At the gathering in Montclair, Arthur warned his giddy relatives not to read too much into his recent victories over Osuna and Emerson. But he, too, believed in his future—that he was finally on his way to bigger and better things. “I was like a hunting dog that sniffs something good,” he later explained. “Beating Emerson showed me that I might be able to lick anybody in the wide world.” As he contemplated a post-collegiate career, he became bolder and more adventurous, determined to “hit the trail harder,” as he put it.11
In mid-September, he took the risk of accepting an unexpected invitation to the Colonial Invitational Tournament in Fort Worth, Texas. This would be his “first country club tournament in the South” and a very different experience from his Davis Cup journey to Dallas six weeks earlier. “Instead of traveling with the Davis Cup team, as I had on my first trip into Texas,” he explained, “I went alone. The first thing I heard when I got off the plane was the genuine deep Suth’n drawl all around me. I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach. I hadn’t heard many voices like that since I had left home years before. Unpleasant memories of growing up in Virginia came back. I was in the enemy camp, I felt.”
Arthur’s introduction to the posh Colonial Country Club a few minutes later did little to ease his anxieties: “When I walked into the Colonial Club, the Negro employees’ eyes widened. They’d never seen a Negro guest there. Some of them thought I was a waiter who had dressed up and tried to sneak in the front door.” Fortunately, the white Texans in the club proved to be “pleasant enough,” though one man mistook him for a locker room attendant and yelled “Hey, boy, where’s the bar?” They even made a point of addressing him as “Mr. Ashe,” a courtesy title that surprised and pleased him. As the tournament progressed, he began to relax, bonding with several of the club’s black employees, who took pride in his status as a black pioneer in a white world. “Every day,” he reported, “the shoeshine man at the golf shop asked, ‘How did we do, brother?’ ”
As Arthur advanced into the quarterfinals and beyond, several of the black waiters and caddies couldn’t conceal their delight, telling him “you really took care of business.” And later, after he won both the singles and doubles titles, upsetting Fred Stolle in the singles final and teaming with Ham Richardson to beat Stolle and Emerson in doubles, the waiters at the closing banquet made sure he received special service. “Frank Froehling was standing at the crowded bar,” Arthur remembered, “and having no luck whatever in getting a drink. I stepped up and presto, I had my drink. At dinner, the largest piece of meat turned up on my plate. So the others began begging me to use my pull to get them better service.”12
Rowland Scherman, a twenty-eight-year-old Life photographer assigned to cover Arthur’s unprecedented Southern foray, captured much of the drama on film. During the tournament, he and Arthur became friends, and at the end of the week they decided to drive back to Los Angeles together. Traveling in Arthur’s Mustang, they crossed 1,400 miles of plains, deserts, and mountains as the young tennis champion experienced the longest road trip of his life. After arriving in Los Angeles, Scherman spent several days taking additional photographs, including a memorable snapshot of Arthur’s first encounter with UCLA’s highly touted freshman basketball star Lew Alcindor.13
Although he was glad to be back in California, Arthur did not stay for very long. As he had recently revealed to his parents, alterations in the Davis Cup training schedule had forced a postponement of his graduation until June of 1966. Following the devastating loss in Barcelona, MacCall felt he had to do something dramatic to put the U.S. squad on the right track. With the backing of the American Davis Cup Committee, he decided to abandon the traditional pattern of bringing the squad together for relatively brief periods before and during the ties. The new regimen would involve a lengthy commitment spanning several months of preparation and team building, with the players receiving daily expense money.
