“Just One More Time” What Jimmy Connors Taught Me by Mark Anthony Neal

“Just One More Time” What Jimmy Connors Taught Me by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
By many measures, tennis star Jimmy Connors was old that late summer of 1991; old for an elite athlete; old in a sport, when most turn pro in their teens; old in the eyes of the hubris that so defines the idea of  being young.  At 25 I was at the peak of such hubris, still with the building blocks of the life that I know claim.  
In my first semester of graduate school, and newly wedded, Connors became a passing commentary in a poetry seminar that I was enrolled in.  As a New Yorker, I was of course aware of Connors; you couldn’t claim New York City as home and not find an affinity with some tennis player -- any tennis player -- when the US Open came to town and and became the city’s energy. Where John McEnroe always seemed the pretentious brat, there was always grown man element to Connors’s badassness.  
Indeed my professor that day, was a women of a certain age, who no doubt would have found Connors as alluring that September of 1991 as she did when he was at his peak in the mid-1970s and engaged to Chris Everett.  Connors was already an old-man in the sport -- past 30 -- when he won the US Open in 1983, his last win in a major.  There was no reason to think that this now 39-year-old man, a year removed from wrist surgery, and ranked 174th in the world, would be anything but a broken-down disposable body during that tournament.
But what Connors possessed, channeling the late Derrick Bell for a moment, from his “Space Traders” short story, was “cunning and guile.”  Even when he dominated the sport, Connors was more known as a finesse player, and that improvisational mode -- what baseball players used to assign to the “crafty” left-handed -- is a thing that never leaves you, that in fact, is more finely tuned with age, as your physical gifts begin to betray you.
Connors’ run ended in the semi-final round against a bigger, stronger, younger (and infinitely less interesting) Jim Courier. Yet there was no denying there was an infectious beauty to what Connors achieved that late summer -- the season a metaphor for the closing moments of a distinguished career.  It was that beauty that brought Connors to the table in the first place in that now long forgotten poetry seminar.  Wrapped in the aesthetics of the aging body in movement are the possibilities of that moment and the ones imagined thereafter.  As Connors’ longtime nemesis Ilie Nastase remarked "What Jimmy has...is what we would all kill for: Just one more time."
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“Just one more time” -- those words resonate, as does the example of Jimmy Connors as I endure my 51st trip around the sun.  I am now close to the age that my dear professor was when we sat in that poetry seminar in the fall of 1991.  What I could not appreciate then, or even consider, was that the abundance of tomorrows would slowly diminish. The betrayal of aging is that you might be well past many of those tomorrows before you realize how relatively few there will be left.  The grace of aging comes with the ability to imagine those “just one more time(s)” with the passion that you expect the waking dawn.
As an academic, so much of my life revolves around the work that gets done during the summer months, which lay folk assume, is the time teachers of any rank, are “off.”  Do to familial demands on my time and energies that were both planned, and in some cases not anticipated, this past summer was a lost summer. When I was 25, I always took for granted there would be other “another summer(s)” (“sound of the funky drummer”); indeed there have been 25 of them. But as I take an accounting of the where that I stand, there’s that slow realization, that there are fewer summers ahead of me, and no doubt much less productive ones, in any event.
From this vantage the hubris of youth, looks like the Facebook feeds of any number of my  younger colleagues -- faster, stronger, smarter, and with a strong selfie-game -- and youth is an annoyance, if I’m being honest about it all.  
Recently my partner of more than 28 years (25 in marriage), without even a hint of her signature sarcasm, asked if I “felt old” watching our 18-year-daughter start her run of another summer(s) in Chicago.  There is a certain timelessness about 18-year-olds; ain’t never been an 18-year-old that done some shit that some other 18-year didn’t think about at some point -- ain’t no surprises there.  
What makes me feel old are 30-year-olds -- thinking about the millennial that told 50-year-old me and 49-year old Bakari Kitwana on social media that the “movement” was focused on the experiences of 30-somethings and younger -- and then you remember some stupid-ass shit you wanted to say to some version of yourself 20 years ago, but had enough home training to know better. 
Grace teachers that you don’t offer insight until asked; Age teaches that such insight is best shared by the example of grace.  And like Jimmy Connors a generation ago, I’m just trying to do it “just one more time” as often as possible until those tomorrows are done.