Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Playing at Durham, North Carolina, in July, Fennell justified Dr. J’s confidence by winning both the ATA National Junior and 15-and-under titles, beating an overmatched Ashe in the latter division 6–1, 6–2. Indeed, Fennell’s wins at Durham were so convincing that Dr. J decided to enter him in the upcoming adult men’s singles competition at the ATA National tournament in Wilberforce, Ohio. His application, however, was rejected after the tournament’s rules were amended to exclude Juniors from the adult competition, a move prompted by several of the ATA’s older players who pressured the organization’s leadership to preempt their probable humiliation by a fifteen-year-old upstart. Dr. J protested the decision, and Fennell angrily declared he was through with the ATA. But the decision stood. After returning to Lynchburg, Dr. J and his controversial protégé gained a measure of revenge a few days later when Fennell entered and won a USLTA Junior tournament in Wilmington, Delaware. But the young star could not contain his rage for long. During an August workout lesson in Lynchburg, he suddenly lashed out at Bobby Jr., who had been instructing him on the proper way to hit a lob. Tossing his racket, Fennell stormed off the court, never to return.16

  Though saddened by the loss of his top prospect, Dr. J came to regard the Fennell fiasco as an object lesson in the supreme importance of emotional control and discipline. There was simply no place in his program for self-indulgent behavior, particularly in the increasingly dangerous atmosphere of the post-Brown South. As Leslie Allen, who spent two summers with Dr. J, later observed, “he was preparing us for a world that didn’t want us.” Virginia was a long way from the Deep South, but after a year of watchful waiting, Virginia’s most powerful politician, Senator Harry Flood Byrd Sr., was actively pushing the state toward a more militant defense of segregation during the summer and fall of 1955. All across the region, racial moderates were in full retreat, cowed by the prospect of massive and even violent resistance to change.

  Much of this resistance was political and judicial. But nothing symbolized the trend toward sectionalist defiance better than the brutal murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in late August. When the young black boy’s racially “inappropriate” remarks to a white woman led to his murder in Money, Mississippi, many Americans recoiled in horror. Black Americans especially were sickened both by the murderers’ acquittal by an all-white jury and by the photographs of Till’s mutilated body lying in an open casket at his Chicago funeral. For many blacks, including Dr. Johnson, the Till episode also served as a gruesome reminder that provocative behavior could have serious consequences in the Jim Crow South. Polite advocacy and pressing for orderly change were fine. But he certainly did not want any of his boys endangering himself or the race—or his junior development program—by acting out or causing needless controversy.17

  Accordingly, he imposed a strict code of court behavior designed to forestall racial conflict. The code, as Johnson’s biographer Doug Smith aptly concluded, amounted to “a variation of the turn-the-other-cheek philosophy that Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey urged Jackie Robinson to embrace in 1947.” Smith, who spent time at the Lynchburg camp in the late 1950s, recalled Dr. J’s rules as a means of keeping his players out of “harm’s way” and his integration-bound program on track. In Dr. J’s system, Smith explained, “court ethics meant more than extending common courtesy and sportsmanship. He preached subservience. He instructed them never to argue with the umpire, to pick up the balls and give them to the opponent when changing sides. He insisted that balls hit close to the line be called in favor of the opponent, even if the call is incorrect. He told them that they must never argue with their opponents during a match.”18

  Dr. J felt compelled to spend part of each camp session reinforcing the importance of court behavior. “We’re going into a new world,” he warned again and again. “We’ve got to be extra careful. We’ve got to turn the other cheek. All they want is an excuse to keep us out.” Not everyone had the requisite temperament and concentration to meet Dr. J’s behavioral standards. But for a select few, including Arthur Ashe, the inflexibility of the system was tolerable and even beneficial. By the end of his second summer in Lynchburg, Arthur had become a model of composure and restraint, overcoming his physical limitations and emerging as one of Dr. J’s favorites.19