The goal, as Arthur later explained, was “to upgrade the prestige of our Davis Cup team and weld it together.” MacCall “arranged to pay each member $20 per day, all year round, and $28 for days we were in tournaments,” he recalled. “This would add up to about $9,000 per year. We would no longer be allowed to accept any money from clubs or promoters. So we were financially under his thumb. He controlled our income and our travels. Any money we were given for exhibitions had to be handed over to him. We couldn’t enter a tournament unless George said go.” In effect, the U.S. Davis Cup team became “an elite corps of tennis players, offered to tournament promoters as a package.” While he chafed at the loss of independence, Arthur accepted the necessity of commercializing the Davis Cup. “Big Tennis is basically show biz,” he conceded, “and the top dollar in that industry comes with package deals and block bookings.” He and his teammates stood to gain from a system in which “George has the bargaining strength of Sol Hurok in dictating terms.”14
The first test of the new system came in late 1965 and early 1966. For three and a half months, from mid-October until the end of January, the American Davis Cuppers lived, practiced, and traveled together as they honed their skills in international tournament play, primarily in Australia. Hoping to enliven its traditional end-of-the-year tour, the Australian Tennis Federation had already invited several Americans to play as individuals, and MacCall seized the opportunity to turn the tour into a semiofficial practice season.
This brash scheme took them to a part of the world unknown to most Americans. Ashe had traveled to Europe three times since 1963, but he had never visited any place as exotic as Australia, New Zealand, or Fiji. The awesome Aussies, as he sometimes called them, had long been his primary tennis heroes and role models. No country in the world could match Australia’s exuberant love for tennis, and no one played the game quite as well as they did. With Laver and Rosewall dominating the professional game and a seemingly endless string of talented amateurs winning nearly every major tournament in sight, the Aussies had never been more dominant. In 1965’s four Grand Slam tournaments, six of the eight finalists and three of the four winners were Australian. “Never before had one nation dominated a tennis year so thoroughly,” Bud Collins would later write. “This was the tennis version of the Holy Roman Empire, and Emerson, Stolle, Smith, Lesley Turner, John Newcombe, Tony Roche et al. were holy terrors.”15
Embracing the opportunity to play against several of the world’s best players week after week, Ashe couldn’t wait to see how MacCall’s experiment in extended play affected his game—even though the plan had certain drawbacks. He would miss seeing his family—and his many friends at UCLA, where exciting changes were in the offing. He would be far away when the university’s new athletic arena, Pauley Pavilion, hosted its first basketball game in late November—an exhibition contest between the varsity and a freshman team that included the towering Lew Alcindor, the decade’s most celebrated freshman athlete. And he would not be there in early January when the UCLA played in the Rose Bowl. Though not insignificant, these sacrifices represented a relatively small price to pay for the obvious benefits of a tennis holiday in the beautiful South Pacific.
Learning that their son’s graduation would be delayed was a major disappointment to his father and stepmother, but he promised to return to school in the spring semester of 1966, remaining there until he earned his degree. The Ashe family would just have to wait a little longer to congratulate its first college graduate. Besides, he explained, postponing his graduation would also postpone his induction into the Army, giving him several additional months of civilian life devoted to honing his skills on the tennis circuit. With the recent escalation of the war in Vietnam, no one in his family was in any hurry for him to put on a uniform. The Ashes were already worried enough about Johnnie, who in July 1965 had left high school at the age of seventeen to join the Marines.16
Despite their disappointment, Arthur Sr. and Lorene trusted their oldest son’s judgment. Highly motivated and disciplined, he had an aura of practicality and common sense that few twenty
-one-year-olds could claim. Time and again, he had proven he was not one to choose immediate gratification over long-term goals. On the court and off, his commitment to self-improvement helped to define his character, and he never seemed to waver. He wanted to be the best tennis player in the nation—perhaps even the best in the world; and he wanted to do it without any loss of integrity or sportsmanship.
