Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Ashe’s reticence was based partly on self-interest—he didn’t want to say anything that would damage his career. But he was also inhibited by self-doubt and a measure of intellectual and political confusion. While he had certain predilections, he had not fastened upon a consistent frame of reference that would help him assess the flow of issues and events with any degree of certainty or clarity. Like most college students, he was a work in progress. On important matters such as war and peace, economic opportunity, and civil rights, he was still trying to refine his core beliefs in the forge of education and real-life experience. It was not that he didn’t think about such things, or that he didn’t care. He just wasn’t ready to commit to a position that he might want to retract later.

  Deliberative by nature, Arthur did not want to be hurried or to become involved in controversies that might complicate his life. Part of the problem was a lack of time. As a college athlete trying to manage a hectic schedule of practice sessions, matches, classroom assignments, and personal activities, he found it challenging to get through the average week even without the added pressure of active political involvement. As his college years drew to a close, he was busier than ever, and when he returned from Australia in late January 1966 after three and a half months abroad, he was already seriously behind in his classes. Even though he was no longer eligible for intercollegiate play, his tennis schedule for February and March was relentless. When he wasn’t working out with Pasarell and the UCLA varsity on the home courts, he was often away playing tournaments to satisfy George MacCall’s determination to maintain his players’ sharpness on the court.

  As soon as Richmond’s Arthur Ashe Day concluded, he made his way to Philadelphia for an invitational indoor tournament. He lost the Philadelphia singles final to Pasarell, despite serving up 20 aces, but together the two roommates won the doubles title. Two days later they were both in Salisbury, Maryland, competing in the U.S. National Indoor tournament, where Ashe lost in the quarterfinals to South African Cliff Drysdale, and where Pasarell won his second singles title in a row. From there they traveled to New York to play in the first annual Vanderbilt Athletic Club invitational round-robin tournament, which showcased eight highly ranked amateur players. Despite flashes of brilliance, Ashe finished fourth in the round robin, two places ahead of Pasarell, who finished sixth.10

  Ashe had expected a higher finish, but fortunately his brief visit to New York proved successful in other ways. During the week, he was introduced to Joseph Cullman III, a noted tennis enthusiast who served as chairman of Philip Morris Incorporated. The giant tobacco-based conglomerate had extensive holdings in a number of subsidiaries, including Clark Gum and American Safety Razor, and Cullman had recently taken advantage of his contacts in the tennis world by hiring several top players to represent Philip Morris’s interests, notably Rafael Osuna in Central America, Roy Emerson in Australia, and Manolo Santana in Spain. Impressed by Ashe’s clean-cut and well-spoken manner, Cullman offered to do the same for him once he finished his two-year stint in the Army. Thus began a personal relationship that would become increasingly important to Ashe over the coming years, despite his misgivings about indirectly associating with a potentially lethal product like tobacco. With tobacco companies moving into sponsorship roles in the tennis world, he simply went with the flow, but his primary reason for agreeing to work for Philip Morris’s nontobacco divisions was his deep respect for Cullman. The corporate executive “became a second father to me,” he declared in 1992, as well as “an invaluable mentor” in the ways of the business world.11

  The other highlight of the week was the time he spent with his girlfriend, Pat Battles. Working as a telephone operator in nearby Stamford, Connecticut, Battles had long hoped Ashe would ask her to marry him. But she was stunned when he actually proposed during the New York tournament. In what he later acknowledged to be an impulsive set of decisions, he asked and she accepted. His closest friends were shocked, including ex-roommate Jean-Edouard Baker, who later described Ashe’s romantic folly: “While he was in New York City on a tennis tour he went out a couple of nights with this Negro girl he’d met a long time ago. They’d been writing each other for several years. She was a telephone operator. They had a good time and Arthur asked her to marry him. Right like that! Took ten minutes to make the decision. She accepted, so they were engaged. When he got back to Los Angeles she phoned every day.”12

  True to form, Ashe “the traveling man” was not always there to take his fiancée’s calls. In early March, he was back at UCLA, where puzzled friends quizzed him about his surprise engagement, but he was there for only a few days before heading for the Pacific Coast Doubles tournament in La Jolla. Two weeks later, while he was winning the singles title at the annual Thunderbird tournament in Phoenix, Arizona, news of his engagement finally hit the press. The young couple, Pat’s proud mother announced, would be married in Richmond on June 5. The announcement in The New York Times added that Ashe would graduate in late June and upon completion of his ROTC training later in the summer would receive a commission as a second lieutenant in the Army.

