The Outsider: A Memoir (20 page)

Against Borg I knew I had to be at the top of my game, especially because there was so much attention and drama created around every match we played. That’s why I said I’d follow him to the ends of the earth; I didn’t want him to feel too comfortable if he beat me. I didn’t want him to settle in and gain more confidence. There were only two other guys I felt that way about, Mac and Lendl. The three of them were my toughest challenges. They raised their games when they faced me, no doubt about it; they all wanted to kick my ass. I took it as a compliment.

I beat Borg at Flushing Meadows that year as bad as he beat me at Wimbledon, and because of that I became the only player ever to win the Open on three different surfaces. It was my fifth career Grand Slam title and my third US Open title.

The turnaround in my relationship with the New York fans that had started with my victory at the Garden in January felt complete that day at the Open. After the match, I thanked all 20,000 of them.

“I play my best tennis when I come to New York. Whether you like me or not, I like you.”

At the end of September, Patti and I went to Vegas for a couple of days of R&R. Then we were off to Argentina, where I was playing a four-man exhibition against José Luis Clerc, Nasty, and Borg—which I ended up winning. Then I was winging my way to Australia to play the Sydney indoor tournament.

Patti had her own apartment on Maple Drive, in Beverly Hills, but since I was going to be out of the country, I wanted her to stay in my place with Mom because, as I told her, I thought she’d be safer there.

“You just want to keep an eye on me,” Patti said. “You’re not fooling anyone.” I was also hoping she and Mom would get closer, and I think they did. Patti told me they cooked together, went shopping, and enjoyed each other’s company.

From Australia I was off to Japan for the Tokyo indoor tournament. I didn’t like being away from Patti and I had a conversation with a guy who worked in Mom’s office, Joe Roundtree, in which I confided I was thinking about asking Patti to marry me. I asked Patti to fly to Japan and had Joe accompany her. Of course, he spilled the beans on the plane. Later, Patti told me that her first thought was “Whoa, we haven’t been together that long,” then she thought it was sweet and it made her feel good to know that I was serious about her.

Patti and I were slow-dancing in a Japanese nightclub and I was worried that, if I waited too long, she might get to know me better and lose interest!

“Let’s go back to the hotel and make a baby,” I said. The words just came out of my mouth. Being a good Irish Catholic, it was my way of asking her to marry me.

“OK,” she said, and that was her way of saying yes. We’re from the Midwest. That’s how we roll.

She told me afterward that it was the moment she knew for certain that I really loved her. She hadn’t thought about starting a family before then. As she said later, “I grew up during women’s lib. It wasn’t my be-all-and-end-all to be a mother. But when you said those words, I melted.”

We were married a few weeks later, in a small Shinto ceremony in Japan, just the two of us and a friend. Quiet, and exactly what we wanted. The next March we had a simple family blessing in Belleville. Mom and Johnny were there, plus Patti’s parents, her aunt Nita, and her sister. The whole thing lasted about 90 seconds. I wore a flannel shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. Patti looked pretty in a rose and lace-silk dress.

We could have made a big thing of it with Patti’s connections. I’m sure
Playboy
would have enjoyed laying on a lavish event for publicity, but that wasn’t what we were about at the time. We’ve talked about the possibility of renewing our vows, but we’ve had a lot of friends who have done that, and the marriage took a nosedive afterward. I’m too superstitious to go down that road.

I think it’s fair to say that when Patti and I announced that we’d gotten married, we weren’t exactly everybody’s best bet to succeed as a couple, and mainly for one reason: Most people thought I was probably too tough to live with.

But the truth is, even our friends had their doubts.

Many years later, when we were at a seniors’ event in Dallas, drinking a few margaritas with Eddie Dibbs and Dick Stockton, the conversation turned to our wedding.

“You know, when you guys got married,” Dick said to us, “out of all the tennis players and wives on the tour, we thought you’d never last. In fact, we thought you’d be the first to go.”

Well, 33 years later we are still going strong, although I am not saying we haven’t had some rough patches, mostly as a result of my stupidity. But we’ve come through it all.

