Jimmy Connors Quotes

I hate to lose more than I like to win. I hate to see the happiness on their faces when they beat me!

[In the modern game] you're either a clay court specialist, a grass court specialist or a hard court specialist... or you're Roger Federer...

Greatest thing in life: Winning a tennis match. Second greatest thing in life: Losing a tennis match

Rather than viewing a brief relapse back to inactivity as a failure, treat it as a challenge and try to get back on track as soon as possible.

Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you're too damned old to do anything about it.

New Yorkers love it when you spill your guts out there. Spill your guts at Wimbledon and they make you stop and clean it up.

I never lost a tennis match, I just ran out of time

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.

I hate to lose more than I love to win.

With everything else that would swirl around me when I got involved in it, tennis was my main concern.

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

Big money encourages tanking. In my opinion, tanking is going on even with a lot of the top guys today - it's quite evident.

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

What works for the person you're imitating may not work for you.

I don't go out there to love my enemy. I go out there to squash him.

The minute you think you know everything about tennis is the minute your game starts going down the tubes.

Tennis was never work for me, tennis was fun. And the tougher the battle and the longer the match, the more fun I had.

There was never anything I wanted to do more than play tennis. Never once walked out there and thought, 'I wish I was doing something else.' Not once.

People say I'm around because I have a lot of heart, but I know all the heart in the world couldn't have helped me if I wasn't physically fit.

Equality? They ought to play the women's final on opening day. Everybody knows who's going to be in it.

I was never part of the crowd.

I like any title with the letters U.S. in front of it. To me, the U.S. Open is the most important tournament in the world.

Nothing's perfect along the way [in life], and you ride the ups and downs. It's how you come out of those and continue on that I guess really matters.

The trouble with experience is that by the time you have it you are too old to take advantage of it.

There is only one number one. It is a lonely spot but it has got the best view of all.

I'm not begging to be remembered or whatever. I did my thing, and if you remember, that's even better. But if you don't, there's so many other things going on.

When you're hot, anything can happen.

Playing in front of 25,000 people and millions more on television, and performing and doing what I worked so hard to try to accomplish was, in my opinion, the ultimate. Do I miss it? Of course I do.

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

For the last five or six years the most important thing in my life has been my family.

From where we lived, to practise in St Louis was an hour-and-a-half drive each way, so that took a lot of the time. So really, our lives just took different paths.

People don't seem to understand that it's a damn war out there.

But why should I read what somebody else thinks of my life when I know the real story?

No, like I said, my dad was never really part of the tennis. His involvement around what I did with the tennis and with my mom and my grandparents was really not a part of my life.

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.

Tennis would be much more exciting if they had pitching machines firing Tennis was given to me to keep me off the street corners of east St. Louis.

You have to remember that I played longer than anybody else on the main tour; I played until I was 40, and then played another six years or so on the seniors tour.