June 1991
Three months after blowing it with the most beautiful woman on the planet, I took a two-week vacation from ET and headed to London to host the nightly Wimbledon wrap-up show for NBC Sports. It was a plumb assignment that I knew, from experience, would draw harsh comments from more than a few sportswriters who were in short pants when I labored six years as a courtside reporter for CBS’s US Open tennis broadcasts. The day before I was set to leave for England, I remember scribbling on my ET script the headlines I knew would be coming:
“Tesh? Wimbledon? Seriously?”
“What’s the ET host doing at the Old England Club?”
“Get ready for ‘Celebrity Birthdays at Wimbledon!’”
As always, from people like that, the unspoken message was one of intimidation through shame: stay in your lane and everything will be just fine.
I had bigger concerns than prophesying the barbs of sportswriters though. Flying eleven hours to Europe from Los Angeles, I found myself reliving my epic fail with Connie on an endless loop and trying to shake off this familiar feeling of regret, again realizing that I had dug myself another deep hole for reasons that didn’t make any sense to me.
Call it insecurity, doubt, cowardice? Yeah, that sounds right. Let’s call it all those things. They conspired to spoil a terrific opportunity to spend time with a fascinating, talented woman and compelled me to choose “boys’ night out” instead.
I needed to spend this eleven-hour flight being more constructive than destructive. So at thirty-five thousand feet somewhere over the Canadian Arctic, I began to brainstorm ways to get back into Connie’s good graces. I went through multiple British Airways cocktail napkins before finally arriving into London’s Heathrow Airport with a three-part master plan:
1. Call my new friend Sharon Smith in Research.
2. Have Sharon and her team track down a contact number for Connie Sellecca.
3. Call Connie Sellecca relentlessly and ask her out again until she says yes.
It is a rudimentary plan, I admit, and there is probably a slim chance for success in any of it, but I fully intend to at least give it a shot. So while I get into a taxi and head to the Savoy Hotel, waiting for Los Angeles to wake up so I can organize my attack, I have some time to ruminate about what is ahead of me in London, at Wimbledon. And what is ahead of me, I am convinced, is a different kind of fight—one fought up close and personal with one of my broadcast partners on the nightly wrap-up show: my old nemesis Jimmy Connors.
Jimmy had been hired along with fellow Grand Slam title–winner Tracy Austin as an expert commentator for NBC’s Wimbledon coverage. I already know from experience that Tracy will be as affable and approachable as Connors would be irascible and combative. Not just because that was his nature, but because that was my last, direct experience with him nearly a decade earlier, on Center Court after the 1982 US Open Men’s Final.
That year Jimmy Connors met Ivan Lendl. As expected, from the start the match was a slugfest. It resembled, in retrospect, the final fight scene involving another Ivan three years later, that one named Drago in the classic Rocky IV. A comparison made even more poignant by the fact that Lendl had faced America’s other great bad-boy tennis hero, John McEnroe, in the semifinals and had demolished him in straight sets to reach the finals.
In their history, Connors had won eight of nine previous matches against Lendl. Lendl only won his first match against Connors earlier that same year. On this day, Lendl, cast as the evil Czech foreigner, was playing perfect tennis. Connors, wielding his relic Wilson T-2000 metal racket, was doing the same, but he was also giving New Yorkers what they loved most—his larger-than-life personality. Grunting, gesturing, giving the finger to a linesman who disputed a call, Connors strutted around the court with the racket handle between his legs and, in his frenzy, yanked on the handle in a grotesque manner while his fans went wild. The louder the crowd got in Flushing Meadows, the stronger Jimmy grew. He absorbed the fan energy like one of my childhood Marvel Comics favorites, Galactus, who consumed planets to sustain his life force. Connors was that.
While Connors and Lendl are slugging it out, I stand at the ready, perched along the sidelines not thirty feet from the action, in my capacity as a sideline reporter for CBS Sports. This is a huge role for me. It will easily be my most-viewed appearance on the network to date.
Aside from offering updates to the producers in the booth between sets, the most important part of my duties will be asking the very first question of the day’s champion. This will be broadcast live to a national TV audience while at the same time witnessed live, in the stadium, by twenty thousand fans. Right now those fans are watching a tennis match that’s as much a street fight as anything else. Judging by the crackle of conversation in the production truck that I’m hearing in my earpiece, it’s clear the producers are giddy with excitement.
