Part of his preparation involved getting acclimated to extreme exertion in a hot climate, a goal that took him to Atlanta during the first week in May. Joined by the entire American squad, he played in the Atlanta Invitational tournament, where he was the top seed. This was his first appearance in a Deep South city, and he was understandably nervous about how he would be received in a state that had just elected the white supremacist demagogue Lester Maddox to the governorship. Well aware that virtually all of Atlanta’s private tennis facilities still barred blacks from membership, he feared the worst. But he made it through the week without any major incidents; playing well, he reached the semifinals before faltering against Marty Riessen. Thankful for the supportive presence of Pasarell, who knew what his close friend was going through, he left town with a sigh of relief and renewed confidence that he could face any challenge, even in the haunted land of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara.5
By the time Arthur and his teammates arrived in Mexico City, both his nerves and his backhand were under control. A week earlier MacCall had announced that the second lieutenant on leave from West Point would play the first singles match against the Mexicans on May 27. Having withheld Arthur from the singles competition on the clay courts of Porto Alegre with disastrous results, he was not going to make the same mistake again. The previous August, while Arthur was still at Fort Lewis, the American Davis Cup team had defeated the Mexicans 5–0 on a hard court surface in Cleveland. But MacCall anticipated that it would be much more difficult to beat the Mexicans on their familiar home clay.
Despite MacCall’s concern, the high altitude in Mexico City actually lessened the Mexicans’ advantage. While the light air at 7,400 feet posed a conditioning challenge for anyone accustomed to lower altitudes, it also quickened the clay, making the pace not nearly “as slow as it is on this surface at sea level.” Osuna admitted as much the day before the tie began. “The game here is different from tennis anywhere else,” he assured reporters. “It is different from clay and it is different from grass and cement.”
Whatever the balance of advantages and disadvantages, the tie did not begin well for the Americans. In the first singles match played at the cavernous Chapultepec Sports Center, Osuna fought back from a 2–1 set deficit and a service break in the fourth to overcome Richey. Though eight years younger than Osuna, the Texan ran out of gas by the middle of the fourth set, losing nine games in a row and dropping the fifth set 6–1. Down 1–0 as a team, the Americans looked to Ashe to even the score in the second match against Marcelo Lara. Having never played against the young Mexican, or even seen him play, he did not know what to expect. Within minutes of taking the court, he realized Lara was no pushover. With the crowd urging him on, Lara hit several backhand winners that seemed to unnerve Ashe, who served up several double faults before a rain delay gave him time to regain his composure. Eventually he gained control, winning the first set 7–5 and the second 6–2. Lara came back strong in the third, but after a second rain delay Ashe closed out the match 7–5. The team score was now tied.
On the second day, Graebner and Riessen won a surprisingly easy victory over Osuna and his young partner, Joaquín Loyo-Mayo, putting the American team into the lead going into the final day. Facing Osuna in the second round of singles matches, Ashe got off to a strong start in the first set and withstood a spirited comeback by Osuna to win 8–6. After that Osuna faded noticeably; unable to counter Ashe’s big serve and exhausted by several long rallies, he managed to win only five games in the last two sets. Looking fresh without “the slightest sign of fatigue,” according to one observer, a smiling Ashe marked the victory by walking over to the American bench and embracing MacCall, who must have been the happiest man in the stadium. For the time being, at least, the monkey was off his back, and the quest for the Cup was alive and well. A few minutes later Richey and Lara took the court to play the now meaningless final singles match, but a violent rain and hailstorm postponed the formal end of the tie until the following morning. Richey eventually won the match in five sets, but Ashe was not there to see it. With his leave about to expire, he rushed to the airport to board his return flight to New York.6
The next round would be played in mid-June at the Pancho Segura Tennis Club in Guayaquil, Ecuador, but Ashe had already informed MacCall it was highly unlikely he would be available. During the month of June, he would be busy getting squared away and learning his new job at West Point, and it was doubtful the Army would grant him another extended leave only three weeks after his return from Mexico. Neither he nor MacCall expected his absence in Guayaquil to pose much of a problem. Ecuador, in only its sixth year of Davis Cup play, had never had much success in international competition and had only reached the Americas Zone final by upsetting Argentina. So it didn’t appear that Ashe’s presence would be necessary for the heavily favored Americans to advance to the next round.
