Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Unfortunately, Ashe’s smooth exit simply set the stage for a major confrontation the following evening. “Twenty-four hours later the contrast was total,” Evans recalled. “From the serene, understated, imperturbable human being I had always known, Ashe had been reduced to a screaming, nerve-ruined wreck. I have never seen him like it before or since. And the cause of it was, of course, Nastase.” Once he was on the court, it was clear Ashe was in no mood to put up with the Romanian’s clownish antics. Periodically throughout the match, Nastase received warnings from the referee Horst Klosterkemper, but he blithely ignored the West German and continued to hold up play by bantering with the crowd.

  With the match even at one set apiece, Ashe began to pull ahead in the third and was leading 4–1 in games and 40–15 in the sixth game when Nastase started in again with his crude comments and stalling tactics, delaying his serve by more than two minutes at one point. Ashe had finally had enough, and after looking at the referee and waiting for a few seconds for Nastase to be disqualified, he took matters into his own hands and shouted out: “I claim a default. I’m leaving.” The normally unflappable American star then zipped up his racket bag and disappeared into the locker room.

  This was the first time in Ashe’s long career he had done anything like this, and the crowd was stunned. So was the referee, who issued an immediate disqualification. A few minutes later, Klosterkemper explained to reporters that Ashe’s impulsive departure had actually preempted Nastase’s ouster. “I had made up my mind to disqualify him,” he insisted. “But I had no chance because Arthur Ashe left the court.”

  In the locker room, Ashe continued to vent his anger. “I’m not taking any more of that crap,” he screamed at one point. “There’s no goddamn way you’re getting me back on that court. He’s broken the rules, goddamn it. I helped write them. I ought to know.” After ripping off his sweat-drenched shirt and flinging it toward his locker, he vowed: “That son of a bitch isn’t going to get away with it anymore. I’ll damn well see him run out of the game before he tries that stunt again.” Ashe’s emotional outburst shocked everyone in the room, including Nastase, who was hiding behind a row of clothes and towels before “sheepishly” venturing out to issue an apology. Stonily silent by this point, Ashe simply ignored Nastase’s gesture.16

  Following the match, Klosterkemper announced that both players had been disqualified but both would be allowed to continue in the round-robin competition. Under this ruling, both men still had a shot at the $40,000 first-place prize money, but this solution did not sit well with Ashe. Vowing to file a formal protest against the double disqualification, he declared, “I know the rules were broken; it’s as simple as that.” While he conceded walking off the court was a mistake—that he had allowed himself to get “mad for the first time in 10 years”—he insisted enough is enough: “I’ve felt like walking off the court against Nastase many times before but never did . . . but I won’t take that from him anymore.”

  To his surprise, an ad hoc committee headed by ILTF president Derek Hardwick upheld the protest the next day. After Ashe was awarded the first-round victory, Nastase complained: “If you’re not an American in this game, you don’t count.” With the dual disqualification overturned, the “travesty,” as Arthur called it, was over, and his quests to secure the year’s number one world ranking and to set the all-time record in earnings remained intact. All he had to do was defeat several of the world’s best players at a time when he was almost too tired to care.17

  This feat, as it turned out, was too much for Ashe to manage. After playing well in the early rounds, he came up short against Borg in the semifinals, losing three sets to one. Playing one of his worst matches of the year, he double-faulted seven times and, as one observer commented, “was consistent only in hitting the ball into the net.” It was a disappointing end to a great year, even though the $10,000 check for making it to the semifinals raised his 1975 earnings to $315,550, the highest in tennis history to date.18

