Pasarell and Ashe were teamed up in the doubles, but both hoped to challenge the defending singles champion, McKinley. Playing indoors on a fast canvas court, the two former roommates ran through the field. Facing each other in the final, they put on a serve-and-volley show that wowed a biracial crowd of 3,300, most of whom were disappointed when Pasarell emerged victorious. Later in the day, there was some recompense when the two singles finalists joined forces to overwhelm Drysdale and Ron Holmberg in the doubles final. Overall the hometown favorite made a good showing, but the tournament’s most important achievement was the degree to which a still divided city had adjusted to interracial competition.40
Arthur took all of this in with a mixture of skepticism and relief, realizing that the orchestrated scene in the public arena masked a darker reality. While he could sense the subtle changes sweeping over Richmond in the wake of the civil rights acts of the mid-1960s, he also knew that, with few exceptions, the traditional patterns of racial segregation and economic and social stratification still held sway. The local code of Jim Crow segregation had loosened with respect to public accommodations, and there seemed to be more respectful dialogue across racial lines. Yet some by-products of the civil rights revolution were hard for Ashe to swallow, notably the closing and bulldozing of Brook Field Park.
The parkland had already been cleared by the time of Arthur’s visit, and by the end of 1967 the area surrounding his boyhood home would be completely transformed into a sprawling federal post office complex. Redevelopment of the broader Jackson Ward neighborhood had begun several years earlier with the construction of the Richmond–Petersburg Highway (later part of the I-95 Interstate), which removed many historic structures and effectively bisected the northeast corner of the city. Arthur hardly recognized much of the streetscape that had been so familiar to him at the beginning of the decade. Most of his extended family was still there, but Jackson Ward’s status as a viable residential community was under siege, threatened by unsavory real estate speculation and physical deterioration.
Arthur was pleased, however, to discover that his father, now past fifty, had survived the Brook Field demolition by diversifying his employment and being more entrepreneurial than ever. When Deford interviewed him in August 1966, Arthur Sr. not only had a job with the city but also a thriving two-truck landscaping business. The enterprising leader of the Ashe clan owned “a car and a 21-foot motorboat” and had “just built a new house out in Louisa County with virtually nothing but his own two hands.” When the journalist John McPhee visited the house in Gum Spring, Arthur Sr. was commuting to Richmond, supervising eight employees, and juggling three jobs, including a special police officer pool and tennis court supervisor position with the Richmond Department of Recreation and Parks, and a janitorial business specializing in office buildings, banks, and medical centers.
Somehow Arthur Sr. also found time to oversee the annual court installation at the Richmond Invitational, and to spearhead an effort to build a tennis complex in northeast Richmond’s Battery Park neighborhood as a substitute for the Brook Field courts lost to the post office development. He even owned four rental properties in addition to the Gum Spring house. A seemingly tireless worker, he had achieved economic security while somehow finding ample time to fish and hunt on the weekends. His only major concern seemed to be the likelihood of his two sons finding themselves in harm’s way on the battlefield.41
Arthur shared his father’s concern for Johnnie and was haunted by the thought that his little brother might not make it back from Vietnam. He was less worried about his own situation, having been assured that the Army planned to keep him away from the war. While he had yet to receive formal orders, West Point’s Coach Cullen, with MacCall’s blessing, had quietly arranged a stateside assignment. Slated for a position in the Adjutant General’s Corps, which he termed the “chairborne infantry,” he would report to the Adjutant General’s School at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Lawrence, Indiana, during the last week of February, and would remain there for nine weeks before moving to West Point. As he explained in the final chapter of Advantage Ashe, written just before he went on active duty, he did not want to shirk his duty by accepting “special soft spots,” yet at the same time he was willing to go along with the Army’s decision “to put me on tennis courts as a sort of showpiece.” While the moral ambiguity of his position was obvious, he had no choice but to accept his good fortune.
