In Bucharest, Connors helped the Americans blank the Romanians 5–0, while reveling in teasing the home crowd as it hooted and hollered for its favorite son Nastase. The entire Romanian team was overmatched, winning only one set in five matches. Along the way Connors even seemed to get along with McEnroe, whom he had long resented as a publicity hog, but this fragile camaraderie did not last long. True to form, Connors soon lost interest in a team that did not recognize him as its biggest star. While he participated in the subsequent ties against Argentina, Australia, and Sweden, eventually his “old discomfort with the Davis Cup began to surface,” as Arthur later put it. “To Mac and me, that silver cup was the Holy Grail,” Arthur added. “To Jimmy, it seemed that it might have been made of Styrofoam, he had so little sense of, or interest in, Davis Cup legend and lore.”3
Despite a spate of distracting on-court antics and boorish outbursts by Connors, McEnroe, and Fleming, Arthur was able to keep the team on track against the Argentines and Aussies, winning both ties 5–0. But during the final tie, held in Göteborg, Sweden, in December, the American cause went completely off the rails. Arthur later described it as “one of the more dismal points of my tennis career.” The final tally was 4–1 in favor of the Swedes. But that wasn’t the worst of it. What hurt the most, he recalled, was “the way we had lost to Sweden. . . . From our arrival, nothing seemed to go right. . . . We needed to accustom ourselves to the surface, but none of us seemed ready to make the supreme effort. Meanwhile, everyone on the Swedish team except Mats Wilander [who was competing in the Australian Open] diligently arrived in Göteborg ten days before the tie and worked out hard for four hours daily.”
The Americans, especially McEnroe and Connors, seemed “badly off their stride.” To Ashe, McEnroe “looked exhausted and depressed, which was understandable since he “had recently been suspended for twenty-one days for outrageous behavior in a tournament in Stockholm. Viewers around the world had seen the film clip of McEnroe engaging in a vile, murderous tirade, smashing racquets and cups and abusing officials. Now, rusty from his enforced rest, he had to return to Sweden to play Davis Cup tennis. With the press he was first testy, then surly, and finally bitter and contentious.” Connors’s mood wasn’t much better. Distracted by the impending birth of his second child, he had received Ashe’s permission to arrive in Göteborg a day after the rest of the team. Ashe later conceded this accommodation was probably a mistake. By the time Connors arrived, “all his hostility to the Davis Cup and to team play seemed to return. Everything about our arrangements appeared to anger him, and nothing I said made any difference.”4
Connors would eventually direct most of his hostility toward the umpires and referees, but he reserved some of his barbs for Ashe. As the captain walked onto the court to oversee a practice session, he was greeted with a “FUCK YOU” message “scrawled in large letters in the soft clay.” Angry that Ashe had arrived ten minutes late, Connors had expressed his displeasure as only he could. Though stunned, Ashe kept his composure. “I felt exactly as if he had slapped my face,” he recalled. “I wanted to replace him on the spot and send him home, but I knew our chances of winning would have dropped precipitously. I swallowed my pride and endured the insult.”
Ashe’s restraint, as it turned out, did little good. In his opening day singles match against Wilander, Connors played poorly and lost in straight sets. Most distressingly, at the end of the first set, he unleashed his frustration, resorting to what Ashe later characterized as “unspeakably vile language cursing both the umpire and referee Alan Mills.” After the match, an outraged Mills fined Connors $2,000 and let it be known he was considering recommending at least a temporary banishment from Davis Cup competition. This threat vanished when Connors, at Dell’s insistence, apologized profusely to both Mills and the umpire. But the whole ugly scene gave the Americans a terrible start in their final thrust for the Cup. When McEnroe followed with a loss to Henrik Sundström, injuring his wrist in the process, Ashe could see the chances of winning a third Cup slipping away. The next day the feared loss became reality when the young but talented Swedish doubles team of Anders Järryd and Stefan Edberg upended McEnroe and Fleming in four sets.
