Joel Drucker, a frequent contributor to the mother ship, TENNIS Magazine, reports that there will be a British edition of his recent touching memoir, Jimmy Connors Saved My Life.
When I last asked Joel if Connors had read the book, he said that his moles in the Connors camp had determined that Jimmy had read a few dozen pages—which would put Drucker’s book into the same category as The Red Badge of Courage, War and Peace, Moby Dick, Thus Spake Zarathrustra, the Bible, and probably even The Da Vinci Code. If anyone were ever insane enough to ask Jimmy to write a cover blurb for his book, he’d surely write: Once you put this book down, you’ll never pick it up again.
Jimmy never was much of a reader, and he famously got in trouble during one year at UCLA for handing in a term paper that had been run off on a mimeograph machine.
In typical fashion, Jimmy refused to make himself available to Joel when he was writing the book, despite having had a long friendship with the Berkeley-based journalist. In a way, that was a good thing, for it allowed Joel to write about Connors freely, with no obligation to insert his point of view or do what we journalists so often must: print statements or sentiments that we know to be either questionable or deceptive, and which are intended to make our subjects look good.
All in all, I enjoyed Joel’s somewhat quirky book; among other things, it demonstrated very persuasively how athletes can be real (and I don’t use that word lightly) sources of inspiration, in unexpected ways, for unlikely people. The point-by-point match descriptions were superfluous, and the book could have used a critical, hands-on editor to keep the excitable author in line. But the book makes a great case for the argument that sports heroes matter.