Top 35 Jimmy Connors Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I hate to lose more than I love to win.”

— Jimmy Connors

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

— Jimmy Connors

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

— Jimmy Connors

4. “I never lost a tennis match, I just ran out of time.”

— Jimmy Connors

5. “I was never part of the crowd.”

— Jimmy Connors

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

— Jimmy Connors

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

— Jimmy Connors

8. “What works for the person you’re imitating may not work for you.”

— Jimmy Connors

9. “I’ve been kicked in the teeth more times in tennis than the law ought to allow.”

— Jimmy Connors

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

— Jimmy Connors

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11. “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.”

— Jimmy Connors

12. “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.”

— Jimmy Connors

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

— Jimmy Connors

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

— Jimmy Connors

15. “People don’t seem to understand that it’s a damn war out there.”

— Jimmy Connors

16. “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.”

— Jimmy Connors

17. “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.”

— Jimmy Connors

18. “I don’t go out there to love my enemy. I go out there to squash him.”

— Jimmy Connors

19. “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.”

— Jimmy Connors

20. “When you’re hot, anything can happen.”

— Jimmy Connors

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

— Jimmy Connors

22. “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.”

— Jimmy Connors

23. “Bjorn was a different breed, I threw my best material at him, but he would never smile, but that added to the charm when he played me and Mac. We were going nuts and losing our mind and he was sitting back like he was on a Sunday stroll.”

— Jimmy Connors

24. “Big money encourages tanking. In my opinion, tanking is going on even with a lot of the top guys today – it’s quite evident.”

— Jimmy Connors

25. “People don’t seem to understand that it’s a damn war out there. Maybe my methods aren’t socially acceptable to some, but it’s what I have to do to survive. I don’t go out there to love my enemy. I go out there to squash him.”

— Jimmy Connors

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

— Jimmy Connors

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

— Jimmy Connors

28. “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.”

— Jimmy Connors

29. “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.”

— Jimmy Connors

30. “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.”

— Jimmy Connors

31. “Tennis was always there for me, which was lucky. I would go play baseball, basketball, football, hang with my brother, do whatever, and at the end of the day I’d come back and say, ‘Hey, Mom, would you hit 15 minutes worth of balls with me?’”

— Jimmy Connors

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

— Jimmy Connors

33. “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.”

— Jimmy Connors

34. “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.”

— Jimmy Connors

35. “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.”

— Jimmy Connors

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

— Jimmy Connors

37. “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.”

— Jimmy Connors

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

— Jimmy Connors

39. “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.”

— Jimmy Connors