Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Earlier in the decade, several of the greatest players of the post–World War II era, including Santana, Segura, and a trio of legendary Aussies—Rosewall, Laver, and Neale Fraser—had entered the Hall, and now he was there with them. The other three 1985 inductees were the British tennis writer David Gray, his fellow Briton Ann Haydon Jones—the winner of seven Grand Slam championships—and Fred Stolle, the towering Australian who had won a record 10 Grand Slam doubles titles plus the 1965 French and 1966 U.S. national singles championships. Ashe was the only American inductee and, as a throng of reporters pointed out, the first African American to achieve this status since Althea Gibson in 1971. The two racial pioneers would remain the Hall’s only black members until Dr. J’s posthumous induction in 2009.

  Following the ceremony, Ashe sat down with a group of reporters. Steering them away from both the racial and commercial aspects of his career, he emphasized his joy in playing tennis for so many years. “To hell with the bank account, even though I’ve profited handsomely from tennis,” he exclaimed at one point. “I hope that everyone at the end of their playing career, at whatever level, can say the one thing I can say: ‘It was fun.’ That’s what means the most.”

  Eventually Arthur turned to the special difficulties facing aspiring black players. “Tennis is still a rich kid’s sport,” he told Marion Collins of the New York Daily News, before addressing her question on the Code of Conduct controversy. “Sure I get fed up being the nice guy,” he confessed, “but back in the ’60s, if you were black and the first one, you simply had to behave yourself. I couldn’t have gotten away with coming on like Ali—it wouldn’t have been tolerated.” He then added: “I genuinely believe that if McEnroe were black, he wouldn’t be allowed to do some of the things he does.” This comment prompted Collins to explain: “If behavior weighs heavily on him, it is because his main task as captain of the U.S. Davis Cup squad isn’t showing its millionaire members how to hit the ball, but keeping their notorious tempers in check, something he has tackled with restraint and loyalty.”25

  In the days and weeks following the Hall of Fame induction, Ashe’s challenge was no longer reining in McEnroe and Connors but rather assembling a strong team without them. When the Americans came up against Boris Becker and the West Germans on the clay courts of Hamburg in early August, it became clear just how much the team missed its biggest stars. Three weeks earlier Becker, still technically a Junior, had shocked the tennis world by winning the Wimbledon singles title. After the tall redhead crushed Teltscher in the opening singles match, the Americans’ hopes rested with Krickstein, but the steady baseliner lost a tough five-set match to Hansjorg Schwaier. The Americans mustered a spirited comeback, winning the doubles and the first singles match on the final day. But Becker closed out the tie in style with a convincing victory over Krickstein. As Ashe later recalled with a shrug, the young German hardly broke a sweat; from the start of the match, he wore a sweater “and never bothered to take it off.”26

  Ashe was crestfallen after the Hamburg defeat. “For the third straight year,” he later explained, “I had led the United States to defeat in the Davis Cup. I understood that my days as captain were numbered.” After nearly five years as captain, he could be philosophical about his fate. He had been given his shot, and he had made the most of it, becoming only the second American captain in thirty years to win back-to-back titles. When the axe fell in mid-October, he was disappointed but not surprised. At a meeting in Manhattan, Randy Gregson and Gordon Jorgensen, the chair of the U.S. Davis Cup Committee, delivered the bad news. Although Arthur “made it clear” he “wanted to stay on,” the decision was final.

  On October 22, The New York Times announced Ashe would soon “be dropped” as captain, reportedly “for a perceived lack of discipline and organization on the team.” Later in the day, he submitted his resignation. Grateful for his cooperation, Gregson and Jorgensen offered him the ceremonial position of Davis Cup Committee vice chairman. In the interests of a smooth transition, he accepted, but after Tom Gorman was named as his replacement in December, he quickly faded into the background. At the same time, the USTA quietly dropped the requirement to sign the Code of Conduct, paving the way for McEnroe’s possible return to Davis Cup play.

