Connors returns to centre stage but memoir’s fan flattery self-serving dross

Jimmy Connors grew up with his granny’s advice swirling around his head – “You can get away with almost anything if you win.”

Connors believes ignoring the “almost” helped him transform tennis and the Wimbledon spectacular that will engross the world for the next fortnight. And he might be right.

He concedes it wasn’t just him. McEnroe and Borg were there too; Nastase and Gerulitas as well. But Connors was the first. It is 40 years since the working-class hard man from St Louis won Wimbledon, a spitting, snarling, swearing, grunting, fist-pumping f**k you antidote to decades of south London gentility. The blazers didn’t know what hit them, didn’t recognise they were on to a good thing.

Between McEnroe’s shrieking demands for attention, Borg’s Scandinavian stoicism, Nastase’s ridiculous gurning, and Connors’s fondness for calling a spade a f*****g shovel, tennis had a cast of heroes and villains that were headline gold and, if you listen to nostalgists, are just what the game lacks now.

"Suddenly there we were, a group of rebellious bandits, shooting from the hip – and the lip – with different styles, personalities and attitudes," writes Connors in his autobiography The Outsider which is out in paperback. "And we knew exactly what we were doing. None of it happened by accident. We recognized the show we had to provide."

It’s hardly surprising the description attempts a self-consciously Rolling Stones style danger-chic from the same era, just as it isn’t surprising that, like the band, Connors & Co now come in a much more cuddly if crinkly package. None of them, least of all Connors, is ever going to be guilty of underplaying their impact. But he surely over

eggs it when describing his relationship with the fans.

“[They] made every broken bone, every knee operation, every wrist operation, every torn muscle, every aching back, and all three hip operations worth it,” says Connors. “The fans won me more matches than I won myself.”

You can see how that would be lapped up. But really Jimbo, you did it all for the fans? I know few players have ever fed more off the energy around them and Americans swallow a lot a sugar, but come on. For someone who still prides himself on being a working Joe, and outside the loop, calling it as it is, that really jars.

Connors is hardly alone in laying the plámás on thick. It’s a safe bet that whoever wins this time in SW19 will trot out the same shinola, thanking the greatest fans in the world, who make it all possible, create the atmosphere that helps everyone perform, an inspiration, etc. All of this might give some a warm tingly feeling, but leaves others, to quote Kevin Kline’s hilariously off French accent, with their asses “tweeetching”.

It’s hardly a mortal sin to fill an occasion with nonsense. And if it makes people feel a little better. Where’s the harm in a little claptrap. And there isn’t any, really. But it gets to be tiresome and condescending after a while. There can’t be an army anywhere, in any sport, that doesn’t rejoice in a best fans in the world tag and the supposed relationship between their desire to win and the team’s success.

Irish soccer has pedalled it for years

and you’ll see it really coming to the fore soon in the GAA: the grassroots one of our own bit, the pandering to yahoos from the back of a truck, all that with-us-every-step-of-the-way shtick: and if it gets a cheer in September then it would be churlish to quibble too much.

It’s delusional though to believe those flogging their guts out in the freezing February rain are doing it for anyone but themselves, their teammates and maybe, at a push, those closest to them. In reality it can’t be any other way. It’s the unseen hours of slog that prioritise, and you can be damn sure the greatest fans in the world – many of whom it’s safe to say are odds on to be chortling down in the warm pub about the stupidity of the eejits sacrificing the best years of their lives to a few games months away – come a long way down the list.

That might not be what people want to hear. But it is ridiculous to expect more than that. When Paidí Ó’Sé famously described Kerry football fans as “f***ing animals” he was only reflecting the reality of fickle fan devotion, how months of sweat and tears can count for nothing with one dropped ball or one bad wide. Nothing turns quite as quick as a Gael whose summer day out has been ruined by a bad result.

Nevertheless, the relationship between fan and performer in the amateur environment remains immeasurably closer than the one in many professional sports where the role of fan is becoming more and more just a variation on the theme of pay up and shut up.

It has always been so to an extent but never more than now. Maybe that’s why the public relations waffle is starting to grate more.

There’s no doubt Connors helped transform tennis from an image of club-membership elitism into the sporting mainstream, and embracing showbiz was part of that. And there’s no doubt the game benefitted to such an extent that histrionics aren’t required to sell it anymore. Nadal and Federer do n

ot need to go into panto.

However, it goes beyond panto for Connors to be still resolutely showering fans with such crap. His granny was right about winners getting away with almost anything. But surely the almost line gets crossed when it comes to platitudinous rubbish.