Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  As student-athletes at UCLA, Arthur and his teammates received a financial aid package that covered most of their expenses. But the level of support was modest by NCAA standards. UCLA provided its intercollegiate athletes with tuition, books, room and board, and guaranteed employment, but no scholarship per se. In Arthur’s case, his job involved working at the UCLA tennis facility, mostly on custodial matters and equipment and court maintenance. “I picked up trash from tennis courts, swept and hosed them, maybe mended a net sometimes,” he recalled. “Nobody cared when I worked, or how many hours a week, just so I logged 250 hours during the year. The pay was $2.50 an hour.”8

  Arthur had hoped to augment his financial aid package with a stipend from the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), which he and all other first- and second-year male undergraduates were required to join. But he soon learned that ROTC stipends were reserved for upperclassmen committed to an additional two years of training after their first two mandatory years. Even so, he had no problem donning a uniform and tolerating military discipline. He knew this would please his father, since in the Ashe-Cunningham family there was considerable pride that two of Arthur’s uncles, Rudy and James Cunningham, had served as Marines in Korea, while a third uncle had been Admiral Chester Nimitz’s valet during World War II.

  Arthur relished the prospect of becoming an Army officer, a position of considerable status among black Americans. After completing four years of drills and military science classes, plus a six-week summer camp, he could expect to receive a commission as a second lieutenant with a two-year service commitment. During the spring of his sophomore year, when he was puzzling over the decision to sign up for the third and fourth years of ROTC, he turned to Coach Morgan and Bob Kelleher, a prominent Los Angeles attorney recently appointed U.S. Davis Cup captain, for advice. A World War II veteran who had commanded a PT boat in the Pacific, Morgan counseled him with a simple calculus: “You would be better off going in as an officer than an enlisted man.” Kelleher agreed, declaring: “an officer’s commission would look good on any resume.” So Arthur signed up, setting himself on a path that would alter his life later in the decade.9

  Uncertain about how much freedom he could handle, Arthur was receptive to just about any form of guidance—military or otherwise. With his family and Dr. J almost three thousand miles away, and with Coach Hudlin back in St. Louis, he could no longer rely on the authority figures that had given his pre-college life structure and direction. As a college student, he discovered his best option was relying on the wise counsel of Coach Morgan. For the next five years the man known as J.D. would be the most influential person in Arthur’s life, and not only on matters related to tennis.

  As a coach and mentor, Morgan paid close attention to what his players were doing on the court, but his greatest talent was his ability to identify and recruit young men with superior physical and mental potential. A case in point was his successful recruiting of Pasarell. As the first day of class approached in late September 1961, the young Puerto Rican was still wavering between his offers from UCLA and USC. The thought of joining Dennis Ralston and the powerful Trojan netters was enticing, but Morgan’s persuasive charm decided the matter during a carefully orchestrated dinner at a fancy Sunset Boulevard restaurant. Arthur was on hand to help convince his friend to choose UCLA, but the wily coach did most of the talking. After a few minutes of casual conversation, Morgan, sitting between the two boys, suddenly grasped their forearms and pulled them toward him as if to seal a bond. “Glad to have both of you as Bruins,” he declared with an air of assurance, and that was that. Though not quite sure what had just happened, Pasarell obediently nodded his assent, drawing a big smile from his new teammate.

  Once Morgan had his recruits safely in the fold at UCLA, he didn’t “try to teach them much about technique or strategy.” Nor did he place much emphasis on physical conditioning or curfews. As Arthur recalled, the coach was not one to “tuck the boys in bed and say, ‘lights out at ten.’ ” Nevertheless, whenever one of his players faced a personal crisis or needed advice on a serious matter he was always there.10

  In Arthur’s case, Morgan sensed immediately that his first black recruit could benefit from more than the normal “welcome to campus” orientation session. Wasting no time, he called Arthur into his office for a lengthy briefing during the first week of the semester. Accustomed to strong mentorship, the young freshman seemed to embrace the special attention. “From the first day I met J. D. Morgan,” he wrote in 1981, “my antenna told me to trust him. After my arrival at school, he gave me the most complete rundown of a situation I ever received until General Creighton Abrams briefed the Davis Cup team in Vietnam seven years later. I didn’t have to go to freshman orientation: J. D. knew everything and everybody.”

