By November, David had gathered enough support to push through a resolution committing the LTA to an Open Wimbledon in 1968. The decision shook the tennis establishment to its foundation as David declared in so many words that the revolution had begun. As Evans later paraphrased the declaration: “The All England Club Championships would be open to all categories of player and that if the ILTF didn’t like it, they could lump it.” “From that moment on,” Evans continued, “life in tennis was never quite the same again.”15
The overall reaction of the various national tennis federations was mixed, but the support for radical change gathered considerable momentum after Bob Kelleher, the former Davis Cup captain who had just ascended to the presidency of the USLTA, convinced a majority of delegates at the USLTA’s national meeting to empower him “to break with the ILTF if necessary.” This was a brash move, considering that the British LTA was already under the threat of expulsion, but Kelleher’s diplomatic skills proved decisive when he traveled to Paris for a special ILTF meeting in early March. At that crucial meeting, he worked out a tentative compromise that ratified national autonomy on the issue of Open Tennis.
An unfortunate element of the compromise, one that would later complicate the implementation of the new system, was acceptance of a formula that placed players in four separate categories ranging from full-blown professional to registered (or “authorized”) player. The creation of the latter category, which stipulated that certain players could only accept prize money at a limited number of tournaments, represented a desperate attempt by traditionalists to hang on to an ethos of amateurism controlled by the national federations. Even with this complication, however, the basic agreement coming out of the Paris meeting supported the idea of Open Tennis, an advance ratified at a second ILTF meeting at the end of the month. Faced with the prospect of a full-scale revolt by the powerful British, American, and Swedish federations, the delegates at the second meeting approved a plan for twelve experimental Open tournaments in 1968.16
Ashe, like everyone else in the tennis world, watched with amazement as this drama unfolded. While he still had a year of military service to go, his plans for the future now had to be reevaluated in light of the extraordinary developments of the past six months. Ranked second among American amateurs at the beginning of the year, just behind Pasarell, he stood to gain from Open Tennis—if he could regain the level of play he had reached before entering the Army. Not yet twenty-five, he had every reason to believe his best years were ahead of him, even though the competition from younger players was getting stiffer. At the Sugar Bowl tournament in New Orleans in late December, he had barely survived his opening round match against the reigning NCAA singles champion from USC, twenty-year-old Bob Lutz. When he faced the twenty-eight-year-old Yugoslavian star Niki Pilic in the title match, he felt relieved to be playing someone with a few years on him.17
Ashe managed to defeat Pilic, but he worried he was losing ground every week he languished at West Point. Some rivals—like Ralston, Newcombe, and Roche—had already turned professional, and the remaining amateurs had the advantage of playing week after week against tough competition. Fortunately for Ashe, he would do far less languishing during the winter and spring of 1968 than he had expected. Benefiting from a very liberal leave policy, he spent much of January and February playing in a series of tournaments that took him from Puerto Rico to Long Island to Richmond, where he won the singles title on his third try—and later to Philadelphia, Salisbury, and upstate New York’s Kiamesha Lake resort.
In between the Salisbury and Kiamesha tournaments, Arthur stopped at West Point just long enough to learn he was being promoted to first lieutenant. March was only slightly less hectic as he traveled to California for the Pacific Coast Doubles tournament before ending the month with appearances at the Mexico City International Championships and the Madison Square Garden Challenge matches in New York City. In the final match of the Madison Square Garden tournament, he defeated Emerson in straight sets, in what turned out to be the Australian’s last amateur competition. The day after the final, Emerson signed a pro contract with George MacCall’s recently organized National Tennis League (NTL), a rival to a similar pro tour associated with Lamar Hunt, the Texas oil baron who had helped to found the American Football League in 1959.18
In 1967, Hunt joined forces with the New Orleans promoter Dave Dixon to form a new professional tour known as World Championship Tennis (WCT). Offering an unprecedented level of prize money, WCT would have a major influence on the evolution of Open Tennis. The new age began with the signing of a cluster of players known as the “Handsome Eight,” a talented group that included three of the four semifinalists from the 1967 Wimbledon singles competition. Bankrolled by Hunt, WCT held its first tournament in Sydney in January 1968 and followed up a month later with its first American tournament, held in Hunt’s adopted hometown of Kansas City.