  On the surface Arthur’s immediate future seemed set, yet from the beginning his closest friends had serious doubts he would go through with the marriage. “Gradually,” Baker recalled, “we could see Arthur getting bored with her,” which had been his pattern over the last two years. “He’d get interested in some girl, then get bored—or scared, maybe—and wouldn’t want to see her,” Baker observed, adding: “I told him, ‘Better not get married, you’ll be bored with your wife.’ ”13

  In late March and early April, Arthur spent a week in San Juan, Puerto Rico, participating in an international tournament at the Caribe Hilton resort, where Pasarell had played since he was a small boy. For years the man known as Charlito in San Juan had been regaling Arthur with tales of his beautiful native island, and now Ashe had a chance to see for himself. This was his first visit to the Caribbean, and he was immediately charmed by the tropical lushness of the landscape and the warm welcome he received from the Pasarell family. The range of skin color, the blurred racial lines, and the appearance of congenial social relations were outside his experience, and he came away fascinated with the overall contrast between the harsh biracialism of the Jim Crow South and the more diverse and open culture of Puerto Rico. The Caribe Hilton was obviously not the best place to explore the deeper realities of race and class on a poverty-stricken island. But Arthur took in what he could, peppering his hosts with questions about local life. He also managed to win the tournament, defeating Cliff Richey in the singles final.14

  Ashe’s impressive victories in Phoenix and San Juan drew the attention of the press, including Look magazine, which ran a feature story titled “Arthur Ashe: Hottest New Tennis Star.” The text by senior editor Chandler Brossard was complimentary, and to Arthur’s delight it broke new ground by focusing more on his tennis than on his role as a racial pioneer. Frank Deford had followed this line in a brief article published the previous August in the wake of Arthur’s Davis Cup victory in Dallas. But Brossard’s was the first in-depth profile to play down his singular status as a black tennis star.

  During his college years Arthur found it difficult to explain why he resented press coverage that stressed his race. He finally began to level with the press corps in May 1966 in a forthright Sport Magazine interview titled “Arthur Ashe: I Want to Be No. 1 Without an Asterisk.” Years later he clarified his views, lamenting that “there was a great deal of fuss about being the ‘first black’ Junior Davis Cup player, the ‘first black’ to get a tennis scholarship to UCLA, the ‘first black’ to win at Charlottesville, etc. Those comments always put me under pressure to justify my accomplishments on racial grounds, as if sports were the cutting edge of our nation’s move toward improved race relations. The fact that this kind of accomplishment by a black player got so much attention was an indication that we still had so far to go.”15

  The persistent problem of being measured and identified acco
rding to race-based standards went well beyond press coverage. It was also part of a society being challenged and reshaped by an increasingly influential civil rights movement. To black Americans striving for racial justice and equal opportunity, and to the embattled white conservatives resisting the movement, Arthur was more than just a talented tennis player. Whether he liked it or not, his career was also a marker of racial progress.

