By the time the U.S. Open started in late August, Ashe was tournament tough. Seeded sixteenth, he was eager to play on the hard courts of the new National Tennis Center at Flushing Meadows after several years of struggling on the slow clay at Forest Hills. With Jeanne looking on, he breezed through the first three rounds, losing only two sets along the way. In the fourth round, however, he came up against the always tough Raúl Ramírez. He had played Ramírez many times before, with mixed results. The Mexican was ten years his junior and much more likely than he to survive a long, drawn-out match. After Ashe lost the first set but won the next two, Ramírez won the fourth in a tiebreaker and the fifth going away. The thirty-five-year-old ex-champion didn’t know it at the time, but this would be his last appearance at the U.S. Open.10
Following the Open, the U.S. Davis Cup team was scheduled to play Chile in Santiago, and there was some speculation that Captain Tony Trabert would select Ashe as one of the two American singles competitors. He had always been at or near his best in Davis Cup play, and as recently as December 1976 he had won a singles match against Mexico. That win had come on a hard surface in Tucson, however, and the Santiago matches would be played on clay, Ashe’s weakest surface. For that reason, Trabert bypassed him in favor of Solomon and Gottfried, a decision later questioned after they won only two singles matches between them as the U.S. team barely edged the Chileans 3–2.
Under increasing pressure in the weeks leading up to the next tie—a tough contest against a Swedish squad that had won the Davis Cup in 1975—Trabert decided to shake things up. Since the tie would be played in Göteborg, Sweden, on a fast indoor carpet, he turned to Arthur as the logical choice to join Vitas Gerulaitis in the singles competition. Delighted, the “old man” was ready to give his all for the U.S. squad. But even that was not enough against Borg, the consensus number one player in the world. Although Arthur played as well as he had in months, he lost in straight sets. In his second singles match, he fared much better, easily defeating against Kjell Johansson. This victory not only clinched a 3–2 American triumph, but also marked the 27th Davis Cup singles win of Arthur’s career—an American record.
Davis Cup exploits were a matter of great pride to Arthur, making it all the more painful when Trabert left him off the team in the next and final round. When the United States beat Great Britain for the Cup at Rancho Mirage, California, in early December, the 4–1 victory came on a hard court just to Ashe’s liking. But in preparing for the tie, Trabert decided to go with Gottfried, essentially depriving Ashe of the chance to close out his Davis Cup career with a victory in the spotlight. He had good reason to feel slighted, having beaten Gottfried on the same surface in the final match of the Pacific Southwest tournament in September. But he kept his feelings to himself. True to form, he was as polite as ever even in the face of disappointment. The only thing that mattered, he insisted, was America regaining the Cup after a six-year drought.11
As 1978 drew to a close, Ashe took stock of his comeback. Since the beginning of the year, he had won three tournaments and made the final in a fourth, winning more than 70 percent of his matches. For someone who two years earlier had feared he might never play competitive tennis again, these were no mean accomplishments. Yet he wanted more. As he later explained, his record put him “within striking distance of the top eight players who would qualify for the Grand Prix Masters tournament at Madison Square Garden. I had qualified for the eight-player season-ending events before, but this one took on new importance for me. I had a feeling it would be my last chance to win the Masters.”
By early December, he was in eleventh place in the Grand Prix points standing. The odds that he would make the cut were low, but the rumor that Borg and Connors were planning to bypass the tournament gave him some hope. The only problem was his commitment to spend the Christmas holidays at Doral conducting clinics. Since his only chance of qualifying depended on earning points in several late-December and early-January tournaments in Australia, his fate was in the hands of his Doral employers, who understood his dilemma and agreed to let him skip the clinics.12
Even so, getting to Australia in time to play was a near miracle. After playing a match in Stockholm, he flew to Brisbane via Zurich, Bahrain, Singapore, and Sydney. Arriving in the morning, he played his first match at 5:30 that afternoon. After he managed to win that one and several others before bowing out in the semifinals, it looked like he might have enough points to qualify for the Masters. But, taking no chances, he went on to play two more tournaments, the New South Wales Open in Sydney and the Australian Open in Melbourne.
