Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  A year earlier, Arthur had been pleased to play his way into the fourth round of the USLTA National Junior Championships, where he lost to the heavily favored David Reed, his future UCLA teammate. But in 1961 he actually had visions of winning the tournament. Having already won two national championships in the last nine months, he knew winning the coveted singles title at Kalamazoo would, in all likelihood, catapult him to the top of the national Junior rankings. And if that happened, selection to the U.S. Junior Davis Cup squad would almost certainly follow. For Arthur, who was well aware that no African American had ever represented the United States in Davis Cup competition at any level, this was the real prize. In Charlottesville the guardians of Jim Crow could keep him from sitting where he pleased in a movie theater, and in Richmond they could still bar him from playing at Byrd Park. But, if he kept winning, he could experience something potentially much more important: official affirmation that a black man was good enough to represent his country in international tennis competition. Just as Rafer Johnson, Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali), Ralph Boston, and several other African American athletes were making their final preparations for the Summer Olympics in Rome, Arthur dreamed of sharing their formal inclusion in national life.

  After several easy victories in the early rounds, he reached the semifinals at Kalamazoo with supreme confidence, having beaten Buchholz handily all summer. But the underdog from St. Louis rose to the occasion, playing the match of his young life. Arthur, in one of his weakest efforts of the year, managed to win only four games in two sets. When Pasarell defeated Buchholz for the title the next day, he, not Arthur, vaulted to the top of the Junior rankings. Despite all of his earlier victories, Arthur was still ranked fifth, a solid but disappointing showing for someone who had come so close to the pinnacle. Fortunately, he received more than a measure of solace a few days later when Tom Price, the head of the USLTA’s Junior Davis Cup selection committee, overlooked his poor showing at Kalamazoo and put him on the national team.

  Being tapped for Junior Davis competition was essentially honorific and only involved a commitment to a brief training period and the possibility of playing in one international tournament in late August. And only the top two players—in this case Pasarell and Buchholz—would actually represent the United States in the tournament. But Arthur was thrilled with his selection nonetheless. It gave him a powerful sense of inclusion, even though he suspected he would never completely shed his status as an outsider. When his Junior Davis Cup teammates tagged him with the nickname “Shadow,” he laughed it off, insisting it was all in good fun. “If I didn’t know these guys better,” he admitted in 1965, “I’d be offended.” Yet as he wrote two years later, “It never bothered me. I’d rather have people kid me about my race than pretend not to notice it.” Perhaps because he never took obvious offense when it was invoked, the nickname followed him for several years. To many in the mainstream tennis world, he was indeed a shadow of sorts. But to the less visible world of the ATA and Dr. J—a world that he was about to leave—he was king of the court, plain and simple.25

  Arthur spent much of August 1961 in the familiar surroundings of Dr. J’s tennis camp. This would be his eighth and last extended stint in Lynchburg, and he enjoyed it to a degree he had never been able to experience before. Now, as the unchallenged king of the ATA’s Junior development program—as the boy who had finally brought Dr. J the Interscholastic championship he had been hungering for—he could almost relax and bask in the glory of his accomplishments. In truth, no Lynchburg camper, not even Arthur, felt comfortable enough to relax around Dr. J for very long. But when Arthur accompanied him to the ATA National tournament at Hampton Institute in mid-August, he sensed that their relationship had entered a new stage of mutual respect and consideration. He now had the satisfaction of having given something back, something that no other Lynchburg boy had been able to muster.

  At the Hampton tournament, Ashe found himself in the enviable but nonetheless awkward position of being treated as both a celebrity and the tennis version of the “Great Black Hope.” As he blasted his way to his second consecutive ATA singles title, losing only thirteen games in a long week of matches, he couldn’t avoid the feeling, at once exhilarating and vaguely troubling, that he had outgrown his origins. He was, however, able to mitigate at least some of the guilt by teaming with Charity in the doubles competition. Now thirty-one and somewhat past his prime as a player, Charity had never won an ATA national title despite years of trying. But together he and Ashe engineered a blissful on-court reunion, defeating the defending doubles champions, Wilbur Jenkins and Thomas Calhoun, in four hard sets. Few victories ever meant more to Charity, or to Ashe, who later expressed his delight in sharing a moment of glory with the mentor who had “started me on the tennis escalator so long ago.” Yet even a moment as emotional as this did not alter the realities of Arthur’s situation. As he acknowledged a half decade later, “I’d gotten to the stage where there wasn’t much competition for me in Negro tennis. So now it was time to make the big move into the white man’s world.”26

  To this point, all of his experiences in the white world had been fleeting and carefully controlled. In virtually every instance either Dr. J or Coach Hudlin had been on hand to guide and watch over him. In California, for the first time in his life, he would be on his own, beyond the buffering influence of empathetic protectors who understood the psychological burden of crossing racial boundaries. In later years he would reflect at length on the difficulty of maintaining one’s sense of self and identity while negotiating this crossing. But in the late summer of 1961 he had only a vague notion of the challenges and opportunities ahead.

