Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  In this roundabout way, Arthur expressed his continuing reservations about radical protest and revolutionary change. In the wake of his controversial speech the week before, he was on his way to becoming an activist, though definitely one with a light touch. At the end of the month, he was noticeably reticent when asked if he would boycott Davis Cup play that involved South Africa. “I’m thinking about it,” he told reporters, “but I want to stay within the confines of Army policy. I’ll do what they let me do. But even so, I’m wondering if it would be worth it. If I’m one lone voice in the wilderness, it might not accomplish anything.”26

  Ashe would never relinquish his attachment to careful deliberation and rhetorical understatement, even when the issue at hand tapped his deepest convictions. But in an important sense the Church of the Redeemer speech and its immediate aftermath represented a major milestone in his life. Although he had no way of appreciating its full significance at the time, his later reflections emphasized the importance of the speech and the Army’s subsequent disapproval. For one of the first times in his life, he was playing the role of a rebel. Clearly, it was not a role that he could assume with complete comfort, at least not yet, and for a while he had second thoughts about his public speaking debut. “After the rebuff,” he recalled in 1981, “I felt I had been used by the Reverend Rogers. But I gradually admitted to myself that I had a strange sense of satisfaction for speaking out. I knew there would be trouble if I made the speech, but I accepted the rebuke as my way of paying dues to the cause. After all, I had done nothing in the sixties but play tennis and enjoy life.” In his view, “the speech released a great deal of anxiety and guilt I had repressed and marked the beginning of a period of political activity—in and out of tennis. I became more serious and started to notice political elements I had ignored in certain situations.”

  One expression of Arthur’s new approach to politics was his deepening concern about South African apartheid and the movement to combat it. On April 12, he was one of sixty-five athletes to endorse the American Committee on Africa (ACOA)’s call for an Olympic boycott to protest South Africa’s inclusion in the 1968 summer games. Led by former CORE activist George Houser, ACOA was in the forefront of the small but growing American anti-apartheid movement. Another example of Arthur’s rising political consciousness was a greater concern for what he was witnessing at West Point. Suddenly he saw the rough treatment of first-year cadets in a different light, and over time he came to deplore the “beast barracks,” where the Army employed “an intensely dehumanizing experience designed to break them down so they could be reconstructed into military men.”27

  He was also developing a profound respect for Martin Luther King, whose fight for freedom and equality had recently expanded into the realm of economic justice. Captivated by the Memphis sanitation workers’ struggle, Ashe suffered a devastating blow on April 4 when King was gunned down. He learned of the assassination while driving across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan, and the image of shock and horror stayed with him for years. “I wanted to pull over,” he remembered, “but I was in the middle of the bridge. Once I got off, I pulled to a stop on Amsterdam Avenue. A number of black people had done the same thing and were listening to the bulletins. Some got out of their cars and talked about the shooting. Their reactions ranged from sorrow to anger.”

  Arthur felt the loss deeply and personally, having established a relationship with King earlier in the year. While they had never met, the Nobel Prize winner and civil rights icon had sent him a warm letter on February 7. “Dear Mr. Ashe,” the letter began, and the brief text that followed moved from a boilerplate expression of gratitude—a “personal appreciation and that of my co-workers in SCLC for your expression of support and solidarity in the fight for justice, freedom, and dignity for all people in this country”—to a more intimate reference to the Reverend Rogers’s belief in Arthur’s potential value to the civil rights struggle. Rogers, whom King described as “a long-time and staunch freedom fighter,” had “spoken to us several times of your basic devotion and dedication to the movement.” “Your eminence in the world of sports and athletics,” King continued, “gives you an added measure of authority and responsibility. It is heartening indeed when you bring these attributes to the movement.” The letter ended with a tantalizing invitation to a personal meeting sometime in the future, followed by the salutation: “Yours for freedom, Martin Luther King, Jr.”

