The Outsider: A Memoir (35 page)

I like the game, but let’s face it: It’s not tennis. It can be tiring, sure, but it’s not the kind of exercise I’m looking for. I want to work up a sweat. Golf is more of a mental pursuit, an opportunity to learn how to concentrate better while trying to figure out the technical side. Waiting 10 minutes between shots? Well, you know enough about me to understand that 10 minutes alone in my own head can be disastrous. Adding something to the mix though, even if it’s just a beer at the bar, gives me a reason to play.

I accept that I’m a gambler and I don’t want to change. Pop was right all those years ago. I like it too much. But I know at this point in my life that I can keep it under control. Maybe everyone thinks that, but everyone’s not me. I’m back on sports-betting again, but only with a group of local buddies. It’s a form of socializing for me now. Do I occasionally hit the tables? Yeah, I do when I’m traveling, but gambling doesn’t dominate my life anymore. I won’t let it. Remember any time I had to overcome anything, I always went back to what I knew best: exercise and pushing myself so that I could exorcise my demons. Exercise to exorcise.

Mom’s health started rapidly declining in 2003. She never strolled or meandered. She moved quickly, and that had been her lifelong pace.

Before the illnesses took over, she’d tell me over the phone, “I’m going to the tennis courts, Jimmy. I’m hitting some balls with a friend.”

Then it became “I’m going to hit five balls against the backboard.”

Soon all she could manage to do was walk to the courts to watch the kids play.

Later that year, she took a bad fall in the kitchen and broke her hip. She recovered from that, but she would never be the same again.

I started spending two weeks a month at Mom’s home. Her condition worsened, and she needed a wheelchair and oxygen tank. The woman who had fought all those battles for me off the court was losing her own fight, and all I could do was sit there and watch her slip away.

You can’t be in two places at one time, no matter how much you want to. Just over a year after Mom’s fall, I was sitting on a plane at the Santa Barbara airport, about to take off for Belleville, when Patti called my cell to say that one of Aubree’s best friends, Colleen Kennedy, who had been fighting leukemia for years, had passed away. Aubree had been driving to the hospital, hoping she would be able to say goodbye, but Colleen died before she could get there. I called Aubree immediately. When she heard my voice, she burst into tears.

“It’s OK, Aubree. Pull over and take a deep breath. Calm down. I’m so sorry.”

My mother needs me, my daughter needs me, and it’s tearing me up. What’s the right thing to do? There isn’t one.

I flew to Belleville, leaving Patti to piece Aubree back together.

Soon after I got home, I underwent the first of three hip-replacement surgeries in LA. I had been dealing with the discomfort and restricted movement for several years, but the constant travel between California and Belleville had started to make the pain unbearable. I’d put it off long enough, and if I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life crippled, I had to overcome my fear of going under the knife and just get it done.

I’d been on Vicodin and Percodan for pain for a while leading up to my hip replacement. There’s something to be said for getting through a day without pain and not knowing where you are, but I’d come to see that the amount of pills I was taking was becoming a problem.

Patti and Aubree were there in my room when I came out of the anesthesia. The operation had gone well, and after visiting for an hour or so they left and headed back to their hotel to pack and make arrangements for transferring me home the following day, October 22, 2005.

Aubree was driving when Patti took a call on her cell phone. It was her Aunt Nita but she couldn’t get any words out before the line went dead. Patti knew something terrible had happened and asked Aubree to pull over. Moments later, her cousin called back with the news.

Patti’s mom had been killed in a car accident. A huge part of my wife’s life had been brutally ripped away from her—and I was in a hospital bed, barely able to move, incapable of supporting her. Aubree stayed home to look after me while Patti attended her mother’s funeral without me.

Then, on November 12, 2006, Patti’s stepfather, one of the most easygoing, coolest, wonderful men I’ve ever met—Gramps, we called him—died of a brain tumor.

It was as though some terrible curse had swept through our lives and left us wondering what disaster would happen next. I was never more aware of the importance of telling my family every day how much I loved them.