Third-seeded in Sydney, he lost to Allan Stone in the fourth round. In Melbourne, he played some of his best tennis in years and cruised into the semifinals. The possibility of actually winning a second Australian Open had hardly occurred to him. Yet there he was on the verge of facing Vilas in the final. The only person in his way was twenty-six-year-old John Marks, an unheralded but heady Australian.
The match against Marks proved grueling. Playing before a crowd of twelve thousand fans, the two men went back and forth for nearly four hours. After Marks won the first two sets, Ashe fought back and won the next two 6–2, 6–1. In the fifth set, Marks took a 3–0 lead and appeared to be coasting to victory. Once again Ashe refused to give up. Fighting off five break points in the fourth game, he won that game and the next four, for a 5–4 lead. By this point, both players were so exhausted that neither could hold serve. In one game Ashe had two match points, but in the end Marks prevailed 9–7. For the loser the extended standing ovation that followed was bittersweet, but there was no longer any doubt he had come almost all the way back.13
After Vilas went on to defeat Marks in the final, the Argentine star decided to forgo the Grand Prix Masters, joining Borg on the sidelines. With this decision, Ashe became the eighth qualifier. The last time he had played in the Masters was 1975, when Nastase’s antics had pushed him to walk off the court. This time Nastase had failed to qualify, but Ashe faced an even bigger problem when he drew John McEnroe in the first round. A few weeks earlier Ashe had praised the young New Yorker as the best player in the world. At a tournament in Stockholm the previous fall, he had watched McEnroe “destroy” Borg. “McEnroe just sliced Borg up like Zorro,” he recalled. “Just a cut here, a nick there. It was unbelievable. Borg did not know what to do.”14
Unfortunately for Ashe, McEnroe did pretty much the same thing to him in the opening round at Madison Square Garden. The left-hander’s 6–3, 6–1 victory took only fifty-five minutes, and incredibly he committed only one unforced error in the entire match. Early in the second set, with Ashe trailing 0–2, a woman in the crowd yelled out “Remember 1975!” A smiling Ashe tipped his racket in acknowledgment, but there would be no repeat of the Wimbledon miracle.
Fittingly, Ashe’s scheduled opponent in his second match was none other than Connors, the odds-on favorite to win the Masters title. Humiliation at the hands of a cocky rival was a late-career experience Ashe hoped to avoid, and fortunately for him a severe blister forced Connors to withdraw from the tournament a few hours before their match. Advanced to the semifinals by default, Ashe reached the final by outlasting Gottfried after a long struggle. Though disappointed, Gottfried praised Ashe after the match. “He should be commended for what he’s done,” the young Floridian declared. “For him to maintain eagerness and put as much work into coming back is phenomenal.”15
He was eager all right, but no one expected that to make much difference in the final against McEnroe. When asked about his chances, Ashe responded: “He can be had as well as anyone else.” Perhaps so, but almost no one expected a competitive match. What they didn’t factor in, however, was Ashe’s willingness to adapt. Following McEnroe’s victory over Eddie Dibbs in the other semifinal match, Ashe spent several hours at his Manhattan apartment poring over a videotape of the contest. He then came up with a strategy of positioning, dink shots, and defensive lobbing designed to blunt McEnroe’s wide kicking serves and powe
rful overheads.
Through four sets, the strategy worked. Ashe won the first set 7–6 in a tiebreaker, but McEnroe came back to win the second 6–3. They also split the next two sets, pushing the match toward an unexpected and rare drama. As the fifth set progressed, Ashe hung in against his heavily favored opponent, setting the stage for a possible upset. With the game score 4–5 and McEnroe serving at 15–40, Ashe actually had two match points, and the $100,000 first-prize check was almost in his grasp. But the miraculous upset was not to be. After McEnroe fought off the two match points and held serve, the last two games and the match were his.
