by Arthur Ashe
Chapter Three
Stars and Stripes:
A Captain in the
Davis Cup Wars
EVER SINCE ONE fateful afternoon in 1950 or 1951, tennis has been at or near the center of my life. On that day, when I was seven, I had spent the greater part of an hour quietly watching Ron Charity, the most accomplished black tennis player in Richmond, practice his serve alone on one of the tennis courts my father supervised at the eighteen-acre Brook Field playground where we lived. At some point, Charity stopped his practice. Walking over to me, he gently asked, “Would you like to learn to play?”
“Yes, I would,” I replied. As casually as that, my life was transformed.
Diligently over the next year or two, Charity laid the foundation on which I built my career through the junior ranks, then as a college player and an adult amateur, then finally as a full-fledged professional. Now, thirty years later, as I retired from the circuit under strict orders from my doctors, I knew that tennis, above all, could provide the sturdiest bridge from my old life to the new. If I could no longer play the game, I could certainly teach it. In my capacity as director of tennis at the Doral Resort and Country Club in Florida, I would continue to do so. But I also knew that my richest reward would come from my continued involvement in the Davis Cup campaigns, where teams represented their country in the most distinguished international competition in tennis.
Once Charity’s lessons and a love of the game had taken hold of me in Richmond, three stars shone brighter than all the others in my sky. One of them was Pancho Gonzalez, who was not only the best player in the world but also an outsider, like me, because he was a Mexican American. The second was the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York, sacred ground to me because it was the home of our national tennis championships. The third star, at least as bright as the others, was the Davis Cup, the international competition in which one day, with luck, I might be allowed to play for my country. (The original thirteen-inch silver cup was named for Dwight F. Davis, an American who donated it in 1900 both to stimulate international competition and to promote goodwill.)
Segregation and racism had made me loathe aspects of the white South but had left me scarcely less of a patriot. In fact, to me and my family, winning a place on our national team would mark my ultimate triumph over all those people who had opposed my career in the South in the name of segregation. As a junior in Richmond, I was barred from playing on most of the public tennis courts, which were reserved for whites; and the most powerful local tennis officials had tried to kill my game by shutting me out of any competition involving whites.
But my game hadn’t died, because other people had given it the chance to grow. Finally, in 1963, when I was twenty years old and a sophomore at UCLA, Bob Kelleher, then the U.S. Davis Cup captain, invited me to join the team. Even as race relations in America became increasingly stormy, and I started to feel the attraction of more militant approaches to segregation and racism, I nevertheless saw my Davis Cup appointment as the outstanding honor of my life to that point. Since no black American had ever been on the team, I was now a part of history. Despite segregation, I loved the United States. That year, I played only one Davis Cup match, a “dead rubber” match (one played after the best-of-five series has been decided), in which I defeated Orlando Bracamonte of Venezuela. And at the moment of my victory, it thrilled me beyond measure to hear the umpire announce not my name but that of my country: “Game: United States,” “Set: United States,” “Game, Set, and Match: United States.”
Over the next fifteen years, I played thirty-two Davis Cup matches and won twenty-seven of them, more than any American in the history of the Cup to that point. I had some stirring victories, but so demanding is Davis Cup play that I remember most clearly my losses, especially two singles defeats against Ecuador in 1967. I remember them vividly because they were national as well as personal defeats, and thus hurt me more. I played my last Davis Cup match in 1978.
To my surprise, the opportunity to lead the team came sooner than I had expected, indeed, the very year I retired. Between 1980 and 1985, I served as captain of the United States team. Although other involvements marked that period of my life, my captaincy was its highlight. My captaincy also proved to be much more challenging than I had anticipated. Those five years turned out to be, on the whole, a disorganized, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes frustrating and even humiliating epic of victories and defeats, excitement and tedium, camaraderie and isolation. At a mature age, I learned a fair amount about my strengths and my weaknesses, my principles and my moods.
I also learned much about other people, including the two finest players in the world, Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, and a generous selection of the other memorable personalities who then made up the elite of men’s international tennis competition. I learned about the sharp differences between individualism and leadership, playing and coaching, the younger generation and the old guard, of which I was rapidly becoming a member. In my middle passage, nothing shoved me along so rudely into the future as my experience as a captain in the Davis Cup wars.