  Ashe’s own assessment of his record as captain was mixed. As he later pointed out “with some pride,” his overall record was 13 wins and only three losses, a highly respectable showing in any context. Nevertheless, he freely acknowledged his shortcomings, stating: “as I had led some of the most talented teams ever fielded by the United States, we should have done better, and some of the blame must rest on my shoulders.” He knew his critics were right when they faulted him for failing to keep his players in line: “To be more effective, I suppose I should have been more gregarious at times, and at other times more aggressive. I should have tried harder to impose my will on the players. But I couldn’t do that, and I have to live with the consequences. I accepted the fact that as much as I want to lead others, and love to be around people, in some essential way I am something of a loner.”27

  The silver lining in the cloud of dismissal was the recognition that “to be effective, I would have to step up more boldly into the spotlight, especially if I wished to be effective in the crucial area of social and political progress.” Looking back on the ups and downs of his five-year tenure, he later wrote: “My Davis Cup captaincy was a rich, challenging, and also satisfying experience, not least of all because of that simple lesson.”28

  His only complaint concerned the Davis Cup committee’s discomfort with his activism. Two days after his resignation, he granted an interview to Jet magazine, and the resulting story ran under the provocative headline: “Ashe Says Activist Role May Be Part of His Ouster as Davis Cup Team Captain.” When asked if “politics had anything to do with it”—specifically his opposition to apartheid—Ashe had responded: “I think so. . . . Some people probably think I’ve gone too far. . . . No one at the USTA said so to my face. But I’ve heard so from other sources.” Nearly a decade later, he remained convinced “Gregson and others in the USTA saw me as someone far more concerned with politics than a Davis Cup captain should be. And by politics, I’m sure they meant ‘radical’ politics.”29

  Beyond the arrest and his high-profile role in the anti-apartheid movement, Ashe’s involvement in electoral politics clearly disturbed some members of the American tennis establishment. While he had resisted the temptation to run for office, his vocal support for Jesse Jackson during the 1984 presidential campaign became a subject of controversy at the highest levels of the USTA. Even though he was not especially enamored with the flamboyant Chicago-based civil rights leader’s grandstanding, Ashe overcame his reservations and founded an organization known as Athletes for Jesse Jackson in late 1983. Soliciting funds and endorsements from professional athletes representing a range of sports, he boosted Jackson’s support in the Democratic primaries, where he finished third behind Vice President Walter Mondale and Senator Gary Hart of Colorado.

  Even though he knew some USTA officials disapproved, Ashe never tried to hide his support for Jackson, which continued through the 1988 primaries. He also embraced Douglas Wilder’s historic 1985 campaign for the lieutenant governorship of Virginia, just as he had done in the early-1980s campaigns of Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Senator Chuck Robb of Virginia, Mayor Andrew Young of Atlanta, and Mayor Wilson Goode of Philadelphia. None of this went over very well at USTA headquarters, but as long as Ashe’s squad remained a viable contender for the Davis Cup no one dared to voice any strong objections. Only when the squad began to lose did Ashe’s political activity contribute to his expendability.

  While Ashe conceded there were legitimate arguments for his ouster, he nonetheless felt wronged by the tennis establishment. “Many people in the tennis leadership, as in other points, are terrified of taking a stand on political affairs, or on controversial questions of social justice,” he observed. “Although certain exceptions come to mind, th
e prevailing political ambience of tennis has always been a wealth-oriented conservatism of the kind associated in this country with staunch Republicanism and exclusive country clubs.” Perhaps more to the point, civil disobedience was anathema to the tennis elite regardless of the issue at hand. “The idea of apartheid in South Africa undoubtedly is abhorrent to some of these people,” granted Ashe, “but the idea of demonstrating in the streets against it might be even more abhorrent, in practical terms.” Once one of the sport’s most orderly figures, he had come to reject this amoral calculus. Near the end of his life, he put the matter as simply as he could: “I hate injustice much more than I love decorum.”30

  Whatever its origins, Ashe’s ouster as Davis Cup captain had a silver lining. During the next three years—relieved of the pressures of his captaincy—he redoubled his efforts to bring the book project to completion. Expanding his staff to seven, he presided over a beehive of activity. With Ocania Chalk and Kip Branch doing most of the research, and others attending to the compilation of statistics, he concentrated on writing the sport-by-sport narratives. He hoped to deliver a first draft to Howard University Press by early 1986. But having exhausted his $10,000 advance during the first year of the project, and having subsequently invested more than $200,000 of his own money, he didn’t know how much longer he could provide such a high level of funding.

