Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Arthur’s Northeastern adventure—and his official career as a Junior—both began at the posh Berkeley club, where he competed for the New Jersey State Junior singles title in mid-July, just days after his sixteenth birthday. Seeded second behind Herb Fitzgibbon, he played well throughout the tournament and ultimately defeated Fitzgibbon—all six feet, four inches of him—in a grueling five-set final. But he had to play the match of his life to do so. Having lost in straight sets to Fitzgibbon at Kalamazoo in 1957, he was a heavy underdog. Prior to the match, Dr. J gave him strict instructions on how to foil his towering opponent. “Don’t try to pass him,” Johnson counseled. “Try to hold him back from the net by hitting deep. When he does get to the net, lob deep and try to retrieve every smash. Keep at it no matter what.”

  Years later Arthur recalled the remarkable turnaround that launched his career as a Junior: “I followed instructions and lost the first set 6–1. Still, I kept lobbing. Soon the second set was gone too, 6–1. But I would no more disobey Dr. Johnson than I would spit in his face. Fitzgibbon ran up a 4–1 lead in the third set and the spectators must have thought I was slaphappy, because I’d reached the finals with my passing shots and now I wouldn’t try to pass Fitzgibbon. But finally he weakened, from all that running and smashing, and began missing his overheads. That was my signal to begin passing him. He took only one more game in the set, and I pulled it out 7–5. He was through. I gobbled up the last two sets 6–1, 6–0.”9

  Arthur’s unexpected triumph at the New Jersey Junior tournament was thrilling, both for him and for Dr. J. But the Lynchburg upstarts had no time to savor their victory. With only a week to prepare for the Eastern Junior Championships, held at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, they settled in for a few days of practice in the Big Apple. Like all aspiring tennis stars, Arthur had dreamed of playing on the hallowed grass at Forest Hills, so he felt exhilarated by his first glimpse of what he later called “sacred ground.” But he couldn’t avoid feeling he was out of place and not altogether welcome at Forest Hills. The atmosphere of white privilege had been palpable at the Berkeley Tennis Club, but it was doubly so at the West Side Tennis Club. Even though Althea Gibson had breached the local color bar at the U.S. Nationals nine years earlier, racial exclusion was still the norm. The week Ashe arrived in Forest Hills, Ralph Bunche announced he and his son had once again been rejected for membership in the club.

  With the Bunche controversy swirling in the headlines, Arthur took the court as both the number one seed and the only black in the tournament. Despite this diversion and a few catcalls from the crowd, he played well from the outset and fought his way into the finals against Hugh Lynch. A violent rainstorm forced a postponement and the relocation of the match to the North Shore Tennis and Racquets Club in Bayside, Queens, where Arthur won the first set 7–5. But after a shift in the weather forced a second postponement and a return to West Side, he lost the last three sets and the title. Even so, he won plaudits from his mentor. “He’s going to be a good one,” Johnson told a Washington Post reporter. “He has the perfect temperament for tennis. When he makes an error he just smiles. I can’t use a boy unless he can control his emotions.”10

  A few days after Arthur’s creditable showing, the Richmond public courts tennis director Sam Woods received a letter from the West Side club inviting him “to form a five-boy team that would play” similar teams from New York and other Middle-Atlantic cities. The letter suggested that the Richmond team should include the city’s two best young players, Arthur and Tom Chewning. A white boy who would later cross the color line to play on the courts at Brook Field Park, Tom would become Arthur’s closest white friend in Richmond after they met at a 1960 USLTA tournament in Wheeling, West Virginia. Before Wheeling, Tom had never heard of Arthur, even though they had lived and played in the same city all of their lives. Arthur, by contrast, was already familiar with Tom’s exploits, having read about them in the Richmond press for several years. This incongruity embarrassed Tom, but he, like Arthur, welcomed the opportunity to participate in the intercity competition. Both boys were crushed when Woods declined the invitation. “Probably, he had to, if he wanted to hold his job in Richmond,” Arthur later observed.11

