In the Spirit of the U.S. Open, Happy 50th Birthday Jimmy Connors!

Tennis has been around for centuries.

In the late medieval text The Turke and Sir Gawain, the Turke shows Gawain a castle wherein the tennis balls are so large they can only be hit by giants:

Many aventures thou shalt see there,
Such as thou never saw yare
In all the world about.
Thou shalt see a tenisse ball
That never knight in Arthurs hall
Is able to give it a lout.

Shakespeare mentions tennis no less than five times if one includes brief notes alluding to tennis balls and tennis courts. Polonius, describing a scenario of his son Laertes’ possible activities in Paris, briefly mentions tennis to the spy Reynaldo in act 2, scene 1 of Hamlet:

He closes with you thus: “I know the gentleman,
I saw him yesterday”—or t’ other day,
Or then, or then—“with such and such…
There was a gaming, there o’ertook in ‘s rouse,
There falling out at tennis.”

Shakespeare, or whoever wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare, must have had some intimate knowledge of the game, because the writer also mentions tennis in Henry VIII/All Is True, Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles, and Henry the IV, Part Two.

After Shakespeare, a few innovations moved the game along until it began to look roughly like what we see today. And then came Jimmy—he was a southpaw, he was a hard-hitter, and he was the kind of man who spoke what he felt with the umpires and the officials. Jimmy Connors, with some help from Elie Nastase, Bjorn Borg, and Chris Evert, moved tennis into the age of rock and roll.

Before the 1970s, tennis was a game, many thought, that was restricted to the country clubs; after the arrival of Jimmy Connors and his Wilson T2000 racquet, tennis became the sport of the seventies.  Sure, there was football and the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers, and sure, there was the 1975 World Series between the Reds and the Red Sox; there was even some guy named Ali storming around in the world of boxing, mowing men down to the mat and reciting poetry as they fell.

However, the face of tennis was Jimmy Connors. Title after title, continent after continent, Connors faced the best. In the decade that defined modern tennis, Connors stayed on top of the game longer than anyone. He was the U.S. Open champion three times in the 1970s (twice more in the early 1980s), and he won both doubles and singles championships at Wimbledon during the same decade.

Among his many other accolades, Jimmy Connors was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1998. He is married to another icon of the 1970s, model Patti McGuire. Jimmy Connors celebrates his fifty-eighth birthday today, September 2, 2010.

--Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution 

 

Works cited:

The Turke and Sir Gawain, ed. Thomas Hahn, originally published in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995) http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hahn-sir-gawain-turke-and-sir-gawain (accessed September 1, 2010).

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

Image: Jimmy Connors (born 1952) / by Ross Barron Storey (born 1940) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine