If I told you that an East St. Louis sports icon has penned a memoir recalling mob hits and witnessing a mother and grandfather beaten to a bloody pulp by thugs, who would you guess is the author?
Olympic champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee, NFL Hall of Famer Kellen Winslow or, perhaps, NBA star Darius Myles?
Wrong.
How about tennis legend Jimmy Connors?
That’s right, even though you may have assumed that Jimmy Connors was a Belleville, IL native. Well, in his book The Outsider (Harper Collins), Jimmy Connors dispels that myth early and often.
In fact, Connors’ first account of ESL is that of his mother Gloria Connors (a former tennis pro) and his grandfather Al Thompson getting beaten senseless by a group of hoodlums on ESL’s Jones Park tennis courts.
That traumatic event, at eight years of age, was what Connors says molded him into the renegade or bad boy of professional tennis – that, and a wealth of other typical coming-of-age experiences that came with, as he describes, growing up on the “wrong side of the tracks” in ESL.
Connors’ paternal grandfather John T. Connors had been the mayor of East St. Louis, but was later indicted in 1947 (along with 19 other officials) for malfeasance (ignoring evidence of gambling and election irregularities, etc.).
Mayor Connors was also a good friend of the notorious ESL mobster Frank “Buster” Wortman. It was at Wortman’s Paddock Lounge that a six-year-old Jimmy Connors claims to have witnessed a mob hit while dining there with his family.
Jimmy’s father “Big Jim” Connors wasn’t as involved in his sons’ upbringing as his mother/tennis coach Gloria, but he taught the boys how to drive a car at age eight and how to hop the same railcars used by hobos as transportation in those days.
“Big Jim” eventually became the GM of the old Veteran’s Bridge (now the MLK Bridge). This enabled their family to move into a newly built house off of 68th and State Street (in East St. Louis), complete with a tennis court in the back yard.
I can’t count how many times I’ve taken out-of-towners to that old house and pointed out that Jimmy Connors once lived there. Many of ESL’s senior citizens have done the same over the years and were probably called liars, as was I.
And though Jimmy did, eventually, move to Belleville and then onto California and, finally, onto tennis superstardom, throughout the book Connors seems to have a chip on his shoulder as being “The Outsider” from the public tennis courts of East St. Louis.
That seems to have given him the motivation to succeed in a world of spoiled country club tennis brats (like John McEnroe) who would become his competitors on the world stage.
But despite his own flaws and issues (obsessive compulsive disorder, dyslexia, addictive gambling, womanizing and obnoxious behavior), Connors always reverts back to East St. Louis as the root of his defiant, determined drive which led him to win more titles (109) and compile more wins (1,237) than any other male player in professional tennis.
East Boogie created that same passion, drive and defiant spirit in the likes of a jazz musician by the name of Miles Davis and many achievers who dared to dream of success despite the negative stigma associated with being from ESL or any place that’s considered the “wrong side of the tracks”.
Email: jtingram_1960@yahoo.com; Twitter@JamesTIngram.
