Arthur’s fortunes on the court weren’t much better. In early May, he began an extended tour in Europe, the scene of many of his greatest triumphs and potentially the perfect backdrop for his return to form. The first stop was the Nations Cup tournament in Düsseldorf, West Germany, where the United States team beat the West Germans but lost badly to both the Australians and the Italians. Arthur, who did not play particularly well, hoped his fortunes would improve once he arrived in Paris for the French Open, where at thirty-five he would be the oldest player in the field, two years older than Rosewall when he won the French Open in 1968. As the ninth seed he had every expectation of playing his way into the later rounds. But in the third round he lost in four sets to an unseeded nineteen-year-old Czech by the name of Ivan Lendl. Seventeen years Ashe’s junior, Lendl would go on to become one of the world’s greatest players. But in 1979, the loss to a boy who had won the French Junior championship the year before was crushing.25
A bitter factional feud that threatened to destroy the ATP in the weeks preceding Wimbledon added to his despair. Unhappy with Bob Briner, the ATP’s executive director, and wary of Briner’s ally and patron Donald Dell—who was thought to represent the original core of ATP stalwarts while neglecting other members—Cliff Drysdale and Ray Moore led a revolt to elect an anti-Dell majority to the board of directors. Arthur had close friends on both sides, but since he was personally closer to Dell than anyone else, he became a marked man during the lobbying campaign preceding the board election. As Richard Evans, himself an ATP insider, described the situation, “The anti-Dell faction needed Ashe’s position on the Board to go to one of their own men and Arthur, understandably, was terribly hurt at being opposed by colleagues he had always considered to be his friends.”
When the ballots were counted during the pre-Wimbledon Queen’s Club grass court championships, Ashe retained his seat on the board by a narrow margin, and the power of Dell and his management company ProServ emerged essentially undiminished. But the battle for control of the board scarred or destroyed several close friendships. While Briner’s departure and replacement by Butch Buchholz had a healing effect, the turmoil in the organization sickened Ashe, who already had enough challenges in his life.26
The following week, he was in London for the Stella Artois Wimbledon warm-up tournament. Once again he played well in the early rounds before losing to the #30-ranked Víctor Pecci, a flamboyant six-foot-three-inch Paraguayan. In the pre-Wimbledon press coverage, Ashe drew some attention as a potential spoiler in the upcoming tournament. But in the opening round at Wimbledon, Chris Kachel, a virtual unknown from Australia, eliminated him in straight sets, the second straight year he had bowed out early.27
Following Arthur’s unexpected exit, Jeanne decided they should take advantage of the situation. “You need a vacation,” she told him, clearly implying she needed one, too. “Let’s just get away from everything and everybody.” Angling for a real vacation for some time, she reminded him he had not taken any time off since their brief trip to South Carolina. “Whenever we travel, you’re playing tennis and I’m looking for a Laundromat,” she complained. “I would like to be able to sit down at a dinner table and not have someone come over and sit in a chair next to us and start a conversation.”
Still smarting from his loss, Arthur was out of sorts and initially cold to her idea. But he soon came around. As the second week of the Wimbledon fortnight began, they flew to Paris and then on to the French Riviera, where they stayed in the Château St. Martin, near the quaint village of Vence. Their time in Vence proved restful and therapeutic for Jeanne, while Arthur—“not the vacation type,” as he put it—did his best to relax. Try as he might, it wasn’t easy for him to forget his recent reverses and nagging doubts, even in the beautiful setting of southern France.28
Back in New York, he reflected on his prospects. “The end was clearly in sight,” he conceded. “Nevertheless, I saw no reason why I couldn’t continue to play professionally, with mixed success to be sure, for at least two or three more years.” Fortunately, he did not have to worry about losing his elevated standard of living. Unlike less successful touring pros, he enjoyed the luxury of having other sources of income, ranging from an array of endorsements and investments to an exciting new career as a broadcaster.
