The actual withdrawal required the approval of a majority of ATP members, and a morning meeting on June 20 took care of that. According to Ashe, after the board presented its recommendation to the full membership, “they accepted it with hardly a dissent.” In the end, seventy-nine ATP members withdrew from the tournament, including Ashe and thirteen of the top sixteen seeds. Only three ATP members—Nastase, Roger Taylor, and Ray Keldie—remained in the draw.29
For a time, it appeared that many of the top women’s players would join the boycott, partly as a show of support for Pilic and the ATP, but mostly as a demand for narrowing the gap between men’s and women’s prize money. But Billie Jean King’s effort to mobilize the women’s draw fell flat after Goolagong and Evert, among others, refused to join the boycott. “I’ve come over here to play tennis, and that’s all I’m interested in,” Evert declared. Ashe and the ATP would have to fend for themselves.30
They also had to face a furious reaction from the British tennis establishment, as the national press rushed to the defense of the hallowed All England Club and excoriated the boycotters for putting their personal interests ahead of the public good. One television reporter, Peter Wilson, who sparred with Ashe in a confrontational interview, described the absent players as “brash,” “ill-mannered,” “overpaid,” and “spoiled.” Wimbledon, he and other reporters insisted, was too important to be brought down by a petty labor dispute. Accordingly, they urged British tennis fans to buy Wimbledon tickets as a demonstration of patriotism. The result, to the ATP’s dismay, was a series of near record crowds.
Much of what the fans saw was not up to Wimbledon standards, but the fortnight also witnessed moments of rare drama, especially in the highly competitive women’s draw, where King won her fifth Wimbledon singles title, outlasting Evert in the championship match. On the men’s side, the first Wimbledon appearance of the popular “young guns”—Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors—gave the fans and the press something positive to talk about. But the excitement didn’t last. After the prohibitive favorite Nastase lost to Sandy Mayer at the close of the first week, and after both Borg and Connors were eliminated in the quarterfinals, the men’s singles competition lost much of its punch. In the end, Jan Kodes of Czechoslovakia defeated Alex Metreveli of Russia in a lackluster men’s singles final that revealed just how much damage the ATP boycott had wreaked.31
It would be many months before the hard feelings and post-boycott recriminations subsided, and Ashe and others were well aware that the Wimbledon boycott—essential as it was to the stature of the ATP—entailed certain costs. Decades later, he speculated that the boycott, along with the infusion of big money, led to a coarsening of the game in the early and mid-1970s. Betraying a measure of guilt, he wrote: “For many of us, the deluge of money led to confusion and an unholy scrambling after dollars. Certain values and standards that had bonded players in my earlier years—certain codes of honor and a spirit of cooperation and camaraderie—disappeared.” “I wonder,” he added, “how much we, the leaders of the players during this transition, contributed to the fall.”
The anger and divisiveness that enveloped the game of tennis in 1973 saddened Ashe. But neither he nor anyone else at the time could find a workable solution to the age-old dilemma posed by reform—how to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The ATP needed money and power to counter the stifling influence of the ILTF and its national federations, yet the path to power threatened some of the game’s most laudable traditions. The players were fighting on so many fronts it was difficult to keep track of allies and enemies or to maintain a steady course of responsible and ethical behavior.32
The confusing battle over World Team Tennis (WTT) was a case in point. The collective brainchild of Larry King, the enterprising husband of Billie Jean King, and three other sports promoters—WTT offered intercity team competition involving men and women in an innovative coed format. Announced with great fanfare during the week leading up to Wimbledon by Jerry Saperstein, the former owner of the Harlem Globetrotters and a co-owner of New York’s WTT franchise, the new league was scheduled to begin play in May 1974.
In its original form, WTT play called for teams of six players, two of whom had to be female; a four-color court; a forty-four-match season running from May to August; equally weighted matches in five categories—men’s singles and doubles, women’s singles and doubles, and mixed doubles; and a no-ad scoring system in which match victories required five winning games with nine-point tiebreakers invoked after a 4–4 deadlock. No one had ever seen or even proposed anything like it, and tennis traditionalists groaned with contemptuous skepticism.
