73 Quotes by Jimmy Connors

I am not looking to be understood or liked. Like me or not, I don't care. I am an outsider, that is the way I was brought up.

Every time I went out there I performed the best that I could and it was time to step back and clear my mind.

I would watch Gonzalez play and he mesmerized you. It would be like looking into the flame of a fire. You know you couldn't take your eyes off him because you never knew what he would do next.

It was okay for Wayne Gretzky's dad, for instance, to give him a hockey stick, or Joe Montana's dad to give him a football, or Larry Bird's dad to give him a basketball, but it wasn't okay for Gloria Connors to give her son a tennis racquet.

Nothing is like being out there and playing and performing and winning - nothing. But to have an interest in the player? The nerves and everything that goes with it? Seeing what he's learned and how he's done it? That's the second best thing to playing. I think.

I was raised by two women, and that laid the groundwork for the way I treat 'em: with the utmost respect and admiration.

I always insist on my jeans being ironed. Is that a problem?

Back in East St. Louis, tennis wasn't the real thing. If you weren't playing baseball, basketball, football, you were kind of on the outside.

I've been kicked in the teeth more times in tennis than the law ought to allow.