  Despite the earnings record, this was not the way Ashe had hoped to close out his most successful year. But he won a major victory off the court on December 8 when the Men’s International Professional Tennis Council (MIPTC)—a tripartite committee representing the ILTF, the ATP, and tournament directors across the world—voted to implement Open tennis’s first formal code of conduct. Ashe himself was a member of the MIPTC, and for several months he had been calling for such a code, largely in response to Nastase’s increasingly outrageous behavior. During the past year, the Romanian star had incurred more than $8,000 in fines, including a hefty assessment for mocking the social pretensions of British tennis. When he and Connors added bow ties to their tennis outfits and drank champagne between games during a London tournament, British officials were not amused. The new Code of Conduct did not expressly prohibit the courtside consumption of alcohol, but there were strict standards and fines for just about every other possible offense, starting with “$50 for “throwing a racquet or hitting or kicking a ball out of the court in anger.”19

  The largest fine, $10,000, was reserved for the general category of “conduct detrimental to the game.” No one, including Ashe, was altogether confident that the Code—often referred to as the Nastase Code—would bring decorum back to the game. Yet he and many others thought it was worth a try. One critic, Ed Meyer, a New York lawyer who had recently represented Connors, Riordan, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), and WTT in court, insisted what tennis really needed was a “czar” in the mode of the National Football League’s powerful commissioner Pete Rozelle. But few people shared his belief that a single person could bring order to the money-driven “mixed-up tennis world.”20

  The drama in Stockholm symbolized the continuing fluidity of professional tennis, a jumble of uncertainties that extended to the annual determination of world rankings. “Who is No. 1?” Charles Friedman asked in a provocative New York Times essay on December 10. “That question pops up in tennis at the end of every year. Sometimes the answer is clear as who deserves to be rated the best player in the world, sometimes it’s not.” According to Friedman, the top ranking for 1975 was still unclear, although he judged Ashe to be the leading contender in a strong field that included Borg, Connors, and Nastase. A week later, the USTA named Ashe the top-ranked American player as determined by its new computerized ranking system. But there was no such clarity at the top of the world rankings. Just before Christmas, World Tennis magazine rated Ashe as the world’s best, followed closely by Connors, Borg, Orantes, and Nastase. During the coming weeks, however, some unofficial year-end evaluators would reverse the top two positions and put Connors first.21

  The uncertainty about the world number one ranking, though a problem for some, did not seem to bother Ashe, who harbored a healthy skepticism about athletic superlatives. While he was as competitive as ever, he took great satisfaction in being the first thirty-two-year-old during the Open era to challenge his younger rivals for the top ranking. Laver was thirty-one in 1969, the year of his last number one ranking, and Rosewall, the other great Australian, was already thirty-five and past his prime at the beginning of the Open era. Thus, Ashe could legitimately claim that he was making tennis history at an age when most of his peers were winding down their careers. Whether his ranking was first or second, he was defying conventional wisdom about life as an aging tennis player.22

  Ashe’s late-career resurgence—along with his close identification with good sportsmanship at a time when the sports world was growing coarser and more crass—was one of the major reasons the press and the public began to embrace him as an iconic figure. In the months since his Wimbledon victory, his fame had grown exponentially. Some journalists had even begun to refer to him as King Arthur. To others using more contemporary language, he had become a “superstar.”23

  Ashe’s sudden elevation to superstar status can be attributed, in part, to the sheer drama of his upset victory over Connors, an unexpected reversal of fortune performed at one of the world’s premi
er sporting events. But there were other powerful forces at work, forces much less in evidence when Ashe had won his first Grand Slam tournament seven years earlier. In the mid-1970s, his rising fame was amplified by a maturing culture of celebrity that was transforming American life in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Fueled by a consumer culture that fostered everything from competitive narcissism to an entertainment-based search for identity, personal fulfillment, and vicarious experience, the American public of the 1970s exhibited an obsessive fascination with an ever-expanding array of movie idols, television personalities, rock stars, and sports heroes.