Lamar Hunt, the primary sponsor of WCT, didn’t see any conflict with his organization and welcomed the formation of WTT. But Ashe and many of his ATP colleagues had serious concerns about Team Tennis’s compatibility with Open tennis. Speaking to reporters in Miami, Ashe questioned the wisdom of WTT’s plan to offer individual salaries. “As of now, the concept of salaries is against our constitution,” he explained. “Our players compete ‘solely for prize money,’ that’s the phrase in our constitution.” He also expressed concern that the WTT summer schedule “would conflict with the Wimbledon, French and Italian tournaments.” Among the ATP’s top players, only Rosewall had endorsed WTT, in sharp contrast to the strong opposition expressed by his fellow Aussies. “Rod Laver said W.T.T. would wreck international tennis in May, June, and July,” Ashe reported, adding: “I agree with him. I can understand why Rosewall would want the security of a salary at his age, but I don’t think it would be good for the A.T.P. players as a group.”33
This stance put Ashe squarely at odds with a number of influential figures, including Billie Jean King, whom he would come to admire as much as anyone in the world of sports. On different sides of the gender equity issue, the two were not yet close friends, largely because Ashe shared many of the chauvinistic attitudes common on the men’s tour. “Women’s Lib has been very trying,” he confessed in August 1973, adding: “I don’t know if, all of a sudden, I could psychologically handle a fifty-fifty split in my house. I mean: who breaks the tie? I do want to be up-to-date and fair and all that, but the truth is that I also don’t want any woman telling me what to do with my life (and vice versa too). So all right, if that sort of thinking makes me a male chauvinist, then I’m a male chauvinist.”
Ashe would later come to regret these words, but in 1973 his consciousness level did not allow him to ally with King and other feminists. While her primary loyalty was to any movement or innovation that challenged the hidebound traditions of male dominance, his was to the boys club known as the ATP. Only later, after years of separate struggle, would they become comrades in arms bound by a common commitment to social justice, racial equality, and gender equity. Looking back on the WTT controversy from the perspective of the early 1990s, Ashe acknowledged: “Although both Billie Jean and I resented the stodginess and snobbery of the international tennis establishment, we had different ideas about how best to proceed.”34
In June 1973, in the heat of battle, Ashe claimed there was an anti-WTT consensus in the ATP. But he almost certainly overstated the case. Speaking for WTT, cofounder Dennis Murphy effectively disputed Ashe’s contention. “Ashe has been saying that from day one,” Murphy insisted, “but when the A.T.P. held a vote, there were seven against us, nine for us and 29 who wanted more information.”
In truth, attitudes toward WTT were in flux and undoubtedly changing from day to day. Yet the unprecedented amount of money dangled in front of the players by the new league virtually insured that Murphy’s view would prevail over Ashe’s. By early August, ten players had signed WTT contracts authorizing individual teams to “bid for their services.” The league also conducted a twenty-round draft, with the New York team picking Ashe, an unlikely signee as the league’s most vocal critic, in the fifth round.
At this point, WTT was technically an outlaw league operating without validation from the ILTF or the ATP. But once the leagu
e floated the rumor that Newcombe’s WTT salary guarantee was $75,000 and that King’s exceeded $100,000, a number of players were poised to sign up. The only thing stopping them, it seemed, was the possibility of being banned, either by the ILTF, or its American affiliate, the USLTA. “World Team Tennis officials insist they want peace and harmony with other organizations,” Neil Amdur observed. “But unless a broad accord is reached between now and next May, there may be as much activity in a courtroom as on the tennis court.” For a time it appeared that WTT contract players would be turned away from the U.S. Open by the USLTA. But an emergency meeting convened on August 27, two days before the Open’s first match, led to a tentative truce forestalling any banning. Even so, the legal situation surrounding WTT would remain murky for the remainder of the year.35
For Ashe, the 1973 U.S. Open was a distracting jumble of organizational complications that left little time for concentration on his on-court performance. Just as the immediate WTT crisis was subsiding, a second and even more troubling controversy emerged. The ATA, the organization that had nurtured Ashe during his early years in tennis, had always had a complicated and somewhat troubled relationship with the USLTA and Forest Hills. In recent years, the hard feelings had been smoothed over by an agreement to guarantee the ATA singles champion a spot in the U.S. Open draw. Yet somehow, through a combination of negligence and indifference, 1973 ATA champion Arthur Carrington had been left out of the draw.
