Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Arthur’s character was also the subject of an admiring profile published in Sports Illustrated the same week. Frank Deford had written two earlier pieces on Arthur, but his August 29 cover story, “Service, But First a Smile,” went well beyond his earlier efforts. Assigned to preview the upcoming tournament at Forest Hills, Deford decided to focus on Arthur, who in his view represented America’s best hope to recapture the National singles title.

  Later one of Arthur’s closest friends, Deford marveled at the young star’s poise and grace under pressure. Predicting he “may someday be the best player in the world,” Deford concluded that “the only Negro player in a white tennis world” had figured out how “to endure the capriciousness of a time that so arbitrarily gives and takes from his race.” Beyond dealing with the daily challenges and slights of racial discrimination, Arthur inevitably found himself in the position of serving as “an image, that of the American dream, minority division.” “It is a difficult role for a 23-year-old,” Deford declared, “but Ashe bears it all with ease.”33

  The article went on to sketch the outlines of Arthur’s life and career. The dominant theme throughout was Arthur’s ability to mix an inner vitality with an outwardly calm detachment. “The most impressive thing,” according to Pasarell, “is that he is so able to take things as they are. He can be absolutely objective.” Along the same lines, Arthur told Deford: “I’m always thinking. I don’t care how tired I am, once I get in bed I can’t go to sleep for an hour. There’s just so much to think about.” Ashe’s UCLA coach, J. D. Morgan, who had come to regard Arthur as an adopted son, stressed his former player’s fertile imagination, which he acknowledged was a potential problem on the court. According to the coach, “the biggest thing he has going for him is also his biggest fault—his imagination.” Arthur’s “intellectual meandering” during matches had become notorious, and Deford duly reported, “most players agree that the best way to beat Ashe is just to hang with him until his concentration starts to wander.” Gonzales, who had sometimes criticized Arthur on this score, chose instead to stress his integrity and constancy of purpose. “I don’t know how the Army, the two years, will affect Arthur’s tennis career,” he told Deford, “but I know this. He is at peace in his mind. He won’t duck a thing, and he won’t let anybody down.”34

  With all of this praise ringing in his ears, Arthur arrived at Forest Hills more determined than ever to play up to his potential. Having reached the semifinals in 1965, he expected to do even better after an additional year of seasoning. The Australian tour had elevated his game, especially on grass, and his eight tournament wins in the last twelve months boosted his confidence. Seeded fourth, with only the defending champion Santana, Emerson, and Ralston ahead of him, he felt no ill effects from his six-week hiatus at Fort Lewis.

  In the first round, Arthur got off to a rough start, barely outlasting Lamar Roemer of Houston 15–13. But he came on strong in the final two sets, winning 6–2, 6–0. His next opponent, New Yorker Ron Holmberg, was much tougher. After losing the opening game at love and splitting the first two sets, Arthur eventually took charge, but he had to survive a forty-five-minute rain delay before closing out the match. His third-round opponent was John Newcombe, an unseeded twenty-two-year-old Australian who had first attracted attention in 1963 as the youngest Aussie ever selected to play Davis Cup. Two years later he would team with Tony Roche to win the Wimbledon doubles title, but his prowess in singles play was only beginning to show in 1966. A rangy player whose powerful serves rivaled those of the world’s best amateurs, Newcombe was destined to be one of the dominant players of his era, winning three Wimbledon singles titles (1967, 1970, and 1971), two U.S. National singles titles (1967 and 1973), and five Wimbledon doubles championships.

