He Got Down And Did It

Apart from the death threat, the diarrhea, the foot you hurt and the 107° heat you had to play in, how did you like your trip to New York, Mr. Connors?

"You got the airplanes flying over, and you got 20,000 people crowded in here animalistic style," said Jimbo one day, "but I happen to like that."

Never, it seems, has a tournament been so right for a player as the U.S. Open is for Jimmy Connors. And when he won his fifth one on Sunday, it was all the more appropriate that Flushing Meadow should turn out to be his 100th tournament title. No other pro has ever achieved triple figures. Last week also marked the first time Connors had won back-to-back Opens and the first time he'd won a Grand Slam title in an odd-numbered year. In the championship match Jimbo defeated Ivan Lendl 6-3, 6-7, 7-5. Lendl checked out early and was billed 6-0 for a fourth set.

Connors' victory wasn't pretty, but that was hardly his fault. Besides, seldom anymore does he win on looks. He's like his homely old racket, which he terms an "obsolete antique" and which literally doesn't exist anymore in the public domain. It's a little metal colander that Wilson stopped making years ago because nobody could play with it except one obsolete antique of a player. In his bag, as a spare, Connors still carries the racket he used to win Wimbledon and Forest Hills in '74, which is a little like Babe Ruth hauling around the bat he used to hit his 60th home run just in case he needed it to hit fungoes.

After '74, that wondrous year in which Connors won three legs of the Slam—and would surely have steamrolled the French, too, had the game's majordomos not locked him out—Arthur Ashe whipped him in the famous Upset of '75. Then Bjorn Borg was invented, and for the next seven years, during what should have been the heart of his career, Connors won only two Grand Slam events. Now, past his prime, he has, on guts and steel, suddenly upped and won three more major championships in barely more than a year.

At the 1983 Open, Jimbo had an easier time in the finals than in '82, when Lendl also was his victim. On that occasion Lendl only snuck into the match for a while after losing the first two sets. This time they split the first two sets, and Lendl went up a break in the third and appeared to be in command.

Lendl remains an enigma. He's perceived—unfairly, his friends say—as being humorless, but without question, at 23, he's more independent and mature than most of his colleagues. He has, since age 18, made his way through the West, dealing in strange languages and customs while fighting retrograde actions by the bureaucracy in his native Czechoslovakia. He's never cheered, is forever the road team. He hasn't set foot in his homeland for a year and a half, most of that time being spent in the States. The other day he agreed that the few glimmers of ease and wit he displays are the result of a certain Americanization of Ivan.

Against Connors, Lendl glued himself to the baseline, determined at all costs to win from there. However much this strategy might have been disputed, it was working. His big straight-up serve, reminding oldtimers of Ellsworth Vines—with a forehand to match—moved him ahead, even though Connors had shown a capacity to break down Lendl's backhand with pressing approach shots.

Connors did make a number of scattershot errors in the process, but then, that's his gambling style. Furthermore, he was more troubled by a painful bone spur on his right little toe than he let on publicly. It hurt to play. To boot, he had the trots going in and even had to rush to the head late in the second set. (One such trip for extenuating circumstances is permitted.) So it was, at a set apiece, that Connors and Lendl came to the 10th game of the third set, with Lendl serving at 5-4. He saved a break point and reached set point with a sharp forehand. Then he missed his first serve and tossed the ball up for his second....

The temperature on court was better than 100° on this final day. In fact, the Open had been played in a relentless tropic heat right from the start, when the tournament had begun with a natural clash between Mr. First Day, Trey Waltke, who had wowed the opening Wimbledon crowds by appearing in long flannel trousers, and Mr. Worst Day, John McEnroe, the top seed, who customarily makes an inaugural ass of himself. Not wanting to disappoint the hometown faithful, McEnroe picked up $1,850 in fines for reviling the umpire and a lineswoman and for lacerating a spectator with insults and a handful of sawdust. The fan's heinous crime had been to cheer on occasions that McEnroe, that arbiter of court etiquette, deemed inappropriate.