Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  The loss to Ralston and USC stung, but in the immediate aftermath of the Princeton tournament Arthur was too excited to dwell on what had just happened. “That same night,” he remembered, “it seemed that almost everybody from the two teams was on the plane to London.” Having been left behind the previous year, he was ecstatic to be included in the American contingent headed for Wimbledon. As he put it, “even without winning the NCAAs, I was flying on several levels.” Earlier in the year, he had been resigned to staying behind for a second time as many of his tennis-playing peers headed for the world’s most prestigious tournament. Financially strapped as he was, there was simply no money to fund an expensive trip across the Atlantic. Indeed, at the close of the fall semester in December 1962, he had received a sobering reminder of his unenviable economic situation.35

  Unable to scrounge up enough money to travel to Virginia over the Christmas break, Arthur had no choice but to remain at UCLA while the vast majority of his fellow students “went home for the holidays.” “The campus became a ghost town with just a few of us left to haunt it,” he later explained. “There was no meal service for several days and I was flat broke. For the first time since I left home, I did not have a cent in my pocket.” Advised that Arthur was still on campus, J.D. invited him to have Christmas dinner at the Morgan house, but his lonely star declined the invitation, saying he had already made other arrangements. As Arthur described his embarrassing dilemma, “I really had no plans and I was too proud to ask my father to send me some money.”

  By Christmas Day, he was reduced to borrowing a dollar from his Haitian friend and future roommate Jean-Edouard Baker to pay for “some fruit and a sandwich from the vending machines in the basement of the dormitory.” He later remembered this experience as “the worst” moment of his life as a college student, a low point that gave him “a sober regard for money.” “Even five dollars,” he explained, “would have meant I could walk to Westwood to see a movie. I wasn’t tempted to run out and steal anything, but I thought long and hard about what it meant to have no money at all for an extended period. I was determined never to be in that situation again.”36

  Then an unexpected windfall in April changed his circumstances. As he and Pasarell left the court following an exhibition match at the California Club, a well-dressed, middle-aged white woman approached him and struck up a conversation about his tennis. After praising his play, she asked about his plans for the future. “I don’t know,” he told her. “If I can find the money, I’ll go to Wimbledon next month. If not, I’ll try to go back East and play the summer circuit there.” When she asked how much it would cost for him to go to Wimbledon, he replied: “Oh, about eight hundred dollars would do it.” After assuring him she thought he certainly deserved “a chance” to play at Wimbledon, she told him to “wait here just a moment . . . I’ll be right back.” Arthur assumed that the woman—who, he later learned, was Joianna Ogner, the wife of a Beverly Hills auto dealer—“was going to get a business card.” But instead “she walked about thirty yards down a long hall into a card room and shut the door behind her.” For a few moments Arthur didn’t know what to think, but “about three minutes later, she came striding back and put eight crisp hundred dollar bills” in his hand. “Here, this should do it,” she declared with a smile. “Good luck. We’ll be looking for your name in the Times.”

  As it turned out, the enterprising Mrs. Ogner “had gone into the card room, found eight guys around the table, and hit each one for a hundred dollars.” In the years to come Arthur often cited this “act of kindness” as one of the turning points of his career. Not only did it fund his first trip abroad, but also it “balanced the Balboa Club incident” that had shattered his “image of California.” “Now I knew,” he explained, “there were warm and generous people out there who would give me a hand when they could.” Coming at a critical point in his journey from Jim Crow to the wider world, the California Club episode gave him a glimpse of a bright future beyond the dark shadows of racial prejudice.37

  SEVEN

  TRAVELING MAN

  DURING THE SPRING OF 1963, several other benefactors stepped forward to help fund Arthur’s first overseas adventure. “J.D. worked hard to get me to Wimbledon,” he later explained. “I wasn’t eligible for USLTA expense money abroad, because I hadn’t yet been named to the Davis Cup team, but J.D. got some of his high-powered alumni to put the bite on various people for part of my expenses. Dr. Johnson also worked hard on it. His junior development fund made a contribution toward my trip. So did several Richmond people, white and black. And the Negro high schools in Richmond took up a collection.” Arthur was grateful for this tangible show of support, which he took as a clear sign that he had finally “moved up into the higher-flying level of players.”1

