Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  All of this complicated the final stop of Ashe’s trip, a meeting with Koornhof in the capital city of Pretoria. Held in the seat of power, this second meeting offered both men a chance to clarify their positions and expectations related to the desegregation and democratization of South African sports. The conversation was blunt but cordial, and by the time Ashe left for the Johannesburg airport he felt cautiously optimistic.

  Once he arrived at the terminal, he read a prepared statement, a version of which had already been distributed to reporters. Written by the journalist Richard Evans, the original statement began with a “strongly worded” condemnation of apartheid, but Ashe decided to soften the first paragraph. “Gentlemen, you were handed a statement prematurely, which is a mistake on my part” he told the reporters. “I would like to change the statement—the first paragraph—and I trust you will do this as a favour to me.”

  He then read the revised statement. “Having read a great deal about your country before my visit,” he began, “nothing I have seen or experienced in South Africa has surprised me. . . . However, after talking to and exchanging views with people of every political persuasion, from my brothers in Soweto to students at Stellenbosch, I believe the first breezes of change may be reaching the Southern tip of Africa. I am optimistic that progress can be made in the immediate future and I fervently hope my presence here over the past 12 days will be of benefit to all concerned.” He went on to acknowledge that the desegregation of the South African Open was “only a beginning” and ended with a thank-you to “all the many people for the cordial and friendly way they received me.”37

  Ashe worried then and later that his statement was too sanguine, but thankfully, just before boarding the plane, he learned that a few minutes earlier Koornhof had announced the Sugar Circuit would soon be open to all races. Minutes later, with the plane still sitting on the tarmac, the man now called Sipho in Soweto received three additional parting gifts. The first two, concealed in a rolled-up newspaper and smuggled onto the plane by Carole Dell, were a poem by Don Mattera and a picture of Winnie Mandela, the wife of Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned ANC leader serving a life sentence on Robben Island. A handwritten message on the back of the photograph delivered a farewell message of thanks and advice. “The best you can do,” Mrs. Mandela counseled, “is ask the South Africans what you can do to help in their struggle.” Mattera’s poem, titled “Anguished Spirit—Ashe,” brought the departing tennis star to tears. Written ten days earlier on the day of Mattera’s banning, the anguished verses would haunt and inspire Ashe for the rest of his life. They began:

  I listened deeply when you spoke

  about the step-by-step evolution

  of a gradual harvest

  tendered by the rains of tolerance

  and patience.

  Your youthful face

  a mask

  hiding a pining, anguished spirit, and

  I loved you brother,

  Not for your quiet philosophy

  But for the rage in your soul38

  The third gift was a large bouquet of flowers rushed onto the plane just before takeoff. The accompanying card was from Koornhof. Genuinely surprised, Ashe didn’t quite know what to make of this gesture. Did the gift simply reflect good manners? Or had the wily cabinet officer been playing him for a fool all along? Did the white South Africans believe they had foiled his best efforts? What, after all, had black South Africans gained from his controversial and exhausting trip? On the long flight to New York via Dakar, he had a full day to reflect upon these and other troubling questions.

  Ashe’s diary entry for November 29, written for the most part on the plane, registered his initial assessment of his experiences in South Africa. All in all, he was proud of what he had accomplished. “I still have the resolve,” he wrote, “that contact with an adversary is better than isolation of him.” The progress he witnessed—and the likelihood of more to come—had proved his critics wrong. “I believe that the criticism applied against my trip,” he argued, “is more emotional than logical, and more frustrated than anything, and I’m convinced that my way can produce results. Arthur Ashe is not going to topple a government, but the very nature of sports is such that I believe that progress can be made in this frivolous area first. . . . Cliché or not, sports can bring change.” Even something as simple as white boys and girls clamoring to get his autograph at Ellis Park provided real hope for the future. “South Africa cannot be a lost cause,” he insisted. “Not from what I saw at Ellis Park.”

