Jimmy Connors: The Brash Basher Who Wouldn't Leave
On 2 September 1991 — his thirty-ninth birthday — Jimmy Connors trailed Aaron Krickstein 2–5 in the fifth set of a US Open fourth-round match that had already run past four hours. He was a decade past his prime, freshly rebuilt after left wrist surgery, and ranked nowhere. He won anyway, in four hours and forty-one minutes, and kept going to the semi-finals. Connors later called that fortnight "the best 11 days of my tennis career." It was the purest distillation of a twenty-year argument: that will, properly weaponised, is a technical skill like any other.
The Mother Who Built the Game
Connors was raised in East St. Louis, Illinois, in a household run by women. His mother Gloria and his grandmother Bertha taught him the game; his father Jim operated a toll bridge, and his paternal grandfather John had been the city's mayor from 1939 to 1951. Gloria was not a background influence but the coach of record, and she remained his primary coach even after taking him to Southern California at sixteen, in 1968, to work with Pancho Segura. The results came absurdly early: a first appearance at the US Championship at age nine, Junior Orange Bowl titles in both the 12-and-under and 14-and-under categories, and — as a UCLA freshman in 1971 — the NCAA singles title and All-American status.
1974: The Season That Broke the Sport
He turned professional in 1972, won the Jacksonville Open and five more titles that year, and pointedly refused to join the ATP, playing instead under the management of Bill Riordan. Then came 1974, a season with almost no parallel in the men's game: a 93–4 record, fifteen titles from twenty-one tournaments entered, and three of the four majors — the Australian Open, Wimbledon and the US Open — making him the second man of the Open era to take three in a calendar year. The fourth was unavailable to him. Barred from the French Open over his contract with the Baltimore Banners of World Team Tennis, he never got a shot at the calendar Slam. He reached world number one on 29 July 1974 and stayed there.
The Weapon: A Flat Ball and a Steel Racket
Connors was left-handed and hit the ball flat, low and early, using a semi-Western forehand grip and taking the ball on the rise from the baseline — a method that gave opponents no time and gave him no margin. His two assets, in the plain accounting of the record, were a two-handed backhand and the best return of serve in the game. He built all of it around the Wilson T2000, a steel racket he kept using until 1984, long after everyone else had abandoned wood and moved to graphite; he later moved through a Wilson ProStaff, a Slazenger Panther Pro Ceramic in 1987 and an Estusa in 1990. The style had a known counter, and Arthur Ashe found it at the 1975 Wimbledon final: soft-touch tennis — dinks, drop shots, lobs — starved Connors of the pace he fed on, and Ashe beat him.
An Enemy of Almost Everyone
Bud Collins christened him the "Brash Basher of Belleville," and the antagonism was not a marketing device. In 1974 Connors and Riordan sued the ATP and its president, Arthur Ashe, over restrictions on his freedom to play; Ashe in turn called him seemingly unpatriotic for preferring exhibition challenge matches to Davis Cup duty. Connors dropped Riordan and the lawsuits in November 1975. He declined to walk in the parade of former champions at Wimbledon's 1977 centenary. He boycotted the Masters from 1974 to 1976, entered in 1977 once he had moved to New York, and won it, beating Björn Borg in the final. As late as February 1986 he was defaulted from a semi-final against Ivan Lendl at Boca Raton after a line-call protest escalated through warning, point penalty and game penalty; he was banned ten weeks and fined $20,000, on top of a $5,000 penalty on the day. On court he gave the finger to linesmen and strutted with the racket handle between his legs. He also, in the record's own phrase, thrived on the energy of the crowd, positive or negative, and manipulated and exploited it to his advantage.
Fire and Ice
His rivalries defined three eras and, awkwardly for his reputation, he lost most of them. Against Borg he finished 8–15, though they split four major finals two apiece — Borg taking Wimbledon in 1977 and 1978, Connors the US Open in 1976 and 1978. "Fire and ice," Connors said of the pairing. "We were just entirely different people on and off the court." Against John McEnroe, six and a half years his junior, he went 14–20, winning the 1982 Wimbledon final in five sets and losing the 1984 edition in straight sets; McEnroe took six of their nine meetings at majors. Against Ivan Lendl, eight years younger, he was 13–22 overall — but beat him in both the 1982 and 1983 US Open finals. Ilie Năstase won eleven of their first twelve meetings; Connors then won eleven of the last fifteen, and the two were doubles partners for the 1973 Wimbledon and 1975 US Open titles.
The Numbers, and the Long Exit
The career totals remain extraordinary: 109 singles titles, an Open-era record still standing; 1,274 match wins against 283 losses, an 82.4 per cent rate across 1,557 matches; 398 tournaments entered; eight major singles titles, including five US Opens; 31 Grand Slam semi-finals; 268 weeks at world number one, including 160 consecutive, a run not surpassed until Roger Federer broke it on 26 February 2007; and year-end number one five straight times, 1974 to 1978. He played his last major at the 1992 US Open, losing to Lendl in the second round on his fortieth birthday, and his final ATP Tour match in Atlanta in April 1996. He reached a quarter-final at Halle in June 1995, aged forty-two.
Why Jimmy Is Called a Genius
The word, applied to Connors, is not about intellect and the honest version of the claim should say so. It rests on three specific capacities. The first is perceptual: returning serve at the very top of the bounce, flat and hard, requires reading a server's toss and shoulder in fractions of a second, and by common assessment nobody of his era read it better. The second is technical and genuinely original — his flat two-handed backhand is credited with helping develop the ball-striking style that became modern power tennis, which makes him an innovator rather than merely an executor. The third is temperamental, and it is the strangest: he could convert hostility into fuel, turning a crowd's mood — approving or venomous — into a resource he actively manipulated. That is a rare form of competitive intelligence, and the 1991 US Open is its proof, because nothing else about him at thirty-nine was still elite.
The counter-case is serious. He finished with losing head-to-head records against Borg, McEnroe and Lendl, the three best players he faced. He never won the French Open. His tactical repertoire was narrow enough that Ashe dismantled it in a Wimbledon final simply by removing pace. Jack Kramer in 1979 placed him among the twenty-one best players of all time, and Fred Perry in 1983 ranked him third among the moderns, behind Rod Laver — high praise, but not the language of singularity. Connors was a genius of application, not of variety.
Legacy
He is the only player to have won the US Open on three different surfaces — grass, clay and hard — and the first man to win majors on three. He entered the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Hall of Fame in 1986 and the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1998. He coached Andy Roddick from July 2006 to March 2008, steering him to the 2006 US Open final, and lasted exactly one match as Maria Sharapova's coach in August 2013. His 2013 autobiography, *The Outsider*, won the British Sports Book Awards prize for best autobiography — a fitting title for a man who spent two decades proving that the inside was overrated.
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