When USLTA officials informed Carrington that his only avenue into the draw was to compete for an alternate position as a wild card, he exploded. “There’s a reason why there’s not many blacks in tennis,” the first-year pro protested. “We can’t say Althea Gibson or Arthur Ashe have opened the doors because no one has followed them up. We have to do it all over again.” The USLTA president, Walter E. Elcock, was unmoved by Carrington’s complaint, or by the ATA’s insistence that an agreement had been breached. “I told them that, to my knowledge, there used to be an understanding that the A.T.A. annual singles champion was given a spot in the draw,” Elcock explained. “But since the advent of the open championships, with so many good players, they’ve gone into qualifying tournaments.”
Despite intervention by Ashe and others, Elcock refused to soften his racially insensitive stance, and only after John Paish of Great Britain withdrew at the last minute did Carrington receive a place in the opening round of 128. A host of loyal ATA stalwarts turned up at courtside to cheer Carrington on, but the young star, playing for the first time on grass, had an off day and lost his hard-earned first-round match to Ove Bengston of Sweden.
Distracted by the Carrington controversy, third-seeded Ashe also seemed off his game. He had been looking forward to the 1973 U.S. Open as a special occasion after agreeing to team up with Althea Gibson in the mixed doubles competition. But the twenty-third anniversary of Gibson’s Forest Hills debut did not turn out the way he had hoped it would. In the singles competition, he kept his focus long enough to win his first two matches, but on September 2 he suffered a double defeat, losing a third-round match to the seventeen-year-old Swedish phenom Bjorn Borg and suffering a straight-set loss in the mixed doubles. “This was the worst day of the year,” Ashe wrote in his diary. “I don’t want to think about it. . . . Jesus, I feel like an old man. I’m thirty years old and teeny-boppers are upsetting me. It takes something like this to make you aware of how really short an athlete’s life is. It seems like the day before yesterday that I was the kid, beating the old man.”
To make matters even worse, Ashe had to excuse himself immediately after his loss in the mixed doubles and rush off to an important ATP board meeting in midtown Manhattan. After arriving at the meeting, he assured Meryl that the directors could finish their business in an hour, so she agreed to wait outside the meeting room. Three hours later she was still waiting, angrily cooling her heels and wondering why her boyfriend had abandoned her. “I just forgot about her being there,” Ashe confessed in his diary. “I just forgot. You can imagine how that went over.” Meryl soon forgave him for his uncharacteristic thoughtlessness. But the entire scene reminded him that real life is a challenge, even for famous athletes with beautiful girlfriends.36
The U.S. Open was the biggest show in tournament tennis in 1973, easily outshining the boycott-tarnished Wimbledon. But even the excitement at Forest Hills was upstaged by the buzz surrounding a single match in late September. Promoters heralded the upcoming “Battle of the Sexes” between twenty-nine-year-old Billie Jean King and the fifty-five-year-old hustler Bobby Riggs as the “match of the century,” and it was difficult to argue with the claim. Four months earlier, Riggs had crushed the Australian star Margaret Court in the first male-female confrontation, winning 6–2, 6–1 in fifty-seven minutes. Held on Mother’s Day, before a crowd of 3,500 at the San Vicente Country Club in Southern California, the nationally televised $10,000 winner-take-all match left Riggs itching for more fame, namely a confrontation with King, the biggest name in women’s tennis. “I want her, the Women’s Libber leader,” Riggs chortled. “She can name the place, the court and the time, just as long as the price is right.”37
