UCLA controlled the tournament from start to finish, placing four players among the eight singles quarterfinalists, and all four players in the doubles final. After teaming with Crookenden to win the doubles title over Reed and Sanderlin, Arthur defeated the previously undefeated (20–0) Mike Belkin of the University of Miami in the singles final. The fifth UCLA tennis player to win the NCAA singles championship, he took his place beside Jack Tidball (1933), Herbert Flam (1950), Larry Nagler (1959), and Allen Fox (1960). As impressive as he was in victory, Arthur was even more pleased with the team’s performance—a staggering 31 points, more than double the total of second-place Miami. The USC Trojans, to his delight, finished a distant sixth with 10 points. After three years of frustration, the Bruins netters were back on top, and the skinny kid from Virginia was able to walk away from his collegiate career knowing he was the primary reason why.40
EIGHT
FROM DIXIE TO DOWN UNDER
WITH HIS COLLEGE TENNIS career officially over, Ashe turned to other challenges. Aside from winning another Davis Cup or two, his fondest wish was to play well at Wimbledon. His first two visits to the hallowed British tournament had produced meager results, but after his recent NCAA triumph he had high hopes he could do better on his third try. Only two days separated the end of the NCAA championships and the beginning of Wimbledon, but somehow he and the rest of the American contingent arrived in London in time for the first round.
Without any time for warm-up play in the pre-Wimbledon grass tournaments, Arthur and the other Americans were at a distinct disadvantage. Pasarell, for one, had a terrible time on the slippery grass, repeatedly falling during a straight-set loss in the first round. Arthur fared somewhat better, though only after a slow start in the first set against Doug Kelso, a quirky young Australian who somehow managed “to serve without looking at the ball.” Ultimately rallying to defeat Kelso in four sets, he had a similar experience in the second round against the Frenchman Pierre Darmon, losing the first set but winning the next three. In the third round, he won a tough match against Bob Carmichael, a twenty-four-year-old Australian from Melbourne. But in the fourth he ran out of luck against Osuna. Five years older than Ashe, the two-time Wimbledon doubles champion ended Arthur’s dream, 8–6, 6–4, 6–4. Three Americans—Marty Riessen, Dennis Ralston, and Allen Fox—reached the Wimbledon quarterfinals in 1965, the nation’s best showing since 1954. Arthur would have to wait until 1968 to join such select company.1
Following his return from Wimbledon, Arthur traveled to the Western Open in Milwaukee, where he teamed up with Ralston to win the doubles title after losing a tough quarterfinal singles match to Riessen. The next week took him to the U.S. Indoor Championships in Chicago, where once again he came up short in the singles quarterfinals, losing to Mike Belkin, whom he had defeated for the intercollegiate crown in June. This disappointing showing against a younger, less experienced opponent was troubling. During the month since his NCAA victory, he “seemed to be just treading water,” as he later put it. “I couldn’t gain any momentum.”2
He had a full two weeks to sharpen his game before the Americas Zone final against Mexico. Earlier in the year, after a period of solemn deliberation, he had recommitted himself to the goal of breaking into the top echelon of tennis. So he pressed on, motivated by dreams of personal glory, a burning desire to earn the respect of his peers, and the fear of disappointing Coach Gonzales.
During the last two weeks in July, Arthur turned his attention to getting ready for Osuna and the Mexicans. Mexico had won the Americas Zone only once—in 1962 when it defeated the United States squad for the first time in fourteen tries. But the 1965 Mexican squad was no pushover. The tie had originally been scheduled to take place in Mexico City, but the financially strapped Mexican Davis Cup Committee agreed to move the contest to Texas after Dallas businessman Jack Turpin offered them a $20,000 inducement. Dallas had never hosted a Davis Cup tie, and Turpin and other local tennis boosters were eager to put their city on the big-time tennis map in an effort to counter the stigma of the presidential assassination eighteen months earlier.
