Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  This was not what Ashe wanted to hear, yet he knew from personal experience that Noah had a good heart that would eventually lead the young star to a more mature and statesmanlike posture. Noah’s later philanthropic endeavors would confirm this judgment, but during the late summer of 1983 most of the attention was directed at his skills on the court—specifically his chance of winning his second major at the U.S. Open. It had been fifteen years since the first U.S. Open, and there was even more hoopla than usual in the days leading up to the tournament. The top two seeds were McEnroe and Lendl, but Noah as the #4 seed was considered a potential spoiler. Noah did not win the U.S. Open that year, losing in the quarterfinals to nineteen-year-old Jimmy Arias. Nevertheless, the excitement he generated helped make the tournament a special experience for Ashe.24

  As a commentator for HBO, a tennis historian, and the first U.S. Open champion, Ashe was called upon to take stock of the tournament’s first decade and a half. When Bud Collins asked him to reflect on his unique double victory in the 1968 U.S. Amateur and U.S. Open tournaments, the legendary tennis journalist reminded him he had been “a curiosity.” Collins set the scene for his readers: “As he mounted the U.S. Open victors’ podium at Forest Hills 15 years ago, Arthur Ashe stood out like a Brooks Brothers suitor at a nudist colony or a go-go dancer in ‘Swan Lake.’ It was strange enough that he was black and an American. What made him an even greater oddity was his status: Ashe was an amateur. Practically a missing link.”

  The U.S. Open had changed dramatically since then, Ashe acknowledged, and mostly for the better. They had not yet named the stadium court for him—that honor would come posthumously in 1997. But there were already enough honors to assure him his accomplishments at the Open had not been forgotten. At one benefit banquet held during the second week of the tournament, he received the Omega Award, given annually to a tennis player “who has shown determination of spirit and ability in overcoming significant physical obstacles.” A few days earlier, he had been on the giving end of an award ceremony, presenting the Arthur Ashe Award for NCAA Division II to a young college player from Pennsylvania in recognition of combined athletic and scholarly achievement.

  The 1983 U.S. Open—later remembered mostly for its “record crowds” and “record temperatures”—ended on September 11 with Connors defeating Lendl in the men’s singles final for the second straight year. Connors had won five U.S. Open singles in the past ten years, but at age thirty-one he was clearly entering the downslope of his career. Lendl would go on to win three Open titles, and Connors would never win another. Nevertheless, Ashe was convinced even a somewhat diminished Connors would be a welcome addition to the 1984 U.S. Davis Cup team. That Connors was now a Dell and ProServ client gave him hope that the left-hander would agree to play Davis Cup. But as the opening round tie against Ireland approached, there was no sign Connors would come around anytime soon.25

  The root of the problem, as Ashe saw it, was a selfish attitude all too common among the tour’s leading players. “It’s time that some of the older players—guys like Connors—started to help out the sport,” he declared just prior to the beginning of the Open. “I think nothing burns in the gut of ex-top players more than to hear players like Connors say, ‘We are the game.’ Connors doesn’t mean the players in general, he means just the three or four top players.” This straight talk was hardly calculated to soften Connors up—and true to form he kept his distance from Ashe and the Davis Cup. But Arthur was not one to mince words when the good of the game was involved.26

  Once the Open was over he still had three weeks before turning his attention to preparations for the 1984 Davis Cup competition. In addition to preparing materials for his second semester of teaching at Florida Memorial, on September 14 he joined the singer Harry Belafonte and several other celebrity activists—including the dancer Gregory Hines, the white actor Tony Randall, and the husband-and-wife activist duo Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee—at the United Nations headquarters in midtown Manhattan for an important announcement regarding South Africa.

  Ashe and Belafonte, with the help of TransAfrica’s Randall Robinson, had taken the lead in organizing Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid (AAAA). The goal of the new organization was to convince artists and athletes to boycott venues in South Africa proper and in the so-called native homelands. Their chosen weapon, Ashe announced, was persuasion. “John McEnroe was offered seven figures to play tennis in Sun City,” he reminded reporters. “Once we explained why he shouldn’t go, he decided not to.” It was a critical time in South African history, he explained; during the past week the all-white South African parliament had approved a new constitution that would allegedly “give nonwhites a role in the national Government for the first time in the country’s history.”

