Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  When Arthur sat down with Dell two weeks later, Drysdale’s challenge was still burning in his mind, and the fire of indignation would continue to burn over the next five years until he finally obtained a South African visa. In the near term, Dell’s willingness to discuss this and related issues openly and honestly helped seal a personal bond that transcended race and political ideology. It was a bond that Arthur would treasure for the rest of his life, and the subsequent triumphs and adventures the two men shared had a lot do with the trust that solidified during the 1968 Wimbledon fortnight.

  Despite Dell’s preppy image, he and Arthur had more in common that most people realized. Like Arthur, he had experienced life-changing upward mobility, an ascent based on a first-class education made possible by the sacrifices of his lower-middle-class parents. During their seminal conversation at the first Open Wimbledon, he revealed that his parents had even “skipped much-needed dental work to send their kids through school.” This story, which Dell only learned as an adult, gave him new respect for his parents, and in turn his willingness to share the story with one of his players heightened Arthur’s respect for him. For much of his life, Arthur had yearned for true friendship based on mutual respect embedded in the emotional and intellectual tissue of head and heart, and in his relationship with Dell, as in his relationship with Charlie Pasarell, he had found such a friendship.33

  Nothing captured the meaning of Dell and Ashe’s friendship better than their common passion for the pursuit of the Davis Cup, and this passion would be on full display when the American squad took on Spain in mid-August. But first there would be five weeks of preparation, first in Sweden, a week later at the U.S. National Clay Court Championships in Milwaukee, and finally at the annual grass court tournaments in Haverford and South Orange.

  Ashe’s second visit to the Swedish resort town of Bastad, where he celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday in style, was every bit as satisfying as his first. The competition was stiff, with Graebner, Santana, and Koch in the draw, and the Swedish girls were as friendly and alluring as ever. Fortunately, Dell was there to keep his singles star out of trouble and make sure he spent at least some of his time on the practice court. Midway through the week, Dell and his doubles partner, Ion Tiriac of Romania, actually gave Ashe and Graebner a scare in the doubles competition before fading in the second set. For once, Ashe felt reasonably comfortable on clay, though the clay court specialist José Edison Mandarino of Brazil outlasted him in the quarterfinals.

  The only downside in Bastad for Ashe was the international reporters’ insistence on pressing him with essentially unanswerable questions about his future, and even more disturbingly, about South Africa. During and immediately after the Wimbledon fortnight, there was considerable speculation and more than a few rumors about lucrative professional contract offers being waved in the faces of Riessen, Okker, Graebner, and Ashe, either by WCT or its rival, MacCall’s NTL. While it was generally assumed Ashe would remain an amateur until after his discharge from the Army in February 1969, his attractiveness to professional recruiters was obvious.

  It was the questions about South Africa’s participation in Davis Cup competition that made him sigh the most. What would he do “if the United States had to face South Africa in the Davis Cup at Johannesburg?” His tentative answer was that he would probably give up his position on the U.S. squad. “Perhaps I better withdraw,” he told reporters on his first day in Bastad. “Maybe I risk violence because I’m a Negro. The white South Africans don’t like to watch a Negro on the court, and nonwhites don’t like me to appear together with whites. I don’t know what to do.” This would not be the last time Ashe found himself struggling with the dilemmas of engagement with South Africa. But at least he was beginning to recognize the importance of addressing the many issues related to apartheid and South Africa. All he asked, at this point, was enough time to figure out the best positions to adopt. He was already engaged, but not yet knowledgeable about the complexities of the South African situation.34

  Between his tennis future and the troubled state of the world, Arthur certainly had plenty to think about in the weeks after his return to the United States. His immediate challenge was to sharpen his game on the clay courts in Milwaukee. As a Southern boy, he felt like a stranger in the Midwest, but he had always fared pretty well in Milwaukee, where he had actually won the tournament in 1967. As the defending champion, he had high hopes for a second singles title, but he ran into the equivalent of a Chilean buzz saw in the third round. After winning the first set against Patricio Cornejo and holding a match point in the eighteenth game of the second, he lost his edge and his chance to advance. He did better in the doubles, making it all the way to the semifinals before he and Richey were upended by the tournament favorites Stan Smith and Bob Lutz.35

  The penultimate warm-up before the tie against the Spanish took place at the Merion Cricket Club. On the first day of the tournament, Ashe received a boost when the mid year “Tennis Player of the Year” standings were released. According to the ballots cast by an international panel of eleven sportswriters, he was the fourth best player in the world with only the three top Aussies—Laver, Rosewall, and Roche—ahead of him. Another powerful Aussie—Newcombe—finished fifth in the balloting. Strikingly, Ashe was the only amateur in the top five; the next highest amateurs were Okker and Graebner at #7 and #8.