McEnroe took home the big prize, leaving Ashe with the $64,000 second-prize money. Yet much of the glory adhered to the runner-up. Humble in victory, McEnroe declared: “I don’t know how I won the match.” In truth, both men emerged as winners. “The final,” Amdur observed, “saved the $400,000 event, which had been wracked by the absence of Bjorn Borg and Guillermo Vilas, the early loss of an injured Jimmy Connors and otherwise routine round-robin matches. It was Ashe who made the occasion, saying he felt more like 28 and playing as if his last hurrah was still years away.”16
With such encouragement, Ashe could not help but look forward to the 1979 tour. His world ranking had risen into the top fifteen, while his American ranking now hovered around number five, not bad for a thirty-five-year-old who had all but disappeared from the rankings a year earlier. He felt reasonably fit, and even though he continued to wrap his left heel and ankle and stretch his legs strenuously before every match, he was confident he could still play at the highest level.
In his first regular tournament appearance of the year, the U.S. Pro Indoor championship in Philadelphia, he proved his performance in the Grand Prix Masters final was no fluke. After upsetting second-seeded Vilas in the fourth round, and engineering a comeback five-set victory over Gerulaitis in the semifinals, he was the talk of the tournament. “Suddenly, Arthur Ashe has become the most exciting player on the men’s tennis tour,” wrote Amdur. “Not the best, not even the most consistent but certainly the most dramatic mix of maturity and talent.” Dramatic was indeed the word when he faced Connors in the final. They had not played each other since Ashe’s Wimbledon victory in 1975, and Connors went all out to extract a measure of revenge, which he accomplished with brutal efficiency. Still recovering from the Gerulaitis match, Ashe put up little resistance in the final. “I think Arthur may have been a little bit tired,” Connors observed, leaving his defeated opponent to quip: “I feel like somebody beat me with a stick.”17
A week later, Ashe was in his hometown of Richmond for a WCT tournament, and this time he played well, eventually losing to Vilas in the semifinals. But at a Palm Springs tournament in mid-February, he was forced to withdraw prior to the opening round. While getting up from a training table just prior to the match, he strained his neck, which soon became too stiff for him to play. This sure sign of aging drew a few gibes from the younger pros in the locker room, but he soon recovered enough to play in the National Indoor championship in Memphis, where he made it all the way to the championship match against Connors. Ashe had never won the National Indoor, the only major American title to elude him, so he was fired up to play Connors for the second time in a month. The rematch was a close contest, as Ashe used his strong serve to counter Connors’s superior speed and court coverage. But the left-hander ultimately prevailed, winning a record fifth National Indoor title.18
After his unexpectedly strong start in the winter of 1979, Ashe cooled off in the spring. There were no championship matches, no titles, and to his dismay, no invitation to play Davis Cup. Nevertheless, the press continued to marvel at his spirit and longevity. In April, Ebony ran a feature story titled “Arthur Ashe: The Man Who Despite Age and an Operation Refused to Quit; He Comes Back as a Top Star.” The author, Louie Robinson Jr., described Ashe’s comeback as “the game’s most exciting development of the year.” Tennis fans were excited, he explained, “not just because a great champion has gained extended life” but also because tennis could still claim “a respected celebrity in a sport which now seems to have more prima donnas than an Italian opera company.”19
At the same time, Ashe’s interest in politics and social issues was as strong as ever. In a series of speeches and newspaper articles, he expressed his opinions on a wide range of issues, from the questionable value of sports boycotts to the educational and moral challenges facing black college students to his doubts about the wisdom of affirmative action. He did not shy away from controversy, and there was a direct, no-nonsense quality to many of his public statements. Speaking at Atlanta University in April 1978, he chided an audience of black students for squandering the gains of the civil rights movement. “Your older brothers and sisters got their heads busted in,” he complained, “but you’re not utilizing the tools it took a lot of people a lot of time to get.” He pleaded with them to eschew a sense of entitlement, to assume responsibility for their own actions, and to avoid putting their faith in professional sports as a means of advancement.20