Not long after Gramps passed, tennis came back into my life again. I wasn’t consciously looking for it, but maybe with all the loss and pain, I was searching for something I could control, something I understood.

At Wimbledon in 2005, I was being interviewed by 1976 French Open champion Sue Barker for the BBC when I mentioned I might be able to help out Andy Roddick with a few aspects of his game. Nothing major, just the small things that can make a difference, like playing more aggressively or taking his backhand a little earlier to generate more power. Andy’s biggest weapon was his serve, plus he had a great forehand, but I thought if he could mix things up a little, he could continue to be a real force on the tour.

Wimbledon 2006 was a disappointment for Andy. He’d made it to two finals in a row (losing to Federer both times), but this time he lost in straight sets to Andy Murray in the third round, dropping his world ranking to 10th. Roddick and I spoke later that month about maybe working together, and on July 24 we made a formal announcement that I would be coaching him. Andy was the US Open champion in 2003 and the success that he’d already had was tremendous, so the changes I would be suggesting for his game would be small. Tinkering.

He spent four days in Santa Barbara with me, where we broke down some of the fundamentals of his game in preparation for a tournament in Indianapolis. He made it through to the finals there, and a month later he won his first title in over a year by beating Spain’s Juan Carlos Ferrero in Cincinnati. At the US Open in September, he defeated Lleyton Hewitt in straight sets and had a great opportunity to beat Federer in the finals. Federer went on to win the title, but given where Andy had been, we were making good progress.

After the Open, I told Andy that the guys on the circuit were picking up on the changes we’d made to his game and to keep moving forward we had to work harder.

In practice he played brilliant tennis. He took the ball early, moved well, volleyed precisely, made the big shots, and fired serves that seemed impossible for anyone to return.

Our focal point became: Practice like you play your matches and play your matches like you practice. He had it in him, we knew that, but he wasn’t taking the progress he had shown in practice into his tournament play, and that was frustrating to both of us.

In November, he played Federer again, at the Masters Cup in Shanghai, where he came within one serve of winning the second-set tiebreak and the match, which would have been tremendous for his confidence. But he walked off with a 4-6, 7-6, 6-4 loss. Both of us were emotionally drained and frustrated.

Andy worked hard and gave it his all every time he went out there, and in the end, that’s all you can really ask of a man.

After almost 20 months of working together, it became clear that we’d gone as far as we could. When we should have been spending time, developing different aspects of his game, it wasn’t happening. I wrote to him at the beginning of March 2008 to let him know I thought it was better that we part company and wished him the very best of luck. It was a great experience for me to be a part of Andy’s career for that period of time and I hope that he feels the same.

I guess I needed to be back in tennis, even if it was just for twenty minutes.

It’s spring 2006, a few months after Patti’s mother’s passing. My mother is in constant pain from the osteoporosis and becoming weaker every day. One evening during dinner, Mom just comes out and says, “Jimmy, I want to go home.”

“What do you mean, Mom? You want me to take you down to 48th Street? See where you grew up?”

That wasn’t the home she was talking about. Deep down I knew that.

Over the last couple of years I’d been spending two weeks in Santa Barbara, then two weeks in Belleville, and I had been watching my mother move slowly toward the end of her life.

From California I spoke to Mom 10 times a day.

“Hey Mom, you up?”

“Had your lunch, Mom?”

“Been outside?”

Most of the time she’d reply, “Nah. Not today, Jimmy.”

I tried to keep her involved in my life by telling her about my coaching Roddick, about what the family was up to. I wanted her telephone to ring. I wanted her to interact. She’d been so active, so involved in everything for years that, when it all disappeared, I knew she would be missing it.

That day, when she said she wanted to go home, I said to her, “Mom, you’ve never given up on anything in your life. Why start now?”

Her answer was to look at me with an expression that said, “What’s the point of living like this?”

In December she had her gallbladder removed. Because of her emphysema and other complications, they couldn’t knock my mother out; instead they used “twilight sleep.” How much more could her little body take? And for the first time I too felt, “Enough already.”

