Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Ashe had expected the black press to embrace his effort to tout the achievements of black athletes while exposing the tawdry history of racial discrimination in the world of sports. But by and large he encountered indifference from black as well as white journalists. Part of the problem was Amistad Press’s inexperience with the process of getting books to potential reviewers. Yet a more fundamental obstacle seems to have been a general disdain for sports history, not only in the academic world but also in the broader arena of public affairs.

  In March 1989, Nicolaus Mills wrote a decidedly mixed review of the book in the progressive magazine The Nation commenting: “Too often Ashe writes in a dreary prose that belongs in an encyclopedia, but the story he tells is nonetheless riveting.” Surprisingly, neither the Journal of Negro History nor the Journal of Sport History reviewed the book, and only two academic reviews appeared before the second edition was released in 1993.19

  By the spring of 1989, it was becoming clear that the public’s response to the book was not what Ashe or his publisher had hoped it would be. Sales were relatively small for a book touted by David Halberstam in The New York Times Book Review. The number of copies sold for each volume did not reach ten thousand until the summer of 1990, and Ashe’s obvious disappointment became a concern among friends, who worried an emotional deflation might affect his health. Consequently, several friends—Dr. Eddie Mandeville and his wife, Harriette, the noted psychologist Kenneth Clark, and Clark’s daughter and son-in-law, Kate and Donald Harris (a former SNCC field secretary)—decided to sponsor a book-signing party designed to boost Arthur’s spirits. Held at the posh Hudson Valley Tennis Club in Hastings-on-Hudson, the party drew an overflow crowd, and Arthur left the gathering with renewed hope that a widening readership was in the offing.20

  This brightening mood did not last. On Palm Sunday, March 19, one week after the book party, Arthur’s father passed away at Humana St. Luke’s Hospital in Richmond. After collapsing during a dinner at his daughter Loretta’s house in the Richmond suburb of Glen Allen, he was rushed to the hospital. Having battled serious heart disease for more than a decade, he succumbed to cardiac arrest seven weeks before his seventieth birthday. Devastated, Arthur Jr. struggled to keep his composure. “My heart withstood the shock but I cried and cried when I heard the news,” he later wrote. “Dominating, stern, protective, my father had loved me when I needed him most.” During the funeral service held at the New Line Baptist Church in Louisa, only a few miles from the house in Gum Spring where father and son had shared so many good times, the tears flowed again as the loss became real.

  The stern taskmaster of Arthur Jr.’s youth had become a close companion and trusted friend in recent decades, and it was difficult for family members to imagine one without the other. The father was the son’s primary link to the past, to a beloved mother absent for nearly forty years, and to a deep family heritage that he felt down to his bones. Surviving his own challenges would be harder from now on, and he would need Jeanne and Camera more than ever. Fortunately, he still had his stepmother, Lorene, his brothers Johnnie and Robert, his sister, Loretta, and a passel of aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews to share both the grief and family pride. “He’s a family person,” Loretta stated proudly, knowing her older brother never forgot a family member’s birthday or failed to offer financial help or words of comfort in times of need. “He hasn’t changed since the day he started playing tennis,” she insisted. “I really love and admire him for that. . . . He’s a wonderful person. And I’m not saying that because I’m his sister.”21

  Staying close to his family helped Arthur deal with grief and anxiety about his own mortality. But he also coped by embracing a whirl of activity. Not only did he continue the public life he had led since his turn to activism in 1968; he also sought new experiences. Serious illness, he assured one reporter, “makes you feel a bit more pressed for time. And I’m always looking for new challenges, the challenges I feel are worthwhile and interesting.” One was the Ashe-Bollettieri Cities program, also known as ABC. Hatched at the French Open in 1987 but not begun until August 1988, ABC was based on the idea tennis could be used, in Arthur’s words, “as a way to gain and hold the attention of young people in the inner cities and other poor environments so that we could teach them about matters more important than tennis.”