As Turpin had predicted, the matches against the Mexicans drew sellout crowds. Part of the attraction was watching Ashe in his first serious test as a Davis Cupper, but even more important was the obvious historical parallel with the vaunted spirit of the Alamo. This time, of course, the Texans held an advantage over the Mexicans, who were competing as decided underdogs on American territory. Texas was now officially and chauvinistically American, but unfortunately for Arthur, it was also a state with a strong commitment to racial segregation. There was considerable speculation about how he would fare in an ultraconservative town with a long history of racial intolerance.
Adding to the drama, the matches in Dallas coincided with the final days of congressional debate over the highly controversial Voting Rights Bill, a measure opposed by most Texas congressmen. Even so, there were few visible signs of protest against Arthur’s appearance, partly because local leaders had wisely chosen to hold the Davis Cup matches on the public courts at the recently completed Samuell Grand Park. From the beginning Turpin had wanted to show off the new public facility, but others were motivated by the likelihood that Arthur would be turned away from the only alternative site, the all-white Dallas Country Club.
How much Arthur knew about the behind-the-scenes venue negotiations is unclear, but racial tensions were clearly part of the backdrop as he took the court in the highest-profile match of his life. He had not expected to play in the opening singles match against Osuna, Mexico’s best player, primarily because he had just lost to him at Wimbledon. But Captain George MacCall surprisingly turned to Arthur for the marquee match. As an untested twenty-two-year-old, Arthur was understandably nervous about the entire scene. But his greatest challenge was the unusual style of his wily opponent. Osuna could slice and dice with the best clay court players in the world, and he had both the cunning and the stamina to frustrate and outlast the game’s biggest hitters. The bituminous cement surface of the Dallas courts, substantially slower than grass, also favored the Mexican star. Having beaten Arthur handily the month before, he was the overwhelming favorite.
None of this seemed to matter, however, once the two men began to play. Osuna played poorly from the outset while Arthur was at his best, winning handily in straight sets 6–2, 6–3, 9–7. Serving up 15 aces, he simply overpowered Osuna with what Time magazine dubbed “the strongest serve in U.S. amateur tennis.” Writing in Sports Illustrated, a gleeful Frank Deford reported: “In the very first match the show went haywire: a supporting player, not really a principal, decided to become a star.” MacCall agreed, declaring: “Today Arthur became a man. He was under tremendous pressure, and he came through.”
In the other opening day singles match, Ralston prevailed over Antonio Palafox, giving the Americans a comfortable 2–0 lead. But on the second day, the American doubles team lost to Palafox and Osuna, setting up a pair of potentially crucial singles matches on the third and final day. This time Arthur’s opponent was Palafox. In another strong showing, Ashe served and volleyed his way to victory, giving the American team the three points needed to advance to the Inter-Zone Final against Spain. “It was his booming serve,” commented Palafox after the match. “I tried to break his concentration, but I couldn’t do it.”
That night, the triumphant U.S. Davis Cup squad decided to celebrate at The Levee, one of Dallas’s most popular nightclubs, later described by Arthur as “a sort of beer hall where they play Dixieland Jazz and bellow out songs that don’t put Negroes in a favorable light.” Sensing that he might not be welcome at the traditionally all-white club, Arthur tried to beg off but his teammates insisted that he join them. Walking into the club, they could not help but notice the giant Confederate battle flag hanging on the wall behind where a rockabilly band was playing. As soon as the band spied Arthur, the music stopped and a hush fell over the room. Alarmed, he was about to turn on his heel when the club manager rushed to t
he microphone to bellow a congratulatory welcome to the “winning” American team and “Arthur Ashe, the hero of the Davis Cup triumph over Mexico.” Loud applause and cheers broke out, and Arthur and his teammates were soon sitting at a table accepting pats on the back and free drinks from a host of clubgoers. Perhaps at least part of the white South was redeemable after all, he thought, as he shared a night of triumph with men and women who, at least temporarily, seemed willing to put national pride ahead of racial prejudice.3
Arthur’s ability to rise to the occasion in Davis Cup competition—a skill he would demonstrate over and over again in the years to come—established him as the hero of the moment in Texas. “All at once,” he recalled, “I began to feel I could really get to the top.” Even so, he learned a hard lesson during the next stage of Davis Cup play. When the U.S. team left for Spain on August 4, two days after the Dallas triumph, he was on the plane, though MacCall had no intention of tempting fate by putting him on the notoriously slow clay courts of Barcelona. Frank Froehling, the only American Davis Cupper with any experience on the European clay circuit, took Arthur’s place in the singles rotation, and during the next two weeks, the star of the Dallas tie was reduced to the role of practice partner for Ralston, Froehling, and Graebner during the rigorous daily drills concocted by Coach Gonzales. “My recollections of Barcelona are dreary,” he later wrote. “Gonzales worked us long hours every day to whip us into top condition. We always started with 15 minutes skipping rope. . . . Then tennis practice and then sit-ups, maybe 100. . . . We always finished with a run of several miles, with Pancho setting a fast enough pace so I was on the verge of throwing up.” After all that, he sat on the sidelines.
