Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Even before his arrival in plush Sandton, Ashe experienced a few surprises. “My first impression,” he reported, “was that apartheid was a much more subtle proposition than I had anticipated. . . . During the entire trip from the airport, nearly an hour’s drive, I saw only two blacks driving cars. All you see are Africans walking—and walking slowly, as if they really have no place to go.”11

  Subtle or not, the power of apartheid became obvious during his first meal at the Young mansion. When he asked one of the house servants for a cold drink, she dropped her eyes and said: “Yes, master.” Unnerved, Ashe recognized and later commented on the irony of his situation: “So here is little Artie Ashe, the skinny black kid from the capital of the old Confederacy, all set up in a mansion, carrying on jes’ like white folks, and gettin’ himself called Master.” In the days that followed, Ashe made a concerted effort to equalize his relationship with the woman whose name, he learned, was Anna. He also learned she came from a “homeland” village more than two hundred miles from Johannesburg and was able to see her family only twice a year. In a series of long conversations, they compared notes about black life in South Africa and the United States, and on Ashe’s last day at the house she finally addressed him as “Arthur.”

  Arthur’s experience with Anna betrayed a deep ambivalence about his luxurious accommodations. “I knew in advance,” he acknowledged, “that a lot of people would call me a hypocrite for living in a white man’s house.” But he also knew the only viable alternative was a much too public stay in a first-class hotel where he would be treated as an “honorary white.” The suggestion that he should have arranged to stay in Soweto—which he termed a “grim ‘black’ city”—was, in his view, unrealistic for someone preparing to play competitive tennis. “I did not come to South Africa in sackcloth and ashes to serve penance,” he explained. “I know damn well how badly the Africans in this country live, but I cannot see how it would serve any useful purpose to live like one myself. I know I’ll catch a lot of heat for this, but I think it’s best this way.”12

  On his first night in Johannesburg, Ashe and his friends attended a Saturday-evening cocktail party hosted by several of the breweries sponsoring the South African Open. Ashe couldn’t help noticing that the invitees included whites, blacks, Indians, and others officially classified as “Coloureds.” With its racial mingling, the party was clearly illegal under the laws of apartheid, which prohibited whites from providing “drinks for persons of any other race.” Yet no one seemed to care. Later, Ashe joined Williams for dinner at an exclusive restaurant, and once again he marveled at the way everyone seemed to wink at an obvious breach of racial etiquette. “If I had been a native nonwhite,” he observed, “I would have not been permitted in the place. Hell, if I had been a native nonwhite, I wouldn’t have even be permitted to be up that late in Johannesburg. There’s a curfew for all nonwhites at 10 P.M.”13

  On Sunday morning, Ashe made his initial visit to the Ellis Park tennis courts, where he saw his first “WHITES ONLY” signs, something he hadn’t seen in America for nearly a decade. He was there to begin his preparation for his opening round match, and to “hit with some of the country’s best black players.” Right away, he realized that “none of them” was very good, an obvious reflection of being denied access to decent tennis facilities and systematic coaching. This would have to change, he decided, if there were to be any meaningful progress toward equal performance. “You can’t just bring a handful of them into the Open, beat them love and love in the first round and then send them back to nowhere till the next year’s Open,” he insisted. “We’ve got to obtain the right for the best players to compete on the Sugar Circuit.” Of course, the first order of business was for him to lead the way by winning the Open, the Sugar Circuit’s biggest prize.14

  By Monday, his third day in South Africa, Ashe was beginning to get a better feel for the realities of apartheid, and he didn’t like what he was seeing and hearing. In a private meeting with black journalists held in the players’ lounge at Ellis Park, he received an earful about the pass laws and a racially repressive criminal justice system. “Apartheid is handled with such sophistication,” he noted after the meeting, “that it is sometimes easy to forget that South Africa is nothing less than a police state. The injustices here go far beyond the seminal matter of racial inequality. . . . Arrest is arbitrary, incarceration capricious, and there is an execution, on the average, every nine or ten days. Without any trial, you can be imprisoned for three months at a clip—and they can repeat that each and every three months, ad infinitum.”

