Segura and Connors

Caroline Seebohm

In 1968, Jimmy Connors won his first national singles title in the boys' sixteen championship. A revolutionary new addition to the game helped him do that. The Wilson T-2000--a tennis racket made of stainless steel instead of wood--was introduced in 1967, and Jimmy immediately took to it, not only for its jazzy looks but because it had a lot of power if the ball was struck dead center.

Most players found controlling the ball quite difficult with this erratic new racket, but after so many years of accuracy drills with his Mom, Jimmy's consistency in hitting ground strokes made the racket an ideal weapon.

That year, Gloria Connors came to a major decision about her son’s future. With that first national title, she knew he had it in him to be great, but she also sensed that she could not take him any further herself.

"I had my game, and I had my strokes," Jimmy said later, "but I needed something more."

When Pancho Segura came through St. Louis that year on a tour, Gloria made arrangements to meet him. "Pancho," she said, "I've got this kid. He's a good player."

Pancho laughed. "Yeah, yeah," he said, "I get that from every parent." But Gloria and Pancho had been friends a long time, and had played tennis together, so Pancho listened to her and finally agreed that Jimmy should move to California and be coached by Pancho.

The Move

"You want to come to Beverly Hills?" Pancho said to Jimmy. ''I'll get you in school where my son, Spencer, goes to school."

So Gloria and Bertha, Jimmy’s grandmother, scooped up the young tennis player, leaving behind his father and brother in St. Louis, and moved to California. Jimmy was sixteen years old.

At first the move was a difficult one. Jimmy had family, friends, and a home he had always known, and he was going into a very different environment. "The first day I got off the plane," he recalled, "I spent a day in Beverly Hills, and we were walking to a restaurant and I said to my mother, I don’t want to do this. I want to go home.

"So my mom said, Look, why don’t you go see where Pancho teaches, and just drive around a little bit. So I did and I came back that night and I said, Listen, I'm not going anywhere. I’m staying right here. And the next day, my second day in Beverly Hills, I got up and went to the tennis club where Pancho was and never left."

Perfect Choice

Gloria's instinct and timing were inspired. Of all the tennis player-coaches in the world at that time, only Pancho could have been such a perfect fit for the young prodigy. "Gloria liked the way I played," Pancho said.

"Because I was small, I played with two hands, and because of my ability to run, and my ability to fight for every point, and my concentration. Jimmy liked it too. "You play like me," Connors said.

"Basically my game was formed by then," Connors said. "My mom had given me the kind of tennis, the strokes and skills that I was to play with through my whole career. But what Pancho really gave to me was everything else. He gave me the mental aspect, because I was taught by women to play in a man’s game, and I needed a male influence to change that.

"Pancho and I were about the same size, both small compared to many of the other players. We understood each other's advantages and disadvantages. But it was the thinking part of the game, the understanding of the game, the knowledge of what it took to win, that he was able to give me. My mother recognized that. I mean, how smart was she to understand that?"

Very smart. Jimmy Connors had learned his tennis from his mother and grandmother, and they taught him how they played game.

"It was compact, and it happened to be just the kind of game that fit my style and my personality, Connors explained. "But it was a ladies' game, and what goes into your head and your mind when you go into a match is something else, and that has to be added to the mix."

Pancho saw in Jimmy initially a player who was sometimes too tight, too careful. "He was very conservative," Pancho said later. "He played too safe. I tried to tell him, if you're ahead a point, gamble a little. Be more aggressive. But don't gamble or be aggressive when you're behind. In other words, be protected by the score. You have 30-love, 40-love, you can afford to go for an ace when you're serving. When you're returning, you can afford to go for placement. In other words, take chances when you're ahead--if you call that taking a chance!

"Connors liked long rallies and he would never go to the net. I told him when to play defense, when to play offence. I had to teach him how to lob. If he's five feet behind the baseline, I'd ask him to play defense, but throw in a lob, which will give him time to come back to the middle. I taught him how to use his side of the court wisely, how to go for big shots, take into consideration the score and where he's hitting the ball from, and the weakness and strengths of his opponent.

"If the guy has a weakness and likes low balls, we're going to give him the high ball. If he doesn't like the net, we're going to play short and low, so he has to come to the net. Have a plan. Have a plan of playing winning tennis."

Jimmy listened, transfixed. And learned. "I was so well prepared for everything," he observed, "my strokes, my footwork, all the groundwork had been laid for this very moment with Pancho. It was a perfect fit."

For Pancho, it was an unimaginable stroke of luck. All the knowledge he had accumulated over his years of struggle and hard work would now be called into play.

