Jimmy Connors: The Hellion of Tennis

The best show in men’s tennis in recent weeks opened beside the pool at the exclusive Beverly Hills Tennis Club. The world’s No. 1 player was nursing a sprained ankle, but the injury did not stop him from uninhibitedly demonstrating a self-choreographed twist-and-shake step he calls “Soul Train.” Nor did the sedate surroundings squelch his urge to sing a few bars from the rock song Philadelphia Freedom in an uncertain tenor or to entertain the club’s teenagers with raunchy jokes. James Scott Connors, 22 going on 19, was taking his own kind of time-out from training for this Saturday’s televised million-dollar match with the world’s No. 2 player, Australian John Newcombe.

From Beverly Hills he flew off to Las Vegas for a day to consult with Songwriter-Singer Paul Anka, who has confected a ditty called I Believe There’s Nothing Stronger Than Our Love, about Jimmy Connors’ revived romance with the First Lady of Tennis, Chris Evert, 20. Connors, who has never sung professionally, will record the song himself. After meeting with Anka, Connors hopped back to Los Angeles to greet Evert, who had just jetted in from Philadelphia for a tournament.

The reunion was going fine until Connors had a sudden onset of chest pains and thought he had suffered a heart attack. Jimmy checked into Marina Mercy Hospital in Marina del Ray, arriving in a disguise to avoid autograph hunters. Some Washington, D.C., tennis fans who were expecting to see him play in a tournament there charged that he was faking. After all, Connors had pulled out of other tournaments this year with vague ills. Jimmy did not end the skepticism when he passed the time waiting for test results (which proved negative) by practicing tennis and repeatedly pratfalling as he clutched his chest and screamed, “Oh, my heart, my heart!”

Connors saved his lowest comedy for last. On a rainy afternoon at an old Hollywood sound stage turned indoor court, the 1974 Wimbledon and Forest Hills champion missed a shot during practice and unabashedly yanked down the seat of his pants before half a dozen wide-eyed watchers.

By now, tennis fans are used to such antics. Ever since the young man with the impish grin, two-fisted backhand and high-octane temper burst into pro tennis three years ago, the keepers of decorum have been alternating between disgust at his behavior and admiration for his play. Rumania’s Ilie (“Nasty”) Nastase, of course, has for years been notorious for his displays of anger and unsportsmanlike conduct, but James Connors has taken the art of on-court temperament to new heights — or depths. Given an audience, Connors can seldom resist the temptation to ham. Occasionally he loses control and crosses the boundary of mischief into malice. When that happens, usually at a taut moment in a match, Connors can explode in one of the self-indulgent tantrums that have earned him his reputation as the world’s reigning Tennis Brat and Bad Boy. Much of the time, though, off the court as well as on, he is simply a friendly, uninhibited urchin.

“I like my image,” Connors says.

“It’s me.” He has good reason to be pleased with himself: taking the starch out of tennis has proved to be highly profitable. His income this year could reach $ 1 million, with only a quarter of that coming from tournament winnings — at a time when tennis has busted out of its country-club cocoon to become one of the nation’s most popular spectator and participant sports with an estimated 34 million players. Jimmy Connors, the hellion of tennis, has become a leader and symbol of the upheaval.

This Saturday he hits the richest pay dirt in tennis history — the battle with Newcombe at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Encouraged by the success of last February’s nationally televised winner-take-all match between Connors and Rod Laver (which Jimmy won by a score of 6-4, 6-2, 3-6, 7-5), CBS is paying $600,000 for the rights to broadcast live this second “Heavyweight Championship of Tennis.” Caesars Palace is adding a purse of $250,000 plus $50,000 for expenses. The sale of foreign broadcast rights should yield another $100,000. The approximate payoff: the winner $400,000, the loser $250,000 and the promoter (Connors’ manager Bill Riordan) $300,000.

Though Connors, a lefty, took 14 of the 20 tournaments he played in last year, including Wimbledon and Forest Hills, many fans still consider Newcombe the world’s premier player. Newcombe, 30, has won Wimbledon three times (1967, ’70, ’71) and Forest Hills twice (1967, ’73). Moreover, he beat Connors in both of the tournament matches that the two have played, including the tightly contested final of the Australian Open earlier this year.

Newcombe’s two victories over Connors came on grass, a fast surface suited to his serve-and-volley power game. The Las Vegas match will be on a slower synthetic surface, but Newcombe seems too strong to be seriously handicapped by a dull court. When he is pent up, Newcombe lets go with the toughest serve in tennis, and no one has a more murderous volley.