  In November, his new status would be confirmed by a cover story in World Tennis magazine, his first real splash in the press. But the Wimbledon trip was the milestone that meant the most to him, bringing the realization of a lifelong dream. No African American man had ever graced the green turf of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, and now he would be the first. Traveling outside the United States was a rare experience for black Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, few of his relatives and boyhood friends had ever traveled more than a hundred miles from home, and the idea of crossing more than three thousand miles of ocean to play tennis must have seemed preposterous to anyone growing up in the Jackson Ward section of Richmond. In this context, Arthur’s flight to London represented a radical new departure, literally for him, and vicariously for his friends and family. Sharing the flight with six Wimbledon-bound friends from the California tennis scene, he was sure he had embarked on the greatest adventure of his young life.2

  Arthur’s first visit to Great Britain was full of revelations. Even before his arrival at Wimbledon, he marveled at the multicultural mix streaming through the airport and along the streets of central London. Yet he couldn’t help but notice the all too familiar signs of racial hierarchy. “The first thing I saw at Heathrow Airport after my arrival were the Indian and Pakistani women who cleaned the floor,” he later commented, adding, “I quickly found that in London, like Richmond, black people did the dirty work.” Noting that he “never saw a black face among the famous Guards” at Buckingham Palace, he concluded British colonialism had left a legacy of institutionalized discrimination manifested in a “class system” that “only made racism more oppressive.”3

  While London reminded him “of home in many ways,” Arthur found Wimbledon to be “in a class by itself.” As he gazed at Centre Court and its surroundings, the setting reminded him of “an Ivy League school, with ivy on the majestic walls,” not unlike the Princeton campus where he had played two days earlier. Less grand was the gritty “B” locker room, the changing room to which he and the other “lesser-known players—the nobodies and qualifiers” were assigned. This manifestation of “the British class system” reminded him of “the ‘separate but equal’ cry of Virginia’s Massive Resistance movement after the Brown decision.”

  One consolation was the tradition of dispatching Rolls-Royces and Bentleys to ferry all of the players to Wimbledon from their central London hotels. As Arthur recalled: “I’ll never forget my first ride in a Bentley; it was the roomiest car I had ever been in and the driver addressed me as ‘sir’ or ‘mister.’ I was impressed but not fooled. I had learned early to be wary of strangers or whites bearing gifts. Still, I enjoyed the luxury; it made me feel important even though I wasn’t.” Being transported like a celebrity from the Westbury Hotel, where all of the American players were housed, “through meadows and trees to Wimbledon township, where the All-England [sic] club is,” was a fantasy-like experience. The car “drove us around to the door of the locker room,” he recalled. “People were crowded there getting autographs. We felt like movie stars.”4

  The celebrity treatment had actually begun the previous night. Writing in his memoir Advantage Ashe four years later, Arthur remembered
the scene: “We ate at a nice restaurant that first evening. Our waiter thought at first we were cricketeers, because some test matches were going on in London. When we told him we were tennis players, he gasped, ‘Oh, you’re playing at Wimbledon!’ From then on he served us as if we were royalty.” “Wimbledon in England,” he pointed out to his American readers, “is like the World Series here. The matches are televised all over Europe. You go on the streets and people recognize you. Make a phone call and the operator knows your name.”5