A spate of WCT tournaments soon followed, and when the first event of the Open era was held at Bournemouth, England, in late April, Roche, Newcombe, Drysdale, and the other members of the Handsome Eight were off playing pro tennis somewhere else. The quality of the draw at Bournemouth did not match the significance of the occasion, and most of the professionals present were affiliated with the NTL and George MacCall, who had abandoned amateur tennis and the Davis Cup wars with obvious relief. There was considerable interest in how the amateurs would fare against professionals, especially after two of the world’s best pros, Roy Emerson and Pancho Gonzales, lost to Mark Cox—an unheralded twenty-four-year-old left-hander from Cambridge. In a later round Laver dispatched Cox in straight sets, avenging the pros’ honor, and the eventual tournament winner was Rosewall, who took away the Open era’s inaugural top prize of a little over £2,000.
Though paltry by the standards that would soon rule the game of tennis, Rosewall’s windfall represented a small fortune to Ashe, who had been earning less than $4,000 a year as a second lieutenant. The allure of financial gain had never been a primary motivating force for him, but he began to consider the option of turning professional once his military career was over. His primary reservation about committing to a future on the pro tour was uncertainty about how it would affect his eligibility for Davis Cup play. Under the current rules, professionals were barred from Davis Cup competition, and there was no clear indication that this rule would change. Sacrificing his right to represent his country was unthinkable for Ashe, especially after Donald Dell replaced MacCall as Davis Cup captain in March 1968.19
Five years older than Arthur, Dell had been a star collegiate player at Yale and a member of the American Davis Cup squads in 1961 and 1963. Their paths first crossed in 1964 at Wimbledon, but other members of the Dell family—Donald’s younger brother Dickie and their father—had known Arthur since the early days when Dickie and Arthur were competing in the same USLTA Junior tournaments. On at least one occasion, the Dells gave Arthur a ride back to Washington, where he caught a bus to Lynchburg. Dickie and Arthur kept in touch, and after Donald completed law school at the University of Virginia in 1963 and joined the tour, he and Arthur struck up a friendship that would change both of their lives. Donald had ambitions beyond the mastery of tennis and didn’t remain on the tour very long. Although he eventually developed an extremely successful career in sports management, he turned first to law and politics, securing a position as an aide to Sargent Shriver, the head of the Office of Equal Opportunity and the brother-in-law of the recently slain President John F. Kennedy. Eventually, as a member of the Kennedys’ inner circle, he became close to former attorney general Robert Kennedy, who asked him to serve as his advance man in California during the 1968 presidential primary campaign.
During the turbulent spring that saw President Johnson’s unexpected withdrawal from the race on March 31 and Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis five days later, Ashe’s and Dell’s like-minded politics, combined with their shared passion to reclaim the Davis Cup, drew them together. Dell encouraged his
friend to get more involved in politics, but he was not the only person pressing the young lieutenant to assume an activist stance.20
Two years earlier, the Reverend Jefferson Rogers, the pastor of the Church of the Redeemer, Presbyterian, in Washington, D.C., whom Arthur had known since childhood, had reentered his life after Rogers’s son had been barred from integrating the 1966 Mid-Atlantic tournament in Richmond. Over time Rogers became something of a father confessor as Arthur wrestled with the responsibility to speak out against social and racial injustice—and a morally questionable war in Southeast Asia that Dr. King had been condemning since 1965.
