Word: pancho
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Like Newcombe, Connors is adept at mixing strokes. "When a guy's playing Jimmy," says Pancho, "he doesn't know what to expect. Jimmy will stay back and play base line, then rush the net. He can lob you or beat you down the alley with a winner. He's impossible to predict." Much of the credit for that unpredictability belongs to Segura, a Clausewitz of subtle shots and stratagems. As a small player who uses a two-handed forehand, Segura is in many ways the perfect teacher for Connors. Before all of Connors' big matches, he and Pancho, currently...
...fisted backhand, with jackhammer force, pounding down an opponent with his nonstop attack. Small-bodied, he gets his power from outsize muscular shoulders and a swing calibrated to bang the ball on the rise, a technique first taught him by his mother, Gloria, and later stressed by Pancho Segura, the wily pro who has been Connors' instructor for the past six years. "Never let a ball come to you" is Segura's First Law. Charge the ball, he insists, lean into it and meet it on the rise. That attack tactic maximizes power and control and allows the player...
...short-rib stew or chicken-fried steak will be ready, he does not let her protective mantle smother him. Connors' father never joins his wife and son on their trips. In Los Angeles, Connors can usually be found at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, unbending with Spencer Segura, Pancho's son and Connors' longtime friend, by playing endless games of relaxed tennis and backgammon and downing gallons of Coke...
When he was 16, Jimmy enrolled at Rexford High, a private school in Beverly Hills, and started taking lessons from Pancho Segura, then pro at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. To help pay his way, Jimmy's mother temporarily moved to L.A. to teach tennis herself. "Everyone said Jimmy was too small," remembers Segura. Undaunted, Segura began passing on his knowledge about technique, tactics and strategy, and at the club he and Connors would often pore over improvised diagrams that Pancho drew on paper table napkins...
Died. General Wilhelm D. Styer, 81, commander of the U.S. Army in the Western Pacific in the final months of World War II; in Coronado, Calif. A 1916 graduate of West Point, Styer saw action against Pancho Villa's guerrillas in Mexico and in the trenches of the Western Front in 1917. While returning to Washington to join the Army General Staff in 1918, he survived the torpedoing of his troopship. In World War II, he served as a liaison officer with scientists developing the atomic bomb, witnessed the Japanese surrender in the Philippines, and headed the military tribunal...