Jimmy Connors:
A Biographer's Quest
Joel Drucker
The night at the 1990 U.S. Open when Jimmy Connors requested I write a proposal to become his ghostwriter, I asked him what autobiographies he liked. He confessed he had not finished a book in 20 years. If Connors trusted me enough to reveal such long term disengagement with the world of thought, surely we could make a great team.
That proposal was the tunnel I was digging in hopes of escaping my career in public relations. Arriving at my office at 7:30 in the morning and squeezing in time at lunch and through the day, I wrote a 60-page document and overnighted it to his house. He told me he was glad to receive it.
Often when my phone rang, I imagined it was Connors telling me the proposal was great and that a publisher was set to give me $200,000 to start on his autobiography. But there was no actual response and then weeks turned into months.
My boss, having read the World Tennis story on Connors I'd written several months earlier, wondered why it sounded so differently from what I wrote for clients. I told her it was a matter of angles, omitting to say how little I cared about our various clients' products and services.
Through that winter I wondered how to make a mix of tennis, journalism and consulting viable. Public relations agency life provided me with many skills I'd use forever. But it occupied my head, not my heart.
Two years later, as nearby Silicon Valley accelerated, my firm decided to focus strictly on high technology accounts. I was asked to make a full commitment to this world or leave. I knew this wasn't something I wanted to do and in May 1993, was laid off.
Quickly I made a list of 50 people I could contact. By the next day, I was ghostwriting articles for a former client. A week later I completed a credential request for the 1993 U.S. Open. I began to cultivate relationships with editors, sending them ideas while building a network of agents, coaches, sponsors, tour officials, parents, ex-players and players.
But in 1999, a simple one paragraph notice in Tennis Week sent a dagger to my heart. A biography of Connors was due out shortly. The authors were two people I had never heard of.
Who were they? Had Connors cooperated with them? Why them and not me? Why had he told me I knew him better than any writer?
It turned out the authors had never met Connors. As I read the chapters, the material began to seem familiar, especially a section that seemed almost identical to a Sports Illustrated profile by the celebrated writer, Frank Deford. I contacted Deford and sent him the book.
The Sports Illustrated legal team found dozens of examples of plagiarism, comprising most of the text. Faced with a lawsuit for millions of dollars, the publisher withdrew the book. If I couldn't have Connors, no one could.
Now in retrospect, for all I knew, Connors' request to me was an idle thought. Or he might have made the same suggestion to two, six, or ten writers.
But by 2003, for more than 20 years I had been in pursuit of him, constantly looking for ways to see both the tapestry and the threads of his story, and to confirm some kind of formal agreement. It never happened.
So I am not Connors' authorized biographer, nor his ghost, nor even probably his friend. I'm told by many he has none and I believe it. None of that loss stopped me from continuing to obsess over Connors, his tennis, and the way he unleashed the sport and saved me from potential mediocrity, or, probably at least, ironic midlife alienation.
All along I'd chased him, chomped to tell the tale of Connors. But in retrospect, I realized he hadn't really been the subject of my pursuit.
It was my own story, my own life, on and off the tennis court, that I was chasing all those years. As time passed, a different book started to take shape: how my relationship with Jimmy, both real and imagined, had saved my life.
"Why do you love tennis?" I had once asked Connors. "You're out there by yourself, your whole destiny is in your hands," he said. "That's how life should be."
The loneliness of life, democracy and tennis—to me Connors made it all transcendental, mainly because I was ready to accept his gifts and recast them. Because of his immense impact, I had exited the corporate world and became a person with my own destiny as a writer and consultant in my own hands.
When I called Connors to tell him about the book, he was friendly as always but firm.
"Don't write a book about me, son," he said, "don't write a book."
I told him it was too late, that the ship was off the dock and the book was about what he had meant to me and why he was so important to tennis.
"Your story," he said, "that could be of interest. But you'll have to do it on your own," he said. "But I'll tell you this, I'll be the first one to buy it." I told him he wouldn't have to buy it. "I'll buy it, son, I'll buy it. Good luck to you, son."