All his intelligence, cunning, and psychological skills would be used in the best way possible to further the career of a gifted young player. All Pancho's passionate love for the game would now be passed on to this eager pupil,who could hardly wait to follow in the steps of the master.

"Connors was very coachable," Pancho said simply. "He believed in me and what I was doing." The experienced Ecuadorian, almost from the first practice session, knew what he had on his hands. "I am teaching the next world champion," he told his son Spencer.

"I was a sponge," Connors said. "I was able to absorb everything he said. I'd take what I wanted, and what didn't fit me, I'd let go. But I wouldn't let it go out the window. I'd let it go into the sidecar, so that if I ever wanted it, I could always go back and say, what was that?

"But basically I absorbed everything. And once you absorb everything and you're confident in what you have absorbed, then whatever else you have inside you comes out that much easier."

It was an intense time. Jimmy would be on the court three or four times a day, hitting balls, playing, and learning. "If somebody said, Hey, Connors, come on over here, let’s play, Pancho would say, Go hit some with him. And I'd say, Yes, sir. Right now. Not because he told me to, although that was part of it, but because I wanted to. And I knew that if he told me to, then it must be right. So when you say it was a perfect fit, it was a perfect fit. And my mom allowed that to happen."

The Beverly Hills Tennis Club, where Pancho taught, was also a perfect fit. "It was an unbelievable scene, all the people who were there," Jimmy recalled. "And that was all Pancho.

"It was, Connors, go play with Pancho Gonzales or go play with Stan Smith or go play with Charlie Pasarell. Not a problem. And at the end of the day I'd sit around, have a Coke or take a steam, and laugh, and have fun, and talk about the day's tennis, and who am I playing tomorrow, and what’s coming next week? Can I play anybody? Or if not, can I play you, Pancho, for thirty minutes?"

There was no stress, no strain, no obligations, no anything except trying to become a better tennis player at the age of sixteen years old. "So how perfect a life was that? My mom wanted me to become good at tennis and get an education. And that’s what I did."

The other members of the club watched as Pancho transformed Jimmy's game. Pancho would haul out a bucket of balls and feed them, and Jimmy had to hit the bucket. Then hit the corners. Then the bucket again. This exercise went on for hours, without a pause, on and on, Jimmy striking the ball over and over, aiming at the bucket, then the corners.

He Was Good

"We knew he was good," long time member David Blum recalled later. "But he was small, with no big strokes, no power. He became the product of Pancho Segura."

"Once you get to a certain level, it's strategy that makes the difference." Blum suggested that perhaps the most important lesson Pancho imparted to Jimmy was grit. "He never gave up. The line between great and good is very small. It is that determination that separates the two--and Jimmy had it."

Pancho coached to win, but he also had his own brilliant way of letting his pupil deal with defeat. His psychological understanding of the player's needs at these times was astonishingly sophisticated for someone who had never opened a psychology textbook.

"Jimmy would get down on himself when he lost, but I would not let him," he explained.

I would let him cool off for two or three days, never belittling or demeaning him. I would never, ever get down on him. A good coach should be smart enough not to do that. I'd always pull him up. Later, I might say, in the conditional tense, You could have done this, you might have done that, but the point is the match was history. If he came to me saying, "Coach, I should have done this, right?" I would say, "Yeah, but we'll talk about it tomorrow. It's history."

Pancho remembered being hard on himself after a loss. "I wasn’t a happy loser," he confessed. "I wouldn’t want to look at myself in the mirror. You stupid Indian, you! That was some big gringo!"

The two would reconstruct Jimmy's play, from tapes or memory, to see what happened. "We'd talk about it until we decided how to deal with any problems, or how to improve them. If we fail in execution, we must do a drill, reconstruct the play. Jimmy was always ready. You could feel the electricity in his play, his desire."

Coach and pupil spent hours together, on and off the court. Pancho would write things down for him on cocktail napkins, plan strategies, what to do at 0-40 or 15-40. "I would scout his opponents, tell him, The guy's a good competitor, he's a front runner. Front runner in tennis means the guy gets in front of you and plays great for a few minutes, then he cools off."

"There comes a point where things are bouncing off your head so much that it becomes natural," Jimmy commented. "Like I said, I was a sponge. The fun part was that the better I became, the more I was able to incorporate Pancho’s instructions and then try something of my own. I'd try something that might work, and then I had two things that work. Those times gave me a bit of mystery about myself and the game that made it even better for me."

Jimmy worked hard-day after day after day. "I never let up one minute. But tennis came very naturally to me, as a player and as a competitor. That's what I wanted to do. There was nothing else in the world that I'd rather do."

