Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Accepting the position at the Town Tennis Club, which maintained two rooftop courts “high above Sutton Place,” represented Ashe’s first major venture into the potentially lucrative world of product endorsement. This was a milestone in his career, as was his association with an elite private club that would have excluded him from membership a decade earlier. The irony of the situation was not lost on Ashe, who reminded the guests that he had come “a long ways” from the segregated facilities of Richmond, where he spent seven years on the public courts before being granted permission to play at a private club.

  His allusion to past exclusions caused a minor stir, but the story of the day was the disclosure that he and several other players had decided to form an organization of independent professionals. With WCT and the NTL making threats and demands, the players needed some means of “protecting their interests in major open events against domination by the two American-based groups of contract pros.” As he explained, “the 16 contract pros are holding up all the money in the major tournaments. They get prize money, plus so much expense money. We don’t get expenses. In a draw of 128, why should 16 guys get all the money?”33

  Why, indeed, but there would be a lot of off-court volleying before the matter was settled. Three days after his appearance at the 21 Club, Ashe was off to the Monaco Open for the beginning of a three-month stint on the European tour. This was his sixth trip to Europe, but all of his previous visits had been limited to three weeks or less. The 1969 trip, stretching across six nations, would provide him with his first extended experience with slow, European-style clay courts. His prior performances on European clay had been less than stellar, and the uncertain status of his right elbow did not bode well for his chances for success this time. But he could not resist the double lure of making serious money at the various European Opens and traveling across Britain and the Continent with Pasarell and Graebner. Rome, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, and London beckoned, and sore elbow or not, he was determined to make the most of the situation.

  Culturally, the grand European tour of 1969 was a great success, but tennis-wise it proved to be thoroughly disappointing. Even when his elbow behaved, he felt awkward on clay and never really got his rhythm. In Monaco, he lost to Newcombe in the quarters; at the Italian Open in Rome, he lost badly to Jan Kodes in the third round; and at Bournemouth in late April he suffered a humiliating first-round loss to a young, unheralded Frenchman, Jean-Claude Barclay. “I could have stayed in the States, but I came here for experience,” a disconsolate Ashe commented after the Bournemouth match. “I sure got it. Right now I have no confidence at all.”34

  The quality of his play picked up in early May, and he made it to the semifinals in Madrid. But at the West Berlin Open a week later, in the final warm-up for the French Open, he played erratically, losing in the third round. Played on the famous red clay of Roland Garros stadium, the French Open was the biggest event on the 1969 Continental tour with first-place prize money of $7,000. Seeded sixth, Ashe was the highest-seeded American in the singles competition, and he and Pasarell were also considered a serious threat in the doubles. No American, however, had won the French national singles championship since Tony Trabert’s consecutive victories in 1954 and 1955, and during the past decade only one American, Gonzales in 1968, had made it as far as the semifinals.

  In 1969, three Americans—Ashe, Stan Smith, and Cliff Richey—made it into the round of sixteen, but none advanced to the quarters. Playing in a rain-delayed match against the unseeded Australian Fred Stolle, Ashe suffered one of the worst defeats of his career. Unable to gain secure footing on the damp clay, he sprayed forehand after forehand into the net or beyond the baseline, and managed to win only six games in three sets. He and Pasarell fared much better in the doubles, losing a close semifinal match to the top-seeded Australians John Newcombe and Tony Roche. But overall Ashe’s first encounter with Roland Garros was sobering at best. The City of Light might be dazzling outside the stadium, but on the inside the red clay did nothing for him.35

  Ashe left Paris in early June with only a few hundred dollars in prize money to his credit. Fortunately, the next stop on the tour, the Wills Open in Bristol, England, would be played on the more comfortable surface of grass. Even his elbow seemed to perk up on the lawn at Bristol, and he won three matches without losing a set before succumbing to the always tough Ken Rosewall in the quarterfinals. By the time he arrived at Wimbledon in mid-June, his confidence was on the rebound, and he seemed ready for the biggest challenge in tennis.36