Although I am not long out of the WCBS newsroom as a hard news reporter, these post-match tennis interviews are not intended to elicit 60 Minutes “gotcha” moments. They are expected to be softball conversations, appealing to the average TV viewer at home. My job is to be more Mike Douglas, less Mike Wallace. Earlier in the week, in fact, I’d been kicked out of a post-match news conference by a US Tennis Association official when I’d challenged John McEnroe with a question about his verbal abuse of a linesman.
“Are you kidding me? Who is this guy?” McEnroe had shouted from the podium.
“No, Mr. McEnroe, I’m not kidding,” I said.
“Why don’t you get the hell out of here!” McEnroe replied.
I was led out of the press room to lots of muttering, boos, and head-shaking by my fellow reporters who wouldn’t dare challenge McEnroe.
Perhaps inspired by this—or because of it—our team was cautioned during the broadcaster’s meeting prior to Sunday’s final to avoid asking questions that were too controversial or confrontational.
I had been conducting these post-match interviews for the last two weekends, so they were not unfamiliar exercises, and I knew I’d be taking strict time cues in my ear from the truck. I might be asked to stretch out my interview an extra four minutes to fill time, as I had been during the first weekend, or to keep it to a tight ninety seconds, as I’d been asked from the truck on the second weekend.
As I hear play-by-play announcers Pat Summerall and Tony Trabert wrap up Connors’s two-hour-plus fist-shaking, finger-pointing, racket-abusing, obscenity-fueled four-set victory in my earpiece, I swallow hard and prepare for them to throw down to me, courtside, for the live interview. The crowd is stomping their feet and cheering. When Jimmy Connors steps off the court, the crowd and the international TV audience will be hanging on every word of the post-match interview. If you polled the crowd at this very moment, I’m convinced they would want to hear, in detail, what was going through Jimmy’s mind as he delivered the knockout blows in this episode of Bad Blood on Center Court.
In my ear I hear, “Coming to you in five, four, three, two . . . Ready camera six annnnnnd . . . go, John.”
“Congratulations, Jimmy,” I say, “America’s champion in America’s tournament.” The words echo twice inside the stadium, and then repeat one more time in my left ear with another delay created by the CBS production truck. Yikes, this is new. The audio delay on my voice gives me pause.
“Thanks, John,” Connors replies.
“Well, Jimmy, it looked to me like there was a lot more than just tennis going on out there today. Tell me about that,” I say.
The question hangs in the air for an extra moment as Jimmy thinks it over. I see his demeanor, his body language, shift a bit from sunny to almost sanguine. The pause between question and answer, between call and response, grows longer still. Mercifully, Connors leans into my microphone for his answer, but it’s too late. The crowd has read his body language as being very put off by my question. Before he can say a word, twenty-thousand people answer for him and begin to boo. They’re booing . . . me? And it’s that inimitable, New York City, angry-mob kind of boo.
“Get outta here, throw da bum out,” style of booing.
I’m baffled, disoriented. I’m in full panic mode. Jimmy turns from me now, as the victorious gladiator, playing to the crowd, and shows them his palms turned up in supplication, as if to say, “Can you believe this guy and his stupid question?”
They go nuts. The fans are screaming and stomping again. I’m in Marcus Aurelius’s Colosseum and my head is in the lion’s mouth. Finally, my earpiece crackles to life with the screaming voice of my producer Frank Chirkinian: “Tesh, Tesh, good God, Tesh, upbeat questions. Ask upbeat questions! What the hell are you doing?”
I try again. I know I can save the interview. I quickly change tack.
“Jimmy, after winning the first two sets, Lendl seemed to . . .”
I can barely hear my own voice over the raging crowd. Connors turns back to look at me. He’s going to hang me out to dry, I can feel it.
“Hang on, John, you didn’t let me answer your first question!”
The crowd erupts. Connors’s condescending tone has triggered a blood lust. This is officially the Jimmy Connors Show. There’s more shouting in my earpiece. I say a few more things into the mic that I can’t remember. Jimmy smiles and then mercifully turns his back on me and heads back to center court for the trophy presentation and ceremony.