As in other aspects of his life, he brought a special quality of perspective and experience to the broadcast booth. He knew the sport inside and out, and demonstrated both a wry sense of humor and an impressive command of the English language. In the ABC booth with Howard Cosell covering the round-robin matches at the Forest Hills Invitational in mid-July 1979, he more than held his own with one of broadcasting most colorful figures. As one television critic described the scene, “In the friendliest of manners, Mr. Ashe kept puncturing his broadcast partner’s pomposities. When Mr. Cosell managed to turn ‘architecture’ into a verb, Mr. Ashe laughingly said, ‘I’ll have to look that up in my Funk and Wagnalls.’ ” It was classic Ashe—subtle, whimsical, and on point.29
TWENTY-ONE
OFF THE COURT
EVEN THOUGH HIS TRANSITION to the broadcast booth ensured gainful employment for the foreseeable future, Arthur was not quite ready to hang up his racket. A week after the July 1979 Forest Hills broadcast, he entered a tournament in Kitzbühel, in the mountains of west Austria. The beautiful setting and luxurious accommodations were simply too alluring to pass up. As he explained to Jeanne, if he managed to make it into the late rounds, which he fully expected to do, they could turn the trip into an extended Alpine vacation. Unfortunately, this anticipated Austrian idyll soon fell victim to two unexpected developments: a second-round loss to an unheralded French player, Christophe Freyss; and a call from Arthur’s sister Loretta, who informed him their father had been hospitalized after a severe attack of angina.1
Although Arthur Sr. soon recovered and lived for another ten years, the angina attack warned of troubles to come. Indeed, within a few days of his return from Austria, Arthur Jr. suffered an attack of his own. On Monday, July 30, still feeling the effects of jet lag, he went to bed in his and Jeanne’s New York apartment around half past ten while she was still downstairs working in her darkroom. A little over an hour later, he was, in his words, “jolted awake by the most intense chest pain I had ever suffered. After about two minutes, the pain subsided. Telling myself that I was suffering from nothing more than a severe case of indigestion, I tried to go back to sleep. I was almost there when the pain returned even more intensely than before. Breathing hard, I sat up in bed. I could not remember an attack of indigestion so acute. Again, the pain subsided; again I relaxed; and again, after about fifteen minutes, I was jolted by an excruciating pressure in my chest. Finally the pain ebbed and I returned to sleep.”2
When Arthur awoke the next morning he felt fine, so he decided to honor his commitment to conduct two youth tennis clinics, one at Crotona Park in the Bronx and a second at the East River Tennis Club in Queens. After playing an eight-game pro set against the club pro Butch Seewagen and signing a few autographs, he “stepped under a large courtside umbrella to escape the sun.” Almost immediately the chest pains from the night before returned, this time with much more intensity. He later described the pain as a “sledgehammer” hitting his chest. “My breastbone,” he remembered, “felt like it would cave in.” Without telling anyone, he tried to “walk off the pain” in a nearby parking lot.
At that point Seewagen looked out the window of the pro shop and saw his friend in distress. Rushing over to help, he yelled out to Dr. Lee Wallace, a New York Hospital staff physician who happened to be playing on a nearby court. Following a few quick questions from the doctor, Arthur was whisked away to New York Hospital for an examination. “I’ll never forget the ride,” he later wrote. “Thank God, we just happened to be near the 59th Street Bridge, and it wasn’t busy. . . . Butch drove. I sat in the front clutching my chest. Dr. Wallace was in the back. We made small talk, touching on everything except the pain.” Fortunately,
it only took seven minutes to reach the emergency room.3
Arthur was shocked when Dr. Wallace told the emergency room doctor: “I want Mr. Ashe admitted as a possible heart attack patient.” While Seewagen called Jeanne to tell her what was happening, the hospital staff wasted no time. “Within 10 minutes of the time we left the club,” he recalled, “I had an oxygen mask over my face, IV needles in my arm, and an EKG machine monitoring every beat of my heart.” Even before they were sure he had suffered a heart attack, the doctors gave him morphine for pain and medication to prevent arrhythmia. “All of this took about five minutes,” he estimated. “Meanwhile, my mind was racing as fast as the medics. I thought of all sorts of things—all bad, debilitating and permanent. Stroke. Bypass operations. No-salt diets. No more tennis. Worse yet, dying.”4
