Jimmy Connors is part of an elite club of 6 male players that have won more than 900 matches. Tennishead profiles his extraordinary career
Jimmy Connors
Date of birth: 2 September 1952
Years played: 1969-1996
Matches won: 1,274
Matches lost: 283
Win percentage: 81.8
Singles titles won: 109
Grand Slam singles titles won: 8
Weeks as world No 1: 268
Career prize money: $8,641,040
Jimmy Connors traces his openly combative approach back to his childhood days when he was coached by his mother, Gloria. “Mom didn’t take it easy on me,” Connors wrote in his autobiography, The Outsider. “She’d hit that ball right down my throat. ‘See,’ she’d say. ‘If your own mother can do that, imagine what others will do to you’.”
Over the course of a career that lasted 27 years Connors won more matches and more titles than any other man in the Open era. In an age when many players peaked by their mid-twenties, the left-hander was still going strong late into his thirties. At 39 he reached the semi-finals of the US Open after a series of memorable victories. He held the records for the most appearances in Grand Slam semi-finals (31) and quarter-finals (41) until they were broken by Roger Federer.
Connors took the ball early and hit his ground strokes flat and with great power. His double-handed backhand in particular was a hugely effective weapon. He won his first title in Florida in 1972 and his last in Tel Aviv in 1989. In his most prolific year in 1974 he won 15 titles and played 99 matches, winning 95 of them. He won the Australian Open, Wimbledon and the US Open that year but was denied entry to the French Open because he had signed up to play in World Team Tennis.
