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Gloria Connors with the young Jimbo: What is a visionary? If indeed all action begins with a thought, then the seminal thinker in this story is Gloria Connors. But it’s hard to call someone so narrowly focused a visionary. Supposedly visionaries are expansive, able to spot phenomena on the horizon undetectable to mortals. There was nothing expansive about Gloria Connors. To many who came in contact with her during her son’s career, she embodied paranoid provincialism , a pushy stage mother only able to see the world through the needs of her beloved Jimbo. Tennis is rife with stories of Gloria holding sponsors, promoters and media hostage for money and time. Permit another definition of visionary: a peculiar mix of personal desire, disparate skills, and fortunate outcomes. Conventional wisdom says they see the future. But perhaps they immerse themselves so completely in their own present – absorbed purely in their private passions – that they generate a special frenetic energy. “The man who writes about himself and his time,” said George Bernard Shaw, “is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.” And while it is unlikely Gloria Connors read George Bernard Shaw, she knew what…