20130901

TENNIS

Jimmy Connors celebrated his 40th birthday in September 1992. At the U.S. Open championships, he played Ivan Lendl for the 35th and last time. At the time, Jimmy made the observation, "Myself and Mac (John McEnroe), we had a very special thing with (Bjorn) Borg when (Ivan) was playing. We had a triangle there where the tennis and the excitement and the attitude were kind of all clashed. Lendl in some way was left out of there. I don't know if he was biding his time at that point of his career - not waiting for me to get old and McEnroe to kind of take a sabbatical and Borg to stop or what - but if he would to enter in and start to play his best tennis at that time and made a square instead of a triangle we could really have something special." 

Mary Joe Fernandez had played Gabriela Sabatini 23 times. "We've played a lot and I know her game very well," Mary Joe had said. At the 1992 U.S. Open championships, Mary Joe and Gaby met in the quarter-finals. In the deciding set, it was deadlocked. At that point Mary Joe began to think back to 1990, to their semi-final match, "It was a big match for me. I had beaten her like 4 of the last 5 times. I was up 4-0 or 4-1 and she changed tactics on me, coming in on everything. I freaked out a little bit, ended up losing in the 3rd (set). And she ended up winning the tournament, which made it a little worse. It stood with me for a very long time. During the match, I actually thought about it a few times and I didn't want that to happen again. I thought I had it and I let it slip away."

 

Blog Archive