Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  On October 1, Ashe’s social conscience took him to “darkest Mississippi,” to Jackson, where he gave a speech at a National Urban League luncheon. Arranged by his Aunt Lola, who lived in Gulfport, the speech focused on the need for black economic empowerment and voter registration. Ashe also conducted a clinic and played an exhibition match at Jackson State, the site of a brutal police riot three years earlier. To his surprise, James Meredith, who a decade earlier had desegregated the University of Mississippi, was in the crowd.

  After the match, the two men talked about the climate of fear that still pervaded many parts of Mississippi, a discussion that led to a brief diary entry on the general state of black politics in America. “Jackson must be one of the toughest places in America for black franchise,” Ashe wrote. “—It really takes you back in time when you hear about blacks being afraid to vote in the 1970s—but then, everywhere I go in the U.S. I find that we are still politically unsophisticated, just now coming into our own. . . . Blacks will not really have arrived in politics until we start publicly disagreeing with each other.” Independence of mind had long been a cherished virtue to Ashe, but it carried special force for a thirty-year-old black activist trying to find his way through the uncertain racial politics of the early 1970s.42

  FIFTEEN

  SOUTH AFRICA

  ASHE’S COMMITMENT TO INDEPENDENT thinking was especially evident in his determined effort to play tennis in South Africa. Ever since his first application for a South African visa had become public in 1969, he had received sharp criticism from several leading anti-apartheid organizations. Any contact with the white South African regime, they warned, would almost certainly backfire, redounding to the interests of white supremacist propagandists. Though recognizing the potential pitfalls of providing white South Africans with an opportunity to misrepresent superficial change as something substantial, he continued his struggle to desegregate South African tennis.

  After three visa refusals, Ashe’s stubborn determination to play in South Africa appeared moot. But, to his delight, the situation shifted in his favor in late June 1973. On the eve of the Wimbledon fortnight, just as his chance of cracking the South African color bar seemed all but gone, new hope emerged during a private meeting with Owen Williams. Having befriended Ashe during the 1969 U.S. Open, the liberal South African promoter had been working behind the scenes for more than a year urging officials of the Vorster government to reverse their decision. Prodded by Gladys Heldman, the editor of World Tennis magazine and a strong proponent of all manner of good causes, Williams was determined to see Ashe play in the South African Open.

  Once one of his nation’s most gifted amateur players, Williams was an active member of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party, a small party holding only one seat (held by Helen Suzman) in the South African parliament. Yet, as the successful promoter of the South African Open, he was in a position to influence several of the government’s most powerful figures. In particular, he had access to Piet Koornhof, the Minister of Mines, Immigration, Sports, and Recreation. Widely considered to be the heir apparent to Prime Minister John Vorster, Koornhof was the primary architect of a three-year-old policy that had opened South Africa to “a carefully audited handful of world-class black athletes,” most notably Goolagong, the golfer Lee Elder, and the racially integrated New Zealand rugby team. In Ashe’s estimation, “it was all strictly window dressing, since there was no comparable integration (if any at all) permitted at the lower-levels of sport,” though he acknowledged “at least it was a start.”1

  As Koornhof’s experimental policy became almost standard practice, Williams began to plot a breakthrough for Ashe. “The more enlightened Nationalists believe that the white Afrikaners, the party’s main constituency, are ready to accept Koornhof’s policy,” Williams assured Ashe, adding, “If so, it becomes petty and foolish to let in a lot of other athletes and continue a vendetta” against you. After listening intently to Williams’s assessment of the situation, Ashe reaffirmed his willingness to play in South Africa. But he would only do so, he told Williams, if four conditions were met:

  First, that I would come and go as I pleased, anywhere in the country. Second, that the stands . . . at Ellis Park, in Johannesburg, would be “totally integrated,” with no special sections for racial groups. Third, that a conscientious effort would be made to try and arrange a meeting for me with Prime Minister Vorster. And fourth, that I would be accepted for what I happen to be—a black man. I would not permit the issue to be avoided by supplying me with any temporary “honorary white” status.