  The entire American Davis squad was at Merion, and most, including Ashe, were happy to be back on grass. Ashe was in top form, vanquishing the Indian Davis Cup star Premjit Lall in the quarterfinals and the Australian Allan Stone in the semis. At the same time, he and his partner Riessen were advancing through the doubles field, hoping to get by the top-seeded team of Smith and Lutz in the semifinals. After Riessen defeated the South African Ray Moore in the other singles semifinal, the doubles partners faced each other in the title match. All during the week, there had been rumors that Riessen planned to sign a WCT contract as soon as the tournament concluded, and at one point the former Northwestern star said plainly, “I want to make a living playing tennis,” suggesting the rumors were accurate. All of this drew attention to the match between the two friends.

  Riessen had never had much success in his singles matches against Arthur, and the 1968 Merion final was no exception. Playing in front of an overflow crowd of 3,500, Arthur ran over his doubles partner—with whom he would have to finish a suspended doubles semifinal later in the day. Punctuated by 14 service aces, it was one of the most impressive performances of Arthur’s career. “I think he played the best I’ve ever seen him play,” Riessen remarked after the match. “I’ve never seen so many balls go by me when I thought I had a chance.” A few minutes later, he was back on the court to complete the doubles match against Smith and Lutz, which he and Arthur eventually won thanks to a hand injury to Lutz, who had to retire. The biggest development of the day, however, was the professional contract Riessen signed that afternoon. The pro tour now had “The Handsome Eight plus One,” with plans for the future addition of Okker, Graebner, and Ashe. All of this left Dell with a sinking feeling, since the current rules of Open Tennis did not allow professionals to participate in Davis Cup competition.

  The dismal prospect of eventually losing his best players to the professional tour gave Dell more than a few sleepless nights. But his immediate challenge was to complete his team’s preparation for the tie against Santana and a tough Spanish squad. He had hoped to have his entire team on hand for the final warm-up tournament in South Orange, but a dental emergency put Arthur temporarily out of commission. While his teammates competed in the Eastern Grass Championships, a tournament won by Pasarell in a thrilling come-from-behind victory over Graebner, he was still recovering from minor surgery. Fortunately, after the close of the tournament in New Jersey he would have twelve full days to get ready for the Spaniards.36

  By the time Arthur arrived in Cleveland, following a week of rest at West Point, he was back in good health and ready to play. The long-awaited tie was held
on a hard surface in front of a wildly enthusiastic home crowd. On the first day of play, Graebner faltered in the opening singles match against Santana. But the Americans were back on track after Arthur followed with an easy victory over Juan Gisbert. After Graebner and Pasarell—Dell’s controversial substitutes for the successful Smith-Lutz duo—won the doubles match, the U.S. team went into the final day leading 2–1. Needing one more singles win to clinch the tie, Dell turned to Graebner and Ashe to close the deal. Graebner, who played first, sealed the team victory with a clutch performance against Gisbert, and Ashe followed with a difficult but satisfying five-set win over Santana. Advancing to the next round, the American squad was now halfway to its goal of wresting the Cup from the mighty Australians.37

  In Arthur’s life, as in the nation and the world at large, 1968 was turning out to be a year of extreme highs and lows. The winter had brought his belated political awakening, followed by a spring of assassination and heartbreak, and now the summer was becoming a season of largely unexpected personal triumphs. In the political realm, the rising political fortunes of the demagogic Republican candidate Richard Nixon and the bitter conflict in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention were disheartening. But set against these troubling developments was an upward personal trajectory that took Arthur to a new level of fulfillment.

  Less than twenty-four hours after the Davis Cup tie victory in Cleveland, Arthur rushed to Boston for the U.S. Amateur Championships. Despite the tournament’s title, no American had won the U.S. Amateur singles title since 1955. The 1968 event was the 88th annual U.S. Amateur tournament but the first played at the Longwood Cricket Club. Though seeded number one, Arthur had not come close to winning the title in eight tries, and considering the lingering effects of his extended play in Cleveland the day before arriving at Longwood, he didn’t expect to win. The grass surface at Longwood was to his liking, but that was about all he had going for him, or so it seemed.