  At the end of August, Arthur squeezed in one final tournament—his third trip to the U.S. Nationals at Forest Hills—before saying goodbye to his family and heading to the airport for the longest and most important flight of his life. Normally his disappointing loss to the Frenchman François Godbout at Forest Hills would have occupied his thoughts for days. But his attention was elsewhere, fixated on his impending liberation from the confining realities of his hometown. “When I decided to leave Richmond,” he later explained, “I left all that Richmond stood for at the time—its segregation, its conservatism, its parochial thinking, its slow progress toward equality, its lack of opportunity for talented black people.” Turning away from it all, he opened his heart and mind to the uncharted wonders of the golden West.27

  SIX

  THE GOLDEN LAND

  THE LONG FLIGHT TO California was a revelation—the endless plains, the towering Rockies, the first glimpse of the blue Pacific. For an impressionable eighteen-year-old, the Western landscape was intoxicating and a bit frightening all at the same time. In a sense, Ashe had seen much of it before, either on television or in the movies, or in the pages of his favorite magazine, National Geographic. But by the time the plane touched down at LAX on the western edge of the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, he was beginning to sense just how far he had strayed from the sheltered environment of Richmond. St. Louis had been a comfortable way station; now he had arrived in a different world.

  Ashe, like most westward migrants, came to California with great expectations and certain mythic conceptions of what he would find there. During its first century of statehood, California had attracted millions of American settlers drawn by its image as a golden land of promise and opportunity. These outsized expectations were seldom fully realized, but there was enough truth in the state’s seductive image to sustain successive waves of mass migration, from the Gold Rush of the 1840s to the postwar booms of the second half of the twentieth century. Compared to many parts of the nation, California was relentlessly dynamic—a churning mix of economic growth, demographic change, and cultural innovation. The contrast with Virginia was striking and obvious.1

  For Ashe, the strangeness of California resided not only in its gilded, metropolitan culture and arresting scenery, but also in its racial and ethnic demography. Los Angeles, in particul
ar, was a vast, multicultural polyglot—an endlessly diverse city of Hispanics, Asian Americans, native white Californians, and all manner of transplants, white, black, brown, and yellow. Unlike the rigid racial divide of black and white in Richmond, the demographic mix in Los Angeles was complicated and unstable. In 1960, the population of Los Angeles County included five million whites, nearly two million Mexican Americans, approximately 470,000 blacks, and a slightly smaller contingent of Asian Americans, mostly of Japanese descent. The South Central area of Los Angeles had the largest concentration of blacks in the state, but even there the numbers were relatively small by Virginia standards.

  In the state of California as a whole, blacks accounted for only 6 percent of the population. Many of California’s black families had been drawn to the Pacific Coast in the 1940s by military assignments and wartime industries. Remaining in the state after the war, they spawned a continuing chain migration of family and friends. In Los Angeles, this migration eventually produced a distinct “black Angeleno” subculture rooted in several South Central neighborhoods. Hemmed in by de facto residential segregation and persistent employment discrimination, working-class black communities such as Compton and Watts had little to do with the city’s white establishment, or with privileged enclaves such as UCLA.2

  When Ashe arrived in the fall of 1961, blacks accounted for less than one percent of the university’s total enrollment. The entire student body, graduate and undergraduate, included fewer than two hundred blacks, and many of them were either African exchange students or upper-middle-class coeds from the Baldwin Hills neighborhood, home of the city’s small black elite. The number of students like Ashe—African Americans with working-class or Southern backgrounds—could probably have been counted on two hands.3

  Arthur, of course, had some familiarity with white institutions. But nothing in his past had prepared him for full immersion in UCLA college life. Located in the tony neighborhood of Westwood, UCLA was a world unto itself. The campus, with its manicured grounds and massive brick buildings, was home to a relatively affluent student body of nearly nineteen thousand—mostly the sons and daughters of Southern California’s comfortable upper middle class. Founded in 1881 as a two-year normal school, and later reorganized as the “south campus” of the University of California, the onetime stepchild of Cal-Berkeley had evolved into a major, independent university by mid-century. By the early 1960s, UCLA would merit a growing reputation as an academically rigorous, research-oriented institution, thanks in part to the efforts of its energetic new chancellor, Frank Murphy, who had come to the university in 1959 from the University of Kansas.

  By the close of Murphy’s presidency in 1973, UCLA would be a public university of the first rank, an institution with an enviable national profile. But in 1961, the year of Arthur’s arrival, it remained a regional institution with limited national and international visibility. While the institution could claim several rising academic programs and a number of distinguished professors, UCLA’s proximity to Hollywood and its chic social scene dominated its public image. Like Los Angeles itself, the university that bore the city’s name was thought to be long on style and short on substance.4

  Later in the decade, this showy image would be enhanced by the hoopla surrounding UCLA’s intercollegiate athletic programs. Indeed, by the late 1960s, the Westwood campus became, first and foremost, the home of the Bruins, or the “Athens of Athletics,” as proud UCLA sports boosters put it. This overweening sense of athletic pride was not yet a part of campus life when Ashe first arrived. While UCLA’s big-time, Division 1 athletic program was decades old, its overall record was mixed, highlighted by its celebrated tennis teams and a few strong showings in track and field—but not much else.