The CBS cameras to my left and right swish-pan off of me and follow Connors. The interview is over. And so, I’m convinced, is my brief career at CBS Sports. In less than two minutes, Jimmy, once more as Galactus, has absorbed me and the moment.
On Monday, as expected, sportswriters ripped me apart. Even the New York Times thought my debacle at center court worthy of a few painfully critical horrible paragraphs. As I walked off the elevator onto the thirtieth floor at Black Rock that morning, I was prepared to surrender my CBS Sports microphone flag and blazer. By lunch I’d already begun gathering up my personal effects from my office. Then network sports president Van Gordon Sauter summoned me to his office.
I knew Van would get right to the point. He was a brilliant communicator and his charm and wit in meetings was a big part of why the sports department was so popular with major advertisers. Sauter greeted me with a look that I was not expecting. Through his bushy beard and his red-and-white reading glasses, Sauter shot me a wide grin.
“Wow, if not for these guys, you’d be a goner, Tesh,” Sauter bellowed as he held up the front page of the New York Daily News sports section.
The headline read, “Tesh Gets Right to Match Point!”
The thrust of the article was a defense of my approach to the post-match interview with Connors and an indictment of the way sports reporters often pandered to professional athletes. The writer went on to champion my hard news background and heralded CBS’s decision to include me in the coverage. While the Daily News reporter had saved my job, Mr. Connors had still put a sizeable dent in my reputation as a broadcaster.
This was where I assumed my relationship with Jimmy had remained when, in the summer of 1991, I walked into the makeup room of the NBC Sports Wimbledon compound on the first day and there sat Connors, the two of us ten years older now and linked once more, this time both as sports broadcasters. I still saw us as adversaries and now we had been hired as broadcast partners.
“Hey, Tesh!” yelled Jimmy as I walked in.
“Oh, hi, Jimmy,” I replied to the man who nearly torched my career a decade earlier.
“How ya been? I’m looking forward to working with you guys on this,” he said.
The voice in my brain was so loud at this moment, I couldn’t tell whether what I was thinking was already coming out of my mouth.
Here’s the dilemma, says my brain. Do we bring up the US Open thing and get it out of the way so it doesn’t come flying out of our mouth while we’re on the air, or should we just pretend it never happened? Maybe he doesn’t even remember.
I went with my gut.
“So, Jimmy,” I said, “I haven’t talked to you since that interview at the Open ten years back. I thought we could—”
“Oh my gosh, Tesh, that was hilarious! The crowd was going nuts. The look on your face! You gotta love that New York crowd, right?” he said, completely oblivious to the impact his antics had on my psyche. “I’m working on getting back there to play one last time this year, actually. I’ve been training hard. I’ll be almost forty. Can you believe it?”
In fact, there was so much about our exchange I couldn’t believe. But now was not the time to litigate all that. I had to decide how to respond: go right into “host rage” and give him a piece of my mind in an attempt to clear the air while indulging my ego, or take one for the team, chicken out, laugh like a hyena, and give him a high five?
I chose Door Number Two and went full Colonel Sanders.
“Yeah, that was crazy,” I said. “Everybody was booing me and you looked like you were loving it.”
“I know, right?” Jimmy chuckled.
That was it. Game, set, and match, Connors.
I won’t lie; it helped that I had much more important things on my mind than Jimmy Connors. I had to activate Operation: Get the Girl, my battle plan for Connie’s heart that I knew would require relentless determination.
Since the sun had come up back in Los Angeles on my first day in London, I had made some decent strides. I managed to reach Sharon Smith in Research, who armed me with the number for Connie’s answering service and for her publicist, Richard Grant. I then immediately dialed Mr. Grant, and while I cannot remember what fiction I engineered, I do remember that it wasn’t nearly convincing enough to result in a direct line to Connie. From there I evolved my plan into what one might call a message carpet-bombing strategy. I would leave two messages a day with Connie’s answering service until I got a response from the woman herself.