  Morgan’s first task was to help Arthur choose a realistic set of courses compatible with his tennis responsibilities. When Arthur mentioned he “had thoughts of majoring in engineering or architecture,” Morgan gulped before inquiring: “Are you prepared to study five hours a day?” “Five hours a day?” the young freshman asked incredulously. “Yes, Arthur. Engineering and architecture are very difficult disciplines,” the coach insisted, adding: “I don’t doubt you can do the work, but unless you have your heart set on a career in those fields, I suggest you try business administration.”

  As Arthur pondered this unexpected advice, Morgan offered a few more words of academic counseling. “Arthur, you’re a big boy now,” he said. “You’re going to be here for four years. All my boys graduate. I’ll know who your teachers are, and in some cases, I’ll know if you’re having trouble before you do. You’re here on great recommendations. I know you’ll do well. The most important thing for you to begin today is to learn to organize your time. It’s difficult enough for freshmen who don’t play varsity sports. It’ll be tougher for you. Don’t waste your time, plan ahead, and do your papers early. This is a tough school academically. Don’t get behind.” Before Arthur left, the coach gave him his home telephone number and an open invitation to ask for help: “If you think you’ve got a problem that you can’t solve, give me a call any time. Don’t worry about waking me. I only sleep six hours a night anyway.”11

  Less than a week later, as he faced the first crisis of his college career, Arthur took Morgan up on the offer. Like all incoming freshmen, he had been asked to write an essay to determine his English composition course placement. Having received considerable praise for his writing ability throughout his high school years, he had expected to score well on the placement essay. But to his shock the essay placed him in the lowest quartile of freshmen. With his confidence shaken, he phoned Morgan to report that he had been assigned to a low-level remedial English class. Unfazed, Morgan told him not to worry, that remedial assignments were common among freshmen coming from inner-city public high schools. Although the coach meant well, this revelation did little to lessen Arthur’s feelings of anxiety and shame. Clearly, this was not the way that he had hoped to kick off his college years. After earning a solid B in the remedial course, he was elevated to the normal English course sequence during his second semester, and his overall performance in the classroom was well above average throughout his tenure at UCLA. But the remedial English assignment was not the last time he would have to overcome the limitations of a substandard Jim Crow education.12

  Three weeks later, Arthur and J.D. faced a second crisis, and this time the resolution was not so easy. After calling Arthur into his office, the coach got right to the point: “Arthur, there’s a weekend tournament at the Balboa Bay Club. Well, it’s held every year and they usually send out invitations to the college teams. For some reason, they have decided not to invite you. So I’ve called you in to decide what you want to do about it.” Arthur knew little about the Balboa Bay Club, but he knew enough about the whites-only tradition at elite private tennis clubs to realize immediately that race was the issue. “For a moment, I was too stunned to say anything,” he recalled years later.
“We don’t have to send the team, Arthur,” Morgan explained. “We can make an issue if you like. It’s up to you.” Caught off balance, Ashe tried to get his bearings. “I really don’t know if I want to make a big thing of it just yet,” he stammered. “I am not sure. I’ve only been in school a couple of weeks and I’m hardly in a position to start fighting the establishment. If the other players don’t want me to play, I won’t play. There are a lot of other tournaments I can play in.”

