Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  In the singles competition, he won a tough first-round match against Ivan Molina of Colombia, who had defeated him as recently as August 1973; and in the second round he outlasted Antonio Muñoz of Spain, despite losing the first set. His third-round match against Muñoz’s countryman, Manolo Orantes, one of the world’s premier clay court shotmakers, was a different matter, however. In his diary, Ashe described Orantes’s 6–1, 6–2, 6–2 victory as “an assassination.” At one point in the second set, after Ashe hit “a beautiful approach shot and followed it to the net,” he was “passed so cleanly” that all he “could do was stand there and laugh—out loud.”4

  Almost no one was surprised when Ashe lost to Orantes, who went on to test the ultimate champion, Bjorn Borg, in a five-set final. Like any serious competitor, Ashe hated to lose, but two weeks in Paris was ample compensation for a Francophile who could never get enough of the City of Light. Ashe loved Paris almost as much as he loved London, and nothing—not even Chatrier’s prolonging of the WTT controversy—could sour him on the French. The red clay he could do without. But the rest of it—the food, the wine, the women, the cosmopolitan culture—was intoxicating.5

  On this visit the Parisian women were less distracting than in the past because Meryl was with him. They had been in Paris together before, but this time it was different. After nearly two years of dating, their relationship had reached a critical stage. There was talk of a long-term commitment and even marriage, and Ashe was feeling the pressure. On their second night in Paris, they had a pleasant dinner at the historic Left Bank restaurant Le Procope. But later in the week they had an uncomfortable discussion about fatherhood and what she alleged to be an unhealthy American preoccupation with status and ego. The inevitable challenges of an interracial and interreligious relationship had been on his mind for some time, but now it appeared there were other potential problems to consider. He wasn’t sure they wanted the same things out of life, or that she could find happiness as the wife of a touring tennis professional.6

  The latter point was driven home their ninth day in Paris, when they had dinner with two recently married tennis couples, the Lutzes and the Tanners. Months earlier, a sober reflection in Ashe’s diary had focused on Nancy Cook Tanner’s “identity crisis.” “She is trying to understand that she is no longer Nancy Cook,” he explained, “but she is not even Nancy Tanner; primarily she is just Roscoe Tanner’s wife. In the tennis world, nobody really bothers to sort out the wives as people; they are just tolerated as appendages. It’s not right, but that’s the way it is.” He predicted this would “change in time,” but nothing during the Paris dinner suggested mitigation would come anytime soon. At that point, he had no way of knowing that the Tanners’ marriage would end in a bitter divorce, but the signs of trouble were already in evidence.7

  On June 13, Meryl and Arthur flew to London before driving northward to Nottingham, the site of a pre-Wimbledon warm-up tournament. On the way over both caught serious colds, complicating their plans for a romantic week in the English Midlands. Arthur managed a few hours of practice on the grass courts, but mostly they stayed in their room sneezing and coughing. By the third day, both were “going stir crazy,” with the only excitement being an anti-Semitic incident in the hotel bar. When the bartender pointed to a slot machine and called it “a Jew box,” Meryl exploded, which did nothing to improve the struggling couple’s mood. The next day, rain postponed Arthur’s opening match, sending him back to the same bar, where this time he received a jolt of a different kind. An old friend from UCLA was getting a divorce, he learned from a conversation at the bar. At first, he professed shock, but later that night he speculated in his diary “that marriage as an institution is on its way out.” Whether marriages have to contend with the tennis tour or not, “very few people seem to be able to handle it anymore.”8

  Over the next two days, he passed through a confusing range of emotions that he apparently kept to himself. After losing a close match to Guillermo Vilas on Wednesday afternoon, he spent most of the evening on ATP paperwork and reading the early chapters of Hermann Hesse’s then popular novel, Steppenwolf. Others had found wisdom in Hesse’s tale of an existential hero, and now it seemed to spur Arthur into action. On the morning of June 20, his last day in Nottingham, he awoke with a sense of clarity. His cold was gone, but so was his passion.