  Once the visiting Americans arrived at Wimbledon, the special treatment continued. “There was a masseur available to rub us down,” Arthur recalled with an enthusiasm that would seem quaintly innocent to future generations accustomed to overprivileged athletes, “and a TV so we could watch matches without going outside. We had the freedom of a cafeteria, a tea room, and a bar if we wanted it.” “Outside,” he continued, “I found that all courts—not just the main ones—were perfectly manicured. There were linesmen for every match, so no players had to call their own lines.” Even more amazing was the dignified presence of umpires wearing “hard straw hats and carnations just as they did in 1880.” As Arthur “wandered among the spectators” on his first morning at the site, he was, in his words, “awed by the ladies hats, which seemed to be topped with pink cabbages, velvet bows, and assorted feathers” and “by the nobility taking tea under impressive umbrellas.” Wherever he looked, he saw “green everywhere—green ivy, green canopies, green doors and balconies and chairs,” as “people stood around elbow to elbow, craning on tiptoe to look at aristocrats or to watch tennis.”

  Although he tried to remain calm and collected, he later confessed: “all the magnificence and efficiency dazed me a little,” so much so that “I felt jittery when it was time for my first-round match.” By the time he finished a nervous pre-match warm-up on one of the outside courts, he “was beginning to see why players say that no tournament in the world touches Wimbledon.” Only after surviving his opening round match did he begin to feel that he belonged in such august surroundings.6

  His first-round opponent, Carlos Fernandes of Brazil, was a clay court specialist unaccustomed to grass, but he gave the American serve-and-volley specialist all he could handle in a five-set thriller. After losing the first two sets, Arthur mounted a ferocious comeback, winning the last three sets 6–4, 6–4, 6–1. In the words of one reporter covering the match, “the first American Negro to play in the men’s singles had acquitted himself with honor.” His second-round match against the hard-hitting Aussie John Hillebrand proved to be an even stiffer challenge, but Arthur ultimately prevailed in five long sets.

  For Ashe, the twin victories—however narrow—represented a major milestone in his career. “Suddenly, in my first Wimbledon, I had reached the third round,” he later explained. “I was so excited and nervous I could hardly contain myself. The first win over Fernandes had been the psychological hump. . . . For me, moving to the next round was like my first big win over one of those ‘white boys’ on the junior circuit.”7

  After playing two five-set matches in two days, Ashe was pretty much spent, and the Wimbledon schedule did not allow for any days off. Less than twenty-four hours after defeating Hillebrand, he found himself on the court with the #4 seed, Chuck McKinley, who had made it all the way to the Wimbledon final in 1961 before losing to Rod Laver. He had faced McKinley before with little success, and in his depleted state he was no match for the relentless five-foot-nine-inch dynamo. As he knew all too well, McKinley, a student at Trinity University in San Antonio, had been the clear favorite to win the recent NCAA singles title before withdrawing from the intercollegiate competition to focus on Wimbledon. In granting his request to skip the Princeton tournament, the president of Trinity had told him “you’d better win,” and win he did, not only defeating Ashe in the third round but going on to win the 1963 Wimbledon singles title without losing a set. “We met on Court 6, next to the canvas-covered ‘members’ enclosure,” Arthur recalled. “It is the noisiest court at Wimbledon because the members are talking, eating, and drinking right next to the court. But I couldn’t blame the members for my game against McKinley. He was the best U.S. player, and I was talented but inexperienced.”

  Considering the circumstances, Arthur did not feel too bad about his elimination. “My arm seized up,” he explained to the press after the McKinley match. “I wanted to quit halfway through.” That he did not quit was a testament to a fighting spirit often camouflaged by his quiet demeanor. He wanted to win at Wimbledon as much as he wanted anything in his tennis life, a steely determination he would evidence on more than one occasion in the years to come.8

  He also competed in the 1963 Wimbledon men’s doubles competition teamed with the former UCLA standout Allen Fox. Though unseeded, the Ashe-Fox duo won two matches before losing in the third round to two Soviet players. The Cold War implications of the match attracted a larger than normal crowd, but the American cause received a boost in the next round when McKinley and Ralston defeated the Soviets.