  An emergent version of this cult of fame had existed since the development of motion pictures and radio in the 1920s, with a noticeable expansion in the early years of television and economic recovery following World War II. But it took the social challenges and technological innovations of the 1960s to bring about the celebrity-saturated popular culture of what some called the “Me Decade” of the 1970s. Only then, in the wake of the turbulent 1960s, did hyper-individualism and preoccupation with self-discovery and self-fulfillment morph into a relentless drive to identify with the rich and famous.24

  No American institution embraced the media-fueled culture of celebrity more enthusiastically or more emphatically than the world of spectator sports. Driven by a preoccupation with winning and superior performance—a quest enhanced by unprecedented media coverage, increasingly sophisticated training regimens, and all manner of statistics and quantitative measurement—the American sports establishment of the 1970s wasted few opportunities to stimulate popular interest in the private and public lives of the nation’s most accomplished athletes. No detail was too trivial or too intimate to escape public scrutiny. Every aspect of an athlete’s life—what he or she did on or off the field, from the locker room to the bedroom, from the training table to the courtroom—was fair game. The more famous the athlete, the deeper the curiosity, it seemed, as Ashe would discover in the months following his Wimbledon victory. Tennis fans had always paid close attention to the ups and downs of their favorite players. But by the mid-1970s the range and intensity of public interest in tennis personalities had reached unprecedented levels.25

  In less than a decade, professional tennis had become big business and the object of considerable popular attention. With the emergence of WCT and WTT, the resurgence of interest in Davis Cup competition, the triumphant swagger and outsized personality of Jimmy Connors, the hoopla surrounding the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” exhibition match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, and the growing popularity of female tennis stars such as King, Evert, and Goolagong, tennis had belatedly joined the ranks of the nation’s major spectator sports. It finally had its share of glamorous and controversial personalities, personal rivalries, internal power struggles, and plenty of money on the line—all requirements for the sports celebrity sweepstakes. By the end of the decade, the drama—some might say soap opera—of professional tennis would take on new dimensions with the ongoing rivalry and contrasting styles of Borg and Connors, the tantrums of McEnroe, the WTA’s continuing fight for equity, and the controversy surrounding the transgender status of Renée Richards. But in the mid-1970s there was already enough grist to keep tennis’s celebrity media mill churning.26

  Ashe was just one of several tennis superstars who benefited from the enhanced status and visibility of Open tennis. But he was the only one who also faced the challenge of meeting the special responsibilities of a black celebrity. In the post–civil rights movement era of the 1970s, black celebrities were no longer strange and rare curiosities. After decades of underrepresentation in American popular culture, black artists, entertainers, and sports figures were becoming commonplace. From Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin to Ray Charles and Louis Armstrong, from Sidney Poitier and Sammy Davis Jr. to Bill Cosby and Cicely Tyson, black celebrities populated the nation’s airwaves, movie screens, and concert halls. Some had even risen to superstar status, placing themselves among the nation’s most popular and revered artists.27

  This phenomenon affected all aspects of African American culture, including Ashe’s love life. In the wake of the Wimbledon victory, his eligible bachelorhood took on a heightened profile. One of his admirers was Beverly Johnson, the Ford Agency supermodel who created a sensation in August 1974 by becoming the first black woman to appear on the cover of Vogue. Ashe, who had seen Johnson’s face on several covers, found her beauty captivating. As he recalled in 1981: “I thought her photographs were stunning, had wanted to meet her for some time, and kept asking Gene Barakat, a New Zealander who worked at the Ford Modeling agency, ‘When are you going to introduce me to Beverly Johnson?’ ” Eventually Barakat came through, awkwardly relaying Ashe’s request for a dinner date in New York.

  Initially Johnson declined his invitation but later reconsidered after a friend upbraided her for missing a great opportunity. Rejecting her argument that Arthur was too “squeaky clean” for a woman accustomed to dating edgy bad boys, he urged her to reconsider, which she did. On the first of what would become many dates, Beverly found herself falling for Arthur’s gracious and courtly manner. “We shared a charming dinner, then went to see a funny movie starring Richard Pryor,” she recalled. “Arthur was a bit shy and . . . kissed me on the cheek at the end of the night and asked if he could call again. I felt like a schoolgirl after a drive-in movie.” She remembered thinking, “Was this my real Prince Charming at long last?” Before long, she was smitten and harbored hopes he would come to feel the same way about her. Soon news of their relationship reached the pages of Ebony and Jet, which made Arthur a little nervous. He did not want the pressure of publicity to push him into an arrangement that would be difficult to end without considerable embarrassment. Yet this did not stop him from dating her for more than a year.28