  As his diary entry that night explained: “I don’t want the responsibility of worrying about her, and us, anymore, and the chemistry has ebbed. I don’t know when it did, but it has, and if there’s one thing you can’t fake, it’s a feeling, especially if the feeling has been there before. So I just said, well I think we had better call it off, and she knew I meant it, so there wasn’t really much for her to discuss. She knew I had made up my mind.” Putting a tearful Meryl on the train to London later in the morning was “one of the hardest things I had ever had to do,” he acknowledged. Still, he had done it, decisively closing an important chapter in his life.9

  The clean break gave Arthur’s personal life a fresh start. Fresh and exciting, as it turned out: following his second-round match at Wimbledon, he received an unexpected call from Diana Ross, the great Motown artist and actress who had achieved international fame as the lead singer of the Supremes. Married to music executive Robert Silberstein and the mother of two young daughters, she had no romantic interest in Arthur. But she had wanted to meet him for some time. A big fan of her music, he was happy to accommodate her, especially after she volunteered to make a special trip to Wimbledon from her central London hotel.

  “Her record company drove her out to Wimbledon in a burgundy Rolls-Royce,” he recalled. “We met in the foyer and went up to the tea room. I had already played and won my match that afternoon. When she walked into the room, all eyes turned to us.” After watching a late afternoon match from the Tea Room roof, they hopped into the Rolls and headed for the Mayfair Hotel, where she was staying. Following a couple of drinks in the lobby bar, she left for a dinner engagement and he returned to his hotel, but not before arranging to meet in Washington two weeks later. As Arthur later explained: “I was going to play in the Washington Star tournament and she would be performing at the Carter Baron Amphitheater next door. It turned out that we unknowingly were on the same floor of the Washington Hilton and had dinner together on a couple of evenings. One night, my family came up from Richmond with some home-cooked food and we all ate in her suite. She seemed lonely at the time and really enjoyed the warmth of the family gathering.”10

  Arthur was learning that life as a celebrity had its privileged moments. But there was no guarantee fame would do anything for his tennis game. Wimbledon 1974—his eighth appearance at the world’s most prestigious tournament—turned out to be a disappointment on the court. Seeded eighth, he breezed through the first two rounds only to lose to Tanner in the third as the big left-hander wore him down on a hot and blustery afternoon.11

  At several points during the match, he had trouble with the wind and appeared to lose his concentration, none of which surprised his closest friends. Those who knew about the recent breakup with Meryl, not to mention his platonic dalliance with Diana Ross, had worried about his state of mind going into the match. And all of them were well aware that love lost and friendship found were not the only diversions dividing his attention at Wimbledon. A week earlier, on June 23, he had been elected president of the ATP, replacing Cliff Drysdale. Assuming the presidency was both an honor and a burden, but an unexpected development earlier in the day put immediate emphasis on the latter.12

  Just hours before Ashe’s election, the ATP was informed that WTT, along with Evonne Goolagong and Jimmy Connors, had decided to file a $10 million lawsuit against the French and Italian tennis federations, the Commercial Union Assurance company (the primary sponsor of the Grand Prix series, which included the French and Italian Opens), and ATP executives Donald Dell and Jack Kramer. Claiming that Dell and Kramer had “conspired with the French and Italians” to bar WTT players from the European gr
and slams, the suit promised to reheat the tennis wars. Ashe, who rarely lost his temper, was furious. “Every time I passed Connors in the locker room today,” he wrote in his diary, “it took all my will power not to punch him in the mouth. It’s sickening. He and Riordan could be such a good part of tennis, but will they only be satisfied when they have wrecked the whole game?”13

  Publicly, Ashe was more circumspect. “Now that I’m president,” he acknowledged, “I’ve . . . got to watch what I say and differentiate between Ashe the player and Ashe the ATP president. But I’m going to devote myself to this job. When I give it up a year from now, I want ATP firmly established as a responsible force in the game.” Yet he already knew it wasn’t going to be easy to balance success on the court with administrative responsibility. “This job is going to be tough for me,” he conceded, adding, “Cliff has not done well as a player since he assumed the presidency.”14