  In the year leading up to the Rome Olympics of 1960, the university gained fame as the training home of the world’s two greatest decathletes, Rafer Johnson and C. K. Yang. But in the high-profile sports of football and basketball, especially, the Bruins were still overshadowed by instate rivals such as USC, Cal-Berkeley, and Stanford—and by the public universities of the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference (SEC). UCLA would not win the first of its ten NCAA basketball championships until 1964, or the first of its five Rose Bowl victories until January 1966.5

  In earlier times—prior to the glory years of Coach John Wooden and hardwood superstars such as Walt Hazzard, Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), and Bill Walton, and before the gridiron exploits of Heisman Trophy winners Gary Beban and Troy Aikman—the Bruins had often been noteworthy, but rarely for what they accomplished in the gym or on the field. What made UCLA special in the world of college sports was not success but rather the racial diversity of its athletes. This tradition—the Bruins’ long history of recruiting black athletes—was one of the factors that drew Ashe to UCLA. He came primarily for the tennis—for the opportunity to develop his skills at the highest level, and to play on a team that would vie for the NCAA championship. But he did so with the expectation that he would be treated with a certain amount of respect, on and off the court.

  Ashe was the first African American to play intercollegiate tennis at UCLA, but as he well knew, he was by no means the first black athlete to represent the university. In the mid-1920s Ralph Bunche was the starting point guard on the UCLA basketball team, and as early as 1939, the UCLA football team fielded no fewer than four black stars—Woody Strode, Kenny Washington, Ray Bartlett, and Jackie Robinson—making it the most integrated college football team of its day. Robinson went on to become the first UCLA athlete to earn varsity letters in four sports, and in the post–World War II era dozens of other lesser-known pioneers played for various Bruins teams. No other state university in the United States—other than historically black institutions—could match this heritage. Though predominantly white, UCLA offered Ashe inclusion in a tradition of racial integration that must have eased at least some of his apprehension about a strange new environment.6

  Yet as Arthur soon discovered, this reputation for racial diversity and tolerance was not altogether deserved. The realities of campus life for UCLA’s approximately two hundred black students were challenging at best, as institutional inertia and the weight of past injustices inevitably led to frustration and disappointment. Black students had been barred from living on campus as recently as the mid-1950s, and blatant racial discrimination in nearby neighborhoods continued to stymie the efforts of black students to find decent and affordable off-campus housing. As the civil rights movement raised everyone’s consciousness, university officials did their best to keep up with the pace of social change and rising expectations. But progress was slow.

  The future Olympian Rafer Johnson was elected president of the UCLA student body in 1958—the third African American to win that office, following Sherrill Luke and Willard Johnson, who would later collaborate with Ashe in the movement to abolish South African apartheid. But three years earlier, when Rafer first registered as a UCLA freshman, he had discovered that his only option was off-campus housing. Fortunately, this indignity had been eliminated by the time Arthur arrived in 1961. He, like hundreds of other incoming freshmen, was assigned a room in Sproul Hall, a one-year-old coed facility he later described as “a massive modernistic dorm on the edge of the campus near Sunset Boulevard.”

  Most Sproul Hall residents, including Arthur, were asked to share double rooms, but in his case there was the delicate matter of either pairing him with another black student or finding a white roommate who did not object to an interracial rooming assignment. After a bit of quiet deliberation, university administrators placed him in a room with Sam Beale, a Los Angeles–born Jewish sophomore known to be racially tolerant. As the drummer for the interracial UCLA Trio, the young biology major played music with the black bass player John Halliburton and the Czech-American pianist and vocalist Ray Manzarek, who later found stardom with Jim Morrison and the Doors. The son of a machinist father and an Iowa-born mother who often socialized with black friends, Beale had attend
ed a predominantly white Los Angeles high school that had recently elected a black student body president.

  As fellow “outsiders” on a WASP-dominated campus, Ashe and Beale were a good fit. Even though Beale had no interest in tennis, they hit it off from the outset, and with a year of college under his belt, the Californian proved to be a valuable mentor for the green freshman from Virginia. Both were serious students and the first members of their families to go college, so they shared a determination to improve their lot in life through education. A near perfect role model, Beale would go on to earn a PhD at UCLA and to enjoy a long and distinguished career as a professor of molecular and cell biology at Brown University.7

  In the early weeks of the fall semester, Beale eased Arthur’s transition to college life. But it didn’t take long for Arthur to realize he would be spending most of his time with his teammates. His real home was the nearby Bruins Tennis Terrace, “a sort of Greek theater built especially for tennis, with elevated concrete seating for 1,500 people.” Most of the time Arthur and his teammates found themselves practicing in front of empty seats, but the promise of future glory kept them motivated as they maintained the grind of practice hour after hour, day after day. Looking back on this regimen, Arthur acknowledged there was never any question he and his teammates were “in school primarily to play tennis.” Yet he insisted “a UCLA tennis performer doesn’t feel quite so different from other students as a big-time football or basketball workman does. The squad is too small for a special dormitory or training table. There are only six or seven of us. So we just melt into the student body. At times we feel almost like the kids who pay their own way.”