Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  In August, Ashe temporarily turned his attention away from South Africa and the ongoing tennis wars to focus on his preparation for the U.S. Open. With his elbow problem seemingly behind him, he was eager to defend his title—and to vie for the first-place prize money of $16,000, the largest payday in tennis history. In the final warm-ups before Forest Hills, he lost to Stan Smith in the semifinals of the Eastern Grass Court championships, and a week later he came up just short in his attempt to defend his national “amateur” title at Longwood. In the Longwood semifinals, he lost a tough five-set match to Lutz, whom he had defeated in the final the year before. This was Ashe’s first loss to his young Davis Cup teammate in four career matches, but he played well enough to pronounce himself ready to face the world’s best at Forest Hills.49

  In truth, Ashe knew his chance of repeating as U.S. Open champion was slim. Laver, who had dispatched him with relative ease at Wimbledon, was the overwhelming favorite, and even if the Rocket faltered there were other powerful Australian grass court specialists to overcome. And beyond them there was Stan Smith, who had won on the grass at Longwood the week before. Seeded fourth, Ashe found himself on the same side of the draw as Laver, which meant that barring any major upsets they would face each other in the semifinals. First, however, he had to contend with a serious threat to his concentration.

  On the eve of his opening round match against eighteen-year-old Dick Stockton, who would later serve as his colleague in the broadcast booth, Ashe received telephone calls from two anti-apartheid groups considering setting up a picket line to protest Williams’s involvement in the Open. Ashe did his best to dissuade them, in part because he did not want to embarrass the host West Side Tennis Club, which had just voted “to reward all U.S. Open singles champions with honorary memberships.” As the 1968 singles champion, he had become the first black member in the club’s history, and he did not want to face a picket line on his first day as a member. “I told them, you’ll have to trust me for another year,” he informed reporters. “I said, we think we can lick this problem, and that if nothing’s done by next year, I’d join the picket line myself.” While he didn’t specify what “the problem” was—his application for a South African visa, Williams, or apartheid itself—his pledge was enough to forestall the anti-apartheid demonstration.50

  With one potential crisis avoided, Ashe promptly ran into a second when Gonzales publicly criticized his work ethic, comparing him unfavorably to Laver in a New York Times interview. “Arthur Ashe has ease of movement, stamina and speed,” Gonzales opined. “He has all the equipment to convince you that his potential is unlimited. But I don’t like his inclination to loaf in practice. He could—and should—learn from Rod Laver. . . . What I admire most in Rod is his determination and concentration. He carries that determination even into practice, because he chases every ball as if it were match point in a championship. It’s a wonderful habit to get into. Ashe would become better if he were to do the same.” This was not what Ashe wanted to read on the eve of a tough third-round match, but part of the sting came from the recognition that Gonzales was right.51

  Despite all the diversions, Ashe managed to maintain his composure and a string of impressive victories through the quarterfinals. The real test came when Laver joined him in the semifinals. Ashe was the only independent pro and one of only two Americans to reach the quarterfinals. The other six were all Australians, and after his old friend from St. Louis Butch Buchholz was eliminated, the defending champion stood alone against a fearsome trio of Australian contract pros: Rod Laver, Tony Roche, and John Newcombe.

  The pride of America and the ITPA were clearly at stake in the match against Laver, and Ashe was determined to give it all he had. It was a competitive, seesaw match from the start, with Ashe pulling ahead in the first set only to lose 8–6. He also led in the early going in the second set, surging ahead 4–2, but once again he faded and lost 6–3. The third set was an all-out slugfest that went to 12–12 before the referee suspended play on account of darkness. After a night’s sleep, Ashe was still hoping for an upset. But after a rare foot fault led to a service break in the 25th game, Laver quickly closed out the match 14–12.

  It was Laver’s 29th consecutive singles victory, and in the championship match against Roche the next day he extended the streak to 30, becoming the first player in tennis history to win a second Grand Slam (he first won all four major singles championships in 1962). Ashe was still number one in the United States, but the Rocket was undeniably the world’s best tennis player. Before presenting the championship trophy at center court, USLTA president Alastair Martin turned to Laver and exclaimed: “You’re the greatest in the world . . . perhaps the greatest we’ve ever seen.”52

  In the immediate aftermath of the second U.S. Open, Ashe did not have much time to think about the implications of Laver’s dominance. He was too busy getting ready for the Davis Cup Challenge Round tie in Cleveland. The surprise challenger was an upstart team from Romania led by the mustachioed veteran Ion Tiriac and a brash twenty-three-year-old shotmaker named Ilie Nastase. Known for his courtside antics and outsized personality, Nastase presented a clear contrast to the cool and collected Ashe, whom he faced in the opening singles match on September 19.

