Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Any concern he had about the current administration’s policies, however, paled in comparison to his fear of what Carter’s opponent Ronald Reagan would do in Southern Africa. Throughout the 1980 Republican primary campaign, Reagan promised to institute a hard-line foreign policy stressing anti-Soviet vigilance. In his view, any ally willing to stand up to Soviet expansion deserved America’s unqualified support. For South Africa, this meant no interference with the system of apartheid.33

  During the early summer of 1980, the Reagan threat became all too real. Carrying the burden of an unpopular boycott of the Moscow Olympics and a deepening hostage crisis in Tehran, Carter seemed unable to counter the image of a failed presidency. His approval ratings were in steep decline, and after Reagan secured the Republican nomination in mid-July the situation only got worse. When Carter won the Democratic nomination on the first ballot in August, Arthur was disappointed, convinced that Kennedy was the only Democrat with a reasonable chance of defeating Reagan in November.34

  By late August Arthur had turned his attention back to tennis and the upcoming U.S. Open. As the political winds blew in the wrong direction, he drew more than a little consolation from the surging popularity of his favorite game. Working as a commentator for ABC Sports, he participated in one of sport’s greatest spectacles. Twelve years after he had won the first U.S. Open, he could still experience the rush of excitement he had always felt being in the presence of the world’s best players. This time the focus would be on McEnroe and Borg, the 1980 Wimbledon finalists headed for an epochal championship-round rematch. Some observers were anticipating a match for the ages, and Ashe felt fortunate to be there to see it. The life of a sports-celebrity-turned-broadcaster-and-public-intellectual had its moments, even in the face of forced retirement and political turmoil.35

  TWENTY-TWO

  CAPTAIN ASHE

  DURING THE FIRST WEEK of the 1980 U.S. Open, Ashe got word that Marvin Richmond, the new president of the USTA, wanted to speak with him. Sensing this might have something to do with the Davis Cup team, a subject dear to his heart, he immediately went in search of Richmond, whom he had known for several years. Richmond got right to the point: “Tony Trabert wants out. He can’t take it anymore.” “Take what?” Ashe asked a bit coyly, knowing that Captain Trabert was frustrated by his team’s early exit from the 1980 competition, and by his players’ lack of discipline. “The behavior of the players. McEnroe. Gerulaitis. Fleming. They are driving him nuts,” Richmond explained. Realizing his dream of captaining the American squad might be in the offing, Ashe asked: “Am I on your short list?” “No,” Richmond responded, “because we don’t have a short list. We want you.”

  Ashe could hardly believe his ears, but he maintained enough composure to ask for twenty-four hours to think it over. He later confessed he really didn’t need any time to make the decision; he just wanted time to prepare for “the inevitable onslaught of the press.” From the moment Richmond made the offer, he knew he wanted the captaincy as much as anything in his life. “I felt so happy and proud I could have jumped into the air,” he recalled, “—the job meant that much to me.”

  Ashe—who respected Trabert, having played for him on the 1977 and 1978 Cup teams—wanted him to be the first to hear the news. “I’m happy for you, Arthur,” the outgoing captain exclaimed. “You would have been my first choice, too.” Yet he couldn’t resist offering a few words of warning: “good luck to you with some of these guys. It’s just not the way we were brought up. . . . I can take high-spirited. But what’s been going on is really offensive. I find too much of the behavior distasteful. It’s just not fun anymore, Arthur.”1

  Ashe placed part of the blame on the generational gap between fifty-year-old Trabert and his players, and on Trabert’s “law-and-order” persona. Perhaps a younger coach (Ashe was thirteen years younger than Trabert) would have better luck modulating the players’ behavior. As he told Tennis magazine, “I’m a little closer in age to the players so I’m hoping that my brand of friendly persuasion will work.”

  Richmond and his USTA colleagues shared this hope. Arthur’s demeanor, combined with his knowledge of the game and his superior Davis Cup record as a player, made him an obvious choice to replace Trabert. Indeed, his selection was universally popular aside from the rants of a few extreme white supremacists. As soon as the selection was announced on September 8, letters of congratulation flooded the Ashes’ mailbox.

