Whatever the truth of the matter, Ashe’s dazzling play in Dallas temporarily silenced even his toughest critics. In the first pairing, he had to overcome a 6–1 first-set loss to Mark Cox before serving his way to victory in the final three sets. And in a semifinal match against John Alexander he followed the same pattern, losing the first set and winning the next three. In the final pairing he faced Borg, who had survived a tough five-set semifinal match against Laver. Once again, as if by design, he lost the first set but closed out the match and the championship with three sets of brilliant tennis. In the final set, Borg failed to win a single game, losing the last three games at love.
The triumph in Dallas was Ashe’s biggest win in five years, and his friends knew how much it meant to him. In characteristic fashion, he tried to downplay the significance of what had just happened. But Dell would have none of it. “Go ahead, Art,” he yelled out during the post-match press conference, “come right out and say you’re happy.” Managing a wry smile, Ashe did admit that a “gypsy in Stockholm” had predicted his victory two weeks earlier. Mostly, he confessed, he was “relieved.” After all, it had been a long time since his win at the 1970 Australian Open. When the reporters peppered him with questions about how he had handled the pressure to win the WCT crown, he couldn’t resist offering a sense of perspective and putting in a plug for his beloved Davis Cup. The final against Borg had tested his composure, but he insisted: “there is nothing that approaches the pressure of playing for the Davis Cup, not even this.” It was vintage Ashe—cool, collected, and rational.50
For him the significance of Dallas was not so much that he had won but how he had won. At the age of thirty-one, he had outlasted three younger opponents, including a nineteen-year-old. Part of the explanation, to be sure, was Borg’s condition after playing an exhausting five-set match against Laver in the semifinals. And there was the international travel issue. “It was not surprising that Borg wilted,” Leonard Koppett claimed in The New York Times. “Last Sunday he played a Davis Cup match for Sweden in Warsaw. He flew here Monday, competed and reached a rare emotional peak in the grueling Laver match, so he was pretty worn out mentally as well as physically by the time things turned against him today.” Perhaps so, but Ashe had survived a tough semifinal match of his own and had not wilted in the final. While he did not want to claim too much in the wake of his victory over Borg, he later revealed his confidence “soared” after the match. “Winning WCT made me think about Wimbledon,” he recalled. “Much of the decorum had gone out of tennis, and the respect for tradition that was promoted by Laver, Rosewall, Emerson, and the other Aussies was fading. But Wimbledon remained special.”51
SEVENTEEN
WIMBLEDON 1975
WIMBLEDON WAS NEARLY SIX weeks away, and Ashe did not want to get ahead of himself. But in mid-May he began to prepare for what he hoped would be the tournament of his life. In years past, he had spent the late spring in Europe playing the often frustrating clay court circuit, which included the Italian and French Opens. This time he decided to play only in the Italian Open and forgo the French. Skipping Paris was a personal sacrifice, but it allowed him to spend more time on the grass courts of England. The previous year he had tuned up for Wimbledon at Nottingham, where he had said goodbye to Meryl. In 1975, he began his grass court preparation a week earlier at Beckenham, in County Kent.1
While Bjorn Borg and Guillermo Vilas were slugging their way into the finals at the French, Ashe was reacquainting himself with the speed and odd bounces of tennis played on turf. He played well, beating Sherwood Stewart in the quarterfinals and Andrew Pattison in the semis. In the final, he faced Roscoe Tanner, who loved playing on grass and who was hitting the ball harder than ever. But somehow Ashe managed to win the title match in straight sets. Both men soon moved on to Nottingham, where the last tournament before Wimbledon began on June 16–and where Connors, Vilas, and several other top contenders joined them.2
Connors’s presence at Nottingham gave the warm-up tournament an added intensity. The reigning Wimbledon champion and the odds-on favorite to repeat at the age of twenty-two, he seemed almost invicible. Predictably, when the official Wimbledon seedings were announced on the 16th, he was seeded first; Rosewall was second, followed by Borg, Vilas, Nastase, and Ashe. Connors, like Ashe, had skipped the French Open, and he had bypassed the Italian as well, serving notice that all of his energy was directed at Wimbledon. Most observers expected him to breeze through the field at Nottingham. But the tournament took an unexpected turn when Tanner upset him in the quarterfinals. Ashe also failed to advance, losing to Tony Roche in straight sets. The Australian left-hander had been away from the tour for three months recovering from an Achilles tendon operation, but he played almost flawless tennis against Tanner in the semifinals, so Ashe didn’t feel too bad about being upended. Connors also refused to panic and credited his loss to bad luck. After insisting he was striking the ball about as well as he ever had, he promised that at Wimbledon there would be no hitting the ball “just a tiny fraction out,” as he had at Nottingham. “By Monday,” he predicted, “the ball is going to be meeting the line.”3