Mom didn’t always make it easy, either. When we first got together, she was happy Patti was around, a nice Midwestern girl, but as we grew more serious, Mom found it hard to accept that Patti was another woman in my life who I was turning to for advice. I can understand that, I guess; she thought she was protecting me, worried as she was that Patti might be out to take advantage of me, which is sad, because nothing could be further from the truth. Patti had a successful career when we met. She didn’t need anything from me.

Mom kept Patti at arm’s length for a lot of years, which was difficult for Patti to deal with, because she’s such a strong family person. “Gloria, all I want is to be a family,” Patti said to Mom once. “I understand what you are protecting. I know that you have poured your life’s blood into Jimmy and his career. Let me be a part of that.” Still, Mom found it hard to see that Patti saw something in me other than fame and fortune.

Six weeks after Patti gave birth to our son, we moved from LA to Florida. Mom never came to see us there, nor did she visit when we moved back to California a few years later. Mom loved being in Belleville. I got that. She had friends there and her coaching, but that wasn’t the reason for her staying away from us. She was making a statement.

Yet she always loved spending time with our kids, having them sleep over at her house as often as possible. In fact, she would do too much, organizing events and outings when all the kids wanted to do was hang around the friends they’d made in Belleville. I think Mom had to feel she was needed, and then she overcompensated, when in reality she had nothing to prove. All Patti and I ever wanted, all the kids ever wanted, was for Grandma to share our lives both at home and in Belleville.

Is there a secret to a long marriage? I don’t know; all I can talk about is what works for us, and that comes down to one thing. We love each other. Patti said it at our wedding in Belleville when Mom asked her how she knew I was the man for her.

“Jimmy made me laugh,” Patti answered, “and the others made me cry.” That’s a huge part of it. We still crack each other up today, just as we did on that first night together at Pips.

We also understand each other’s need for independence. Without that we wouldn’t have made it this long. For the first two decades of our marriage, I was probably away, on average, 38 weeks of the year, on the main tour and then later with the seniors. You have to know how to survive on your own in those circumstances. That still applies today, and fortunately we have our own passions. With me it’s golf and playing tennis, while Patti competes in high-level ballroom dancing, takes care of our home, and has a lot of good friends.

Patti recognized early on that I was two people: the one on court who pumped my fists and swore at umpires and the one who came home to her and the kids.

Patti didn’t find it easy to cope with the different sides of my personality. When I played tennis, I’d leave any personal distractions behind. If Patti and I had a fight (and we’ve had a few) that wasn’t resolved before a match, I’d come off the court afterward and go find her. Knowing I had another match to play, she had the wisdom to say, “OK, Jimmy, we’ll talk about it later.”

That need of mine to avoid confrontation off the court could be frustrating in another way, because I would let things fester. If something upsets me, I won’t bring it up until much later, when something completely unrelated sets me off. Whenever that happened, Patti would look at me and smile, as if to say, “What’s wrong with you? That’s six weeks ago, that’s over.” And I would calm down.

All of this took a while for us both to learn since our relationship worked backward. We were lovers first, soon husband and wife, followed quickly by mother and father, and then we were friends. Best friends. I guess I just can’t do things like everyone else.

We were living in LA and waiting for the birth of our first child, who was already two weeks past his due date of July 20. I had just come back from Wimbledon and arranged to take some time off so that I could be around for Brett to make his grand entrance. I had committed to a series of exhibitions in Europe, and I could only be released from my obligations by an “Act of God,” or they would sue me. Patti and I agreed that having a baby qualified as an AOG, but the tournament organizers didn’t see it that way. I stayed with her in LA as long as I could, driving her nuts as we waited for the baby to arrive. I couldn’t leave the house without asking Patti, “Are you sure it’s OK for me to play golf?”

“Please go,” Patti would say. She wanted me out of her hair so she could take a nap and get a break from my anxiety.

Finally, I was off to Europe but made it back on American soil for a tournament in North Conway, New Hampshire. It was Tuesday morning, July 31, and I called Patti before I got ready to go out and play my match. We’re talking. Then . . .

“Ow! Ow. What was that?” Patti says.

“What? What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I think I’m having my first labor pains.”

Holy shit!

