This was welcome news for Ashe, who took time out from his practice rounds at the National Indoor Open in Salisbury, Maryland, to explain his position to reporters. A week earlier, at the urging of U.S. representative Charles Diggs—an African American from Detroit who had experienced a disillusioning visit to South Africa in 1969 under a restricted visa—Ashe had testified before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa. During the hearing, he announced that he opposed the imposition of political sanctions against the entire nation of South Africa. But, as he insisted in Salisbury, that did not mean he had any reservations about expelling South Africa’s white athletes from the ILTF and Davis Cup competition. “I’ll keep on trying to have South Africa kicked out until it happens,” he vowed. “I just don’t want the punishment to fall on the wrong people.” He went on to dismiss the South African government’s gesture of allowing him to play in South Africa as a member of the Davis Cup team as “ridiculous.” “I view it as an affront to my humanity,” he declared. “They’ll accept me as a piece of the American flag but not as an individual human being.”27
Getting this off his chest proved cathartic, but it did not seem to have much effect on his peers. In a poll conducted by the Voice of America, players offered a wide range of opinions on Ashe’s effort to use the visa denial issue to bring about social change in South Africa. A few voiced strong support for his position. Tom Koch of Brazil vowed to bypass the South Africa circuit as long as apartheid was in effect, declaring: “Arthur Ashe is my brother”; and Ingo Buding of West Germany said he “would do anything Ashe asked him to do regarding . . . sanctions against South Africa.” But most of those polled—including Roche and Laver—rejected Ashe’s call for action.
Some of the most critical comments came from Ashe’s Davis Cup teammates. “Ashe should be a tennis player,” Richey declared, “not a politician.” Graebner argued, “The South African situation is very complicated” and complained “Arthur thinks he can solve everything by just saying ‘Give it to me.’ ” Even Riessen, who shared Ashe’s revulsion for apartheid, was unwilling to support a boycott. “I can’t change anything,” he explained. “It’s not worthwhile to protest if you have to break your contract and go to jail, which even Arthur wouldn’t want me to do.” Though disappointed and even hurt by these remarks, Ashe was philosophical about the situation. “It’s not that they don’t care,” he observed, “but tennis players as a group are apolitical, independent, even egotistical, perhaps, and each goes his own way. Their view is that it’s my problem and has nothing to do with them.” When asked if conducting an almost solitary fight against tennis apartheid was a burden, he responded: “Problems such as these hurt tennis, but I enjoy my role. . . . If it does good in the world, it is not a burden.”28
Ashe was less sanguine in private, but the ongoing controversy did not seem to affect his tennis. During the winter and spring of 1970, he played some of the best tennis of his career. After the first four tournaments of the indoor tennis circuit, he was the leading money winner among independent pros, with $6,400 in earnings, and his national ranking had improved from third to second. At Richmond, in mid-February, he combined a welcome visit with his family with a rare double victory, defeating Smith in the singles final and teaming with Pasarell to win the doubles. In Macon, Georgia, in early March, he lost a tough final round match to Richey, but as the tour progressed his confidence grew. With the erratic play and elbow problems of the previous year safely behind him, his future looked bright.29
The only other dark cloud on the horizon was the continuing organizational struggle between the contract pros and the ILTF. The players themselves, often caught in the middle, had formed the ITPA in June 1969. But during its first year the fledgling players organization had faltered, the victim of tension and conflict between independent and contract pros. To counter the bargaining position of the contract pros, Ashe and thirty-one other independent pros announced the formation of the Association of Independent Tennis Professionals in March 1970. The plan was to hire a nonplaying administrator to manage their contractual arrangements and financial affairs. But no one was confident that any organization, however well intentioned, could bring solidarity and peace to the warring tennis world.30
