Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Whatever the source of Connors’s dominance, Ashe was impressed—and more than a little concerned. He had less than twenty-four hours to recover from his match with Roche and to figure out some way to counter Connors’s all-around brilliance. He wanted to beat Connors in the worst way, especially after watching him strut around like the cock of the walk. But how any mortal was going to do it remained a mystery as he left the stadium for his hotel. The ride back to the Westbury gave him some time to think and reflect on the challenge ahead, but when he walked into the lobby he was still uncertain about how to neutralize Connors’s combination of speed, agility, and power.

  Even so, Connors’s annihilation of Tanner had confirmed Ashe’s suspicions and made one thing crystal clear: it would be foolish to try to overpower him. As Evans later put it, “Feed Connors pace and you are dead. He had tried it. He knew. But everyone else knew that Arthur’s whole game was based on power. How many times had we seen him go down hitting, seemingly unable to change the magical pattern of that beautiful flowing game of his. It was magical when it worked, but anything that allowed so little margin for error was liable to come apart at the seams and Ashe’s game had often done just that. The way Connors took the ball early and stepped into those howitzer drives of Ashe’s spelt doom for the black American and there didn’t seem to be anything Arthur could do about it. At least that was what everyone believed.” Everyone, that is, but Ashe and a few of his friends—and surprisingly enough Bill Riordan. Unbeknownst to Ashe, Connors had aggravated a foot injury during the Tanner match, after which Riordan took the ailing star to Chelsea Hospital for an examination. The doctors at Chelsea recommended withdrawal from the tournament, counseling that his failure to do so might result in a career-ending injury. Unmoved, Connors brushed off their concerns and vowed to play on. Riordan, always looking for the main chance, also played on—leaving Connors at their hotel while he visited his bookmaker to place a large bet on Ashe.

  Later in the evening, Arthur gathered a group together to discuss strategy. More than friends, they represented some of the best minds in tennis: Dell, Riessen, Pasarell, Erik Van Dillen, and Freddie McNair. These were men who knew his game almost as well as he did, and who probably wanted Connors to lose as much as he did. While he didn’t expect any of them to come up with a perfect plan, he hoped for some sage advice as well as moral support. It made him feel better just to have his trusted friends close at hand. Although Connors might win, as a lone wolf he would probably never enjoy the kind of camaraderie and mutual respect that Arthur’s circle of advisors provided.18

  Fortunately, Arthur found more than consolation that evening. As his friends peppered him with suggestions, a clear course of action began to take shape. McNair started it off with the admonition: ‘You’ve got to play through his strengths to his weaknesses.” When Arthur responded, “That’s easy enough to say,” Dell jumped in: “You can do it if you put your mind to it. But it involves changing your style of play.” Predictably, Arthur’s first thought was that the night before the Wimbledon final was hardly the time to reinvent oneself. But he was willing to listen and learn. As he recalled the scene, “We broke down Jimmy’s game, shot by shot. His major weakness was the low forehand approach shot. Also he liked pace, and he loved opening up the court hitting cross-court. If you tried to open up the court, he would try to open it wider. I had to go wide on both sides with my serves and keep as many balls as possible down the middle. Keep the ball low. And pray.” Several hours earlier Ralston had called to offer the same advice. Always the coach, he boiled it all down to a single maxim: “Chip the ball. Don’t hit over. Chip it. You want to make him hit up all the time. . . . Don’t hit the ball hard. No pace. No pace.”19

  By the time the gathering broke up a few minutes before nine, Ashe had a definite plan in mind, one that involved hitting shots seldom seen on the grass courts at Wimbledon. “I could hit a slice forehand,” he later explained. “But sliced forehands were a shot that players used in the 1920s; we saw it more at the club level, on clay courts, than on the tour. But I knew I could use the sliced forehand if I had to. I also had a backhand slice, and I made up my mind that slices were going to be my bread-and-butter shots. . . . When he served, I would chip the ball down the middle and short because the grass was worn down the middle, the ball wasn’t going to bounce very high. . . . If he came to the net, I would lob to his backhand side.”20

