Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  In the end, Arthur stuck by his guns. There was no lowering of standards and no tolerance of poor attendance, late submissions, or disrespectful behavior. Several students responded with renewed commitment. But others simply dropped the course. “On the whole I was rather disheartened,” he later confessed, ultimately judging the semester to be “one of the more discouraging seasons of my life.” Even so, his first semester was an important learning experience. “Its main virtue,” he concluded, “was to make me even more determined to try to make a difference in the area of education, in particular. Certainly it was the major reason for the uncompromising position I took on the question of higher academic standards for athletes governed by the NCAA.”3

  Another salvation was a busy schedule that often diverted his attention from the problems at FMC. During late January and eary February, for example, he attended Aetna and AMF-Head board meetings, huddled with his New York literary agent, appeared on the Sportsbeat radio show, and played golf at the Bing Crosby Pro-Am at Pebble Beach. He was also busy preparing for the upcoming Davis Cup tie against Argentina and thinking about how tough the Argentines would be in front of a raucous Buenos Aires crowd. The only two times the Americans had played in the Argentine capital, in 1977 and 1980, they had lost. It had been tough enough to beat them in Cincinnati in 1981, and this time they would be stronger than ever. In the past two years, Vilas had risen to number four in the world and Clerc to number five, and the tie would be played on their favorite surface, the notoriously slow clay of the Buenos Aires Lawn Tennis Club.

  Ashe, too, would have a strong squad, with now third-ranked McEnroe and seventh-ranked Gene Mayer as his singles players, and McEnroe and Fleming in the doubles. Unfortunately, no one on the American team was a clay court specialist, though the win in Grenoble had demonstrated some capacity to adapt to a slow surface. Ashe could only hope that lightning would strike twice.4

  The mounting pressure to defeat the Argentines was palpable. But on February 9 and 10, less than three weeks before the Buenos Aires tie, Ashe enjoyed a welcome respite on the Ivy League campus of Yale University. Awarded the Kiphuth Fellowship, named for the legendary Yale swimming coach and athletic director Bob J. H. Kiphuth, Ashe was only the third recipient following the British runner Sebastian Coe and Ireland’s Lord Killanin, the former president of the International Olympic Committee. Established to honor “men and women distinguished in the fields of physical training, sport, sports writing, physiology, literature and the arts,” the award required the recipient to deliver a public lecture dealing with an issue of major importance.

  If Ashe was nervous, he didn’t show it, perhaps because he already knew so much about the school, having listened to Donald Dell’s endless tales about his alma mater. “During his brief visit,” commented Steve Flink of World Tennis, “one discovered that Ashe would probably fit comfortably into the intellectual landscape of campus life as a teacher, if he ever chose to do so.” Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., a young assistant professor of English destined for academic stardom, was similarly impressed. After watching Arthur interact with a group of students during a campus tour, Gates asked the visiting tennis star if he had ever thought about pursuing a PhD. He also tried to recruit him to teach a multiweek course at Yale, perhaps on sports, race, and education. Arthur was flattered and told Gates he would think it over.

  Arthur’s visit included a press conference held at the Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Accompanied by his old friend Benny Sims, the first black teaching pro at Longwood Cricket Club, he strode to the podium to answer a bevy of questions posed by a mixed crowd of students and reporters. Relaxed but focused, he offered a full measure of constructive advice. “It’s very important to learn another language and to speak it like English,” he declared. “Second, take a course in computer science. Third, take one in public speaking to give you self-confidence. . . . Last, I urge you to get to see as much of the world as possible. You can’t learn enough about it from the New York Times, Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw. You’ve got to see it for yourself.”

  Predictably, someone in the crowd wanted to know his opinion on Proposition 48, the new NCAA policy that raised the existing requirements for Division I and II scholarship eligibility. Beginning in the fall of 1986, freshman athletes receiving scholarships would have to have a score of at least 700 (out of 1600) on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), and a 2.0 or better high school grade point average in eleven academic courses.