Ashe winced when he read Connors’s statement in the newspaper. It was just the kind of arrogance that had made him a near pariah among his peers. Neither Ashe nor anyone else was surprised that Connors was the number one seed. But the air of condescension and sense of entitlement that enveloped his persona irked Ashe as few things ever had. To him, Connors’s attitude was ultimately self-defeating in terms of the things that mattered most—personal honor and earned respect—and he couldn’t imagine anything more destructive to the game of tennis and sportsmanship than Connors’s win-at-any-cost approach to the sport.4
Or at least he thought he couldn’t until the week before Wimbledon. On June 21, two days before the opening round, the world learned what Ashe had known for several days. Standing before a gaggle of reporters, Connors’s manager, Bill Riordan, announced that his famous client had recently filed two libel suits in an Indianapolis court. The first sought $3 million in damages from Ashe for characterizing Connors as “brash, arrogant and unpatriotic” in a letter sent to the ATP membership. The second suit asked for $2 million more from Kramer, Dell, and ATP secretary Bob Briner, for sanctioning a disparaging magazine article written by Briner. The frivolous nature of the suits left many observers shaking their heads, but for Ashe the timing of the announcement was the worst of it.5
Ashe, like all serious tennis players, had dreamed of becoming a Wimbledon champion since he was a boy. Winning a title on Centre Court would be the experience of a lifetime, and he wanted it more than he cared to admit. But now, even more than wanting to win himself, he wanted Connors to lose. He had no reason to believe he could stop him; in three meetings—twice in South Africa and once at the U.S. Pro Championships in 1973–Connors had thrashed him.
Ashe had every intention of breaking this pattern. But if he couldn’t do it someone else had to step up. Who that might be was a puzzle, however. Laver and Rosewall were probably too old, Newcombe, described by one observer as “the one man whose power could worry Connors on the fast grass,” was sidelined with an injury; Nastase was out of shape; Vilas was still unsteady on grass; and young Borg wasn’t quite ready. Anything could happen on any given day, but the prospects for stopping Connors’s march to a second title didn’t look very promising as the Wimbledon fortnight began on June 23.6
The London bookies certainly didn’t think there was much chance that anyone but Connors would hold up the coveted silver-gilt trophy at the close of the tournament. For the first time in Wimbledon history authorities had allowed a betting tent to be set up on the tournament grounds, and there was an almost frenzied anticipation of playing the odds at Centre Court. The betting scene was complicated by a recently imposed ban on players placing bets on the Wimbledon competition. At Nottingham, several players had made a killing after discovering the bookies had made mistakes in setting the odds, and Wimbledon officials did not
want the world’s most famous tournament to be sullied by a betting scandal. Ashe and the ATP board endorsed the ban, but there was some grumbling among ATP members, particularly those who had placed winning bets at Nottingham. Ashe, who liked to gamble from time to time, regarded the betting controversy as a minor matter. But it was still an annoying distraction on the eve of the tournament. He knew that to have any chance of making it into the late rounds, he would have to focus on tennis and nothing else.7
With a costly libel suit hanging over his head, that was not going to be easy. But a favorable draw helped him ease into the tournament. His opponent in the first round was Bob Hewitt, a strong doubles player but no match for the #6 seed in singles, especially on grass. Hewitt played well, taking a set, but Ashe’s serve-and-volley game was too much for him the rest of the way. Ashe breezed through the next two rounds, beating Jun Kamiwazumi of Japan and Brian Gottfried in straight sets. Getting by Gottfried was a relief, since he had once crushed Ashe in a tournament in Las Vegas. Ashe anticipated a tough fourth-round match against Alexander, the tenth seed, but the Australian lost unexpectedly to the unseeded British veteran Graham Stilwell.8