The ethical dimension of achievement was a matter of no small importance in the Ashe household, and Arthur Sr., as his sons well knew, never let down his guard on such matters. True achievement was tied to an old-fashioned sense of honor, as he made crystal clear when the journalist Frank Deford visited the Sledd Street house in 1966. “Look at these trophies,” he told Deford, pointing to the accumulated symbols of his famous son’s success. “I’d just as soon take them, the ones in the attic and that placard from the city, and throw them all in the junk heap if he ever did anything to disgrace me.” For Arthur Jr. there was never any mystery about what his father valued most.17
Arthur Sr. actually had little to worry about when it came to misbehavior by his eldest son or any other member of his immediate family. His relationships with his second wife remained strong and loving, and their blended family continued to provide a nurturing enclave within the broader Ashe-Cunningham clan. Before going into the Marines, Johnnie had developed into a good student and a multi-sport athlete at the recently integrated John Marshall High School, where he earned letters in tennis, baseball, basketball, and football. When he left school after his junior year, the reason had little to do with race. His rebellion, he later explained, had more to do with living in the shadow of his famous brother. “While Arthur and I remained close,” he recalled, “I got tired of being asked: ‘Why can’t you be like your older brother?’ ” “Leaving Richmond,” he added, “was the only way I could establish my own identity.”
The Ashe boys had no quarrel with their father’s values, though they sometimes chafed at the autocratic manner in which he enforced family rules. Arthur’s years at UCLA had prompted a gradual loosening of parental control, but by no means an end to it. The only time he felt reasonably free to make his own decisions was when he was traveling, especially when he went abroad and was generally inaccessible by phone. He was eager to see how he would fare during his extended stay in New Zealand, Fiji, and Australia.
When Arthur left for the South Pacific in late October 1965, he envisioned a three-month sojourn that would provide him with a measure of personal freedom, sharpen his game, and perhaps expand his understanding of the world. But he wasn’t fully prepared for his sudden transformation into an international star. To his surprise, the New Zealanders and Australians embraced him as if he were one of their own. More than just another visiting American, he seemed to strike a chord of acceptance and approval in societies that had seldom been kind or welcoming to dark-skinned visitors.
The first stop was New Zealand, where the Americans played a week-long series of exhibition matches. Arthur was entranced by the spectacular landscape, which he later described as “the greenest place I’d ever seen,” and by the exotic subculture of the Maoris, “the first South Sea Islanders I had ever seen.” Struck by their distinctive physical appearance, he later confessed: “I looked at them and wondered, ‘Where the hell did they come from?’ ”18
Arthur had a similar reaction to Fiji Islanders during a one-day stopover on the way to Australia. After an impromptu set of tennis at the capital city’s Nandi Tennis Club, where he encountered a multiethnic mix of Japanese, Indian, Australian, and “native Fijians with their bushy black hair,” there was just enough time for a whirlwind visit to the countryside, where he caught his first glimpse of a sugarcane field before experiencing a harrowing horseback ride. Unaccustomed to a hornless English saddle, he hung on for dear life after the horse bolted down a rough-hewn path bordering the rows of sugarcane. “I landed on my side, bruised but unbroken,” he recalled. “I had been scared, but there was no permanent injury. It would be a while before I went near another horse.” It would also be a while before he leveled with MacCall about his close call. He suffered in silence during the flight to Brisbane.19
Arthur’s brief encounter with the Maoris and Fijians stirred his curiosity, and in the years to come he would develop a keen interest in the native cultures of the South Pacific, including the downtrodden Australian minority known as Aborigines, a group that had just begun to express its discontent through social and political protest. Though numbering more than a million and representing approximately 7 percent of Australia’s population, the Aborigines had limited visibility in the national scene.
With his travels limited to urban tennis venues and a few rural tourist spots, he came away believing that the nation’s inhabitants were “almost 100% white people.” “I was treated fine on my tours of Australia,” he later acknowledged. “But living there would be out of the question. They’re not too fond of Negroes or Asians. I’d heard this, and I could see that there weren’t any dark-skinned people around.” The Australian situation reminded him of London’s “cold” attitude toward racial minorities. “Because I’m a tennis player, I’m welcome there,” he concluded, “but the average Negro isn’t. I’ve read about it. The British try to hide the prejudice, but it’s there.”20
Part of the Australians’ attraction to him, Arthur soon discovered, stemmed from their fascination with an exotic object of curiosity: a black tennis player competing in an otherwise all-white sport. But beyond that there was a deep and unmistakable appreciation for his ability to combine talent and sportsmanship. The Aussies—who considered themselves to be among the most passionate and knowledgeable sports fans in the world—judged Arthur’s character and performance to be the equivalent of sports nobility.
