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CONTENTS
Preface
PROLOGUE
1: Under the Dominion
2: Playing in the Shadows
3: Dr. J and the Lynchburg Boys
4: The Only Raisin in a Rice Pudding
5: The Gateway
6: The Golden Land
7: Traveling Man
8: From Dixie to Down Under
9: Advantage Ashe
10: Openings
11: Mr. Cool
12: Racket Man
13: Doubling Down
14: Risky Business
15: South Africa
16: Pros and Cons
17: Wimbledon 1975
18: King Arthur
19: Affairs of the Heart
20: Coming Back
21: Off the Court
22: Captain Ashe
23: Blood Lines
24: Hard Road to Glory
25: Days of Grace
26: Final Set
EPILOGUE: Shadow’s End
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Arthur Ashe’s Tennis Statistics
Note on Archival Sources and Interviews
About the Author
Notes
Index
Photo Credits
For the dearest of friends—
James Oliver Horton (1943–2017) and Lois E. Horton
And for my beloved grandson—
Lincoln Hardee Powers
PREFACE
For the past ten years, I have enjoyed playing doubles just about every Sunday morning on the soft courts of the St. Petersburg Tennis Center, where Arthur Ashe played his final match as an amateur in March 1969, the year I graduated from college. Playing under a high-blue, Florida sky with old friends: what more could one ask for, aside from a faster serve, a better backhand, and a little luck against left-handers? Of course, even Ashe had trouble against left-handers, especially his nemesis, the great Aussie Rod Laver. So I shouldn’t have been surprised in January 2016, when a crafty left-handed opponent hit a drop shot that caught me off guard, causing me to lunge awkwardly, lose my balance, and fall to the ground—breaking my left wrist in two places. Embarrassed, I joked with friends that my clumsiness proved, once and for all, that “I was no Arthur Ashe.”
Clearly, there is only so much a biographer can learn from his subject. As my doubles partners will attest, immersing myself in all things Ashe has not improved my tennis game, and I still play with more enthusiasm than skill. On the other hand, I feel my continuing encounter with Arthur (it took me several years to reach the point where I felt comfortable referring to him on a first-name basis) has been immensely helpful in other parts of my life. Of all the historical characters I have studied during my long scholarly career, he comes the closest to being an exemplary role model. He wasn’t perfect, as the chapters following will demonstrate, and he, like everyone else, was a flesh-and-blood human being limited by flaws and eccentricities. Yet, through a lifetime of challenges large and small, he came remarkably close to living up to his professed ideals.
As the first black man to reach the upper echelon of a notoriously elitist and racially segregated sport, Ashe exhibited an extraordinary strength of character that eventually made him the most beloved and honored figure in tennis. He was the Jackie Robinson of men’s tennis, but unlike the great Brooklyn Dodger star he was destined to soldier on alone throughout his playing career. On the men’s tour of the 1960s and 1970s, there was no counterpart to Robinson’s black peers—no Lary Doby, Willie Mays, or Hank Aaron. Though shy and generally reticent into his mid-twenties, Ashe took a sharp turn toward activism in 1968 and never looked back. By the close of his career, he had become a model of cosmopolitanism and a self-proclaimed “citizen of the world,” earning almost universal respect as a forceful civil rights activist, an independent-minded thinker and writer, a humanitarian philanthropist, and an unrivaled ambassador of sportsmanship and fair play. More than any other athlete of the modern era—with the possible exception of Muhammad Ali—he transcended the world of sports.
Arthur had a positive impact on virtually every part of the world he touched by adhering to a stringent code of personal ethics, an uncommon generosity and empathy in his dealings with all who crossed his path, a passionate belief in the salvific power of education and intellectual inquiry, an extraordinary work ethic, and a deep commitment to social and civic responsibility. Add his zest for life and capacity for true friendship and you have the full package of commendable personal traits. He did not live very long—dying five months short of his fiftieth birthday—but he jammed as much meaningful activity into his relatively brief lifetime as was humanly possible.
Ashe’s remarkable saga deserves a full biographical treatment that balances text and context, while paying careful attention to the multiple dimensions of his life. At its core, Arthur Ashe, A Life tells the story of an African American tennis player who overcame enormous obstacles to become one of the most successful and influential athletes of the twentieth century. Yet it also examines the lives of hundreds of other supporting characters—all connected in some way with Ashe’s struggle and ascent. Written in the form of a braided narrative, the analysis twists and turns through a series of interrelated stories involving Ashe, his contemporaries, and the profound economic, social, cultural, and political changes that marked the half century following the close of World War II.
These stories developed against a complex backdrop that included militarization and the Cold War, the African American freedom struggle, major waves of feminism and antiwar sentiment, wrenching challenges to the industrial order, consumption on an unprecedented level, revolutionary changes in the role of television and mass media, and the maturation of celebrity, sports, and leisure as all-encompassing phenomena. Accordingly, this book presents an extended meditation on three of the most important themes in modern American history—the consequences of racial discrimination, the movement to overcome that discrimination, and the emergence of professional sports as a dominating cultural and commercial force.
