and Maria were already there.

Q. When you signed on with Sharapova, many likened it to Ivan Lendl coaching Andy Murray. It would seem that confidence has been a tremendous part of what Lendl has brought to the equation.

A. Go back and look at what Andy’s attitude was like on the court and how he handled situations before Lendl and then after. I think that to have somebody like Lendl, who has been in all those situations and won and lost, has been huge for Murray.

Q. Before he started working with Lendl, Murray would get down on himself easily. Which is precisely what Lendl often did during his playing days.

A. But it’s amazing that a lot of people don’t really see that. Lendl fought his way through that to become a great champion. So to have experienced that and then been able to help Murray with that — I mean, this won him an Open and a Wimbledon. That’s the way I see it. It’s not all about the tennis. At a certain level, they all play great tennis. And then it becomes more about what you’re willing to give and what you expect of yourself and being unafraid to bring that out.

Q. In your younger years, you were made fun of a lot for being coached by your mom, but one thing that impressed me about your book was the very powerful influence of women in your life.

A. Yeah, from the very beginning, from my grandmother to my mom and even with my wife, Patti, being around women and spending time with them has been just the norm for me. When I was growing up, tennis meant that I got to spend time with my mom and my grandmother. My dad wasn’t really interested in the game. To a lot of people it would have seemed more normal if I’d been taught by a man and been under the influence of a father figure — instead, I was an outsider. When you’re young, those things affect you. When you’re older you say, “That’s all right, say what you want.” But why was it O.K. for a father to teach his kids and not O.K. for Gloria Connors to teach her son? I was taught by a woman, given a woman’s game to beat men.

Q. What do you think about the modern game? In your book, you give the impression that it’s pretty two-dimensional.

A. One-dimensional. Outside of a few guys, it has become just a flat-out power game, with the emphasis too much on just one stroke, the serve. And so the variety and the imagination and what guys like Sampras and Nastase and Mac and Gerulaitis and Laver and Gonzales brought to the game is mostly gone. Not that today’s players aren’t great — they are. But outside of the top few, it just seems to be so much one way. In my day, the crowds would come and see Mac hit a tough volley or Nastase hit a topspin lob, then they could go out and play that afternoon and hit one like that and say, “I saw McEnroe do that, and I can do that, too.” That would just grab the people more into the game itself — the excitement of not only watching the tennis but also playing it. It’s very difficult for a regular guy to go hit a 150 m.p.h. serve without having his shoulder end up in St. Louis.

Q. You and McEnroe and Vitas Gerulaitis and Ilie Nastase, among others, were so wonderful to watch not only because of the tennis itself but also because of your pugnacity and style. You guys brought in an audience for tennis that had never existed before and has never been seen since.

A. We weren’t afraid to step out of bounds. But it was a different time. In a way, tennis was new then, too. Even with all the great players that had come before my generation, the game was really coming out of the country clubs. We stepped into a Wild West show: there were no rules, because tennis didn’t know how to handle things like that. They were scrambling to figure out what to do. “Well, we gotta calm the players down a little bit, but how much do we calm them down, because look, last night we had 4,000 people in the stands, and tonight we’ve got 9,000.” How do you calm that down when tennis is looking to grow and to become as popular as baseball, basketball, football and the rest of the big sports? Everybody before today fought for it. We wanted big sponsors and big television contracts and big crowds. That’s what we fought for, and it certainly is more fun to go play in front of 25,000 than 2,500.

Q. A lot of that audience has wandered away now.

A. I hate to hear that, but I think with Murray stepping up and Djokovic playing well, if Nadal can get healthy and Federer can step up again and get his game in order, that would be great. But some good young kids need to start giving them a challenge. Some of these good young guys need to start making their presence known in the majors, so that it’s not just Roger and the rest of the foursome that you’re talking about every week. And say what you want about it, but a couple of them should be American, too.

Q. You had that miraculous ’91 Open at age 39. Does Federer have another act in him?

A. To say 32 is old — it’s almost degrading to even feel that way. But you’ve got to look at the outside more than the inside, and the outside is he’s got two kids, he’s played a long time, he’s won 17 Grand Slams, and the older you get, two things enter into it: One is how you stay in shape, and the other is what you’re willing to put into it. Even if you’re willing to put in that time, you’re still going to take your shots — be dismissed. When I hit a rough patch in the late 1970s, I took my shots for three years.

Q. People were saying you were done.

A. And I was 26 or 27. So not getting discouraged is a big thing — continuing no matter what’s being said about you. To go out and be able to push all that aside, that’s where mental toughness comes in.

Q. Can you teach mental toughness?

A. To a certain point, but I think that’s got to be in you — I don’t think a coach can just go up to a player and say, “O.K., you’re mentally tough now.” Also I really had an I-don’t-care attitude — I went my own way — and that’s hard with the kind of endorsement money and prize money that are in tennis today. I wonder if my attitude and the way I went about things would fly now. I don’t think they would. Tennis was the only thing for me. I had endorsements and everything, but winning was everything to me. Don’t get me wrong — the money was very important, but winning came first.

Q. Toward the end of the book, you make a quick, semi-humorous reference to anger management. Did you ever see a therapist about anger? McEnroe has been on the record about having addressed that in his life.

A. I addressed it every day for years when I would take my dogs for a walk. I don’t say that lightly. I called my dogs my shrinks. I vented plenty on the court, but once I retired, it got a little trickier. With my dogs, no matter what I said or did, those tails would still be wagging. They’d come up to me like, It’s O.K., Dad, it’s all right, let it out, that’s not a problem, let’s go on a walk. My dogs never judged me. I would come back from walking them and be a different guy when I’d walk in my house.

Q. Is there any of that old edge between you and McEnroe, or has that mellowed out?

A. Sure, it’s mellowed, but if that ever ended, to me that would be a shame. We should compete over who gets to the bananas first in the grocery store. I say that with a big smile on my face, because it was just such a special rivalry — a total rivalry on and off the court. Even today, when we just go out and hit some balls at the Open, I don’t want to miss. And he doesn’t either. We’d go at each other on a backyard court if there was nobody watching. You just can’t buy something like that, and I don’t say it with any animosity — I say it with nothing but respect, because I thought I had some really special rivalries. Lendl was one, Borg was one, Nasty [Nastase] was one; I had a good one with Vitas Gerulaitis and Guillermo Vilas. And with Mac, it was just all-out wa — . . . battles.

Q. You almost said “war.”

A. I did — but I don’t want to do that. It’s a different time.

This article updates the print version, which had gone to press before Sharapova pulled out of the tournament.

INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.

James Kaplan co-wrote John McEnroe’s autobiography, “You Cannot Be Serious,” and is working on the second volume of a biography about Frank Sinatra.

Editor: Jon Kelly

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