Jimmy Connors is one of those tennis players who stick in the memory: a ham actor who talked to crowds, screamed at umpires and chased down impossible balls until he was 40. He had rivalries with two of tennis’s most intriguing characters, John McEnroe and Björn Borg, and was engaged to Chris Evert. So you start this book eager to find out: what was everyone really like?
But 400 pages later, you still don’t know. In Connors’ analysis, he and McEnroe were angry because of “Irish blood”. He admits to having no idea why Borg walked out of top tennis aged 26. When Connors has an affair and his wife asks him why, he replies: “I don’t know.” McEnroe and Andre Agassi pioneered the emotionally intelligent tennis memoir, but this is not it. That’s a shame, because there is an excellent story hidden in this book: a working-class kid breaking into a posh sport just as it was entering its 1970s rock-star era.