  Williams carefully wrote down the four conditions, which he acknowledged were reasonable and potentially acceptable to the Vorster government. Predicting Ashe would be playing in South Africa before the end of the year, he promised to call as soon as the arrangements were set. After four years of frustration, Ashe remained skeptical. “It is my guess that nothing more will ever come of it,” he noted in his diary.2

  Even so, just in case he was wrong, he began to prepare for a South African journey. Back in New York on July 4, he devoted most of Independence Day to the writing of “letters to several friends, black and white, asking them for their views on any possible trip of mine to South Africa.” Although he wanted to go in the worst way, he was also “deeply concerned with how other blacks might take such a trip.” The recipients included Representatives Andrew Young and Barbara Jordan, the noted black poet Nikki Giovanni, the expatriate South African anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus, and UCLA’s J. D. Morgan.

  The responses were mixed. Three advised him not to go; four urged him to go; two others said yes, but only if stringent stipulations were imposed; and Barbara Jordan was noncommittal, assuring him she trusted his “good judgment.” None of this mattered, however, since his July 4 diary entry indicates he had already made up his mind long before the letters were mailed. “There are two basic avenues used to approach the South African question,” he wrote. “One is more a roadblock than an avenue, a militant, all-or-nothing policy, which maintains that nobody should have anything to do with the dreadful place: boycott it, freeze it out, ignore it and wait for its millennium from a respectful distance. The United States wasted a generation on that philosophy toward China; it still operates its Cuban policy that way. The other avenue is a gradualist one—result-oriented. It assumes that progress can only come in small chunks; that you deal for your advances as you can. Surely, it is less emotionally satisfying this way, but, I’m certain, more realistic and more successful.”3

  Ashe associated the gradualist approach with the nonviolent movement led by his hero, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and with the wisdom of the nineteenth-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Quoting Douglass’s famous aphorism, “Power concedes nothing without a struggle—never has, never will,” Ashe insisted, “you must be prepared only to chip away at power and injustice.” In late July, he received reinforcement for this view from Giovanni. “I should imagine in the modern world information is the key to freedom,” she wrote. “We have very little information coming from that country. A lot of emotion, a lot of rhetoric but very little first hand reports. I should think an intelligent young man like you will be able to absorb not only what is said but what is not said. . . . We know, of course, that one visit won’t change a government but it’s a start.” Coach Morgan agreed. “I believe that your presence there would be another important factor in breaking down the walls of racial bias against the black community,” he told Ashe on July 12, adding, “positive, constructive representation by you would have a far greater impact on the white South African government than anything else you could do.”4

  Sharing Giovanni’s passion for information, Ashe had schooled himself in the intricacies of South African history, politics, and culture. During the past four years, he had been reading everything South African he could lay his hands on—dozens of books and scores of journal articles and newspaper accounts. He absorbed it all, from the Afrikaner Trek of the early nineteenth centu
ry and the Bantu, Xhosa, and Zulu migrations to the rise of the African National Congress (ANC) and the recent hard-line politics of Vorster. He studied the legal history of apartheid, from the Population Registration and Group Areas Acts of 1950 to the Black Homeland Citizenship Act of 1970, poring over documents that few native South Africans had taken the time to read. If the chance to visit South Africa actually did materialize, he wanted to be ready to make the most of it.