  The South African regime also made diabolically effective use of house arrests, better known as “banning.” This practice, Ashe reported in his diary, “permits you to exist but not really to live. If the government bans you, you cannot publish, attend a university, visit a library, travel or even meet with more than one person at a time.” He had long been aware of the most blatant aspects of South Africa’s system of social and political control, including the incarceration of Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders at Robben Island. But in recent years the counter image of what Ashe called “well-publicized ‘liberal’ breakthroughs” had obscured the reality of “increased repression.” After listening to the black journalists talk about what was happening beneath the veil of propaganda, he offered an apt metaphor for the regime’s disingenuous claims. “It is as if they have unscrewed the top of one bottle of apartheid and given the rest of the world a good heady whiff of that,” he observed, “but then screwed the lid even tighter on all the other bottles—and tightest of all on those that are concerned with men’s minds: the schools, the press, the churches.”15

  In addition to giving Ashe a sobering introduction to life on the ground in black South Africa, the journalists informed him that much of the black community resented his visit. “Many blacks don’t want me here,” a distressed Ashe reported, because “they feel my being here legitimizes the government and lends it some credence.” This was not what he wanted to hear. He could only hope his critics would keep an open mind as he moved through his two weeks in South Africa. This hope received an immediate boost from Don Mattera, an aspiring poet and Johannesburg Star correspondent who had a private conversation with him after the other reporters had left.

  Classified as Coloured, the light-skinned Mattera was an independent thinker who had his own take on Ashe’s visit. When Ashe asked him if he approved of the visit, Mattera responded with a resounding yes. “Oh, I’m glad you’re here,” he exclaimed. “We need some contact, we need to be periodically assured that people in the rest of the world still understand and care. Committed black Americans should visit South Africa.” He was adamant, however, that they had to come for the right reasons. Bob Foster, a black American boxer scheduled to fight a white South African opponent in Johannesburg later in the month, had already worn out his welcome as far as Mattera was concerned. From the outset Foster had studiously avoided the local black community while publicly praising white South African hospitality. Claiming that he “loved” South Africa, he talked of building a vacation home somewhere in the nation, presumably far away from Soweto and other black enclaves. “Someone like Foster only hurts us,” Mattera told Arthur. “That kind of person should stay away.”16

  When the tournament began the next morning, Arthur was eager to see who would show up to see the first interracial match in the long history of South Africa’s top-flight men’s competition. Although the stands were “not quite filled,” he could see that a significant number of blacks—perhaps as many as two hundred—had turned out to see him play. Mostly, he was pleased there was some intermingling between blacks and whites, though the scene stopped short of the fully integrated seating arrangements Williams had promised.17

  The opening day crowd included Mark Mathabane, a skinny, thirteen-year-old boy from Alexandra, an impoverished, nonwhite shantytown located in the Witwatersrand mining area north of Johannesburg. Five years later, with the help of Stan Smith, he wou
ld migrate to the United States to attend college, and in 1986 the publication of his searing memoir, Kaffir Boy, would establish his reputation as a leading critic of apartheid. But in November 1973 he was an aspiring young tennis player awestruck by Ashe’s example. “The more I read about the world of tennis, and Arthur Ashe’s role in it,” he recalled in Kaffir Boy, “the more I began to dream of its possibilities. What if I too were someday to attain the same fame and fortune as Arthur Ashe? Would whites respect me as they did him? Would I be as free as he?”