IN THE SUMMER of 1980, I was at the U.S. Open at the National Tennis Center at Flushing Meadows, New York, when I received word that the incoming president of the United States Tennis Association, Marvin P. Richmond, wanted to see me. When I found him, Richmond was with the outgoing president of the USTA, Joseph E. Carrico. They wasted no time.
“Tony Trabert wants out,” Richmond said. “He can’t take it any longer.” Trabert was our current Davis Cup captain. He had been serving since 1976, and there had been no hint that he might step down soon.
“Take what?” I asked.
“The behavior of the players. McEnroe. Gerulaitis. Peter Fleming. They are driving him nuts.”
“Well,” I said. “I’ve been reading a little about all that. But I didn’t think it was all that bad.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Richmond assured me. “Anyway, Trabert’s out.”
“Am I on your short list?” I asked.
The U.S. Davis Cup captain is chosen by the president of the USTA. The captain then chooses the team.
“No,” Richmond replied, a grin on his face.
“What?”
“No, because we don’t have a short list. We want you.”
I felt so happy and proud I could have jumped into the air—the job meant that much to me.
“Gee,” I said, “it’s quite an honor, but this is rather sudden. I need to think about it. Can you give me twenty-four hours?” I was buying time from the inevitable onslaught of the press. I wanted to anticipate the questions and prepare for them, as well as talk to a few players.
I had played Davis Cup tennis under Trabert’s captaincy in 1978 and knew him fairly well, so I sought him out immediately. In his prime, starting at his hometown University of Cincinnati, Trabert had been an extraordinary player. He had won the national collegiate singles title, then had gone on to compile one of the most distinguished records in American tennis. Until Michael Chang won the French Open in 1989, no American had been victorious at Roland Garros since Trabert earned the title, for the second time, in 1955. That year, he also won at Forest Hills and Wimbledon.
Trabert had played Davis Cup tennis for four years, between 1951 and 1955. Then he had turned professional, touring with Gonzalez. Once he turned professional, of course, all the major amateur tournaments and events were closed to him, including the Davis Cup. He returned to the Cup as captain of the team, and under his coaching they won fourteen matches, a better record than any of his predecessors. Trabert is a Midwesterner in the best sense of the term—solid, dependable, principled. He had collided with a generation of players who had a different and far less reverential concept of what it meant to play for the Davis Cup.
“I’m happy for you, Arthur,” Trabert told me. “You would have been my first choice, too. But good luck to you with some of these guys. It’s just not the way we were brought up.”
I liked
him for saying that. On the other hand, we really were not of the same generation. Trabert was thirteen years older than me. I considered myself to be one of the younger guys, even though my attitudes and values were more of Trabert’s generation than McEnroe’s.
“Well,” I responded, “some of them certainly are high-spirited.”
“High-spirited? I can take high-spirited. But what’s been going on is really offensive. I find too much of the behavior distasteful. It’s just not fun anymore, Arthur.”
Trabert was progressive and fair, I knew, but he also had the deserved reputation of being a law-and-order man. I myself certainly believed in law and order, if the laws were just; but I thought I could sympathize more readily with the younger players, to whom I was closer in age and with whom I had played. Vitas Gerulaitis, for example, was a good friend. The previous summer, in 1979, Jeanne and I had rented a car with him for a week and driven from Munich to Kitzbühel. I had played against McEnroe twice in the 1979 Masters tournament at Madison Square Garden in New York and admired the sheer genius of his play. “I’m a little closer in age to the players,” I told Tennis magazine, “so I’m hoping that my brand of friendly persuasion will work.” With my fingers crossed, I sincerely believed so.
In my day as a player, and for a long time after, Davis Cup play was the most exciting, the most demanding competition in the world of tennis. It remains probably the most challenging competition for the players involved. Almost every player would readily admit that playing for his country in the Davis Cup is much more nerve-wracking than competing for himself in a Grand Slam final, including Wimbledon. “It takes at least a week to prepare for the thing,” Boris Becker once said about a typical Cup series or “tie,” as it is called, “another week to play it, and a week to recover.”