While all of this was brewing, Ashe and his Davis Cup teammates flew to Boston for another new twist in the evolution of Open tennis, a special three-day charity event called the World Cup. Playing for $20,000 in prize money, tennis’s two national powerhouses, the United States and Australia, competed in a series of seven Davis Cup–style matches. The designated beneficiary was the Sportsmen’s Tennis Club, a local organization raising funds for a Roxbury inner-city tennis center. The event’s secondary goal was to get the attention of Davis Cup national delegates and encourage them to rescind the ban on contract pros. The inaugural World Cup, won by the Aussies 5–2, drew large crowds and helped fund the center. But it would be nearly three years before the Davis Cup delegates came around on the contract pro issue.31
The tennis establishment was more tractable on the question of South Africa’s participation in Davis Cup competition. On March 23, at a special meeting in London, the delegates suspended South Africa from Davis Cup play for two years. Halfway across the world in Melbourne when he heard the news, Ashe termed the suspension “a pretty sad but just decision.” Personally, he confessed, “I feel that I have gained an empty victory from which I will get about five minutes emotional satisfaction. I would rather see South Africa change its ways instead of seeing them excluded from Davis Cup competition.” He worried about its secondary impact on individual South African players such as Drysdale and Ray Moore, both of whom were outspoken opponents of apartheid.32
In mid-April, Ashe elaborated on his feelings during testimony before a special eleven-member United Nations Committee on Apartheid. Coming off back-to-back wins in Puerto Rico and Bermuda, he was on an emotional high as he addressed the United Nations delegates. Continued “pressure from the top” was essential, he insisted, and addressing the perverse racial discrimination in South African sports required nothing less than expulsion from the ILTF. With the ILTF annual meeting scheduled for July, anti-apartheid forces had less than three months to ratchet up the campaign for expulsion. “If we isolate South Africa completely—athletically, legally, culturally, physically—will they change?” he asked rhetorically, his voice cracking with emotion. “Maybe they will say the world really hates us. Maybe they will change. We’ve tried everything else.”33
At the time, South Africa was in the midst of a bitter national election campaign that was pushing the ruling regime of Prime Minister John Vorster to the right. Dr. Albert Hertzog, a former minister in Vorster’s cabinet, had launched a splinter party known as the Reconstituted Nationals in an effort to forestall any dilution of the apartheid system. Vorster’s decision to approve a visit to South Africa by a touring New Zealand rugby team that included dark-skinned Maoris had enraged Hertzog, forcing the prime minister to renew his support for apartheid. “We are building a nation for whites only,” Vorster proclaimed. To bring home this point, the government had recently decreed that black South Africans would no longer be tolerated in a wide range of clerical jobs, including receptionists, telephone operators, cashiers, and typists. To the dismay of Ashe and others trying to open South African’s sporting world, the racial strictures of the apartheid system were hardening.34
The tennis wars were also experiencing a hardening of lines. On April 8, the ILTF announced it was following through with the creation of an “experimental Grand Prix circuit” consisting of Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and at least sixteen other tournaments. First suggested by Jack Kramer in September 1969, the Grand Prix was lavishly sponsored by Pepsico and featured a point system that led to cash awards and a possible berth in a season-ending Grand Prix Masters tournament. Participants in the Grand Prix shared a bonus pool of $150,000, and the top six point accumulators went on to vie for an additional $50,000 in the Grand Prix Masters.35
> These figures, extraordinary for 1970, were clearly designed to prevent independent pros like Ashe from signing with either of the contract pro groups. This forced the hand of the contract pro administrators, and after WCT absorbed the NTL in May, expanding its stable of players to thirty, it was only a matter of time before the leaders of the combined and strengthened organization created a Grand Prix–style circuit of its own. The “declaration of war,” as Bud Collins later described it, came during the U.S. Open in September, when Lamar Hunt, the multimillionaire backer of WCT, announced plans for the 1971 World Championship of Tennis, a twenty-tournament circuit limited to the world’s best thirty-two contract pros. Selected by an international panel of tennis writers, the participants would compete for a million dollars in total earnings, and the top eight point winners would square off in a season-ending playoff worth $50,000.
