This article is part of our New York Court Classics series, a special feature produced by The Athletic looking back at classic U.S. Open performances, iconic athletes and timeless moments.
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FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. — James Scott Connors, the battler from Belleville, Ill., won eight Grand Slam titles during a 24-year career.
He is a five-time U.S. Open champion, a two-time Wimbledon champion, and a leading man of the first golden age of professional tennis in the 1970s and 1980s.
Just don’t look for him at the tennis “Star Wars” bar that every Grand Slam turns into, with old legends of the sport all over the grounds. They are in front of television cameras and behind the closed doors of corporate suites, where they receive generous checks for popping in, shaking some hands and telling some stories, before heading off to the next appearance.
Let them have their fun and their appearance fees. Connors will keep his distance. His relationships with them were always a little spicy. Connors, known to the world as Jimmy and now 72, called his memoir “The Outsider,” so maybe staying away is for the best. His two artificial hips, one of which required a second surgery, and his wife of 47 years, Patti, are happy to stay at home near Santa Barbara.
He golfs with a regular bunch of buddies, plays tennis several times a week and does a podcast with his son, Brett. They talk about the worlds of tennis and gambling. He’s made some good investments. Money is not of concern. Getting to choose how to spend his time is his reward.
Connors, who was, is and surely will be full of surprises for the rest of his life, saved his biggest one for his home major. Even with all those Grand Slam titles, and his record 109 tour titles, Connors may be best known for a fourth-round match he played on Louis Armstrong Stadium at the U.S. Open, on Labor Day in 1991. He woke up on his 39th birthday in the last 16 of his favorite tournament, a supposedly over-the-hill legend of the sport engaging in one of his last dances at his home Slam.
It’s the match that U.S. Open broadcasters used to show during rain delays, back before the advent of roofs at Grand Slams made their virtual storage closet of classic matches obsolete.
Connors had undergone wrist surgery less than a year before. He entered the U.S. Open as a wild card, ranked No. 174. He was facing Aaron Krickstein, a once and future top-10 player 14 years his junior. Krickstein, 24, was in his athletic prime and on his way back to the top of the sport. The first week had been brutally hot, sapping players far younger than Connors of their energy, leaving them depleted ahead of the business end of the tournament.
Someone forgot to mention all that to Connors. The crotch-grabbing exhibitionist, whose profane tirades rubbed much of the tennis establishment the wrong way, was never much for following conventional wisdom.
Krickstein didn’t know what to think of the matchup. He’d never beaten Connors, winless in five tries. He’d played Connors two months before at Wimbledon. Connors had dumped him in three sets, 6-3, 6-2, 6-3.
Unlike a lot of players on the tour, Krickstein liked Connors. They had known each other for nearly a decade; they were friends. Krickstein didn’t really like playing against his friends. Especially this one, who could act like his soulmate off the court before transforming into the most mercilessly vindictive soul on the planet once the first ball went over the net. He would make the crowd despise his foes. He would bully the umpires and linesmen into what looked like makeup calls. If fans got so riled up that they started to yell through every shot, he would not stop them.
Still, this was Krickstein’s favorite tournament, too. It was the site of his 1983 breakout run to the fourth round, when he was just 16. There, he produced an epic comeback from two sets down to defeat Vitas Gerulaitis, a hometown favorite and matinee star of the era with his flowing blond hair and Studio 54 personality.
“There’s no reason that Aaron Krickstein at 24 shouldn’t beat 39-year-old Jimmy Connors if I can stay mentally focused and play up to my standards,” Krickstein said during an interview this summer from Florida, where he is the director of tennis at the St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton.
As match day approached, he figured the New York summer heat would give him an assist and prove too much for his opponent, given the scorchers they had been living through.
“And then of course Labor Day was nice and cool and no humidity,” Krickstein said.
Connors’ 1991 game against Krickstein is shown at the U.S. Open during a rain delay in 2009. (Timothy A. Clary / AFP via Getty Images)
Still, when the match started, Krickstein felt like it was going according to his plan. It was a day match. They played the first set while much of the crowd was eating lunch. Krickstein did what he had to do, keeping Connors back, winning the longer rallies, not offering much to get excited about. He won it 6-3.
Then Connors started to find his rhythm, lacing balls across the net and charging in behind them to finish points. He surged to a 5-1 lead in the second set, only to lose it as Krickstein pushed proceedings into a tiebreak. At 7-7, Connors cracked an overhead that appeared to nick the sideline. The line judge called it in. The chair umpire, David Littlefield, overruled him. Krickstein’s meticulously constructed bulwark against any kind of chaos had collapsed.
Connors rushed the chair. The crowd howled. Littlefield told Connors the ball was clearly out, even though he was on the opposite side of the court. Connors unleashed, pointing at Littlefield, taunting him, calling him a bum and likely some obscenities, inaudible through the din. Connors told Littlefield that he couldn’t see balls beneath his feet, much less across the court. Littlefield sat silently atop the chair like a stoic.
