Playing Jimmy Connors

By Trey Waltke

I'll never forget the first time I ever saw Jimmy Connors. I grew up in St. Louis and learned to play at a clay court club where a lot of the great St. Louis players like Butch Buchholz also played when they were young.

One day when I was 9, I was on the way to the courts with my dad and he said on the way over, "You should see this kid Jimmy Connors. He's ranked three in the nation. He's going to be hitting today and I want you to take a look at him."

And I'll never forget walking down the path to the little clubhouse and then seeing Jimmy on the court hitting there. Everyone at the club was watching, including my dad and some of the other men players. Jimmy was 12 years old and was on his way to the Nationals. People were saying things like "Look how deep he's hitting the ball."

"He's hitting every ball two feet from the baseline. That's what you want to do." And that was his mother Gloria Connors. That was her whole thing. If you hit the ball deep you'll never be in trouble. And Jimmy perfected it.

People were always saying when he was a kid that he was too thin and too scrawny, that he's not a great athlete, and that kind of stuff.

But they overlooked the fact that he had incredible tenacity and great hand eye coordination. He was amazingly consistent and accurate. And that he had a great backhand. How many guys had two-handed backhands in those days? Remember, that was back in the days of wooden rackets. In those days most players backhands were actually attackable. His wasn't.

I have another early memory of Jimmy from a few years later. I was probably 11 and Jimmy was 14. Our families took a car trip to North Carolina to play in a tournament, but it poured for 3 straight days. So we were all cooped up and there was nothing to do. We finally we went over to a college gymnasium and found a wall.

So I starting hitting against the wall, just casually hitting the ball, and practicing some touch shots, and Jimmy started copying me and doing the same thing. But Jimmy's grandmother saw us, and she didn't like it. She didn't like it at all. She came over and grabbed the racket out of Jimmy's hand. She said, "That's not how you hit against the wall, this is how you hit against the wall." And she just started bashing the ball hard against that wall, over and over. Bam, Bam, Bam!

And I'll never forget the look on Jimmy's face. His eyes just got huge. His grandmother was demonstrating the intensity she wanted from him, whereas we had been a couple of kids just goofing around. So Jimmy took the racket and started hitting against the wall just like his grandmother. And that was the end of our little fun game with the wall. I'll never forget it because it encapsulated the whole mentality that his mother and grandmother wanted him to have.

Even though we both grew up in St. Louis, the funny thing is I never played Jimmy in the juniors, or even practiced with him. But every Sunday Jimmy would play my dad, and I'd play Gloria. We play on conjoining courts, and my dad and Jimmy would have knock down drag outs. My dad was around 40, and one of the top 5 men's players in St. Louis, and Jimmy was like 14. And even then they were pretty darn even.

That's the way his mother handled him. He was always playing with the older players, mainly the adult men. His mother tried to shield him away from the other kids and wanted him to play with just the adults, and usually, the adults who were better than he was. But as soon as he passed one group of players, that was the end of that, and then it was on to the next group.

So it may seem strange, but it wasn't until we were both in the pros that I actually played a match against Jimmy. The first time we played was 9 or 10 years after that car trip, and it was one of my first pro tournaments. Jimmy had just come off playing Rod Laver or John Newcombe in one of those heavyweight challenges. And he was literally on a rocket ship. He had this air of invincibility going. He was just munching guys badly.

And I thought I was playing pretty well. I had just played a year in college. I had already beaten Clark Graebner and several other top American players, guys in the top 50 in the world. And then I went out to play Jimmy. And I was down 6-0, 5-0 in about 35 minutes.

And I remember thinking that there was no way for me to get into his game. I couldn't find the crack in his dam at all. It just wasn't there. And nothing I did bothered him. I kept trying stuff. I tried to be more assertive and less assertive and no matter what I tried, it was just a complete, deep steam rolling.

He's playing on the baseline or a foot behind. He's taking everything early, taking away your time and hitting everything deep, a foot inside your baseline. In that era you learned to come in on the other guy's backhand and you knew you were going to get a sitter or a lob or maybe your opponent would try a dink. But against Connors there was no weak side to attack.