The ILTF immediately countered by raising its Grand Prix prize money to $1.5 million, but WCT’s advantage in the ensuing “bidding war” soon became clear. When combined with the guaranteed payments that came with WCT contracts, the extra prize money became an almost irresistible lure for independent pros. Even Ashe, who had been vocal about his desire to remain independent, could not resist the temptations of the enhanced WCT. At first, he responded cautiously, acknowledging the WCT plan “was great for tennis” but warning that the contract terms might be “too restrictive” for him. Although Hunt had promised that the top independent pros would be eligible for inclusion in the field of thirty-two, Ashe was not sure it would be worthwhile to participate in the WCT tour as an independent. “I’d have to play it with no guarantee,” he explained, “when the contract pros are playing it with a guarantee.”36
Whatever his reservations, Ashe rocked the tennis world on September 17 with the news that he had agreed to a WCT contract worth $750,000. The five-year deal included guarantees and deferred payments for Ashe and similar but less lucrative packages for Pasarell and Lutz. “I’m glad everything is finally settled,” Ashe told reporters. “I didn’t sign for the money. I was offered more in the past to sign. I just felt now was the time.” His primary motivation for signing with WCT, he insisted, was his continuing frustration with the Davis Cup and the USLTA.
Ashe had already warned Davis Cup officials he would not play for the U.S. team in 1971 unless the competition was opened to contract pros. Now he wanted to send a strong message to the USLTA, which he felt had mismanaged the expansion of Open tennis. “I appreciate everything the U.S.L.T.A. has done for me,” he declared. “But they just move too slowly. . . . They make bad appointments, their hands are tied by antiquated rules and they don’t want to assume a role of leadership.” At the 1970 U.S. Open, the USLTA had finally relaxed the rules enough to allow pastel shirts and shorts alongside the traditional whites, and it had instituted an innovative nine-point (first player to win 5 points wins the set) sudden death tiebreaker system to close out 6–6 sets. But for Ashe it was too little too late. By contrast, in his view, WCT would almost certainly “move the game in the right direction.”37
Dismissing money as a primary motivation was in keeping with Ashe’s image. But it did not change the fact that the WCT contract established him as one of the wealthiest athletes in the world, putting him on a par with the best-paid stars of the NFL, NBA, PGA, and Major League Baseball. In only his second year as a professional athlete, he had achieved a degree of financial security few Americans could even imagine. In 1970, he was one of three tennis players to earn more than $100,000 in prize money, trailing only Laver and Rosewall in on-court earnings. And when hundreds of thousands of dollars in endorsement money were added in, he had money to burn.
For the first time in his life, he could buy just about anything he wanted, and for a while he was tempted to test the limits of his enviable situation. After lavishing his family with gifts, he bought a vintage Rolls-Royce that he shipped home from Australia, as well as indulgences such as expensive clothes, jewelry, and golf clubs. He also added to his growing record and book collections. The shopping spree did not last long, and he soon returned to his frugal ways. Yet he confessed he often felt like a parvenu susceptible to money worship. “This is terribly embarrassing to admit,” he wrote in June 1973, “but money makes me happy. I’m not as secure about money as people like Pasarell and Graebner who always had the damn stuff. But I don’t mean I just sit on it. I’m a pretty good giver to the causes I’m really interested in, and I love to play with money to gamble. . . . Maybe if you never had money you’re more inclined to use it just to remind yourself that you’ve got some.”38
Money helped to make 1970 a breakthrough year for Ashe, but for him the most important development of the year was proving his 1968 U.S. Open victory and number one ranking among American players were more than flukes. The erratic ups and downs of 1969 had given way to a string of successes in the first year of the new decade. Staying healthy enough to play in thirty tournaments, he won 82 percent of his matches, reached fourteen finals, and won eleven titles. After starting the year with the Australian Open title, he finished a close second to Richey in the final Grand Prix standings, winning $17,000 in bonus money. Even though he stumbled at Wimbledon, losing to Andrés Gimeno in the fourth round, and at the U.S. Open, where he dropped a close quarterfinal match to Newcombe, losing two sets 7–6 under the controversial new tiebreaker system, he seemed to play at or near the top of his game week after week.