  Fearing his young freshman had misinterpreted the situation, Morgan immediately countered the suggestion that prejudiced white teammates were part of the problem. “The other players have nothing to do with it,” the coach insisted before offering his best counsel. “You can’t make a little issue,” he advised. “If you want to fight something like that, you have to fight it to win it. And you have to prepare for it, get your ducks in order so to speak. There will always be clubs like that and people like that. If you want to make a career out of fighting them, your tennis is going to suffer. When you’re more established, you can be a good tennis player and be in the position of fighting them on your terms.” In the end, Ashe agreed to let the matter slide, and neither he nor Morgan told his teammates the real reason for his absence during the Balboa Bay Club tournament. Not even Pasarell knew about the racial exclusion until several years later.13

  Coach Morgan helped Arthur to weather the Balboa Bay Club incident, but for the most part the young freshman had to chart his own course on matters of race. For the first time in his life, he found himself in a multiracial environment in which he had the freedom to associate with a racially diverse assortment of friends and acquaintances. All of his teammates were white, as were the vast majority of his classmates living in Sproul Hall. Yet he also spent time and developed friendships with a number of black students, including two prominent sophomore basketball players, Fred Slaughter and Walt Hazzard. In addition to playing center on the basketball team and competing as a sprinter for the UCLA track team, the Kansas-born Slaughter was the reigning campus table tennis champion until a skinny freshman named Ashe showed him what a highly coordinated tennis player could do with a paddle. Following Ashe’s unexpected Ping-Pong conquest, he and Slaughter became fast friends, united by their common love of sports and shared educational interests. Similar in many ways (Slaughter later became a prominent attorney and sports agent, eventually serving as lead counsel to the National Basketball Association Referees Association), they would keep in close touch for decades.

  Hazzard and Ashe were even closer, “drawn together,” according to Ashe, “because we both came from families with modest incomes, and from segregated neighborhoods. Athletics was our big chance to make a name for ourselves. So we had pretty much the same outlook on life.” The two black athletes could often be seen shooting baskets on the outdoor basketball courts adjacent to Sproul Hall. A year older than Arthur, Hazzard acted as his friend’s social mentor, instructing him in the ways of college life. As an active member of UCLA’s all-black fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi, which maintained a small off-campus fraternity house on Crenshaw Boulevard, Hazzard urged Arthur to become a pledge. Having already been approached by Zeta Beta Tau, a more prestigious predominantly white fraternity, Arthur hesitated. He eventually decided that Zeta Beta Tau was too expensive and the chance to become Hazzard’s “little brother” was too tempting to turn down—even though he was troubled by the racial implications of joining an all-black fraternity. Referring to Hazzard and his black fraternity brothers, he recalled, “They sort of pressured me into joining.”14

  Choosing between integrated and all-black institutions was a new experience for Arthur. Integration had never been an option in Richmond or St. Louis. Now he had choices to make as racial considerations complicated his social relationships. Arthur generally kept his freshman ruminations on race to himself—but not always. On several occasions, he discussed his “racial” options with Tebbie Fowler, a black sociology major who had grown up in the rough inner-city neighborhood of Compton and who had come to UCLA on a baseball scholarship. Fowler, who harbored strong feelings on the importance of racial pride and solidarity, warned Arthur about the limitations of racial assimilation. “If you’re going to maintain your identity and your equilibrium,” he insisted, “you can’t associate too much, you can’t assimilate. You can commingle, but not assimilate.”

  Behind this warning lurked the potentially perilous matter of interracial dating. For the first time in his life, Arthur found himself in the midst of white and Asian girls. Living in Sproul Hall, a coed dorm split into male and female wings, he couldn’t avoid casual contact with “the forbidden fruit” of his Jim Crow past. And, as he later confessed, he didn’t want to avoid them. He was quite literally fascinated by all manner of women, by the way they acted, looked, and dressed—and most of all by their enticing accessibility.15

  Arthur’s first college girlfriend, whom he met during his first month on campus and whom he dated steadily for six months, was Susan Ikei, “a Nisei, born in California of Japanese parents.” The daughter of traditionalist parents who had moved to Van Nuys after spending several years in a World War II internment camp, she shared Arthur’s growing curiosity about race and culture. “She had never dated a black before,” he later pointed out. “She was just as intrigued with me as I was with her. We took classes together, studied together, went to football games and school dances together, we were crazy about each other.”