  This was Ashe’s fifth appearance at Wimbledon but the first as a high seed. As the reigning U.S. Open champion and the top-ranked American, he drew considerable media attention, fueled in part by the recent publication of John McPhee’s flattering profiles of him and Graebner in The New Yorker. Even before they took the court, the men’s locker room at the All England Club was abuzz with congratulations for the two young Americans. Once the tournament was under way the center of attention shifted to Rod Laver—the winner of the last two majors, the Australian and the French, and the heavy favorite to win his second consecutive and fourth overall Wimbledon crown. Ashe continued to draw secondary attention as a player worth watching.37

  The biggest topic of conversation at the 1969 Wimbledon, however, was the recent founding of the International Tennis Players Association (ITPA). Announced at a June 16 London news conference by John Newcombe, the new organization had been in the works for several weeks as Ashe, Pasarell, Marty Riessen, and other members of the organizing committee played and talked their way across Europe. With Ashe taking an active role in the ongoing discussions of strategy and purpose, Newcombe stepped forward to serve as the ITPA’s temporary chairman and spokesperson. “The world tennis situation is in a turmoil,” Newcombe told the reporters in London, “and the players think they can help if organized. We want to raise the standards of the tournaments we play in. . . . If necessary we will act as one to discipline players who misbehave, and we will also fight to protect players who are unjustly treated. We want better communications between all the people concerned with the game.” Anticipating opposition from the traditional movers and shakers of the tennis world, he added: “We are not politicians. We do not intend to get involved in nation-to-nation controversy. Nor do we intend to strike. But we do feel that we should express our opinions.”38

  By the time the ITPA held its first general meeting on June 19, three days before the start of Wimbledon, there were signs that several parts of the tennis establishment felt threatened by the players’ assertive stance. Ashe and his colleagues were determined to force the issue of players’ rights, and over the pre-Wimbledon weekend they approved five recommendations, including the demands “that all members receive in writing conditions for their participation in a tournament” and “that a player representative be assigned to each country where major tournaments are held.”

  Elected ITPA treasurer, Ashe spoke to the press during the first official day of Wimbledon, a rain-soaked Monday that forced the postponement of the first-round singles matches, including his scheduled match against Riessen. “We can’t tell anybody what to do,” he conceded, “but we can advise and recommend. And we want observer status at the I.L.T.F. meeting next month.” Earlier in the day, he and other ITPA representatives had been granted a meeting with Wimbledon officials, which he viewed as a good beginning for the organization. “That’s almost de facto recognition, already,” he said with a wry smile.39

  Once the rain stopped and the tournament began, Ashe was all business, proclaiming he was “90 per cent fit” and claiming his elbow had healed to the point where he could “go all out on his service.” All he needed was the opportunity to soak his arm “in hot water every day” plus a bit of “hot weather.” In typical London fashion, the weather remained cool and windy, but Ashe managed to dispatch Riessen in four sets anyway, despite losing the opening set 6–1 and double-faulting five times in his first two service games. He had a similarly slow start in a second-round
match against the South African Terry Ryan, losing the first two sets. But he came back to win the last three. In the third round, he once again needed five sets to overcome a nonseeded opponent, Graham Stilwell of Great Britain.

  In the round of sixteen, Arthur finally found his stride, winning an emotional four-set victory over his childhood idol Pancho Gonzales. Three days earlier, the forty-one-year-old Gonzales had outlasted Pasarell in the longest match in Wimbledon history—112 games played over five hours and twelve minutes. So after he lost to Arthur the crowd gave “the old lion” a thunderous standing ovation. No one appreciated Gonzales’s effort more than Arthur, yet avenging his best friend’s loss was sweet nonetheless.40

  Arthur had two days’ rest before facing Lutz in the quarterfinals, but maintaining his focus proved difficult. When London Times reporter John Hennessy got wind of a rift in the ITPA ranks, Arthur offered a candid and full disclosure that put him in the middle of a public controversy. The issue was South Africa and the ITPA’s willingness to issue a strong statement against apartheid. Arthur had raised the matter at a closed meeting of the ITPA earlier in the week. After informing his fellow members that he had been denied a visa by the South African government in March even though the South African Lawn Tennis Union (SALTU) had approved his application to play in the nation’s annual championship tournament, he argued strenuously that South Africa should be banned from Davis Cup competition and expelled from the ILTF.