The Cup was lost, and only two meaningless “dead rubber” singles matches remained. With his wife about to give birth, Connors had no interest in sticking around. Though still fuming, Ashe granted Connors’s request to leave before the closing singles matches. This opened up an opportunity for Jimmy Arias—who had “made it clear that he did not enjoy being a backup player, even to Connors and McEnroe.” But the young clay court specialist failed to take advantage of the situation, losing to Sundström—and ending the American fiasco with a whimper. The humiliation was not quite over, however. At the closing awards banquet, USTA president Hunter Delatour apologized to the Swedes for his countrymen’s outrageous behavior, a gesture unique in the annals of Davis Cup play.5
In the aftermath of Göteborg, Ashe braced himself for a barrage of criticism. As he was the first to admit, his team had not only failed to win the Cup but had also embarrassed the American tennis establishment. In the view of many observers, he had lost control of his players. “We had prepared shabbily, and had paid the price accordingly,” he readily conceded. “For this I bear most of the blame.” Even so, he was surprised by the magnitude of the fallout. J. Randolph Gregson, the incoming USTA president, vowed to undertake a thoroughgoing investigation of the nation’s Davis Cup program, and one of the program’s primary sponsors, Louisiana-Pacific corporation chairman Harry Merlo, threatened to “withdraw our sponsorship” unless “constructive changes” were implemented. William Simon, the former secretary of the treasury and an avid tennis fan, condemned McEnroe’s and Connors’s “disgusting and vulgar displays of childishness” in a column titled “America’s Punks,” and other journalists called for the dismissal of the players who had acted so shamelessly.
Ashe also had to endure a torrent of correspondence from fans asking him to throw McEnroe and Connors off the team. The most troubling reaction, however, was Gregson and Merlo’s move to require all American Davis Cuppers to sign a contract to “abide by a list of guidelines for good behavior.” Implemented in January 1985, the pledge drew sharp criticism from the players and a mixed reaction from Ashe, who wanted to find some way to foster decorum but who disliked the Draconian nature of the new requirement. As he later conceded, “I couldn’t bring myself to a resolutely hard line against the players even if . . . they behaved in ways that I detested.” The root of the problem, as he saw it, was a new spirit of self-indulgence that had replaced sportsmanship and the best traditions of the game. He also believed the recent crisis had a lot to do with the technology of televised matches. Cursing on court had always been a part of the game, but its effect had changed with the use of highly sensitive microphones. Television cameras captured every outburst and tirade, producing a spectacle that drew the rapt attention of some fans and the disgust of others.
Without endorsing either the pledge or the misbehavior that inspired it, Ashe tried to find a middle ground. “Tennis players are not going to stop cursing,” he declared, “but they are going to have to learn to do it sotto voce or else they will be defaulted. In the future, audible coarse language will not be tolerated from our team members.”6
Though sympathetic to Ashe’s position, McEnroe adamantly refused to sign the pledge. He had already announced plans to sit out the March 1985 tie against Japan, but now he vowed not to return to the team as long as the pledge was mandatory. Connors also rejected the pledge requirement as unnecessary and insulting and promptly dropped off the team. “Connors’s refusal was more symbolic than substantial,” Ashe concluded. “He had never really been one of us.” Connors admitted as much in a revealing statement to reporters. “I’ve never been a team man,” he confessed.”7
With McEnroe, Fleming, and Connors out of the picture, Ashe was hard pressed to find suitable replacements. Eliot Teltscher was the only carryover from the 1984 sq
uad, and the best the embattled captain could do to fill the other three slots was Aaron Krickstein in singles and Ken Flach and Robert Seguso in doubles. Seventeen-year-old Krickstein was years away from fulfilling his considerable potential, and Flach and Seguso, who had played together at Southern Illinois University, were twenty-one-year-olds with less than two years of experience on the professional tour. Talented and full of youthful enthusiasm, the squad was nonetheless a pale imitation of the powerful American teams of the early 1980s.