  Dr. J was also disappointed, but he took a measure of consolation from the West Side club’s initiative. One of Johnson’s long-standing goals was to see one or more of his Lynchburg boys play in the U.S. National Championships at Forest Hills. But for nearly a decade he had been stymied by ATA executive secretary Baker’s policy of selecting only senior players as the ATA’s designated participants at Forest Hills. Every year Johnson pressed Baker to change the policy, and every year he came away disappointed. Finally, in July 1959, Baker agreed to choose three of the ATA’s most promising juniors—Joe Williams, Horace Cunningham, and Ashe. He even promised to arrange a week of practice on grass courts for the three Lynchburg boys. But in the end he reneged on both promises, tendering a lone invitation to Ashe. This last-minute reversal brought the simmering feud between Johnson and Baker to a head, though at least Ashe got a second chance to appear on the grandest stage in American tennis.12

  Coming six weeks after his participation in the Eastern Junior Championships, Arthur’s second appearance at Forest Hills was intoxicating but brief. The luck of the draw pitted him against the most talented young player in the world, the twenty-one-year-old Australian Rod Laver, in the first round. A powerful left-hander with a devastating serve, “the Rocket,” as he was known, would win three consecutive U.S. National singles titles between 1960 and 1962 and ultimately prove to be Arthur’s greatest nemesis, winning 19 of 22 head-to-head matches. In 1959, Arthur reportedly “served well and hit with good pace and length off the ground,” but several misplayed volleys gave the edge to Laver, who won in straight sets 7–5, 6–2, 6–2. Though clearly overmatched, the young Virginian came away with his pride intact—not bad for a sixteen-year-old about to enter his junior year in high school. While Richmond’s white establishment clearly had no regard for his emerging talent, he drew considerable satisfaction from attracting attention in the nation’s largest city.13

  Arthur returned from Forest Hills in early September, just prior to the opening of the school year. It was his second year at Walker High, and he settled in like a veteran. His grades were excellent, and he got on well with his teachers. He now had his driver’s license and occasional use of his father’s pickup truck, and to his surprise the family rules were relaxed to allow him to stay out until 11 p.m. on some weekend nights. Most of his friends had much later curfews, but he didn’t dare complain. He had a few casual dates, one of which resulted in his first serious sexual experience, an impromptu late-night front-seat seduction at the hands of a girl who knew what she was doing. As Arthur recalled the scene, which amazingly enough took place in a parking lot at the normally whites-only Byrd Park: “Soon my pants were down, her dress was up and her panties pulled down and she shoved me under the steering wheel. I just went along. . . . I could not let her think this was my first time.”

  The excitement of sexual initiation was memorable enough to make it into Arthur’s 1981 memoir, Off the Court. But in 1959 he was fixated on his continuing long-distance infatuation with Pat Battles. With her, he was a perfect gentleman, happy to take things slowly. He was also reasonably content with his home life, having resigned himself to his father’s strict ways and having developed a close and loving relationship with his stepmother. Like most adolescents, he suffered from periodic insecurities and mood swings, but, all in all, he seemed to have few complaints.14

  What he worried about most was his future as a tennis player. Now that he had seen something of the world beyond Richmond, he realized that both time and place were against him. In the nation as a whole, the arc of history had begun to tilt toward increased tolerance and racial justice, but not in Virginia, where the fixation with racial segregation and white supremacy seemed stronger than ever. Years later, he recalled being deeply discouraged by the dark cloud o
f racism that threatened to blot out his potentially bright future: “I wondered if there was any point in keeping on with the grind of serious tennis. A Negro player didn’t seem to have any future. Many players had lost hope and dropped out after a few summers with Dr. Johnson.” Knowing that “some of those ex-players were driving cabs or mopping floors around Richmond and Lynchburg,” he feared he would share their fate. “Did I want to go their way?” he asked himself. After considerable soul-searching, he decided to stick with tennis even in the face of racial discrimination and disadvantage. Reasoning that those “who had hung on even after the tournament gates slammed in their faces had at least gotten a better start in life,” usually in the form of college scholarships arranged by Dr. J, the resilient sixteen-year-old “kept on.”15