  Win or lose, Arthur gave the game all he had without losing his cool. For a boy so young, this was a major psychological feat. But, as he later acknowledged, his disciplined demeanor was hardly surprising considering his family background. Adopting Dr. J’s inflexible “training rules . . . wasn’t so hard for me,” he concluded, “since Daddy had always been firm at home.” Of course, none of this would have mattered if he had not been able to demonstrate his aptitude and passion for the game of tennis. “The kids who stuck were the ones who kept winning in the tournaments,” he remembered, explaining that “Dr. Johnson’s aim was to produce players who would be too strong to be ignored in the white world of tennis. . . . So I knew I’d be dropped sooner or later unless I kept winning. And I sure didn’t want to be dropped. This was what made me try so fiercely through summer after summer. I beat some physically superior kids just because I was keyed up higher than they were, or because I out-gutted them in long matches.”20

  At the end of the summer the only remaining champion in camp was Arthur, who had won the national ATA 12-and-under singles title at the Durham tournament, defeating his friend and fellow camper, Willis Thomas Jr., 6–3, 6–4. Just before the final match, Arthur’s parents and his brother Johnnie drove down to Durham to surprise him, and he later claimed he nearly lost his concentration and the match when he saw them in the stands. But he was never in any real danger of losing. Though still too small to have much chance of beating older players, he was virtually unbeatable in his age group. Good black tennis players under the age of thirteen were scarce, and he had beaten just about all of them by the time he entered Graves Junior High School in the fall of 1955.21

  Winning a national championship was the thrill of Arthur’s young life. But it was only the beginning of an ascending career that would lead to twelve more ATA national titles over the next seven years. His second title would come in July 1956, when he and Willis Thomas teamed up to win the doubles championship of the age 12–15 group. Playing in Durham, he lost the 12–15 singles final to fifteen-year-old Joe Williams, a much taller and stronger player. But Dr. J was pleased Arthur took the first set and pressed Williams throughout the match.

  By this time, Arthur had become one of the Lynchburg camp’s favored veterans, one of the fortunate few included in all of the weekend trips to ATA tournaments. Two or three times a month, he and two or three other kids piled into Dr. J’s big Buick and headed out on the open road bound for Norfolk, Durham, Baltimore, or Washington. Years later he recalled the wonderful “camaraderie” of the hours on the road, the educational experience of listening to Dr. J’s stories and moral lessons along the way, and the gracious hospitality of the black families that opened their homes to the doctor’s wandering band. Along the way, he played an exhausting number of matches against a steady stream of opponents, many of whom were considerably older and bigger than he was. “By that third summer,” he remembered, “Dr. Johnson was entering me in the juniors and men’s divisions. I always got whipped. But I always won my own age division. These were all ATA tournaments. Dr. Johnson didn’t think I was ready yet to go up against white boys with white umpires and white crowds, even though a few USLTA tournaments were now accepting Negro players.”22

  Though clearly encouraged by Arthur’s progress, Johnson must have wondered if his diminutive pupil would ever be strong enough or tough enough to compete with full-grown adults, black or white; and despite a fierce determination to succeed, Arthur himself must have shared at least some of Johnson’s concern. As he entered his teen years, he was beginning to see the faint outline of a bright future. With no firm sense of how far or fast he or any other black tennis player could rise in the world of mainstream tennis, he could o
nly hope that the days of racially restricted play were numbered. The opening of the tennis world since the late 1940s amounted to little more than tokenism, but it was a start. And if the recent trajectory of racial change in other sports was any indication of what lay ahead for tennis, there was reason to be optimistic.

  During the mid- and late 1950s, the pace of desegregation was quickening all across the sports world; indeed, by mid-decade the concept of the black sports hero had become an important element of American popular culture. This encouraging development was most obvious in boxing, where Sugar Ray Robinson and Floyd Patterson held sway, and in the national pastime of baseball. In 1954, Willie Mays and Monte Irvin, both born into poverty in Alabama, led the New York Giants to the team’s first World Series title in twenty-one years. Moreover, the hitting star of the team the Giants defeated in the series, the Cleveland Indians, was the American League home run king and onetime Richmond resident Larry Doby. A year later, three black stars—Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, and Roy Campanella—led the Brooklyn Dodgers to the first World Series championship in the team’s history. Campanella won three National League Most Valuable Player awards, and when Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves was named National League MVP in 1957, he became the seventh black player in nine years to win the coveted award. By the end of the decade, future Hall of Famers Frank Robinson, Ernie Banks, and Roberto Clemente had joined the league’s elite, preparing the way for the emergence of many more black stars during the 1960s and beyond.23