The general outline of Ashe’s life is well known. He has not been forgotten, and invoking his name still triggers recognition and respect among millions of tennis fans, especially among those who are African American. His legacy lives on in several organizations that he helped to found, including the Association of Tennis Professionals and the National Junior Tennis Learning Network. Indeed, with his continuing presence on television—either in the documentaries that often appear on ESPN, HBO, or Tennis Channel, or in the annual tributes accompanying broadcasts of the U.S. Open matches played at Arthur Ashe Stadium—the situation could hardly be otherwise.
What has been missing, however, is access to the intricate web of his life—to the tangled strands of experience accumulated over nearly half a century. Today, twenty-five years after Ashe’s death in 1993, the absence of a full-scale biographical treatment is striking. With this in mind, I offer Arthur Ashe, A Life as an attempt to do justice to the nuances and subtleties of a personal saga worthy of our full attention. Such books were once a rarity in the historical literature on sports. But in recent years there has been a proliferation of carefully crafted sports biographies, several of which deal with African American athletes. The best of
these “black” biographies—studies of Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Satchel Paige, Muhammad Ali, Roberto Clemente, Jackie Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Bill Russell—have placed individual experiences in the broader context of American history, illuminating the frequently overlooked cultural dimension of the national struggle for civil rights.1
Books on figures from the realms of baseball, basketball, and boxing dominate this list, while many other sports, including tennis, are conspicuous by their absence. The closest we have come to a major tennis biography are Frank Deford’s groundbreaking Big Bill Tilden (1976), Susan Ware’s excellent Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports (2011), and Chris Bowers’s recently published Federer (2016).2
Fortunately, the tennis world has produced a number of candid and revealing autobiographies, including no fewer than four by Arthur Ashe. Each of Ashe’s published memoirs has been instrumental to my reconstruction of his life, and collectively Advantage Ashe (1967), Arthur Ashe: Portrait in Motion (1975), Off the Court (1981), and Days of Grace: A Memoir (1993) provide an indispensable view of his saga on and off the court. Spaced throughout his adult life, they allow us to gauge change over time and the evolution of both his private persona and expanding role as a public figure.3
Ashe’s memoirs complement the wealth of archival material in the Arthur Ashe Papers located at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—as well as the material gleaned from more than one hundred interviews with individuals who knew him well. Together these sources make it possible for a biographer to give voice to a man who has been dead for a quarter century. Whenever possible, I have allowed Arthur to speak for himself. Quoting liberally from his published writings, I have tried to recapture the texture and meaning of his experiences, from his early years in Richmond to his final days as a public intellectual and activist holding forth on a range of important social and political issues.
After eight years of immersing myself in the details of Ashe’s life, I am more convinced than ever that his unique story is worth telling. As one of the first black sports celebrities to be valued not only for his athletic accomplishments but also for his intellectual prowess and moral stature, he occupies an important position in the interrelated history of race and sports. In his ability to represent the best of what the sports world could offer to a nation in dire need of real heroes, he had no peer during his lifetime. And sadly, during the past twenty-five years—despite a measure of progress on several fronts—no one has emerged to take his place. In this sense, he resembles the irreplaceable Martin Luther King Jr., a man whom he revered and tried to emulate. Uniqueness is a grossly overused word in the modern lexicon, but sometimes it is appropriate. Sometimes remarkable individuals from unexpected sources such as the streets of Jim Crow Richmond or Atlanta soar above the rest of us and point the way to a brighter future. Arthur Ashe was such a man.
PROLOGUE
IT WAS LATE JUNE 1955, and a boys and girls tournament sponsored by the all-black American Tennis Association (ATA) was about to begin on the public courts at Turkey Thicket Park, in the University Heights section of Northeast Washington, D.C. One girl eager to play that day was Doris Cammack—an up-and-coming fifteen-year-old harboring dreams of becoming the next Althea Gibson—the talented young woman from Harlem who six years earlier had become the first black female to breach the color line in competitive tennis. A victory in the Washington tournament would solidify Doris’s ranking as a regional star, but as the first round began she faced an unexpected problem. On that sultry Saturday morning in June, her dreams took a tumble when she learned an odd number of competitors had registered for the girls draw, leaving her with no girl to play in the opening round. Her only option, the ATA organizers explained, was to play a first-round exhibition match against an eleven-year-old boy borrowed from the male draw.
Though disappointed, Doris reluctantly agreed to the unusual arrangement. Yet when she saw how small and scrawny her opponent actually was—a boy with arms as thin as the handle of his wooden racket—she balked. “I’m not playing against him,” she sneered, convinced she had been set up as a foil in what would almost certainly be a farcical match. Only after sensing that pulling out of the match would hurt the little boy’s feelings—and after being assured by ATA officials that he was “pretty good”—did she agree to take the court against her four-foot-eight-inch, seventy-pound opponent.