  Spending most of his time outside the South during the critical years 1961 to 1966 shielded Arthur from some of the pressure to become actively involved in a struggle centered below the Mason-Dixon line. As he later recalled, “At UCLA, I was geographically removed from most of the major activities of the civil rights movement. The marches and sit-ins and arrests were on the front pages every day, but I was a long way from them.” Even so, geography did not absolve him of the responsibility to take a stand on issues related to race and civil rights. Nor did it remove him completely from the sounds and sights of the struggle. Both before and after the trauma of Watts, UCLA witnessed vigorous campus debates over questions of racial integration, cultural nationalism, and what came to be known as “Black Power.” “It would have been difficult,” if not impossible, he acknowledged, to avoid racial politics altogether. “Growing up in the South in the 1950s, studying at UCLA in the 1960s, even playing tennis,” he pointed out, “planted seeds of confrontation.”16

  One such confrontation occurred during Arthur’s last year at UCLA, when he encountered Ron Karenga, a militant Black nationalist holding forth outside the entrance to the student union. Karenga, as Arthur described him, “was a short, bald-headed graduate student who headed a group called US, which meant ‘us slaves.’ He wore great big dark glasses, a Fu Manchu mustache, bright dashikis, and was known as the heaviest, baddest black dude on campus.” For nearly thirty minutes Arthur stood in a small crowd of students listening to Karenga’s take on the importance of “self-defense for the black community” and the need to inculcate respect for African traditions. Eventually the rest of the crowd slipped away leaving Arthur and Karenga to carry on a one-on-one discussion. “We talked about the black struggle, California-style,” Arthur recalled, with Karenga making a plea for cultural awareness of the African past: “If black people didn’t start learning and enjoying their culture, Karenga argued, they would become ‘white Europeans.’ I’d never heard this doctrine before. And with my southern background I wasn’t sure he understood where I had come from and what I was up against.”

  Arthur never forgot Karenga’s parting words: “It’s attitudes like yours I’m trying to change. Look, you’re the cream of the black crop, you’re in college, you’re going to do fairly well in life. If I can’t convince you, then what do you think about the black masses?” This was a hard sell for someone who had become adept at blending in with his surroundings, even though both men knew this routine was becoming more challenging as the fear of black militancy grew. “In 1966, I secretly felt uneasier, what with all those riots and talk about ‘white backlash’ and ‘black power,’ ” he confessed in Advantage Ashe.17

  During the past year, several “tennis incidents” had given Arthur cause for concern: “In one Southern town people on the streets yelled ‘Nigger!’ at Luis Glass, the young Negro player from UCLA, and the situation got so edgy that he withdrew from the tournament.” Even in Richmond, where Arthur Ashe Day had promoted a measure of interracial harmony in February, a distressing racial confrontation occurred four months later when regional officials of the Middle Atlantic Boys Division of the USLTA scheduled a tournament at the whites-only Hermitage Country Club. Four years earlier, Byrd Park had hosted an integrated Middle Atlantic tournament, but breaching the color bar at the Hermitage club proved much more difficult.

  When Weldon Rogers, the thirteen-year-old son of the Reverend Jefferson Rogers, a well-known Washington, D.C., civil rights leader, showed up unexpectedly and tried to register for play, he was turned away by the tournament director, who explained that the registration period had long passed. Convinced that enforcement of the pre-registration rule was a smoke screen for racial discrimination—a reasonable conclusion in light of the director’s declaration that “Club policy doesn’t allow a Negro to take part in any of its athletic or social events”—the Reverend Rogers forcefully pleaded his son’s case but to no avail. In an earlier time, this would have been the end of it. But in the spring of 1966, there were signs of change. To the Rogerses’ amazement, thirteen white players, later dubbed “Thirteen Young Heroes” by World Tennis magazine, refused to play and walked out in protest. Unfortunately, the USLTA officials on-site were unmoved by this show of courage and refused to suspend the tournament.18

  Arthur faced his own challenges in the South that spring. Trying to capitalize on the success of the 1965 Davis Cup tie against Mexico, the Dallas Country Club organized an invitational tournament scheduled for April. Contacting Captain George MacCall, the organizers made it clear that they planned to invite several members of the Davis Cup squad, but not Arthur. MacCall shot back an ultimatum: “Take all the players I send you or none.” After the organizers reluctantly agreed to MacCall’s conditions, everything seemed set. But the country club soon threw a monkey wrench into the deliberations by accepting Arthur while refusing to admit black spectators. To circumvent this complication, the tournament was soon moved to the Samuell Grand Tennis Center, the public park that had hosted the 1965 U.S.-Mexico tie. Though wary of what he might face once he arrived in Dallas, Arthur managed to avoid any troubling incidents, and by the end of the week he had won both the singles and doubles titles.