  Several days before his departure, Ashe and Williams had discussed the possibility of jointly underwriting a foundation dedicated to developing the tennis skills of young nonwhite South Africans. During the flight, he decided he would definitely follow through with this idea. “Those who show promise will get money for equipment and coaching,” he promised. “Also, all the used rackets and clothes and any paraphernalia that I have left over will go to black South African players.” He anticipated that this decision would draw some criticism from black Americans who expected him to give priority to the needy in his own country. But he reasoned the desperate situation in South Africa warranted special attention.

  “Tennis, or boxing, or any sporting event can, if only for a moment, in that cursed, bizarre place, bring a diversion,” he speculated. “Maybe that is what South Africa needs above all—a little escape. The place is so intense, so scared.” Much of what he wrote on the plane expressed his belief that the liberation of black South Africa was going to take time; it would be years, he feared, before anything approaching racial equality could be achieved. Nevertheless, he ended his diary entry declaring it was “just a matter of time” before black South Africans experienced this liberation. “Sooner or later, the black man is going to rule South Africa,” he wrote, “and the white man knows it. But more important, the black man knows it.”39

  Ashe’s first trip to South Africa had proven to be an all-encompassing experience. “I felt strange touching down at JFK and reentering the ‘real world,’ ” he recalled. “My stomach had been knotted the entire time and I was tense and taut.” Even growing up in Virginia had not prepared him for South African apartheid. In 1973, following two decades of advances in civil rights, it was “incredible” to him that white South Africans “still thought in terms of racial supremacy.” He knew all too well, of course, that America was still struggling with the vestiges of Jim Crow and white supremacist ideology. But he returned from South Africa with a newfound appreciation for the progress that had been made since his childhood.40

  Ashe saw tangible proof of this progress within hours of his early morning arrival in New York. After an emotional press conference where he vented about his hatred of apartheid, and after saying goodbye to the Dells, he boarded a flight for Raleigh, North Carolina. Several months earlier, he had agreed to speak at Duke University in Durham, conduct a youth clinic, and play an exhibition match against Roscoe Tanner. Having hardly set foot in North Carolina since his early ATA days, he was amazed at the relatively relaxed racial atmosphere in the Raleigh-Durham area. Indeed, he was astonished to learn that a month earlier Raleigh had actually elected a black mayor, a funeral director and city councilman named Clarence Lightner.41

  After a breathless and jet-lagged day in North Carolina, Ashe flew to Newark on December 1. Meryl, whom he hadn’t seen in nearly a month, was there to greet him and drive with him down to Princeton, where he was scheduled to play in another series of benefit exhibition matches. Though still exhausted from his intercontinental travel, he did not want to disappoint the Princeton event’s chief organizer, Margie Gengler, the star of Princeton University’s undefeated 1973 women’s tennis team and the girlfriend and future wife of Stan Smith. In an attempt to raise funds for the Youth Tennis Foundation of Princeton and the Friends of Princeton Tennis, Gengler had enlisted several pros—including Ashe, Tanner, and Bob Lutz—plus the actor Dustin Hoffman and the songwriter Burt Bacharach, for a round of celebrity doubles.

&
nbsp; Ashe had first visited Princeton in 1963 when it had been the site of the NCAA tennis championships. At that time, the Princeton student body was virtually all white, and the local black community, the boyhood home of Paul Robeson, was isolated from the university and the town’s upscale neighborhoods. Culturally, Princeton had long been considered the southernmost of the Ivies, and in its entire history prior to the mid-1960s the university had enrolled fewer than a dozen black students. Ashe had felt like an intruder in 1963. But a decade later—as he mingled with celebrities and signed autographs for fans, black and white—he could see that the town and the university had changed. Not only had the university’s black enrollment increased dramatically, but also when he was introduced to the mayor of Princeton township he found himself shaking hands with longtime black community activist Jim Floyd Sr.42

  Racial progress, it seemed to Ashe, was beginning to take hold in all regions of the country. But there were some things he hoped would never change. Whenever he became disoriented or uneasy, as he did after his return from South Africa, he felt the pull of his family and the nurturing folk culture of his childhood. Nothing soothed his nerves or restored his spirit more than a visit to Gum Spring, still the source of his sense of place, and that is where he headed a few days after the Princeton fund-raiser. “My parents and I live such completely contrasting life-styles,” he wrote on December 7, “that it is necessary for us to see each other every now and then to get to know each other again. I don’t mean that I have to come down here to love my parents again, but we all have to get together every so often so that we can remember how much we do share and how much we love each other.”