  Pro-boycott activists could have given Mathabane an earful of objections, but the boy from Alexandra was hardly alone in embracing Ashe’s visit. “His coming meant so much to blacks,” he insisted, “who literally worshipped American blacks who proved they could triumph in a white man’s world, a world that many of us believed was booby-trapped with all sorts of obstacles designed to sink blacks deeper into the mire of squalor and servitude, where white people wanted them to belong.”18

  Mathabane’s fascination with Ashe was common knowledge at the Barretts Tennis Camp, one of the few places in South Africa that occasionally allowed blacks and whites to play on the same court. The owner of the camp—a liberal German immigrant named Wilfred Horn—provided Mathabane with a ticket and bus fare to the first-round matches at Ellis Park. Once he arrived at the park, the wide-eyed boy took it all in, noticing that “the few black people at the tournament, much to my surprise, mingled freely with whites, as the two groups walked about the courts, eagerly seeking autographs from the tennis stars.” He saw a different situation, however, in the bleachers at Centre Court, where Ashe was about to play. There “most black people kept to themselves, sitting in a cluster in the northeast section of the stands, an area without a canopy and fully exposed to the torrid Transvaal sun.” Exercising the brashness of youth, Mathabane “tried, along with a couple of friends from Soweto to ‘integrate’ ” the more comfortable, shaded section inhabited by whites, but “the atmosphere became so tense that we abandoned the effort,” and rushed back to the safety of “the black section.”

  A few minutes after noon, Mathabane and the rest of the crowd watched Ashe open a new era of South African tennis with a crisp forehand winner down the line. His opponent, a tall, bearded Texan named Sherwood Stewart, could only smile. Having flown in from Sydney on Monday night, he told his seatmate Bud Collins that, win or lose, he simply wanted to be a part of history. Ashe went on to win the match in three straight sets, delighting most of the crowd as well as a bevy of reporters looking for a good story. Whenever Ashe won a point, Mathabane recalled, “black spectators rent the stadium with clapping and cheering. I chuckled at catching subtle expressions of disdain on several white faces as a black man trounced a white man.” He also noted—to his amazement—that many white spectators appeared to be rooting for Ashe.

  This surprise only added to the surreal quality of the experience, which became obvious as Mathabane headed home to the stark realities of Alexandra. “Throughout the entire day at Ellis Park,” he wrote, “I had been existing in a different world, a sort of make-believe world. I had breathed fresh air, walked on paved roads, mingled freely with white people, rested upon green grass and eaten free hot dogs given to me by whites. But as the packed bus rattled along Louis Botha Avenue, leaving behind the city of gold with its neon lights for a ghetto of darkness, smog, fear and violence—and all around me I saw sullen, worn, tired and sad faces of black workers—my spirits sunk.”

  The shock of such sharply contrasting worlds made Mathabane question the reality of what he had experienced. “Now that I had seen Arthur Ashe play,” he explained, “I found it hard to believe that he was a black man. How could a black man play such excellent tennis, move about the court with such self-confidence, trash a white man and be cheered by white people? . . . How did Arthur Ashe get to be so good in a white man’s sport? . . . Were the blacks in America really like us?”19

  This self-deprecating question was not the kind of query Ashe had hoped to provoke during his visit to South Africa. But he had his own questions about the cultural distance between black Americans and black South Africans. Reading historical and contemporary accounts of racial challenges and civil rights struggles had given him some basis for comparison. Yet he yearned for firsthand knowledge of black South African life. He didn’t want to miss any opportunity to get beyond the surface realities and reductionist stereotypes obscuring the human potential of black South Africa.

  Accordingly, within minutes of his win over Stewart, he left Ellis Park for an impromptu tour of Soweto, the infamous black township located seventeen miles southwest of downtown Johannesburg. Williams had provided him with a car and a driver—a black Mozambiquan named Solomon—and had encouraged him to explore Johannesburg and its environs.20

  Solomon, who turned out to be an extremely knowledgeable and perceptive guide, provided Ashe with a rare inside look at life in one of Africa’s densest ghettos. The tour was almost too much for Ashe to endure. Almost no one worked or shopped in Soweto, he discovered. Instead, Soweto blacks had to travel by train or bus back and forth from work and “to buy most of their goods from the white man.” Though it had a population of more than a million, Soweto, in his estimation, was “not a city so much as . . . an urban reservation.” As he reported with some shock in his diary, “the government owns all the houses. No public transportation within the city. One fire brigade, one hospital, one switchboard for 500 phones. Plumbing is rare, and perhaps a tenth of Soweto has electricity.” The almost total lack of educational institutions was perhaps the worst of it: “Unlike the whites, who have free education, the blacks, who can least afford it, must pay tuition, so that thousands of kids never go to school, and roam the streets, idly passing all the formative hours of their lives.” Jim Crow Richmond, even at its worst, had done better than this.

