Raised By Women To Conquer Men

Not even Riordan could fathom these upside-down transformations. "Jimbo was so thoughtful," he says. "He always called his mom. Whenever he saw me, he'd ask about Terry, my wife. When I first sent him to Europe, he clung to me at the airport. 'Bill, please don't leave me,' he said. He was such a child. And we had such fun. I could make Jimmy laugh. But then all of a sudden he'd be obscene, and I'd just get lost, because it was so distasteful to me. I never understood that in him, because it doesn't fit. Which is strange, because that's how he is on the court, that's what people see the most. But it's not his dominant side. And I could forget it because we had so many good times, and there should have been so much more of that ahead."

One day when Jimbo was 11 or 12, Gloria and Two Mom took him out to the backyard court and told him it was time to abandon his childish two-handed backhand and start learning to hit backhands with one hand. This had always been their intention. The two women watched the child hit one-handed for a couple of days, and then Two Mom said, "Let's put it back, Glo. By the time he's 19 or 20 he should be able to tear tennis apart with the two-handed backhand." Two Mom, as usual, was right as rain.

Still, as great as Connors's backhand is—one of the three or four best shots in tennis history—what always set the kid apart was his ability to be offensively unorthodox; he scores best from defensive situations, especially with the return of serve. No one ever used an opponent better against himself. No wonder players hated to face him.

For power, Connors learned to literally throw himself at the ball. His strength comes mainly from his thighs; it is his secret, a perfect, fluid weight transfer. And then, finally, he grew adept at what is known in tennis as hitting the ball on the rise—meeting the ball as it comes off the court, before it bounces to its apex. That is the ultimate attack, taking it on the rise, a man spitting back bullets. It speeds up the game infinitesimally in time, exponentially in fact, by putting constant pressure upon the other man. To hit on the rise requires three essentials: excellent vision (Connors's is 20-15), superb coordination (he even slugs with a trampolinelike steel racket) and utter confidence.

And so the Connors all-court game grew as a whole, each part advancing with the others, and one day, when he was 16, only five years before he was to win Wimbledon, he beat his mother. He came to the net apologetic and said, "Gee, Mom, that hurt. I didn't mean to do that."

Gloria almost cried. "No, no, Jimmy," she said. "Don't you know? This is one of the happiest days of my life."

But now it seems that everything thereafter has been anticlimactic. Even 1974 just came naturally, in the wake. Nothing ever changes. To even acknowledge that changes might be considered would, it seems, repudiate all that Gloria and Two Mom did with a child many years ago. For example, Connors's serve had always been relatively weak, and Borg exposed it at Wimbledon as an outright liability. But when Jimmy and his mother worked out for a week after that defeat, no special attention was paid to his serve, to his forehand approach or to any other of the weaker elements of his game. "His serve is good enough for me," Gloria says, peeved. "We just worked on the overall game. Borg just had one of those days, like Jimmy did in '74 against Rosewall."

Unfortunately, Borg and Connors meet only in the finals, on Saturdays and Sundays, and those appear to be the two particular days Borg has. Besides, even if Borg did just happen to get hot at Wimbledon, the real crux of the matter is that only a year ago, under no circumstances could Borg have routed Connors in straight sets. But Borg has worked on his game, and it has matured. Borg, the machine, the robot—"the Clone," his colleagues call him—he, not the exciting, bombastic Connors, has put variety and spice into his game.

Connors is so locked into the past that he cannot bear to change even his practice routines. Practices are rugged and spirited physically, but they only amount to "hits" against lesser players. In Los Angeles, Connors's regular sparring partner is Stan Cantor, a middle-aged movie producer; on the road, he hits against Kuhle. Dick Stockton, who has known Jimmy since childhood, says, "To improve, you must practice against players of your own ability, and you must work on the individual parts of your game. If Jimmy really wanted Kuhle to help him, he'd have him hit 300 balls in a row to his forehand approach. But Jimmy can't change. He only knows one way."

And that is precisely what Connors himself says, again and again, as a point of pride: "It isn't me if I don't play the way my mom taught me.... My mom gave me my game, and she taught me one way, that lines were made to be hit.... My mom and my grandma were the only ones who ever touched my game, and they taught me to play one way. There's no other way."