Talented but inconsistent, Stilwell had grown up on grass courts and at one time or another had beaten many of the world’s best players, including Ashe. This would be his last Wimbledon, and he put everything he had into the match against the favored American. After losing the first set 6–2, Stilwell rallied to win the second 7–5. With Ashe in unexpected trouble, the British fans surrounding Court 1 began to stir. But to their disappointment Ashe pulled himself together and won the last two sets easily.9
Having lost only two sets in the first four rounds, he was pleased with his performance so far. Confident and relaxed, he felt somewhat detached from the hoopla that always surrounded Wimbledon. At this point, the British press had hardly paid him any notice, as all eyes were on the defending champions, Connors and Evert. The speculation and the betting odds predicted a “love-bird double” for the young couple, and reporters and fans couldn’t get enough of one of the most romantic stories in Wimbledon’s long history. The story line took a strange twist during the second week, however, when the tabloids revealed the tennis romance was over. Between matches, Connors was out on the town, not with Evert, but with the beautiful British actress Susan George. “We’re just good friends,” George insisted, but tongues continued to wag as the tournament progressed.10
For serious fans, Connors’s performance on the court was the real story. No man had run through the Wimbledon field without losing a set since Chuck McKinley in 1963. But Connors’s dominance in the first four rounds put him on track to do just that. His matches against John Lloyd, Vijay Amritraj, Mark Cox, and Phil Dent turned out to be mismatches as he unleashed powerful groundstrokes from both sides. During the Lloyd match, Connors slipped on the grass and hyper-extended a knee, but even that didn’t seem to slow him down. In the next round Amritraj forced him into one tiebreaker, but that was as close as anyone came to taking a set from him. The first man since Emerson in 1966 to make it through the first four rounds without losing a set, Connors was drawing raves even from old Wimbledon hands who thought they had seen it all.11
Connors’s mastery continued in the quarterfinals against eighth-seeded Ramírez, whom he vanquished in three quick sets. Meanwhile, Ashe was engaged in a brutal quarterfinal match against Borg. Determined to avenge his loss in Dallas, Borg came out smoking, winning the first set 6–2, and cruising through the first three games of the second. Ashe’s dream of winning Wimbledon, it appeared, was all but gone. But somehow he hung on. After barely managing to hold serve in the fourth game, he won four of the next five games and evened the match with a backhand winner that caught Borg off balance. When Borg’s missed volley gave the second set to Ashe 6–4, the fans settled back in their seats for what looked to be a long struggle. For a while, Borg steadied himself, and the advantage went back and forth in the third set until Ashe eked out a close 8–6 victory. After that Borg faded just as he had done in Dallas. Winning 6–1 in the final set, Ashe was on to the Wimbledon semifinals for the first time since 1969.12
The victory over Borg should have been a confidence builder, but after the match the Swedish star revealed he had strained a groin muscle during an early morning practice. “I continued to play because I thought that perhaps I was just a little stiff,” he told reporters. “It got worse and I had problems moving up and down the court. . . . You have to get under the ball on grass, but I couldn’t do it. There was no way I could bend my knees, there was so much pain.” This was not what Ashe wanted to hear, but he knew Borg was telling the truth. During the match he had sensed the Swede wasn’t quite right. For once the tennis gods had given him a break. He was in the semifinals, and he was not going to worry too much about how he got there. Mostly, of course, he didn’t want to think about how easy it had been for Connors to get there.13
Ashe’s unlikely opponent in the semifinals was Tony Roche, the colorful thirty-year-old from Wagga Wagga, Australia. Seeded sixteenth, Roche had entered the Wimbledon singles competition at the last minute after playing so well at Nottingham. Considered a threat in the doubles competition but largely unheralded as a grass court singles player, Roche went into his quarterfinal match against Okker as the clear underdog. Most of Roche’s success in singles had come on clay, where he had won both the French and Italian national titles in 1966. But on occasion he could exhibit flashes of brilliance on any surface, as in 1968 when he made it all the way to the Wimbledon finals, where he lost to Laver. In the early going against Okker, the match held to form, with the Dutchman leading two sets to one. But Roche stormed back, taking the final two sets 6–4, 6–2.14