He got a high percentage of his first serves in, and obviously it wasn't a high powered shot, but for some reason it always bounced higher than you wanted. And you always felt that if you didn't do something with the return, then the next ball was just going to be down your throat.

That was the era when we all used wooden rackets but he was using the T2000, which had a little more power. You have to understand that it was hard to hit a return well enough with a wood racket to come in on a high bouncing leftie serve. Now with the new rackets you can just wallop the return. It's such a different game. Then you had to worry that on big points Jimmy would serve and volley, a tactic he mixed beautifully into his game.

Also, I don't think people really understand the level of mental dominance Jimmy achieved at his peak. With Connors the match started before the match. If you were in the locker room and you had to play Connors it was like a heavyweight fight. He didn't look at you. You didn't look at him. He wouldn't give you the time of day.

The vibe was that what he was doing was serious business and what you trying to do was almost like a joke to him. It was like "Are you trying to even consider that you could beat me?"

He was one of the first guys with an entourage. This was new, sort of Sinatraesque. They didn't mix with anybody. It wasn't a friendly group. It's hard to describe what it felt like. It's like he was the man and you weren't. And somehow he was able to make you feel that without saying a word.

On the court, there was no interaction. It was literally like he was going out to chop wood or something. It was like he wanted to keep what he was doing separate from any sort of human endeavor. He used to make fun of other players. He would imitate them when they turned their backs and the crowd would laugh and they would look around and not know what was happening.

If there was a way to win every point of a match, you had the feeling Jimmy would figure out how do it. He made no errors. I mean none. And then he'd capitalize on your slightest misstep and tighten the screws down even further.

I still have this horrible memory of one of my best approaches in that first match. I just completely knifed a cross court backhand deep into the corner, hit it at about mach 80, and the ball stayed ultra low, bouncing about a foot off the court. (Click Here to read an article about how to hit that shot.)

So Jimmy's on the dead run outside the alley and he finally catches up with the ball, and he slaps a forehand with that T2000 racket, hits it completely flat down the line over the high part of the net, and I had this sinking feeling as I'm watching this ball travel from outside the alley and land in the corner, a completely clean winner. I had one of those moments of revelation where you just say, well okay, that's enough. That's too good for me.

But in the long run losing 0 and 1 to Connors was probably a good exercise. Playing Jimmy forced you jump to a new level--or consider quitting. He was the ultimate acid test.

As fate would have it I played him the very next week in an exhibition and won a set. I didn't give in so quickly mentally when he hit an unbelievable shot. I decided at the very beginning to make him hit a lot of them.

Playing Jimmy was probably also the catalyst that got me thinking more about the court and where to hit the ball. I realized that against a player like Jimmy if you didn't know what patterns to follow you were dead.

I realized you had to go after him. I realized that I had better start hitting a lot more balls deep cross court. I realized I needed to try to keep the ball low, and that I needed to volley anything that came back five inches or higher over the net. I realized that on a short ball he would always go up the line. He couldn't really roll it crosscourt. So I said, okay, I'll wait for that one up the line. All this was all a real revelation for me.

I played him five or six other times. And finally in 1980 I got him. It was at the Canadian Open in Montreal. The funny thing is that my strongest memory of that match is that I was late. My taxi got stuck in traffic. Literally we could not move. I was pretty sure I was going to get defaulted. It was the worst feeling ever.

Jimmy and the whole stadium were waiting for me. So I had the driver literally drop me off behind the stadium and I actually jumped over a fence to get in, if you can believe that.

So my heart's beating like a rabbit thinking well I'm going to be defaulted-- Jimmy Connors is waiting for me and I'm sitting here in a taxi.

And it was like, I was so scared that I was going to be defaulted that I had no nerves about the actual match. Somehow I spring boarded all that into an energy frenzy. I just wasn't scared. I mean, I just I didn't miss. My backhand low slice was really working. It was just one of those days where I felt I could do no wrong.

And I beat him like 4 and 3. For me it was like a personal lifelong thing to finally climb the mountain. Anytime you beat Jimmy Connors you know you earned it. In the grand scheme of tennis history it might not have been that big a deal, but to me, if I could finally beat Jimmy that must mean something.