Ever since his arrival at West Point, Arthur had harbored doubts about the wisdom of waging an all-out war in Vietnam. In the spring of 1968, in the wake of the devastating Tet Offensive earlier in the year, he became disillusioned with the war effort. To him, the reason for fighting was too murky, and the cost in lives was just too high. “During one stretch,” he later recalled, “it seemed there was a funeral every day at West Point. I was saddened to see so many young men, so young they had not even been promoted to first lieutenant, brought back in boxes that reminded us of the consequences of our business. I never thought this war made sense.” Adding to his sadness was the obvious connection between the senselessness of the war and racial inequality. “Seeing the dead and knowing that a disproportionate number of young blacks were paying the ultimate price for faulty American policy,” he wrote in 1981, “moved me toward firm opposition to our involvement in Southeast Asia, even with my military status.”21
On issues ranging from war and peace to civil rights, the Reverend Rogers saw himself as a liberal counterpoint to the conservative counsel of Arthur Ashe Sr., whom he knew and didn’t especially like. He had come to regard Arthur Jr. as almost a surrogate son, even though he detected few signs of religious faith in his young friend. He knew all too well how stultifying the ritualistic but often empty emotionalism of some forms of African American religion could be—including, he suspected, the kind of religion Arthur had been exposed to in his youth. More than anything else, the reverend wanted to infuse him with the uplifting spirit of the Social Gospel, the powerful force that animated his own life. A towering bear of a man with a deep and mellifluous voice persuasive enough to suggest divine origin, Rogers possessed a natural charm that often proved irresistible to anyone ensnared in his moral orbit. Certainly this was the case with Arthur, who could not say no when the reverend asked him to address the Church of the Redeemer’s public forum on social issues.
After recovering from the shock of accepting an assignment well outside his comfort zone, Arthur decided to speak on the proper role and responsibilities of black athletes in the era of civil rights. The speech was scheduled for March 10, but several days before he traveled to Washington, The Washington Post, for whom he would soon be a special correspondent, ran a story with the provocative headline: “Ashe Becomes Activist, Plans Speech Here on Civil Rights.” That was embarrassing enough, but even worse was the story’s subheading: “Negro Tennis Star Emerges from Shell.”
By the time Arthur arrived at the Church of the Redeemer, he was as nervous as he had ever been. His anxiety turned into near panic when a smiling Reverend Rogers introduced him to the radical SNCC leader, Stokely Carmichael, who was scheduled to deliver his own speech to the forum the following week. Feeling “hemmed in,” as he later put it, between the ideology of Black Power and the constraints of being on active duty, he now feared his prepared remarks would alienate both ends of the political spectrum and probably embarrass his host in the process.
Since he had never given an extended speech in public before, his heart was in his throat as he began. Somehow the words came out, a bit halting at first, but eventually with rhythm and composure. Most of the speech proceeded as planned, nothing “revolutionary or militant,” just a straightforward discourse on the social responsibilities of black athletes. As he later recounted the message, he told the capacity crowd he believed “the black athlete, whether of average ability or a superstar, must make a commitment to his or her community and attempt to transform it.” Citing Bill Russell and Jackie Robinson as role models, he argued for a long-term strategy that recognized meaningful reform as a gradual process. “What we do today may or may not bear fruit until two or three generations,” he insisted. The most important thing was to begin the process in earnest, and to remain engaged over the long haul. He could have stopped there, and probably should have, but he couldn’t resist adding a few remarks about the negative effects of black laziness and complacency. “There is a lot we can do and we don’t do because we’re lazy,” he declared. “This may be brutal, but poverty is half laziness.” This seemingly gratuitous feint to the right raised more than a few eyebrows. But generally speaking the audience seemed to like what he had to say. At the end of the speech he received a standing ovation, and there were pats on the back and handshakes all around as he left the church.22