The howls went on and on. Connors relished all of it. He won the next point with a stinging volley and pointed at Littlefield. Two points later, the match was even.
“That was the start of a crazy match,” Krickstein said. “Who knows if I pulled that out or we didn’t have that altercation or him screaming at the umpire … I would have been up two sets.
“Probably history would be a lot different.”
Ironically, Krickstein reset and cruised through the next set 6-1 before letting Connors back into the match in the fourth set. Littlefied overruled another call, and Connors unleashed once more, calling him “an abortion.” More stoicism from Littlefield. No penalties.
Krickstein grabbed a 5-2 lead in the fifth set, and that’s when Connors hit the afterburners. Suddenly, he started sprinting across the court, catching up with balls that a 29-year-old might struggle to get, much less someone a decade older than that.
Now the crowd was really going. Krickstein remembers serving for the match and pushing an easy forehand approach off of a low, chipped drop shot beyond the baseline. The errors started piling up. The crowd got louder with every point Connors won, even on some of the Krickstein errors.
Krickstein had been in hostile environments before. He often performed well in them. This one was different.
“I was kind of in a fog in the last four to five, six games,” he said. “I wasn’t able to really focus like I normally do in those pressure situations at the end of a match.”
He noticed Connors stalling between points to regain his wind. He thought about complaining, but figured it would make things worse. There was no way Littlefield was going to default Connors in front of his baying faithful.
“They would have burned the place down,” Krickstein said.
On match point, Connors got into the net and stabbed a backhand volley into the open court. He raised his arms and pumped his fists, pointing at every side of the stadium. After four hours and 41 minutes of tennis, his work for the holiday was done.
For Connors, whose run ended in the semifinals with a three-set defeat to Jim Courier, it was the last great win of a great career. He would play one more season, and beat Krickstein one more time before retiring at the end of 1992.
Following that Labor Day barnburner, the two men did not speak for 23 years.
Krickstein (left) and Connors ahead of their exhibition match in 2015, which formalized the end of a 23-year rift. (J Pat Carter / Associated Press)
Connors declined to be interviewed for this story. Brett Connors, a producer with Tennis Channel, said his dad — “Pops” to his son — wasn’t crazy about some things that were written about him in recent years, so he decided just not to talk publicly anymore. It’s a source of some frustration to Brett, who feels like his father doesn’t get his due in the tennis pantheon, perhaps because he’s not sitting behind a television desk, handing out trophies or glad-handing and working the celebrity appearance circuit.
Connors plans to come to New York with a friend around the final days of this year’s U.S. Open, mostly to visit the city and have some dinners with his son. He plans to fly back on the early side of Sunday, Sept. 7, the day of the men’s singles final.
Will Pops visit the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center?
“Truth be told, I wish he would,” Brett said. “I’d like him to get his due.”
Jimmy did do a little television work in retirement. It was fine. He coached Andy Roddick for a little while. He liked that. There were also limited stints with Maria Sharapova and Eugenie Bouchard.
Brett said his father still loves the game and the life it gave him. But Jimmy also learned early, after a series of losses to his buddy Ilie Năstase, that he couldn’t be friends with guys he needed to beat. So he wasn’t. Not with John McEnroe, not with Björn Borg and not with Ivan Lendl. Gerulaitis, who uttered the famous “nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row” quote after breaking a long losing streak to Connors, was a friend. Eddie Dibbs, a solid pro nowhere near Connors’ level, remains a buddy to this day.
“They talk all the time,” Brett said. “He loves Dibbs.”
As for everyone else, they do their thing, lapping up the attention four times a year. Jimmy does his. Until recently, many of his old trophies and other baubles had been in a storage unit in Illinois since his mother died 18 years ago. Brett said that when they retrieved them not so long ago, his father tossed much of it in the trash, especially the runner-up ones.
Krickstein and Connors, meanwhile, reunited in 2015. Krickstein invited Connors down to his club in Florida for a fundraising exhibition – a reunion match, so to speak. Given that Krickstein might be best known as the guy who lost to Connors in that epic, he obliged, despite having two artificial hips.
“I kept the balls pretty much in the center, but he was still playing well,” Krickstein said. “I was playing well, and obviously in a lot better shape.”
Krickstein won 8-4. Jimmy Arias, another 1980s hotshot, worked as the chair umpire. About 750 people showed up to watch. Connors stayed until 11 p.m., talking to members, posing for pictures, doing all the things he rarely does.
Krickstein has moved on plenty, too. For the first five or six years after the loss, Krickstein would catch glimpses of it during those rain delays and turn away. He didn’t want to hear about it, talk about it, or see it.
With age, perspectives can change. He’s fine with it now.
“It is an iconic match,” he said. “People who saw it still think of it as one of the best tennis matches of all time, even though it wasn’t the finals and even though it wasn’t one of the greatest tennis matches as far as level of play. It had a little bit of everything.”
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