  Arthur’s persistence was rooted not only in the expectation of a college scholarship but also in his abiding love for the game and a determination to please his father and Dr. J, both of whom had made numerous sacrifices on his behalf. But there was no clear path beyond college. Planning a life around the game of tennis was a viable option for rich amateurs, not for those in need of gainful employment. Prior to the post-1968 Open era—a future virtually impossible to foresee at the beginning of the decade—the idea of achieving financial success, or even a modest living, solely through tennis was fanciful at best. While success on the tennis court might lead to a coaching career, the number of positions open to African Americans was limited, and many of those were part-time. As a top student, Ashe could envision other career choices—in law, medicine, education, or business. But a tennis-centered life was a dim prospect for a young black man coming of age in the early 1960s.

  Arthur’s motivations as a maturing adolescent were complex, and his continuing attraction to tennis involved varying calculations of risk and promise. Yet there was no sense of desperation. In later years, when journalists and others inquired about the trajectory of his life, he tried to counter the notion that he had used tennis to escape the alleged miseries of poverty and black life in Richmond. “We were never poor. Not even close,” he insisted in 1968. “Things weren’t that tough for me.”16

  What he did hope to escape, he freely acknowledged, was the stultifying racism that narrowed his options whenever he ventured outside the black community. Recalling his early childhood in Richmond, he insisted “the first whites I got to know—the insurance collectors, the Thalhimers, the Schillers, the Schwartzchilds—were nice people, so my first impression of whites was positive.” “But I soon learned,” he added, “that, collectively, white people didn’t really like blacks. They kept us from going to school with them, worshipping with them, playing with them.” The early realization that most white Virginians regarded him as less than fully human was reinforced by all manner of racial epithets. “I grew up aware that I was a Negro, colored, black, a coon, a pickaninny, a nigger, an ace, a spade, and other less flattering terms,” he recalled with sadness in 1981.17

  During the winter and spring of 1960, the racial situation in Richmond became increasingly volatile. In late February, several hundred students at Virginia Union joined the widening sit-in movement begun three weeks earlier by four North Carolina A&T students in Greensboro. On the first day of the Richmond protest, future Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary Charles Sherrod led two hundred students down Chamberlayne Avenue, just east of the Ashes’ house in Brook Field Park. Headed for a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter, they soon occupied a row of stools and waited patiently until closing time to be served. Two days later, the sit-ins spread to Thalhimers department store, where several students were arrested for trespassing. Picketing and mass rallies ensued, galvanizing much of the local black community and producing a seven-month-long boycott of Richmond’s downtown business district. The crisis subsided somewhat in September, when several stores agreed to desegregate their lunch counters. The comforting fiction of local black complacency was gone forever.18

  Tensions were also rising on the education front, where the NAACP was demanding belated compliance with the Brown decision. In early 1959 the federal courts had declared Virginia’s Massive Resistance laws unconstitutional, paving the way for successful local desegregation suits in Richmond and other school districts. Pressured by a local civil rights organization known as the Crusade for Voters, the Richmond school board reluctantly endorsed token desegregation in the spring of 1960. Led by board chairman and future U.S. Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell Jr., who publicly advocated tokenism as the best means of avoiding “substantial integration,” Richmond’s pragmatic white establishment hoped to avoid the fate of nearby Prince Edward County, which had closed its entire public school system the previous fall. On September 7, 1960, the enrollment of two black students at the previously all-white Chandler Junior High School initiated a new era in Richmond’s racial history. Two years later, Arthur’s younger brother, Johnnie, would enroll as a freshman at the newly integrated John Marshall High School, becoming one of only 127 black students in Richmond enrolled in an integrated school.19

  As the son of a conservative and protective father, Arthur did not dare to become involved in any of this agitation—commonly known among traditionalists as “the civil rights mess.” But as a highly visible participant in predominantly white tournaments, he could not avoid the escalating racial tensions that permeated Virginia and the surrounding region. In the tennis world, even in times of crisis, racial discrimination tended to be subtler than in the world at large. As Arthur once put it, most tennis players were “too well mannered to express racism crudely.” “No one ever refused to appear on court with me,” he recalled. “No official ever called me a name. But the indirect rebuffs and innuendoes left their scars.”

