LIFE LESSONS
The Iconic Jimmy Connors
Longing for Simpler Times in Southwest Ohio
My siblings and I were camp kids. We had the double good fortune of growing up in the pre-cellphone era and also having parents who believed in the power of camp to teach you everything you needed to know about life.
We spent a minimum of two weeks every summer in the bucolic confines of the best camp in the Midwest, Fort Scott. Fort Scott attracted mostly middle-class Catholic kids who appreciated drinking bug juice three times a day, conducting midnight cabin raids, and riding second-tier horses through the woods of southwest Ohio.
Despite the seemingly homogenous nature of most of the kids at camp, Fort Scott campers and staff were in reality a motley crew of personalities straight out of a John Hughes movie. Like Edie McClurg said in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” there were “…the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads.” They all adored Fort Scott.
It was at Fort Scott that I met one of my childhood idols, Jimmy Connors. Jimmy, ten years my senior, was a Columbus native who spent the entirety of at least a few summers on the 204 acres of the nation’s first Roman Catholic camp.
When you’re 10, it seems like every 20 year-old is John Travolta. But in the case of Jimmy Connors I was convinced he was the single coolest person I had ever met.
Jimmy had both the swagger of a seasoned ladies’ man and the looks of a male model, but somehow still mustered empathy with a bunch of greasy 10 year-olds who only wanted to stand out to the much cooler, older crew of counselors and maintenance grease monkeys.
Working on the maintenance crew at Fort Scott gave Jimmy ample time to focus on impressing a bunch of kids with his Frisbee skills. If you can envision Tiger Woods’ golf swing, that’s how pure Jimmy’s Frisbee throws were.
Jimmy would send a bunch of us 70 yards in the distance and then launch throw after throw in our direction, loudly designating each throw’s point value as he was launching the disk. Whoever was the first to 500 points was the winner. I always wanted to impress Jimmy with my catching ability, but I had the height of a consistent third-place finisher.
While I didn’t know Jimmy as an adult, I thought of him every single time I threw a Frisbee since I was 10 years old. While this wouldn’t be often for most people, a fairly big part of my life has been focused on nontraditional “athletic” pursuits like Frisbee, juggling, and unicycling.
In being older and infinitely cooler than us but still taking the time to treat us like equals, he taught me and my fellow campers about an important part of life’s code: everybody matters, everybody deserves attention, and you never know what somebody else is going through.
Jimmy was a longtime chef on the West Coast. Like a lot of seasoned restauranteurs, Jimmy had a rough go in the pandemic era. Apparently he wrestled with demons that wouldn’t let go of him.
I had a visceral reaction to finding out that Jimmy died recently at the far too-young age of 63. The news took me back to a simpler time, one in which summer camps thrived and kids knew how to communicate without the help of an iPhone. It also served as one of those unwelcome reminders about the fragility of life and the brevity of our time on the planet.
Jimmy and I knew each other only briefly, but he made an impression on me that sticks with me to this day. My memories of him have taken on mythic proportions, the kind that implant themselves in your brain when you’re 10 and never really leave.
I’ll celebrate the impact he made on me as a 10 year-old by launching a Frisbee far into the distance today. I’ll call out “500!” at the top of my lungs, watch its arc, and hope it lands gracefully in the hands of somebody who will appreciate the beauty of the throw.