  His collaborator was Nick Bollettieri, the flamboyant director of the famous Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida. While agreeing with Arthur on the need to encourage education and character development among disadvantaged kids, Bollettieri was also interested in expanding the recruitment of talented Juniors beyond the country club elite and creating a national tennis academy that could compete with the state-supported training programs in Europe. Determined to make all of this happen, he enlisted the cooperation of Bob Kain—CEO of International Management Group (IMG), the owner of the Bollettieri Academy—to expend most of the seed money needed to initiate ABC.

  The ambitious goal was to make ABC self-sufficient within two or three years and eventually to acquire public funding from municipal governments. The first camp opened in the summer of 1989, in Newark, New Jersey, with Arthur’s old friend Bobby Davis in charge of the tennis instruction. Davis—who had helped Arthur to develop the Black Tennis and Sports Foundation’s tennis workshops—soon had more than 1,500 kids in the program, an office in the Newark City Hall, and a board of directors that included the mayor.

  In 1990, a second ABC program opened in Kansas City with Kevin Dowdell, a young black Princeton graduate, as director, and a year later a third program was added in Albany, New York. By the time the Kansas City program became operational, Bollettieri and IMG were in the process of disengaging from ABC, which had shown no sign of becoming self-sufficient. With the Bollettieri Academy hemorrhaging money in an effort to keep ABC afloat, Nick and Arthur, who had known each other since the late 1950s, decided to go their separate ways.

  This split allowed Arthur, working closely with Dowdell, to reconfigure ABC as a true nonprofit, which he renamed the Safe Passage Foundation (SPF). From the beginning, Arthur had considered ABC to be a welcome alternative to the NJTL. Convinced that many NJTL programs under USTA influence had become fixated on competition, he wanted to establish a network of inner-city tennis centers that allowed kids to experience the sheer joy of the game. Under his leadership, the SPF developed a formula based on a strict division of time and effort, with half devoted to competition and the other half to off-court life skills. Utilizing indoor gymnasium courts, shortened rackets, and low-compression balls, SPF programs allowed kids to ease their way into full-scale competitive tennis. Traditional one-day workshops typically left participants with a day of memories, a T-shirt, and little else, but Arthur wanted a program that changed kids by “teaching them the game of life.”22

  In 1991, Arthur turned over the operational leadership of the SPF to Dowdell. Though highly successful, the three SPF centers required constant attention, especially after they became affiliated with the Athletes Career Connection (ACC), an organization Ashe had founded several years earlier. The ACC’s efforts were directed at college students and athletic programs in an attempt “to redress the terrible attrition rate among black college athletes.”

  Initially, ACC worked with only seven colleges and universities—Seton Hall, Fordham, and Penn in the Northeast; American and Howard in Washington; and Morehouse and Spelman in Atlanta—but Arthur had plans to expand across the nation. Unfortunately, the organization—which sponsored lectures and workshops designed to stimulate academic achievement among black athletes—went into decline as financially strapped institutions began cutting nonessential programs during the economic recession of 1990. But this did not blunt its founder’s determination to prepare black athletes for “the full range of career options open to them after college.”23

  Such preparation, in his view, had to begin at the K–12 level well before admission to college, and his strong feelings on the issue of minimum st
andards for college admission put him at odds with several of the nation’s most prominent coaches. On January 11, 1989, by a vote of 163–154 the NAACP adopted Proposition 42, the hotly debated measure that strengthened the freshman admission standards mandated by Proposition 48. Beginning in August 1990, freshman athletes would have to satisfy all of the minimum requirements outlined in Proposition 48: a 2.0 average in a core curriculum of eleven high school courses; a 2.0 cumulative grade point average, and a score of either 700 on the SAT exam or 15 on the ACT.

