The Outsider

Jimmy Connors is a working-man's hero, a people's champion who could tear the cover off a tennis ball, just as he tore the cover of country-club gentility off his sport. A renegade from the wrong side of the St. Louis tracks, Connors broke the rules with a radically aggressive style of play and bad boy antics that turned his matches into entertaining prizefights. In 1974 alone, he won 95 out of 99 matches, all of them while wearing the same white shorts he washed in the sink of his hotel bathrooms. In The Outsider, Connors tells the complete, uncensored story of his life and career, setting the record straight about his formidable mother, Gloria; his very public romances; and his famous opponents. Connors reveals how his issues with obsessive-compulsive disorder, dyslexia, gambling, and women at various times threatened to derail his career. The Outsider is a grand slam of a memoir written by a man once again at the top of his game, as feisty, unvarnished, and defiant as ever.