One of the things that Arthur liked best about tennis was the unpredictability of any given point—an unpredictability that dictated a wide variety of shots and split-second decision making. The thrill of responding to a challenging situation with a dazzling winner was not something he was willing to forgo, even if creative shotmaking sometimes got him into trouble.
For a tournament player to survive with this degree of self-indulgence required a measure of security born of confidence and success. As Arthur described the summer circuit, there were two basic types of players, those who “sail around enjoying life” and those who “work hard to be consistent winners.” He judged himself to be in the latter, more serious group, but he knew climbing up the rungs of the national tennis ladder was an uneven process of fits and starts. “Once in a while somebody develops into a better-than-average tournament player,” he explained. “Then he begins getting invitations to more important tournaments. And if he does well in these, eventually he starts beating nationally known players now and then. At that point he moves into a different orbit of tourneys and a different way of life. That happened to me.”13
One of the most obvious benefits of moving into this higher orbit of tournament play was financial backing. Although technically amateurs, most successful players survived on a combination of private sponsorship and tournament guarantees, and within this system there was a hierarchy of support mechanisms. “If he’s an also-ran,” Arthur once explained, “he’ll pay his own fares. If he has a sponsor who thinks he’s a future champ, the sponsor will give him gasoline or air tickets. If he’s a seeded player, the tournament promoters themselves will pay his transportation.” Beyond these distinctions, virtually all players received additional support once they were on site: “No matter how he gets there, once he’s at the tournament site he can just about make it for nothing. The tournament committee will have arranged for him to be put up in someone’s home or at a hotel; and meals are usually free or can be mooched if necessary.”
Prior to the summer of 1963, Arthur had lived on the lower margins of this system. “In my first years on the circuit I had to pay my own way from city to city, with the help of Dr. Johnson and my father and a few friends,” he remembered. “While I was in a tournament the officials gave me a little money for ‘living expenses’ but the maximum allowable was $28 a day and only the top-seeded entrants got that. At Forest Hills when I was unseeded I didn’t even get expense money, although the USLTA did arrange a special rate of $5 a night at the Hilton in New York.”14
As a highly regarded seeded player, Arthur received what he called “full hospitality,” which “meant better accommodations in most towns, and the legal maximum of $28 a day for living expenses, plus transportation money. And if I wanted to go some place during my free hours the tournaments usually provided a car for me.” With a few exceptions, he was also accorded full participation in the social events that accompanied the weekly tournaments, especially after he joined the Davis Cup squad in early August. “That first summer as a top-seeded player was in some ways the most fun I’d ever had in my life up to then,” he recalled. “I’d gotten over the strain of being a Negro alone in white men’s clubs. Everyone had accepted me. I could relax a little. My tennis improved.”15
As the first black player in the long history of the nation’s Davis Cup competition, Arthur attracted considerable attention in the national press, which was searching for positive stories to offset the disheartening headlines marking the rise of violent resistance against an expanding and increasingly insistent civil rights movement. In his January inaugural address, Alabama’s new governor, George Wallace, pledged to defend “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” and in May, much of the nation was shocked by the arch-segregationist Bull Connor’s use of attack dogs and fire hoses to intimidate nonviolent protesters, many of whom were adolescents or children, in the streets of Birmingham. A month later, on June 11, Governor Wallace defiantly stood in the “schoolhouse door” in a futile effort to prevent the desegregation of the University of Alabama, and the next day Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated outside his home in Jackson by a white supremacist extremist.16
Arthur’s selection to the Davis Cup team was welcome news to Americans shaken by the racial turmoil and violence of recent events. Bob Kelleher had been hinting for several months that Arthur would eventually be put on the team, but when the selection became official the young UCLA star broke out into a broad smile that left no doubt how much this meant to him. His selection put him in the same category as Althea Gibson, who had played well in the Wightman Cup matches against Great Britain in 1957 and 1958. “I’ve got to live up to it,” he acknowledged, and by “it” he meant the long American Davis Cup tradition of winning with style and sportsmanship. Whether he liked it or not, participation on the Davis Cup squad carried the special responsibility of representing both his nation and his race, and he didn’t want to do anything on or off the court that might detract from what he regarded as an official elevation to full citizenship.17
Arthur’s selection to the U.S. Davis Cup squad was not without controversy, and even he later questioned the merits of the choice. “Why was I picked over Frank Froehling, Ham Richardson, Allen Fox and Gene Scott, who were all higher ranked?” he wondered out loud four years later. “Was the committee tossing Negroes a crumb to make them happy?” At the time of the selection, W. Harcourt Woods, the chair of the Davis Cup selection committee, insisted racial considerations played no role in the committee’s deliberations. “Ashe was picked on ability,” he declared, “not because of the color of his skin.” In defending the choice, Woods cited Ashe’s recent victories over Richardson, Fox, and Riessen, and his blistering first set at Merion against McKinley, the nation’s number-one-ranked player. But not everyone accepted this explanation.