  As a kid, Ashe had helped his father build the house at Gum Spring, and some of his fondest memories were of fishing and hunting with his father and brothers in the streams and woods of rural Louisa County. On this particular visit, he became philosophical about the impact of Gum Spring on his life. “When I think back on it,” he concluded, “I sort of lived a dual life as a boy. I was city, but I was raised country by an old-fashioned country father. Maybe that’s why I can manage so well as the black in a white world. It’s the same sort of experience. I’ve never been the kind of sonuvabitch you ever could put in any particular niche.”

  Perhaps so, but Ashe’s country upbringing was sorely tested on his first morning home when his father woke him up early to go deer hunting. This deer hunt, he soon discovered, was no casual walk in the woods. In addition to the Ashes, there were eighteen other hunters in their party, fifteen of whom were white. Cultural change had clearly come to rural Virginia, and nothing he had seen in Raleigh or Princeton could match this taboo-breaking interracial gathering. “Just four or five years ago,” he insisted, “you never would have gotten blacks and whites hunting together in Virginia, especially out in the sticks like this.”

  The Louisa County hunters, Ashe’s father explained, were just ordinary folks who had come not for sport but rather “to put meat on the table.” The hunting party turned out to be “a very well organized, efficient operation” in Ashe’s estimation, but before the day was over he was picking shotgun pellets out of his leg from a stray shot. The wounds turned out to be superficial, but he still had quite a tale to tell. Whether his friends back in New York and Miami would actually believe it was another matter.43

  A week later, he traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, for another kind of shooting. A film crew was working on a documentary about his recent trip to South Africa, and the director John Marshall wanted to film Ashe in Jamaica “in a place where there are a lot of blacks around in a natural setting.” At one point, the crew left Kingston to do some filming in the small town of Lucea, where Ashe met with a group of high school students who were encouraged to talk about their views on race and South Africa.44

  After a brief respite with Meryl in Miami, he rejoined the film crew in Pennsylvania, where Marshall had arranged for him to have an on-camera conversation with Muhammad Ali at his training camp at Deer Lake. Having never met Ali, he was thrilled to to spend time with the man known as “The Greatest.” Although their personalities could hardly have been more different, the two men hit it off, especially after Ali praised Ashe’s decision to go to South Africa. After the camera was turned off, he even confessed he too had planned to go to South Africa but had called the trip off after being pressured by several Islamic ambassadors to the United Nations. “Me representing the whole Islamic world,” he told Ashe, “I had to listen to these people. But you going as an individual, Arthur—I support everything you did as an individual.”45

  That night Ashe flew back to Miami for the opening of Doral’s holiday tennis program. Spending Christmas in Miami had become a treasured part of his annual routine, a time to relax in the sun, play a little golf, and get ready for the beginning of a new WCT tour. He also liked to spend at least a few hours at the Orange Bowl Junior tournament, where he had gotten his start in the late 1950s. In 1973, there was the added attraction of seeing his old coach from St. Louis, Dick Hudlin, who had accompanied the latest hot ATA prospect, Juan Farrow, to the tournament. A native of Lynchburg, Farrow had recently followed Ashe’s example in leaving Virginia and enrolling at Sumner High, where he would soon win the first of three consecutive Missouri state scholastic singles championships. Ashe was impressed with Farrow’s tennis, but he worried about how the funky young Virginian would be received on the tour. “I can hardly wait till he gets on the circuit,” Ashe declared in his diary. “Juan wears big apple caps, the flashy clothes, the two-toned high heels, the works. I can just see the day when he shows up at some country club like Longwood. All those tennis officials are going to be walking around saying, ‘Whatever happened to that nice little colored boy Arthur Ashe?’ ”46