In March 1985, the team had little trouble defeating the Japanese on indoor carpet in Kyoto, winning all five matches and losing only one set. The true test would come later in the year when his young squad faced the world’s strongest teams. But in a sense it didn’t really matter. He had already begun to lose hope, though publicly he continued to put up a confident front. Hamstrung with the bitter conflict between McEnroe and Connors and the continuing squabbles over the new Code of Conduct, he no longer felt he could do his job effectively. Despite his best efforts, he knew the Cup was not coming back to America anytime soon.8
This unwelcome turn of events was discouraging, but Arthur had other deep and consuming interests that kept him afloat emotionally. First and foremost was his life with Jeanne and their continuing efforts to have a child. By 1985, after two years of unsuccessful fertility treatments, they had become roundly discouraged, so much so that they abandoned the in vitro process and turned to adoption.
By that point they had already initiated a major lifestyle change by buying a home in suburban Mount Kisco, forty miles northeast of New York City. Approximately an hour’s train ride from the city, Mount Kisco offered a quiet, bucolic contrast to the bustling urban scene of Manhattan. After eight years of married life in an urban environment where they could not walk down the street without being recognized, the Ashes had decided to seek a bit of privacy in the gently rolling hills of upper Westchester County.
Home to a number of celebrities—including New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Sr. and Ilie Nastase—Mount Kisco featured sprawling, farmlike estates. The house and seven acres of land the Ashes purchased in the spring of 1985 was adjacent to a farm owned by James Wood, who told the press he was pleased to sell the house and land to “a really nice neighbor.” Built just prior to the Civil War, the Italianate-style house featured thick stone walls, thirteen rooms, and, in the words of one awestruck visitor, a view “so picturesque that people sometimes park their cars across the street and admire the landscape.” After completing the first phase of extensive renovations—which included a darkroom for Jeanne and an office for Arthur—the Ashes moved into the house in the fall. For the next six years they would split their time between Mount Kisco and their Florida home near Doral.9
Beyond the Davis Cup captaincy and family matters, Arthur continued to embrace a wide range of passions that took up a great deal of his time, from overseeing the black athletes book project to writing occasional columns for The Washington Post to working with TransAfrica and AAAA on South African liberation to supporting the expansion of the NJTL. As the sports columnist Thomas Boswell quipped in January 1985: “With only nine different careers, the former tennis ace says he’s itchy.”10
All of these varied public activities were extremely important to Arthur, and all in some way involved issues of racial equity and social justice. As he later put it, “my Cup captaincy did not fully satisfy my desire to make the most of my retirement years, or give me an entirely settled perspective on my new life. . . . Even the most important record in tennis would not have stilled certain disquieting feelings that ran deeper in me than patriotism or sporting fame. I am an African American, one born in the iron grip of legal segregation. Aside from my feelings about religion and family, my innermost stirrings inevitably have to do with trying to overcome racism and other forms of social injustice. . . . Not the tennis court but the arena of protest and politics would be the single most significant testing ground for me in the middle years of my life.”11
His signature role as an activist remained his involvement in the anti-apartheid movement, a commitment that reached a new level in mid-January 1985 when he was arrested while participating in a protest march in front of the South African embassy in Washington. The march was part of an ongoing protest campaign led by Randall Robinson, who had organized the Free South Africa Movement two months earlier. Beginning with a November 21 sit-in at the embassy by Robinson, District of Columbia congressional representative Walter Fauntroy, and Mary Frances Berry, a member of the United State Commission on Civil Rights, the movement soon enlisted a number of public figures as picketers, including Harry Belafonte, Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson, and Ashe. During a six-month-long campaign, the protests spread to more than a dozen cities, and several thousand marchers were arrested. On the day Ashe was arrested, sixteen others were taken into custody, including trade union officials, municipal employees, and teachers. Many were seasoned protesters who had been arrested before, but this was the first arrest for Ashe,
As he confessed, “Because I had spent my life making sure no one would ever have cause to arrest me for anything, the experience of being handcuffed, carted away, and booked was daunting.” The night before joining the picket line, he telephoned his father to warn him of the likelihood of an arrest. This was not good news in Gum Spring, but Arthur Sr. knew his eldest son lived in a different world than his. “Well, son, I don’t know,” he offered. “South Africa’s an awful long way from us here. But if you think you have to do it, then I guess you have do it.” “Just be careful,” he added.