Though friendly with Ashe, one vocal dissenter was Scott, the nation’s #8 ranked player, who had been led to believe by a USLTA official that he would be on the team. Ranked ten positions higher than #18 Ashe, he demanded an explanation from the committee. “No wonder he was irked,” Arthur later conceded. Inevitably a television interviewer asked him if he thought he had been “chosen because of race.” “That was an insulting question,” he later complained. “My impulse was to scream No! But . . . I know better than . . . to let my feelings show. So I just gave the TV guys a polite no.”18
A month later Scott was added to the team, restoring his pride and preserving his friendship with Arthur. But a certain tension continued to surround the squad. As both men well knew, there was considerable pressure on the 1963 squad to win, since the United States had not won the Cup since 1954. Australia had won eight years in a row, eclipsing the United States team’s seven-year winning streak from 1920 to 1926. Even more distressing, the 1962 U.S. squad had been eliminated in the semifinals of the Americas Zone, losing to Mexico for the first time in Davis Cup history. No one in the American tennis establishment wanted anything like that to happen again, but the same strong Mexican squad was scheduled to face the Americans in a semifinal rematch in mid-August.
The rematch would be played on a fast concrete surface at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, unlike the slow clay that had benefited the 1962 Mexican team playing at home in Mexico City. But neither Captain Kelleher nor anyone else on the American squad was taking anything for granted. If everything went according to plan, the team’s two strongest players, Ralston and McKinley, would play both singles and doubles, leaving the remainder of the squad sitting on the sidelines as cheerleaders. The only possible hitch was a nagging hand injury that threatened to keep Ralston out of the competition. If Ralston couldn’t play, McKinley would team with Riessen in doubles, leaving the hard court specialist Ashe as the likely singles substitute. When asked about how he thought he would fare against either of Mexico’s singles specialists, Rafael Osuna and Antonio Palafox, Arthur expressed confidence. But the inner reality underneath his cool exterior must have tied his s
tomach up in knots. Barely twenty years old—and coming off a less than stellar summer season—he had little reason to be confident other than a faith in his ability to come through in the clutch.