  Filed away with Arthur’s most cherished possessions, the letter later served as a comforting reminder of King’s grace and power to inspire. While he never felt worthy of consideration as one of King’s lieutenants, he did his best to follow the civil rights leader’s lead, partly through his friendship with the Reverend Andrew Young, whom he met in 1970 during a chance encounter at LaGuardia Airport. Young was running for a seat in Congress representing Atlanta, and Ashe impulsively offered the former King aide a $500 campaign contribution. He would later make more substantial, nonmonetary contributions to the cause, but this early gesture was his way of reconnecting with the spirit of the fallen leader whom Young had served so well.28

  In November 1970, Ashe was disappointed when Young lost his congressional race. By that point, he had developed a deep interest in politics, having cut his political teeth two years earlier when he became absorbed in Robert Kennedy’s run for the White House. Spurred on by Donald Dell’s close friendship with the Kennedys, he supported the former attorney general in every way he could. They first met in Washington in 1967, and in early June 1968, he saw him again in Sacramento after Ashe and some of his teammates participated in the Central California championships. The American squad was still in California after sweeping a tie against Mexico in Berkeley the previous week, and Dell seized the opportunity to introduce his players to the man he hoped would become the next president of the United States. Ashe would meet President Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey when the Davis Cup team was invited to the White House later in the year, but meeting the charismatic brother of a departed hero was one of the greatest thrills of his life. For someone who had grown up under the yoke of Jim Crow, Johnson’s folksy Southern twang was off-putting, and Humphrey’s continuing vacillation on the war was problematic at best. But Ashe felt comfortable with the political style and rhetoric of a Northeastern liberal like Kennedy, especially after the New York senator espoused a progressive platform promising an end to the war as well as serious attention to the plight of the urban poor.

  After the encounter in Sacramento, Kennedy traveled on to Los Angeles while the Davis Cup squad flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, to prepare for an upcoming tie with Ecuador. The Americas Zone final began on June 7, but by that time the nation was reeling from the shock of RFK’s assassination two days earlier. When Ashe’s newfound political hero died twenty-six hours after being gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan, a young Palestinian Arab with Jordanian citizenship, he could hardly believe it. Barely two months after the loss of Dr. King, the Democrat with the best chance to put some of King’s ideas into practice was gone. Dell was devastated and Ashe only slightly less so, as the U.S. Davis Cup tried to keep its composure during the attempt to avenge the unexpected loss to Ecuador the previous year.

  Despite the unfortunate circumstances—before the opening match Ashe confessed to being “extremely nervous”—the Americans won both singles matches on the opening day. On the second day, with Pasarell substituting for captain Dell, who was in New York attending Kennedy’s funeral, Graebner and Lutz defeated Pancho Guzmán and Miguel Olvera to clinch the tie. The next day Graebner and Ashe completed the sweep with two singles victories, bringing Arthur’s Davis Cup singles record to 16–2.

  Back in early May, Arthur had begun his 1968 Davis Cup winning streak in the opening round tie against the British Caribbean team. Held at Richmond’s Byrd Park—formerly a forbidden venue for Ashe—the tie produced little drama on the court as the Americans won all five matches with ease. Dell had chosen the Byrd Park venue as part of his
plan to reduce the Davis Cup’s elitist, private club orientation. As he explained to reporters on the eve of the tie, “We’re taking tennis to the people and putting the matches where they can be seen and appreciated.” Despite its history as a whites-only facility, the recently desegregated Byrd Park represented a step toward democratization. But as Dell well knew, playing there would be an emotional experience for his friend. Arthur’s earlier exclusion from the park still rankled and would continue to be a sore subject for years to come. “What infuriated me most,” he wrote in 1981, “was having a white Richmond type come up to me somewhere in the world and say, ‘I saw you play at Byrd Park when you were a kid.’ Nobody saw me at Byrd Park, because when I was a kid it was for whites only.”