  Ashe’s determination to press on with the book did not stop him from attending to other aspects of his life. He still fulfilled his commitments to Doral, showed up at periodic NJTL events and Aetna board meetings, wrote columns for The Washington Post, visited family in Virginia, lobbied for TransAfrica, worked with Jeanne on advancing the adoption process, and even served as a cheerleader for the Davis Cup squad when it traveled to Ecuador in March 1986. But, for the most part, his daily routine was dominated by hours of poring over research reports and trying to bring the black ghosts of the past back to life on the page. “A Hard Road to Glory was an emotional experience for me,” he recalled, “because it dealt so intimately, at almost every stage, with both the triumph and tragedy, the elation and the suffering, of blacks as they met not only the physical challenges of their sport but also the gratuitous challenges of racism. No sport was exempt from this painful double history, so that compiling the record was a fairly relentless exposure to disappointment.”

  He was on a mission, determined to draw attention and respect to the black athletes who had come before him—the forgotten as well as the famous. He told himself he had stood on their shoulders and owed it to them to cast a light on the dark shadows of the past. So he was more than a little upset in December 1985 when Charles Harris resigned as executive director of Howard University Press. Fourteen years earlier, Harris had left Random House to found a new university press at Howard, and most observers had expected him to finish his editorial career there. But over the years he had become increasingly frustrated by a chronic lack of funding and had lost confidence in the press’s capacity to publish high-quality books on African American history and culture.

  Harris explained all of this to Ashe, who must have wondered why his editor hadn’t revealed any of these concerns two years earlier. For a time, Ashe was afraid Harris’s departure from Howard would make it difficult if not impossible to produce the substantial, groundbreaking book they had envisioned. But by mid-February 1986, there was cause for optimism. One reason was the recent success of a television documentary version of A Hard Road to Glory broadcast on February 1. With Ashe as host and the deep-voiced actor James Earl Jones as narrator, the sixty-minute film used rarely seen archival footage to recapture the experiences of Jack Johnson, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, and several others who had overcome racial discrimination to become world-class athletes. Later in the year it received an Emmy.

  The other hopeful signs were Harris’s creation of a new press dedicated to publishing high-quality books on African American topics, and his belief that Ashe’s history of black athletes was the perfect book to launch his new enterprise. Crossing over from a strictly academic audience to a broader range of lay readers, the press would facilitate Ashe’s goal of reaching as wide a readership as possible. There would also be financial advantages for Ashe, who would receive a much larger advance against royalties than the $10,000 he had received from Howard University Press. He would have to return the Howard advance, but Harris assured him he would come out ahead in the long run.

  In July 1986, with Ashe listed as a member of the board of directors, Harris established Amistad Press, Inc., named for the famous slave ship redirected to the Connecticut coast by mutinous slaves in 1839. Soon thereafter Harris entered into a co-publishing agreement with Dodd, Mead and Company, a venerable New York publishing house founded the same year as the Amistad revolt. By the time Amistad Press’s first books appeared in print in November 1988, Harris had replaced Dodd, Mead with another co-publisher, Warner Books. Throughout the period of Ashe’s involvement, the fledgling press maintained strong ties to financially and editorially sound publishing houses.

  Although it took him two years to pay back the advance, Ashe’s faith in the project was fully restored by late summer. With more than a thousand pages of the manuscript completed, he could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Most of the narrative was finished, and the major task remaining was fact-checking and filling in gaps in the encyclopedic chronicles of each sport. He could now spend more time with Jeanne at the Mount Kisco house. Earlier in the year, he had been troubled by a nasty feud between Dell and Craighill over the transfer of the La Quinta tournament rights from PEI to Charlie Pasarell. But the PEI dissolution storm had blown over by late summer.31

  For the remainder of the year, life in general was probably as good for Ashe as it had been in years. In June he was finally able to vent his frustrations about the lack of black participation in competitive tennis by writing a New York Times opinion piece titled “Why There Aren’t More Blacks Playing Tennis.” The reasons, he told his readers, were threefold: “money, accessibility, and peer pressure.” While he expressed pride in the efforts of the NJTL, he warned “no real breakthrough can be achieved . . . until more black coaches are trained.” In closing, he predicted: “It may take until the 21st century before a black player again wins at Wimbledon or the United States Open.”