  Prop 48 was approved despite considerable opposition, mostly from historically black colleges and universities. From the moment it passed, there was pressure either to lower the standards or to allow exceptions to accommodate disadvantaged and minority students. Eventually the NCAA worked out a compromise—essentially a “partial qualifier” category providing scholarship possibilities in the sophomore year (they could not play as freshmen) for marginal and underperforming students if they met one of the two requirements—either the minimum acceptable score on a standardized test or the required high school grade point average. This amendment would later spawn a countermeasure known as Prop 42, which sought to restore the original strict standards of Prop 48.

  Ashe, who was in the process of writing an opinion piece on Prop 48 for The Washington Post, confessed he was no fan of the SAT as a determining factor in college admissions. “The intent of the proposal is commendable,” he acknowledged, but he did not like Prop 48’s rigid and inflexible standards. “Many athletes are in college to play ball and not to get an education,” he pointed out, before resorting to a mixed metaphor: “but the remedy is too broad a brush. You need to do it with finely chiseled tools, not with a sledgehammer. Basically, what you are saying is you will keep someone out of college on the basis of what they did one Saturday morning on an S.A.T. test.” By the end of the press conference it was obvious to everyone in the room that the speaker was no ordinary tennis jock.

  That night, Arthur, accompanied by Jeanne and Dell, attended a dinner party at the home of Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti, a literary scholar who later served as the commissioner of Major League Baseball. The next morning he toured the campus with Professor Gates before lunching at Mory’s, the famous Yale eating and drinking club. After lunch he met with the men’s and women’s tennis teams and fielded a variety of questions, including one about Connors’s refusal to play Davis Cup. “Why doesn’t he play?” one student asked, and Ashe responded candidly: “It’s a matter of money, priorities and his age.”

  Candor was also in evidence when Ashe delivered his formal Kiphuth Fellowship speech later that afternoon. Billed as a lecture on “College Athletics: A Reappraisal,” his forty-minute talk was both down-to-earth and philosophical. Professor Michael Cooke’s introduction set the tone. “The important thing is not that Arthur won, but how he won,” Cooke declared. “He has a rare level of spiritual class.” Arthur began by reflecting on the lasting influence of his Jim Crow upbringing in Richmond. “Being black you take certain baggage everywhere you go,” he told the crowd of five hundred. He then turned to issues related to collegiate sports and education but would revisit the “upbringing” theme during the question-and-answer period. “When I grew up I had to say ‘Yes, sir’ ‘No, sir’ to my father,” he recalled. “You do it for a while and it stays with you. . . . But I’ve got to admit that for a long time I’ve had this urge to walk out on Centre Court at Wimbledon and for just one match act like McEnroe.”

  When asked about the future of tennis, he placed himself in a dying breed. “Tennis is going to be changed by a new breed of athlete,” he predicted. “By 1990 there will be a large number of players who are 6 feet, 3 inches, weigh 185 to 190 pounds. They will be fast and will be the kind of athletes who could have gone into the NBA. It will change tennis completely. Until very recently we had great players but not the best athletes in terms of foot speed and hand-eye coordination. Soon the best athletes will be playing tennis and it will be at a level like you’ve never seen.” The prototype of this new breed, he poin
ted out with some pride, was Yannick Noah.

  At the Kiphuth awards dinner that evening, the guest of honor found himself blushing as Dell addressed the gathering. “Arthur has a quiet confidence in himself,” Dell explained. “Underneath that quiet exterior lies someone who is very forceful, always changing, ever different, very much a leader. He believes in striving for excellence by example, not by what he says but by what he does.” Later, when Arthur rose to accept the award, he expressed his gratitude with gracious humility. “Awards like this Kilputh Fellowship increase the pressure not so much to prove myself but to live up to the ideal,” he insisted. “But each time something like this happens, it makes me feel my philosophy of life is right.” The concluding ovation was long and loud, leaving him with a feeling of optimism that had been difficult to muster since Johnny Moutoussamy’s death.5

  Ashe departed from New Haven with a renewed sense of hope and purpose—two assets he would surely need in Buenos Aires. He knew the Argentines were slight favorites, but he wasn’t prepared for an injury to McEnroe three weeks before the tie. Just as injury-plagued Gene Mayer was rounding into the best shape of his career, McEnroe suffered a shoulder injury that impeded his serve. He could still play but not with his normal abandon. The American squad’s best option, at this point, was to recruit Connors, and both Ashe and McEnroe pleaded with him to come to the aid of his national team. But Connors refused, leaving Ashe with little choice but to stick with his injured star. If anyone could overcome physical adversity and gut it out, Ashe reasoned, it was McEnroe.

