If there was any tennis showdown that interested Sport Writer Philip Taubman more than this week's record $1 million duel between Jimmy Connors and Australia's John Newcombe, it was one he hoped to arrange between Connors and himself. Well before he went out to Los Angeles to interview Connors for the story, Taubman began practicing for a fast set or two with his subject. Unfortunately, Connors declined the challenge, pleading a need to rest a recently sprained ankle before his match with Newcombe. It was just as well. Taubman took up tennis at eleven and is a weekend player of some skill and ferocity. Yet in a series of poolside conversations with Connors at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, he found the world's top seed "talking about a wholly different game -- a repertory of shots and spins, angles and strategies of chesslike intricacy calculated several volleys in advance." Taubman came away from his talks with Connors "even more impressed with the incredibly intense concentration he brings to the game than with his speed and power."

Taubman continued his study of the superstar's style -- both on and off the court -- during interviews with his tennis-pro mother Gloria Connors and his Wimbledon-winning sometime fiancee Chris Evert. Reporter-Researcher Jay Rosenstein talked to Connors' manager Bill Riordan, tennis officials and a courtful of American and Australian pros, including Newcombe. When Rosenstein grew up in Brooklyn, his game was boxball, a kind of street tennis that is played with a "Spaldeen pinkie" ball on a court made up of sidewalk squares. "These pros have a certain panache," Rosenstein concedes, "but they couldn't have handled the 'flukes' and 'dinks' off the cement cracks."

One trademark of the Australian pro game that Rosenstein noted in the course of his reporting was a deep loyalty to the strong Sydney-brewed beers that some Australian pros bring with them when they play in the U.S. Interviewing Newcombe at a tournament in Tucson, Ariz., Rosenstein observed that despite an outward display of confidence, "he was taking Connors very seriously." The clue: an uncharacteristic glass of milk instead of beer with Newcombe's roast beef sandwich.

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