Arthur’s candor begins in the opening pages of the first chapter, “Richmond Revisited,” a bittersweet and telling account of a recent visit to his hometown. He was there to participate in the first annual Fidelity Bankers Life Invitational Tournament, an indoor tournament limited to eight players. The leaders of the Richmond Tennis Patrons Association (RTPA), an organization founded in 1954 to provide funds for Sam Woods’s program at Byrd Park, had long dreamed of bringing a top-level tournament to the city, so when they were approached in 1965 by the indoor tennis promoter Bill Riordan—who was looking for a venue to complete his indoor circuit—they jumped at the chance.
During its first decade, the RTPA limited its activities to the white community, but the organization’s president in 1965–66 was Lou Einwick, a racially liberal investment banker who had moved to the city in 1958. Einwick, who would oversee the Richmond tournament for nineteen years, was determined to overcome the RTPA’s segregationist past by reaching out to Ron Charity and Arthur Ashe, who he hoped would anchor the new tournament. Even though he had never been allowed to play in a racially integrated tournament in Richmond, Arthur not only accepted Einwick’s invitation but also encouraged several of his friends to join him. At the same time, Arthur Sr. agreed to transport an indoor canvas surface from Salisbury, Maryland, and to install it in Richmond Arena (renamed the Arthur Ashe Tennis Center in 1982). Several days before the Richmond tournament began, a heavy snowfall complicated the transport from Salisbury, but somehow Arthur Sr. found a way to retrieve the canvas on time. When the all-black crew installed the surface, it established a tradition that would last until 1984, the last year the tournament was held. Along the way Einwick became a close friend to the Ashes, and over time his openness to change and zeal for bringing big-time tennis to Richmond had a major impact on both the local tennis scene and Arthur’s relationship with his hometown.
Anticipating Arthur’s return to Richmond to play in the new tournament, several white leaders active in the RTPA teamed with Charity to organize a civic celebration called “Arthur Ashe Day.” Held on February 2, on the eve of the tournament, the celebration involved a public greeting from the mayor delivered on the steps of City Hall, a morning appearance before the General Assembly, a formal resolution from the City Council naming the day in his honor, and a “grand banquet at the John Marshall Hotel.” “This city is known around the world for many products,” Mayor Morrill Crowe proclaimed, “—cigarettes . . . statesmen . . . and now Arthur Ashe, who has carried his country’s banner around the world with dignity, honor, and skill.” Just off the plane from Los Angeles, and barely two days removed from his return flight from Australia, an exhausted Ashe marveled at the hometown scene.
Underscoring the irony of the event, the interracial banquet was held at the same hotel where segregationist leaders had planned Virginia’s Massive Resistance campaign twelve years earlier. Though legally desegregated by federal law in 1964, the Marshall had welcomed few black guests during the past two years, so Arthur was surprised and pleased when the Ashe Day committee reserved a room for him in the hotel. On this night more than two hundred guests, black and white, paid $10 each to honor Arthur and raise funds for the ATA’s Junior Development Program. As a young man growing up under Jim Crow, he would not have thought of entering the stately Marshall Hotel through the front door, much less dining in the hotel’s grand ballroom. But a lot had happened during the six years since he had left—namely, success and celebrity for him, and a growing realization in the city that the old ways of intransigent white supremacy were on the way out. Less than two years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, whites and blacks could at least gather together in the same room to honor a favorite son. “There I was, in Richmond, Virginia,” he wrote, “getting the big hello and the high-elbow handshake from folks who’d paid me no heed when I lived there.”