  Black stardom was slower to emerge in professional football, but by 1957 the gridiron’s dominant running back and most magnetic figure was Cleveland Browns rookie Jim Brown, who would soon become the National Football League’s first superstar. In basketball, black stars were also elevating the game, as Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain ushered in the era of the dominating pivot man. Between them, Russell and Chamberlain led their college squads to three consecutive NCAA titles from 1955 to 1957, before transforming the style of play in the National Basketball Association (NBA) later in the decade. In 1957, Russell’s rookie season with the Boston Celtics, his team won the NBA title, and during the next twelve years, with Russell at center, the Celtics dynasty would win ten more.24

  Young Arthur Ashe, as an aspiring athlete and avid sports fan, found plenty of encouragement in the recent success of black male sports figures. But for him the most important sign of progress in the sports world was the rising fame of Althea Gibson. Along with Jackie Robinson and Pancho Gonzales, who dazzled Ashe at a professional tournament in Richmond in 1954, Gibson was his idol and role model. Ashe and the other kids at the Lynchburg camp followed the ups and downs of her career with rapt attention, so when her fortunes began to rise in late 1955 there was jubilation among the faithful. Reversing a long decline that had threatened to end her career, Dr. J’s most famous protégée reinvented her game after acquiring a new coach—Jamaica-born Sydney Llewellyn—and adopting a new Eastern-style grip.

  Following a confidence-building 1955 international exhibition tour, during which she won eighteen of nineteen events, Gibson dominated the field at the 1956 French National Championships, capturing both the singles and doubles titles. Later in the summer, at Wimbledon, she finished second in the singles competition and won the doubles title. In less than a year’s time, one of the biggest disappointments in women’s tennis had become the hottest player on the tour. Soaring to the top of the tennis world, she won the Wimbledon women’s singles and doubles titles in July 1957, which earned her a tickertape Broadway parade after her return to New York. Two months later, she won the U.S. National singles and mixed doubles championships at Forest Hills, and the following spring she was awarded the Babe Didrikson Zaharias trophy as Female Athlete of the Year for 1957. More accolades followed in the summer of 1958, when she repeated as the Wimbledon singles and doubles champion and as the U.S. National singles titleholder. By then she was acknowledged as the greatest player in women’s tennis and one of the most accomplished athletes, black or white, in the world.25

  This was a thrilling turn of events for Dr. J, Arthur, and everyone associated with the ATA and the Lynchburg camp. Foiling her early critics, Gibson had proven she had the talent and grit to overcome any obstacles to success on the tennis court. Unfortunately, it was a different story off the court. Gibson’s belated rise to greatness at the age of twenty-nine brought her fame and put her in the celebrated company of black heroes such as Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and Jim Brown. But she was not always comfortable in the limelight, particularly when black journalists pointed out her responsibilities as a leader of the race. After being criticized for being self-centered and for ignoring pressing civil rights concerns, she lashed out at her detractors. “I am not a racially conscious person,” she explained in her 1958 autobiography, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody. “I don’t want to be. I see myself as just an individual.” Statements like this only made matters worse, and her popularity in the black community gradually declined. Gibson’s biggest problem, however—the one that brought her tennis career to a premature and disappointing conclusion—was financial. Despite her fame, she couldn’t earn a living in the rarefied world of amateur tennis. Unable to secure steady sponsorship or lucrative endorsements, she turned professional in late 1958, immediately reducing her public profile to an appendage of the men’s pro tour. By 1963 she had quit tennis altogether, turning to professional golf for her economic salvation.26