  The opening singles match between Gene Mayer and Vilas did not bode well for the Americans. Mayer had lost to Vilas the first five times they had played, and the sixth meeting, framed by a boisterous Argentine crowd, led to the same result. Then it was McEnroe’s turn. He knew Clerc would be tough, but neither he nor Ashe was fully prepared for the hostility that pervaded the small, bandbox stadium. From the outset, as one observer noted, the crowd “whistled and jeered . . . sang soccer cheers, waved blue-and-white Argentine flags and chanted the names of the Argentine players.” Clerc, in addition to playing well, did everything he could to whip up the crowd, lapsing into a mock victory dance “after winning key points” and delighting in the frequent chants of “la batata” (the Spanish word for sweet potato), his favorite nickname.6

  Part of the fans’ intensity was almost certainly a response to the support the United States had given to the British during the recent Falklands War. Having suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the British navy in June 1982, Argentina was in desperate need of a victory that would restore some of its national pride. For a nation where tennis was second only to soccer in popularity (reportedly more than 3 million of Argentina’s 28 million citizens played tennis), the notion of exacting a bit of revenge from the U.S. Davis Cup team—especially from the brash young star dubbed “El Irascible” by the Argentine press—was irresistible.

  To the Argentines’ delight, this notion became reality on a hot and humid weekend in March. Unsteady and seemingly unnerved, McEnroe won only two games in the first two sets, losing a set “at love for the first time in six years of cup play.” Somehow he battled back to win the next two sets, but in the fifth set he fell behind 5–2 before play was halted by darkness. After a night’s sleep, McEnroe returned to the court hoping for a miracle, and for a while the miracle appeared to be in reach as he fought back to tie the set at 5–5. But after two sessions and nearly five hours of play, Clerc closed out the match 7–5. Though disappointed, McEnroe had no time to think about what might have been. Later that afternoon, he and Fleming took the court against Vilas and Clerc with the tie on the line. This time the American side was fortunate enough to prevail in an exhausting five-set war of attrition.

  By staving off elimination in the doubles, the Americans could still win the Cup by taking both singles matches on the final day of competition. But this was a highly unlikely prospect considering McEnroe’s tender shoulder and the 10 exhausting sets he had already played. After McEnroe broke Vilas’s serve in the first game of their match and went on to take a 4–2 lead, Ashe detected a glimmer of hope. But it soon faded as Vilas subjected McEnroe to a humiliating drubbing. Dropping the first set 6–4, and the second 6–0, the American star lost the first five games of the third. McEnroe’s losing streak ultimately stretched to an incredible 15 games, the longest drought of his career. He lost the third set 6–1, but not before initiating a strange moment of bonding with Ashe. “Well, captain,” he asked during the last changeover of the match, “do you have any pearly words of wisdom for me?” Ashe could only smile and wave him back out onto the court and certain defeat. “I thought it was our finest moment together,” he wrote years later. “Sometimes a defeat can be more beautiful and satisfying than certain victories.”