I couldn’t stand the thought of her being in the hospital over Christmas, and I managed to get her safely released just in time for the holidays. I went home to celebrate Christmas with my family then immediately returned to Belleville to make sure Mom was doing OK. One evening she turned to me and said, “I’ve had it, Jimmy.” She repeated over and over again, “I’ve had it.”

“I know, Mom. If you don’t want to fight anymore, I get it. I do. It’s OK.”

I had to return to California for a few days to prepare for a trip to Australia with Roddick. Before I flew out, I stopped off in Belleville again, arriving at quarter to seven in the evening, Sunday, January 7, 2007. Mom was awake, and at the suggestion of her nurse, Hattie, I had brought her fried chicken for dinner. We sat together and ate. Afterward, Mom gave me a list of things she wanted from the drugstore, and I went to get them. When I walked back into her room I knew something bad had happened. Mom could barely talk.

“I think I just had a stroke,” she managed to say. I can’t be sure, but she sounded almost happy.

We called my doctor friend Curtis Jones, whom I’d gone to high school with and who had been taking care of Mom, looking in on her almost every day. He arrived within minutes. “Call the paramedics, Jimmy,” he told me. “We’ve got to get your mom to the hospital right now.”

I didn’t want people buzzing round her, sticking tubes in her, scaring her. It was too late for that. With Curtis there, I asked Mom whether she wanted me to call an ambulance. “No,” she managed to whisper. “No, Jimmy, not now.”

I called Johnny. “You’d better come over right away, because Mom is failing quickly.” I then called Patti and told her to come to Belleville.

Johnny arrived. We sat on either side of Mom’s bed and held her hands, just the way we had done with Dad. She had a fixed gaze almost like she was staring at a light.

My buddy Lelly showed up and remembered that Mom had said she wanted to have the priest there with her. At 12:30 a.m., Lelly pounded on Monsignor McKevely’s door, woke him up, and brought him back to Mom.

After Monsignor McKevely administered the last rites, Mom took her final breath and died peacefully.

Mom was gone, but I knew that, wherever she was, she was going to be working on her backhand and enjoying a martini with Dad, Two-Mom, Pop, and my puppies.

After Mom passed, I wanted to bring her back with us to California to be near the family. I knew she would have left me instructions on how she wanted her funeral service conducted, and I had a good idea where I would find it.

Patti and I were leafing through her Bible, maybe her most precious possession. Mom used to put letters in there, things that mattered to her, and I thought maybe she would have left one for me. We read through all of her treasured notes and checked the backs of photographs and prayer cards, looking for a message, but there was nothing there.

I go through the pages one more time. Something catches my eye, a scribbled message in the margins of a page, Mom’s handwriting.

“Jimbo, when the time comes, make sure I am buried next to your dad.”

Next to it is a small slip of paper that we missed the first time around. I open the folded note, read it, and hand it to Patti. She studies Mom’s words for a moment, then shows it to me.

“Stay with Patti, Jimbo,” it reads. “She genuinely loves you.”

23

MY VISIT TO THE BIG HOUSE

A
fter Mom’s passing, my life was relatively quiet. I wasn’t hanging around the game much, and I’d finished coaching Andy Roddick. I was staying at home, laying low and playing golf with my buddies.

In November of 2008, Jerry, one of my golfing friends and a local commentator for the University of California at Santa Barbara college basketball team, invited Brett and me to the UCSB Thunderdome to watch the game with top-ranked North Carolina. Brett, who was living in LA at the time, got caught in the evening rush-hour traffic after a late start, and it took him a good four hours to get to the house. Running late, we decided to take a taxi to the game to avoid the hassle of parking.

At the Thunderdome, we went to pick up our tickets. There was a guy in line behind us who didn’t look happy to see me. Maybe he lost some wagers on me in the past. All I know is that suddenly he bumps me and gets right in my face.

“Excuse me,” I say and turn back around and don’t think anything else about it. As Brett and I are walking toward the entrance, the guy follows and bumps me again. I turn around.

“What the hell?”

“You’re a fucking loser,” the guy tells me.

