Raised By Women To Conquer Men

Nastase was once very close with Connors. Then, at their TV challenge match in 1976, Nastase was wounded by some tiger-juice insults that Connors hurled at him, and last year, in a match at Caesars Palace—where Connors had never been beaten in a dozen outings—Nastase was prepared. When Connors began abusing him, Nastase stopped him dead by saying, "You don't want to fight. Go get your mother." Connors, shaking, was beaten for the first time on that court.

Acknowledging the incident, Nastase adds beseechingly, "Hey, don't get Gloria mad at me." For, notwithstanding Pauline Addie's tender memories, Mrs. Connors is feared. She is feared as a zealot, for being an implacable advocate for her son. When, after months of negotiations, Riordan obtained the unheard-of guarantee of $500,000 for a single match—a figure so large that even CBS considered it obscene and refused to divulge it—Gloria's first response was that it should be a million. Last year a three-man round-robin among Borg, Guillermo Vilas and Connors was set up for television. Michelob was bankrolling it for $1 million: $500,000 for the winner, $300,000 for the runner-up, $200,000 for show. At worst, 200 grand for losing two exhibitions over a weekend. "Isn't there something else?" Mrs. Connors said to the promoter, Gene Scott. "There has to be an extra $250,000 for Jimbo." Michelob, aghast at this hubris, walked.

Such examples are legion. The possibility that somebody will "use" Jimbo haunts the Connors entourage. What makes this all the more fascinating is that neither Gloria nor Jimmy gives a tinker's damn about money. In all their lives, they have been extravagant only with their love for and loyalty to one another.

In her devotion to him, Gloria makes sure that everyone pays in some way to use Jimbo; the press pays in the currency of delay and exasperation, which it can least afford. She is herself, frankly, "scared" of the press, and she has a right to be, for she is never treated sympathetically, and often savagely. Jimmy's image may be as negative, but the press is hardly to blame; his cockiness and vulgarity, the strut and bluster, are visible enough that they do not need to be filtered through newspaper columns in order to produce a bad public taste.

But poor Gloria: The existing impression of her derives more from deep-seated biases. People who don't know Mrs. Connors from Mrs. Calabash just plain don't like the idea of her. She is, first of all, dead correct in what she has perceived: that she is viewed as a stage mother and that Americans do not approve of that species. It is dandy for Mickey Mantle's father to instruct his son to switch-hit, but only a pushy dame like Judy Garland's mother would shove that poor kid onto the stage. Moreover, in our affluent society, parents who lavish stereos and Toyotas upon their children are approved of, while those who only devote their time and talent are eyed suspiciously; they make other parents feel guilty. This is all the more so with Gloria, because as a coach she comes in the wrong sex. She and Jimmy are also victims of sexism.

To be sure, it is an unusual relationship. To be sure, Gloria is on guard in private, and Jimmy is obnoxious in public. Guaranteed, they will find a way to louse up public relations. And yet, for all the negative consequences that this unusual relationship might have, nobody ever pauses to acknowledge the greater truths: that this relationship contains an extraordinary amount of love, and that it made Jimmy Connors champion of the world.

By now they expect no quarter. Having been cross-examined on their relationship for so long, they are both defensive—as Nastase proved consummately—and they both have pat answers. They maintain that all final decisions are Jimbo's, and both will intimate archly that people who are offended by their relationship probably have very unhappy family histories themselves. Says Jimmy, "The people who talk meanly about my mom and me are just a lot of people who are jealous. Wouldn't most people like to love their mom or dad the way I do?" He always adds the "or dad" when making this point.

As important as Gloria has been to her son, she has never really been isolated with him until now. Two Mom was a constant presence for the first two decades. "Our right arm," as Gloria always refers to her, Stonewall Jackson to her Lee. Jimmy is just as emphatic: "Both my mom and my grandma gave me my blood." So much was Two Mom on the road with Gloria and Jimmy that the family took to calling Al "Lonesome Pop," and, after Two Mom died (while in Los Angeles, with Gloria), Lonesome Pop suggested it might be more appropriate for Gloria to take his cemetery plot next to Two Mom's.

One of the reasons why Riordan, the outsider, could come to exert such authority for a time was that he was, in effect, Two Mom's legacy. She had admired him, suggested to Gloria that if they ever did need a male specialist off the court, he might fill the bill. Riordan, who is in bitter litigation against the family now, is in their eyes a nonperson who tried to take over tennis by "using" Jimmy as the wedge, but the fact cannot be avoided that he was a major male influence in Jimmy's life at precisely that time when Jimmy was leaving adolescence and becoming a public figure. With legal suits that became a crusade with hints of paranoia, Riordan probably brought a surfeit of contentiousness into the life of a boy already brimming with antagonisms.

But Riordan did provide Connors with a close, influential adult male figure for the only time in his life—and it showed. Away from the tennis establishment, Connors exhibited an ease and good humor that he has never again shown. Granted, some of his comic material came with lines written, inflection indicated, by Riordan, but the public image was of a dead-end kid who could stop and laugh at the world and himself. Since Riordan's leavening influence has disappeared, this breezy Cagney figure has hardened into a surly and sour wiseguy—the bluster and forced antics culminating in the mortifying episode at Forest Hills last year when Connors ran around the net onto the other side of the court and erased a ball mark that his opponent, Corrado Barazzutti, was citing as evidence of a bad call. (Connors says now that he blacked out on his feet and doesn't recall the incident.)