  It was all very exciting to think about, but no strategy would mean much if he were too tired to play at full tilt. By all rights, he should have retired for the night after the strategy session ended. But he didn’t. His friends were going to the Playboy Club for a late dinner and a bit of blackjack, and he went, too. When he finally went to bed around one in the morning, he felt a few pangs of guilt. But he doubted that anything he did prior to the match would matter very much.21

  He arrived at Wimbledon around midday expecting to experience one of two extremes—either complete humiliation or the sweetest of triumphs. He suspected the former was much more likely, especially after walking past the betting tent. There on the big board were the current odds: Connors, 3 to 20 to repeat as champion, and 9 to 10 to win in straight sets. At least he now knew what the oddsmakers thought of his chances—not much. On the positive side, he expected most of the crowd to be with him. Perhaps the most adventuresome among them might even take a risk and bet on him. But no amount of support would mean very much if the chip-and-lob strategy let him down.22

  Strangely enough, the long odds had a calming effect during the final minutes before the match. For once, Ashe decided he had nothing to lose, even by adopting what might appear to be a foolhardy strategy. He felt loose and supremely confident as he joined Connors for the traditional Centre Court walk-on. “I had the strangest feeling that I just could not lose,” he insisted in a 1985 interview with World Tennis magazine.23

  Taking the ceremonial bow before the Royal Box, the two finalists made quite a pair—Connors, short and compact with his mop of hair and freckled skin; Ashe, tall and lean with his Afro and chocolate brown skin. The sharp contrast extended even to their warm-up clothing, with Connors wearing a red, white, and green sweater designed by his friend the former Italian star Sergio Tacchini, and Ashe wearing a dark blue Davis Cup pullover emblazoned with the letters “U.S.A.” in red. Some observers later suggested Ashe was trying to needle Connors by wearing the Davis Cup apparel, and they were probably right. Ashe was in no position to overlook any potential advantage, and reminding Connors that he and Riordan were on the unpopular side of the Davis Cup controversy couldn’t hurt.24

  Riordan himself was sitting in the friends box along with professional tennis’s most infamous stage mother—Gloria Connors—and Susan George, looking beautiful as ever but also appearing as the “other woman” who had edged Evert aside. Always a sentimental favorite at Wimbledon, Evert had lost in the semifinals to Billie Jean King, and now it was clear that she had lost Connors, too. Since most of the crowd had no idea that she and Connors actually had parted ways weeks earlier, seeing George as the girlfriend unfairly reinforced Connors’s image as the bad boy on the court. Ashe, of course, didn’t care about any of this. He was just glad to see that Dell and his other ATP friends were on hand, clustered in the stands as an unofficial rooting section.25

  The match began on time at two o’clock under a gray sky, with Connors serving first. He held serve, as did Ashe in the second game. So far there were no surprises and no hint of what was about to happen. In the third game Ashe took Connors to add out and, after a furious rally, appeared to have broken serve when Connors hit the ball beyond the baseline. But to Ashe’s astonishment the linesman called the ball good. Fortunately, the venerable umpire, George Armstrong, who knew the shot had floated long, soon announced, “The ball was out, game to Ashe.” Connors grimaced and pointed an index finger to the sky, but the game was over. Now leading 2–1, Ashe went on a tear, winning the last four games of the first set and the first three of the second. The fo
urteen thousand fans at Centre Court, and the millions watching on television, could hardly believe what they were witnessing. The great Jimmy Connors, the prohibitive favorite, had lost the first set 6–1, and he was being bageled in the second.26

  After a disappointed patron shouted “C’mon Connors” during the changeover between the third and fourth games, Connors yelled back, “I’m trying, for Christ’s sake.” He went on to hold serve in the fourth game, breaking Ashe’s string. But after that he had no consistent answer to Ashe’s off-pace returns and steady serve-and-volley game. Ashe handily won the last three games of the set. Having not lost a set in his first six matches at Wimbledon, the number one seed had now lost two in a row, winning only two games.27