  The outpouring of support and affection continued for months, including heartfelt letters from two former Davis Cup captains, Ed Turville and Donald Dell. “I don’t believe I have ever been more pleased in my life,” Turville wrote in mid-November, “when Marvin Richmond came up to me in September and said you were to be the next Davis Cup captain. . . . It has always been my opinion since our Davis Cup days that you would be a logical choice for the job.”

  Two weeks later, Dell expressed similar sentiments while adding a few words of caution. “I think you will make an outstanding Captain, Arthur,” he wrote, “but believe me these new players will test your patience, determination, and character. . . . Never lose sight of the big picture in dealing with the USTA, the press, the players, and the public: As Davis Cup Captain you and your Teammates represent 220,000,000 Americans above all else. Davis Cup is the Olympics of Tennis and therefore everyone on the Team must act accordingly or he shouldn’t be on the Team.” Over the next four years, Dell’s words would come back to him again and again.2

  His serious challenges began during the first month of his captaincy, a full six months before the first round of the 1981 Davis Cup competition. Even before he announced the members of the U.S. team, he had to deal with a major controversy surrounding John McEnroe. In the aftermath of the thrilling Borg-McEnroe championship matches at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, a promoter named Sol Kerzner seized a golden opportunity. With McEnroe losing to Borg in five tough sets at Wimbledon, and Borg returning the favor at Flushing Meadows, the idea of a rubber match became irresistible—both as a potential moneymaker and as a means of determining the best player in the world.

  The biggest problem for Ashe was that Kerzner owned and operated a South African hotel chain that included Sun City, a year-old luxury resort and casino located in Bophuthatswana, “one of the phony ‘independent’ states set up by South Africa.” Hoping to promote his resort while circumventing the objections of anti-apartheid activists, Kerzner planned to hold the match in Sun City’s new fourteen-thousand-seat stadium. To seal the deal, he offered Borg and McEnroe a total of over $1.5 million ($600,000 each in appearance money plus an additional $150,000 to the winner, plus a share of an estimated $200,000 from television rights) for a five-set match—one of the largest one-day paychecks in sports history. The two tennis stars readily accepted the lucrative terms, and Kerzner scheduled the televised match for December 6.

  Ashe was apoplectic when he heard the news. The ink on his Davis Cup contract was hardly dry, and he was already faced with a major crisis. With the United Nations preparing a blacklist of entertainers and athletes who had performed in either South Africa or one of its homelands, McEnroe’s decision to play in Sun City could have dire consequences. An upcoming heavyweight championship fight between the American boxer Mike Weaver and the South African Gerrie Coetzee, scheduled for October 25 in Sun City, had stirred up a storm of controversy, and Ashe knew the Borg-McEnroe match would be even worse. “The outcry against Weaver was nothing compared to what would probably be visited on McEnroe,” he recalled. “Weaver might claim that he needed the money; but most people would think that John had already made a fortune in prize money and endorsements or would do so soon. The huge sum of money might make playing there excusable, but it also seemed to put a price on McEnroe’s integrity.”3

  Feeling the need to protect the honor and reputation of the U.S. Davis Cup team, Ashe intervened in early October. “Determined to stop the match,” he later explained, “I approached John McEnroe, Sr., who is a lawyer and his son’s principal
adviser. I did not want to make a public fuss about the matter. However, I let the McEnroes know that a public fuss was bound to ensue if the match were played.” Signing the Sun City contract was not only morally wrong; it would also tarnish John Jr.’s reputation. Others, including Franklin Williams, the former U.S. ambassador to Ghana, approached John Sr. and voiced similar objections to the match. “I relayed the problems and concerns to him as expressed by some very responsible people,” John Sr. told Ashe.

  The combination of pressure and persuasion worked, and after John Jr. called Ashe to discuss the matter, John Sr. announced on October 16 that his son had withdrawn from the Sun City match. “John and I felt it was neither the right time, nor the right place, for that match,” he informed the press. Ecstatic, Ashe seized the opportunity to explain why he felt so strongly about boycotting any event involving Sun City and the “phony homeland” of Bophuthatswana. During an interview on the cable television program Sports Probe, he declared: “I would have less objection if it were in Johannesburg. I still don’t like it, but at least South Africa is a legally constituted nation.”