By that time Jeanne had arrived. Four years earlier she had watched her father nearly succumb to two heart attacks suffered in a single day, so she was experienced enough to know her husband could draw comfort from her strength. “Jeanne’s grip on my hand was reassuring,” Arthur would later write. “I listened for beeps from the EKG machine. Were they faster or slower? How serious was my condition? What was happening to me? I tightened my grip on her hand.” At one point, after detecting shivers, she grabbed his arm and with what he remembered to be “a studious, controlled calm” asked “Are you cold?” “No, just scared to death,” he replied, in a moment of vulnerable but endearing honesty. If “partners in a marriage have to feel like they’re needed,” as he later insisted, Jeanne was about to enter a new phase in their relationship. Earlier in their marriage, she had sometimes chafed at his self-sufficiency, voicing doubt that he really needed her in his life. That problem would never trouble them again.5
An examination soon confirmed Arthur had indeed suffered a heart attack, the result of myocardial ischemia—“a lack of oxygen in the blood going to the heart muscle.” The initial assessment by the attending cardiologist, Dr. Stephen Scheidt, suggested the scale of the attack was moderate and that the heart had suffered only limited damage. Nevertheless, Arthur was clearly unnerved. As one early visitor—the journalist Carole Kranepool—reported: “When I first visited Arthur in the hospital, he looked despondent and he seemed frightened. He wasn’t the Arthur I knew, always outgoing and happy. He was withdrawn.”
Less than a week later, however, a second visit revealed a dramatic change of spirit. Now “he was keeping constant charts of his condition: hoping to explore and explain the reasons for his heart attack,” and he had become “an incessant reader of books on heart diseases.” One of the attending physicians told her Arthur probably “knew more about his condition than most doctors know about heart disease.” Following two days in intensive care, “Dr. Ashe” spent nearly a week in the coronary care unit before being sent home with strict orders to rest.6
Arthur’s heart attack shocked the tennis world. As soon as they heard the news, fans across the globe asked the obvious question: how could this happen to a world-class athlete still in his mid-thirties, a man so thin and seemingly so fit he had managed to keep pace with younger opponents barely half his age? That he looked considerably younger than his years made it even more difficult to believe he was seriously ill. For Arthur, the heart attack “shattered a myth that every professional athlete has about invincibility.” Writing in 1981, he recalled he had once shared the public’s naïveté on such matters: “Athletes, especially those involved in aerobic sports, are in great shape. If they catch cold or sneeze, they consider it a personal affront.” But “when you do get sick, it brings you back to life, to reality.”7
Ashe’s first public statement on his illness came four weeks after his attack, in an article written for The Washington Post, where he had been writing opinion pieces for two years. Both personal and philosophical, the article asked the question: “Why me?” After describing the whirl of confusion and fear he had experienced during his first few minutes in the hospital, he revealed that “during the entire episode—in the car on the way to the hospital, in the emergency room and during the four days in the intensive care and cardiac care unit—one thought recurred: Why me?” This question, he insisted, “was more than just a complaint from someone who felt cheated by fate.”
To prove his point, he went on to analyze his recent experience, turning a personal story into a discourse on fitness and fate. “I’m not your typical heart attack patient,” he explained, stating the obvious. “My blood pressure is below normal. I don’t smoke or take drugs. I’m thin. My serum cholesterol is low. I’m not hypertense. I have no trouble absorbing sugar. And with all the tennis I play, I’m about as physically fit as a 36-year-old man can be.” All of this helped to explain why he “didn’t pay much attention at first to the chest pains.” As he recalled his reasoning: “I had started to sweat, but I wasn’t short of breath. I felt some pain in my arms and I made a vague connection to my father’s recurring symptoms. But I’m a pro athlete—no way I’m having a heart attack.” Only after hospital tests confirmed the attack did he begin to acknowledge his situation. “The answer to my big question—why me?” he eventually concluded, “—seemed to boil down to family history and random chance.”
