Ignoring the Bark

by Pete Bodo

Let's get right down to business. Yesterday, a very cordial reader, Jimbo Fan dropped a comment that read, in part:

The book (my first book, Inside Tennis: A Season on the Pro Tour, published in 1979) does go on at length about Connors and Borg and your conclusion then was that they were equals. For that reason I'm a bit surprised that your blog hasn't shown Connors more love. If the GOAT debate were not so Grand Slam centered, surely Connors would rate higher. (Will anyone match his longevity as a top 5 player or come close to his 109 singles titles?). When writing about Federer, you concluded that a Borg comparison is not fair because of the difference in playing conditions over their respective eras. However, you did say in another post that Connors would have been lucky to take five games off of Fed.

So let me elaborate, because a number of other readers also expressed an interest in hearing more about Connors. I thought it interesting that Jimbo Fan found me assigning equality to Connors and his first and greatest rival, Bjorn Borg. That I did so was partly because of the timing of the book's publication. As of the end of 1978, the rivalry was marked at every turn by a distinct sense of. . .To Be Continued. . .

Between 1974 and 1978, Connors was an amazing (for the time) 5-6 in Grand Slam finals - that is, he was in the final of every major final he played but one (he lost in the quarterfinals of Wimbledon in 1976). Connors skipped the French all five of those years, and the Australian for three of them. One astute reader pointed out that Connors could hardly be said to have "intimidated" Borg in those glory years and that was, admittedly, a little bit loose of me.

To be more specific: Connors won six of his first seven meetings with Borg (oddly enough, Borg won their first - but that was in his native Sweden, in Stockholm). The streak of six straight wins stretched from the summer of 1974 (Indianapolis) until Wimbledon of 1977, where Borg beat Connors in a five-set final.

But it was their next match - in what was basically an exhibition to everyone, if not Borg himself - that the Swede, by his own declamation, turned the corner mentally. Early in 1977, Borg beat Connors 6-3 in the third in the made-for-TV Pepsi Grand Slam, a four-man round-robin event held in Boca Raton, Fla., on Har-tru clay. It's telling that this match (in fact,three PGS results) are listed in the official ATP head-to-head records. I'm assuming that the two men played a pile of run-of-the-mill exhibitions, but this is the only exo result in the official record. There are two other "questionable" entries in the H2H, both of them in World Championship Tennis invitational events (a hybrid exo-tournament).

If you lean to conspiracy theories, you could say Borg's record is padded with five wins in events that perhaps should not qualify in the "official" record. But if you know what the Borg-Connors rivalry was like, you understand that neither man considered those matches mere exhibitions.

Anyway, after that critical first win at the PGS, Borg and Connors split their next four matches, three of them big 'uns. Connors won at the Masters (when that event was the de facto year-end championships) in 1977, and a final the following year at the U.S. Open. Those wins sandwiched two by Borg: yet another PGS encounter, and a significantly more important final at Wimbledon. But this brief era of real equality was rapidly coming to an end. Starting with the PSG of 1979, Borg won 10 matches in a row.

Connors played on the tour from 1970 to 1992 (staggering in and of itself), and never beat Borg in an official match after September of 1978.A Connors fan can vociferously argue that Jimbo was punished for his longevity, but it's pretty clear that if Connors was playing well enough to get to play the likes of Borg at tournaments, he was anything but over the hill. The plain truth is that Borg simply was better. The key match in the overall scheme of things may have transpired at the Masters of 1979, in which Borg took out Connors 7-6 in the third on a surface (indoor carpet) that was better suited to Jimbo's game, and in front of a Jimbo-worshiping New York crowd.

When someone wins 7-6 in the third, the notion that he's "better" than the other guy is fragile at best. You want to tell me that there's a noteworthy difference in talent or execution when it's that close? One guy won because the game demands that someone must. And the most valid takeaway, for me, is that the winner in that situation generally has superior mental strength or confidence (you can look at the last two Wimbledon finals in that light as well). Tennis at the level we're discussing is about owning the other guy; it has little or nothing to do with the other bits.

So when it comes to something like the GOAT debate, H2H is a critical factor. And Connors' record against Borg (8-15), even if throw out those five exo-type wins, is not persuasive. It also raises an interesting and largely unremarked aspect of Connors career - the way he tailed off against the three titans he battled over his long, illustrious career: Borg, John McEnroe, and Ivan Lendl. Connors was 14-20 against McEnroe. Starting in Cincinnati in 1983, McEnroe won 12 of his last 14 meetings with Jimbo. Lendl finished 22-13 against Connors, including the last seventeen of their meetings starting at Wembly in 1984. This, after Connors started like a  house on fire, winning their first eight meetings, and 10 of their first 12.

By the time Lendl started that 17 match streak, Connors was 32. He was 30 when McEnroe began to get the best of him. But when Borg began to dominate Connors, Jimbo was still a sprightly 27 - and if Borg had not abruptly retired in 1981, who knows how ugly that H2H might have become?