During his final weeks of civilian life, Arthur was confident the Army would fulfill its promise to place him at West Point. His brother Johnnie, who was all too familiar with the vagaries of military life, was not sure. Accordingly, without telling his older brother, he hatched a plan to extend his tour in Vietnam in exchange for a promise that Arthur would remain stateside. After broaching the idea with several of his superiors, he received assurances that military policy would not allow two brothers to serve in the same combat zone at the same time. While there is no evidence that Johnnie’s noble gesture had any impact on his brother’s assignment, the effort spoke volumes about the Ashe brothers’ devotion to one another. The fact that Johnnie made sure his older brother knew nothing about his behind-the-scenes maneuvering until many years later made his selfless act all the more remarkable.
Despite Arthur’s physical separation from his family in the years since 1961, the familial bond had remained strong. So he was grateful for the opportunity to spend time with his father, stepmother, and other close relatives before going off to the Army. By the time he left Richmond on February 9, 1967, bound for Philadelphia’s annual indoor international tournament, he felt emotionally renewed and ready for the challenges ahead. The most pressing challenge, other than playing well in Philadelphia and in the upcoming national indoor championships in Salisbury, Maryland, was to put the finishing touches on the final chapter of Advantage Ashe. Writing a memoir at the tender age of twenty-three had proven more difficult than he had imagined when he and Gewecke had begun the project in early 1966. But his ability to express himself in print, and his willingness to reveal his thoughts and opinions to the public, had grown during the past year. Gradually overcoming his natural shyness, he felt more comfortable speaking out on issues that mattered to him.42
One such issue was the American Davis Cup team’s perennially poor showing on clay, a point he made clear in a lengthy interview published in The New York Times in February. The team’s failures on clay, he maintained, could be traced to a lack of practice on the slow surface—and to the USLTA’s refusal to address the problem. “I sometimes wonder,” he confessed, “whether the United States Lawn Tennis Association wants to win the cup back, after what has been happening to us.” “How,” he asked plaintively, “are we going to beat these guys—Mandarino, Koch, Santana—on the slow courts they practically live on when we play only two or three clay tournaments a year?” The root of the problem was the long-standing USLTA policy prohibiting extended summer play in Europe. “When Wimbledon ends in early July,” he pointed out, “we are required to be back home within a week so that there will be somebody to play in our own grass tournaments. Our clay court season is a joke.” Considering that more than 90 percent of the recent Davis Cup ties had been played on clay, the USLTA’s policy was, in his view, tantamount to surrender.43
Arthur knew this sharp criticism would generate considerable consternation in the higher circles of the USLTA. American tennis officials rarely countenanced open dissent by players, and no one expected the most well-mannered player on the tour to be the one to lead the charge against the grass court crowd. There was less surprise, however, among the people who knew him best, those who had watched him mature into a confident and strong-willed young man. “Arthur’s gone a long way in four years from the guy I first knew,” Jean-Edouard Baker assured Gewecke during a 1966 interview. While Baker conceded that his former roommate was still “basically shy” and an “introvert,” the new Arthur Ashe was “a lot more sophisticated” than the innocent, wide-eyed eighteen-year-old freshman
he had met in 1962. In another interview, Luis Glass marveled at Ashe’s “internal strength” that was beginning to surface for all to see. Much of his behavior was still ruled by a determination to maintain a clean image, to avoid, as his sophomore roommate David Reed put it, “the least little thing that might offend people.” But there were now enough exceptions to this reticence to suggest he was on the path to purposeful assertion, and perhaps even to full-blown activism.44
In the closing chapter of Advantage Ashe, titled “Looking Ahead,” he provided a hint of things to come in a lengthy commentary on the dismal prospects for black tennis players aspiring to join him on the tour. The heart of the problem remained the lack of opportunity for young blacks to develop their skills at an early age. “Many of them are born with the reflexes, stamina, and desire that a top player must have,” he insisted. “But where will they get the financing and coaching?” he asked. As for the problem of funding, he pointed out that “a coach costs $10 or $15 an hour” and “rackets and stringing come to $750 a year.” “Where can Negro families get that kind of money?” he demanded. “Tennis is still mostly for the country-club types,” he concluded, predicting “it will probably stay that way for another generation.”45
As Arthur acknowledged, part of the problem was tennis’s lack of popularity in the black community. “Negro boys look up to Willie Mays, Lew Alcindor, Bill Russell, Floyd Patterson, Bob Hayes—and try to follow them,” he wrote with more than a touch of regret. “I don’t think Negro boys are impressed that much by what I’ve done. I’m the only one. If there were a bunch of us it would be different.” At this point, his lament was limited to a few pages in a memoir. But within two years he would join forces with Pasarell to do something concrete about the barriers of race and class that plagued the game he loved. Together—along with the former University of Virginia tennis star Sheridan “Sherry” Snyder—the two UCLA alums would found the National Junior Tennis League (NJTL) in 1969.