Ashe’s family history should have alerted him to his own vulnerability, considering his mother’s death from cardiovascular disease at the age of twenty-seven, his father’s two heart attacks—the first suffered at age fifty-five—and the high blood pressure and hypertension rife among his aunts, uncles, and cousins. But it didn’t occur to him that professional athletes had to worry about such things. “I never thought about it in terms of myself, really,” he later confessed, “because I was an athlete, and I figured I was immune.” Eventually he became convinced the rigorous physical regimen of competitive tennis, while giving him a false sense of security, had also softened the blow. “The doctors tell me,” he reported, “that my physical condition probably kept the attack from being more severe. It may even have saved my life.” No amount of physical conditioning, it seemed, could completely offset the combined influence of bad genes and bad luck. But four weeks after the attack he already felt his body regaining its normal energy and rhythm.
Barring any unforeseen problems, he assured the Post’s readers, the prognosis looked good. “Some time in the next two months an angiogram will be performed on me,” he explained. “Assuming I pass the test, a graduated conditioning program will be mapped out for me around the beginning of November. In the meantime I am walking about normally, eating what I want, taking French lessons and going to the Sports Training Institute here every day for about 40 minutes.” While acknowledging that a full recovery was less than certain, he made the startling announcement: “right now I plan to start playing competitive tennis again at the U.S. Pro Indoor tournament in Philadelphia the third week in January. It will then be five months since my attack, and I’m looking forward to re-establishing myself where I left off—among the top 10 tennis players in the world.”8
A month later, to Arthur’s shock and dismay, the test revealed the damage to his heart was extensive, much greater than his cardiologists, Drs. Mike Collins and Virginia Bouchard Smith, had first thought. He was suffering from a 95 percent closure of his left anterior descending artery, a complete closure of his circumflex artery, and 50 percent closure at two places along his right coronary artery. “The amazing thing,” he later conceded, “was that I had been playing professional tennis like this.” The doctors acknowledged the damage from the August heart attack could have been even worse, but they strongly recommended coronary bypass surgery. When he asked about his prognosis without surgery, they responded with sobering news: “Sorry, Arthur. Unless you have an operation, you can forget about playing tennis again. Certainly not professional tennis.” Since these were not the words he wanted to hear, he tried his best to ignore them. For a time, nothing the doctors said seemed to dampen his optimism—or his determination to achieve a full recovery without surgery.9
Throughout the fall of 1979
, he clung to the hope of proving his cardiologists wrong. Given enough time for proper rehabilitation and conditioning, he reasoned, he could avoid surgery, gradually recover his strength and skills, and eventually come back stronger than ever. The main problem with surgery, as he saw it, was that his doctors could not cite a single case of a patient returning to competitive athletics following open-heart surgery.
By late November, he had grown confident he had made the right decision—and that it was time to think about returning to the tennis court. During a recent trip to Iowa to campaign for Senator Edward Kennedy, he had shown considerable stamina and had returned to New York ready to tackle additional physical challenges. After consulting with his doctors, he agreed to start slowly with an exhibition match scheduled for December 9. The match was part of a United Negro College Fund benefit event featuring celebrity doubles and an exhibit of Jeanne’s photographs taken during a 1978 trip to the South Carolina Sea Islands. Held at the Art Salon on East 62nd Street, the photography exhibit represented a new beginning for Jeanne’s career and a perfect complement to Arthur’s return to tennis.10
The Ashes’ planned participation in the UNCF benefit signaled a resumption of normal life. But, unfortunately, the tennis side of the plan never materialized. On December 6, three days before the event, Arthur developed chest pains after watching Monday Night Football in a Jacksonville hotel room with several of his ATP tennis buddies. He refused to panic, but after a restless night punctuated by heart palpitations, he asked Pasarell, who always seemed to be there when he needed him most, to take him to Jacksonville Memorial Hospital.
After two days of tests and bed rest, the doctors released him with the reassurance he had not suffered a second heart attack. Prior to his release, however, he had a lengthy conversation with another patient—a man “who had just undergone a triple bypass two days before.” To his amazement, the man “was in great shape: no blood, one tube in his arm, no oxygen, all he had was a simple dressing. He said all the pain was gone, and that he wasn’t even on medication anymore.” This, as it turned out, was enough proof to dispel Arthur’s fear of heart surgery. “So I went back home,” he recalled, “and resolved that I would get this done myself.” Though still wary of going under the knife, he said, in effect: to hell with the odds against a postoperative return to the tour. He had beaten the odds all of his life, and he was confident he could beat them again.11
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