  By the end of 1967, Newcombe would be the number-one-ranked amateur in the world. But there was only a hint of this future success in September 1966. Nearly everyone expected Ashe to make it through to the round of sixteen. But on a day of upsets, when both Roche and Drysdale lost to lightly regarded, unseeded opponents, Ashe suffered one of the most disappointing defeats of his career. “Thoroughly outplayed,” in the estimation of one reporter, he was never really in the match, which barely lasted an hour. His only consolation was that he was hardly the only American star to suffer an early exit. When the dust settled at the end of the round of sixteen, Clark Graebner was the only American to advance to the quarterfinals. This was the nation’s worst showing in the eighty-six-year history of the U.S. National Championships. As recently as 1963 half of the eight quarterfinalists had been American. But now no fewer than five of the quarterfinalists were from Australia. The long-standing rivalry between the world’s two tennis superpowers seemed totally out of balance, even before Stolle defeated Newcombe in an all-Aussie final to become the first unseeded Forest Hills champion since Mal Anderson in 1957. Adding insult to injury, Stolle also teamed with Emerson to run away with the doubles title, easily defeating Graebner and Ralston in straight sets.35

  America’s chance of seeing an American champion at Forest Hills anytime soon or of recapturing the Davis Cup suddenly seemed remote. The pressure to shake up the American Davis Cup squad was now intense, but MacCall refused to panic. “We’re just going to have to work harder,” he told the press on the last day of the tournament, adding: “Everybody seems to forget that our boys, particularly Ashe, did very well against these same Aussies during our tour of Australia last winter.”

  Ashe appreciated MacCall’s comment, but he also feared the rising tide of Australian dominance had yet to reach its crest. The first test came two days after the closing match at Forest Hills when five members of the Australian Davis Cup squad squared off against five of the Americans in a preview series held in Cleveland. To the surprise of almost everyone, Ashe and his teammates won all five matches, though the significance of the rout was tempered by the absence of Emerson and Stolle. Later in the week, a second series of matches was held in Toledo, followed by two more contests in west central Texas. In each case, the results were mildly encouraging for the Americans, especially in Odessa, Texas, where Ashe defeated Emerson in a tough three-set match. The following week, several of the Australian stars stopped off in Berkeley to play in the Pacific Coast International Championships before returning home. This time the Americans clearly dominated the competition, with both Ashe and Pasarell making it to the semifinals. Five of Australia’s best players—Emerson, Newcombe, Roche, Kerry Melville, and Owen Davidson—were eliminated in the earlier rounds after finding Berkeley’s concrete courts less than ideal for their style of play. While Stolle ultimately overcame Pasarell to win the title, the Aussies’ overall performance was lackluster at best.36

  None of these exhibition matches had any direct impact on the fight for the Davis Cup, but the boost to American morale came just in time. The American squad’s first official tie was scheduled for November 5 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, against a weak Brazilian team that bore no resemblance to the powerful Aussies. MacCall was concerned nonetheless, knowing the Porto Alegre matches would be played on slow clay with a raucous crowd of Brazilian fans cheering on their countrymen. The American Davis Cup Committee had tried to move the tie to Los Angeles, but was rebuffed by the designated arbiter, the Australian Lawn Tennis Association. The fact that the captain of the Brazilian Davis Cup team, Paolo da Silva Costa, was also the president of the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF) did not help the American cause. But it was the Australians who turned the knife.

  Taking nothing for granted, MacCall arranged for the American squad to arrive in South America a full two weeks beforehand to acclimate his players to the slow clay. Entering Arthur and his four teammates in the South American tennis championships held in Buenos Aires in late October, MacCall did what he could to neutralize the Brazilians’ advantage. In the Buenos Aires warm-up, the Americans performed surprisingly well, with all five advancing to the third round or beyond. Arthur made it to the semifinals before bowing out to Brazil�
�s best player, Thomas Koch, in a five-set marathon, and Richey defeated Koch for the South American title the next day.

  It was a different story once the team arrived in Porto Alegre. Influenced by Richey’s strong performance in Buenos Aires, MacCall generated considerable controversy by substituting the nineteen-year-old Texan for Arthur in the second singles spot behind Ralston. Considered to be relatively weak on clay, Arthur was limited to a pairing with Ralston in the doubles. At a purely technical level, the move seemed to make sense, but after Richey lost to José Edison Mandarino on the first day of competition the second-guessing began. Playing in 100-degree heat, Richey won the first set but faded noticeably thereafter, suggesting that Arthur’s superior fitness could have led to a different outcome. Ralston had no trouble disposing of Koch in the other opening day singles match, and he and Arthur followed up with a decisive victory over Koch and Mandarino in the doubles match to give the Americans a 2–1 lead going into the final day of play.