  For Arthur, playing the March 1968 tie at Byrd Park was definitely bittersweet, though he tried to make the best of it. In his judgment, “it was a homecoming of sorts, because the city made a big deal of my return. I could have held a grudge for all the previous injustices Richmond blacks had suffered, but I began to forgive the city for its past injuries. After all, they were trying to right some of those wrongs. I felt that I should meet them more than halfway. I had an obligation to make things better for those who would follow me.” Besides, he added: “My family still lived there.”29

  After Richmond, Sacramento, and Charlotte, the next round of Davis Cup play was scheduled for Cleveland in mid-August, when the Americans would face Spain, the last obstacle before the expected confrontation with the defending champion Australians. Fortunately, Arthur and his teammates had two months to prepare, and thanks to West Point’s increasingly liberal leave policy, he was now on the court far more often than he was in his office. Army officials had been told that the United States had the best chance in years to win the Davis Cup, and they did not want to do anything to hurt their national team’s chances. America’s image in the world was bad enough, they reasoned, without squandering an opportunity to enhance the nation’s prestige away from the battlefield.

  By the summer of 1968 Arthur had become too important as a symbol of African American success to be sacrificed at the altar of military discipline and duty. Some of the parents of the young men who were fighting and dying in Vietnam probably questioned the fairness of this arrangement, but Army officials were willing to take the heat in the hope that winning the Davis Cup would justify their decision to treat Arthur as they did. With a brother fighting on the front lines, Arthur had considerable sympathy for the parents who objected to his special status. But he felt the most appropriate response to this perceived inequity was to expend every ounce of his energy to achieve athletic excellence. His personal challenge, whether he liked it or not, was to represent his race, and more importantly, his nation with all the integrity and dignity he could muster.30

  All of this was swirling around in Arthur’s head when he and Pasarell left for England on June 10, the day after their emotional victory in Charlotte. He hadn’t played at Wimbledon since the summer of 1965, when he had lost to Osuna in the fourth round. Now three years older and vastly more experienced, he was eager to see how far he could go on the English turf.

  In a pre-Wimbledon warm-up tournament in Bristol, he fought his way through a tough draw, winning the right to play Cliff Richey in the semifinals by beating the transplanted Hawaiian Jim Osborne in the quarters. Though Richey was playing well, his infamous temper got the best of him after several verbal altercations with the umpire Harry Evans. With the match even at one set apiece and with Arthur leading 3–2 in the third, the fiery Texan reacted to a questionable line call by swatting a ball into the stands in disgust and vowing to do it again in defiance of Evans’s warning. A heated exchange followed, which soon led to Richey’s disqualification by tournament referee Hugh Kerridge, who pronounced Arthur the winner.

  The next day, with Richey still fuming and his Davis Cup teammates trying to calm him down, Arthur defeated Graebner to win the tournament. Taking advantage of a teammate’s outburst was not the way he wanted to win the title, and certainly not the way to build solidarity among the American Davis Cuppers. But he went on to the Queen’s Club tournament in London with hopes for a less volatile experience. For him, as for most of the American amateurs entered in the draw, the 1968 Queen’s Club competition would be the first Open tournament of his career. Many of the world’s best pros were there, including the number one seed Laver and his fellow Aussies Roy Emerson and John Newcombe. It was an intimidating field, to say the least, and no one was all that surprised when Arthur was eliminated in the second round by the fleet-footed Dutchman Tom Okker.31

  Crushing Okker 6–1 in the first set before fading, Arthur had reason to think that with a little luck he might fare better at Wimbledon. But when he read through the list of names in the Wimbledon draw, he wasn’t so sure. Thirty-two of the 128 entrants were pros, accounting for thirteen of the sixteen seeds. The number one seed and the odds-on favorite to win the men’s singles title was Laver, who had won the title in 1961 and 1962, the last two years he had played in the tournament as an amateur. The highest seeded amateur, Manolo Santana, the 1966 champion, was #6, and the only other amateurs among the seeded players were Okker at #12 and Ashe at #13.