In October 1978, Ashe wrote a provocative piece for The Washington Post objecting to a proposed boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics—a position consistent with his opposition to the movement to boycott the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. The morale and competitive spirit of the world’s best athletes, he insisted, were more important than using sports to make a questionable political statement. In late December, just before he left for Australia, he returned to Atlanta to speak at Morehouse College on the virtues of careful career planning and the shortage of black students preparing for careers in the sciences. Nothing, it seems, was beyond his capacity for social and philosophical commentary.21
Six weeks earlier, in November, a rumor that Ashe planned to run for public office had resurfaced after his friend, the former New York Knicks star Bill Bradley, was elected a United States senator from New Jersey. Ashe did not deny he had thought about running for office, but such a venture would have to wait, he insisted, until after his tennis career was over. He also feared he was too honest—too much of a truth teller—to survive as a politician.22
A case in point was his appearance at Howard University in March 1979. Representing Aetna, he was there to lay the groundwork for the future recruitment of black employees. While his prepared speech ruffled few feathers, during the question-and-answer period he alienated much of the crowd by endorsing the recent Bakke decision. After being rejected for admission to the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine in the early 1970s, a white applicant named Allan Bakke had filed suit against university officials charging them with reverse discrimination. Widely viewed as a test of the constitutionality of using racial quotas as a form of affirmative action on behalf of black applicants, the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in November 1978 issued a complicated 5–4 ruling that simultaneously upheld both the general principle of affirmative action and Allan Bakke’s case for admission. Despite a measure of confusion, the ruling inspired considerable anxiety among affirmative action supporters, and few liberal Democrats found anything good to say about it.
Ashe was an exception. In his view, the ruling served a useful purpose in striking down the use of formal racial quotas by university admissions officers. Speaking as a firm believer in meritocratic self-reliance, and as a corporate representative of the Aetna insurance company, he offered the Howard students a stern warning. “The day will come,” he told them, “when you’re going to have to stand on your own two feet and make it. . . . You have to come to the realization you’re going to go through the door because you’re fully qualified not because you’re part of a quota.” In a properly constituted society, he insisted, the only acceptable roads to success were education, hard work, and earned respect; equal opportunity, not entitlement, was the key to a brighter future for black Americans. When a chorus of boos and angry objections followed, he retreated to another topic, but many students left the hall disappointed and disillusioned.
&nbs
p; Later he rarely mentioned the Bakke controversy in public. In private, however, he continued to struggle with the issues of racial entitlement and self-reliance. In his last public statement on the matter, written in 1992, he confessed he still had strong misgivings about any policy that favored one race over another. “If American society had the strength to do what should be done to ensure that justice prevails for all,” he insisted, “then affirmative action would be exposed for what it is: an insult to the people it is intended to help. What I and others want is an equal chance, under one set of rules, as on a tennis court. . . . Affirmative action tends to undermine the spirit of individual initiative. Such is human nature: why struggle to succeed when you can have something for nothing?”23
Ashe lived his entire life according to this standard of hard work, and he never worked harder than during the comeback spring of 1979. As he had learned early in life, there was no guarantee even the most strenuous efforts would pay off, and over the next few months this hard truth would become all too evident. Earlier in the year, against Dell’s advice, he had entered into a risky business partnership with an old friend from Richmond. Sharing an interest in Africa, he and his partner formed a trading company, International Commercial Resources, with the intention of establishing trading links across the continent. “We were cautious, very cautious,” Ashe later insisted. “We began our venture by negotiating with the government of Liberia, which seemed to be the safest, most stable place in Africa for an American to do business. . . . Our main dealings were with an efficient and apparently principled government administrator, Charles Taylor, who was himself a confidant of the president of Liberia at that time, William R. Tolbert.” Unfortunately, within a year Tolbert’s regime would be toppled by a violent coup, rendering the investment worthless. Ashe “never saw a penny of the money again.”24
Arthur Ashe Page 61
