If Donald Trump had been a tennis player, he would have been Jimmy Connors. Brash, bombastic, bullying, bludgeoning anything in his way, swollen with entitlement, constantly grabbing his crotch to assert his manhood. If there had been such a thing as Twitter in the 1970s, Connors would have set it on fire. I hated him.
Well, I suppose I didn’t hate him, exactly. But I certainly very badly wanted Arthur Ashe to beat him on 5 July 1975, in the final of the Wimbledon men’s singles. In fact I wanted Ashe to humiliate him in the way that, a year earlier, the 22-year-old Connors had humiliated the 39-year-old Ken Rosewall with a 6-1, 6-1, 6-4 destruction that denied the great Australian the one major title he was destined never to capture.
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