Within a week of his arrival in Australia, he had become the darling of the local and national press. The Americans’ first stop on the continent was Brisbane, the site of the Queensland Championships, where Arthur unexpectedly dominated the draw. Prior to the tournament, most observers had expected Emerson and Stolle to show Arthur and the Americans what real tennis was like. As Arthur later explained, “Maybe they figured that Emerson had been off form when I beat him at Forest Hills, and that I’d get put in my proper place as soon as I played the big boys again.” But the young American played some of the best tennis of his life, crushing Stolle, the Wimbledon runner-up, in straight sets in the semifinals. Serving 21 aces, he became “Aces Ashe” in one newspaper account, and the nickname stuck throughout his time in Australia. The final against Emerson was even more revealing, with Arthur outlasting the great Aussie champion, winning 6–1 in a fifth set where he lost only nine points. “That seemed to convince the Australian tennis experts,” he recalled. “Suddenly I was a celebrity. I’d beaten the world’s top-ranked player twice in a row.”21
Arthur was almost giddy in victory, and once the Americans moved on to Sydney for the New South Wales championships he decided to celebrate. “Maybe it went to my head a little,” he later confessed, but for once he abandoned his normal tournament discipline, spending “more time enjoying life” and “less time resting to get strong for the next match.” During his first two weeks in Sydney, he took in several movies—always one of his favorite pastimes—and ate “heartily at the big barbecues and dinners given by Australian tennis officials and the U.S. consulate brass.” Somehow he also found time to “hit a few music spots,” to buy “kangaroo-skin rugs” and other Christmas presents for his family, to spend a day at the famous Sydney Zoo, to fish on the Hawkesbury River, and to pass “a lot of time with the rest of the squad at the big flat MacCall rented for his wife and two daughters, where there was a tremendous view of Rushcutters Bay.”22
Arthur was having the time of his life, and during the early rounds he found he could still win after long days and nights of self-indulgent behavior. Later in the tournament, however, he learned a hard lesson about the importance of concentration. As he later described the situation, “Early in the t
ournament Ken Fletcher introduced me to two gorgeous airline stewardesses from Trinidad. Their names were Bella and Michelle. I sat at a table with them for an hour. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I found out Bella was going with Neil Hawke, a star Australian test cricketer, so I decided I’d better just admire from afar. But I began dating Michelle.” “This was living!” in his estimation. But it was no way to win a major tennis tournament. When he faced John Newcombe in the championship match he lapsed into what Australians might have termed a dreamy but disastrous walkabout, thinking about girls and everything but tennis. “My mind drifted to Michelle and Bella,” he confessed, “and the next thing I knew the tournament was over.”23
Arthur had lost, and he had no one but himself to blame. In the post-match press conference, after acknowledging his lack of concentration, he made the mistake of attributing Newcombe’s victory to a fierce determination to secure a spot on the Australian Davis Cup squad. Newcombe himself ignored this rather ungracious assessment, but it prompted several Australian reporters to criticize Arthur’s lackadaisical attitude. This was the only time he fell off his pedestal during the trip, but as he later acknowledged “the sting was good medicine. It sharpened my game and clamped my flapping jaw.”24
Over the next month, Arthur continued to have fun, attending festive dinners and enjoying the dating scene, especially a night of revelry at the legendary Herman’s Haystack nightclub on New Year’s Eve when he “danced up a storm with an Australian airline stewardess.” But along the way he managed to play some of the best tennis of his career. Relying on a strong, almost overpowering serve, he found a new consistency that put him ahead of the field week after week. Despite a bruised toe that inhibited his mobility, he won the South Australian tournament at Adelaide in mid-December, the Western Australian at Perth in early January, and the Tasmanian singles championship in Hobart a week later.25
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