  While Arthur did not call for an outright boycott of South Africa by the ITPA, he did ask for a public statement condemning racism and apartheid. A month earlier, he had been one of thirteen black athletes to join more than a hundred other black leaders and intellectuals in the sponsorship of an American Committee on Africa (ACOA) statement calling for the revocation of a U.S. government permit allowing South African Airways to schedule commercial flights between Johannesburg and New York. Filling a full page in The New York Times, the ACOA statement urged the U.S. government “to support U.N. action against apartheid instead of aiding the South African government and its representatives like South African Airways.” It also mocked the airline’s tourist brochure slogan “We’d like the pleasure of your company” by pointing out that “any ‘welcome’ to South Africa is reserved for whites only under your government’s laws.”

  This direct, public condemnation of apartheid was what Arthur was looking for from the ITPA. The ensuing discussion revealed that, with the exception of the South African Bob Hewitt, all thirty-six members at the meeting opposed apartheid and generally sympathized with Arthur’s views. Yet when Arthur called for a vote as to whether the ITPA should issue a formal anti-apartheid statement, his proposal went down to defeat 19–17. Where this left Arthur and the ITPA was unclear, but when a reporter asked several ITPA members if they would refuse to play in South Africa “as a gesture of solidarity,” he found few takers.41

  The Wimbledon rift was the first of many unexpected twists in Ashe’s long involvement in the South African liberation movement. Over the next twenty years he would experience the inevitable highs and lows of political struggle and grow accustomed to the fits and starts of uneven progress. But in 1969 he was a novice activist who found it difficult to accept complacency, or worse yet hypocrisy, masquerading as caution. When he took the court against Lutz in the quarterfinals, he was still angry, though he tried to avoid taking out his frustrations on his friend and Davis Cup teammate. Whatever his mood, he played his best tennis in months, winning the first two sets in less than fifty minutes and eliminating Lutz in four sets.

  This victory advanced Ashe to the semifinals against Laver, the defending champion, who had beaten him in the semis the year before. No one expected Ashe to do much better in the rematch, but when he took the first set 6–2 the Centre Court crowd began to stir. Unfortunately for Ashe, both men soon returned to form, with Laver winning three straight sets, the last at 6–0. Once again Ashe had come up short, failing to make the finals of the tournament that meant more to him than any other.42

  Distressing as it was, the loss to Laver was not the worst news of the day for Ashe. While the semifinal match was in progress, delegates from forty Davis Cup nations were meeting less than a hundred yards away. The delegates had gathered to consider two major issues—a French proposal to open up Davis Cup competition to contract and teaching professionals and a Polish-Hungarian proposal to expel South Africa from the competition. Though supported by the United States, Australia, and most of the larger tennis powers, the French proposal went down to defeat 21–19, falling well below the necessary two-thirds majority. Bitterly disappointed, Ashe insisted the vote—orchestrated by the smaller nations—made “no sense at all” because “it’s the smaller nations who will suffer most from it.” To complete the fiasco, as far as he was concerned, a procedural maneuver prevented the South African expulsion proposal from even coming to a vote. For the time being, the buck had been passed to the ILTF, which was scheduled to consider a similar proposal in July.43

  Ashe’s involvement in the controversy surrounding South Africa’s participation in Davis Cup competition became a subject of public discussion in the weeks following Wimbledon. While in Washington for the inaugural Washington Star International Open in early July, he faced tough questions from reporters who wanted to know what he would do if South Africa and the United States faced off in the Davis Cup Challenge Round scheduled for September in Cleveland. Would he agree to play against the avowedly racist nation, Neil Amdur asked, or “would he protest that country’s apartheid policy by sitting out the series?” Ashe’s murky response betrayed the difficulty of his situation. “Either way I guess I’m a target,” he acknowledged. “If I play in the Davis Cup, some people might protest. If I don’t play as a sign of protest, that may only help South Africa win the cup, which would be twice as bad for everyone.” When pressed to be more specific, he refused to be pinned down. “I want the International Lawn Tennis Federation to make the first move this week at their meetings in Prague,” he insisted. “If they don’t do anything, then I think you’ll see some things happening.”