He is also a brilliant tactician, capable of the drop shots and lobs that make for a varied pace of play. He expects that hard-soft mix to be a telling weapon against Connors. “This will be a mental battle,” Newcombe says. “I won’t be offensive all the time. I’ll stay back and slow-ball him sometimes and let him make the mistakes.”

Connors has his own weapons. At 5 ft. 10 in., 150 lbs., he cannot match the brawn of Newcombe (6 ft., 173 lbs.), but he has the most consistent, well-rounded attack in tennis. His game is built on quickness, conditioning and a savagely total concentration. Blessed with stamina, fast reflexes and a long-distance vision that allows him to read the ball’s direction of flight the instant it leaves his opponent’s racket, Connors will return shots others cannot reach.

I don’t like the ball,” he says. “I don’t like that little thing coming back over the net.” To keep it away, Connors hits every shot, especially his two-fisted backhand, with jackhammer force, pounding down an opponent with his nonstop attack. Small-bodied, he gets his power from outsize muscular shoulders and a swing calibrated to bang the ball on the rise, a technique first taught him by his mother, Gloria, and later stressed by Pancho Segura, the wily pro who has been Connors’ instructor for the past six years. “Never let a ball come to you” is Segura’s First Law. Charge the ball, he insists, lean into it and meet it on the rise. That attack tactic maximizes power and control and allows the player to move toward the net after the shot.

“Jimmy is the closest thing we have to a complete player,” says Segura. “He can do everything.” Most pros agree. Says Marty Riessen: “Jimmy has oodles of talent.” While Connors lacks Newcombe’s power serve (in fact, Jimmy’s serve is the weakest part of his game), he is a master of approach shots, top-spin lobs and overhead smashes. But the keys to his game are his ground strokes, particularly service returns. “When Jimmy gets grooved returning serves, he’s really dangerous,” says Stan Smith, co-ranked No. 1 with Connors last year. Tennis experts agree that Connors’ chances against Newcombe depend on his counter to the Australian’s serve.

Like Newcombe, Connors is adept at mixing strokes. “When a guy’s playing Jimmy,” says Pancho, “he doesn’t know what to expect. Jimmy will stay back and play base line, then rush the net. He can lob you or beat you down the alley with a winner. He’s impossible to predict.” Much of the credit for that unpredictability belongs to Segura, a Clausewitz of subtle shots and stratagems. As a small player who uses a two-handed forehand, Segura is in many ways the perfect teacher for Connors. Before all of Connors’ big matches, he and Pancho, currently teaching pro at La Costa, a resort north of San Diego, review the opponent’s style and prepare a game plan. “I tell him how to beat these guys,” says Segura.

Segura and Connors concentrate on such nuances as playing percentages and angles. “My first instinct is to hit the hell out of the ball,” says Connors. “I’m still learning to control that. If you’re serving down 30-40, you don’t play like it’s 40-love. You just try to get the first serve in.” On taking advantage of angles, Connors says, “You’ve got to use the open court. If my opponent and I are both at the base line, I’m going to hit cross court to his backhand, and if he hits back to my forehand, I’ll go down the line. If he returns that, my next shot might be a short, top-spin drive back across court. That way I’ve always got him running.”

Connors tops these tactics and skills with a pitiless competitive instinct. “Jimmy was taught to be a tiger on the court,” says his tigress mother. “When he was young, if I had a shot I could hit down his throat, I did. And I’d say, ‘See, Jimmy, even your mother will do that to you.’ ” Connors learned well. “No one’s ever given me anything on the court,” he says. “Maybe that’s one reason I prefer singles. It’s just me and you. When I win, I don’t have to congratulate anyone. When I lose, I don’t have to blame anyone.”

In a match, Jimmy can become a man possessed. He yells at himself, flaunts insults and makes gestures at hecklers. Sometimes he will slow play by bouncing the ball ten or twelve times before he serves. Last year he even leaped into the stands to go after a boisterous fan. What the public does not see or hear can be just as livid. As spectators in Las Vegas gave Rod Laver a standing ovation before their February match, Connors was standing next to Segura, his mother and Evert, howling back obscenity after obscenity.

Why does he do it? “I play tennis for two reasons,” says Connors. “I like to hit balls, and I like to entertain. My behavior gets people involved, and I think that’s what the game needs.” As the bad guy, Connors believes that “people pay to see me get beaten.”