In Cup play, the captain’s role can be crucial, especially as it has evolved in the United States. In some other countries, a committee chooses the players. The American captain selects the squad of players, and then sets the tone for the entire effort. The strong sense of responsibility I brought to Davis Cup play was keenly supported by my first captain, Bob Kelleher, and indeed by all the others I played under—George MacCall, Donald Dell, Edward Turville, Dennis Ralston, and Trabert. Kelleher, who went on to become a federal judge in Los Angeles, constantly emphasized the lofty ideals inherent in the Davis Cup that I had and still have. In fact, Kelleher seldom passed up a chance to let his players understand that no matter what the event—a Davis Cup match, a Grand Slam event, or a city tournament in the south of France—as team members we represented the United States of America. Therefore, we had an obligation to act accordingly. We not only had to try to win, but we had to try to win with grace. We could not besmirch our country’s honor. My father had brought me up to think exactly like that, and I would not have dreamed of behaving any other way—not in any tournament, but above all not in the Davis Cup, where I was representing all of America.
In 1980, I was well aware that I was taking over the U.S. captaincy at a particularly significant time in the eighty-year history of the Cup, with its national and international prestige waning. The best players did not care to play, and attendance had dwindled at many matches. As much as I regretted its loss of prestige, I knew that I had certainly had something to do with the evolution in tennis that had weakened the Davis Cup. I had been one of the leaders in expediting changes that had altered the face of tennis.
Tennis had needed to change, because the world had changed. When my international career began around 1963, very few players earned a living from the sport. Amateurs could not play with professionals, who were shut out from the Davis Cup and from all the major tournaments. After mounting pressure, all of that ended one day in April 1968 in Bournemouth, England, when Mark Cox played Pancho Gonzalez in the British Hard Court Championships, the first sanctioned tournament for both professionals and amateurs. The Open era of tennis began. Later that year, when I won the first United States Open and received only $280 in expense money, I was still an amateur and a gentleman player, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army happy to be able to make the payments on my beloved Ford Mustang. Tom Okker lost to me in the final, and took home $14,000. Tom was a gentleman, too; but he was also a professional who could accept prize money.
Between 1968 and 1981, professional tennis exploded in popularity. As a leader of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the players’ union founded in 1972 (I was president in 1974–75), I saw the fireworks intimately. No one was well prepared for the transition from the closed amateur (or “shamateur,” as some called it) to the open era—not the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF), as it was then called, nor the Big Four (the governing bodies of the American, French, Australian, and British championships). Fearful that they would lose control of the game and the players, the ILTF (later shortened to ITF) and the Big Four pursued a reactionary strategy, impeding us at almost every turn. In my judgment, they resisted change in defense of privilege and a stuffy conception of the traditional. In the end, they lost control.
If the governing bodies were not ready, neither were most of the players. For many of us, the deluge of money led to confusion and an unholy scrambling after dollars. Certain values and standards that had bonded players in my earlier years as a professional—certain codes of honor and a spirit of cooperation and camaraderie—disappeared. In some ways, the youngest players arrived in a world in which the very concept of values and standards was unknown or quaint and obsolete, like wooden racquets or the white tennis balls on which Wimbledon insisted long after the superiority of color had been demonstrated.
I wonder how much we, the leaders of the players during this transition, contributed to the fall. I can’t forget, for example, in light of my concern for the Davis Cup, that one of the main blows struck by the ATP in the name of freedom for players was at the expense of the Davis Cup. In 1973, we boycotted Wimbledon after Nikki Pilic of Yugoslavia was barred from taking part in the tournament by his country because he refused to play in a particular Davis Cup match. The ILTF, reactionary to the core at the time, backed the Yugoslavian Tennis Federation’s banning of Pilic. Our view in the ATP was that a tennis player had the right to play or not to play in the Davis Cup. The ILTF and Wimbledon would not budge from their position of supporting the suspension, and the British courts refused to intervene. We carried out the boycott.