I don’t know about you, but when I think about engaging with an answering service, I expect a neutral party, like Switzerland, who tries to stay out of the particulars between the parties—the leaver and the receiver—on either end of a message. In the case of Connie’s answering service, however, I felt very much like the saddest member of the Axis powers trying to establish a line of communication through a united Allied front. Each time I called the number Sharon Smith gave me, a human picked up the phone and offered increasingly condescending responses to my entreaties: “Yes, Mr. Tesh, we’ve given Miss Sellecca each and every one of your messages. I’m suuuure she’ll call you when she can.”
Still, I persisted in my singular purpose. Connie had agreed to a first date for a reason, so I had to believe whatever that reason was still held some sway in her heart. I had to have faith.
After a week of unreturned calls, I resorted to adding a pathetic postscript to my messages: “Please tell Connie I’m calling from Wimbledon, where I’m hosting NBC’s television coverage. If I can’t pick up the phone, because I’m on the air, have her leave her direct number and I’ll get back to her the moment I’m off the air.” (It still makes me cringe today that I said this.)
If my relentlessness wasn’t enough to earn a returned call, I thought, maybe I could impress her with my professional bona fides.
Wimbledon lasts two weeks. So did my Connie Sellecca answering-service phone-barrage. I left twenty-eight messages—two a day. All of them unreturned. Ironically, in that time I’d managed to repair one relationship I thought was completely unsalvageable, while getting shut out completely from another that I was positive held great promise. I took the first plane home after my hosting duties were complete, battered and bloodied but not beaten.
The way through ultimately materialized thanks to two Los Angeles DJs, Mark and Brian from KLOS. The boys were heading out on a two-week vacation and they decided to invite various musicians and entertainers to fill in for them on the air while they were away. I got the call to host their three-hour morning show on August 29, 1991.
The program’s producer, Nicole Sandler, suggested that the guest hosts “invite some of their ‘famous friends’ to come on air with them.” That’s when the light bulb went off. First, I invited my old Nashville co-anchorman, Dan Miller, to join me, knowing that he would make a great Ed McMahon for the broadcast. Then I suggested to Nicole that she call Connie Sellecca’s press agent and schedule an interview with the Mark & Brian Morning Show to promote her new TV series, P.S. I Luv U, which was set to premiere on CBS in a couple of weeks.
“But don’t mention that I’ll be the one doing the interview,” I told Nicole. “I want it to be a surprise. Trust me, it will be great radio.”
From my research, I knew that Connie was still in Palm Springs shooting the series with Greg Evigan and Earl Holliman. I also knew that the powerhouse ratings of the Mark & Brian Show would appeal to a PR maven like Richard Grant, and that my pal Dan Miller would go along with whatever scheme I’d cooked up.
Sure enough, Connie agreed to the interview, which was set for that Thursday morning at 5:15 a.m. before her call time to the set of P.S. I Luv U. When Connie called in, it was Dan Miller who greeted her live on the radio: “Good morning, Connie, this is Dan Miller from the Mark and Brian Show. I’m here co-hosting the morning show with John Tesh.”
“Oh, John Tesh,” she said, with a coyness in her tone that broadcast a thinly veiled message to me over the Los Angeles airwaves.
I swiftly launched into a barrage of softball questions about the series premiere to try and keep the train on the tracks. Listening to her answers, with that hint of the Bronx occasionally slipping out, I was bewitched. She was classy, witty, and hilarious. She spoke in perfect radio sound bites. She was the ideal interview, which I hoped would, one day soon, translate to being the ideal conversation partner over dinner. Eventually, Dan came through with the smooth transition that only my master-interviewer-buddy could deliver.
“So, Connie, you and John have met before. Is that right?”
“Yes, we have,” she said, letting each word dangle in the air so that I would know she still hadn’t forgotten my disappearing act four months earlier. Dan picked up on it, too, and he immediately shifted into Cyrano de Bergerac mode, outlining the top reasons he thought Connie and I should go on a dinner date. It was a stunt straight from the morning zoo radio-show playbook.
There was coy banter back and forth between Connie and Dan. Then I pretended, as we had planned, to be outraged by Dan’s unprofessional behavior and protested his lack of interview etiquette.
“Dan, this is neither the time nor the place!” I said into the microphone while giving Dan a huge thumbs-up.