  Arthur later pointed out with considerable satisfaction that he had “yet to lose a match in any big Southern tournament.” But he had to admit that to date he hadn’t “played in many.” “I’ve never been asked to the Blue-Gray at Montgomery, the Atlanta Open, or the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans,” he observed in 1967, adding that fortunately “most Southern tourneys don’t count for much.” Even so, he freely admitted he “sometimes felt a little resentful at seeing swanky Southern tournaments ignore me in favor of white players I know I can beat.”

  Yet he was not willing to make a public issue of these racially motivated snubs. “Some people tell me I should ask other players not to compete in the South unless I can too,” he reported. “There’s been pressure on me to make a big stink about it, or to tell Martin Tressel and Bob Kelleher, the past and present USLTA presidents, ‘In effect you’re sanctioning race prejudice when you sanction these Southern tournaments. If you don’t make them drop the color bar, I’ll put out public statements blasting you.’ ” Putting out public statements was not Ashe’s style during these years. As he explained, “I’m not getting militant as long as I’m the only player shut out. When more Negroes want to play in Southern tournaments and have the skill to be worth watching, then maybe I’ll go along with an organized protest if one is needed.”19

  This tentative openness to participation in a protest movement sometime in the future was one of the first hints Ashe was beginning to rethink his position on the civil rights struggle. As a public figure on the verge of celebrity—and as the only identifiable African American in the upper echelons of tennis—he found it increasingly difficult to remain mute on matters of race and civil rights. Privately he had been trying to make sense of the evolving civil rights scene for some time, but his first extended public commentary on such matters came in 1967 when he and Gewecke collaborated on Advantage Ashe.

  Written against the backdrop of intense ideological debate over nonviolence, Black Power, and racial separatism, Arthur’s statements as a twenty-three-year-old memoirist suggest a temporary retreat into the lost world of Booker T. Washington. While not quite an accommodationist, he expressly endorsed leaders whom he considered to be moderate centrists: Dr. Ralph Bunche, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Robert Weaver, Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The inclusion of Marshall and King indi
cated he understood the necessity of struggle, both in the courtroom and in the streets. But he also expressed serious doubts about the utility of extended mass protests. “I know Dr. King has the best interests of Negroes at heart,” he wrote, “but I doubt if his tactics will work indefinitely. It looks to me as if a Negro’s best chance to advance is to get himself an education somehow and prove his worth as an individual. I’ve seen many Negroes do this—even in the South. Then they’re accepted voluntarily because people appreciate them. But all the civil rights in the world won’t help the lazy ones or the soreheads.”

  Continuing his critique of the movement, Arthur distanced himself from the philosophy of nonviolent direct action advocated by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), CORE, and SNCC. He also revealed his political naïveté by lumping nonviolent and violent protesters together. “By crusades and protest marches and rock-throwing we seem to try to ram ourselves down people’s throats,” he observed. “Sometimes a demonstration is the best way of getting headlines about a bad deal, but I don’t think demonstrators should try to make trouble for anyone. We’ll never advance very far by force, because we’re outnumbered ten to one. Quiet negotiation and slow infiltration look more hopeful to me.” Sensing this view might be unpopular with many of his black readers, he asked rhetorically: “Does this make me an Uncle Tom? If so, okay. I’m not the crusader type. I pay my $3 yearly dues in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and tend to my tennis. I feel the way Joe Louis does. When somebody asked why he wasn’t active in the civil rights fight, he said, ‘some people do it by shouting, some march, some give lots of money. I do it my way—behaving. All ways help.’ ”20