  Connors played much better in the third set, using every shot in his arsenal to fight his way back into the match. Ashe knew Connors was nothing if not a scrapper—and was certainly young and strong enough to wear down an older opponent. So this was no time to play cautiously or sit on a lead. Ashe made a valiant effort to close out the match in straight sets, but he couldn’t do it. He was on serve at 5–6 and serving to even the set when Connors broke through to win the third. With the crowd murmuring and sensing a momentum shift, Ashe tried to compose himself. But it wasn’t easy with Connors suddenly coming on like a thrashing bull. After Connors broke Ashe’s serve in the second game and held in the third, the defending champion was up 3–0. Describing one winning exchange by Connors as “a rally for the gods” and commenting that the defending champion might be “an arrogant young man but what a tennis player,” the BBC television commentator prepared his audience for a classic comeback.28

  At that point, it looked like nothing short of a miracle could stop Connors from winning the set and squaring the match at two sets each. He had come back from the dead before, and now it seemed he was doing it again. And certainly no one could be surprised that Ashe—one week from his thirty-second birthday—was running out of gas. Besides, tennis fans were accustomed to seeing him finish second; always a bridesmaid but never a bride, as more than one sportswriter put it. After two hours of disbelief, there were smiles and knowing looks among the bookies at the betting tent and among Connors’s loyal friends and supporters. Dell and the ATP crowd could hardly watch as Ashe walked out to hit his first serve in the crucial fourth game. Years later, Richard Evans recalled the palpable sense of impending doom as Ashe’s triumph seemed on the verge of slipping away: “Now what price for Ashe’s brave tactics? Would Arthur’s nerve hold? Would he continue with the pre-match plan to slow-ball Connors into oblivion or would he find, as danger loomed, the wholly natural desire to resort to type and play his normal game too tempting? At change-overs, Ashe was still sitting motionless in his chair, eyes closed like some meditating Buddha, letting his whole mind sink into a state of complete relaxation for 30 seconds.”

  Once he was back on the court with his eyes wide open, Ashe showed no signs of panic—or of abandoning his chip-and-lob strategy. He won the first point and lost the second, before forcing Connors to hit the ball wide. At 30–15, Ashe served an ace wide to the left, and suddenly he had a chance to stop Connors’s run. At game point, he missed his first serve but spun the second one in, hoping somehow Connors wouldn’t crush it. Taking advantage of the short second serve, Connors stepped forward and hit a blistering forehand to Ashe’s right. For a split second it looked like a sure winner, but Ashe managed to lunge and hit a low backhand volley beyond Connors’s reach. The game score was now 3–1 in Connors’s favor.

  “We are really watching a tremendous battle here,” the BBC announcer exclaimed at the beginning of game five, and both men soon proved him right. The advantage went back and forth, with Connors finally moving to game point with a strong first serve that Ashe barely touched. But Ashe fought back, winning one point on a great chip shot to Connors’s left and another on a backhand volley. At break point, Ashe hit a spectacular forehand passing shot that had Connors flailing. Suddenly, the game score was 3–2, and the set was back on serve. Ashe held serve in the sixth and eighth games, and Connors did the same in the seventh, thanks to three backhand errors by Ashe.

  In the ninth game, Connors served with new balls, and Ashe couldn’t handle the tremendous kick on the first serve. On the second point, Connors again hit a powerful first serve, forcing Ashe into a desperate backhand lob return. Thinking the lob was out, Connors pulled his racket down at the last second, but the ball grazed the baseline. This “error in judgment,” as the courtside commentators called it, drew a murmur from the crowd that seemed to unnerve Connors. He failed to win another point, giving the game and the lead to Ashe. As improbable as it seemed, one more game and the championship was his.29

  In the tenth game, with Ashe serving for the match, Connors managed one cross-court winner. But otherwise Ashe was in command. On the final point, he served hard and wide to Connors’s backhand, and the soft return barely made it to the net, where the new champion swatted it down. “He has done it. He really has done it,” the BBC announcer cried out, momentarily abandoning his British reserve as a crescendo of applause filled the stadium. “What a terrific scene. That’s a final we shall never forget.”30