The next morning the Washington Post reporter covering the speech stressed Arthur’s candor, a virtue that did not impress his superiors at West Point. Upon his return to duty, he was subjected to a stern reprimand and a warning “not to make any more speeches of even a vaguely political nature.” In point of fact, West Point officials could have blocked his outburst in Washington if they had been more observant of his rising political consciousness. Back in late January, New York Times reporter Neil Amdur, later the coauthor of Ashe’s 1981 memoir, Off the Court, had published a lengthy article profiling the preparation for the Church of the Redeemer appearance. “This is the new Arthur Ashe: articulate, mature, no longer content to sit back and let his tennis racket do the talking,” Amdur announced, and Arthur concurred. “I guess I’m becoming more and more militant,” he told the reporter, who felt the need to add a caveat for his readers. “Ashe’s ‘militancy’ is subtle,” he explained, “like his sense of humor.” Later in the article, however, Amdur acknowledged that this subtlety had recently undergone a significant transformation. “Ashe’s confidence,” he assured his readers, “contrasts with the reticence associated with his past.”23
Solid proof that Arthur had indeed turned a corner in his slow march toward activism came a week later when he returned to the Church of the Redeemer to hear what Carmichael had to say. After the speech, Carmichael gave him “two pieces of advice: boycott the Davis Cup because of South Africa’s participation and buy a gun.” Ashe’s immediate reaction to the words of a true militant went unrecorded, but he later expressed admiration for Carmichael’s forthright advocacy of black insurgency. As he explained in 1992, “something of Stokely’s militancy may have rubbed off on me.” Despite important differences on a number of issues, there was a bond between them. “Viscerally, emotionally, I admired Carmichael,” he recalled. “His raw courage inspired me.”24
Earlier in the day, several hours before Carmichael’s speech, Arthur had joined Dell for a youth tennis clinic held in the gymnasium of McKinley High School, an inner-city school with an overwhelmingly black student body. After the two Davis Cuppers entertained 150 students with a dizzying exhibition of serve-and-volley tennis, Arthur gave an interview to Phil Finch, a young reporter for the Washington Daily News. “The second-ranked amateur in the U.S. and undoubtedly the best Negro tennis player in history,” Finch explained to his readers, was also “a man of startling candor who is quite aware of his position in life and quite unafraid to discuss it.” This was in keeping with the article’s headline, “Ashe Isn’t Afraid to Tell It Like It Is, Baby,” but Finch went on to emphasize the tennis star’s distinctive style of activism. As the admiring reporter put it, “He possesses an intriguing levelheadedness and states his case without the polemics that sometimes seem to have become associated with the civil rights movement, pro and con.”25
Confirming this point, Arthur did not flinch when Finch inquired about a proposed Olympic boycott being organized by controversial San Jose State sociology professor Harry Edwards. While Edwards wanted a b
oycott that would bring attention to racism in the United States, the primary issue at hand was apartheid-plagued South Africa’s probable readmission to the Olympics, a development that spurred the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa (SCSA) to call for a boycott. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) had barred South Africa from participation in the 1964 Tokyo games, and the SCSA wanted the ban to remain in place for the 1968 Mexico City games scheduled for October. So did a number of prominent African American athletes, including Ashe, Jackie Robinson, Bob Gibson, K. C. Jones, Dave Bing, and more than twenty others who signed a petition in early February. Despite this show of concern, on February 15 the IOC voted to reinstate the South Africans. Angered, the SCSA and its allies stepped up the pressure, forcing Ashe and others to decide just how far they wanted to go to make their point.
In his conversation with Finch, Arthur did not discuss the proposed African boycott. But he walked a fine line between support for Edwards’s boycott by African American athletes and skepticism that it would have much effect. “I think Edwards has shaken the guilty consciences of a lot of Negro athletes,” he told the reporter. “Take me, for example. Why should I complain? I’ve got it made, nothing to worry about. . . . Negro athletes have got to realize that they may be cheered during a game, but as soon as they take a shower, it’s just the same old story. So, I think Edwards is doing good, if only for bringing the problem before the public.” That said, Ashe warned: “there’s a bit of egoism involved. Everybody likes his name in the papers. And progress is going to come, too. It’s coming already. But it’s going to come piecemeal, despite all the shouting and demands for equality ‘now.’ ”
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