  As Solomon steered through Soweto’s crowded streets, Ashe saw it all. “The best of it,” he concluded, “is endless rows of tiny little cottages; the worst, shacks of paper, wood, and tin.” Before returning to Sandton, he witnessed a parting scene that touched him as few experiences had ever done. “It was late afternoon now,” he wrote, “and the thousands of workers were coming home from the long day in Jo’burg. Many had risen before dawn, and many were burdened with food and other items they had to buy in the city. There was the train station, and before it, a great field, maybe half a mile wide, which they had to cross. . . . We watched as they came, hundreds, thousands of them, filing toward us as the sun fell across their backs. Suddenly it occurred to me that I had seen something very much like this once before, and then I remembered that that scene was in Africa too, a time in Kenya when I saw hordes of wildebeest crossing a broad savanna.” Turning away from this “last tableau . . . the most vivid, and the most heartless,” he told Solomon it was time to leave.21

  The next morning, while he was still trying to make sense of what he had seen in Soweto, Ashe learned his new friend Don Mattera had been banned. The only consolation was that the banning order had apparently originated before their conversation at Ellis Park. Considering what he had already experienced since his arrival, he was hardly in need of any additional guilt. In an afternoon match against the Australian Barry Phillips-Moore, he was able to hold his concentration long enough to win. That evening he ran into Mattera just prior to a reception for black journalists sponsored by the United States Information Agency (USIA). Guarded by a stern-looking agent from BOSS, the South African Bureau of State Security, Mattera explained he could not attend the reception, even though he had organized it. Before leaving he shook Ashe’s hand and vowed to continue his fight for freedom. “They have banned me, but they cannot stop me,” he insisted.22

  Though unnerved by Mattera’s situation, Ashe gathered himself for the dialogue with the black journalists. Jammed into a small, cramped hall were seventy-five black and Coloured South Africans, several of whom—Ashe later learned—were paid informers. The BOSS agent was also there, silently presidi
ng over a scene charged with what Arthur interpreted as “fear and passion.” “I did not really understand how scared the people were though until I looked over at one of the group’s officers and saw that his hands were trembling,” he confessed. Somehow the trembling man screwed up his courage and opened the session with a tribute to Mattera. “He has spoken out for the common brotherhood,” the man declared. “So our time must be short too, for so do we.” Suddenly, there were cries of “Power, power!” and “Shame, shame!”

  This seemed to signal that the dialogue could begin in earnest, but to Ashe’s chagrin, much of what followed was sharply critical of his visit. One man called him an “Uncle Tom,” and another bluntly told him to go home before he did any more damage: “You stay away, all of you. All right, Arthur?” When Arthur responded that this advice made him “very sad,” another critic jumped in. “Your presence delays our struggle,” the man explained. “You go back to New York. Stay away, Stay away. You come here and save their tennis. Soccer is dying here because of the sanctions placed on it.” Arthur then made the case against sanctions, arguing they simply “won’t work” in a world where money is valued more than morality. But one of the few female journalists in the room would have none of it and scolded him for thinking like a naive American. “We don’t just want equality, as you do,” she explained. “We were dispossessed. We want our land back.”

  Ashe fought back with a brief history lesson taken from the American civil rights movement. “History,” he pointed out, “shows that progress does not come in huge chunks. It comes bit by bit. There was the lady Rosa Parks on the bus in Montgomery, and she was tired, and she said, No, I’m not moving, and the whole thing for us started from there.” But the mention of Parks only fueled the fire. “She would have been banned here,” one man shouted out, “and Martin Luther King would have been put on Robben Island.” Another challenged his credentials, asking, “What role did you play in the civil rights struggle in the United States?” and “Were you in the 1963 march on Washington?”