  To advance to the next round, the Americans had to win only one of the two closing singles matches. But neither Richey nor Ralston was up to the challenge. Richey was the first to go down, so unnerved by the crowd and the heat that he was almost hapless against Koch’s steady game. The overmatched Texan won only seven games in three sets. Now all of the pressure was on Ralston. As the crowd rallied behind the home team, baiting the fiery American with jeers and catcalls, Mandarino rose to the occasion, playing the match of his life. Somehow Ralston managed to win two of the first three sets, but after that the Brazilian took charge. Arthur, who watched helplessly from the sidelines, later recalled the shock of his old rival’s unexpected loss: “Twice Ralston went ahead in sets, but twice Mandarino pulled even. We could see Ralston fade after the rest period. The fifth and deciding set was no contest.” Worst of all, he wrote, “it was the fifth time in seven years we’d been put out before the challenge round.”

  Giddy in victory, the Brazilian captain da Silva Costa attributed the upset victory to the “fiber and courage” of his players. But Arthur expressed a different view, arguing the Americans had no one but themselves to blame. “Probably our team’s worst trouble,” he wrote, “was that we hadn’t worried. It just never crossed our minds that Brazil might win. All our talk was about ‘after we beat Brazil.’ ” Some American tennis officials and many irate fans called for MacCall’s dismissal, but Arthur stood by his coach, who was uncharacteristically quiet after the defeat. “We felt real low afterward,” he remembered. “George didn’t bark at us. It was too late for that. We just brooded, then gradually began to bury the memories and look ahead.” Perhaps so, but it seems more likely that the memory of the Porto Alegre debacle lingered just below the surface of his mind, a cautionary affirmation of the sin of pride he had first encountered in the Sunday school lessons of his youth.37

  Once MacCall realized his job was not in jeopardy, he began to rally his players around his chosen strategy of rigorous training and continuous play. In short, he wanted to repeat the experiment of seasoning his players on the tough Australian circuit. Initially, he had hopes that his entire squad would be available for a second dose of extended play Down Under. But in the end only Ashe and Richey were able to commit to the entire tour. Pasarell, still enrolled at UCLA, agreed to come for the first month but informed MacCall he would have to return to the United States before the end of the year. The team’s unofficial alternates, Allen Fox and Jim McManus, made a similar commitment, temporarily fleshing out the American contingent. This made Ashe and Richey the stalwarts, especially after Ralston, the nation’s top-rated player, left the team to join the professional ranks in late December.

  Ralston’s departure dealt a serious blow to the American squad’s chances of keeping up with the Australians, but it opened up new opportunities for Ashe. Making the most of the Australian tour suddenly became an even higher priority than it had been when he had arrived in Melbourne in late November. From the outset, he had been eager to return to the scene of his triumphant run the previous year. He also looked forward to reengaging with Australia’s lively social scene, a prospect that did not please his fiancée. Since announcing their engagement in March, the couple had seen relatively little of each other, their relationship having definitely cooled since Arthur’s impulsive proposal. Within four months he would break off the engagement, confirming his roommates’ prediction.

  The Australian trip, Arthur reasoned, would not only sharpen his game and keep him in MacCall’s good graces; it would also enable him to have a bit of fun and adventure before submitting to the constraints of military life. Despite their continuing rivalry for the Davis Cup singles spot, he and Cliff Richey were on good terms, and their relationship got even better after Cliff ’s sister Nancy, one of the top female prospects in American tennis, joined them on the Australian tour. For two months the three Americans were nearly inseparable as they made their way from Melbourne to Adelaide, the site of both the South Australian and Australian National Championships. Both the tennis and the camaraderie had more than a few high moments, even though Arthur was unable to repeat his wildly successful run of the previous year. At the Victorian tournament in Melbourne, he lost to Newcombe in the quarterfinals, and at the mid-December South Australian championships, where he was the defending champion, he suffered a second early exit, losing in the third round to young Ray Ruffels, who had defeated him at Beckenham in 1965.