  Gibson’s bittersweet saga eventually became a cautionary tale for Ashe and other African Americans looking to tennis for economic opportunity and personal fulfillment. Even so, during the glory year of 1957 and 1958, Gibson’s triumphs on the court repeatedly inspired Arthur, lifting his drive and ambition to new heights. “Politically, Althea’s acceptance was crucial to my own,” he later observed. “It made it easier for other blacks to follow.” These were pivotal years in his development, a time of physical maturation and growing confidence. Having survived his testing time as the proverbial runt of Dr. J’s litter, he “no longer got so many of the dirty jobs like cleaning the doghouse.”27

  In the early summer of 1957, Dr. J decided Arthur was ready to take on the pressure of an integrated USLTA tournament. He had interacted with whites before, but only on a casual basis, and never in a competitive situation. His first experience with integrated tennis took place at Clifton Park in Baltimore, a multiethnic, border-state city. Unlike most cities south of the Mason-Dixon line, Baltimore had begun the process of school desegregation, and the persistence of Jim Crow there had more to do with custom than codified discrimination. Confident that Baltimore was ready for integrated tennis, Dr. J registered several of the Lynchburg boys for the tournament. While he and the boys were a bit nervous, they were able to avoid open hostility by keeping to themselves. “We talked to white players,” Arthur recalled, “but we didn’t mix.” On the court, the Lynchburg boys made a strong showing, winning several matches. Arthur fared the best, battling his way into the 15-and-under semifinals before losing to Hugh Lynch III of Bethesda, Maryland. The strategy against Lynch, dictated by Dr. J, was “to hit every ball to his backhand.” At this point, Dr. J imposed strict rules as to what Ashe could or could not do during competitive matches; even after four years in camp, he was limited to the baseline area and not allowed to rush the net or serve and volley.28

  Despite his disappointment following the Lynch match, Arthur left Clifton Park with a new understanding of the tennis world. The entire scene made a deep impression on him—especially the behavior and class background of the white players and their aggressive, hovering parents. “I noticed that most of the white boys were better dressed than we were,” he later wrote. “Their folks drove up in big shiny cars or station wagons, and practically pushed Sonny Boy onto the courts. Some parents arrived late with their sons, and lit into the umpire if he had forfeited their match. . . . I heard them tell officials, ‘Don’t put my boy on an outside court. The crowd wants to see him.’ ”29

  Later in
the summer, Arthur would have other opportunities to test his skills against white players and to observe demanding tennis parents. At the 1957 Middle States Clay Court Junior Championships, held in Wilmington, Delaware, in late June, he and one of the older Lynchburg campers, Tom Hawes, fought their way through a tough field of white Juniors to face each other in the finals. Playing in front of a depleted crowd—relatively few of the white players and parents stuck around to see an all-black final—Hawes defeated Arthur for the title, the first USLTA tournament championship “ever won by a Negro boy” in the Middle States region. This unexpected triumph provided Dr. J with more than enough encouragement to enter both boys, plus Hubert Eaton, in the 1957 National Boys’ Tournament in Kalamazoo, Michigan. At Kalamazoo, Herb Fitzgibbon of Garden City, New York, easily defeated Arthur in the first round. However, the slim fourteen-year-old from Virginia played well enough to impress several college coaches in the audience, one of whom, J. D. Morgan, would recruit him to play at UCLA four years later.30

  Participating in his first two USLTA tournaments gave Arthur a taste of mainstream tennis, but he spent most of the summer of 1957 either practicing in Lynchburg or playing in segregated ATA events. Though still smarting from the Fennell controversy of 1955, as well as from ATA executive secretary Bertram Baker’s refusal to include any of the promising Lynchburg boys in the U.S. Nationals at Forest Hills, Dr. Johnson continued to take Arthur and the other Lynchburg boys to as many ATA tournaments as possible. To his delight, Arthur, though barely fourteen, managed to win the 15-and-under ATA title in July 1957. “Suddenly everybody who was interested in Negro tennis took note of me,” Arthur recalled. “When I went home to Richmond in the fall, my junior high school joined the Virginia Interscholastic Association (VIA) so it could enter me in the state high school all-Negro tennis tournament.” Several months later the young star justified the school’s faith in him by winning the VIA high school singles title—even though he was still technically a junior high school student.31