  Beverly Johnson’s fame was global in scope, but during the mid-1970s the mystique of African American celebrity was perhaps most evident in the world of sports. Indeed, Ashe’s celebrated victory at Wimbledon was only one of several signal achievements that marked 1975 as a breakthrough year for black athletes and coaches. All across the sports world, it seemed, blacks were reaching unprecedented levels of success, visibility, and acclaim.

  In Major League Baseball, the 1975 season began with Frank Robinson assuming the helm of the Cleveland Indians as the national pastime’s first black manager and ended with Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s all-time RBI record and extending the major league career home run record to 745. In between, Rod Carew became the first hitter since Ty Cobb to win four consecutive batting titles, and Joe Morgan—the National League’s Most Valuable Player—led the Cincinnati Reds to a memorable World Series victory over the Boston Red Sox.29

  The rising profile of blacks was even more obvious in basketball, especially in the NBA where African Americans accounted for more than 75 percent of the league in 1975. A quarter century after desegregation, professional basketball had become largely a black man’s sport. At the NBA All-Star Game in March, only three of the ten starters were white, Walt Frazier of the New York Knicks was named the Most Valuable Player, and for the first time the coaches of both the East and West squads were black. The two coaches, K. C. Jones of the Washington Bullets and Al Attles of the Golden State Warriors, squared off again in the NBA finals in June, the same month that black stars Marques Johnson and Richard Washington led Ashe’s alma mater UCLA to a record tenth NCAA championship.30

  Black numerical superiority did not extend to the gridiron, where whites accounted for roughly two thirds of the nation’s college and professional football players. Yet black players more than held their own at the star level. In professional football, the most celebrated superstar was unquestionably O. J. Simpson, who led the National Football League in rushing with 1,817 yards gained in 1975, while setting the single-season touchdown record of 23, one more than Chuck Foreman of the Minnesota Vikings, another African American. The NFL’s dominant team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, on its way to a
second straight Super Bowl victory, was led by the bruising Afro-Italian running back Franco Harris and the all-black front four of its vaunted “Steel Curtain” defense: Joe Greene, L. C. Greenwood, Ernie Holmes, and Dwight White. With the exception of James Harris of the Los Angeles Rams, all of the NFL’s starting quarterbacks—the gridiron’s most glamorous position—were white. But at the other positions the achievements and stardom of black players were undeniable.31

  Finally, in boxing African Americans had achieved a hard-earned dominance by the mid-1970s, especially in the heavyweight division where Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman held sway. A decade earlier, Ali’s outsized personality, politics, and skills had made him one of the most important sports figures of his time. But with the carefully staged championship bouts of the mid-1970s—most notably the “Rumble in the Jungle” against Foreman in Zaire, held in October 1974, and the “Thrilla in Manila” against Frazier a year later—he took celebrity to a new level, becoming one of the most recognizable individuals on the planet.32

  The proliferation of black sports celebrities in the 1970s was a sure sign that Jim Crow culture was on the wane. But for Ashe the situation was decidedly bittersweet. On the one hand, he now belonged to a fraternity of shared experience and privilege. Yet the growing number of elite black athletes all across the sports world made the racial tokenism of professional tennis all the more conspicuous. The oddity of his solitary status as the nation’s only black tennis star became more obvious with every passing year. During twenty years of struggle the modern civil rights movement had brought substantial change to almost every corner of America, opening up institution after institution. But somehow the revolution had all but bypassed the world of competitive tennis. After more than a decade on the men’s tour, and after eight years of Open tennis, Ashe was still alone. The boy from Richmond had become King Arthur, but there were no black knights in—or indeed on—his court.33