Although Arthur was not sure about his new status as a hometown hero, he made a concerted effort to be gracious. “This is the biggest day of my life,” he told the gathering, and he later insisted that he “meant it.” Determined to steer clear of controversy, he kept his remarks brief and avoided any mention of race. But a year later, his memoir revealed what he had been thinking as he addressed the crowd in the hotel ballroom. “Times were changing,” he wrote. “The one-time capital of the Confederacy was honoring a descendant of slaves. Racially-mixed tennis matches were now possible in the city that had barred me from going to school with white children, or from playing on tennis courts with whites. That’s why I added in my speech, ‘Ten years ago this could not have happened.’ ”
After the banquet, Arthur joined his father, stepmother, other family members, and a horde of friends at the Sledd Street house at Brook Field Park. “That night I had quite a homecoming—cars and people were lined up solid around the house to greet me,” he recalled. The joyous house party lasted into the morning hours, but since the honored guest was operating on three hours sleep, a less than ideal situation for someone facing an opening round match the next day, Arthur Ashe Sr. advised his son to retire early to get some rest at his hotel. Leaving the house, Arthur Jr. walked into the park, crossing “a long empty area that was full of memories.” Strolling past the park’s four tennis courts, located a mere “thirty steps from the side door of my house,” he thought to himself: “Where would I be today if there hadn’t been any tennis courts near me?”
Walking on alone through the moonlit grounds, he became nostalgic as he recalled his childhood experiences: “Crossing the three-block area . . . I thought of the happy days when it was my whole universe. I saw the basketball courts where I played on winter afternoons and the four ball fields where I played on summer mornings, and the Olympic-size pool where I swam for free on summer afternoons.” His reverie ended, however, when he noticed the pool was closed—and not just for the winter. He had been told that the parks department had closed all of the city’s pools in an effort to sidestep a court desegregation order, and actually seeing the empty pool saddened him beyond words. Despite the promising gestures he had witnessed earlier in the day, white Richmond clearly had a long way to go to overcome its segregationist legacy.
The next day Arthur could not get the image of the empty pool out of his mind. Amidst all the polite smiles, the bare concrete seemed to symbolize the emptiness of the Arthur Ashe Day celebration. Despite the kind words, there had been no apology and no real coming to terms with the indignities of the city’s past and present. This was especially obvious to Arthur, but he was not the only one who felt something was missing. A hard-hitting Richmond News Leader editorial published that afternoon said as much. Referring to the City Council’s official Arthur Ashe Day resolution, the editorial declared: “The resolution probably would have meant more if it had contained at least an implied regret that while he was growing up the inherited mores of the rest of us prohibited him from playing at Byrd Park.”
This public rebuke was shocking, coming from an ultraconservative newspaper known for its strong segregationist stance. Arthur was both pleased and puzzled. But the buzz surrounding the controversial editorial did not help his concentration on the court. “Maybe those past years sort of clouded the air that Saturday in Richmond,” he recalled. “Absent-mindedness, which sometimes comes over me on the tennis court, muddled me more than usual that day. While Frank Froehling was beating me, my mind kept wandering to my kid days.” Expecting an easy victory by the hometown favorite and number one seed, the Richmonders in the stands were no less disappointed than Arthur when Froehling closed out the match. Teaming with Cliff Richey, he fared somewhat better in the doubles, reaching the final before losing to Chuck McKinley and Gene Scott. The previous day the USLTA had released its amateur rankings, which placed Arthur second in singles behind Dennis Ralston and fourth in doubles. Losing in front of his hometown friends took some of the joy out of the realization that he was approaching the top of the nation’s amateur ranks. While he was confident he would have other chances
to win in Richmond, he hated to squander the opportunity to put an exclamation point on his long-awaited hometown debut.2
Ashe’s return to Richmond, with all of its racial overtones and ambiguities, coincided with a critical chapter in the ongoing story of race and sports in America, a saga he would later dub “a hard road to glory.” During the early months of 1966, the racial contours of American sports shifted as the profile of black athletes became bolder and more visible. While three of the nation’s major professional sports—hockey, tennis, and golf—would remain lily-white, or nearly so, for decades to come, several others—notably basketball, football, baseball, and boxing—had reached a turning point. After years of painfully slow progress, long-awaited changes were finally coming to fruition on several fronts.3
