Halfway through this run of success, he drew the attention of Harry Gordon, one of Australia’s most prominent sportswriters. During the Christmas break, Gordon sat down with the young American star for an extended interview. The result, published in The New York Times Magazine, was the first in-depth profile of Arthur to appear in print. Characterized as a “Pioneer in Short White Pants,” he expounded on a wide range of personal and public matters, from his boyhood in Richmond to his recent collapse during the match against Newcombe. Among the many revelations were: his distaste for practice and physical conditioning; his recognition that tennis had provided him with “a kind of apprenticeship in good living”; his reluctance to commit to a life of almost constant travel; and finally his long-term plan to retire from tennis, find a wife, work at a job that involves selling “either products or ideas,” and settle down in Los Angeles.
Much of the article focused on race and Arthur’s experiences as “the first male Negro to make it big in a game that has always been as ‘white’ as its players’ togs.” “I guess I’m just a sociological phenomenon,” Arthur acknowledged. When asked about the rumor that certain white American players resented his intrusion, he insisted he “wasn’t even interested enough to find out their names.” He told Gordon about other indignities such as sometimes being mistaken for a locker room custodian and his exclusion from South African tournaments, where apartheid laws were in force. But he tempered his list of complaints with a certain resignation and an acceptance of reality. “I don’t want to spend my life fuming,” he declared. “What good would that do? It’s like beating your head against a brick wall. If you go looking for discrimination, you can find it in a lot of places.” Turning to a broader consideration of his racial heritage, he continued: “I could get mad about the fact that I don’t know my own background beyond one generation. All I know is that we got our name, like all the other Negro families, from the slave masters who owned us. They sold you like cattle, and when you died, they’d throw you in the ocean, or use you for fertilizer if they were hard put. I could get mad, but what’s the point?”
This was the first time he had expressed a measure of bitterness in a public statement on race, but he immediately reassured Gordon that he was “no militant Negro, no crusader.” Staking out an independent path, he explained: “I want to do something for my race, but I figure I can do it best by example, by showing Negro boys the way. That’s what Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays have done in baseball, Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell in basketball, Jim Brown in football. They’re the three big money sports in the United States, and the Negroes have broken through.” When Gordon pressed him, he acknowledged that the barriers of race and class in the tennis world were formidable. “Tennis in the States has always been a rich man’s sport, and Negroes, generally speaking have not been rich people,” he pointed out. “Look at it this way: It doesn’t cost a boy anything to learn to run or jump or play football, but before he even takes on tennis he has to have a racket that costs $40. How many Negro kids can afford that?”
There were other, more confounding problems to overcome for any person of color trying to navigate the racial crosscurrents of the white tennis world. The situation was not always what it appeared to be, he insisted. “Even when I’m among pleasant white people,” he observed, “they’re usually bending over backward to be too nice. They want to keep making sure that I’m feeling good, just because I’m Negro, and that bugs me.” Gordon interpreted this complaint as a simple request to be treated “as a human being first” and “a colored man second.”
At another point in the interview, however, the Australian journalist extracted a concession that being the only black player in tennis had its compensations. “He knows,” Gordon wrote, “that his color and his recent streak of world-beating form have made him a major drawing card. . . . This knowledge has caused a rather subtle but remarkable change in some of Ashe’s attitudes during recent months. He used to be upset at the constant references to his color which appeared in newspapers. . . . Now, though, he rather enjoys being branded.” As the UCLA business major put it, “Let’s face it, being known as the only Negro in the game probably puts me a hundred dollars a week ahead of the others in market value. You have to be realistic. Every time I go out and beat one of the big ones, like Emerson, I can almost hear the cash register ringing up a higher figure. The amateur tennis market is like business anywhere—it’s a question of supply and demand. People will usually pay a little more for a product that’s different—and that’s what I am.”
As Arthur well knew from the courtside epithets that occasionally punctuated his matches, this racial dynamic could be a double-edged sword. But on balance he did not consider race to be an economic burden; on the contrary, he felt it had encouraged additional tournament invitations and funding and special consideration in the area of commercial endorsements, where he had been asked to represent Coca-Cola, Wilson Sporting Goods, and Fred Perry sportswear.26
Arthur was equally candid and upbeat about his value as an international symbol of improved race relations, citing his current rooming arrangement with Richey as a case in point. “People in other countries read a lot about race troubles in the U.S.,” he reminded Gordon. “But when they see two guys from the South like Cliff Richey and me, one white and one colored, both sharing a room and being close friends, it must do a little good.” This public display of diplomacy was new to Arthur in 1965, but in the years to come both the State Department and the U.S. Army would take full advantage of his success story, sending him on a series of goodwill missions to Africa and Asia. As he observed in 1967, “The State Department kept pointing to me as one of its answers to Red propaganda that Negroes are treated like dirt in the United States.” Following in the footsteps of Louis Armstrong, Joe Louis, Althea Gibson, and other black celebrities, he was, for a time, a willing participant in this style of Cold War politics.