  McEnroe, in Ashe’s estimation, had once again demonstrated the heart and guts of a lion. “In front of all those hostile, jeering fans,” the grateful captain recalled, “he seemed a lonely figure, yet brave and brilliant, heroic.” Neither man would ever forget this experience, and it became part of the deep bond between them. In the short run, of course, they were less philosophical. In March 1983, McEnroe’s strength of character was less evident than the stark reality of defeat and disappointment. Back among the American people, both he and Ashe had difficult questions to answer and crucial decisions to consider. Personal development and team spirit notwithstanding, the Davis Cup was lost, and for the first time in nine years the United States had been eliminated in the first round. There would be no third consecutive victory for Captain Ashe.7

  Losing the Cup was bad enough, but an even more troubling problem soon emerged. On March 10, The New York Times announced the sports management group led by Dell, Ray Benton, Frank Craighill, and Lee Fentress was about to split up, with Dell and Benton on one side and Craighill and Fentress on the other. While his relationship with Dell was special, he liked and respected all four of the major partners. Their firm had served him well and had been instrumental in the maturation of Open tennis. He hated to see them break up and worried that a whole web of friendships and mutually beneficial relationships was in danger of collapsing. “I was upset by it all,” he told a Washington Post reporter in early May. Though “not completely surprised,” he had hoped “that the family would figure out a way to stay together.”

  The biggest issue dividing the partners was the proper role of ProServ, the firm’s marketing and television subsidiary. Under Dell’s direction, ProServ had undertaken the promotion of several tournaments, despite Craighill’s and Fentress’s opposition. Dell’s disagreements with his partners, both personal and professional, ran deep—too deep, as it turned out, to be resolved amicably. In April, the split became formal with Dell and Benton staying with ProServ and Craighill and Fentress forming a new management firm, Advantage International.

  Arthur stuck with his buddy Dell, of course. Their friendship was stronger than ever, and the business partnership they had sealed with a handshake more than a decade earlier was as inviolable as it was successful. Still, the firm’s dissolution hit Arthur hard. He had never thought of himself as a pessimist, but he was beginning to fear an uncertain future. Bad news, it seemed, was becoming a pattern in his life. Ever since Johnny Moutoussamy’s death four months earlier he had suffered one setback after another, with the exhilarating visit to Yale being the only exception. Johnny’s death, the loss of the Davis Cup, ProServ’s breakup—he must have asked himself: what matter of misfortune would be next? He would find out in short order.8

  While attending an Aetna board meeting in early April, Arthur began to experience angina-like pain in his chest. He had felt a few pangs in late March but hadn’t thought much of it. This time, however, the pain was too strong to ignore. Over the next eight weeks, as his doctors ran a series of tests, he tried to maintain his normal schedule of activities, including his teaching and his increasing attention to the book project.9

  On April 13, he held a midday pres
s conference at the Palm restaurant in Washington, where he announced Howard University Press had agreed to publish his manuscript, The History of the Black Athlete in America. For several months his agent, Fifi Oscard, had been trying to secure a contract from a major publishing house. But editors at more than a dozen commercial presses had rejected Arthur’s proposal, largely because they doubted the capacity of a former tennis player with no training as a historian to pull off such an ambitious project.10

  The first editor willing to see beyond this obvious deficiency was Charles F. Harris, the executive director of Howard University Press. The press itself was a relatively unimpressive operation with few major publications to its credit, but Arthur was swayed by “the intellectual tradition of Howard University,” the “philosophy of the Howard University Press publishing program,” and the university’s renowned repository of black history, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. For the press, as for Ashe, the project represented a financially daring initiative. “It is estimated that this project will require an expenditure of $500,000,” the university soon revealed, “half of which will be provided by Howard University Press and Arthur Ashe. The remaining $250,000 will be solicited from public and private philanthropic sources.”11

  Even before the contract signing, Arthur had expended significant funds on the project. By the end of March he had rented office space on Lexington Avenue and hired a clerical assistant, Derilene McLeod, and two researchers—Kip Branch, an English professor at Wilson College in Pennsylvania, and Sandra Jamison, a professional librarian. With their help, he soon filled the office with as many relevant books and articles as he could find. After compiling a preliminary bibliography, Branch and Jamison created an interview questionnaire, contacted a number of black historians, enlisted the help of student interns at several colleges and universities, and sent out information requests to more than one hundred athletic departments. Meanwhile, Arthur focused on reading books on sports and black history and “outlining his research needs.”12