To Ashe and his colleagues, the Classic was a demonstration of the ATP’s power and legitimacy. With its first-place prize money set at $30,000, the tournament attracted many of the world’s best players, including Smith, Laver, and Newcombe. Surprisingly, Ashe was the only seeded player to reach the semifinals. With all of the other top players falling in the earlier rounds, his semifinal match pitted him against Roscoe Tanner, a tall twenty-one-year-old left-hander from Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, reputed to have the fastest serve in tennis. Wildness and inconsistency had plagued Tanner since he had turned professional in 1970, and Ashe had beaten him in their previous three meetings. But on any given day Tanner’s extraordinary serve could test the return skills of the world’s best.
During the first set, Tanner gave Ashe all he could handle, pushing him to a 22-point tiebreaker, the longest of his career. Trailing 6 points to 4 and facing two set points, Ashe rallied, eventually winning the tiebreaker 12–10. He went on to win the second set 6–2, advancing to the final where he expected to face Richey. But to nearly everyone’s surprise, Richey lost the other semifinal to Brian Gottfried, an unheralded twenty-one-year-old rookie pro from Fort Lauderdale, known primarily for his distinctive Fu Manchu mustache. Ashe had never faced Gottfried, but the way the young Floridian had dominated Graebner, Riessen, and Richey served warning that he was not to be taken lightly.
Playing before a nationally televised audience for what was potentially the largest prize money of his career, Ashe was full of confidence prior to the match. But nothing went right once he took the court. From the outset, he had trouble handling wind gusts of up to twenty miles an hour, and he couldn’t seem to adjust to Gottfried’s deep cross-court backhands and passing shots. After dropping the first set 6–1, and double-faulting on game-ending points in the fifth and seventh games of the second, he managed to win only three games in the deciding set.
Described as a rout by the press, Gottfried’s victory received less attention than Ashe’s loss. For the fifth time since January, he had fought his way through the draw only to lose in the championship round. Predictably, questions about his lack of a killer instinct reemerged. Having heard all of this before, Ashe responded with unusual sharpness during the post-match press conference. “I don’t like losing these finals,” he confessed to the reporters. “I don’t like to read those things—that Ashe can’t win the big ones.”20
Ashe clearly was troubled by the growing suspicion that he lacked whatever it took to capture tournament titles on a consistent basis. But he didn’t have much time to ponder this or any other nagging criticism. After Las Vegas, he was off to Paris for the beginning of a six-week stint playing on the clay and grass courts of Europe. Competing in the Paris-Rome-London circuit had been part of his annual cycle since the late 1960s, but this time would be different. Earlier in the spring, he had decided to take on two additional “responsibilities,” both of which complicated his European tour.
The first was Meryl (pronounced Merle) Carr, a strikingly beautiful Jewish woman from Toronto whom he had been dating for more than a year. For several years, he had been playing the field, dating a wide variety of women and studiously avoiding any long-term relationships. His first and only serious romantic entanglement, his year-long engagement to Pat Battles, had ended awkwardly in March 1967, and he had been wary of commitment ever since. His deepening infatuation with Meryl, however, led him to reconsider his aversion to lengthy relationships.
