The Outsider: A Memoir Read online

  Dedication

  To Patti

  Contents

  Dedication

  1. Out of the Shadows

  2. Shaping an Attitude

  3. Nothing Would Ever Be the Same Again

  4. Lose Like a Man, Win Like a Man

  5. The Main Locker Room

  6. Nasty Entertainment

  7. Love Game

  8. Twin Peaks

  9. Battle of the Balls

  10. No One’s Cup of Tea

  11. The Point’s Not Over ’Til It’s Over

  12. Meeting My Match

  13. Björn Again

  14. Back from the Dead

  15. Cracks in the Foundation

  16. House Divided

  17. Road Warrior

  18. Torment

  19. Resurrection

  20. Not Dogging It

  21. A Friend Remembered

  22. Open Heart

  23. My Visit to the Big House

  24. Passion Play

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Photographs

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  OUT OF THE SHADOWS

  I’m 29 years old and for the last three years people have been telling me I’m finished, washed up, done.

  That doesn’t sit well with me. I’ll say when I’m done and I’m not done yet. I haven’t even reached my peak. Screw ’em.

  It’s 1981 and I lost my hold on the number one ranking in the world in the previous year, and even though I’ve claimed 17 titles since then, I haven’t won a major tournament. There’s an element of doubt creeping into my daily training: Do I still belong? Can I still compete at this level? I’m not winning. I’m being pushed onto the back burner. That’s hard to take.

  I’m up, I’m down. I think I’m good and then I don’t win. I get up every day and do the right things, but the results aren’t improving. I’m getting to the semifinals, and I’m losing matches I should win. Not good enough. Winning lesser tournaments along the way is fine, but it’s not the majors and that’s what I’m looking for. Anyone else in those years would have been content with my record—but not me and obviously not the media. This has been the most frustrating three years of my career.

  “You’re not going to reach your prime until your thirties,” my mom keeps telling me. “My prime? What the hell, Mom? What was the last six or seven years about?”

  “You wait,” she says. “You haven’t played your best tennis yet.”

  My wife, Patti, our two-year-old son, Brett, and I are living in North Miami at Turnberry Isle, Florida. We moved down from Los Angeles for the tennis, but distractions are everywhere. This is a playground for the wealthy. Rich people come here from all over the world for the gambling, discos, restaurants, golf, and—I’m guessing—drugs. In the evenings I can go down to the courts and play tennis against guys who bet $5,000 a set they can beat me if I play them right-handed. Guess what? They can’t. The extra cash is nice, but the fun and laughs is what it’s really all about. But I have only one thing on my mind: reclaiming my position at the top of the tennis world.

  I continue to work my ass off every day, practicing two and a half hours in the morning with the Turnberry Club tennis pro, Fred Stolle, a former Grand Slam champion from Australia. He stands in one corner of the court and hits the ball to the opposite corner so I have to run the whole width of the court in order to return the shot. Then he moves to the other corner and I do the same thing from the other side. Then Fred comes up to the net and stands over on the right side so that my forehand passing shots have to go up the line and my backhand has to go crosscourt. Every drill I do is designed to replicate a situation I’m going to face against my toughest opponents. I’ve never hit a shot in a match that I haven’t practiced over and over.

  Later in the day I play a couple of sets with my longtime friend David Schneider, a former top South African player, who practices with me whenever I want to fine-tune what I worked on with Fred that morning. Afterward, David and I have a Coke and relax as buddies. It’s nice to let tennis go and be able to talk about other things.

  It’s difficult balancing tennis with family life, my friends. When I’m with my family, I feel like I’m slighting the tennis. When I’m practicing, I feel like I’m slighting my family. When I get up at 6:30 a.m., Brett is eating breakfast and watching The Smurfs. I want to spend time with him, but I know I have work to do on the court. When I’m playing tennis, I feel I should be spending time at the pool with Brett and Patti. There are conflicts everywhere I turn. When friends visit, I want to go out and have fun with them, stay out late, but then I am slighting both my tennis and my family. If I go down to the restaurant for breakfast I’ll see 10 people I’m obliged to say hello to and that will hold up my day.

