Frustrated but refusing to give up, he made one last effort to make his point. “Please, I know these things,” he said as calmly and diplomatically as he could. “Of course I know it’s infinitely harder here than it is in the States. But I still see my being here as a start. You’ve got integrated seating out at Ellis Park. It was never there before. And we’re trying to get black players on the Sugar Circuit. There will be something left when I’m gone.” The best way to bring about change, he added, was to choose the path of rationalism over emotionalism: “Maybe I’m naïve, but I think, when you’re mapping out a plan for progress, emotion cannot be allowed to play a large role, except for drumming up support.” Reaching back to his early training, he ended with his favorite quotation of Dr. J’s: “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.”
When Arthur recalled the scene years later, he was proud that somehow he had managed to follow his own advice. “I didn’t lose my temper,” he wrote in 1981, pointing out “this was one of the few places they could meet in public and vent some of their anger.” At the time, Arthur was uncertain about what had transpired. His best guess, however, was that by the time he left the room he had gained the support of roughly half of the black journalists. “You know they tell me I can’t sleep on the white man’s sheets because I’m black,” a journalist named Patsy complained, “but they let you come and they find you the best beds, and if you’re black and good enough to sleep on sheets, then so am I. Every time they do something like this, they kick their own policies in the backside.” Another thanked Ashe for inspiring a sense of empowerment: “I see you and other free blacks who come here, and it is a challenge to me to be like you, free, and if not me, my sons.”23
On Thursday—Thanksgiving Day back in the United States (and coincidentally the tenth anniversary of President John Kennedy’s assassination)—Ashe faced another major challenge when he squared off in the quarterfinals against Bob Hewitt. A notoriously ornery competitor, Hewitt was a transplanted Australian who had resettled in South Africa after marrying a Johannesburg model in the 1960s. Among the South African players, he stood out as the staunchest defender of the status quo. “Hewitt and South Africa were made for each other,” Ashe once quipped. The two men had barely spoken since a 1970 argument over apartheid. “The conversation ended rather abruptly,” Ashe recalled, “when Hewitt informed me that he didn’t want to talk about it anymore since I didn’t even know that South African blacks preferred apartheid because ‘they’re happy.’ ”
All of this personal history raised the stakes for the match, which not surprisingly drew a capacity crowd. Ashe guessed roughly half of the fans were pulling for him, and he was pleased there was a large contingent of blacks on hand. He was less pleased, however, with the seating arrangements. While a few blacks were scattered throughout the stadium, most were seated in a segregated section. Even though he appreciated the swell of support from that section, which cheered “brazenly for me, without a great deal of concern for the niceties of evenhanded tennis crowd etiquette,” he worried about the mixed message that the seating patterns communicated.24
Three days earlier the Rand Daily Mail had reprinted an article he had written for the London Sunday Times that reiterated his expectation that there would be “no special sections reserved for Blacks and Whites only.” But he also recognized he had no choice but to accept a partial victory over segregated seating. Tacitly acknowledging this fact, he made a point of saluting the nonwhite section as he left the court after trouncing Hewitt in straight sets. “I saw a ‘force’ in the faces of the black spectators that helped my game,” he conceded, adding: “They shouldn’t have cheered Hewitt’s mistakes, but I understood their feelings. It was comparable to some of my black friends talking about ‘those white boys’ during my junior days, an opportunity to defy the system.” By his admission, after less than a week in South Africa, he had learned that in this strange land “you negotiate the truth along with everything else.”25