MacCall’s decision to bench Ashe was later questioned after the U.S. team struggled in Barcelona, losing 4–1 to Manolo Santana and the Spaniards. Ashe himself was philosophical, swallowing his pride for the good of the team. When he later described the scene, his sharpest memory of the Barcelona debacle was not his personal disappointment but rather the Spaniards’ raucous victory celebration: “I’d never seen a crowd go as nutty as the people in Barcelona Stadium did after their team’s clincher in the doubles. The air was full of hats and cushions, the screaming hurt my eardrums, and people were jumping over seats to hug each other. They paraded Santana and [Jose Luis] Arilla on their shoulders for half an hour. I wedged myself into a corner of the grandstand where I wouldn’t get trampled.” This was not how he had envisioned his first visit to Spain. But he was confident there would be better days ahead for the American Davis Cuppers, and that he would play an important part in the team’s resurgence. As the unexpected hero of the victory over Mexico, he expected to be called upon once the Cup competition shifted to a faster surface. Indeed, his position on the team was enhanced by his noninvolvement in the Barcelona fiasco.4
Ashe and his teammates returned to the United States on August 18. But the homeland they returned to was not quite the same nation as the one they had left two weeks earlier. While they were away, the racial landscape had changed dramatically. On August 6 the long-awaited Voting Rights Act finally became the law of the land. With Dr. King and other civil rights leaders on hand for President Lyndon Johnson’s signing ceremony, the new law signaled an end to black disfranchisement and a new departure in American electoral politics. Or so it seemed.
Five days later, the new era took an unexpected turn when a major race riot broke out in the Watts section of South Central Los Angeles. Somehow a routine traffic stop led to an explosion of anger in a black community suffering from chronic police misconduct and economic distress. During seven days of burning and looting, nearly a thousand buildings were torched, more than four thousand people were arrested, and thirty-four lost their lives. Major inner-city riots had occurred before—as recently as the summer of 1964 in New York City, Rochester, and Philadelphia—but no one had ever seen anything quite like the Watts uprising, where many residents seemed determined to burn an entire section of the city to the ground.
Arthur knew next to nothing about Watts, even though it was located less than fifteen miles from the UCLA campus. He, like most Americans, was genuinely puzzled by the dark spectacle of black protesters burning down their own neighborhood in a desperate cry for help. He would later be called upon to field questions about the infamous riot. “Well, you were in Los Angles, couldn’t you see Watts coming?” people often asked. All Arthur could say in response was “I didn’t know Los Angeles, even after several years.”5
During the immediate aftermath of the riot, while the nation contemplated the meaning of what had just happened, Arthur was three thousand miles to the east preparing for the U.S. National Championships at Forest Hills. For the first time, he felt he had a legitimate shot at the coveted national singles title. It had only been a few short years since the breaching of the color line at Forest Hills, but now he had a realistic chance of becoming the first black man to win a national title on the fabled courts in Queens. Seeded fifth behind Emerson, Stolle, Ralston, and Santana, he would need a bit of luck and a favorable draw to come out on top. But he was definitely in the hunt.