Not all of the outbursts are calculated. “He’s two completely different people on and off the court,” says Evert. “The madder he gets, the better he plays. Jimmy can’t beat someone he likes. He has to hate the person he’s playing.” Connors admits that he thrives on antagonism. “I like to have fans against me,” he says. “I want to do everything I can to get them against me more. When they’re yelling at me, I really get into the match. I guess I’m trying to show them that no matter how much they hate me, they have to respect the way I play.”

Frequently, Connors adds, his tensions produce unintentional outbursts. “I’m hot, I’m thirsty, I’m tired, and I hear people yelling at me, and I crack. I’m so intense and tightly strung I sometimes don’t know what I’m doing. Afterward I have to laugh at myself.”

Not surprisingly, Connors has alienated most of his fellow pros. “He ain’t one of the boys,” says Arthur Ashe. “Right now he’s sorely misguided. We hardly say hello.” As a group, the world’s top players are almost unanimously for Newcombe. “Never will I root so hard for an Australian to beat an American,” admits one U.S. player. Their dislike for Connors is based only in part on his court behavior. They also resent the ways in which he has thumbed his nose at the tennis establishment. Items:

> He has refused to play on the U.S. Davis Cup team for the past two years on the grounds that it is selected and managed unfairly; without him the squad lost embarrassing early-round matches to Colombia and Mexico.

> He has played on a small winter indoor circuit run by his manager Bill Riordan, refusing to join most of the pros on the big-time World Championship Tennis (W.C.T.) tour.

> He has hit directors of the Association of Tennis Professionals (A.T.P.), the players’ union he has refused to join, with a $41 million lawsuit. It charges that leaders of the A.T.P. violated antitrust laws by allegedly conspiring with organizers of the French Open to bar Connors and others from that tournament because they were not playing regularly on the European summer circuit.

When Connors was barred from the French Open in 1974, he lost the chance to become only the third male player (Don Budge and Laver were the others) to win the tennis Grand Slam, which includes Wimbledon, Forest Hills and the Australian Open as well as the French Open. Late last week in an unrelated action, A.T.P. Director Jack Kramer filed a $3 million suit against Connors and Riordan accusing them of making “defamatory” statements about him.

Connors explains that he believes in open tennis: that is, not allowing any one group to dominate the sport. On the Davis Cup issue, for example, he says: “I think having one or two persons running the show and saying who will and will not play is wrong. I think there should be play-offs to select the team members.” Cup officials say Jimmy is miffed because three years ago he was passed over as a singles player.

Connors’ rationale is at best only half the story. The main reason for his war with establishment tennis is Manager Riordan. A former boxing promoter and menswear salesman, Riordan, 55, directed the indoor circuit for the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association until 1973. That year the U.S.L.T.A. cut back its winter indoor tour to make way for the W.C.T. Riordan, who was dismissed, demanded that the U.S.L.T.A. allow him to stay in business at least as an independent promoter managing what was left of the Association’s old indoor tour plus other tournaments he could organize. Eventually, they reluctantly agreed.

Enter Connors, one of the hottest amateurs, winner of the national collegiate singles championship as a freshman at U.C.L.A. Riordan was recommended to Connors by Jimmy’s grandmother, Bertha Thompson, herself a former pro, and Connors quickly signed to play professionally for him. “I told Jimmy,” recalls Riordan, “if you want to be No. 2 in one of the W.C.T. groups, you’ll be a nonentity. But if you want to be the best-known tennis player in the world, come with me.” Connors says he felt he would get more experience on the less glamorous tour because “I wouldn’t get knocked out in the first round by guys like Laver.”

Even playing frequently against second-raters, Connors got the experience to develop. Suddenly Riordan had the hottest property in tennis. “It’s Connors who controls the destiny of the sport,” says Riordan with grandeur. “Connors’ enemies are at his feet.”

Connors now sounds less enthusiastic about Riordan than Riordan does about Connors. Though Jimmy praises the promoter for giving him a start and respects Riordan’s fight for independence in tennis, there are signs that he may be going his own way. “It’s coming to the point where I have to look out for myself,” Jimmy says. “Bill’s been great with me in the past, but I’ve produced for him too.” Riordan does not see a split developing. “Jimmy doesn’t make a move without me,” he says. Last week Connors entered his first W.C.T. tournament in Denver to get a taste of top competition before the Newcombe match. By the weekend he was headed into the semifinals.

Chris Evert senses Connors’ growing independence. “Before, he was being told what to say to the press,” says Chris. “Now he’s making an effort to look into what’s going on, say with the A.T.P. He’s starting to separate the people who are for him from the people who are using him. He’s really starting to know himself,” she says. “He’s thinking about the future, not just about the next tournament.”