Ashe’s year-long record of consistency—achieved while he was devoting considerable time and energy to off-court concerns such as South Africa and the tennis wars—should have put to rest the notion he could not combine top-flight tennis with social and political responsibility. But it did not do so. The charge that his tennis suffered because he spent too much time on such matters would dog him for years, though Ashe himself found ample compensation in using his skills for a higher purpose than mere tennis glory.39
For him the most meaningful experience of the year was not winning the Australian Open in January, or helping the U.S. win a third straight Davis Cup by defeating West Germany, or even signing the lucrative WCT contract. His event of the year took place in late October and early November when he participated in a State Department–sponsored tour of six African nations. The entourage included Stan Smith, Frank Deford of Sports Illustrated, Bud Collins of the Boston Globe, the British freelance writer Richard Evans, and a United States Information Agency–sponsored documentary film crew.40
Ashe had been fascinated with Africa since his UCLA days, and now he finally had the opportunity to gain firsthand experience in the recently decolonized continent. The “Good Will” exhibition tour began in Nairobi, the sprawling capital of the East African nation of Kenya. Independent since 1963, the former British colony had been the scene of the violent Mau Mau uprising during the 1950s. The highlight of the Americans’ brief visit was a meeting with President Jomo Kenyatta, a noted Pan-Africanist intellectual. This was a heady experience for young tennis players on their first trip to Africa. But Kenyatta, known for his charm and eloquence, graciously put them at ease and even impressed them with his knowledge of tennis. Years later Ashe recalled Kenyatta’s sharp intellect, but couldn’t resist adding, somewhat insensitively, that the African leader bore a striking physical resemblance to Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus.41
From Nairobi, the American ingenues flew south to Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, a sprawling nation only nine years removed from semicolonial U.N. trust status. Once a part of German East Africa prior to being transferred to British control at the close of World War I, Tanzania was a complex and fascinating nation led by President Julius Nyerere, who had recently developed a close relationship with Mao Tse-Tung and the People’s Republic of China. Troubled by postcolonial Africa’s propensity for one-party rule, Ashe took a special interest in Nyerere’s attempt to combine a one-party system and socialism. “I didn’t agree with this principle,” he wrote several years later. “How would there be enough room for dissent? Wou
ldn’t you end up with ‘strongmen’ running everything and possibly becoming corrupt? I read Nyerere’s book on African socialism and began to seriously question how countries were organized.”
Tanzania was a revelation in several ways. Though carefully briefed before their arrival in Dar es Salaam, Ashe and Smith were not prepared for the grilling they received during a meeting with university students. Ashe found them “starved for information” about the United States, but also highly critical of everything, from American policy in Vietnam to the lack of activism among African American celebrities. “What are you and other famous Americans doing for the struggle in the U.S.?” they asked. When Ashe tried to turn the tables by asking troubling questions of his own—such as “Why does your government lock up political prisoners?” and “Why can’t you come up with an orderly way to change governments?”—the students became defensive and refused to answer. He later learned that, fearing government retaliation, they had simply been afraid to answer his questions in public. Africa, he was beginning to realize, was a complicated puzzle.42
The next stop was Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, formerly the British colony of Northern Rhodesia. Zambia’s President Kenneth Kaunda was a leading critic of the white supremacist governments of nearby Rhodesia (formerly known as Southern Rhodesia) and South Africa, so it was not surprising when the Zambian press peppered Ashe with questions about the visa controversy. Startled by the directness of the questions, he insisted he no longer had any interest in playing in South Africa. When asked if he would “give up tennis to oppose apartheid,” he responded: “Yes, the liberation of black people is more important.”43
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