Despite Ashe’s busy schedule at Ellis Park—which included playing doubles alongside Tom Okker—his handlers managed to fit in a dizzying round of social events. On Friday, he attended a party hosted by John Burns, the director of the South African bureau of the USIA. Among the invited guests was the noted liberal South African writer Alan Paton, the author of Cry, the Beloved Country. Formerly banned for his militantly anti-apartheid views, Paton had flown in from Durban just to meet Ashe. The two had an extended conversation during which they compared notes on the paradoxes of South African society. “The whole world thinks we are odd,” said Paton, a comment Ashe took as “a spectacular understatement.” A number of black students were also at the party, some representing banned organizations such as the South African Students’ Association and the Black People’s Convention. Several of the students made it clear they disagreed with Ashe’s decision to come to South Africa, but this time he was ready for the onslaught.26
The next morning he was back at Ellis Park for a semifinal match against Cliff Drysdale. Some members of the crowd were well aware of the bond between the two men, but others seemed to view the match as a racial showdown tinged with ideological overtones. Indeed, at several points in the match the referee found it necessary to ask the fans in the black section of the stands to tone down their cheering for Ashe. Coming off a series of lingering injuries, Drysdale was never really in the match as Ashe won handily in straight sets. Meeting at the net for a warm handshake, the two men who had been present at the conception of Ashe’s South African quest exchanged knowing smiles of recognition.27
Tennis-wise, Ashe was nearing his goal of winning a South African championship. He and Okker were still alive in the doubles competition, with two matches to go, and he had won 12 straight sets in singles. Only Jimmy Connors, the brash young left-hander from Illinois, stood between him and the singles title. They had played only once before, in the final at the U.S. Pro Championships in Boston the previous July, and Connors had won. Though only twenty-one, Connors had already earned a formidable reputation as a talented battler and a lone wolf, both on and off the court. Playing on Bill Riordan’s semi-renegade indoor circuit, he had refused to join the ATP and had generally thumbed his nose at Ashe and the tennis establishment. He was an opponent Ashe would enjoy beating, but it wouldn’t be easy. After being trounced by Connors in the semifinals, Okker told Ashe he had never competed against a stronger player.28
One of Ashe’s biggest challenges was to keep his mind on tennis. There was so much else going on, so much to do and see. As he recalled years later, “activities off the court intrigued me more. I wanted to see and do everything. I wanted to visit every tribe, talk to everybody, find out firsthand how this bastion of Western civilization could still fervently believe in apartheid.” Moreover, everyone seemed to want a piece of his time. “The press interest in him was insane,” Connors remembered. “They followed him everywhere, shoving microphones in his face and demanding a comment on every political issue. Arthur stayed cool throughout the whole tournament, but how he managed to concentrate on tennis I’ll never know.”29
Typically—less than an hour after finishing the Drysdale match—Arthur received an urgent message from Williams. The national sports minister, Piet Koornhof, wanted to meet with him as soon as possible. Arthur had asked to meet with Prime Minister Vorster, but it looked like he was going to have to settle for Koornhof. A few minutes later he was face-to-face with the tall Afrikaner, who agreed to talk “candidly but off the record.” Encouraged by Koornhof’s concession that the days of apartheid were numbered, he secured a promise that a future discussion would take up the issue of desegregating the Sugar Circuit. Yet when Ashe recounted the meeting years later, his strongest memory was of Koornhof’s conservative indirection. The Afrikaner “skirted issues,” Ashe recalled, and though “sympathetic to the plight of blacks,” he “stopped short of saying that apartheid was wrong.” Most distressingly, “he offered almost no hope of one-man, one-vote rule,” prompti
ng Ashe to comment: “So much for Western civilization.”30
The next day was Sunday, the day before the Connors match, and Arthur used the time away from the tournament to conduct a youth tennis clinic in Soweto. To his delight, more than 1,500 black South Africans (including Mark Mathabane) showed up, mostly just to watch. Some came to catch their first glimpse of a black tennis star. Many others, he surmised, “had probably never seen tennis played before.”