  Eight days later on Court Seven—after presiding over two tense meetings of the ATP board—he got a taste of just how difficult it was going to be to keep his eye on the ball. The loss to Tanner hit Ashe especially hard. “I take defeat harder all the time,” he confessed. “I just wanted to be left alone after the match. The girls kept jamming their autograph books at me, and I turned them away. ‘I’m sorry, I really don’t feel like signing now,’ I said. I rarely do a thing like that. I saw the press, but I didn’t want to. After a defeat, they make me feel as if I’m on trial.” His only consolation was that his loss paled in comparison to the biggest tennis story of the day, El Shafei’s shocking upset of Borg. In any event, most of the attention was focused on Connors and Evert as they marched toward twin victories at Centre Court. After Ashe and Tanner were eliminated in the third round of the doubles competition, both men slipped away unnoticed.15

  Tanner, at twenty-two, was confident his best years at Wimbledon lay ahead. But Ashe faced a different prospect. Still looking for his first Wimbledon title at age thirty, he was beginning to fear it might never happen. Having reached the semifinals in two of his first five visits to the All England Club, he now appeared to be falling back into the pack. This was not what he had envisioned in early 1973, when he had agreed to keep a Wimbledon-to-Wimbledon diary. He and the editors at Houghton Mifflin had hoped to close his chronicle with a strong showing—perhaps even a victory—at Wimbledon. Instead, he ended with failures on and off the court amid speculation that he was nearing the end of the road professionally.

  In the final entry, he denied he was contemplating retirement. “Hell, I’ve got a lot of years left,” he insisted. “Look at Rosewall. I keep myself in good shape and I don’t have any weight problem. I do hate the practice. That’s the only negative. But I don’t mind the training. I love to run, and I love this life, even if I take the losing too seriously now.” Sometime in the distant future, he would put down his racket and, before moving on to a new career, “take a year off and do nothing—just read all the books I’ve always wanted to and go to all the places I’ve never been.” But for now he was still in the hunt.16

  After the emotional roller coaster of the 1974 European tour, Ashe retreated to the calm of Doral. He was very fond of southern Florida. “Miami is especially nice,” he wrote in 1973, “because it’s so tourist-conscious that they don’t permit any industry to speak of, so there’s almost no smog. And it seems to me there’s still space to move around in here.” His stay at Doral gave him a chance to decompress before moving on to the annual crush of mid- and late-summer tournaments. During the previous year, he had found the routine of keeping a daily journal “therapeutic.” “Writing,” he explained, “has forced me to take a closer look at my life and myself.” And now he had at least a few days reserved for light workouts, relaxation, and reflection.17

  Working with aspiring tennis players, especially children, was never a dreaded chore for Ashe. Not only did he enjoy the role of a teacher, but also the clinics at Doral and elsewhere helped him maintain a sense of perspective and balance. “To watch him with the children—that was really something,” an admiring Rodney Harmon once observed. “He took time to try to hit balls with each of the kids, and what really impressed me was how he would try to make every kid at the clinic feel important. . . . He stayed so long we told him that he probably needed to go for the sake of his own busy schedule.”

  Looking at the flailing arms and legs of his students, virtually all of whom were white in 1974, reminded Ashe that his athletic talent was a special gift not to be taken lightly. His accomplishments as a tennis player had brought him fame, respect, and a certain amount of power. Yet recent experience had confirmed he needed to be more than a great athlete. Success on the court, however glorious, was not enough to sustain his spirit.

  Nor was it enough to be popular and well liked. He also wanted to make a difference in the world, to prove his life had a deeper purpose than striking a tennis ball better than anyone else. He had suspected as much for years, but the visit to South Africa in 1973 affected him in ways that were still bubbling to the surface a year later. He now realized that while he had seen enough of the good life to know he liked it, the role of a decadent tennis playboy did not suit him. He liked to have fun, and he felt reasonably comfortable in the posh surroundings of Doral and other elite enclaves. But he couldn’t block out his responsibilities as an informed citizen painfully aware that poverty, discrimination, and vestiges of colonialism shackled much of the world’s population. “From what we get, we can make a living,” he wrote in his 1993 memoir, Days of Grace. “What we give, however, makes a life.”