If that sounds familiar, it's because Pancho Segura felt exactly the same way. "I saw myself in him," Pancho said. "He played with the same outlook, the same concentration, the same trancelike performance on the court. He believed in himself--that was the best thing. This left-handed kid was going to be a great tennis player."

Pancho pushed him mercilessly, made him compete with older, stronger players. "Everybody thought I was crazy, because he was small--his competitors were Roscoe Tanner, Dick Stockton, and Erik van Dillen, all bigger than Jimmy. Jack Kramer thought he was too small. He said that Jimmy didn't have the serve.

"Jack, I said, Jimmy has a return of serve that's unbelievable: And I was right. He beat all of them. I knew that from the very beginning. I told everyone, this is the guy who’s going to kill them all.'"

Some people criticized the way Pancho pushed his kid, pitting him against the more experienced players at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, for instance. One of Pancho’s regular tricks was to bet money on Jimmy's matches. He found that it reinforced his concentration and the will to win.

"Jimmy was brash in those days," remembered David White. "But it was backed up with ability. I remember one time I played a doubles match with Connors against the two Panchos. Connors played ferociously, poaching all the time, invading my territory, not allowing me to blow a shot. I never saw a kid who wanted so badly to win. And we did win--we beat Gonzales and Segura!"

White learned afterward that their two opponents had money on the match. "Connors collected money from the two Panchos, that's why he wanted to win!"

What was there for Jimmy apart from tennis? He managed to find time to go to Rexford High School, where Spencer Segura had also transferred. In a short time, he and Pancho’s son became close friends. They were almost exactly the same age. Spencer introduced him to the other members of the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, who welcomed Jimmy, this unsophisticated kid from St. Louis, who knew nothing about Hollywood or Beverly Hills or movie people or fast cars.

"I'd stand back and observe, really," Jimmy said. Spencer soon taught him otherwise. They would go to Jack Hansen's house (which formerly belonged to Charlie Chaplin) and party. They would go to the Daisy, the hot nightclub at the time. Spencer had become a good friend to Dean Martin's son, Dean Jr., known as Dino. Dino had taken Spencer under his wing, buying him clothes, welcoming him into his parents' huge mansion, introducing Spencer to his fast lifestyle.

Dino Martin was a year older than Spencer and Jimmy, and all three of them had something in common they would never think of discussing. Dean Martin loved his son but was a remote father and was often on the road doing his act with Jerry Lewis. Like Spencer's and Jimmy's fathers, Dino’s dad was not really present in his life. It is hard to know how damaging that was to a young boy, particular the son of one of the most popular heartthrobs of the age. In 1987, Dino Martin was killed when his jet fighter crashed into the San Bernardino Mountains.

The three gifted, tennis-playing friends spent a lot of time together, both on and off the court. The dark, dashing Spencer; the blond, handsome Dino; and Jimmy, with his Beatles-style haircut, must have made a colorful trio as they roared around the streets of Beverly Hills in Dino’s Ferrari.

Yet even if Jimmy played around with Spencer and the other kids, he was always home early, under the eagle eye of his mother and grandmother. He stayed away from sex, drugs, and rock and roll, always thinking about tennis and protecting himself.

Spencer said. "I think what really separated him was that he had his Mom and Two-Mom with him all the time. Who travels like that, with two moms?"

Some of the other kids sensed Jimmy was different, not only because of his background but because of his obsessive commitment to tennis. "We mostly had family money," Tom Kreiss observed, "or family businesses we were going into, so for us tennis was fun but not the be all and end all. Jimmy only had tennis. He was really hungry. Tennis was his whole life."

How well Pancho understood this kid! With Jimmy's father entirely absent from his son’s life Pancho was not only a teacher but a father figure, a male mentor Jimmy could look up to and respect.

They had disagreements, of course, but never serious ones. Jimmy's main bone of contention with Pancho was that he made him cut his hair too short.

"There were times, seriously, when Spencer and I would go and get a haircut and Pancho would send us back. He said, "Your hair's not short enough. Go get your hair cut properly."

Pancho introduced Jimmy to all the players who passed through the club. The young tiger was tested, and tested again, by the experienced old pros. When Pancho Gonzales played with Jimmy, Gonzales predicted, "He will be one of the top five players in the world."

After two years under Pancho’s tutelage, Jimmy was ready for the big boys. In 1970 Connors reached the finals of the Southern California Junior Tournament at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, where he beat his club mate Bob Kreiss in two sets, 6-4, 6-2. This was the first time reporters noted what were to become some of Jimmy's trademarks--the hunched shoulders, fierce expressions.