Aided by private promoters such as Lamar Hunt and power brokers such as Donald Dell and Jack Kramer, we prospered. The number of tournaments increased to such an extent that it was difficult to keep track of them. The prize money grew amazingly. (Some people would say obscenely; I wouldn’t. Although I missed out on most of the huge purses of later years, I have never heard of any prize money in tennis that I consider excessive, certainly not compared to what individuals make in other sports and activities, such as rock music.)
Meanwhile, the top players were expected to play Davis Cup for expense money only. Increasingly, they found reasons to be elsewhere or flatly refused to play. At last, starting in 1981, the Davis Cup leadership decided to award prize money. A giant Japanese electronics firm, Nippon Electric Company (NEC), put up one million dollars to sponsor the competition in 1981. This piece of news, striking in itself, was followed by the announcement that NEC intended to give $2.5 million dollars to the Davis Cup in 1983. The winning team would collect $200,000, plus its usual share of the gate receipts. The U.S. committee announced that after meeting our expenses, we would distribute most of the remaining money to the players.
The ancient unwieldiness of the Cup format was also a problem. Up until 1972, the defending champion did not play until the other nations had fought among themselves for the honor of meeting the previous winner. Then the challenger met the defending champion in the final, called the Challenge Round.
Reaching the Challenge Round could take the greater part of a year of sometimes rough campaigning. Matches were normally scheduled without any regard for the players’ plans. Many of
the ties were totally uncompetitive (resulting in 5–0 scores) and unprofitable for the more powerful nation involved; yet they had to be played. And after all that effort, the final result was actually quite predictable. From the first match in 1900 until 1973, only four nations had ever won the Cup: the U.S., Britain, France, and Australia. Between 1937 and 1973, only the U.S. and Australia had won it. Under the venerable captain Harry Hopman, the Australians had played in the finals every year from 1950 to 1968. Fortunately for the rest of us, Hopman retired that year. Since 1974, there has been greater diversity among the winners, with the Cup going to South Africa, Sweden, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, as well as to the Aussies and to us.
In 1980, the system was overhauled. When I assumed our captaincy, under the new rules only sixteen countries would play for the Cup—the top four nations in each of four international zones formed for the competition. The following year, twelve of the sixteen spots would be taken by the eight first-round winners from 1981 and the four winners of a relegation match between the eight first-round losers from 1981. The remaining four spots would be taken by 1982’s four zonal winners. Now the winning country would have to play only four ties to claim the Cup. And every effort would be made to schedule matches at sensible times, to avoid any conflicts with lucrative tournaments elsewhere. The main pieces were now clearly in place for a revival of the Davis Cup.
Despite Trabert’s solid record, the United States effort in the Cup also needed revitalizing. Between 1968 and 1972, the U.S. had won the cup five straight times. Since then, we had lost to Australia, Colombia, Mexico (twice), and Argentina. Between 1976 and 1981, the U.S. had won the Cup only twice, most recently in 1979. In 1980, the U.S. had lost to Argentina in Buenos Aires, a defeat that hastened Trabert’s departure. We needed a win in 1981.
MY INITIAL TASK as captain was to select a squad to play the first match, against Mexico in Carlsbad, California. I was determined to field the strongest team possible. I needed two singles players and a pair of doubles players. Everyone knew that the two best singles players in the United States were John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. Whatever trouble Trabert had experienced with the fiery McEnroe, I fully expected McEnroe to be the mainstay of the new team. Connors was a more difficult proposition. McEnroe had committed himself from the start of his career to the Davis Cup concept; Connors had not. He had played in two Davis Cup matches in 1976 but had stayed off the team since then. I soon discovered that he would not be available against Mexico. To play the four singles matches, I named McEnroe and another left-hander (and at that time the possessor of perhaps the fastest serve in professional tennis), Roscoe Tanner. To play the doubles match, I selected Stan Smith and Bob Lutz, who had compiled a Davis Cup record of fourteen victories and only one defeat. When Smith developed arm trouble, I named another veteran duo, Marty Riessen and Sherwood Stewart, to play instead.