  A pure athlete would have spent almost every waking moment practicing and preparing for the next big match. But that was not Ashe. On any given day, his attention was likely to be divided between tennis and a host of other interests, from the administrative details of the ATP to a developing situation in South Africa to whatever he happened to be reading that day. Although the transition to a second career as a social activist and public intellectual was far from complete in 1974, he was clearly on his way. Ashe bristled whenever sportswriters insinuated that outside interests had compromised his performance on the tennis court, but in private he sometimes conceded there might be a measure of truth in such criticisms. Even so, his grudging recognition of limitations did not stop him from trying to prove his critics wrong.18

  During the second half of 1974, Ashe had to deal with a wide range of off-court distractions—everything from Richard Nixon’s resignation on August 9 to South Africa’s Davis Cup participation to the continuing controversies surrounding Connors and WTT. Yet somehow he managed to stay on top of his on-court responsibilities. His results were respectable, especially for one of the oldest players on the tour. He made it to the quarterfinals at the Washington Star International, the WCT tournament in Louisville, the U.S. Pro Championships in Boston, and the U.S. Open.

  The competition was stiff at every stop, especially at the Open, where he lost a close match to John Newcombe. Over five grueling sets, Ashe played some of the best tennis of his life, serving and volleying with power and precision and wowing the crowd with backhand winners. Only a brief lapse in the third game of the fifth set let him down, when two double faults gave Newcombe an opening. Despite the loss, Ashe was justifiably proud of his performance—even if it was soon obscured by the hoopla surrounding Connors and Evert. Once again, as at Wimbledon, the fiancés (scheduled to be married on November 8) appeared to be fashioning parallel victories on a grand stage. This time, however, Evert lost to Goolagong in the semifinals, temporarily disrupting the fairy-tale story line. Unfazed, the reporters covering the Open hardly blinked as they fixated on the “love match” between the “princess” of Fort Lauderdale and the “riverboat gambler” from Illinois.19

  Ashe did not begrudge Connors his latest victory or his rising celebrity. And he felt nothing but admiration for Evert, despite what Ashe considered her questionable taste in men. Yet as ATP president he could not abide Connors’s callous disregard for his fellow playe
rs. He did not like Connors personally, but that was not the issue. He was convinced the players on the professional tour had to pull together to protect their common interests. Promoters and sponsors and tennis federation officials all had their own agendas and could not be trusted to look out for the players’ well-being.

  In this context, Connors’s self-serving independence was no small matter, especially after he joined the WTT lawsuit. Ashe believed, with some justification, that Connors was allowing himself to be used by Bill Riordan, a suspicion that took on new life after a French court ruled against the suit as it applied to the European federations. To many observers, the decision to continue the legal action against the ATP executives and Commercial Union Assurance seemed more personal than anti-monopolist. Connors and Riordan always put on a good show and deserved at least some of the credit for tennis’s booming popularity. But now their determination to go their own way threatened the livelihood of other players and the future of Open tennis.20

  Connors and Riordan, of course, did not see it that way, pointing out that the ATP’s legal problems represented only one of many complications challenging the tennis world in the fall of 1974. Chief among them was a developing situation in the Davis Cup competition. In January, the United States had been eliminated by lowly Colombia, but Ashe and his teammates received some consolation when all of the other world tennis powers, including mighty Australia, also fell by the wayside. Hampered by a cumbersome schedule and competing events, many of the world’s best teams were forced to play critical matches with second-line players. The result was a series of shocking upsets that ultimately reduced the field to two unexpected finalists, India and South Africa. After South Africa defeated Italy at Ellis Park in Johannesburg in early October, the championship match against India was scheduled for the same site later in the month.