Personal Life
In 1968, Connors' mother Gloria sent her son to work with Pancho Segura in Southern California. Segura refined his game, mentored him, and provided the court strategy that made Jimmy great.
In 1979, Connors married Playboy model Patti McGuire. They have two children and live in the Santa Barbara, California area.
In the 1990s he joined his brother John Connors as investors in the Argosy Gaming Company which owned riverboat casinos on the Mississippi River. The two owned 19 percent of the company which was headquartered in the St. Louis metropolitan area of East Alton, Illinois. Argosy narrowly averted bankruptcy in the late 1990s and Jimmy's brother John personally sought Chapter 7 bankruptcy. In the liquidation, Jimmy, through his company, Smooth Swing, acquired the Alystra Casino in Henderson, Nevada, for $1.9 million from Union Planters Bank, which had foreclosed on John. John had opened the casino in 1995 with announced plans to include a Jimmy Connors theme area. It was shuttered in 1998 and became a magnet for homeless and thieves who stripped its copper piping. The casino never reopened under Jimmy's ownership and it was destroyed in a May 2008 fire.
In October 2005, Connors had successful hip-replacement surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
On January 8, 2007, Connors's mother and long-time coach, Gloria, died at the age of 82.
On November 21, 2008, Connors was arrested outside an NCAA Basketball game between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of California at Santa Barbara after refusing to comply with an order to leave an area near the entrance to the stadium. The charges were dismissed by a judge on February 10, 2009.
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Famous quotes related to personal life:
“The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To ‘see the light’ too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)