What happened next stunned the small crowd of spectators that had gathered to watch an impromptu battle of the sexes. Brandishing amazing foot speed and a slingshot forehand that allowed him to hit the ball with surprising power and accuracy, the little boy took poor Doris to the proverbial cleaners. Losing only a handful of games, he needed less than an hour to win two sets and the match. Doris did her best to smile in defeat as she walked to the net and reached down to shake the boy’s hand, but whatever confidence she had mustered before the match was gone. A few weeks later she gave up her ATA dreams altogether, disabused of any notion that she would find glory on a tennis court.
Little Art, as he was known then, was polite and respectful in victory, just as his parents had taught him to be. Yet he also felt the full flush of victory, even at the age of eleven. Soon his aspirations would move beyond mere victory as he began to dream of becoming a tennis star, but he never lost his manners or his sportsmanship—or, for that matter, his boyish enthusiasm for a game that brought him so much joy and satisfaction. Years later, Doris, who kept close tabs on her young conqueror’s path to stardom, had difficulty keeping her composure when recounting her brief brush with a life ultimately marked as much by tragedy as by triumph. While laughing at the story of her own demise as a competitive tennis player, she could not help but tear up when recalling the fate of Arthur Ashe, a valiant and courageous man who would succumb to complications related to AIDS at the age of forty-nine.1
Nearly forty years after Doris Cammack’s humiliation and more than a decade after the close of his storied career, Arthur found himself at the center of a more serious but equally telling scene unfolding in the nation’s capital. This time he was in Washington to participate in a protest march outside the White House. The issue that had drawn him there was the mistreatment of Haitian refugees by immigration and law enforcement officials representing the administration of President George H. W. Bush. Randall Robinson—who grew up with Arthur in Richmond and later collaborated with him on issues related to Africa, race, and colonialism—had asked his old friend to come, and Arthur, loyal to a fault, could not in good conscience say no. Jointly sponsored by the NAACP and Robinson’s twenty-year-old organization TransAfrica, the protest march drew a diverse group of two thousand participants and resulted in nearly one hundred arrests. Only one of those arrested was a sports celebrity. For years, Ashe had urged his fellow athletes to speak out on social justice issues, but relatively few had answered his call. In the Haitian protest, he was the lone representative of the sports world—a situation that did not surprise anyone familiar with American politics.
What was surprising, however, was Ashe’s decision to take part in the protest even though he knew a terminal disease had reduced his medical condition to the breaking point. For nearly ten years, he had struggled with AIDS, a disease acquired from a blood transfusion administered during recovery from heart surgery in 1983. While he had first learned of his AIDS diagnosis in 1988—and his condition had only been public knowledge for five months at the time of the Washington march—his identification with this dreaded disease had already changed his life beyond recognition. Many of the changes were burdensome, and few observers would have blamed him if he had chosen to retreat from public view, spending what remained of his life with family and close friends.
But withdrawal was never an option for a man who had long identified with civic and social responsibility. Ashe followed his conscience even when it meant putting his comfort—or even his life—at risk. The racial prejudice that inspire
d the differential treatment of light-skinned Cuban refugees and their dark-skinned counterparts from Haiti was, in his view, simply too malevolent to ignore, whatever the personal consequences of an action against it might be.
Arthur’s wife and doctors worried that the trip to Washington would tax his strength beyond acceptable limits—not an unreasonable assumption considering he had lost nearly 20 percent of his weight in the last year, reducing his body to a gaunt 128 pounds hanging on a six-foot-one frame. Unfortunately, his caretakers’ fears were soon confirmed. The day after his arrest, and within hours of his return to his home in New York City, he suffered a mild heart attack. Only brief hospitalization was necessary, and his recovery was substantial enough to allow him to live for another five months before succumbing to pneumonia. The Washington episode spoke volumes about the depth of his commitment to active and responsible citizenship. Those who marched with him that day—or anyone else who read the newspaper accounts of his arrest—could not help but admire his determination to stand up for his belief in justice.2
These two anecdotes, separated by decades of history and experience, represent a small sample of the stories that make Arthur Ashe’s saga one of the most distinctive in American history. No one, it seems safe to say, will ever duplicate his extraordinary life, which could have been conjured by an imaginative novelist. The stories that punctuate his biography are real, however, and both the nation and the world are better for them. The dynamic arc of his experiences—from a childhood of limited promise in the Jim Crow South to iconic status as a world-class athlete—followed an upward and sometimes soaring trajectory of maturation and growth. Never complacent, he had a restless spirit and an ever-searching intellect. Ironically enough, all of this philosophical and experiential turmoil was expressed in a reasoned, deliberate style that became his personal trademark. How he became this man, so calm and poised on the outside yet so driven and turbulent on the inside, is the subject of this book.
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