  Mom is on the phone. I talk to her at least 10 times a day. This may sound like a lot, but Mom is also my business manager. My schedule is made six months in advance, so not only is she “checking in” as a mother, mother-in-law, and grandmother; she is letting me know about commercial offers, upcoming tournaments, and all the numerous details involved in my career.

  If any of the calls lasts more than a few seconds, it’s because she knows I’m having problems. She’s concerned about me. I have to push myself further than I want to, train harder, practice longer. I’m older and things don’t come as easily now. I don’t mind the physical part. It’s getting into the right mental state that I find tough. I haven’t been winning the way I expect to, but I have to find a way to act as if I am, so I won’t talk myself out of it. I don’t want to fall into that trap of saying, “Oh, shit, maybe they’re right. Maybe I am finished.” I have to find my self-confidence, even though I’m not sure where I left it. Things aren’t working out for me, so to get myself through it I have to be twice as arrogant. That’s how I’ll cope. I can’t go out there and just be half-assed; I’ve got to go all the way. I have to be prepared, I have to be in the best shape possible, and my game has to be ready.

  Wembley, England. November 14, 1981.

  Wembley is a big tournament at the end of the year, but it isn’t a Grand Slam, and yet this isn’t just another match. I’m down two sets to love, looking across the court at . . . John McEnroe.

  I love playing Borg, Lendl, Nastase, Panatta, and Gerulaitis. The list of great players from my era is as long as my arm, but to play Mac is beyond the realm of just tennis. He’s my gauge; I look to him to see the level I have to reach to be number one again.

  Mac is the best player in the world. He’s just won Wimbledon and the US Open. When McEnroe was coming up he wanted everything that I had. I was number one in the United States and he wanted that. I was number one in the world and he wanted that. Then he took it all. And now I want it back.

  I’m not just going to roll over and say it’s too tough, that he’s too young (seven years younger to be exact). Even though Mac and I clash at every turn, we’re so much alike it’s scary. I’m Irish, he’s Irish. I’m left-handed, he’s left-handed. I’ve got a bad attitude, he’s got a bad attitude. I’ve always said I would love to play myself, and Mac is as close to playing me as I’m going to get.

  This McEnroe match could be my return to winning in a big way. I know my game is getting better again, and now I have a chance to prove it by beating Mac in the final.

  Unfortunately, I’m down two sets to love. All I can do is to figure out how to stay out there one more minute, one more point, one more ball, one more anything to keep putting some pressure on Mac—that’s all I want to do. I made my reputation on my all-out aggressive style of play and I’m going to live or die again today with that. I’m
not just going to wait for something to happen. I’m going to force the action.

  But, right now, I’m not in it. Mac is the show. He’s doing everything right and I’m like a bit player in his future Broadway production of Kicking Connors’s Ass. I’m getting steamrolled, but, in tennis, sometimes even the smallest thing can change the course of a match. It might be a shot, a call, an interruption from the stands, anything to relieve the pressure and the tension. Of course, that kind of small change can work against me, too. It wouldn’t be the first time I let myself get sidetracked.

  Mac is under what I call “confrontation time-out,” which means he hasn’t emptied his bucket yet, there’s still more to come, and he’s resting up for a second assault on the umpire. He’s sitting in his chair looking up at him, and then he starts in again.

  “You don’t know the rules. You don’t have the right to tell me anything.”

  I wander over to a kind, sympathetic face in the stands, a girl who looks like she’s feeling sorry for me because I’m getting hammered. I suck up a few words of encouragement from her and then get back to the business at hand. That one small moment is all it takes for me to feel like I’m a part of what’s going on around me. I loosen up. Now I have a chance to go inside my head and confront my demons; it’s that place where I can dig up something from my past to help me push on to the win.