  Ashe had never played Nastase, but he knew he was in for a fight, having watched the young Romanian defeat Smith in four sets at the U.S. Open. Fortunately, he got off to a strong start on the fast asphalt surface, winning the first set 6–2. Battling a stiff wind, he managed to fight off a series of furious Nastase rallies to win the next two 15–13 and 7–5. At one point in the third set, the referee stopped play when two antiwar demonstrators ran through the stands waving a North Vietnamese flag. Later in the week, demonstrators affiliated with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) marched around the outside of the stadium chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh,” and clashes with police led to seventeen arrests. Nothing, however, could stop the Americans from sweeping the series and retaining the coveted Davis Cup. After defeating Tiriac in five tough sets in the third singles match—his 22nd win in 25 career Davis Cup matches—Ashe embraced Dell in a joyous celebration. For the first time since 1949, the American squad had won back-to-back Davis Cups, and Dell and Ashe were two of the main reasons why.

  The joy of victory was muted only by the undeniable decline in the status of the Davis Cup competition. There was no national television coverage as there had been in 1964, the last time a Challenge Round had been played in the United States, and press and public interest in the Cleveland matches seemed lukewarm at best. The message was clear: as long as Laver, Newcombe, and the other contract pros were excluded from the competition, winning the Cup would mean far less than it had in the past. Even though a record number of countries—fifty-one in all—had entered teams in the 1969 competition, the Davis Cup was no longer a wholly legitimate world championship. As one Cleveland fan explained to his son, “Romania is here because the best players like Rod Laver, John Newcombe, and Tony Roche aren’t.” Neil Amdur agreed, pointing out the hard truth that Romania’s “appearance generated more interest from the Students for a Democratic Society than from any major television network.”

  Nearly everyone acknowledged that major adjustments to the Davis Cup’s eligibility rules were in order. But the arcane procedural requirements of the Davis Cup committee insured it would take at least two years to enact meaningful reform. In the meantime, the excluded contract pros would have to console themselves with prize money, and players like Ashe—those passionately devoted to Davis Cup play—would have to wait for the tennis bureaucrats to work out a compromise that would restore the Cup’s prestige.53

  TWELVE

  RACKET MAN

  RESTORING THE DAVIS CUP to its former glory was important to Ashe. But his first priority as a rookie tennis professional was finding a way to earn a decent living. To his dismay, throughout the summer and fall of 1969 the future of Open Tennis—the source of his livelihood—looked uncertain at best, especially
after WCT announced its plan to hold fourteen invitational tournaments in 1970 with no provision for including independent pros like him.1 During his first nine months as a pro, Ashe had managed to earn a few thousand dollars by scrapping his way into the quarterfinals and semifinals of several open tournaments. But his inability to win the top prize money—his biggest paycheck was $5,000 for finishing second at the Las Vegas Open in October—forced him to look elsewhere for much of his income.2

  Fortunately, the combination of Arthur’s reputation as a consummate gentleman and his success on the court—especially his U.S. Open and Davis Cup victories—allowed him to take advantage of the lucrative field of celebrity product endorsement. With rare exceptions, black athletes had traditionally been considered unmarketable as product endorsers. But with the help of Dell’s public relations and negotiating skills, he was able to defy both prejudice and conventional wisdom. Arthur had come to rely on the young Yale-educated laywer for advice and counsel, and by late 1969 they had become more than friends.

  As Arthur tried to make sense of the choices before him—most notably, whether to remain a registered player or become a contract pro—Dell urged him to entrust his future to Mark McCormack, a Cleveland lawyer and sports agent who had founded International Management Group (IMG) in 1960. The first agent to recognize the almost unlimited potential of celebrity product endorsement, McCormack had turned golf stars Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, and Jack Nicklaus into moneymaking icons. In the weeks following America’s Davis Cup victory in Cleveland, Dell arranged no fewer than three meetings between Ashe and McCormack. Each time Arthur came away with an uneasy feeling about the slick-talking Cleveland lawyer, and after the third unsuccessful attempt to get him to sign a contract with IMG—at a breakfast meeting in New York—he asked Dell plaintively: “How many more times are you going to do this? You keep taking me to McCormack because you think he’s the best, but why don’t you do it? Why don’t you manage me and be my lawyer? Just think about it, if I turned pro and Stan did . . . we could all do it together, you could join us and it could be a lot of fun and we could start a business.”

  At that point, Dell was nearing the end of a two-year leave from the Washington law firm, Hogan & Hartson. Having restored America’s Davis Cup fortunes with the first two championships since 1963, he was ready to return to his law practice. Becoming a sports agent, he later insisted, had never entered his mind before Arthur’s plea. After initially laughing off the suggestion, he soon broached the idea with Hogan & Hartson’s senior partner, who, surprisingly enough, urged him to follow Arthur’s advice. That was enough to convince Dell to take a risk, and by the spring of 1970 the sports agency law office later known as ProServ was up and running, albeit with only two clients, Ashe and Smith. Thus began one of the most successful sports agencies of the twentieth century.3

  Sealed with a handshake, the Dell-Ashe partnership radically altered the careers of both men. While Dell made the deals, Ashe became an active partner in the highly personal “packaging” process. As he wrote tellingly many years later, “A star athlete could make more money off the field than on—if he or she was packaged properly. . . . I had to sell a product—me—and the product had to be of high quality to get a high price. The yardstick, then and now, was Arnold Palmer.”4