  Later in the afternoon, Ashe dashed off a short piece that appeared in The Washington Post the next day. Calling the McEnroes’ decision “a rare triumph of morality over money,” he went on to explain that the creation of “phony independent nation-states” such as Bophuthatswana had “been forced upon unwilling black South Africans in the last seven years by the white-minority government.” “The object of this ‘independent’ scheme by the South African government,” he continued, “is to one day have a country with no black South Africans. The country’s 22 million black citizens are to be stripped of their native-born citizenship and granted new passports from new governments that no one recognizes.”4

  Ashe survived the Sun City episode without any noticeable damage to his relationship with McEnroe. But the episode left him with a measure of uneasiness about mixing racial politics with the fortunes of the U.S. Davis Cup team. While he welcomed the chance to educate the public on the evils of apartheid and South Africa’s duplicitous homeland policy, he was wary of even the appearance of taking advantage of his race or color. He went out of his way to downplay race when asked how it felt to be the first black Davis Cup captain, but his racial status was always lurking in the background. He was, after all, the first black coach of a national team. For a race seldom valued for its intellectual and leadership skills—a race seldom seen on the tennis court much less in the coaching box—this was a momentous step forward.

  Ashe was under considerable pressure to succeed. But he faced the added pressure of assuming the captaincy at a time when, as he later put it, the Davis Cup’s “national and international prestige [was] waning.” “The best players did not care to play,” he recalled, “and attendance had dwindled at many matches.” The U.S. team, in particular, had closed out the 1980 competition in March with an embarrassing 4–1 loss to Argentina in the Americas Zone final. While the U.S. had won the Cup as recently as 1979, the likelihood of winning in 1981 was an open question.5

  There were, however, signs of an impending resurgence of the Davis Cup’s importance and popularity. In October 1980, the Nippon Electronic Company (NEC) of Japan became the first international sponsor in eighty years of Davis Cup competition. Signing a contract for three years, NEC promised to provide $1 million in prize money in an effort “to maintain the quality and tradition of the event.” Player compensation would no longer be limited to expense money, a change that would encourage the game’s best players to participate. Patriotism, it was hoped, would no longer have to compete with the allure of the big money on the regular tour.

  There would also be a new format for Davis Cup play in 1981. Under the new rules, the top sixteen nations would play in a series of elimination matches in March, with the final two nations squaring off for the Cup and $200,000 in first-place prize money in December. The schedule would be compressed to minimize conflicts with tour events, and the format would be further refined in 1982, producing much more manageable and player-friendly competition. “The main pieces were now clearly in place for a revival of the Davis Cup,” recalled Ashe, a strong supporter of the new system.6

  Captain Ashe’s first official task was to choose a squad to play Mexico in the first round. Since the tie would take place in Carlsbad, California, in March 1981, there was plenty of time to select and train the team. He had several of the best players in the world at his disposal—if they agreed to play. Predictably, his biggest problem was convincing Connors, the world’s third best singles player, to join the team. Connors had not played Davis Cup since 1976, when he had suffered an upset at the hands of Mexico’s Raúl Ramírez. To Ashe’s dismay, Connors—still smarting from that loss, which had eliminated the U.S. from the 1976 competition—refused to join the team for the first round. He might play Davis Cup later in the year, he hinted, but he would not play against Mexico. Years later McEnroe, the 1981 team’s number one singles player, characterized this recalcitrance as selfish and indefensible. “Connors hemmed and hawed,” he remembered, “he said he had scheduling conflicts, his toe was hurting—whatever. What else was new? For Jimmy, tennis meant money, and Davis Cup wasn’t money.”