  One such scar came from an incident at the June 1960 Maryland State Junior Tournament, after Arthur and his fellow Lynchburg camper Joe Williams dominated the draw and faced each other in the finals. In an obvious snub, the tournament officials canceled the normal award ceremony and simply “left the trophies” on a bench. A month later, at the Mid-Atlantic Junior Championships held in Wheeling, Arthur won the tournament that had excluded him the previous two years. As he later recalled with pride, the victory “made me the first Negro boy ever to win such an important tournament.” Yet he was nearly disqualified when local officials falsely accused him of ransacking the cabins where the players were housed. After Dr. Johnson vouched for his protégé, the officials backed off. But the tournament’s first black champion left town with a bitter memory of racial presumption.20

  A third unfortunate incident occurred at the 1960 National Interscholastic tournament in Charlottesville, though this time Arthur was partially to blame. As the tournament’s #8 seed, he had a legitimate shot at the coveted title that had eluded the Lynchburg boys for nearly a decade. This situation, coupled with the worsening racial climate, prompted Dr. Johnson to remind him and the other boys about the importance of avoiding any hint of racial conflict during the tournament. Reiterating his standard warning, Johnson stressed: “it was vital not to stir up any trouble.” “A white player might throw a conniption fit about a linesman’s decision,” Arthur explained, paraphrasing his mentor. “Not us. In fact, during the early matches of a tournament on outside courts, where there were no linesmen and sometimes no umpires, and players called their own lines, Dr. Johnson warned us to give our opponents the benefit of the doubt on every close shot. If a ball landed slightly outside, we were to play it anyhow.”21

  As always, Arthur took Dr. J’s advice to heart, which proved to be his undoing. Midway through a quarterfinal match against the tournament’s #1 seed, Billy Lenoir of Atlanta, Arthur was up a set and leading 4–3 in the second, when an errant ball from a nearby court derailed his bid for an upset. On game point in the eighth game, he appeared to win the crucial point and the game with a drop shot beyond Lenoir’s reach. But when he noticed another ball had rolled onto the backcourt well behind Lenoir, he reflexively asked his opponent if the ball ha
d interfered with his play. Dr. J, sitting just a few feet away from the action, later described what happened next: “Lenoir looked back, saw the ball and said ‘The referee said to always play a point over if the ball comes on the court.’ The score would have been 5–3 in favor of Ashe if he had kept his big mouth shut. They played the point over, Lenoir won the point, the game, the set, and the next set because Ashe had lost his concentration, thinking about what it had cost him for opening his mouth, something he rarely does while playing. He did not win but two more games. He lost the biggest opportunity of his lifetime.” “Maybe I carried the ‘fair play’ rule too far,” Arthur later conceded. But perhaps only he, along with Dr. J and the other Lynchburg boys, could fully appreciate what happened that day.22

  Race generally receded into the background when Arthur was at the Lynchburg camp—except when Dr. J uttered one of his favorite motivational reminders such as “Hit that to a white boy and you’ll go home early” or “You’re not going to beat those white boys playing like that.” Race was never an issue at the all-black ATA tournaments, where the sole focus was competition. When Arthur became the youngest men’s singles champion in ATA history in early August 1960, easily defeating six-time former champion George Stewart in the finals, he didn’t dwell on his identity as a champion limited by race.

  Everywhere else, however, racial identification and scrutiny seemed unavoidable. Even at the National Boys Tournament at Kalamazoo, in the hinterlands of western Michigan, Arthur caused a minor stir when he beat a white Rhodesian, Adrian Bey, in the second round. Both boys took their unexpected pairing in stride, but the racial politics of the scene, accentuated by Rhodesia’s harsh system of racial discrimination, did not go unnoticed by others. Although he kept his feelings to himself, Arthur bitterly resented the almost constant racial commentary that surrounded his early participation in mainstream tennis. Like Althea Gibson, he wanted to be judged as an individual, not as the representative of a racial minority. While he acknowledged that he was “as noticeable as the only raisin in a rice pudding,” the curiosity factor was a burdensome diversion for a serious athlete trying to keep his eyes, literally and figuratively, on the ball.23