Ashe’s romantic involvement with Meryl marked his first extended experience with interracial dating, although he had dated white women before on a number of occasions, beginning as early as 1962. He had gone out several times with the Swedish tennis star Ingrid Löfdahl, had enjoyed a fling with an Iranian woman in 1972, and had even engaged in an illicit affair with a married white woman from Dallas. Indeed, in 1967, the year the U.S. Supreme Court finally struck down bans on interracial marriage in the landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling, he had talked openly about his liberal views on interracial dating and intermarriage. “If I see a white girl who fascinates me I’ll make a play for her,” he declared in his surprisingly candid memoir Advantage Ashe. “I’ve taken white girls to parties just to watch the reactions. Some of my acquaintances look shocked or embarrassed, and I feel slightly sorry for them.” Later in the book, he discussed his experiences with Swedish girls in the “swinging” resort town of Bastad: “Girls from all over Sweden save up for a year to go to Bastad and meet the tennis players. The ratio is about two girls to every fellow, and I didn’t see a bad looking girl the week I was there.” “I had two girl friends,” he bragged.21
Ashe was well aware this kind of boastful talk would not play very well back in the States—and that it was potentially explosive in places like Richmond. But he didn’t seem to care, refusing to trim his sails to fit the racial conventions of narrow-minded traditionalists, black or white. “It doesn’t bother me when I see a Negro woman with a white man,” he insisted. “That riles a lot of Negroes. But I feel sorry for Negroes who feel that way. They’re even more narrow-minded than some whites. I’ll go out with a white girl if we happen to like each other. Some Negroes think I don’t like Negroes. I just laugh when they tell me this. Or I give them a silent stare. I’ve had some of them ask me, ‘Ashe, do you think you’ll ever marry a Negro girl?’ ”
While he conceded he was “more likely to fall for a girl of my own race,” he refused to rule out the possibility of intermarriage, even though he recognized the obvious difficulties an interracial union would entail. “If I did have a white wife I know I wouldn’t be too popular in American tournaments,” he acknowledged. “I couldn’t live in Richmond, or even in most other places.” Nevertheless, he took some solace in the fact that Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the first black United States senator elected since Reconstruction, had “married a white wife, and it didn’t stop him from getting elected Senator in a state where only 3% of the voters are Negro.”22
At the same time, Ashe was well aware of the furor over the popular entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.’s eight-year marriage to the Swedish film star May Britt. A decade earlier, the singer and actress Pearl Bailey’s 1952 marriage to the celebrated white jazz drummer Louis Bellson endangered both of their careers. Earlier still, during the so-called Progressive Era and the Roaring Twenties, the heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson’s successive marriages to three white women led to pariah status and several near riots. Indeed, throughout the post–Civil War era, in custom and often in codified law, the intermarriage taboo applied to celebrities as well as ordinary citizens, and even a figure as distinguished as Frederick Douglass could not escape mass ridicule and scorn following his marriage to the white abolitionist Helen Pitts.23
To date, most of Ashe’s interracial dating had taken place outside the borders of the United States, either in Australia or Europe, where attitudes toward miscegenation tended to be somewhat more tolerant and forgiving than in America’s hypersensitive racial climate. Thus, his extended involvement with Meryl presented him with new and potentially uncomfortable situations. Cold stares and ugly incidents were inevitable challenges for any interracial couple living in the United States, where according to an October 1972 Gallup poll only 29 percent of Americans “approved” of interracial marriage between blacks and whites.
Although Meryl’s parents were Canadian, they initially expressed strong disapproval of their daughter’s interracial relationship. Fortunately, after she stood firm and refused to break off the relationship, her family came around and more or less accepted Arthur as a worthy suitor. Even so, he never felt completely comfortable in their presence. For the Carrs, as for most white families in the 1970s, traditional stereotypes and fears related to race and sex were a fact of life, and Arthur’s celebrity status did not shield him from this reality. On the contrary, his visibility probably heightened his vulnerability. Whenever he and Meryl went out in public, they could be sure that somewhere in the room someone was commenting on their relatio
nship, perhaps only in a whisper, but usually with an air of disapproval.
One solution, though temporary and imperfect, was to escape to a more tolerant cultural setting, a place where they could be together without shouldering the heavy burden of America’s racial baggage. This is the path Arthur chose in the spring of 1973. Risking censure from his family and throwing caution to the wind, he invited Meryl to accompany him on the European tour. A freelance commercial artist with an open schedule, she gleefully accepted. For nearly six weeks, from mid-May until the end of June, she would be his companion. Running from the French Open to Wimbledon, it was, as Arthur wrote in mid-June, “the longest time I’ve ever spent with one woman.”24
The second added responsibility was an ambitious book project undertaken in collaboration with Frank Deford, the Princeton-educated sportswriter who had written two of the earliest Sports Illustrated articles on Ashe and who later joined him on the 1970 goodwill tour of West Africa. During his last year at UCLA, Ashe had collaborated with Cliff Gewecke on the memoir Advantage Ashe, and he was eager to write a sequel. The project with Deford was a bit different, however. This time the plan was to keep a year-long, Wimbledon-to-Wimbledon diary—a daily chronicle written in Arthur’s own words to be edited by Deford at the end of the year. As Deford later revealed, Arthur “would tape his thoughts every night into a recorder and then send me the tape. A tape would arrive every three weeks. Plus we would see each other regularly too, so it wasn’t like this was done just by tapes.”