  Connors’s absence left Ashe with a difficult decision regarding a second singles player. After some deliberation, he chose his old friend Roscoe Tanner, another left-handed ace known for his powerful serve. Selecting the U.S. squad’s doubles competitors also involved some complicated maneuvering. The obvious choice was the team of Stan Smith and Bob Lutz, who had represented the United States off and on since 1968, winning fourteen of fifteen Davis Cup doubles matches over the years. Unfortunately, after Smith developed arm trouble several weeks before the tie with Mexico, Ashe was forced to go with his second choice, Marty Riessen and Sherwood Stewart, leaving the U.S. with a strong but less than invincible squad for the first round.7

  He also soon discovered his job involved more than mere coaching. Faced with “a collection of individuals, each of whom was something of a star in his own right,” he found it necessary to cater to ego-driven and seemingly petty demands. “I found myself being called upon to apply both diplomacy and psychology to keep everyone happy,” he recalled. “I also found that I did not enjoy this aspect of my job much. Dutiful myself, I disliked being a nursemaid or a babysitter for my fellow adults.” Keeping McEnroe focused and under control was Ashe’s biggest challenge, but each team member had some measure of personal quirks and demands.8

  In the matches against Mexico, however, most of the problems were on the court. After McEnroe easily defeated seventeen-year-old Jorge Lozano in the first singles match, Tanner lost to Ramírez in the second. With the team score 1–1, Ashe expected Riessen and Stewart to gain a point in the doubles, but they faltered, losing to Ramírez and Lozano in five sets. This put the United States in the unenviable position of having to win the last two matches to avoid a humiliating defeat in the first round. Fortunately, both McEnroe and Tanner came through in the final singles matches, giving their team a 3–2 victory.

  Ashe’s debut had turned out all right, even though an ugly spat between McEnroe and Ramírez tarnished the victory. During the match, McEnroe repeatedly questioned line calls, forcing Ashe to get up from his courtside seat to calm his volatile star. In a post-match interview, Ramírez charged that McEnroe had deliberately disrupted play with his complaints. “I think he complains too much,” the Mexican star insisted, “and I think he does it on purpose.” Feisty as ever, McEnroe shot back that Ramírez was no one to talk about questioning close calls: “He’s the best in the world at that.”

  Arthur wisely stayed out of the fray; he was just happy to get out of Carlsbad with a win. But he did not escape entirely unscathed. Following the unexpected loss in doubles, Pancho Gonzales took him aside for more than a few words of stern advice. The decision to play Riessen and Stewart when McEnroe could have substituted for either of them was a serious mistake, Gonzales declared. “You should play
your best doubles players even if they are playing singles,” he insisted. “If they are fit, they are not going to be too tired. McEnroe would not have lost that match.” More pointedly, he urged Arthur “to be more involved in what’s going on on the court.” When the rookie captain claimed he was involved, that his heart “was thumping away out there,” Gonzales tempered his criticism a bit: “Well, we don’t want your heart to thump too much, Arthur. But you have to look more involved, I guess.”9

  Arthur knew Gonzales’s advice had merit. Yet he could not bring himself to act upon it. He was more than willing to counsel his players behind the scenes and during practice, but not out in the open for the world to see. “I did not want to interfere with the play of international tennis stars by seeking to coach them on camera,” he later explained, adding: “At courtside, I tended to be restrained. I did not intend to leap up at every point during a match merely to assert my presence or authority. And I was determined not to join the players automatically in their protests and tantrums, as football and basketball coaches routinely do. I would back the players if I thought they had a point, but I wouldn’t become enraged on demand.”10

  The challenge of balancing restraint and engagement sorely tested Ashe during a second-round tie against Czechoslovakia at the National Tennis Center in July. Led by Ivan Lendl, the world’s fourth best player, the Czechs were the defending champions; and, to Ashe’s dismay, McEnroe, the Americans’ best hope to defeat Lendl, “arrived at Flushing Meadows with his nerves sorely frayed and his emotions drained.” Fortunately Connors, who had finally joined the team, was on hand to pick up some of the slack. The source of McEnroe’s discontent was an acrimonious struggle with Wimbledon officials over his court behavior. His repeated tantrums over line calls had led to $2,250 in fines, and the Wimbledon committee had threatened to bar him from future All England tournaments if he didn’t stop. The committee had already broken tradition in refusing to offer an honorary club membership to the Wimbledon singles champion. This snub was a first in Wimbledon history, but one that the British press endorsed with savage delight.