Jimmy Connors, now aged eighteen, was on his way. Yet at that time, other junior players were still regarded by the American tennis powers that be as having more potential than Connors, in particular Erik van Dillen, a handsome athlete who seemed to have all the strokes that Jimmy Connors had with a lot more grace and charm. In spite of beating van DIllen, to many observers Connors remained the upstart outsider, while white-shoe van Dillen was the favored one.

But Jimmy's questionable status would not last for much longer. In September 1970, he beat the venerable Roy Emerson in three sets in the first round of the Pacific Southwest Open, a statement of intent that did not go unnoticed within the tennis community. It was the most clear announcement yet of the changing of the guard.

That same month, Jimmy Connors entered UCLA, along with his friend Spencer. The following summer, the NCAA tournament was played in South Bend, Indiana, on the campus of Notre Dame, Jimmy's father's alma mater. Jimmy beat Bobby McKinley in the quarterfinals in a dazzling match and went on to win the tournament, the first freshman ever to win the NCAA championship.

Several people noted that Jimmy's father never even showed up at his old school to see his son play. The severance was complete.

When James Connors was dying in 1977, Jimmy arrived in time to briefly hold his hand. But it should also be noted that Gloria had taken Jimmy away on her own when he was still a teenager, basically abandoning her elder son and her husband. For Pancho, Jimmy's titles were vindication, if any were needed, that his brilliant pupil was set on the path the coach had mapped out for him. Jimbo was readying himself for stardom.

Working Life

They were gratifying moments in an otherwise increasingly difficult time in Pancho’s working life. In 1966, two years before Jimmy Connors's arrival at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, the president of the club created Pancho Segura Day "to commemorate the twenty-five years of active participation in the World of Tennis for this great, colorful, warm human being."

In fact, the event was a disguised way to raise money for Pancho. His close friends knew that he was in financial difficulty and put on this extravaganza to show their support.

But the private board meetings of the club told a different story. Not everyone adored Pancho the way the kids and most of the members did. Some players, who had never seen a double-handed forehand before, complained that Pancho’s strange, anomalous stroke got in the way of his teaching, since everybody else hit the stroke with one hand. Perhaps Pancho’s increasing preoccupation and use of court time with the young outsider, Jimmy Connors, did not help matters.

Eventually Pancho moved to LaCosta in San Diego. In addition to his teaching, he got the profits from the pro shop. He bought his own condo and then sold it for a huge profit.) By the end, Pancho was making at least one hundred thousand dollars a year.

"It was heaven in those days," Pancho recalled. The stars flocked to La Costa. Burt Bacharach, Ava Gardner, Burt Reynolds, William Holden, Grace Kelly, Merv Griffin, and Ann-Margret ·were some of the stars who came to La Costa to enjoy the spa and play golf or take a tennis lesson with Pancho.

Sports heroes like Mickey Mantle, businessmen like Kirk Kerkorian, and jet-setters like Christina Onassis. Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack performed there. La Costa introduced the idea of a destination resort, which is now copied all over the world. La Costa was the most talked-about resort in the country-and the tennis director was at the center of it all.

By the beginning of the I970s, suddenly everybody wanted to play tennis. When tennis became open in 1968, the whole atmosphere of the sport changed. It became chic, fun, and above all, a great game to watch. Much of the credit for this new excitement must go to Pancho’s student from East St. Louis, Jimmy Connors.

The early 1970’s witnessed Jimmy's relentless march to immortality. After a year at UCLA, to nobody's surprise, he turned pro. In his first year as a pro, he won six titles and earned ninety thousand dollars. In I973, he shared the number one U.S. ranking with Stan Smith.

Jimmy also became engaged to Chris Evert, the sixteen year old sensation of the women's game, creating a paparazzi couple. In I974, perhaps his most important year as a tennis player, he won two Grand Slams, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, both finals played against the legendary Australian Ken Rosewall. At Wimbledon, the score was devastating, 6-I, 6-I, 6-4.

At the U.S. Open, the score was even more shocking, 6-I, 6-0, 6-1. In an article in Sports Illustrated, thirty years later, reporter Alexander Wolff wrote, "In I974 Jimmy Connors ignited a tennis boom with his wicked metal racket, his story book romance, his vulgar antics, and his renegade behavior."

Jimmy's coach was at his side throughout these triumphs. Pancho knew Rosewall's game intimately, and his masterful plan to beat him was a textbook case of strategy. At that moment, Jimmy seemed invincible.