Clearly, Roche was dangerous, and Ashe did not take him lightly. He knew it would take his best tennis to win. And yet he couldn’t avoid being somewhat philosophical about the situation. It had been six years since he had played on Centre Court, and he was thrilled to be back, win or lose. The stands were filled to capacity, as always, and the age-old Wimbledon traditions held sway. And, as several commentators pointed out, this year the atmosphere had an added touch of newness. Most obviously, there was the betting tent and all its attendant activity, the soap opera surrounding Connors and Evert, and the strange dominance of left-handers in the men’s draw. For the first time in living memory, three of the four male semifinalists were southpaws. Only Ashe hit from the starboard side. And if the seeds held true to form in the semifinals—if Ashe made it through to play either Connors or Tanner—Wimbledon would have its first “all-American tennis final” since Jack Kramer had squared off against Tom Brown in 1947. This made Roche the last hope of the British Commonwealth and an even bigger sentimental favorite than might normally be expected.15
Ashe had plenty of supporters in the stands, but he wasn’t accustomed to assuming the role of a heavy, even among a minority of fans. This, along with Roche’s topspin forehand, unnerved him a bit, and he saw the first set slip away 7–5. He came back to win the next two sets, but lost the fourth in a tiebreaker. In the fifth set, his strong serve began to desert him when he needed it most, and Roche continued to volley well. But in the end Ashe prevailed 6–4. It had taken more than three hours to wear Roche down, but he had done it. After six long years of waiting, he would get his third and probably last chance to compete in a Wimbledon final. The only thing left to be determined, other than the championship itself, was the other finalist. Would it be his friend and doubles partner Tanner—or Connors, the only man in professional tennis who came close to being his sworn enemy? Shakespeare himself couldn’t have devised a more dramatic choice.16
The Connors-Tanner match promised to be a hard-hitting affair, offering tennis fans a rare exhibition of unbridled power. Several of Tanner’s serves had been clocked at more than 140 miles per hour, and Connors’s fabled returns often came back just about as fast. So whatever the outcome, the first semifinal match would be power tennis from start to finish. Tired as he was, Ashe
was not about to miss it. After a shower and a few words with the press, he settled into a chair to watch the slugfest on the BBC.
Ashe, like almost everyone else, expected Connors to win. He was not prepared for what he saw on the court that day. Tanner was at the top of his game, hitting big serves and volleying well. Yet it didn’t seem to matter. Every time Tanner came close to gaining an advantage, Connors kicked his game up to a higher level. At several points, the sheer power of Connors’s groundstrokes and returns drew gasps from the crowd, and with each game his dominance and swagger became more obvious. The whole thing was over in eighty minutes. Connors was the reigning king of Wimbledon, and he had served notice that anyone who hoped to take away the crown had better be ready to play the best tennis of his life.
The line score—6–4, 6–1, 6–4—did not begin to capture the magnitude of Connors’s victory, and after the match commentators and reporters strained to find the right superlative to describe what they had just seen. Statistics detailing past glories “pale into insignificance in comparison with Connors’ performance today,” Fred Tupper wrote in The New York Times. “Did anybody ever see a ball hit so hard? Possibly Ellsworth Vines did so in his great years of 1931 and 1932, when his service ripped the turf at Forest Hills. Nobody else.” Never one to hide his accomplishments with false modesty, Connors himself offered a similar judgment, though he stressed the scrappiness, not the power, of his performance. “Today my form was my best ever,” he told reporters. “Even better than last year. I was diving, jumping, sliding, slipping and getting balls I could get to.”
Recalling the match years later, the tennis writer Richard Evans had difficulty coming up with superlatives to match Connors’s remarkable performance. “Connors did things to a tennis ball in that match that made people wince,” Evans wrote in 1990. “No matter how far he had to run, no matter how awkwardly the ball came to him, no matter how much off balance he was when he swung into his stroke, Connors belted ball after ball into Tanner’s court with barely credible accuracy. The harder Tanner hit the ball, the better Connors liked it. He devoured power, swept it up inside him and then exhaled it like some dragon breathing fire. Poor Roscoe simply got scorched.”17
Arthur Ashe Page 52