  Ashe’s chances of beating the higher-seeded pros seemed remote, and his situation appeared to get much worse after he strained a leg muscle during a warm-up with Pancho Gonzales. Arthur pronounced himself “70 per cent fit,” but no one thought that was good enough to win the tournament or even get past the first or second round. With nothing to lose, he decided to relax and enjoy what time he had on the grass surface he had come to love. This low-key approach seemed to work, as he quickly dispatched Eduardo Zuleta of Ecuador in the first round, dropping only six games in three quick sets. In the second and third rounds he played even better, beating the tough young Egyptian Ismael El Shafei and the Swede Ove Bengston in straight sets.

  The competition got much tougher in the fourth round when Ashe faced his first professional opponent, Newcombe, the defending Wimbledon champion. Prior to the Ashe-Newcombe match, one of several pitting an amateur against a professional, Fred Tupper of The New York Times took stock of the situation. “It’s been a long time coming, this first open Wimbledon,” he wrote. “At the halfway stage, it still prompts a question that has the tennis world agog in anticipation. Who is to win it? Will it be professional or amateur?” With five of the thirteen pros already eliminated, eight amateurs were still in the hurt, including Ashe, Graebner, Okker, and Tom Edlefsen. Of the eight, Okker seemed to have the best chance of advancing beyond the quarterfinals. But Ashe, gaining confidence with every round, had other ideas.

  Newcombe, seeded fourth, was in top form and had every reason to believe he would dominate Ashe in their quarterfinal match. But Ashe played the match of his young life, serving 19 aces and hitting clutch shot after clutch shot. Before the Aussie pro could catch his breath, the American amateur had won the first two sets. After Newcombe came back to take the next two sets, it looked like Ashe might fall short in the end. But somehow he summoned up the stamina and skill to stymie Newcombe’s closing parries. Leading 5–2, he nervously squandered three match points in the eighth game, but a few minutes later he served out the match with an ace. In the first Open Wimbledon, he had made history by conquering the defending champion.

  As it turned out, the historic fairy tale did indeed end in the next round when Ashe faced the prohibitive favorite Laver. Playing on July 3, a week before Ashe’s twenty-fifth birthday, the two semifinalists—one right-handed, one left-handed, one black, one white—presented the Centre Court crowd with a study in contrast. But both left the court with a sense of genuine satisfaction. Laver won in straight sets, proving he was the better player that day, and he then went on to win his third Wimbledon singles title. For Ashe there was no title and no prize money. Yet the boost to his confidence was incalculable. He now knew he could compete with the best players in the world, pro or amateur. Graebner enjoyed a similar boost, losing narrowly to Sa
ntana in the other semifinal match, and two months later they would build upon their near misses at Wimbledon by waging an epic semifinal match at the first U.S. Open.32

  Before returning to the United States, both Ashe and Graebner received congratulations from their proud Davis Cup captain. But Ashe received something more from Dell, something that would affect the rest of his life. Earlier in the week during a break in a practice session, the two men had what Arthur later described as their “first lengthy conversation about life and tennis.” Dell was older and presumably wiser, but he had the wisdom to listen as his young friend revealed his feelings. Arthur talked about the controversy surrounding his recent flirtation with activism, the speech in Washington, and his evolving views on Harry Edwards’s proposed Olympic boycott and South Africa.

  The land of apartheid, in particular, was on his mind, primarily due to a disturbing conversation with Cliff Drysdale two weeks earlier during the Queen’s Club tournament. As Arthur recalled the scene, a group of players was sitting in the Queen’s clubhouse “talking primarily about the possibility of forming an association of professional tennis players, a kind of trade union, and about the reception we could expect from various governing bodies around the world.” Suddenly, Drysdale, a native South African, interjected that he was excited about playing in the first South African Open in the fall. Turning almost reflexively to Arthur, he counseled with a smile, “They’d never let you play.” Startled, Arthur asked rather innocently, “is it that bad?” In response, Drysdale backed up a little bit, acknowledging that the South African Lawn Tennis Union “would let you play.” “I’m pretty sure of that,” he added. “In fact, they would love to have you come. But you would need a visa to enter South Africa, and the government would never let you have one.” After Arthur asked incredulously if Drysdale was serious, the South African suggested: “Try them. You’ll see.”