The primary goal, as Arthur later wrote in the preface to the book, published in 1975 as Arthur Ashe: Portrait in Motion, was helping the public “to understand tennis, to appreciate the matches you see and the players who participate in them.” But he couldn’t resist adding a secondary goal, the prospect that “the book might even make it possible” for ordinary fans “to understand tennis politics.”
With a bit of luck, the diary would end with Arthur’s first Wimbledon title, or so the editors at Houghton Mifflin hoped. Alas, this storybook ending did not happen, and the narrative closed not with a triumph but rather with a third-round loss to unseeded Roscoe Tanner. Even so, there was more than enough drama along the way—from tennis wars to family funerals to broken romances.25
The book might have been even more interesting if Arthur had begun his diary a bit earlier. His first daily entry was written on June 11, a full month after he arrived in Paris for the French Open. By that time, a rush of events had enveloped him and the tennis world, though most of the action was outside the lines. In Arthur’s case, the lack of on-court success was hardly a surprise. Though seeded fourth by French Open officials, he was not expected to be much of a factor on the slow red clay of Roland Garros. In doubles, he had fared fairly well at the French Open, reaching the championship round with Charlie Pasarell in 1970 and winning the championship with Marty Riessen the following year. But the singles competition was another matter. While he had reached the singles quarterfinals twice, in 1970 and 1971, he had failed to advance on both occasions, losing tough five-set matches to Zeljko Franulovic and Frank Froehling. Having won only one tournament so far in 1973, he didn’t hold out much hope of surprising his critics with a victory in Paris.
True to form, he survived the first three rounds only to be eliminated in the fourth by the Italian clay-court specialist Paolo Bertolucci. For Ashe, once again most of the fun in the City of Light took place far away from Roland Garros. But he tried to keep the situation in perspective, recalling his modest Richmond origins and remembering there were worse fates than having a few extra days to sample the museums, cafés, and nightclubs of Paris with a beautiful woman on his arm.26
A week later, with Meryl at his side, Ashe flew to Rome for the Italian Open. Once again he suffered an early exit, losing in the fourth round to Pasarell. After the loss, he was subjected to a chorus of friendly ribbing from Pasarell and others, but he soon found himself dealing with matters more troubling than another clay court defeat. As the newly elected treasurer and former vice president of the ATP, he was thrust into a resurgent controversy involving Niki Pilic of Yugoslavia.
Earlier in the year the Yugoslav Tennis Federation had suspended Pilic for breaking a commitment to represent Yugoslavia in a Davis Cup tie in New Zealand. The ATP came to Pilic’s defense, arguing the Yugoslav federation’s action constituted an arbitrary abuse of its disciplinary power. Threatening to withdraw all of its members from the upcoming French Open if Pilic’s suspension remained in force, the ATP solved the immediate problem by filing a partially successful appeal with the ILTF’s Emergency Committee. Reducing the suspension from three months to one, the Emergency Committee made it possible for Pilic to play in the French Open, where he made it all the way to the championship match before losing to Nastase.
This temporary solution, while helping Pilic, failed to satisfy Ashe and other ATP leaders, who insisted they should have full disciplinary authority over their members. They were also furious that the one-month suspension included the Wimbledon fortnight. As Bud Collins later observed, the ATP leaders were convinced that the timing of the one-month suspension “was devised by the ILTF to demonstrate its muscle, believing the players would never support a boycott of the world’s premier tournament. Thus, the ‘Pilic Affair’ became a test of the will and organization of the new association. Many ATP leaders felt if they gave in on this first showdown, they would never be strong, whereas if they held firm and proved to the ILTF that even Wimbledon was not sacred, the ATP’s unity and power would never be doubted in the future.”27
Beginning in Rome, when the Italian Federation broke ranks with the ILTF and ruled that Pilic’s suspension was inoperative until after the Italian Open in May, the controversy came to a head in the weeks leading up to Wimbledon. Ashe was often in the thick of it, but there was a brief interlude in mid-June when he took leave to attend to a personal matter. On June 11 he and Meryl flew from Yugoslavia to London, where they planned to celebrate her birthday with a night on the town. Following dinner at Trader Vic’s and an hour or so of gambling at the Playboy Club, they returned to their room at the Westbury Hotel. Twenty minutes after Ashe’s head hit the pillow, he was awakened by a long-distance call from his Aunt Marie in Richmond. His grandmother Cunningham—Big Mama as he called her—had passed away. The matriarch of the family—the mother of ten children and a powerful woman who had outlived her husband by nearly four decades—was gone.