  Ashe himself often pondered the same question. What had happened to the relatively simple life he had led in his teens and early twenties? Success had brought excitement and financial security, but it had also placed him at the mercy of almost ceaseless travel and seemingly impossible demands. At the age of thirty, he didn’t really have a home he could call his own, and at times he wasn’t quite sure where he was or where he was headed. The primary blessing—and perhaps the ultimate curse—in all of this was the stimulation that pervaded his life. Before leaving South Africa, he told the press that the last few days had been “the most interesting week in my life.” But after a month back in the States, he wasn’t so sure. Considering his recent, post–South Africa experiences, he was beginning to think his entire adult life resembled a fantastical movie script. What new adventures lay in store for him in the coming years, he could only imagine.47

  SIXTEEN

  PROS AND CONS

  IN THE WORLD OF tennis, 1974 was the year of Jimmy Connors. As Ashe and others looked on in envy and awe, he won 99 of 103 singles matches, a record unmatched in the modern era. Along the way he won no fewer than fifteen tournaments, including three of the four Grand Slam events. Ashe, in comparison, won 85 of 112 matches and three tournament titles, a very good year by almost any standard but far short of Connors’s amazing run. Any comparison was skewed somewhat by Connors’s decision to forgo the standard WCT tour, where the weekly competition was decidedly tougher than on the makeshift circuit arranged by Connors’s agent, Bill Riordan. But the young left-hander’s dominance at the Grand Slam tournaments quashed any doubt that he was the best singles player in the world.

  In January, Connors took the Australian Open title, defeating Phil Dent in the final. In July, he won the Wimbledon final in straight sets over Ken Rosewall, matching his fiancée, Chris Evert’s, easy victory on the women’s side. And in the final match at the U.S. Open in September, it took him barely an hour to vanquish Rosewall again. Outclassed from the start, the thirty-nine-year-old Australian managed to win only two games.1

  Week after week, Connors played almost flawless tennis. No one on the men’s tour had enjoyed such dominance since Laver a decade earlier, and once Connors achieved the world number one ranking in late July h
e did not relinquish it for a record 160 weeks. He might even have equaled Laver’s and Don Budge’s achievement of winning all four Grand Slam tournaments in a single year had he not been banned from playing in the French Open. When Connors signed a contract with the Baltimore Banners of World Team Tennis (WTT) in mid-January, complicated negotiations regarding the new league’s impact on scheduling and player compensation were just beginning. During the following three weeks, all of the major parties—the ILTF, the ATP, WCT, and WTT—hashed out an agreement tolerable to everyone but the leaders of the French and Italian tennis federations.2

  On February 15, one day after ILTF president Allan Heyman announced the agreement, Philippe Chatrier declared the French federation had no intention of abiding by the ILTF’s decision. There were similar rumblings from a representative of the Italian federation, which shared Chatrier’s concern that WTT’s summer schedule would wreak havoc with the European national championships held in June and July. Under the terms of the agreement, French and Italian tennis officials were given two options designed to guarantee that participation in team tennis would not prevent the world’s top stars from playing in Paris and Rome. But Chatrier rejected both options, including a proposal to offer certain players guaranteed earnings and a place in the draws without having to survive a qualifying round. Defying the ILTF, he vowed that “the French championships, both indoor and outdoor, would be closed to any men or women players who sign contracts with the W.T.T.”3

  Chatrier kept his promise long enough to deny Connors the chance to win three Grand Slam tournaments in a row and to insure a somewhat depleted field at the 1974 French Open. Even so, virtually all of the non-WTT stars, including Ashe, showed up in Paris. Always a bit uncomfortable on the slow red clay at Roland Garros, Ashe nonetheless had won the doubles championship with Riessen in 1971, and he harbored some hope he could win a second French Open doubles title with his new partner, Roscoe Tanner. But the two hard-hitting Americans succumbed in the third round to the exotic and unheralded team of Ismail El Shafei of Egypt and Zeljko Franulovic of Yugoslavia.