  Despite this dire prognosis, Ashe knew the situation was improving on the women’s tour. The previous summer Zina Garrison had made it to both the singles semifinals at Wimbledon and the doubles semifinals at the U.S. Open, setting a new standard for her male counterparts to emulate. She did not fare as well in 1986, reaching only one quarterfinal of a Grand Slam tournament—at the Australian Open in January. Yet Ashe remained hopeful about her future—and his. In August, just before the first round of the U.S. Open, he actually picked up a tennis racket and played in a celebrity benefit match at the National Tennis Center. And in another highlight of the summer—one that had little to do with tennis—he joined his fraternity brother Walt Hazzard in early August at the annual Kappa Alpha Psi convention in Indianapolis, where he received the fraternity’s highest honor, the Laurel Wreath Award.

  Not everything was going smoothly, of course. At the Open, he witnessed the continuing decline of American male contenders—only one American man made the quarterfinals—as well as Ivan Lendl’s second straight Open singles title. The final weekend of the tournament marked a low point in American tennis, and before it was over he wished he had accepted an invitation to South Africa to attend the September 4 investiture of the anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu as Archbishop of Cape Town. His broadcast duties kept him in New York, but South Africa would have provided welcome relief from the American tennis scene, which included the continuing controversy over McEnroe’s banishment from Davis Cup play. In the meantime, the American squad suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Australians, winning only one match on the grass courts of Brisbane. For the fourth straight year, the Americans had failed to win the Cup, though it was no longer Ashe
’s problem.

  In November, Ashe was in the news for another reason. After the basketball superstar Michael Jordan’s lucrative contract with ProServ put Dell and all of his clients in the spotlight, The New York Times ran a story titled “The Selling of Michael Jordan,” in which the agent offered a comparative perspective. “Michael Jordan has a charisma that transcends his sport,” Dell declared. “He belongs in a category with Arnold Palmer or Arthur Ashe.” Later in the article, the author, Phil Patton, discussed Jordan’s desire “to be seen as ‘neither black nor white’ ” when it came to endorsements. “The black star is often caught in a dilemma,” Patton explained. “Conventional advertising wisdom holds that it is very hard for a black athlete to be convincing to white middle-class consumers. There are, of course, those who have crossed this boundary, such as the former football star O. J. Simpson and ProServ client Arthur Ashe. They are both charismatic and articulate, and marketing surveys show they are perceived as ‘beyond race.’ ProServ is betting that Jordan has this elusive quality also.”32

  Ashe appreciated the kind words, but since the early fall he and Jeanne had been lost in a fog of anticipation, preoccupied with the impending adoption of a child. The agency that had approved their application could not give them an exact date, but they were hopeful their baby would arrive before the end of the year, preferably before they were scheduled to be at Doral. Arthur and Jeanne had longed for the day when they could call themselves parents, and they now knew the big day was coming soon. But as Christmas approached the waiting became almost unbearable.

  Finally, on December 21, 1986, they got the word. Their baby—a little girl—had been born earlier that day. They had already picked out a girl’s name—Camera, in honor of her new mother’s profession—and when they saw her for the first time two days later they were overcome with emotion. Brown-skinned with delicate features, she looked very much like what they had imagined their hypothetical birth child would look like. All of that was an unexpected bonus, of course; they were just grateful for a healthy baby. Arthur later described the scene as he and Jeanne nervously prepared for Camera’s first night in Mount Kisco: “We pulled out a bureau drawer in a walk-in closet and that’s where she slept her first night home. Like many first-time parents, we were obsessed by the possibility of sudden infant death (also called crib death) or another mysterious ailment that would take away from us the fragile little body that represented our hopes and dreams of the past few years. We kept popping up in bed and going over to the bureau drawer to make sure she was well—to make sure, I think, that she was still there.”