  I look back at the way my grandfather, Pop, trained me. There was only one way to do it: his way. Anything else was unacceptable. He pushed and pushed. I could jump rope with the best of them, but Pop sometimes went too far. As a kid I’d pick up the rope and start jumping for 10 or 15 minutes. Then I’d ask, “How much do you want me to do, Pop?”

  “Why don’t you do five more minutes?” he’d say.

  I’d be jumping rope for five more minutes and Pop would be walking back and forth in front of me, talking.

  “You know, Jimmy, it might be better if you do 10 more minutes.”

  In that five minutes I had been jumping, I’d be trying to get the most out of that time, and I’d think, “God, now 10 more minutes?” I mean I had pushed it hard from the time I picked up the rope, so do I keep going full-speed, or do I slow down because he might come back and say 20 more minutes?

  All the time I’m jumping, I’m worrying about picking up my feet and doing it the right way, because if I miss I have to start over from the very beginning. I’m trying to concentrate and work.

  “OK, Jimmy, you have 20 minutes.”

  At this point Pop is talking to me about nothing in particular, asking questions about school, my friends, where I want to have lunch. He’s walking around, trying to get in my way, doing anything and everything to distract me and mess up my concentration.

  It almost seemed like a game to him. And I would be thinking, “Son of a bitch! What’s going on here? I’m exhausted!”

  Looking back, I realize he was helping me build the mental and physical strength I would need to cope with the best tennis players in the world.

  Pop was telling me in his way that no matter how prepared you are, there will always be something going on, either on or off the court, that will take your mind off your game. How I deal with that is down to me.

  It’s the beginning of the third set now and my footwork is better and I’m more prepared to hit shots. My returns become more penetrating, deeper, faster, so Mac has less time to react. I start dictating the course of play.

  Once I break serve in the third set, my confidence level rises for the first time in the match. I’m hitting my groundstrokes closer to the lines, with more control and accuracy. Because of that, Mac gets to the ball late, giving him fewer opportunities to impose his game on me. Even though we’re similar in some ways, our styles of play contradict each other. When one of us is really on top of his game, it detracts from the other. His strengths are serving and volleying; mine are hitting from the back of the court and moving the ball around. So, unlike the first two sets, where Mac was serving great and coming into the net, which is his comfort zone, now he has to play the way I want him to play, from the baseline.

  After I win the third set, I’ve turned the momentum in my favor, and even though I’m still down a set, I know that no matter what Mac plans to throw at me, I’m ready for it. Still, I want to make sure I don’t get too cocky. That’s still John McEnroe across the net and you can never take John McEnroe lightly. Ever.

  I go up a service break in the fourth and the crowd senses a turning point. They’re getting their money’s worth and now they’re cheering for both sides. However, the more excited the fans get the easier it is for me to get lost in their enthusiasm. So now it comes down to this: how to keep my wits about me when everyone around me is losing theirs. My job is to make the crowd go crazy, not to join them.

  There’s no doubt my mental game has caused me problems in the past. It seems like nothing ever runs smoothly when I’m going to play. I’ve even forgotten my bag or racquets because I was thinking too much about the match.

  Once when I was about to play the finals of the US Open, my limo—I always had a car and driver take me to and from my matches—got rear-ended two blocks from the hotel. Now we have to go through all this crap of exchanging license numbers and names and I’m going to be late for the title match. So what do I do? Do I tell the driver to speed up and find a shortcut to the stadium? No, it’s back to the hotel to start all over again. There’s been a change in my routine. I have no choice.

  Are you asking yourself, “Why would he do that?” It’s a thing called OCD: obsessive compulsive disorder. Yup. I have it. Didn’t know that, did you? Well, neither did I at the time.

  When I turned pro at the age of 19, I started having what I used to call “twitches.” They showed up the first time I went to Wimbledon. My first “twitch” occurs when I’m playing Centre Court and I walk over to get a Coke. I take a drink and start to put the can down, but my hand won’t let go of the can.