  Ashe and other activists staunchly opposed the new constitution, which they feared would preempt any real move toward a true democracy based on universal suffrage. Since it would be submitted to the white electorate for approval in a November 2 referendum, the time to step up was now, and Belafonte insisted that celebrities had an important role to play. “Artists have had a powerful impact on many issues in recent years—Vietnam, civil rights,” he insisted. “We’re part of people’s lives.” Unfortunately, Ashe could not say the same for celebrity athletes, though he hoped that was about to change.

  Just prior to the referendum, the AAAA initiated a joint effort with the United Nations Committee on South Africa to institute a cultural boycott of the nation that had given the world “the evils of apartheid.” At an October 8 press conference, Ashe insisted the boycott was in compliance with a 1968 resolution passed by the U.N. General Assembly, and that for both political and moral reasons professional athletes and entertainers, indeed all Americans, should boycott all things South African. This was a hard sell at a time when Frank Sinatra was being paid $1.6 million for performing at Sun City, but Ashe and his allies were determined to push the American anti-apartheid movement to a new level. Fortunately, the AAAA was only one part of a multipronged effort to bring the anti-apartheid cause to the forefront of the debate on American foreign policy toward South Africa. In recent months the so-called Sullivan Principles—a plan first introduced in 1977 by Philadelphia minister and civil rights activist Leon Sullivan to require strict fair employment and nondiscrimination standards for all American corporations doing business in South Africa—had gained new life as an alternative to complete divestment.27

  The AAAA’s efforts were important to Ashe, but for much of September he was absorbed in his book project. In the weeks following the U.N. press conference, he began to write and rewrite the early chapters of what would be the first of three volumes. Once he had produced a rough draft of a chapter, he generally sent it out to professional historians asking for feedback. Those who responded included several of the nation’s leading black scholars, notably John Hope Franklin and Benjamin Quarles. Well aware that the academic world had contributed next to nothing to the history of black athletes, most of the scholars who looked at the early drafts offered encouragement and the mildest of constructive criticism.

  The major exception was Quarles, the author of Black Abolitionists and several other well-received books on African American history. To him, Ashe’s efforts were too amateurish to be of much value. Lacking analytical focus and synthetic reach, the early drafts were, in his view, chronicles worthy of antiquarian interest but not consideration as true history. Washing his hands of the whole enterprise, he informed Sandra Jamison in May 1984: “Hence please do not consider me for any further role in the endeavor.” Though somewhat disheartened by Quarles’s critique, Ashe and his staff pressed on, realizing they had plenty of time to make major adjustments to the form and content of the manuscript.28

  In the late summer and early fall of 1983, Ashe’s most immediate challenge was not academic credibility but rather the restoration of the American Davis Cuppers’ confidence. The early elimination by Argentina and Connors’s continuing recalcitrance had cast a shadow
over Ashe’s captaincy. The Americans’ best hope of regaining momentum was to defeat the Irish squad in a tie that determined which country would compete in the World Group, rather than in the less desirable Zonal Group. On paper, the U.S. team appeared to be a heavy favorite, but the fact the tie would be played in Dublin was cause for concern. When Ashe and the Americans left for Ireland on September 24, they feared anything could happen once they took the court on the enigmatic Emerald Isle. Jeanne, who accompanied her nervous husband on the trip, did her best to dismiss any talk of Irish mysticism. But on the first day of play Eliot Teltscher’s loss to lightly regarded Matt Doyle almost made the Americans believe in wily leprechauns and the proverbial luck of the Irish. A native Californian playing for Ireland by virtue of a single Irish grandparent, Doyle took advantage of a wildly enthusiastic home crowd and a fast surface ill-suited to Teltscher’s game.