For ten days prior to the tie, Arthur and his teammates lived at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, spending long hours working out under the watchful eyes of Captain Kelleher and Coach Pancho Gonzales. The practices honed Ashe’s game, and on August 14 Kelleher told reporters the UCLA star “was a 20 per cent better player than he was two weeks ago. Gonzales has been chewing up all of our men and Ashe’s game has benefited particularly.” Ashe himself declared that he was “happy” about the recent improvement in his game, but when Ralston recovered in plenty of time to lead the American team to victory, his Davis Cup debut was postponed until the next round.19
In the meantime, Ashe headed east to play in the National Doubles Championships held at the Longwood Cricket Club before traveling to Forest Hills for the U.S. National tournament. Teamed with Larry Nagler at the Doubles Championships, he made it to the quarterfinals before being eliminated by Osuna and Palafox in a tightly contested marathon match 7–5, 9–7, and 17–15. Having played well, he left Boston for New York with renewed confidence. Still unseeded in his fifth appearance at Forest Hills, he survived the first two rounds. But he couldn’t keep up with Riessen in the third. Playing on “a badly chewed up outside court,” both men had difficulty keeping the ball in play, and in the end Riessen’s superior volleying ability carried the day.20
A week later the two teammates were in Denver preparing for the upcoming tie against Venezuela, and once again they were competitors. This time they were vying to replace McKinley, who was temporarily unavailable for Davis Cup play. In view of Riessen’s victory over Ashe in New York, it was no surprise when he got the nod from Captain Kelleher, even though the cement surface at Cherry Creek Country Club favored Ashe’s game. Two years older than Arthur, Riessen had been on the American squad for three years but had never played a Davis Cup match. So Arthur did not resent his selection. Confident he would get his turn at some point in the near future, he cheered on Riessen and Ralston as they swept the Venezuelans in the opening day singles matches and two days later in doubles. With three points, the Americans had clinched the tie by Saturday afternoon, but Davis Cup tradition dictated that the final two singles matches would be played anyway, essentially “for fun only.” As expected, Kelleher turned to Ralston for one of the Sunday singles matches, and with nothing on the line, he selected Arthur for the second. According to Gene Scott, who roomed with Arthur in Denver, Kelleher’s first inclination had been to choose him for the second singles slot. But perhaps feeling remorseful about his earlier criticism of the selection process, he urged Kelleher to give the slot to Arthur. “I’m going to Australia and Arthur isn’t,” he reportedly told the captain. “Let him play this one.”
On September 15, 1963, after more than sixty years of Davis Cup play, an African American was finally on the court representing the United States. The match proved anticlimactic, as Arthur needed only 46 minutes to dispatch the Venezuelan clay court specialist Orlando Bracamonte, who won only two games in three sets. Later in the day, after Ralston closed out the tie with a win over Bracamonte’s overmatched teammate Iyo Pimentel, Arthur joined in the victory celebration knowing he had achieved something that many members of the ATA had feared would never happen. Unfortunately, his pathbreaking appearance was not the only history made that day. That morning the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham had been rocked with an explosion that killed four little girls and broke the hearts of many Americans, black and white, who had gained hope and inspiration from the March on Washington eighteen days earlier. This would not be the last time that Arthur would have to balance conflicting emotions born of a personal triumph forged in a broader context of racial hatred and human misery.21
The next round of Davis Cup play, only eleven days away, was the Inter-Zone semifinal against Great Britain, to be held on the grass courts at Bournemouth, England. But it had been decided that Ashe would return to UCLA to begin his junior year while the rest of the team traveled to Bournemouth. This meant he would also miss the Inter-Zone final—which, if the Americans defeated the British, would pit them against India in a tie played in Bombay in early November—and the expected Davis Cup final in Adelaide against the defending champion Australians in late December. Playing in India and Australia would require Ashe to withdraw from his fall semester classes, a sacrifice J. D. Morgan was unwilling to countenance.