  Arthur’s early elimination from the singles and doubles competition allowed him to concentrate on his pairing with Carol Hanks in mixed doubles. Hanks, an attractive twenty-one-year-old Stanford student, had grown up in St. Louis where she met Arthur during his year at Sumner High School. Ranked seventh in women’s singles in the United States, she had won both the U.S. Hard Court singles title and the NCAA doubles title in 1962. She and Arthur constituted a formidable doubles team—and the first interracial pairing in Wimbledon history. Breezing through the early rounds, they ultimately lost in the quarterfinals to the veteran Darlene Hard of Long Beach and her partner Bob Hewitt, who along with Fred Stolle was the defending Wimbledon men’s doubles champion.9

  Arthur spent most of the Wimbledon fortnight’s second week as a tourist. Flying home before the end of the tournament was not an option, thanks to the U.S. Davis Cup captain, Bob Kelleher, who had arranged a post-Wimbledon week in Sweden for three of his probable team members. Taking full advantage of the situation, Arthur explored central London, following a nightly routine that he and his California friends adopted. “Every evening on the first trip,” he later recounted, “a group of us would walk up Conduit Street, turn right and walk half a mile to the little statue of Eros in the center of Piccadilly Circus. We ate dinner at Lyons Corner House and roamed Soho.” By the time he left for Scandinavia, he felt he had experienced “the heart of London,” and in the years to come he would repeat this “pilgrimage” to the center of what he termed “my favorite city . . . the most civilized city in the world.”10

  The trip to Scandinavia was brief because USLTA rules required all high-ranking American players to return to the United States within one week of the close of Wimbledon so they could begin play in the Eastern grass court circuit. Ashe and his traveling companions—Ralston and the McKinleys—made the most of their all-expenses-paid sojourn, flying to Copenhagen for a sightseeing day before traveling on to the Swedish resort town of Bastad, the site of an annual international tournament. With the pressure of Wimbledon behind them, the Americans were able to relax and enjoy the best of Swedish hospitality. The entire experience was exotic, from “playing one match at 9:30 in the evening—by sunlight,” to being “a unique item” of attraction for the bevy of beautiful Swedish girls attending the tournament. With his attention obviously compromised by this seductive atmosphere, he didn’t play very well, suffering an early exit in the singles competition. But he was able to combine tennis and pleasure in the mixed doubles competition, where he made it to the quarterfinals with a winsome Swedish partner, Elizabeth Carlgren. “I hated to leave,” he later confessed, but USLTA rules forced him to return to the real world.11

  Two days later, thoroughly jet-lagged, he found himself in River Forest, Illinois, competing in the National Clay Court Championships. Somehow the weary traveler made it to the third round. A week later, he joined the Eastern grass circuit at the Pennsylvania lawn tennis championship held at the Mer
ion Cricket Club. Having seen Wimbledon two weeks before, he was less intimidated by Merion’s posh atmosphere than he had been during his earlier visits, which may help to explain why he played so well. After defeating Marty Riessen in the third round and Allen Fox in the quarterfinals, he played a valiant semifinal match against McKinley. After winning the first set 6–1, he seemed to be on his way to an upset victory, but McKinley fought back with an effective combination of “spin and twist” serves and “trigger sure” volleys—as a New York Times reporter put it—to win the next three sets. As in the past, Arthur’s moments of brilliance were foiled by inconsistency and questionable shot choices. In the judgment of the reporter, “The Richmond youth showed that he is one of the greatest shot makers in amateur tennis. He also showed that his game is immature, erratic and risky.”12

  This type of criticism would dog Arthur throughout the summer and beyond, but it didn’t have much impact on his style of play. While he acknowledged that risk taking sometimes led to squandered points and short-term failure, he maintained his resolve to take chances that few other players were willing to attempt. Developing a distinctive and innovative style of power tennis had become increasingly important to him, not only as a tactical matter on the court but also as a psychological mechanism of asserting his personal independence. Constrained for so many years by the strict mentorship of his father, Dr. J, and Coach Hudlin, he was finally free to make his own decisions. During the intercollegiate season, Coach Morgan often reined him in for the good of the team, but during the summer he was essentially on his own.