A look to the past...Ashe v Connors at the All England Club

“He feeds on speed, so I gave him junk,” said Arthur Ashe explaining his gameplan in the long odds victory over the seemingly indomitable Jimmy Connors 50 Wimbledons ago. It appeared a mismatch. It wasn’t just that Connors was winning; he was winning easy. He had beaten Ken Rosewall 6-1, 6-1, 6-4 at Wimbledon in the final the year before and followed up by drubbing him 6-1, 6-0, 6-1 in the US Open final. Ashe, in contrast, hadn’t won a Slam for more than five years.

The predicted walkover was covered by Michael Davie on The Observer’s front page and Christopher and Shirley Brasher in the sports section. The latter providing a rare example of a shared byline for a tennis match report and an unusual one in that the reporters were a married couple (“I promise to share my byline for better for worse, for richer for poorer…”), the former being the man who transformed Observer sports writing by commissioning everyone from athletes to dons to write for the section. Davie always swore that he would prefer to lose facts rather than jokes if a story had to be shortened. A maxim which might, just might, resurface with the dawning of the Age of AI. His hero was AJ Liebling.

A mismatch it proved to be. But it was Ashe, not Connors, who raced into a 6-1, 6-1 lead. So confuzzled was Connors that, as Mr and Mrs report, he was reduced to shouting out: “I am trying, for Christ’s sake.” Ashe, in a tennis nod to Ali’s rope-a-dope against Foreman the year before, had taken the pace out of the game with the result that Connors started beating up on himself. Perhaps further damaged by his Wilson T2000 racket which, strung around the frame not through it, was like a trampoline in the sweet spot and a frying pan elsewhere. How different might an Alcaraz v Sinner match be if one were playing with a graphite Donnay and the other a steel Wilson?

Ashe was able, Davie writes, “to absorb Connors with his passivity and calm”, adding to this image by taking advantage of a rule change which allowed seated breaks between games “to sit motionless for 20 seconds or more with his eyes closed”. Before 1975 the players would take a glug of Robinson’s Barley Water – did we really think drinking it would make us better at tennis? – and be on their way. Now it provided another opportunity for yet more mind games. And what pause it gives to consider one has spent 50 years watching players sitting on chairs at Wimbledon fiddling with things (is any sport more riddled with OCD?), staring into the mid-distance (thank you, Arthur) or suffering mental disintegration (poor Jana Novotna). A compilation of 50 years of tennis stars sitting on Wimbledon seats might be curiously engrossing, albeit filled with people eating bananas.

Ashe, a man as concerned with politics as tennis, was a one-off. He remains the only player to spend the night before the final playing blackjack at the Playboy Club into the early hours (“We know the game better as pontoon,” write Mr & Mrs) and, disappointingly, is still the only Black man to win the men’s title.

Connors, once described as the most blue collar man to play the sport, was coached throughout his career by his mother Gloria – the original “Tiger Mum”. Gloria had started off coaching Errol Flynn and, continuing to combine tennis with celebrity, showed up in 1974 with Ava Gardner and Jimmy’s fiancée Chris Evert, whose father she had dated, to watch him beat Rosewall.

Whether, a year later, Gloria screamed her famous exhortation “Kick him in the slats, Jimmy” is not reported. However, even if Connors had attempted to carry out this unfathomable instruction, it would have been no match for Ashe’s sublime diet of junk tennis.