The NJTL was designed “to gain and hold the attention of young people in the inner cities and other poor environments,” but Arthur made sure the organization’s charge went well beyond tennis instruction. He and his partners promised to teach aspiring players “about matters more important than tennis,” and from the outset the NJTL’s local chapters stressed the importance of education, self-discipline, and personal growth. One of Arthur’s most important legacies, the NJTL would eventually attract hundreds of thousands of members, transforming the profile of tennis in inner-city neighborhoods across the nation. At the time of his death, a quarter century after its founding, the organization’s impact on the racial and class makeup of professional tennis was not all that Arthur had hoped it would be. But this disappointment was tempered by victories elsewhere. Consistent with the founders’ ideals, the NJTL’s most important accomplishments took place off the court.
The NJTL’s emphases on education, character development, and the cultivation of skills that enhanced economic opportunity grew out of the fear that single-minded dedication to sports had become a serious problem in African American culture. As Arthur later put it, many black children were spending too much time on the playing field and not enough time in the library. One remedy for this imbalance was to use tennis as an entry point for involvement in off-court programs promoting educational and personal growth. Putting this strategy into action changed many lives, including Arthur’s. Over time his activities on behalf of inner-city children led him down a path dedicated to service and philanthropy. Indeed, this commitment to public engagement, which first emerged during the waning years of the turbulent 1960s, would eventually become the driving force of his life. While he was still determined to excel on the court and to encourage young black players to follow his lead, his priorities began to shift dramatically in 1967 and 1968. More and more, he came to see his own athletic success as a means of acquiring moral and social influence, as a source of leverage rather than an end in itself. During his years in the Army, and in the decades that followed, he would demonstrate time and again that his greatest gifts transcended the game of tennis.46
TEN
OPENINGS
ASHE’S LAST HURRAH BEFORE reporting for duty was the final round of a new international invitational indoor tournament held at the Concord Hotel in Kiamesha Lake, New York, a little more than an hour’s drive from West Point. The title match, won by Ashe over Thomas Koch, was held on Wednesday, February 22, two days before he was scheduled to begin his training assignment at Fort Benjamin Harrison. Flying to Indianapolis, where he caught a bus to the base, he arrived on time—a bit breathless but ready for duty. After checking in on Friday, he received word he was free to travel to Cleveland the next day to compete in the Western Indoor Championships. And after that, a second leave would allow him to participate in the second annual Vanderbilt invitational tournament in New York City scheduled for the first week of March.