She had a standing appointment with her doctor, our good friend Lloyd Greig, and she calmly drove herself to his office. When she got there, she and Lloyd called to confirm she was in labor.

“How long do I have, doc?” I asked.

“About eight hours,” he said.

OK. No pressure. I’m only 3,000 miles away.

I went out and beat Eliot Teltscher in under an hour in straight sets. Now we had to find a way to get me out of New Hampshire and back to LA. There was a small airfield nearby, where Mom and I rented a Learjet and headed west. On the plane I was a nervous wreck. The worst and best thing about it was there was a phone on the plane. I tried to reach Patti every 15 or 20 minutes but never got to talk to her. As if I weren’t worried enough, one of the engines lost power over Kansas City. We went into a free fall until the engine got some air and fired back up again. And if you’ve ever been in one of those situations, you know you soil your shorts in a hurry. We stopped in Kansas City to refuel, then continued on to California.

There was no phone in the labor room, so every time I called Patti, I was put through to the nurse’s station. They had Patti’s friend, Judy, come to the phone.

“I don’t want to talk to you. I need to talk to Patti!” I shouted. Grace under pressure—it’s one of my strengths.

“She’s fine, Jimmy, she’s fine,” Judy said calmly, “but she hasn’t had the baby yet.”

We finally got into LAX, where my good friend Dr. Earl Woods met us. He had stopped at the hospital to check on Patti before picking us up. “Whatever you do, don’t let Jimmy drive,” Patti had cautioned Dr. Woods. But I jumped behind the wheel and got us to the hospital, half an hour away, in about five minutes.

When I walked in her room, Patti had already been in labor for 13 hours. “You look like shit,” I said

“So do you,” she said, laughing.

After another six hours of labor, the doctors decided to give Patti a C-section. The baby’s head was turned the wrong way, and his heartbeat had gone down too far. In the operating room, I stayed next to Patti’s head, holding her hand as our son, Brett, was born at 3:02 in the morning. And just in time—his umbilical cord was wrapped three times around his neck.

The doctors were running around, calling for a whole bunch of tests, because they were concerned about Brett’s rapid heartbeat and that he had swallowed some of the meconium, which is high in bacteria. They said they wanted to do a spinal tap on him. Patti was crying and hanging onto my hand.

“Jimmy, they can’t do that on a newborn,” she said. “Don’t let them do that to our baby.”

“OK,” I said. I took charge and told Dr. Greig, “You do what you think should be done for Brett. You’re the doctor.”

Oh, yeah. I took over, all right.

After Dr. Greig put Brett in the neonatal section, there was no way I was going to let him out of my sight. By seven o’clock the next morning, little Brett was stable, but he had to have an IV on his head with a Dixie cup over it so he wouldn’t pull it out. His heels were purple from all the blood tests, and his thigh was bruised from the antibiotic shots they gave him twice a day. Patti was sleeping and I finally went home to try to do the same. The minute my head hit the pillow, the phone rang. It was Nasty. We had a $500 bet: I said I was having a boy, he said I was having a girl. I told you I’d bet on anything.

“Connors, you sonuvabitch, you little weak thing, how can you have a boy?”

Nasty had a girl at that time and he had that Eastern European thing about having sons. Not that we’re competitive or anything.

Patti and Brett ended up staying in the hospital for 10 days, during which time I had to go to Indianapolis for a tournament and then fly right back to bring Patti and the baby home. And let me tell you this, I was a hands-on father and I enjoyed every minute of it. I could change a diaper with the best of them. (Whoa! How did all
that
come out of something so little?!) I was completely in love with my new family.

Patti and I agreed that we didn’t get married and have a family so that I could be apart from her and Brett for more than half the year. We made the decision that we would travel as a family for as long as we could.

Brett went to his first tennis tournament, the US Open, at the age of one month and two days old. I hoped having him and Patti along would act as a good-luck charm to turn around my Grand Slam fortunes. Two disappointing semifinal exits, to Victor Pecci in Paris and Borg at Wimbledon (my fourth-consecutive straight-sets loss to him), had threatened my hopes of retaining the world-number one ranking for a sixth-consecutive year.