  Arthur’s ninth appearance at the U.S. Amateur began in disastrous fashion when he failed to win a game in the opening set of his first-round match against Chris Bovett, an unseeded British player. But he soon righted himself, winning the next three sets in short order. “Different balls, different court surface, lack of pressure and three hours of sleep” was his explanation for the slow start. The important thing, he pointed out to reporters, was that he had survived to play another day. Pasarell, seeded just below Arthur, was not so fortunate, losing in the first round to seventeen-year-old Eric Van Dillen.

  Arthur had little trouble advancing through the next three rounds, and after he defeated Allan Stone in the quarterfinals he began to think he had a chance to win it all. His unseeded opponent in the semifinals was Jim McManus of Berkeley, a left-hander he had played many times before, and the familiarity seemed to work to Arthur’s advantage. While it took four sets to dispatch McManus, with Arthur losing an exhausting third set 14–16, the victory put him in the final match against Lutz, who had upset Graebner in the other semifinal match. Arthur had beaten Lutz twice earlier in the year, but the young USC student from San Clemente, previously known as a doubles specialist, was playing the best tennis of his life.

  Playing in 90-degree heat and gusty wind, both players had trouble keeping the ball inside the lines. Early on Lutz was the steadier of the two, and after three sets he was leading 2–1. But in the end Arthur’s strong serve proved to be the difference. Before the match was over, he had served 20 aces, one more than Lutz’s dispiriting 19 double faults. Closing out the fifth and final set 6–4, after blanking Lutz in the fourth, the new U.S. Amateur champion raised his arms in triumph before receiving a standing ovation from the crowd and warm embraces from several of his Davis Cup teammates. Pasarell and the others knew how much this victory meant to their friend. Not only did it virtually assure him a number one ranking for the year among American amateurs; it also set him up as the amateurs’ best hope to challenge the pros’ expected dominance of the first U.S. Open. With the first matches at Forest Hills less than a week away, Arthur carried considerable momentum into the tournament.38

  He was also dead tired, emotionally as well as physically. Talking to reporters immediately after his victory, he announced plans to “take three days off and fish and hunt before practicing” for the Open. Four days later, after following through with his plan, he sat down with New York Times columnist Arthur Daley to discuss his “rugged assignment” at Forest Hills. Anticipating that Ashe would face Laver in the quarterfinals, that “if all goes well for each in the preliminary stages” the king of the American amateurs would square off against “the paladin of the pros,” Daley asked him about his prospects. Having lost to Laver in the recent Wimbledon semifinals, Ashe had “no illusions” about the difficult path ahead of him. “Playing tennis against Rod,” he confessed to Daley, “makes you feel like Don Quixote tilting at a windmill. He can so overwhelm you that you can’t get started. He makes quite a few errors but an awful lot of winners. He goes for broke and comes out swinging. He reminds me of Arnold Palmer, a great shot maker with a ferocious gambling instinct.”

  Ashe obviously admired Laver’s aggressive style of play, which he had studied since he had first played the Aussie at the U.S. National tournament in 1959. But he feared he hadn’t learned “very much about him at Wimbledon,” explaining “I wasn’t in there long enough.” In any event, Laver was not the only major obstacle in his way. “All the pros will be tough now,” he predicted. “When they went to England for those first few open tournaments, they just weren’t in condition. . . . Besides, they’d come off playing on all kinds of surfaces and grass was so new to them that they were disoriented. This time they’ll all be ready.”