Even so, MacCall, who knew from his bitter experience in Brazil that anything could happen on clay, decided to request another leave for his top singles player. To his surprise, the Army granted his request on June 8, nine days before the opening matches in Guayaquil. Arthur soon joined his teammates in Ecuador, but not before honoring his commitment to play Pasarell in a high school stadium in the Bronx to help launch a Philip Morris–backed inner-city tennis program. In characteristic fashion, he was trying to do it all, keeping faith with his principles while representing his nation and advancing his tennis career.
Arthur had never been in Ecuador, and he was a bit surprised by the gritty character of the port city of Guayaquil. Pancho Segura, for whom the city’s prime tennis venue was named, had told him a few things about his home country during their sessions at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. But he had never mentioned the Ecuadorans’ embattled sense of national pride born of colonial exploitation and condescension from the larger states of South America. In the nation’s tennis circles and elsewhere there was a passion to be taken seriously and to achieve respectful inclusion in the international scene. They had been waiting for a breakthrough, and the Davis Cup battle with the mighty Americans provided them with a golden opportunity to enhance their national profile, as Arthur and his teammates would soon discover.
The tie began well enough for the Americans, with Richey overpowering Ecuador’s second-best player, twenty-one-year-old Francisco “Pancho” Guzmán, in four sets. But the expected American victory in the second singles match, which pitted Ashe against twenty-seven-year-old Miguel Olvera, was in doubt from the opening games of the second set. After winning the first set 6–4, Ashe lost control of his normally reliable serve, committing a cluster of double faults that provided Olvera with an opening. Seven years earlier, as the first unseeded winner of the Cincinnati Masters tournament, the Ecuadoran had shown flashes of brilliance, and he seemed to return to his top form against Ashe. The slightly built, almost gaunt Olvera had only recently recovered from a serious bout of tuberculosis, yet the favored American was down two sets to one by the time a local curfew suspended play at 6 p.m. That night Ashe huddled with MacCall, and Gonzales to come up with a strategy to counter Olvera’s momentum. But when the match resumed the next morning, Arthur was uncharacteristically flat and unable to quiet the crowd as it cheered Olvera’s crisp and accurate shotmaking. The final score in the fourth and decisive set was 6–2, leaving Ashe with his first defeat in nine Davis Cup singles matches. Overcome with emotion, Danny Carrera, the Ecuadorans’ captain, raced onto the court and tried to jump the net, but caught his foot on the tape and ended up with a broken leg.
The next day, with their injured captain cheering from the sidelines, Olvera and Guzmán lost the first set at love before rallying to win three of the next four. Suddenly the American squad was down 2–1 and in danger of suffering one of the biggest upsets in Davis Cup history. To avoid elimination the Americans would now have to win both single matches on the final day of play. After a sleepless night punctuated by vomiting related to a stomach disorder, Arthur took the court against G
uzmán in the first match of the second round of singles. Despite some lingering queasiness, he quickly established his dominance, winning the first set 6–0. But Guzmán came back to win the next two sets 6–4, 6–2. Fighting for his life, Arthur took advantage of Guzmán as the Ecuadoran tired in the fourth, winning for a second time at love. At this point, the extreme swings in momentum had created a bizarre stalemate, leaving the frenzied crowd with an almost unbearable string of highs and lows as the match and the tie hung in the balance.