Only later, after his political consciousness moved leftward in the 1970s, would he conclude that he had been used for propagandistic purposes, and that the official trumpeting of his personal success had served to misrepresent and exaggerate the pace of change in American race relations. Making his way across Australia as a wide-eyed twenty-two-year-old, he still thought of himself as a tennis player, plain and simple, and as such he welcomed all of the public attention without much worry about how his newfound celebrity might be manipulated by political or ideological forces.27
As the Australian tour drew to a close, Ashe began to feel his career had entered a new stage. At the Australian National Championships, which began on January 22, he was the top-seeded foreigner and a legitimate challenger to the highest-seeded Australians—Emerson, Stolle, and Newcombe. Since he had beaten all three in recent weeks, and with the Australian press making a lot out of the fact that he was the first player to win four major Australian tournaments since Rod Laver in 1962, he believed he had a shot at the national singles title. Granted, this would be his eleventh Grand Slam tournament after seven tries at the U.S. National title and three appearances at Wimbledon, and the only time he had made it past the fourth round was at Forest Hills the previous September. But he seemed primed and ready for a dramatic breakthrough.
No American had won the Australian since Richard Savitt in 1951, and the last time an American had made it past the quarterfinals was 1959 when Barry MacKay lost to Alex Olmedo in a memorable five-set semifinal match. So Arthur already felt he had accomplished a lot after breezing through the early rounds, manhandling Tony Roche in the quarterfinals, and outlasting Stolle in a semifinal match that ended with a grueling 10–8 victory in the fourth set. Now all that stood between him and his first Grand Slam championship was Emerson, the world’s number one player, the winner of the Australian championship four of the last five years. He had already proven he could beat Emerson in other venues, and a few observers even judged him to be the favorite since Emerson was having something of a down year. But the betting odds suggested he was still a deci
ded underdog.28
Emerson, as it turned out, had to play the singles final on the same day as the delayed completion of the doubles competition. The previous night he and Stolle had fought Roche and Newcombe evenly through four sets and 14 games of a fifth set before darkness brought the match to a temporary halt. The next morning Emerson and Stolle eventually took control of the final set, winning 12–10. But this belated victory left the defending champion with only a few hours to rest before taking the court against Ashe. Once they began to play, however, it was clear that he had more than enough energy—and skill—to keep his young American challenger at bay. After the Australian won the first set 6–4, Arthur came back to win the second 8–6. But after that it was all Emerson, 6–2 in the third, and 6–3 in the fourth. The only surprise turned out to be the match’s bizarre ending. Serving at 30–40 in the ninth game of the fourth set and facing match point, Arthur was assessed a foot fault that brought the match to a close.
As the stunned crowd reacted with a mixture of cheers and boos, Emerson glared at Tom Addison, the linesman who had made the call, before tossing “his racquet under the umpire’s stand in disgust,” signaling he did not want to win “on a foul.” Arthur didn’t know quite what to do. After dropping his racket to the ground, he was, in his words, “on the verge of popping off, but got hold of myself in time.” “I just walked up to shake hands with Emmo,” he recounted years later, “who undoubtedly was the better player that day.” Talking to reporters after the match, he expressed disappointment with Addison’s call but stopped short of crying foul. “I just don’t know what to say,” he admitted. “I can protest but it won’t do any good.”29
The next day an exhausted and somewhat befuddled Ashe boarded a flight to Los Angeles. While most of the other American players were en route to Hong Kong for a few more days of touring, he “felt glad” to be “going home.” The Australian trip had been a great adventure, but he had grown homesick during the closing weeks of the visit. As he later put it, “I began to run out of things to do” and even became “a little fed up with party food.” “Gradually,” he explained, “the tour stopped being fun.” On the positive side, he had drawn considerable praise from the press and the Australian tennis establishment. Cliff Sproule, a former Davis Cup captain and one of Australia’s most revered tennis officials, claimed Ashe had “done more for the Negro race than anyone in Australia.” Though somewhat uncomfortable with the responsibility of representing an entire race, Arthur appreciated Sproule’s comment enough to include it in his 1967 memoir. Yet in a later account of his first trip to Australia, written in 1981, he chose to avoid any association with such grandiose claims. Instead, he stressed the trip’s tangible impact on his career. “Australia,” he explained, “turned out to be as important to my tennis career as meeting Dr. Johnson and living in St. Louis during my senior year in high school. I had my first opportunity to play on grass for three straight months and won my spurs as an international player.”30
Arthur returned from Australia with renewed confidence and an elevated game. But his experiences also gave him a more realistic view of what life was like for amateurs trying to make a living “from the weekly grind of ordinary tournaments.” Life for the Aussie tennis players, whom he had long admired from afar, turned out to be far less glamorous than he had supposed. “Often they quit high school to take salaried jobs as ‘representatives’ of sporting goods companies,” he wrote. “Their sponsors practically own them, and keep them slaving away in tank towns for a good part of the year. And Australian tourneys don’t pay.”31
When he arrived at LAX after the long flight from Sydney, Pasarell and Baker were there to greet him, and that night the three roommates attended a UCLA basketball game at the new Pauley Pavilion. Arthur cheered on the #10 ranked Bruins as they defeated the University of Arizona, but the evening took an unexpected twist when he had difficulty reading the numbers on the Pavilion’s massive state-of-the-art electronic scoreboard.