  As he waited for Owen Williams’s internal diplomacy to yield a visa, Ashe kept close tabs on what was happening on the ground in South Africa. There were a few scraps of good news—signs of hope that at least some white South Africans were turning away from the most rigid forms of apartheid. But there was no real movement toward freedom for black South Africans. Indeed, in some areas the noose of apartheid was tighter than ever. In April, an Afrikaner extremist named Eugene Terre’Blanche had founded the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (ARM), with the express purpose of convincing all white South Africans that blacks were not only racially inferior but also an imminent threat to the “Afrikaner volk.” As ARM’s influence spread, Prime Minister Vorster faced increasing pressure from the right, which didn’t bode well for Ashe.5

  In mid-October, Williams sent word that the South African cabinet was about to meet and that a breakthrough might be in the offing. But once again Ashe’s hopes were dashed. “No word from South Africa,” he reported in his diary on October 17. “If the cabinet met last night, they either tabled me or aren’t prepared to let me know their answer yet.” During the next two weeks, Ashe followed the European tour from Spain to Germany to France, ending up in Paris at the end of the month. It was there, after surviving a Right Bank shopping spree with Meryl, that he received the long-awaited good news. “Let the record state that it was on Halloween,” he declared, “when they finally agreed to let Arthur Ashe into South Africa. Owen Williams called me at nine this morning with the official word, and it was on the radio this afternoon. Even before then, I had a call from the South African embassy. They told me I could pop around and pick up my visa any time.”

  Whether he was being offered a treat or a trick remained to be seen, but the Halloween surprise gave him a measure of hope. Once Arthur actually saw the visa, he discovered there was indeed a trick of sorts: unbeknownst to Williams, the embassy had issued a visa that described its black American holder as an “honorary white.” As he had done many times in the past, Arthur laughed off this latest indignity. Nothing, not even a gratuitous insult, he told himself, was going to stop him from going to South Africa. Williams marveled at how his American friend sidestepped this unexpected affront. “Arthur handled it like the joke it was,” he observed, “and proceeded to carry himself with an aura of quiet dignity throughout his visit that was the mark of the man.”6

  Ashe received several messages of congratulation, including one delivered in person by Blen Franklin, the president of the all-white South African Lawn Tennis Union (SALTU). Ashe thought nothing of it at first, but he soon learned their “pleasant little chat” had been a prologue to a clever maneuver of South African sports diplomacy. “It turned out at the ILTF meeting,” Ashe reported, “that he used me as one of the ‘eight points’ explaining why South Africa should be allowed back in the Davis Cup. So they’re ahead; they’ve already hooked something very big with me as part of the bait.” Though disappointed, he did not let Franklin’s indirection dampen his enthusiasm for the upcoming visit. Reasoning that “it can work both ways,” he explained: “My going to South Africa is a trade. They’ve already gained something out of me, and I’ll gain something too. If nothing else, my presence signals a pause in apartheid.”

  Ashe, bracing himself for a barrage of criticism, had prepared a response that he hoped would fend off the sharpest blows. “People who do not want me to go point out to me that I will be a tool of an illegal government, one chosen by a minority electorate,” he wrote on November 2. “Unfortunately, this is true; also unfortunately it is the only government South Africa has got.”7

  “There are a lot of reasons why I’m going,” he admitted. “The South African Open is the sixth most prestigious in the world. I want to play in it, and I want to win it. And I’m curious. I probably know as much about South Africa as any person in the world who has never been there, but I wonder how secondhand impressions will square with reality. I’m human: I just want to see the damn place with my own eyes and my own mind.”

  While not denying he harbored a few “selfish, personal reasons” for going, Ashe expressed confidence his visit to South Africa would do more good than harm. “Whereas I don’t see myself as Jackie Robinson or even as Rosa Parks, neither trailblazer nor pawn of history,” he explained, “I do think I’m just a little bit of progress. Ellis Park will be integrated, and I will be a free black on display.” His potential role in the movement to end white dominance in South African sports was too important to ignore. “South African blacks have never had one of theirs become a national sports hero,” he pointed out, adding: “their idols are restricted to neighborhood status, and when you must limit your idols, surely you must limit all the dreams and aspirations, and you remain, perforce, a limited man.”