  Arthur’s relationship with Susan prompted more than a few stares, but the fact she was Asian and not white seemed to shield them from more aggressive forms of disapproval. Even her parents, who invited him to their home on one occasion, seemed to take the relationship in stride. Arthur’s relatively light brown skin color—he wasn’t much darker than their daughter—may have softened her parents’ reaction. Even so, he was well aware that race complicated his first real romance. “We spent hours talking about prejudice,” he recalled, adding: “I could often sense the struggle between Susan, Nisei, and Susan, the college freshman.” Although they remained friends throughout Arthur’s years at UCLA, their daring interracial romance ended during the spring of 1962—to the obvious relief of many of his friends.16

  Tebbie Fowler, for one, was pleased that Arthur had not taken the relationship with Susan to a serious level. “I go out with them,” he said of white girls. “I may even sleep with a few, but I’d never marry one.” At the time, Arthur was not sure that he agreed with his friend’s calculating approach to interracial dating. But he had already surmised from the Balboa Bay Club incident and other more subtle signs of racial prejudice that Southern California was not nearly as tolerant as its boosters claimed. Near the end of his first semester, for example, he learned that several black members of the UCLA football team had received warnings from the athletic department that they should not bring “a white girl to the football banquet.”17

  Arthur’s friendship with a Japanese American girl was just one part of his cultural awakening. His freshman experiences, both inside and outside the classroom, initiated an extended exposure to the wider world, a process of discovery that would continue for the rest of his life. In the fall of 1961 the allure of cosmopolitan culture was new to him, something he embraced without fully understanding just how far it would take him from the parochialism of his native Richmond. While the human diversity of UCLA had its limitations, the mix of students—Japanese and Chinese Americans, Mexican Americans, West Africans, East Africans, and even the native Californians of Anglo background—fascinated him.

  Arthur did his best to absorb as much of this “family of man” mosaic as he could, but he soon developed a special interest in the cluster of African students who congregated in the student union. Prior to his freshman year, he, like most black Americans, had seldom thought about Africa—or about its historical connection to the African American diaspora. None of his teachers had ever encouraged him to reflect on his African antecedents. Only after his encounter with the colonial accents,
colorful native garb, and anticolonial political passions of UCLA’s African contingent did he begin to appreciate the cultural crosscurrents of the Atlantic world. “My conversations with foreign students lasted for hours,” he recalled. “Sometimes the Africans would talk loosely with the black American athletes. Accustomed to direct, unequivocal colonialism, they asked probing questions about our situation. ‘Aren’t you so-called student athletes exploited and underpaid?’ By their reckoning, if five guys in uniform could fill the Sports Arena and all they got was tuition, books, and room and board, something was wrong.”

  Often the African students’ criticisms focused on what they viewed as the cultural and ideological naïveté of most black Americans. “How can you Negroes call yourselves Afro-Americans?” one African student demanded. “You’ve never seen Mother Africa. You don’t speak any African languages. You don’t know our customs. None of you ever visit the Afro-Asian Cultural Center here. All I see you do is play cards and play pool when you’re not in class.” Arthur listened intently to what the African students were saying, but he often found himself questioning the validity of their complaints. “They were right about some things and wrong about others,” he later concluded, “but the excitement for me was my first encounters with real Africans. To see their authentic clothes and their scarification marks and to discuss issues with them was pure intellectual and emotional pleasure.”

  Though initially hesitant to speak up, Arthur eventually gained enough confidence to offer a few criticisms of his own. “You don’t have freedom of speech in Ghana and the Congo, do you?” he asked. As he later realized, he probably should have stopped there, since his next two questions betrayed an embarrassing ignorance of colonialism and its legacies. Displaying a condescension that must have infuriated the African students, he asked: “Why are there only thirty-six universities in all black Africa?” and “Why didn’t you write your history down on paper?” According to Arthur, these blunt questions provoked “tremendous discussions about oral versus written history, origins and legacies, and the similarities between black people the world over.” Right or wrong, at the age of eighteen he had entered the world of ideas, an intellectual arena that would ultimately provide him with countless challenges and much satisfaction.18