The Army’s apparent willingness to go out of its way to accommodate Ashe’s tennis schedule went beyond his expectations. He decided to make the most of it before his superiors changed their minds. On Tuesday, the last day of February and his fifth day of military service, he defeated Clark Graebner for the Western title before returning to Indiana. Unable to reach New York in time for his opening round-robin match on Thursday, he convinced the Vanderbilt tournament officials to delay his first match until Saturday. Harried by all of this back-and-forth travel, he arrived in New York just in time to play back-to-back matches, one of which he somehow managed to win. During the next twenty-four hours, he played six matches in an attempt to catch up with the field. But on Sunday evening, he ran out of time and defaulted his final match in order to catch a 9:45 flight back to Indiana. Arriving in Indianapolis after midnight, he took an early morning bus to Fort Harrison, no doubt collapsing in exhaustion when he finally reached his barracks. A few hours later he stumbled into class for his first full day of instruction. Though accustomed to tight schedules and competing commitments, he had never experienced anything quite like his first ten days in the Army.
The previous year, the Vanderbilt tournament had shaken up his life in the span of a week as he impulsively proposed to Pat Battles. But he hadn’t expected so much excitement this time. Just a quiet send-off and perhaps a mock salute or two from his fellow competitors would have been fine. But his military status had driven him to attempt a balancing act that bordered on the impossible.1
He found time the following week to settle in at the fort. Yet a few days later he was off to Puerto Rico to participate in a tournament at the Caribe Hilton. With a week’s leave, he invited his fiancée to join him in San Juan, where she could meet Pasarell, who was home on spring break from his last semester at UCLA. Ironically, the trip actually ended his romantic entanglement. “We took separate rooms,” he recalled, “and planned to have a nice week while I played the tournament. But I began to have second thoughts about getting married.” Before the week was over, he told Pat he couldn’t go through with the marriage. Though disappointed, she was not surprised. Their courtship had been tepid from the beginning, and it was obvious he had never fully committed to the relationship. Describing the breakup years later, Arthur confessed: “Pat took it all rather calmly, more calmly than I did.” For a time, he “felt ashamed of the breakup,” knowing how much embarrassment it brought to both families. But he soon “realized it had been the right decision.”2
In truth, after his return from Puerto Rico Arthur was so busy with tennis and his data-processing classes that he didn’t have much time to think about his love life. As March drew to a close, he was back on the court, first in Indianapolis, where he faced Koch again in an exhibition of international team competition, and later at Brookville on Long Island. At Brookville, he finished first in the round-robin format, dispatching a series of formidable challengers including Froehling, Scott, and McKinley. Before rushing back to base, he had just enough time to accept the winner’s trophy from the tournament director and former University of Vi
rginia tennis ace Sherry Snyder, who would later help him found the NJTL.3
Ashe’s first two months of active duty would have been even more hectic if he had participated in the first round of the 1967 Davis Cup competition. But when his teammates traveled to Trinidad in late April for the opening Americas Zone tie against the British West Indies team, he stayed behind in Indiana. MacCall—who felt his team had little to fear from the West Indians—decided to save Arthur for the future rounds. While the Army had promised his availability for Davis Cup play, the nervous captain knew there were limits to the amount of leave the Army was willing to grant. With Ralston out of the picture. Arthur was the obvious choice to fill the number one singles slot. The safest path was to let others carry the load in Trinidad, leaving Arthur to join the team in the second round, when the likely opponent would be the powerful Mexican team. The Americans eliminated the West Indians without losing a match, confirming the wisdom of MacCall’s strategy.
While the American squad was vanquishing the West Indians, Arthur was spending his final days at Fort Harrison. With the completion of his nine weeks of training, he was ready to begin his assignment at West Point. But the Army responded favorably to a special thirty-day leave request from MacCall and postponed the West Point reporting for a month. The second-round tie against Mexico was scheduled for the last week in May, and the long leave gave Arthur time to prepare to face Rafael Osuna and the Mexicans’ newest star, nineteen-year-old Marcelo Lara. Since the tie would take place on slow clay in Mexico City, preparation figured to be especially important. Arthur spent most of May getting ready for the Mexicans, but he also took some time to conduct an inner-city clinic in Brooklyn and to visit with relatives still puzzling over why he had canceled his engagement.4
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