  For Ashe, after nearly three hours of frenzy and a lifetime of anticipation, it was a moment of almost pure joy. “When I took the match point,” he recalled, “all the years, all the effort, all the support I had received came together. My first thought and only sad moment was that Dr. Johnson had not lived to see my greatest victory.” In the past he had sometimes felt pangs of remorse after drubbing an opponent, but not this time. As soon as the final point was over, he turned to the section where Dell and his friends were sitting and raised a clenched fist. Some were surprised by this expression of emotion, and he later confessed this was “the only time in my career that I would feel such an urge.” But as he told one reporter after the match, “That was for the friends who have stuck with me. It was for Donald Dell and Jack Kramer and Bob Briner, and the whole ATP board.”31

  Some observers, then and later, saw something different in Ashe’s gesture. To their eyes, he had given a Black Power salute reminiscent of the clenched fists raised by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Though much briefer than the Mexico City incident—Smith and Carlos kept their arms fully extended and their black gloves raised high throughout the playing of the American national anthem—Ashe’s salute represented, in the words of tennis historian Sundiata Djata, “a black power symbol . . . an action that seemed ‘momentous’ for some whites who thought of Ashe as being quiet and shy.” Ashe himself denied any political intent, dismissing any direct association with Black Power, but this did little to dispel the myth that his behavior was racially motivated. According to one account written in 2007, the 1975 Wimbledon champion had “displayed the second most famous clinched fist ever by a black athlete.”32

  Whatever it was, the gesture was over in a flash. Lowering his arm, Arthur walked slowly to the net for a quick handshake. He then took a seat to wait for the presentation of the trophies. During the ceremony that followed, he and Connors both did their best to avoid each other, and there was no pretense of affection. When asked about the apparent awkwardness a few minutes later in the interview room, Arthur made no attempt to sugarcoat the situation. “He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything,” he confessed. A barrage of other questions followed, but Arthur remained, as one reporter put it, “as outwardly cool as ever.” When one questioner suggested this had to be the Wimbledon champion’s greatest day in tennis, he shocked almost everyone by shaking his head from side to side. “No, winning the Davis Cup in ’68 would be first,” he replied. “And winning Forest Hills in ’68 was second until this one.”33

  The candor continued. Responding to a reporter who wanted to know if the win over Connors had surprised him, Arthur stated matter-of-factly: “When I walked on the court, I thought I was going to win. I felt it was my destiny.” When asked the obvious follow-up question—wa
s he surprised by the ease with which he had dispatched Connors—Ashe paused, but after thinking about it for a moment, he threw caution and false modesty aside. “If you’re a good player,” he advised, “and you find yourself winning easily, you’re not surprised.” Later, when one reporter asked for an evaluation of Connors’s performance, he did not hesitate to characterize his opponent’s failings as partly psychological, noting that roughly two thirds of Connors’s errors had fallen “into the middle of the net.” “He hardly ever put the ball behind the baseline,” Arthur explained. “That’s a sign of choking.”34

  Understandably, this explanation did not sit well with Connors. “Any guy has to play out of his mind to beat me,” he told the reporters a few minutes later, after learning of Ashe’s comments. “I’m not going to lose the match. Got to beat me. And he beat me today.” After a pause, he repeated the word “today” with emphasis, suggesting the outcome would be different the next time. “I don’t choke, my friend,” he added, glaring at the reporter who had quoted Ashe. “I’ve been playing too long to choke.” Prompted by another reporter, he turned to the Davis Cup controversy and his feud with Ashe and the ATP. Reasserting he was his own man and that no one should expect him to go along with the crowd, he was feisty to the end. Asked if he planned to attend the Wimbledon Ball that evening, he quipped: “If I can have the first dance,” an honor traditionally reserved for the men’s and women’s singles champions.35