Now, before anybody gets the wrong idea, in no way am I anything remotely approaching a serious tennis fan. I bear it no ill will, but I'm not exactly David Foster Wallace. Yet, Jimmy Connors is unquestionably my favorite tennis player.
Why Jimmy Connors? I'll readily admit that not once have I seen him play tennis. I was not alive the last time he won a major tournament. Why do I admire Jimmy Connors so much?
The first time I even heard of Jimmy Connors was when this huge new house was going up near my neighborhood. It was ridiculously mansion-sized, especially compared to some of the smaller houses around. It even had a smaller house around back which was rumored to be used for a variety of purposes. The neighborhood kids theorized it was a gigantic doll house, a butler's house, a pool house (though I do not think there was a pool), or half a dozen other things. There was a huge fountain out front and a gate surrounding it.
This house was being built by Jimmy Connors for his fuck-up brother. After its construction, for whatever reason, there was a huge controversy about its financing and nobody ever lived in it as far as I can remember. The developer then had huge problems trying to sell the house to somebody else because nobody really wanted to live in a house that outsized all the other houses around it by a wide margin and, actually, nobody really wanted to live in Belleville. The house became kind of a blight on the entire Oak Hill neighborhood. The Oak Hill swimming pool (it was the cool pool because it was under a dome and you could swim in it all the time but everyone knew that the fun pool was Dorchester [my pool] where you could play tennis baseball and adults could drink Zima) was shut down and filled in with cement.
So to summarize, Belleville is kind of a screwed up place. This little anecdote does very little in explaining its true nature, but to do so would take a work on the magnitude of one by David Foster Wallace. It's where I grew up and it's where Jimmy Connors grew up. So that's why I like Jimmy Connors.
1 comment:
so i've been searching high and low for an address for connors (the 2 in Cali that I found are wrong). there was a company called Tennis Management Inc in bellesvile on red fox road but 411 shows no phone # and nothing comes up on them. my guess is when jimmy's mom died a year ago (early 07) it closed. the chamber of commerce and office of econ. develop. show no such business anymore either.
if you have any clue if that company is still around as his mgmt firm, could you post it??
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