In point of fact, Arthur Sr. should not have been too concerned. His son had no intention of risking his physical well-being or of running up a lengthy criminal record. While Arthur Jr. was convinced it was important for him to take a stand on that particular January day, he did not take breaking the law lightly. Despite his continuing involvement in the anti-apartheid movement, he would not be arrested again for several years. He came close in late 1985 when he joined Belafonte and Jackson on an anti-apartheid picket line outside the U.S. mission to the United Nations in New York. But he and his fellow protesters escaped with a warning.
Ashe’s reservations about going to jail were twofold. First, he did not want to be seen as a grandstanding celebrity protestor. “Much as I admire certain well-known entertainers who are quick to respond to calls to the barricades,” he later explained, “I did not want to become a fashionable protestor giving photo opportunities, as they are called, to journalists.” Second, he was sometimes suspicious of his own motives when it came to advocacy on South African issues. “To what extent was I trying to make up, with my anti-apartheid crusade, for my relative inaction a decade or more earlier during the civil-rights struggle?” he asked himself. Indeed, he had doubts about the legitimacy of protests such as those in front of the South African embassy. “No one knew better than I that a demonstration such as the one in Washington, when I was arrested, was mainly a staged or token affair, a piece of political choreography,” he insisted. “I did not feel in any way like a hero for taking part in it. Indeed, I was painfully aware of the difference between . . . the symbolic punishment that I had allowed myself to be subjected to, and . . . the terror that the Ku Klux Klan and thousands of white Southern vigilantes and law officers imposed on black men, women, and children who risked their lives during the civil-rights movement.”12
Captain Ashe did not shirk his activist responsibilities, even though he was aware that the Davis Cup Committee and the USTA frowned upon such activities. One controversial issue that drew his rapt attention in late 1984 and early 1985 was the reorganization of the NJTL. For fifteen years he had hovered over the NJTL’s summer camp programs like a protective parent, volunteering his time on numerous occasions as he urged local chapters to expand their mission beyond mere tennis instruction. Whenever and wherever he was asked to appear at an NJTL workshop or fund-raiser, he made an effort to adjust his schedule—and he never accepted fees or reimb
ursements from local chapters, many of which were strapped for funds.
The financial solvency of the individual NJTL chapters had always been a concern, but successive sponsorships by the Clark Gum division of Philip Morris (1969–70), Coca-Cola (1970–79), and Congoleum (1980–82) had alleviated some of the pressure on local boosters. But in 1983, with no corporate sponsor willing to step up to replace Congoleum, the NJTL faced a major financial crisis. This set the stage for an extended negotiation with USTA officials, many of whom had long advocated a merger between the NJTL and USTA junior development programs. The NJTL needed help, but Ashe and others worried that a formal merger would eventually weaken the organization’s core commitment to inner-city and minority youth. Despite its recent moves toward a more progressive public stance, the USTA, Ashe feared, was far more interested in consolidating and strengthening the nation’s junior development programs than in serving the interests of racial equity and equality of opportunity. When the merger became official in early 1985, Ashe’s doubts remained, but he had little choice but to wish the USTA well and hope for the best.
Ashe shared the USTA’s concerns about the overall state of American tennis. As he told a reporter in July 1985, “It’s a shame that in the U.S. there’s only one McEnroe. We should have half a dozen.” A month later, he offered a sobering evaluation of the American tennis scene: “I don’t want to cast aspersions on the ability of solid professional players, but none of them is the next John McEnroe. We’ll always produce our share of journeymen in the top 60, but as for a new superstar, I don’t see that type around.”
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