The next day he called MacCall and asked him for the name of a good eye doctor, and within a week he was sporting a pair of prescription eyeglasses. Being diagnosed with myopia was a bit of a shock, but Arthur later claimed he “jumped for joy” after leaving the doctor’s office. “I never realized that I had been living in a blur,” he explained, “and I was actually high for a couple of days from the excitement of seeing everything so clearly. The glasses didn’t have much effect on my tennis, but I had to adjust to the sharper and smaller images. Once I did, my confidence improved considerably.” While it would be some time before he felt comfortable wearing glasses throughout the day, he and everyone else eventually became accustomed to the horn-rim spectacles that gave him a scholarly look. When he later adopted the practice of wearing aviator-style sunglasses, his appearance took on a more stylish mode. But in either mode, glasses were now part of his image.32
During his last semester at UCLA, Arthur was content to stay on the sidelines as his buddy Pasarell led the Bruins to an expected repeat victory at the national championships in June. Though no longer eligible for intercollegiate play, he still spent much of his time on campus at the Tennis Terrace, where he was either practicing with the varsity or helping to coach the freshman team, which included his first protégé, Luis Glass, the son of ATA stalwart Virginia Glass. With Arthur’s encouragement, the hard-serving seventeen-year-old from Jackson Heights, New York, enrolled at UCLA in the fall of 1965 after he and his brother Sydney had spent several summers with Dr. J in Lynchburg. Following a stellar prep school career at Deerfield Academy, Glass won the 1965 ATA singles championship, which was enough to convince Coach Morgan to offer him a tennis scholarship. Pleased that he was no longer the only black tennis player on campus, Arthur tried to mentor Glass on and off the court. Tennis-wise, the young prospect flourished, leading the freshmen team with an unblemished 9–0 singles record. But off the court he was unable to adjust to the freedom of college life. Burdened with academic and social problems, he lost his scholarship and withdrew from UCLA at the end of his freshman year.
Drafted into the Army later in the year, Glass survived a tour in Vietnam working as a medic, and following his discharge in 1967 he managed, with Arthur’s help, to secure a scholarship to Hampton University. Once again he fared well on the court, twice earning selection as a small college, Division III All-American in singles. But after two years at the Virginia school, behavior problems prompted university officials to cancel his scholarship. To Arthur’s disappointment, his talented but troubled protégé never fulfilled his potential as a player, though he eventually became a successful teaching pro. The first of several promising black players to be touted as “the next Arthur Ashe,” Glass was also the first, though certainly not the last, to succumb to the special pressures of following in Arthur’s pioneering footsteps.
Arthur did what he could to keep Glass in school during the spring of 1966. But this was also a time for a certain amount of self-indulgence. Realizing that after completing his ROTC training in the summer he would be living the disciplined life of an Army officer, he tried to take advantage of every fun-filled opportunity that came his way. The combination of a busy class schedule and an ambitious tennis regimen took up much of his time during the week, but that left most nights and weekends open for an array of activities: cruising around Westwood in his Mustang; satisfying his passion for going to movies; playing recreational tennis with celebrities at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club; or just hanging out at his apartment with friends and roommates, which now included Andrew Ma, a graduate student from Hong Kong. As always, he also spent a lot of time reading and listening to music. Unfettered by the tight scheduling and competitive pressures that had dominated his life since leaving Richmond in 1960, he did pretty much what he wanted during his final months in Los Angeles. For the time being, he was like a bird on the wing flying high above the constraints of a grounded life.33
NINE
ADVANTAGE ASHE
BY THE SPRING OF 1966, Arthur Ashe h
ad begun to think of himself as an adult—as an autonomous individual with the freedom to make his own decisions. One sign of this new consciousness was his willingness to share the details of his unique life story with others, especially with his growing coterie of fans. Less guarded than in the past, he began to acknowledge his status as a public figure, and to the amazement of his friends, he even began to contemplate the idea of writing a memoir, a remarkable undertaking for a twenty-two-year-old college senior. The idea originated with Cliff Gewecke, a California sportswriter who had played baseball at USC in the 1950s. When Arthur proved receptive, Gewecke set up a series of interviews to serve as the basis for a narrative text. He also obtained a book contract with Coward-McCann, a small New York publisher best known for publishing Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
Gewecke’s collaboration with Ashe eventually produced Advantage Ashe, a 192-page volume published in September 1967. Like most “as told to” books, Advantage Ashe was a hybrid creation filtered through the lens of a professional writer’s literary and philosophical sensibilities. The text’s unpretentious tone suggests that Gewecke had a light editorial touch, allowing his young protagonist to tell his story with a minimum of interference. Arthur’s distinctive voice comes through as he reflects on his background and evolving identity—and on his experiences as a black man trying to succeed in a white man’s sport. Refreshingly direct, the narrative of his rise to prominence is punctuated with revealing passages of self-analysis, social commentary, and tennis lore. Throughout the book, he comes off as a charming if somewhat naive young man, an introspective and intellectually curious person trying to understand himself and his place in the world.1
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