  The seeding order at Forest Hills, determined before Ashe’s victory at Longwood, was consistent with his judgment of the top pros’ readiness. Seeds one through four went to four Australians—Laver, Roche, Rosewall, and Newcombe—and overall professionals eligible to win the top prize money of $14,000 filled twelve of the sixteen seeded positions. Ashe, seeded fifth, was the highest seeded amateur, followed by Graebner (seventh), Okker (eighth), and Pasarell (twelfth). The #13 seed was forty-year-old Pancho Gonzales, who could not resist trying his hand at winning the historic and potentially lucrative inaugural U.S. Open.39

  Ashe’s greatest obstacle was clearly Laver. His best, and perhaps only, chance for survival was an early-round upset that would take the Rocket out of the tournament. That didn’t seem very likely as the tournament got under way on September 1, yet the improbable almost became reality in the second round when the Wimbledon champion lost the first two sets to Koch before mounting a furious comeback to win the last three. Ashe, by contrast, had no trouble in the early rounds, easily defeating Frank Parker, a fifty-two-year-old pro who had come out of semiretirement in search of previously unavailable prize money, and Paul Hutchins, the unseeded captain of the British Davis Cup team.

  Neither Ashe nor Laver had any trouble in the third round, but lightning struck in the fourth. While Ashe won a surprisingly easy straight-set victory over Emerson, Laver waged a futile struggle to stay in the tournament. In a stunning upset, Drysdale, the #16 seed, outlasted the greatest player in the world, winning the last two sets at 6–1. A member of WCT’s Handsome Eight, Drysdale was no slouch. But the victory over Laver was easily the greatest triumph of his career.

  Though pleased that Laver was out of the way, Ashe did not take Drysdale lightly. He knew the South African’s two-handed strokes could be confounding, and that proved to be the case in the first set. After Drysdale won the first set 10–8, Ashe knew he was in for a long and difficult fight. Relying on his superior serve, the U.S. Amateur champion won the last three sets and the match, but the margin was narrow throughout. Well into the fourth set, the result was still in doubt, and even after winning he sheepishly told reporters: “I don’t think I’m playing that well.” When the reporters pointed out that he had accumulated quite a streak of wins going back to early
August, he still insisted: “I’m surprised at being in the semifinals.”40

  Surprised or not, he was now two victories away from winning the first U.S. Open singles title. The victory over Drysdale set up a semifinal match against Clark Graebner, a struggle destined to be one of the most famous matches of Ashe’s career. Much of the fame stemmed from John McPhee’s extraordinary dissection of the two semifinal combatants in a remarkable series of New Yorker articles later published as the book Levels of the Game, widely considered one of the most perceptive tennis books ever written. As McPhee pointed out, the stark contrast between the two Davis Cup teammates—one black, Southern, and quietly determined to make his mark; the other white, Midwestern, and seemingly self-satisfied with his upper-middle-class life—added color, literally and figuratively, to the already considerable drama surrounding the first U.S. Open. Even their equipment clashed, as Graebner used a Wilson T-2000 metal racket, introduced to the tour the previous year, while Ashe still relied on a traditional wood-frame racket.

  Born only four months apart, but different in so many ways, including their style of play, the two men were perfect representatives of the emerging eclecticism of American tennis. As amateurs, neither man was eligible to collect prize money, but their primal contest made good copy and good television. The recent infusion of money into the game of tennis explained part of the public excitement generated by many of the matches at Forest Hills, but the fascination with the Ashe-Graebner match was about something else. In a sense, the match was a throwback to the gladiatorial ethic that had dominated competitive tennis since its nineteenth-century origins. While the era of full-blown commercialization had dawned, Ashe and Graebner were not yet part of it.

  By teasing the meaning out of the match game by game, McPhee enshrined the 1968 semifinal confrontation as a classic in the annals of tennis. Yet in pure tennis terms the match was nothing special. Graebner was quick out of the gate, defeating a noticeably sluggish Ashe 6–4. But after that Ashe was in control, winning the next two sets 8–6 and 7–5. During a required ten-minute intermission prior to the fourth set, Dell found himself in the strange position of counseling both of his Davis Cup players. For Graebner, his advice was to play all out: “Look, go out there and play him 100 per cent. You don’t want to wake up tomorrow morning and know that you didn’t give 100 per cent to win.” The advice for Ashe, in contrast, focused on mechanics: “you can’t play stiff-legged against Clark, you know that. You’ve got to bend your knees. You’ve got to pick up your feet and bend your knees on the return.” After this Solomonic performance, the captain mumbled to Pasarell, who had walked into the locker room midway through the dual counseling session: “I feel like a schizophrenic. It’s a shame they couldn’t have been in opposite halves. They would’ve been in the final together.” Pasarell, who had no reservations about taking sides, counseled his former roommate to “wake up,” and then added with emphasis: “You were asleep in the first set.”