  Oddly enough, the other Irish singles player, Sean Sorensen, grew up in Maine with Irish-born parents before moving to West Germany. None of this mattered to McEnroe, who had his own Irish ancestors. Acknowledging his lineage, one Dublin newspaper’s headline counseled: “Relax, John, You’re at Your Granny’s.” Noticeably unsentimental about his Irish roots, McEnroe downplayed his ethnic heritage and at one point went out of his way to insult his hosts. Dublin, he announced upon his arrival, “looks like London to me, only drearier. I hope the people are nicer.” This statement did not endear him to the Irish faithful, but for many local fans the rudest gesture was his merciless dismantling of Sorensen. Playing in front of a record crowd that included his parents, he set the tone for the American dominance that ruled the rest of the week. The next day, he and Fleming overwhelmed Sorensen and Doyle in the doubles competition, and the American team went on to win the tie 4–1. In defeating Sorensen, the New Yorker equaled Ashe’s American record of 27 Davis Cup singles victories, and two days later he broke the record by beating Doyle. Relinquishing the record in this fashion did not bother Ashe one bit, and he returned from Ireland in good spirits with renewed faith in his team.29

  Ashe’s mood got even better during the next three months as one of the toughest years of his life closed on a series of high notes. He derived a great deal of satisfaction from working on a black athletes exhibit to be displayed at the 1984 New Orleans World Fair, and from waging a successful campaign to add tennis to the upcoming summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Tennis had been eliminated from the Olympics after the 1924 games, and from the 1940s on periodic attempts to restore it had fallen flat. But during the Open era there was renewed hope the sport might eventually achieve Olympic status commensurate with its booming popularity.

  During the early 1980s, Ashe worked closely with ILTF president Philippe Chatrier on the Olympics issue, and together they helped to disentangle the thorny issue of professionalism and Olympic eligibility. This involved delicate negotiations with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and scores of national tennis federations. After a series of close IOC votes and compromises in 1983, tennis was accepted as a demonstration sport for the 1984 games in Los Angeles, with the expectation of a return to full medal status at the 1988 games in Seoul, South Korea. Ashe only wished Olympic tennis had come ten years earlier when he would have been eligible and eager to represent the United States.30

  Fortunately, as a forty-year-old retiree he had other opportunities for glory. In October 1983, he traveled to the Sea Pines Plantation on Hilton Head Island to accept the first annual Du Pont Tennis Hall of Fame Award. The award, which carried a $5,000 charitable contribution to the NJTL, was presented during USA Cable’s television coverage of the Stan Smith Du Pont Classic, a tournament named for his close friend and longtime Davis Cup teammate, who had moved to Hilton Head following retirement from the tour in 1981. Arthur was delighted to spend a couple of days with Stan and his wife, Margie, two of his favorite people, and he was only sorry that Jeanne, who was in Norfolk for a fertility consultation, couldn’t be there for the reunion.31

  Following the festivities at Hilton Head, Arthur felt better than he had in months. The worst by-products of the bypass operation were now behind him, and his energy level seemed to have returned to normal. In mid-October, he held Aetna minority recruiting sessions at Georgetown, Howard, and the University of Virginia, and at the end of the month he joined Chris Beck in Philadelphia for a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Arthur Ashe Youth Tennis Center. Beck, who had known Arthur since the late 1950s, had been instrumental in securing a large bequest that funded the creation of the new facility. Combining character training and after-school educational opportunities with tennis instruction, the center modeled Arthur’s vision of the best that youth athletic involvement could offer.32

  By November, Arthur was also back in the swing of his business and philanthropic activities, traveling to Palm Springs for a Le Coq Sportif sales meeting, convening BTF board meetings and attending an Urban League fund-raising dinner in New York, delivering motivational speeches in Tuskegee, Alabama, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and conducting his weekly classes at Florida Memorial. As Thanksgiving approached, he slowed down a bit, settling in at Doral, where he played as many rounds of golf as his busy schedule would allow. “I think golf is a release for him,” Jeanne told one reporter. “He needs the golf because he is really still a very competitive guy.” Whenever he could, he played in a foursome with celebrated resident pro Seve Ballesteros, with whom he was often paired in meet-and-greet sessions with the Doral guests. Golf had become a passion for Arthur, and he loved to talk about his game. “I have this fantasy,” he once quipped. “And I’m the only one who could do it—win the U.S. Open in tennis and golf.” He knew better, considering he was playing with a mediocre 14 handicap. But anything seemed possible when he was teeing off under a glorious, high blue sky at Doral.