As soon as the clinic was over, he spoke to the crowd through a large megaphone. But his words were soon drowned out by a combination of enthusiastic fans rushing forward for autographs and hecklers carrying anti-Ashe placards. After several angry students confronted him with cries of “Go home, brother, and leave us alone. You’re doing more harm than good by coming to South Africa” and “sellout and stooge,” other members of the crowd came to his defense. A brief melee ensued, but he was able to escape unharmed. “Gingerly, I kept moving and smiling,” he recalled, “and managed to reach a car.”31
On Sunday evening, he remained in Soweto for a lavish yard party hosted by one of the community’s few physicians. Nearly two hundred guests crowded into the house and yard, where they listened and danced to a native band and feasted on a buffet provided by Williams. It was a joyous scene that he had not expected to see in Soweto, and he was almost overcome with emotion when the evening ended with a series of gracious toasts honoring his presence. “You are the pride and idol of us all,” Renee Ngcobo, a leading black lawyer and the head of a black tennis association, exclaimed. “You epitomize sportsmanship, for the essence of sportsmanship is to experience happiness in the happiness of others—and to feel their pain and their suffering too. God bless you for coming, Arthur, our Arthur.” After calling for three cheers from the crowd, Ngcobo placed a traditional luck-bearing amulet around Arthur’s neck and pronounced that the visiting American’s new nickname was Sipho—which meant “a gift” in the Xhosa language.32
Arthur couldn’t have asked for a better sendoff on the eve of his big match with Connors, and when he actually took the court on Monday, he discovered that virtually all of the fans in the stadium were solidly behind him. The crowd was so much in his favor that during the second set he had to “plead with the fans not to applaud when Connors made mistakes.” Reflecting on the crowd’s behavior, he later concluded it was difficult to interpret the actual meaning of the cheers, especially among the whites. “Cheer for the black man and assuage your guilt feelings,” he suggested rhetorically, speculating that “some of the people who supported me so warmly on center court today will tomorrow behave despicably toward some poor black man.”
Whatever the mix of fan motivation, the cheering didn’t seem to bother Connors, who dominated the match from start to finish. Although Arthur played reasonably well and even forced a tiebreaker in the second set, Connors’s ground strokes—especially his whiplashing two-handed backhand—were too much to overcome. The young left-hander won in straight sets, leaving Arthur to comment: “They will have to wait another year for a black man to be champion of South Africa.” Actually, this wasn’t quite accurate. On Tuesday, he and Okker defeated the Australians Rob Maud and Lew Hoad in the doubles final. While this wasn’t exactly what he had come for, the doubles title provided some consolation. “In a way,” he observed, “this might have been the most important doubles match I ever won, for now a black man’s name rests on the list of South African champions. Etched. Forever.”33
With the close of the doubles competition Ashe was done with the tennis scene at Ellis Park, but not with South Africa. He still had two days before his flight to New York, and he was determined to make the most of the time he had left. On the afternoon of the 27th, he and the rest of his entourage—except for the already departed Bud Collins—flew to Durban, on the Indian Ocean. Their real destination, or so they thought, was the remote bush town of Ulundi, where they were scheduled to meet with Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a Zulu chief described by Ashe as “probably the most powerful black man in South Africa.” Unfortunately, after chartering an early morning plane, the Americans flew into a powerful storm that forced a return to Durban. Ashe later reached Buthelezi by phone, but the failure to meet the chief in person was “as great a disappointment as losing to Connors.”34
Later in the day, the stalwart travelers flew west to Cape Town, where Ashe met with a group of graduate students and their teacher, Christopf Hanekom, a distinguished professor of anthropology at Stellenbosch University. Hanekom and his students represented the cream of the Afrikaner intellectual elite, and Ashe was eager to sound them out on matters related to democracy and apartheid. He later claimed to appreciate the general candor of the Afrikaners, as opposed to the hypocrisy that characterized British South Africans, many of whom professed liberal anti-apartheid beliefs that they rarely practiced. “It is one thing to express righteous indignation,” he observed, “it is another, quite obviously, to vote against this dandy arrangement that provides you with cheap servants, cheap labor and complete superiority.”