  Using this calculus, he offered himself as the black South Africans’ surrogate champion, the value of which depended on how well he played on the courts of Johannesburg. “If I lose in the first or second round, I have no platform,” he conceded. “I’m just an interested tourist—who happens to be black—gallivanting around South Africa.” Dell had reminded him of this hard truth during a recent telephone conversation. “Remember,” he advised, “nobody listens to losing quarter-finalists.” Ashe still had two weeks of play on European clay to sharpen his game before flying to South Africa. But the consistently poor quality of his recent performances—“I have been playing worse and worse,” he complained on October 21—did not bode well. The last thing he wanted to do was to embarrass himself in front of a crowd of gleeful white South Africans gloating in front of their black servants. “I’m already starting to worry,” he confessed on November 9, “that I’ll go down to South Africa next week to make history and get wiped out in the first round.”8

  Ashe had one more tournament to play—a two-site tournament in Nottingham and London—before leaving on November 16. Once again his performance—losing to Tiriac in the second round—was anything but a confidence builder. A week earlier, he had put Meryl on a plane to Toronto, thinking a little less romance and a bit more concentration would help his game. But even this sacrifice didn’t seem to help. To make matters worse, during the twenty-four hours before his departure he had to endure a last-ditch intervention by several members of Dennis Brutus’s anti-apartheid group, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC). The heated discussion went on for hours, with the SANROC stalwarts pulling out all stops to convince Ashe to cancel his trip. In the end, an exhausted Ashe remained firm. Later that night, while walking out of the Westbury Hotel lobby to catch a cab to the airport, he couldn’t avoid a sendoff from Nastase, who waved him through the door with a salutary “Hey, Brown Sugar, don’t let them put you in jail.”9

  The long flight to Johannesburg took a full day, with a brief stopover in Nairobi. Though nervous, Ashe had plenty of time to compose himself before setting foot on South African soil, and he had considerable help from his traveling companions Donald and Carole Dell, the ATP’s press officer Richard Evans, and Frank Deford, who was covering the trip for Sports Illustrated. The sixth member of the party, Bud Collins of the Boston Globe, was scheduled to meet the others in Johannesburg, after flying in from Australia. These trusted friends and colleagues would be with Ashe for the entire two weeks, sharing his experiences but also watching his back and keeping him out of trouble. On the flight to Nairobi, Dell and Evans prepped him on how to deal with the South African press. Mostly, they reminded him of his promise to avoid any public criticism of the South African regime. As Ashe acknowledged, “I had agreed as part of the deal that I wo
uld keep my counsel and hold any substantive opinions for my departure. This would also serve to keep the press from hounding me, so that I would be able to concentrate on playing tennis.”10

  Upon his arrival in Johannesburg, Ashe got off to a good start by assuring reporters he intended to fulfill his part of the bargain. “I’m here in a spirit of cooperation,” he told them. “I’ve come as a man, nothing more, nothing less, and I look forward to a fascinating twelve days.” The scene at the airport afforded Ashe “a mellow welcome,” and even before the plane touched down a stranger came up to him with an unexpected greeting: “Mr. Ashe, I’m one of those horrible South Africans, and I just want to wish you the best of success. I promise you we’re not all as bad as we’re supposed to be, and you mark my words: three fourths of the people will be pulling for you.”

  The stranger turned out to be a government official assigned to escort Ashe to the customs bureau, where in Ashe’s words, his passport and visa were examined by a man who “looked like he just came in from the Boer War,” complete with “starched, short-pants, long-socks uniform; swagger stick; bushy mustache.” After being waved through, Ashe spotted the friendly faces of Owen Williams and his wife, Jennifer, who had come to drive the American party to the home of Brian Young, a liberal Jewish businessman who had offered to house Ashe, Deford, and the Dells during their stay. Evans and Collins were housed in private residences nearby in the same upscale neighborhood of Sandton. Young was in Swaziland for the weekend, so their welcoming host was Gordon “Forbesy” Forbes, a former South African tennis star and Cliff Drysdale’s brother-in-law.