  Marketing a black tennis player with only two major titles to his credit was obviously much more challenging than drawing upon the exploits of a legendary white golf champion from the heartland of America. But Ashe and Dell reasoned that in the wake of the civil rights movement a clean-cut and physically attractive athlete of any color was potentially appealing to enterprising capitalists looking for consumers. “I had a good image—U.S. Army, Davis Cup, acceptable manners,” Ashe recalled, adding: “My experience indicated I was acceptable to white Americans, who bought the racquets, shoes, and tennis clothes I hoped to sell.” What else could anyone ask for other than lighter skin and straighter hair? That was the unanswered question as Dell and Ashe approached their first potential business partners.5

  They began early in 1969 with Wilson Sporting Goods, the leading manufacturer of tennis rackets and the largest sporting goods corporation in the United States. Ashe had used a Wilson “Don Budge” racket, named for the sport’s first Grand Slam champion, since the age of thirteen, and he had always dreamed of having a Wilson model with his own name on it. Dell arranged a meeting with Wilson executive Gene Buwick, and the three men sat down in the Polo Lounge of the posh Beverly Hills Hotel. From the outset, Buwick was enthusiastic about offering Ashe a contract, but the deal hit a snag as soon as they began to talk about money. Protracted negotiations followed, but in the end Dell was unable to procure the six-figure contract he thought Ashe deserved.6

  Though disappointed, Ashe encouraged Dell to look elsewhere, and they soon found themselves in the eccentric company of Howard Head, the Baltimore-based aeronautical engineer who had invented laminate skis in the late 1940s. Founded in 1950, the hugely successful Head Ski Corporation had recently moved into the tennis racket business with the hope of expanding upon Wilson’s success with the innovative T-2000 metal racket. Seeking legitimacy in the tennis world, Head wanted to hire a leading professional player willing to experiment with and promote a new line of metal rackets. In Ashe, who was also seeking legitimacy of a kind, he found the perfect match for his unconventional product. On April 21, 1969, the two men signed an endorsement agreement authorizing Head to market “Ashe tennis products.”

  Head would eventually join forces with the Prince Company to produce a metal racket with an oversized head. But the 1969 prototype featured a normal-size head made of fiberglass and honeycombed aluminum. Ashe’s early experiences with the prototype, which he considered to be much too light, were an exercise in frustration. The later, heavier models, however, suited him well and quickly became one of the world’s most popular rackets, making the names Ashe and Head virtually synonymous by the mid-1970s. Along the way, both Ashe and Head made a great deal of money. Under the terms of their five-year contract, Ashe received a 5 percent royalty on every Head racket sold, which amounted to several hundred thousand dollars a year during the 1970s. At the time, the Head contract represented one of the most lucrative deals in sports history. Suddenly the poor boy from Richmond was rich.7

  In the fall of 1969, Ashe signed a second major endorsement contract, this time with Catalina Sports Clothes. A year earlier, the USLTA had granted Catalina a license to “market a line of color-coordinated tennis clothes” bearing the USLTA logo, and subsequently a number of players, including Ashe, had traded in their traditional tennis whites for flashy pastels. This break with tradition did not sit well with certain members of tennis’s old guard, and during the 1969 U.S. Open, Bill Talbert, the tournament director, refused to allow Arthur to take the court wearing a yellow Catalina shirt. Arthur protested that the shirt was USLTA-endorsed apparel, but Talbert remained firm. Incensed by Talbert’s decision, Catalina’s president, Alex Lawlor, promptly canceled the USLTA contract and hired Arthur as the company’s official spokesman. As tennis’s fashion renegade, he was soon making appearances at department stores, and whenever tournament officials looked the other way—brazenly taking the court clad in one bright color or another.8

  Over the next year, Dell arranged additional endorsement contracts with the noncigarette division of Philip Morris, American Airlines, and All-American Sports, a Florida tennis academy run by Nick Bollettieri. For the most part, Arthur posed for magazine advertisements and made store appearances sandwiched between tournaments. The standard routine involved signing autographs and answering questions, a format he soon mastered. “One of the first things I did,” he recalled, “was to throw out the staid approach of my fellow athletes and inject a little theater into the appearances. I would get customers involved by using them in demonstrations. I would turn the tables and ask the audience questions.” It was an easy game for a bright young man who liked to display his natural wit—and who eagerly embraced any opport
unity to dispel negative racial stereotypes.9

  Arthur’s positive image and attitude were crucial elements of his commercial viability. But these attributes wouldn’t have amounted to much without Dell’s skillful direction. A trusted personal friend for nearly a decade, Dell also proved to be a rock-solid advisor and the primary architect of Arthur’s financial security. In addition to arranging and managing endorsements, he and his partner Frank Craighill convinced Arthur and four other players—Lutz, Pasarell, Ralston, and Smith—to form Players Enterprises, Inc. (PEI) in October 1969. Organized as a collaborative investment and pension-earning mechanism and managed by Dell and Craighill, PEI provided the players with an efficient means of financial planning. Eventually expanded to include six other players, PEI became involved in a wide range of commercial enterprises, from tennis camps and shops to condominium developments and tournament sponsorships. For a time in the 1970s, Arthur served as president of PEI, and he played an active role in the corporation’s multifaceted affairs until its dissolution in 1986.10