COMMENTARY : Old Times With Connors Are Great; Old Ways Aren’t

In about a week’s time, Jimmy Connors has become the most revered elder sportsman since Hemingway sent a wrinkled remnant out in a rowboat to catch a marlin. Clearly, at 39, Connors is an old man in a sea of hard servers and hard bodies.

But is the current canonization of Connors warranted? Have his miracles at the U.S. Open tennis tournament earned him sainthood? Do we now start lighting candles under his picture on the walls of tennis clubs around America?

Hardly.

Off the court, I like Connors as much as any player in the game. Over lunch or a cup of coffee, there is nobody better. He is articulate, charming, bright, innovative in his thinking, gutsy, genuine, a good family man, not particularly self-centered. His interviews are lessons in story-telling and life’s perspectives. He’s the kind of guy you want to have dinner with occasionally, so you can talk about who the Raiders’ quarterback should be and what makes Mikhail Gorbachev special.

On the court, I like Connors as much as any player in the game--except when he is playing games instead of playing the game.

His classic victories over Patrick McEnroe and Aaron Krickstein were wonderful theater despite Connors’ bad acting. The athletic effort involved in both long matches was marvelous; the endurance, mental toughness and protracted mental focus remain among the more stirring things I have seen in tennis. None of that can, or should, be taken away from him. He is winning against all odds, turning back the clock, doing the impossible. Pick your cliche.

But he is also blowing a wonderful opportunity.

The promoters of the U.S. Open, no dummies they, have given him prime time, put him in a spotlight never before reserved for a player hovering around a No. 200 world ranking. And he has responded on this center stage of world tennis by overacting.

It would have been enough for him to give it his all, which is a given with Connors. It would have been more than enough, ranging toward the unbelievable, for him to win his way into the quarterfinals, which is always possible with a player possessing Connors’ greatness.

But it was too much when he pandered to the typically loud and rude New York fans at the frequent expense of his opponents. And it was way too much when he told a chair umpire to “get your fat ass out of the chair” and later to call the same umpire “an abortion.”

Connors’ outbursts weren’t necessary--the match didn’t appear to be one of those where dozens of calls were missed and the officiating let things get out of control--and they appeared to be orchestrated, rather than the result of genuine emotion. Connors gave that away when he prefaced his “get your fat ass” speech by saying that he was “39 years old” and he was “out there busting my butt.” Remember, Connors works for the television networks and knows exactly where every microphone in the place is located.

Extemporaneous anger, a la John McEnroe, is one thing. Programmed, mentally rehearsed, orchestrated anger--serving no purpose other than to embarrass and denigrate another person in front of several million television watchers and further stir up an already frothing-at-the-mouth crowd of New Yorkers--is clearly another thing. Bad form, Jimmy.

For that matter, good form, Patrick McEnroe and Aaron Krickstein.

For years, we have been hearing about ill-tempered tennis brats, the so-called racket-throwing prodigies of a game once invented and played only by ladies and gentlemen. Oh, how we have bemoaned their immaturity and longed for the days when these children with the Open Division bodies and C Division minds would grow up and give us competitive and civilized matches to watch.

Well, for those of you who saw the Patrick McEnroe and Krickstein matches, who were the adults and who was the child? Could anybody, in the face of the hurricane of one-sided emotion and favoritism orchestrated by Connors, have kept his poise better than Patrick McEnroe or Krickstein? If I had to pick U.S. Open champions in categories, I’d choose Connors for crass and Patrick McEnroe and Aaron Krickstein for class.

The thing is, it isn’t too late for Connors.

He has another match, maybe another two or three. And if anything, the spotlight that has been on him so far will get even brighter, interest even more intense. And whether Connors cares about it or not, this is not a one-man campaign; this is crusade that, by association, involves all of we occasional athletes whose knees ache when we swing them out of bed in the morning. Connors is playing a tournament for the ages. And the aging.

Now, if only Connors can make this all perfect by playing as if he were 20 and acting as if he were, well . . . 39.