For the most part, the draw went Arthur’s way, though his participation in the tournament almost ended before it began. Following the tradition for seeded players, tournament officials did not declare a default when he arrived ninety minutes late for his opening match due to a traffic jam. Instead, after seeing the stadium court still occupied with another match, they moved his match against Gene Scott to the grandstand court for the first set. By that time Scott was steaming, and once they actually took the court he “couldn’t seem to get his game under control, and lost 12 of the first 15 points.” Arthur was embarrassed and apologetic, but that didn’t stop him from rolling over his opponent in three quick sets.6
In the next three rounds, Arthur made sure he arrived in plenty of time, as he breezed through a series of relatively weak unseeded opponents. In the quarterfinals, however, he faced Roy Emerson, the number one seed. Generally considered to be the best amateur player in the world, the good-natured Aussie had already won nine Grand Slam singles championships, including the 1965 Australian and Wimbledon titles. He figured to make short work of the young collegiate star.7
Arthur, of course, had other ideas. He appeared surprisingly calm as, in his words, “he lazed around the locker room, playing bridge with Ralston and two sports writers.” “I felt more confident than I ever had before,” he insisted. “It was hard to explain, because I also knew that I’d never in my life played well enough to beat Emerson. . . . We’d played twice before and I hadn’t taken a set from him.” Nonetheless, Arthur was convinced he could put his strong serve to good advantage on the notoriously fast turf at Forest Hills, that the best way to play Emmo, as the great Aussie was called, was to reach back and unleash as much power as possible. Former Wimbledon champion Dick Savitt had said as much in a conversation the night before the match. “You’ve got to go for a winner when you return Emmo’s service,” Savitt had counseled. “Gamble and slam it back. When he weakens, his service is the first stroke to slip. But if you don’t attack his serve you’re setting yourself up. He’ll come to the net behind it and kill you.”
Arthur took Savitt’s advice to heart—slamming return after return, breaking Emerson’s serve in the first game of the match, and never letting up for the rest of the afternoon. Holding nothing back, he won the first two sets 13–11 and 6–4, forcing Emerson to mount a comeback to win the third, 12–10. After completing 66 games, both men were thoroughly exhausted by the 92-degree heat, but Arthur, seven years younger than Emerson, showed his superior stamina in the fourth, winning 6–2.8
With several members of his family cheering wildly from the stands, Arthur basked in the appreciation of a savvy New York crowd that could hardly believe what had just happened. The first person to congratulate him was his Aunt Marie, who, following their six-year-old tradition, planted a kiss on his cheek as he passed under the stadium court canopy. A few moments later,
as he approached the entrance to the locker room, he was stunned to see Dr. Ralph Bunche, whom he’d never met, extending a hand and congratulating him on his amazing victory. Bunche and just about everyone else in the tennis world knew he had upset Osuna in Dallas five weeks earlier. But beating the mighty Emerson in a Grand Slam quarterfinal was something else again. “For 24 hours I was a hero,” Arthur recalled, “the big hope to stop foreign domination of U.S. tennis. Remember, no American had won the Forest Hills title since Tony Trabert did it in 1955.”9
When Arthur Sr. heard his son might be closing in on the coveted National singles title, he boarded a train for New York, and two days later Arthur Jr. did his best to make his father proud. But in his semifinal match against Santana, he could not overcome the Spaniard’s accurate groundstrokes and soft spinning returns of serve. Although he got off to a great start, winning the first set 6–2, his Spanish opponent won the next three with relative ease. The next day Santana went on to win the title over Cliff Drysdale, but Arthur was not there to see the crowning of the tenth foreign U.S. national champion in a row. Following a family gathering at his Aunt Marie’s house in Montclair, New Jersey, where his loss to Santana earlier in the day did nothing to dampen the heady talk of his coming stardom, he had flown to Chicago to play in yet another tournament.
Though disappointed by his loss to Santana, Arthur left New York with a sense of accomplishment. Losing in the semifinals did not negate the significance of his breakthrough, since few collegians, and certainly no black man, had ever gone so far in any of the four Grand Slam events. At the age of twenty-two, he had proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he could play at the highest level. What Althea Gibson had accomplished on the women’s side of the game a decade earlier now seemed possible, perhaps even probable, for the rising star from UCLA.10
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