Missing an extended tour of the British Commonwealth was disappointing, but Kelleher assured Arthur that his status as a Davis Cupper was secure. Beyond Kelleher’s promise, there was also a noticeable shift in the way tennis officials and fans, and the press, treated him. Being a member of the Davis Cup team, he recalled in 1967, “definitely put me among the higher-level players, and I began to see what a difference it made.” “Besides the prestige,” he pointed out on another occasion, “I would be entitled to 100 pounds in expenses at Wimbledon the following year and also would escape the ‘B’ lockers.” Playing in the Pacific Southwest Championship matches in Los Angeles the week after the Venezuela tie, he could already detect a change in his status. Suddenly he was no longer just another promising college player whose position as American tennis’s “token Negro” made him an object of curiosity. Now he was identifiably a Davis Cup star and a legitimate national figure worthy of respect and public interest.22
Coming off a remarkable series of experiences during the summer—from Wimbledon and Sweden to his Davis Cup debut—Arthur returned to UCLA with a new attitude, one that allowed for a greater degree of self-indulgence and relaxation. His new spirit became manifest in his decision to live off-campus during his junior year. At first, he considered living alone, but after he had difficulty finding an affordable apartment, Pasarell and Jean-Edouard Baker, who as sophomores had shared a small one-bedroom apartment near Pico Boulevard, urged him to move in with them. Together the three friends soon found a two-bedroom in the Pacific Palisades about two miles north of UCLA.
Pasarell had long been Arthur’s most trusted friend, and during the past year Baker had become the third member of a trio that mixed friendship with a love of tennis. A good prep school player who played briefly at UCLA but who could not keep up with Coach Morgan’s rising standards, Baker came from a prominent mixed-race family in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. His father owned a large sugar plantation, and he had taken an early interest in the business aspects of the family’s extensive landholdings. Cosmopolitan and sophisticated beyond his years, he served as Arthur’s unofficial academic and social advisor during much of their time at UCLA. It was Baker who convinced him to specialize in marketing as a business major. “Baker has a lot of class. You can tell by the way he handles himself. He’ll be cool in any situation. I learned a lot being around him,” Arthur later explained. The fun-loving Haitian scion also urged him to let go and live a little, to enjoy life beyond the lines. Along with Pasarell, they began to explore what Arthur termed “various sports kicks”: “Fall semester it was horseback riding. Then billiards and ping pong. In spring we got baseball mitts and a bat and played over-the-line.”
With Jean-Edouard and Possum leading the way, it didn’t take long for Arthur to loosen up. One sure sign was his decision to buy a new set of wheels to replace his small motorcycle—not just any wheels, but a 300cc. Honda motorcycle, the “biggest one they make” he proudly proclaimed. He bought the bike from Larry Nagler, who was a bit nervous about the sale, fearing the monster bike was more than his small-framed friend could handle. Somehow Arthur, who drove the bike to campus on a daily basis, managed to avoid a serious mishap, though years later Pasarell still cringed when he recounted how “dangerous and wobbly” his cycle-mad friend had been. Many of Arthur’s friends—and especially his coaches—feared for his safety, and within a year the new Davis Cup captain George MacCall ordered him to get rid of it.
The motorcycle was Arthur’s most
dangerous indulgence, but there were other causes for concern. Before long, the strict discipline that had ruled his life since childhood lost some of its force. “Maybe I relaxed too much,” he later acknowledged. “At home I’d lived by the clock, and by Daddy’s strict rules. And when I lived on the UCLA campus I’d been under J.D.’s heavy hand most of the time. All my life I’d watched my words and my moves, so nobody would get sore and make trouble for me. Now I got a little careless, and let my mind wander more.”23
By the end of the fall semester, the change in attitude was noticeable enough to draw Morgan’s attention. As Arthur remembered: “Gradually J.D. saw that I was getting too free and easy. He sat down with me one day and we had a heart-to-heart talk, with his heart doing most of the talking. We talked about goals—not just in tennis, but in life. ‘Self-discipline is the key to success in any line,’ he told me. ‘Why not start organizing your time, making it count?’ ” Arthur took this advice to heart. “I knew I fooled around a lot, wasted time,” he later admitted, pointing to Morgan’s habit of making every minute count as the model for his return to a productive, disciplined life: “Often I’d seen what he did with odd minutes, so I took his principles and began applying them. I started keeping a textbook in my car. Every time I stopped at a red light I read a few paragraphs. Between innings at a Dodger baseball game I read the entire Wall Street Journal.”
Arthur Ashe Page 17