  Three weeks later, following the Christmas break, Arthur’s situation went from bad to worse when a strained hip muscle forced him to withdraw from the singles competition at the West Australian Championships in Perth. Nursing the injury, he recovered enough to join Richey for the doubles competition. A week later, at the Tasmanian Championships in Hobart, Arthur was finally on the mend, defeating the hot Australian prospect Bill Bowrey in a tough semifinal match that went four sets before the American prevailed 13–11. Though upended in the singles final by Tony Roche, he and Richey managed to win the doubles title, signaling he was ready to take on the challenges of the final two weeks of the tour: the Australian-American International round-robin tournament at the famous White City courts in Sydney, and the Australian National Championships in Adelaide.

  Arthur played well at White City, even though the final team score was a disappointing 6–3 in favor of the Australians. Rounding into top form, he was optimistic about his chances at the Australian National tournament. While Emerson had won the Australian singles title five of the past six years, Arthur’s near miss the previous January, plus his multiple victories over the great Emmo at the U.S. National Championships and other venues, gave him hope that he was on the verge of winning his first Grand Slam title.

  As expected, Arthur made his way through the first three rounds with relative ease, though he and Richey suffered an upset in the third round of the doubles competition, losing to the unheralded “pick-up team” of the young Australian Bill Coughlan and the Indiana collegiate star Dave Bloom. Arthur faced Coughlan again in the fourth round of the singles, extracting a measure of revenge, and he went on to crush Owen Davidson in the quarterfinals. In a semifinal match against Newcombe suspended by darkness in the second set, Arthur played one of the greatest matches of his career. With both players at the top of their game, the momentum went back and forth during most of the two-day struggle. After Arthur won the first set 12–10, Newcombe came back with a marathon 22–20 victory in the second. Only in the third set did Arthur begin to pull away, serving ace after ace to win the last two sets convincingly, 6–3, 6–2. Though thoroughly exhausted, he had earned a rematch against Emerson for the coveted title.

  Predictably, Arthur’s epic victory over Newcombe proved to be pyrrhic. With only a few hours to recover after his grueling semifinal endurance test, he found himself overmatched by Emerson, who had enjoyed a day of recovery after a semifinal match against Roche. The first eight games of the match were closely contested, but after that Emerson made short work of his young American challenger. In the 1966 final
Arthur had managed to take a set from the perennial champion, but this time the Australian’s dominance was total.38

  Arthur was philosophical in defeat, knowing he had lost to one of the game’s all-time greats. But he also felt the enduring power of the Australian mystique. A month earlier Emerson had led the Australian Davis Cup team to its third straight title, and, even more amazingly, its eleventh title in the last twelve years. The Americans’ 1963 triumph had proven to be an anomaly, and Arthur wasn’t sure if he and his teammates would ever catch up to the all but invincible Aussies. Back in November, an American friend had approached the Australian journalist Harry Gordon with a disturbing question: “How can our boys learn to play tennis like the Australians?” Other than suggesting that the Americans should kidnap Harry Hopman, Australia’s legendary Davis Cup captain, Gordon had no easy answers for his friend. His only serious suggestions were to urge the Americans to adopt Hopman’s “Spartan approach to training and discipline,” and to open up the American tennis scene to a wider spectrum of its population. “In Australia,” Gordon reminded his readers, “ ‘Anyone for tennis?’ means just that: anyone. Not just people who ski and play polo, or people who went to college, or people with white skins.”39

  Ruminations on the stifling limitations of race and class were always part of the mix for Ashe. But he had more mundane things to think about as he ended his sojourn in Australia. Leaving Adelaide on the last day of January, he had just enough time to fly home for the second annual Richmond Invitational Tennis Tournament. This time there would be no Arthur Ashe Day, only a welcome reunion with family and boyhood friends. The Richeys were also on hand, having accompanied Arthur on the flight back to the States, as were George MacCall, Cliff Drysdale, and four American Davis Cup veterans—Pasarell, Riessen, Froehling, and McKinley. For a fledgling tournament, the draw was impressive—a tribute to Arthur’s stature among his peers. With little fanfare, several of the world’s leading amateurs had come not only to compete but also to support their friend.