A lot more people might be for him if they knew Connors off the court. Marty Riessen recalls: “Jimmy spent a night at my house in 1973. It was very pleasant. I could like him. He’s a nice kid, but I can’t get to him. None of us can. He’s covered up by his mother and his manager.” Evert, a more partisan observer, adds: “Inside Jimmy is a very gentle person. To outsiders, he’s harder because he’s been hurt by the press and crowds. There’s no one he tells everything to, but in that 10% that he keeps to himself, I know it hurts him to be disliked. I can feel it.”

Though he often still travels with his mother (while in Los Angeles, they share a modest two-bedroom apartment) and checks with her to see when his favorite dinners of short-rib stew or chicken-fried steak will be ready, he does not let her protective mantle smother him. Connors’ father never joins his wife and son on their trips. In Los Angeles, Connors can usually be found at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, unbending with Spencer Segura, Pancho’s son and Connors’ longtime friend, by playing endless games of relaxed tennis and backgammon and downing gallons of Coke.

When Connors and Segura get bored, they roar off in Jimmy’s bright green 1973 Porsche, sometimes cruising the streets of Westwood admiring the co-eds at U.C.L.A. Last month they also toured the canyons of Beverly Hills, checking houses for Connors to buy.

When alone, Connors may drive to the beach at Santa Monica. “It’s peaceful,” he says. “I just like to sit there and think about when I should play my next tournament or what I should do after this year.” Connors admits to moments of loneliness. “It’s usually when I’m playing some tournament,” he says. “I get depressed when I go back to my room and no one’s there. I start missing places and get memories about happier times. My mind wanders to Chrissie.”

Connors may not mope much longer. “I think I’ve found the right girl,” he says. “When things are right—which may be soon—we’ll settle down.” After calling off their nationally ballyhooed engagement last fall, Connors and Evert decided not to talk to each other for four months. “We needed to find out if we really wanted to be with each other,” says Jimmy. “I wasn’t very happy, and she wasn’t very happy. Since we got back together, we’re working things out a lot better. I guess we’re much more honest.” Chris seems to agree. “I was going out of my mind,” she remembers. “Every morning I’d read the paper to see how he was doing. It was a very unhappy time for me, but it was good for us.”

These days the two spend all their time together when they are in the same city, which is about one week in four. Around his neck Jimmy wears a gold charm spelling “SUPER” that Chris gave him, while Chris wears a “J.C.” charm from Jimmy. In Los Angeles, they act like any young couple in love—hugging, holding hands, dancing at parties, and skipping the conspicuous consumption they could easily afford (last year Chris earned $197,000 and Jimmy $285,000 in prize money alone). When they play tennis together—a rare occurrence—it is merely a relaxed practice session. They do team up for mixed doubles matches occasionally, though Jimmy says he hates to hit balls hard at young women.

Connors grew up in East St. Louis and Belleville, Ill., the son of a toll booth manager on what is now called the Martin Luther King bridge, which spans the Mississippi River at St. Louis. James Connors Sr., though, was never the main influence in Jimmy’s life, and the two appear to have an uneasy relationship. It was Jimmy’s mother, a tournament player and teaching pro, who began tossing tennis balls at Connors when he was three. “I started him as soon as he could walk pretty well,” recalls Gloria, still in her perky 40s. “Jimmy took to tennis like it was part of him,” she says. “He had his game together by the time he was five.” By the time he was ten, Connors had won his first tournament, the Southern Illinois for players ten years old and under.

When he was 16, Jimmy enrolled at Rexford High, a private school in Beverly Hills, and started taking lessons from Pancho Segura, then pro at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. To help pay his way, Jimmy’s mother temporarily moved to L.A. to teach tennis herself. “Everyone said Jimmy was too small,” remembers Segura. Undaunted, Segura began passing on his knowledge about technique, tactics and strategy, and at the club he and Connors would often pore over improvised diagrams that Pancho drew on paper table napkins.

In 1970 Connors went to U.C.L.A. where he promptly won the N.C.A.A. singles title. Impatient with school and amateur tennis, he dropped out to turn pro in January 1972. “I have no regrets,” he says. “I can always go back, but I might never win Wimbledon again.”

Jimmy Connors might very well win Wimbledon again—and again. But with his eye on Chris and the prospects of marriage and a family, he says, “I don’t want to be playing a heavy competitive schedule that much longer. I’d like to build my own tennis club and teach my kids. Tennis has been my whole life, but it can’t be in the future. And anyway, what am I talking about? I’m gonna be a great singer!”