  “Time, Mr. Connors,” the umpire says, noticing my bizarre behavior. “Time, Mr. Connors.”

  Put the damn can down and get the hell back out there, I’m telling myself. I can feel the umpire looking at me. Time is running out. But I can’t let go of the can.

  “Time, Mr. Connors. Time, Mr. Connors,” the umpire says again.

  The can doesn’t feel right in my hand. For some reason, it doesn’t feel solid. Twenty thousand people are watching me trying to put down a can of soda! I’m saying to myself, LET GO OF THE FUCKING CAN!

  Finally, after about 25 times, the can once again feels comfortable in my hand and I’m able to put it down. I’m ready to play again.

  I go to serve and now I can’t stop bouncing the ball. I bounce it 30 times, trying to get the ball to feel right. Believe me, I’m not trying to throw off my opponent’s game with all the bouncing, although that might be a fortunate side effect. It’s just that I won’t be able to stop bouncing the ball until it feels right in my hand and connected to my brain.

  It was only when I was in my mid-thirties that I saw a television show on OCD, and I realized, Damn! I’ve got that. I thought I was just superstitious, fidgety, and nervous. Who knew they had a name for it?

  I’ve had the symptoms of OCD since that first trip to London and throughout the rest of my career. It was exhausting. Any action—from putting something in the fridge over and over again to moving a chair to the perfect spot—could pop up at any time and totally occupy my thinking. I’ve probably had the symptoms of OCD since childhood, but they didn’t become pronounced until the stress and excitement of my first Wimbledon.

  Even now, when I let my dogs out at night before going to sleep, it happens. Long after the dogs are back in the house and in their beds, I can’t get my mind off the door. Lock, unlock, repeat. Is the door closed? No, that didn’t sound right. Push in the door. That doesn’t feel right either. Sometimes my hand is willing but my mind isn’t, and sometimes my mind is but my hand isn’t. Obviously, it’s not rational. If I had the answers, I’d prob
ably have a cure.

  Sometimes my kids will mess with me. I’ll be in bed—comfortable, horizontal, and ready for a good night’s sleep—and they’ll come in and say, “Dad, I wonder if that door is locked.” Now I’m up again, walking around the house six times, making sure everything is locked and locked and locked and locked and locked and locked. For the most part, though, it happens more when I’m by myself. It’s embarrassing and tiring, but I’ve never looked at it like it was a debilitating disease. I pretty much just laughed at myself. What the hell. But if you see me when you’re out to dinner, don’t think I’m going to be your evening’s entertainment unless I’m your waiter and you bought my book. In that case, I’ll give you a show.

  It’s the fourth set and still tight. Mac probably thinks that if he doesn’t end it now, I’ll probably break his will in the fifth. After I win the fourth, I can see the change in his body language. I can sense his confidence slip.

  Two sets all. Mac trips and twists his ankle. I’m not surprised; the court is a carpet laid over hardwood. It’s difficult to play on. It can bunch, give a little bit, and there are dead spots. Mac walks off the pain and prepares to get back to business. He would have played me on a broken ankle. I’d have played him on a broken ankle.

  Our rivalry is about respect. He’s able to bring out more in me than any other player, and I hope I do the same for him. I’m fighting my ass off and so is he. There is nothing fake about our rivalry. Mac is the one player I can watch limping around the court and feel good about saying, “Fuck that guy.”

  The ump tells Mac to play on. So he does. He serves and takes the point. His next serve hits the lineswoman right in her stomach—it had to hurt. I look at her, grab my stomach, and double over sympathetically. She smiles, the fans laugh and then applaud. I’m loving it.

  I win the game, and at the changeover there are fireworks. Mac is sitting in his chair, yelling at the ump.

  “It’s your stupidity. All right? It’s your stupidity. That was part of my injury time. That was 20 seconds of my injury time,” Mac says. “You only make it worse when you say play on when I actually hurt myself!”