  Fearing this new standard would block the admission of many black athletes, opponents wasted no time in voicing their outrage. Perhaps the most vocal opponent, John Thompson, the celebrated men’s basketball coach at Georgetown University, stormed off the court prior to his team’s game against Boston College, vowing he “would not coach again” until the NAACP agreed to reconsider Prop 42. Harry Edwards, Ashe’s old ally, supported Thompson, calling Prop 42 “an elitist, racist travesty,” and Thompson’s counterpart at Temple University, the fiery African American coach John Chaney, condemned the misguided reform measure as “racist and absurd.” All of this intimidated the NAACP, which soon declared it was willing to convene a special conference to reconsider Prop 42. On the other side of the issue, delegates representing several of the 163 institutions supporting Prop 42 vowed to defend the measure.24

  With no sign the controversy was going away anytime soon, Ashe entered the fray with a provocative New York Times opinion piece titled “Coddling Black Athletes.” After quoting a Newsweek reporter’s conclusion that “there’s got to be a better way” than instituting Prop 42, Ashe begged to differ. “Well, there may indeed be a better way,” he wrote. “But so far we haven’t found it. The rule still contains the most powerful inducement yet for high school athletes to abandon their cynical belief that they’ll get a scholarship even if they don’t bother to study.” While he acknowledged “it is conceivable that some college administrators see Proposition 42 as a convenient cover for a racist policy of reducing the numbers of black athletes who receive scholarships,” he maintained “most probably see it as I do: the only way to establish unequivocally the idea that a scholarship is a reward for academic as well as athletic skills and efforts, not an entitlement granted for athletic prowess alone.”

  As on other occasions, Ashe targeted a pervasive sense of entitlement as the most insidious problem facing young black athletes. “We need to address the deep-seated cynicism of coddled, black public school athletes, many of whom are carried through school with inflated grades and peer group status that borders on deification,” he insisted, adding: “they learn early that they don’t get the idolatry, attention, and, ultimately, Division I scholarships for their intellectual promise.” The long-term benefits of Prop 42 were, in his view, undeniable. “We should either get serious about academic standards,” he argued, “or cut out the hypocrisy and pay college athletes as professionals.” It was time for fundamental reform, he insisted, closing with a dire prediction that “Black America stands to lose another generation of our young men unless they are helped to learn as well as play ball.”

  For Thompson, Ashe’s commentary on Prop 42 was tantamount to racial treason, and he could not let it pass without a response. Within hours of the article’s publication, the strong-willed coach phoned to voice his displeasure, and a candid and sometimes heated conversation ensued. But neither man changed his position. Thompson continued his campaign against Prop 42, and Ashe wrote an article for Ebony describing his recent visits to predominantly black high schools where “the obsession with sports borders on pathology.”25

  Ashe’s crusade against entitlement was part of a larger effort to combat what he viewed as the damaging mentality undergirding calls for reparations and affirmative action. He knew this position was not popular in many black communities, especially among young people. But he refused to bend to popular sentiment. After one disillusioning experience with students at Stamford High School in Connecticut, he went away with a new sense of what he was up against. As he later wrote, “On display was the increasingly dominant African American adolescent ethos of entitlement, of ‘You owe me,’ which I consider monstrous.” On the question of reparations specifically, he argued self-respect and a strong work ethic would do more for black Americans than belated payments or handouts, however much they were warranted. “We may indeed be entitled to something,” he acknowledged in 1992. “But our sense of entitlement has been taken too far. One of the major tasks of my teachers as I grew up was to make sure that no black kid gave up the struggle to do better because of despair in the face of segregation.”26

