Jimmy connors autobiography example

I’VE NEVER LIKED JIMMY CONNORS, considering him among the triumvirate of people who temporarily turned tennis into a game played by bad-tempered men in (very) short pants. And since I spent a lot of my youth watching tennis with my mother, I’ll resort to a quote of hers to qualify just whom Connors has morphed into.

My mother had great expressions, many of which I use every day, some of which I live by. My favorite is “Character is fate,” which she mostly slapped down when the topic was Richard Nixon and my generation&#;s great desire to see him reduced to the ignominy he so rightly earned.

It turns out she’s right about character and fate, and since she never liked Jimmy Connors either, she would not be one bit surprised to learn that Connors has played out to be someone who must depend on someone else’s private – as well as medical – issue to provide the sensationalism needed to sell a book. Oh yeah, and he revealed this detail without first consulting the other person.

All that to sell a book. That’s how it looks from here, since this heretofore unknown detail is the single detail about this book that is making headlines, lots and lots of headlines, as he must have known it would.

Shame on him.

I rarely take out writers of bad memoir, finding it best to vote with my dollars at the bookstore, choosing those books that illuminate us, provoke us and inform us about how to live this life with some degree of honor and integrity.

It’s fools like this that give the art and craft of memoir a bad name.

No, I won’t provide a link to his book. Neither will I tell you what he wrote, nor about whom he wrote it. For that, you’ve got Fox News.

If you think the main job of a sports memoir is to tell the athlete&#;s story in his own voice, and that&#;s a reasonable thesis, then you have to credit Jimmy Connors&#; book, The Outsider with accomplishing that. In the pages of the book, the tennis fan is taken on a ride through the tumultuous post-Open era from the perspective of one of our sport&#;s greatest players.

One oddity of the book is the way Connors, in his direct quotes, seems to call everybody "son." Still, there are plenty of tidbits for the fan in the book. Connors discusses his struggle with OCD and his complicated relationship with his mother and grandmother. He also, very controversially, outs his former girlfriend, Chris Evert, for having had an abortion. Well, nobody ever accused Connors of being a gentleman.

If I said that Connors&#; voice in the book, the public man, apparently, is crass, vulgar, self-centered, one of the most narcissistic divas of his time, easily rivaling that other self-impressed champion, Martina Navratilova, whose self-concern makes Beyonce seem like Mother Theresa, there would be no sense arguing about it.

Connors admits as much and has no problem with it. In one passage, he says he didn&#;t get the memo about not grabbing his crotch during matches. Okay … I guess?

This is the world of sports, and when you deliver the goods, eight Grand Slam singles titles, it proves what Connors says his grandmother told him, "You can get away with anything if you win."

Reading The Outsider is like listening to the Nixon tapes in that the principal is paranoid, obsessed, has a narrow view of the world and an extreme us-versus-them mentality, though the former president never had a run like Connors did at the U.S. Open.

From Connors&#; perspective, all of this vitriol is justified by his back-story about being a battler from the wrong side of tracks, first from East St. Louis, Ill., then Belleville, Ill. The East St. Louis part of the myth is imp

So why has Connors decided now is the right time to tell his story, in his new autobiography The Outsider?

“There’s enough distance,” he explains. “I had opportunities to write a book before but I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want to go to a lot of places. I almost had amnesia – tennis and everything that happened had been really put away.”

At first glance, it’s hard to understand why he’d possibly need to ‘put away’ anything.

In a professional career spanning over 20 years, Connors held the world Number One spot for weeks, took eight Grand Slam singles titles, a record singles ATP tour titles, and was honoured in the International Tennis Hall Of Fame.

But then, of course, you remember that riding alongside the success, came problems. Some were confined to tennis, with complicated battles around the newly formed Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), plus his ongoing fight against the old “stuffy” tennis guard who loved rules, and hated the showmanship Connors brought to the sport.

But perhaps the biggest problems Connors had to fight were not those inside the game, but inside himself. In The Outsider, he openly documents his struggle with gambling – like placing a $1million bet on himself to beat Martina Navratilova in

“I was always looking for that last little bit of something,” he explains. “Tennis should have given me enough excitement, but at times, it didn’t. I was always chasing a feeling that ended up chasing me, to the point where it controlled me, instead of me being in control of it.”

Such lack of control was especially chilling for Connors, who was also haunted by Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) – during his matches. He couldn’t serve unless he’d bounced the ball a certain number of times.

“It wasn’t recognised at the time though, and I only realised what it was, years later, when I saw a programme about OCD and thought, ‘I’ve got that’.”

With typical resilience, Connors doesn’t look for sympathy for