  While there were periodic trips to New York to attend board meetings and to look in on the activities of his book project staff—and one visit to Richmond for a hunting and fishing trip with his father—Arthur spent the remainder of the year in South Florida, mostly on the golf course. All the while, he tried to keep tabs on his public responsibilities while finding time for himself. Sometimes he found a way to satisfy both private and public enthusiasms, as on December 29 when he traveled to the Woodmont Country Club in Tamarac, an hour north of Doral. He was there to participate in a benefit golf tournament organized to raise funds for the Hunger Project, a six-year-old nonprofit organization dedicated to ending hunger and starvation in the Third World. Trying to save the world while playing a game he loved—it was classic Arthur Ashe.33

  TWENTY-FOUR

  HARD ROAD TO GLORY

  AFTER HIS APPARENT RETURN to relatively good health in late 1983, Ashe seemed stronger and more focused than ever. Rehabilitated for the second time by a miraculous medical procedure, he now expected to be around for many years to come. He had not only cheated death; he had also learned important lessons about the human condition, and about what was important in life. Most obviously, as he turned from a quite natural preoccupation with his own condition to an almost obsessive interest in his embattled black predecessors, he reevaluated his own experiences in the light of history. Engaged with the past, he became more inquisitive about the roots of contemporary social and political reality, especially the perseverance of racism and prejudices related to class and gender.

  He had already completed three memoirs, but his examination of the lives of others raised his awareness of the shifting and complex patterns of continuity and discontinuity. With this new awareness came a more forceful approach to public affairs, a boldness that valued actions over words. While he remained a deliberative intellectual committed to evolutionary change, he was growing more impatient—and more forthright about what needed to be done to make the world a better place. Though still respectful of civil discourse, he now prized truth telling above all else. The political imperative of using knowledge to promote justice and equality had taken on a new urgency. After fifteen years, the activist se
nsibility that had first stirred in him in 1968 now dominated his view of the world and his place in it. In this spirit, he would later write: “I know I could never forgive myself if I elected to live without humane purpose, without trying to help the poor and unfortunate, without recognizing that perhaps the purest joy in life comes with trying to help others.”1

  He equated service with leadership and applied this perspective to all aspects of his life, including his Davis Cup captaincy. In January 1984, the American squad received a boost when Connors finally agreed to join the team. The self-absorbed star was now a ProServ client and directly exposed to the powerful persuasive charm of Donald Dell. The turning point was a conversation with Connors and his mother, Gloria, during which Dell convinced them “that no American had ever achieved legendary status in tennis without playing Davis Cup.” This appeal to ego overcame Connors’s reservations about playing under Ashe’s low-key captaincy, which seemed a poor fit with his aggressive style. His Davis Cup debut came in Bucharest, Romania, in March, but several weeks earlier he felt the need to clear the air with the man who had embarrassed him at Wimbledon in 1975.

  As Ashe remembered it, the conversation between the two former rivals was tense but productive. “Look, Arthur, I don’t need anyone sitting on the sidelines telling me how to play tennis,” Connors began. “One thing I want to know though, Arthur,” he continued. “Are you going to fight for me?” “What do you mean, Jimmy?” Arthur asked. “I mean, am I going to be out there by myself? Will I be doing my own arguing?” Connors demanded. “I’m out there, Jimmy,” the captain reassured him. “I’m on your side. I’m going to be working for you.” Later, when Connors took the court in Bucharest, Arthur made a show of vocal support. “Twice during Jimmy’s first match,” he recalled, “I made sure that I jumped up and made my presence known. . . . I am not sure what I accomplished by these moves, except for making Connors happy. But that was reason enough, I suppose.”2