Now Dan slid into the closer role and suggested that Connie stay on the line after the interview so I could get her phone number. The interview wrapped and as the commercials played, I picked up the studio line to find Connie still there. We spoke directly for the first time since April. She confided that in her fury over my disrespectful first date no-show, she had told Richard Grant not to give me her number. “If you give John Tesh my number, you’re fired” were her exact words. And yet, after a few more minutes of conversation, I managed to breach her defenses and secure that ten-digit Holy Grail.
This encounter—while not exactly face-to-face, more voice-to-voice—was a total reversal of my original mind-set (fear and avoidance). This time I was prepared to follow through, even in the face of possible rejection. There was something very special about this woman that had gnawed at my conscience long enough to reconnect my backbone to my brain and produce my natural tendency (in other endeavors) toward persistence.
I was on a mission to fix my original mistake. I had made a plan with Connie in that gym. A date. A promise. And I had broken that promise to mitigate my own insecurity. I even convinced myself that I hadn’t really made a commitment in the first place. A fiction I held in my mind as absolute truth until years later when, at a dinner one evening, I was telling my version of this story and Connie produced the hard copy of my note on the hotel’s stationery confirming our date as evidence to the contrary.
A week and a few phone calls later, Connie agrees to dinner in Pacific Palisades at Giorgio Baldi, a renowned celebrity-spotting restaurant known for its incredible Italian dishes and beachy atmosphere.
On the appointed evening I get there early, secure an outdoor table, and wait. Under normal circumstances, I would have picked my date up from wherever she asked and escorted her to dinner. But as a single mom, Connie had a practice of not letting her son, Gib, see her get picked up by a man for a date until she felt there was real potential there. I had not yet attained “potential” status. It was, after all, our first date, and I had not done anything to move myself out of relationship purgatory. I was still just elated that she’d said yes to our date.
Connie arrives wearing wings and a halo and floats out onto the patio. Sorry, that’s my memory. Dinner is fantastic. The conversation is even better.
We talk for five hours. About our families, about being fellow New Yorkers, about her life as a single mom to her nine-year-old son. I have to be careful with my reactions and my facial expressions, though, because I already knew from the ET research dossier so much of what she was telling me. Still, it is awesome hearing her say it.
Then Connie spoke of something I had not read in the research: her faith in God. I told her I was raised in the Methodist church. She told me she was raised Catholic and then described herself as a born-again Christian. She told me she attended a Messianic service on Sundays and explained that her church combined Christianity—most importantly, the belief that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah—with elements of Judaism and the Jewish tradition.
I was intrigued.
I had been born into the church, but I had not attended church regularly since I enrolled in college in 1970. I’d gone to church camp every summer for five years and I’d studied for and completed my confirmation as a Christian. I had attended church three times a week with my family. I had memorized dozens of scriptures. I’d said the Lord’s Prayer every night before bed. Then, as a freshman at NC State, I took a religion course that I expected to be a walk-through of the Bible but instead turned into a semester-long argument by the professor that Christianity was nothing more than man’s desire to understand the things he could not explain through science. The professor was effective and had me questioning my own beliefs. I told Connie all of this. I spoke these words aloud for the first time in decades.
This was heavy conversation on a first date. But it felt right, natural. At this, Connie suggested I might like her church. She told me that this was how she spent her Sundays, so if we wanted to spend what little free time each of us had together, I might want to consider giving it a try. I liked Connie, so of course I was interested in her church.
As it turned out, I would fall in love with Connie and her church. Beth Ariel Fellowship would become a big part of my life. Led by a Vietnam veteran named Louis Lapides, the Sunday service at Beth Ariel was more like a Bible study. It was held in a tiny school gym that rarely held more than a hundred people. After my first couple of visits, Louis and a few other men in the congregation suggested I join them in the Los Angeles Coliseum for a men’s-only conference called Promise Keepers. The following week I found myself among eighty thousand men singing “Amazing Grace.” A month after that, I found myself serving as the music worship leader at Beth Ariel.
It was quite amazing, all of it. My new relationship with Connie. My renewed relationship with the Word of God. I cannot honestly say that this was what I was looking for when I left for London the previous June and concocted my plan to win over Connie. But I also cannot help but believe that it was God who led me back to Connie, just as it was Connie who led me back to God.