  While Ashe waited for the ILTF to act, he joined Dell and several other ITPA members for a series of inner-city youth clinics. Following the morning clinics, some of the world’s best independent pros began tournament play at a public court facility located in a predominantly black working-class neighborhood. All of this had been carefully planned by Dell as a demonstration of the ITPA’s vision of truly open tennis. Ashe, who had been the first person to urge Dell to place the tournament at a public, inner-city venue, couldn’t have been more pleased. “It’s great to see tennis getting out of the country clubs at last,” he told reporters.44

  Two days later, in the same spirit of innovation, Ashe celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday by starting his quarterfinal match with an experimental metal racket. But after four games of erratic play, he went back to his tried and trusted wood racket. Some forms of change, it seemed, were more risky than others, especially when thousands of dollars of prize money were at stake. Ashe eventually reached the final round, where he lost a tough five-set match to Tom Koch, who had beaten him at Richmond in February. Sporting shoulder-length hair, Koch symbolized the new freedom of competitive tennis, and the match, played in front of a racially diverse crowd that included several members of President Nixon’s family, was a testament to the changes sweeping across the tennis world. For his part, Ashe walked away with the runner-up prize of $3,000, the second largest paycheck of his career.45

  The 1969 Washington Star tournament kicked off the first U.S. Summer Circuit of Open play. The two American Opens of 1968 had been expanded to fifteen Open tournaments offering a total of $440,000 in prize money. Open Tennis was clearly becoming the norm, despite the uncertain future of the registered player classification and the continuing tensions between contract pros and the major tennis federations. At its July meeting, the ILTF withdrew its endorsement of the registered player concept, but the USLTA refused to follow
suit. It would take another two years to clear up the confusion. In the meantime Open Tennis gained an increasingly secure footing among fans and players alike.46

  In mid-July, Ashe was heartened by the unexpected news that Great Britain had eliminated South Africa from the 1969 Davis Cup competition. Played in front of raucous crowds in Bristol, the Britain–South Africa matches were disrupted by anti-apartheid demonstrations featuring protesters lying down on the court as flour bombs were tossed from the stands. Ashe, as a steward of sportsmanship, was ambivalent about the disruptions, but mostly he was relieved that he no longer faced the prospect of boycotting the Davis Cup final.

  Under growing pressure to abandon its racial restrictions, SALTU pledged to do just that in late July. “There will be no color bar in South African tennis,” SALTU president Alf Chalmers announced. “And that means in the selection of South African players for the Davis Cup squad and in foreign teams participating in matches in this country. . . . Furthermore, I would be very happy to welcome a team, like the United States squad, that included a Negro star like Arthur Ashe.” Chalmers insisted that the South African government had “given its approval to these matters,” but Ashe and many others remained skeptical. When asked if the South African government would grant Ashe a visa, Chalmers began to hedge, claiming he could not speak for the government. “All I can say,” he admitted, “is that we would do our very best to assist him.”47

  Ashe did not waste any time in calling the South Africans’ bluff. On July 29, he announced his intention to reapply for a South African visa. His first application had been informal, forwarded quietly through private channels. “This time I won’t be silent,” he vowed. “I’ll go right to the South African embassy in New York. If they want to turn me down, they’ll have to do it right there in front of all of you. . . . As long as the Government’s silent, nothing’s changed.” Ashe also reported he had just spent three hours consulting with Owen Williams, the legendary South African tennis promoter who earlier in the summer had been hired to manage the second U.S. Open. Williams was a close friend of Joseph Cullman, the tournament chairman and president of the Philip Morris Company, and Gladys Heldman, the influential publisher of World Tennis magazine. A controversial choice because of his South African ties, Williams nonetheless drew high praise from Ashe, who cautioned against “guilt by association.” “He’s really a great guy,” the black American declared, who is “all in favor of my coming over to play in the South African open.” Williams expressed some doubt that the South African government would give Ashe a visa but confirmed he would “love to have Arthur in the draw.”48