“I’m not denying that, but that’s not what your wife said when I was on top of her,” I fire back. I know, I know, lay off the wives, but not bad under the circumstances, huh?

Of course, one thing leads to another and finally Brett, who stands 6'4" and weighs about 210 pounds, has had enough and steps in to confront the guy.

“C’mon, Brett, let’s just go watch the game,” I tell him.

The guy’s first mistake is that he’s tubby. The second is that he reaches out and shoves me in the chest. You know enough about me at this point to know that I don’t go looking for trouble, but sometimes it just finds me. Pop always told me, “Don’t touch ’em first,” so I figure the guy is fair game. I grab him by the throat to keep him off of me. (How are those anger-management classes working out for you, Jimmy?) The guy is making those “ack-ack” sounds and spitting all over me. I let go, push him away, and Brett and I head over to the stadium entrance.

I thought the whole incident was over until we start to hand over our tickets at the front door. That’s when five UCSB campus cops approach me. Apparently, after I walked away from the guy, he went running to the campus cops and told them I had assaulted him.

“I’m sorry, you can’t go into the game. You’ll have to leave now,” says the largest of the cops.

“Why?” I ask. “I’ve got a ticket.”

“Doesn’t matter. You have to leave the campus.”

“Why?” I ask again, still not getting it. “You mean it’s fine for the other guy to go in but I can’t? Sorry, but I can’t leave. I came here in a cab.”

“You still have to leave the campus immediately,” he insists. OK, now the guy is just showing off for his buddies.

I can’t seem to make him understand that leaving would be no problem if I had a car. I have no way to leave unless they want me to hoof it off that large campus with my bum hip.

After the fourth time he asks me to get off the campus, I have only one answer.

“Look, I have no way to get home right now unless you want to take me, so fuck it, just arrest me.” And he did! All 320 brave pounds of him and his four friends. I didn’t know I could still command such an audience.

They put me in handcuffs.

“Dad,” asks Brett, “what should I do?”

“Enjoy your evening, son. I’ll see you later.”

At some point, the campus cops have called the Santa Barbara County Sheriff, and they arrive, search me, and put me in the squad car, taking me to the Santa Barbara County Jail, where I’m fingerprinted and mug-shot (quite a good photo, by the way, better than Nick Nolte’s, that’s for sure). Then it’s off to my single cell for the night. All I need is a harmonica. Although the UCSB campus cops are not my favorite, the Santa Barbara County Sheriffs are good guys and take it easy on me.

After an hour in my cell, I’m taken to make my one phone call. I have to ask one of the guys for a quarter to drop in the box.

At home, the phone rings and Patti sees
SANTA BARBARA SHERIFF
on the caller ID.

She picks up the phone, laughing, and doesn’t even bother to say hello.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says. “It’s about time you called.” I start to explain the situation to her, but she cuts me off. “I already heard. Brett called me.”

“Will you pick me up?” I ask.

After Brett’s call, she had phoned the jail and asked what the charge was.

“Failure to leave campus,” they said.

Patti couldn’t help herself: “Wow, you guys have got to be joking. If that’s all we’ve got to worry about in this county, I feel really safe.”

I was out in a couple of hours, but not before my arrest had hit the news wires and gone viral. “Tennis Great Jimmy Connors Arrested.” Nice.

When Patti picked me up, she was still laughing.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “they don’t feed you too well in the big house.”

We stopped at In-N-Out Burger and then, on our way home, we drove by our local restaurant and saw some of my friends I was supposed to have met at the game. We stopped and had a few drinks.

Let me tell you, getting arrested is instant celebrity. By the next morning, the media was banging on my door and blowing up my phone. I had friends calling me from all over the world, wanting to know what had happened. Jeez, if I’d known all it took to get famous was getting arrested, I might not have wasted my time winning 109 titles.

The case never went to court. The guy didn’t press charges (but he got to see the game), and the whole thing ended up being a big waste of time. But for a moment I thought I might get to be on the Investigation Discovery channel. It never happened, just like my singing career.