The place and time turned out to be the Houston Astrodome on September 20, and the price was a staggering $100,000 in prize money plus nearly $200,000 more in appearance guarantees. This time the crowd exceeded thirty thousand—the largest crowd in tennis history—and millions of others watched the television coverage, which reached tennis fans in thirty-six nations via satellite. What they saw was a spectacle befitting Barnum and Bailey. King entered the arena lounging on a “Cleopatra-style gold litter” held aloft by four toga-clad male track-and-field athletes, and Riggs followed “in a gold-wheeled rickshaw pulled by six professional models in tight red and gold outfits.” Meeting at center court, the two combatants exchanged gifts: a large candy cane for King and a baby pig for the self-styled “chauvinist pig” Riggs. Eventually, they actually played tennis, and in the end King overcame Riggs’s clownish antics and chauvinistic bluster, winning handily in three straight sets. Almost immediately, there was talk of a rematch, leaving some tennis traditionalists to wonder if the circus atmosphere would ever subside.38
Ashe, surprisingly enough, did not add his voice to the chorus of criticism, even though he had spoken out against the corrupting power of big money and show business hype in the past. The fact that his good friend Jack Kramer was scheduled to be one of the match’s courtside television commentators (at King’s insistence, Kramer, a notorious male chauvinist, was ultimately replaced by Howard Cosell) may have colored his attitude. He seemed to take genuine pleasure from all the hoopla. As he wrote in his diary three weeks before the match, “Among some of the players, there is grousing that the whole thing is a detriment to the game of tennis, but myself, I love it. I don’t see how it can fail to generate more publicity for the whole sport—and besides, how can anyone not favor the one thing in the whole big bad world that is just good clean fun?”
In mid-September, a week before the big show in Houston, he found himself paired with King at a television taping on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. During their mixed doubles matches, the “odd couple” got to know each other. “I hear she’s really been coming down on my case lately,” he wrote. “Here’s a recent published quote from Mrs. King: ‘Don’t tell me about Arthur Ashe. Christ, I’m blacker than Arthur Ashe.’ Hmmmm. I let it pass today, mostly because I suspect that she’s really not personally mad at me, only in dispute because I’ve been opposed to World Team Tennis. . . . Also, I’ve been against her contention that the women should get prize money equal to the men at tournaments where they both play.” In the end, they “made a pretty good team” in Ashe’s estimation, and he came away from the experience with renewed respect for the woman known as “the Old Lady” on the tour. “I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned playing with Billie Jean King,” he declared. “She is a much better player than I imagined, and I now honestly believe that she has an excellent chance to beat Bobby Riggs.�
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Ashe was right, of course, and he even won a last-minute wager on the match, which he watched on television in a crowded bar in Los Angeles. “As soon as I saw Billie Jean play that first game I knew she had it,” he reported in his diary. “There was no choke there. She was moving so easily, and . . . she just wasn’t scared the way Margaret had been. And I knew Billie Jean could hit the ball, from playing with her at Hilton Head. So, I called out for a bet. . . . When you’ve got one player who can’t move and the other can hit the ball and isn’t nervous, you have got a sure thing in tennis. So I won $80 on The Old Lady.”40
Some commentators hailed the King-Riggs match as a historic turning point in women’s sports, but Ashe was not one of them. Neither his public comments nor his diary betrayed much concern for the politics of gender or feminist consciousness. While he prided himself on being relatively enlightened and progressive on women’s issues, his major public policy interests lay elsewhere. Racism, poverty, war, and barriers to political democracy and postcolonial self-determination—these were the issues that drew his attention. During the fall of 1973, there was too much going on in the world to waste any time on “the Bobby Riggs nonsense,” as Ashe called it. He and other public-minded citizens were busy keeping abreast of a number of ongoing historical dramas, including the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, the OPEC oil embargo, Watergate and the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Vice President Spiro Agnew’s resignation, a coup d’état in Chile, and the election of Coleman Young and Maynard Jackson as the first black mayors of Detroit and Atlanta.41
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