Despite the uncertain situation surrounding Pilic, he felt compelled to fly home for the funeral. Big Mama was special; the strongest direct link to his mother, she was his favorite relative. In his words, she was “a strong, dear, fine woman” who “kept the family together, all the while working full-time in the kitchen at a white public school.” Two days later, he flew home, where his father met him at Byrd Field. By the time he arrived at his Uncle James’s house, a wake was in progress. All of Big Mama’s surviving eight children were there, along with dozens of cousins, nieces, nephews, and in-laws. In the Cunningham-Ashe family, there had not been a gathering like this in more than twenty years, not since Mattie Ashe’s funeral.
For Arthur, the reconnection with his extended family at Big Mama’s funeral was a highly emotional experience. As he sat in the sanctuary of Westwood Baptist Church, where he had spent countless Sundays as a child, he lost all of his legendary coolness. Even though he had become “a closet agnostic” as an adult, the physical closeness of his family and the spirit of the preacher’s “tremendously moving service” touched something deep inside of him as he “was plunged into the warm, familiar world of my childhood again: the minister, sweating and singing and preaching, and the choir.” As he recalled years later, “I tried to keep my reserve through the service and almost did. But when my Uncle Rudy cried, ‘Good-bye, Mama,’ I broke down and emotions poured out of me, totally out of control. I cried like a baby for several minutes. When it was over, I was drained of tensions I didn’t even know had been inside. But it was all right, I was a
mong family and old friends. I was ‘Arthur Junior’ again.”
Earlier in the day he had declined an opportunity to peer inside the open casket for one last look at his grandmother, but he took in everything at the Woodland Cemetery gravesite where they laid her to rest next to his mother’s grave. “It was warm and the sky was high clear blue when they buried her,” he noted in his diary. “Then I got a flight back to New York and was on the nine P.M. Pan Am to London.”28
The emotions stirred by family and a life well lived had drawn Ashe in, temporarily overwhelming his normal air of reserve. But once he was back in the real world of London, he realized it would take a cool head to deal with the fast-developing Pilic crisis. On June 15, the day he returned to the tense pre-Wimbledon scene, ATP’s lawyers asked Great Britain’s High Court for an injunction ordering the All England Club to approve Pilic’s participation in the upcoming tournament. Four days later, less than a week before the start of the first round, the High Court judge, Sir Hugh Forbes, ruled that Pilic and Wimbledon were outside his jurisdiction; there would be no injunction against Pilic’s suspension by the ILTF. Effectively validating the suspension, Forbes ordered a stunned Pilic to pay several thousand pounds in court costs.
That evening, the ATP executive board held an emotional meeting at the Westbury Hotel. “We talked and argued for hours, restrained, remarkably civil, but always on edge,” Ashe wrote in his diary, “for we realized that we were in the process of declaring war.” Sometime after one o’clock in the morning, Drysdale called for a vote on a proposed boycott of Wimbledon. Two board members, including Pilic, abstained, and the Englishman Mark Cox voted no, but the other seven voted in favor. It was two o’clock before Ashe fell into bed, and it was later still before he calmed down enough to sleep. But several hours later, in the cold light of morning, he recorded his thoughts on one of the most turbulent days in the annals of tennis. To his knowledge, this “was the first time any athletes in any sport had voted, on principle, to withdraw from their championship of the world. I could hardly believe what we had done.” A week earlier, he had predicted that the Pilic affair would become a milestone in the history of tennis. “Ban him, lose us all,” he had written on June 11. “Tennis is exactly a century old, and this, at last, will be the moment when the players stand up for themselves.”
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