  Ashe’s concern about entitlement was only one part of his ongoing consideration of the social and economic impact of racial exploitation and discrimination. In the summer of 1990, for example, he interjected himself into a major controversy surrounding racially restrictive membership policies at private country clubs. When the Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham was selected to host the national PGA Championship, PGA officials pressured the club to break with its whites-only tradition. The grudging response was to grant an honorary membership to a prominent black businessman, Louis Willie. Ashe, who knew tokenism when he saw it, nonetheless accepted this gesture as a welcome sign of change. “This is a breakthrough of monumental proportions,” he told The New York Times. “It’s difficult to overestimate it. One of the benchmarks of a breakthrough is that it reaches far beyond sports. What happened at Shoal Creek is only 20 percent about sports. It’s about society, commerce, and culture. It’s the upper echelon of white society finally being forced to say, ‘All right, it’s time.’ ”27

  A month later, when the Augusta National Golf Club followed suit and accorded membership to Ron Townsend, the black president of the Gannett Television Group, Ashe felt vindicated. “When they first said they had been looking for someone for some time, none of us believed it,” he acknowledged. “But in actual fact, they really were. I’m not sure why they thought it was finally time. Maybe it was like what Bear Bryant was thinking in 1970 when he decided ‘we’d better recruit some of those colored boys.’ ”

  Following up on the developments at Shoal Creek and Augusta, a Tennis Week reporter asked Ashe if “any pro tennis tournaments” were still being “staged at clubs that discriminate against blacks,” Ashe said no, primarily because “very few pro tournaments now are played at private clubs.” The real problem, he pointed out, was at the amateur level, at the “hundreds and hundreds of tournaments and clubs where discrimination had its “greatest exposure.” “Just go down the USTA Yearbook pages and throw a dart and you’ll hit one,” he advised, adding: “it wouldn’t take a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter to find problems here if he really wanted to do it.”28

  To combat this problem, Ashe—in cooperation with the BTSF—enlisted Earl Graves, the African American media magnate in charge of Black Enterprise magazine and the BET network, in an effort to reach out to corporate sponsors and advertisers who might fund an array of activities designed to expand black participation in the world of tennis. Instructional videos featuring black players, summer camps at historically black colleges, and special travel packages to tennis tournaments were just three of the proposed elements of a broad, multifaceted marketing strategy aimed at a black audience.29

  As this activity suggests, Ashe’s illness had done nothing to dull his interest in political and social dialogue related to black Americans. During the mid- and late 1980s, he had participated in a series of retreats held either in Miami or on Hilton Head Island, where black political figures such as Andrew Young and Douglas Wilder engaged in wide-ranging discussions of current issues. These extended conversations, which often involved critiques of the quality and character of black leadership, propelled Ashe into renewed political involvement. Despite all that was going on in his life, he found time to campaign for his friend David Dinkins during the 1989 New York mayoral race. And a year later he was a vocal supporter of Harvey Gantt during his un
successful bid to unseat North Carolina’s reactionary U.S. senator Jesse Helms.

  Ashe despised Helms and his ilk, and on the college lecture circuit he often expressed his contempt for white supremacist demagogues. But he was equally hard on demagogic black leaders. He had no respect for men such as Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam or Professor Leonard Jeffries of the City College of New York who indulged in anti-Semitic tirades. And he did not hesitate to criticize the Reverend Al Sharpton and other publicity seekers who seemed to promote their own narrow interests over the interests of the broader black community. He even took popular black icons such as Malcolm X to task. Sweeping and unrestrained condemnations of whites saddened him, and he felt he had to speak out against irresponsible outbursts by misguided black leaders. “I am appalled by the level of irrationality in our community,” he wrote in 1992, “and especially by the complicity of some newspapers and radio stations in encouraging this excess.”

  To his mind, hyper-emotionalism and racial scapegoating were the enemies of social progress. Mass violence—whether in America, South Africa, or anywhere else—sickened him, and he came to feel that Gandhian-Kingian nonviolence was the only true path to freedom for blacks and other oppressed groups. His heroes were men like Andrew Young and the former Freedom Rider John Lewis, who became a congressman from Gergia in 1987. Both of these leaders preached the gospel of the “beloved community,” combining faith with a pragmatic realism designed to move the black community forward.30