The first clear sign of a new era came at the college level in mid-March, when Texas Western University’s all-black starting five shocked the nation by defeating the perennial college basketball powerhouse Kentucky in the final game of the NCAA tournament. The fact that the University of Kentucky team represented the all-white Southeastern Conference and was coached by the legendary Adolph Rupp, an avowed segregationist, underscored the significance of Texas Western’s upset victory.4
Two weeks later, Major League Baseball finally made it to the Deep South when the Atlanta Braves, recently relocated from Milwaukee, played the team’s first game in Atlanta Stadium in front of a racially integrated crowd. Prior to the Braves’ move, the southernmost clubs had played in the border state and rim South cities of St. Louis and Houston. One of the most racially diverse teams in baseball, the 1966 Braves were led by four dark-skinned stars, the incomparable Alabama-born slugger Hank Aaron, Atlanta native Mack Jones, and the Dominicans Rico Carty and Felipe Alou.5
Professional basketball was also experiencing a significant shift in racial consciousness. In April the Boston Celtics overcame the Los Angeles Lakers to win their eighth straight NBA title. Only this time they did it with four black starters: Bill Russell, K. C. Jones, Sam Jones, and Tom “Satch” Sanders. Individual black stars such as Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, and Oscar Robertson had been dominating the NBA for nearly a decade. But no championship team had ever featured more than three black starters. White supremacists must have wondered what was happening to a league that had been more than 80 percent white only a few years earlier, and later in the year their worst fears were confirmed when Russell was named the player-coach of the Celtics. Nearly twenty years after Jackie Robinson had broken the color line in Major League Baseball and sixteen years after Earl Lloyd had done the same for the NBA, a major professional sports team had hired an African American head coach.6
The racial situation in professional football was somewhat less promising, as whites continued to monopolize coaching positions and the high-profile, high-paying “skill position” of quarterback. But the winds of change were also gaining strength on the gridiron. Here the biggest news story of 1966 was the impending retirement of Jim Brown, the Cleveland Browns’ black fullback who had won his third NFL MVP award and eighth rushing title in 1965. Widely acknowledged as the greatest running back of all time, Brown had announced that 1966 would be his last season. He had already begun an acting career, appearing in his first film in 1964, and during the summer of 1966 he was in London for the filming of a major World War II action film, The Dirty Dozen. The filming schedule called for completion in late June, giving Brown plenty of time to attend the opening of the Browns’ training camp in mid-July, but delays kept him in London for several additional weeks. Despite Brown’s stature, the Cleveland team’s imperious owner Art Modell threatened to fine his star $1,500 for every missed week of camp. Incensed by Modell’s disrespectful attitude, Brown, known for his strong sense of pride, announced his retirement on July 9.
The racial overtones of the Brown-Modell dispute were obvious, and some observers, especially in the black community, complained that the plantation mentality appeared to be alive and well in the NFL. Ashe, who had long admired Brown’s outspokenness, applauded the football star’s willingness to stand up to Modell. Self-respect, Ashe believed, was more important than any glory to be found on a football field. He could not yet imagine himself being so bold, yet he understood and empathized with Brown’s circumstances. The tennis establishment, like the NFL, was the purview of wealthy white men, middle-aged or older, who ran their sport with an iron hand. The power relationships in tennis had more to do with class than race, but the result was the same. The power brokers called the tune, and the athletes danced accordingly.7
The racial dynamic of professional boxing—a sport that rivaled professional football as a bastion of imperious white management—was also changing. While black fighters had been welcome in the world of professional boxing since the 1930s, they had always been under the thumb of self-serving, and sometimes predatory, white promoters and managers. Even the great Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion from 1937 to 1951, had been constrained by a system of racial etiquette that demanded deference and obedience from black fighters, no matter how talented they might be. The notion of an independent-minded black boxer had long been a contradiction in terms, a legacy of Jack Johnson’s controversial and tragic career during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
All of this began to change with the appearance of Louisville’s Cassius Clay, the 1960 Olympic light heavyweight champion who proclaimed he was quite simply “The Greatest.” After vanquishing reigning heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in February 1964, beating him again in May 1965, and pulverizing a host of white challengers in between, Clay altered the face of boxing, not only with his fists but also with his braggadocio style of verbal wit. Defying convention by joining the Nation of Islam and changing his name to Muhammad Ali in the immediate aftermath of the first Liston fight, the “Louisville Lip” became the most controversial figure in American sports by mid-decade.