But before I draw any conclusions, I have to note that Connors at his best - in 1974 - probably would have beaten any player, past, present or future. His combative verve and confidence were nothing less than astonishing. That he couldn't sustain that fierce edge is one of the major themes in his career. For as much as the bombastic Connors played up his willingness to "spill his guts" as often as he threatened, menaced, or vowed to follow the likes of Borg to "the ends of the earth," he was never able to back up his bluster once he no longer had the upper hand. Once everyone stopped believing he was the fastest gun in town, it turned out that he wasn't. You know how it is with gunslingers - they tend to die young. It hurt Connors that, at least metaphorically, he did not.

So there came a time when Connors was more apt to lose than win those 7-6 in-the-third type matches against quality competition. But it isn't all about psychology; the mental game is always shaped by a player's physical assets or limitations. Of the latter, Connors had plenty. That serve was nothing short of second-rate. As a young buck, Connors took particular pleasure in beating up the grand old man of tennis (what goes around comes around: the same fate would befall Connors, and partly for the same reason: his serve). But while Rosewall's serve was a puffball, he at least had sound if not explosive mechanics, and an uncanny talent for placement. Connors, most of the time, rolled in his serve with topspin, sometimes slice, his life made easier by the fact that at that time, few players (Connors was the exception) had figured out the importance of the return game.

Connors's forehand, especially on low balls in the mid-court was a glaring liability that Arthur Ashe exploited brilliantly in the ultimate victory of sound and artfully executed strategy over brash aggression and shock-and-awe baseline prowess (1975 Wimbledon final). The low forehand, demanding an approach to the net, was such a sore point with Connors that at one Wimbledon press conference where I was in attendance, he absurdly challenged a reporter to go out and exchange forehands with him, if the press wretch thought the stroke so bad. . .

Connors's signature stroke was the return; along with Andre Agassi, he ranks at the top of the Open-era returners. The return enabled Connors to open up the court, where he could dictate the flow of the subsequent rally. In this, too, he prefigured Agassi. Yet Pete Sampras demonstrated that the way to neturalize Agassi was to deny him the chance or ability to dictate, and that was also true of Connors. All three titans who came to dominate Jimbo did just that.

Only Roger Federer and John McEnroe could rival Connors in the footwork department, and that two-handed, hammer-throw backhand of Jimbo's was breathtaking. He launched himself, body (and soul) into the shot in a way we haven't seen since. Connors had a great ability to keep his groundstrokes deep. He once told me - much to my astonishment - that his signature Wilson T-2000 racquet, while providing fantastic power, was so unpredictable and unforgiving of a poor hit that he usually "aimed" to hit the ball (although it's a poor choice of word; "willed" might be better) a good two feet beyond the baseline - knowing the the likelihood of catching the ball perfectly on the sweet spot was slim, and that operator error would handily reduce his range by roughly two feet.

Sometimes I still wonder if Jimbo was pulling my leg, but at the time we were somewhat close and besides, he wasn't subtle (or is it wicked?) enough to play that kind of trick. He was earnest and literal-minded to a fault and I learned over time that it wasn't an act.

The well-documented flaws in Connors game would have been devastating liabilities in today's game. Most returners would go to town on Connors' serve, and even if he were able to cover the return, simply playing the ball hard and deep (a talent not to be under-estimated, by any stretch) would not have been an adequate response (as heavy-footed by viciously powerful Lendl demostrated).  Just think of the aplomb with which Federer plays those (near) half-volleys off the baseline, and so adeptly transitions to offense. Like Lendl did, today's players would have pounded that Connors forehand until it broke down.

Connors signature accomplishments were all linked to his longevity, which is not a game-based asset but no less a distinguished one. Without doubt, he remains the most prolific great player in tennis history, and kept his place at or near the top for longer than any of his rivals. The things that kept him from becoming a dangerous but not quite dominant player were the same things that kept his appetite for the game intact, and enabled him to maneuver quite effectively around the big guns of his rivals for so many years, even as they fattened their H2H records against him: his confidence, fearlessness, and love of competition. Nobody could crush the little guy as joyfully and mercilessly as this sentimental proponent of the little guy.

Connors is credited with winning 109 titles, and the number is for all practical purposes accurate. It speaks for itself. Here was a guy who absolutely reveled in the thrill of competition, and who had the firmest hand when he battled any player who could be cowed by the self-perpetuated Jimbo myth. Those who didn't entirely buy it, or were able to find ways to neutralize Connors's high-speed, aggressive game  - Borg (with his superior speed and consistency) , Lendl (with his off-the-ground power and thundering serve), McEnroe (with his willingness to attack and take away Connors's time) - discovered that if they ignored the bark, they could suffer the bite and still get the best of him.