In the end, Guzmán proved to be the man of the hour, outlasting Arthur 6–3 in the final set. The Americans watched in stunned silence as deliriously happy fans stormed the court and carried Guzmán around the arena on their shoulders. Moments later, officials of the Segura club doused their hero in champagne, kicking off a celebration that lasted into the night and beyond. The next morning the headline in one of Ecuador’s most popular dailies, El Universo, trumpeted the shocking upset as “La Victoria para Historia,” which even the linguistically challenged Americans could decipher as “A Victory for History.” Later in the day, Harry Hopman chimed in with the speculation that Ashe had not played nearly enough in recent weeks “to bring him to his peak.” “Obviously,” the Aussie captain concluded, “his army duties have restricted his match practice and general condition.”7
Such statements put Ashe in a difficult position. He did not want to make excuses or blame the Army for a weekend of mediocre play; and with more than eighteen months of service to go, he did not want to do anything to endanger the gentleman’s agreement that split his time between tennis and his military routine. Yet he knew better than anyone that there was probably some truth to Hopman’s observation. As he later conceded, it was not easy to navigate the “delicate path between my roles as Lieutenant Arthur Ashe, U.S. Army, and Arthur Ashe, tennis player.” When the Ecuadoran tie was over, his teammates flew off to Wimbledon while he returned to his duties at West Point.8
Arthur was sad to miss Wimbledon, but considering the alternatives, he did not view his commitment to the Army as a heavy burden. With so many of his fellow soldiers slogging through the jungles of Vietnam, he didn’t feel right questioning the terms of his arrangement or complaining about his relatively cushy duty on the banks of the Hudson. After he got the hang of it, his life at West Point was at worst tolerable and at best a good fit with his personal interests and skills. He was good at his job at the data processing center, and he enjoyed his collaboration with Coach Cullen and the late afternoon practice sessions with the freshman team. Relatively busy but hardly overworked, he had plenty of free time to read, listen to music, or take in a movie. He also had a new girlfriend, with two photographs of her proudly displayed on his work desk. Since his arrival at West Point he had accumulated a variety of new friends among the staff, and from the summer of 1968 on he enjoyed numerous weekend outings with his buddy Pasarell, who was serving as an enlisted man at Stewart Air Force Base, located a mere ten miles up the Hudson from the Military Academy. On other occasions, he visited relatives in New Jersey or Virginia, taking advantage of his return to the East Coast after six years west of the Mississippi.9
All in all, Arthur had few complaints about his circumstances in the weeks and months leading up to his twenty-fourth birthday. He and Pasarell were still ranked first and second in the nation, and the Army continued to keep a loose rein on his comings and goings. Spending pretty much the entire second half of July on the road, he traveled first to the National Clay Court Championships in Milwaukee, where he was the top seed and the defending champion. Fearing he would be a little rusty after six weeks away from the tour, he was surprised how easily he advanced through the field, ultimately meeting and defeating Riessen in the title match. Normally he would have left Milwaukee and circled back east to play in the Pennsylvania grass championships. But instead, at the Army’s insistence, he flew to Winnipeg, Manitoba, to represent the United States in the Pan American Games.10
The situation in Winnipeg was less than ideal, with the American tennis contingent missing virtually all of the nation’s top players. Arthur had no choice but to be there, but the rest of his peers were off playing the grass circuit, uninterested in participating in a struggling international competition dominated by track and field. “Of the two other American men there,” the sportswriter Frank Litsky pointed out, “one is ranked 36th nationally and the other is unranked. None of the three American women is ranked in the top 20.” Indeed, Arthur told Litsky that the team was a “joke,” though he did his best to soldier on. Eliminated from the medal competition in singles by Koch, he rebounded by teaming with twenty-year-old Janie Albert, the daughter of the famed Stanford quarterback Frankie Albert, to win the Gold Medal in Mixed Doubles.11
Following the Winnipeg appearance, Ashe’s competitive tennis would be limited to a few benefits and exhibition matches for the remainder of the year. With the defeated American Davis Cup team on hiatus until the following spring, there was less incentive for the Army to grant him leave. So for the better part of a year he stayed close to home. While he often practiced with the cadets at West Point in an effort to keep sharp, he had little chance to test himself against top-flight competition. One exception was the Nassau Tournament held on Long Island in mid-August, when he played and lost badly to Chuck McKinley in the quarterfinals. Adding insult to injury, The New York Times reporter covering the match remarked that Ashe had done pretty well for someone who is “only a week-end player now.”12
To Arthur’s dismay, he missed the 1967 U.S. National Championships at Forest Hills, a mere two-hour train ride from his bachelor officer’s quarters. Unable to secure a two-week leave that would allow him to play in the most important tournament of the year, he had to settle for a one-day pass and a special exhibition appearance. Joined by Emerson, Drysdale, and Osuna, he conducted a clinic for 1,800 kids from all over New York. The unprecedented event was cosponsored by several corporations, most notably the Pepsi-Cola Company and the Clark Gum Company division of the Philip Morris empire headed by Joe Cullman. Having already hired Osuna, Cullman was signaling to Ashe that the job offer they had discussed in 1966 was still on the table. Sharing a common commitment to inner-city youth and uplift through tennis instruction, the two men enjoyed a deepening relationship that would bear considerable fruit in the years to come.