Like many Americans, Ashe had conflicted feelings about Ali, bristling at his flamboyant and sometimes rude posturing while admiring his strong sense of self and his uncanny ability to follow through with even the most outrageous promises and predictions. To some whites, Ali was little more than an “uppity Negro,” and a dangerous one at that, associated as he was with a black separatist cult. This view was especially prevalent after Ali humiliated “the good Negro,” two-time former champion Floyd Patterson, with a twelfth-round technical knockout in late November 1965. After Patterson refused to call him Muhammad Ali, using instead his “slave name,” Cassius Clay, taunts of “Uncle Tom” and “What’s my name?” filled the ring as the champion pummeled the overmatched ex-champion into submission. It was a brutal display of speed and power that revealed Ali’s darker side—winning him few friends outside the Nation of Islam.
By this time, Ali had become anathema to the white establishment, and many of his critics cheered when the Selective Service reclassified his draft status as 1-A in February 1966. With the troop buildup in Vietnam intensifying, this was tantamount to a direct ticket to the jungles of Southeast Asia. After he publicly announced his intention to avoid involvement in the war, stating, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong. . . . They never called me nigger,” outraged boxing officials canceled his upcoming March title bout with Ernie Terrell. Effectively barred from boxing in the United States, he fought his next four bouts abroad. In the meantime the Louisville draft board rejected his application for conscientious objector status, a rejection upheld by the Kentucky State Appeal Board with the consent of the Justice Department.
In early 1967, Ali switched his state of residence to Texas but found no relief there as a four-judge panel of the federal district court ruled unanimously that he had no legitimate claim to conscientious objector status. Scheduled for induction on April 28, he showed up at the Houston induction center at the appointed hour, but when asked to step forward for formal induction he refused, even after being warned that his refusal constituted a felony punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Later that day, the New York State Athletic Commission suspended his boxing license and the World Boxing Association stripped him of his heavyweight title. Seven weeks later, on June 20, an all-white jury in Houston convicted him of draft evasion, assessing the maximum penalty possible. While the case was on appeal, Ali managed to stay out of prison, but he would not reenter the ring until October 1970, when his conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in a unanimous decision that found the government’s rejection of his application for conscientious objector status to be lacking in specifics.8
Two decades later, Ashe and Ali would develop a warm friendship. But in the mid-1960s, the two men were about as far apart, emotionally and politically, as two African American athletes could be. Ashe was as quiet and polite as Ali was loud and brash. While he may have had strong feelings about Ali’s conversion to Islam or his draft evasion, he did not say so publicly. What he did say during these years gave no hint of his later opposition to American involvement in Vietnam. In early November 1965, he revealed his support for the war. “Those bullets don’t have much appeal to me, I’ll admit,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “But if there’s a job to do over there, the sooner it’s over the better. I’ll be proud to serve.” Later the same week, a pro-war reporter for the Redwood City Tribune judged Ashe to be “just as conscientious as any marcher. . . . And he’s showing considerably more patriotism and courage. We need more Arthur Ashes.”9
These early statements in support of a war that would soon divide the nation represented Ashe’s first public commentary on a subject of controversy. With this one exception, he did not speak out on any of the era’s swirling controversies prior to the publication of Advantage Ashe in the fall of 1967. In truth, he was seldom asked about such matters. But even on the rare occasions when he was asked to comment on a controversial issue, he rarely said anything forthright or revealing. Over the next decade he would become increasingly comfortable with his role as a vocal public figure—the “thinking man’s tennis player” as some called him. But as late as 1966 he was still wary of voicing his opinions in public, even on matters of deep personal concern.
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