At Stellenbosch, however, Ashe encountered about as much racist candor as he could tolerate. Early on, Hanekom revealed the racial roots of his politics by offering Ashe a backhanded compliment. “You are an exception,” he insisted, commenting on his guest’s virtues. “You are not completely black; you have some white blood in you.” Later, one student used urban America’s racial troubles as a counterpoint to South Africa’s alleged balance between limited freedom and order. Soon another student jumped in, “delighted,” Ashe noticed, to cite “U.S. faults and inconsistencies to support their own injustices.” After patiently listening to a litany of empty claims, including the assertion that “we don’t have the riots that you suffer,” Ashe got right to the point. “Perhaps riots are a small price to pay for freedom of expression,” he suggested. “And besides, every day that goes by with apartheid increases the chances that the riot that does come will be even more violent, a huge conflagration.”
Ashe then turned toward Hanekom and asked: “Tell me, professor, are you scared?” After an awkward pause, Hanekom shook his head and said no, providing Ashe with a perfect opening. “Boy, I’d be, if I were you,” he said, following up with a quick laugh “to take the edge off.” Hanekom and the students, Ashe noted, just sat there stone-faced and silent, “loath to even admit the violence, both casual and one-sided” that permeated their racist social system.
Later on, Professor Hanekom maintained that a new form of apartheid was emerging, “a voluntary multiracialism” placing South Africa “on the road to diverse equality.” Before Ashe could respond, one of the students added it was all a matter of timing. “We are not so static a society as it may seem,” he insisted. “But at the moment, we just do not believe that racial equality would benefit the whole society.” When Ashe asked how they could “justify the whites making all the decisions,” another student offered differential stages of “evolution” as the primary basis for legal inequality.
Unaccustomed to such unvarnished condescension, Ashe made one last attempt to bring his hosts out of the darkness. Speaking of apartheid, he asked: “All the sophisticated evolutionary arguments aside, all the intellectual and political position papers forgotten—in your heart, do you think it’s right?” When the students hesitated to respond, their professor jumped in with a rehash of his earlier arguments. Growing impatient, Ashe cut him off with a real-life example. Pointing to Conrad Johnson, a prominent Coloured businessman and tennis official who had come to observe the discussion, he turned to Hanekom and said: “Forget all that. Just what about this man? Why can you vote and this man can’t? Why are you free and this man isn’t?” Looking distressed, Hanekom glanced nervously at Johnson and then looked downward as if in defeat. “Mr. Ashe,” he confessed meekly, talking barely above a whisper, “that is an ace up your sleeve. I cannot defend that.”35
Later in the afternoon, Ashe encountered a different side of the South African establishment when he visited the famous heart surgeon Ch
ristiaan Barnard at the Red Cross Hospital in Cape Town. Barnard, Ashe discovered, was a jumble of contradictions. He was proud of his hospital’s biracial facilities and open about his personal distaste for apartheid. Yet he opposed a South African democracy that followed a one-man, one-vote model, and he was unapologetically paternalistic in his attitude toward nonwhites. They remained cultural “children” in his view, and the government had no choice but to treat them as such. The only sane policy, he insisted, was to “take a child’s hand to help him cross the road.” Thanking Barnard for his honesty, Ashe left the hospital with more questions than answers, and a new appreciation for the complexities of South Africa’s problems.36
Before flying back to Johannesburg, Ashe held a youth tennis clinic at the home of Leon Norgarb, one of the Western Cape’s most liberal coaches, and at the Cape Town airport he had a private meeting with Hassan Howa, a prominent Coloured leader who served as president of the South African Cricket Board of Control (SACBOC). Known as an uncompromising “all or nothing” opponent of apartheid, Howa had publicly criticized Ashe for playing in front of largely segregated crowds at Ellis Park. After a surprisingly amicable meeting, Howa stunned reporters with the revelation that Ashe had been given assurances by government officials that “South Africans may be playing mixed sport in three years.” According to Howa, Ashe told him that while “the government was working in the direction of mixed sport,” broad changes could not be implemented until after the next general election. Ashe had asked Howa to keep this information to himself, but the flamboyant activist could not resist making headlines.
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