Three weeks after the Forest Hills clinic, Ashe joined Froehling, Scott, and two other players for a two-day benefit tournament held at a high school in the town of Lawrence on the south shore of Long Island. To participate in the benefit, Ashe had to reorganize his work schedule and rush back and forth between West Point and the high school. But these small-scale charity events were becoming increasingly important to him. They made him feel good about himself and took some of the sting out of his temporary absence from competitive tennis. Moving from words to action, he had found a way to translate his tennis skills, and the social and economic opportunities they had afforded him, into community involvement. His memoir Advantage Ashe was released the same week as the Lawrence benefit, and he was beginning to regret some of the more conservative passages in the book. In a sense, his rising consciousness was moving so fast he couldn’t keep up with himself. Increasingly aware of the distance between his privileged life and the difficult circumstances facing the vast majority of African Americans, he was developing a determination to give back, not just to succeed. The transition from self-absorbed athlete to committed activist had begun.13
Ashe’s emerging consciousness of an imperfect social order in need of radical reform was not the only change affecting his life that year. As he adjusted to his growing awareness of the world beyond the baseline, as well as to the limits imposed by his military status, powerful forces were moving into position to change the game of tennis forever. In the halcyon decades to come, 1967 would be remembered as the seedtime of Open Tennis. After nearly a decade of false starts, a system compatible with the commercialization of modern sports was becoming a realistic prospect. The ag
e of the “shamateur” and the concomitant demonization of playing for money was finally coming to a close, heralding the impending arrival of a brave new world of opportunity for Ashe and other talented tennis players.14
Ironically, the man most responsible for this turn of events was Herman David, the chairman of the All England Club, generally considered the most hidebound of tennis institutions. A bona fide member of the British elite and a former captain of his nation’s Davis Cup team, David was determined to preserve Wimbledon’s status as one of the premier sporting events in the world, and surprisingly enough he was willing to dispense with tradition to do it. Alarmed by the failure of tennis to keep pace with the major sports that had already adapted to commercialization and the media opportunities of the television era, he became, in the journalist Richard Evans’s words, the “brave man” who “kicked Open Tennis out of the womb.”
David had been touting some form of Open Tennis since the late 1950s, but the birthing process began in earnest at Wimbledon in the spring of 1967 when he agreed to sponsor a professional tournament played on the hallowed grounds of Centre Court. Held in mid-July, the precedent-setting tournament featured eight of the world’s finest players—including Rod Laver, who had not played at Wimbledon since turning professional in 1962. The final match, a thrilling struggle between Laver and Ken Rosewall, drew a capacity crowd and was broadcast in color on the BBC2 television network. It was all a huge success, and the public’s obvious enthusiasm and the sizable profits gained from the event were more than enough to convince David and many of his colleagues on the British Lawn Tennis Association’s (LTA) central committee that the time had come to initiate a new, more inclusive era of competitive tennis.
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