Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Dell and others close to Arthur knew that for him the Davis Cup triumph was decidedly bittersweet. They could see that the captaincy had already taken a toll on a man who valued his reputation for decency and sportsmanship above all else, and some even worried his health might suffer—or that he might even sink into depression—if the McEnroe controversy continued for much longer. Dell, for one, knew Arthur needed a bit of timely help to find a way forward. In a letter written in the spirit of true friendship less than a week after the victory in Cincinnati, he avoided any mention of his earlier advice, offering instead words of appreciation and encouragement. “I wanted to write and congratulate you on winning the 1981 Davis Cup,” he wrote. “It was a real achievement and tribute to your sensitivity and leadership ability in light of the many controversies and difficult circumstances throughout the year. Working with some of your players, particularly McEnroe and Fleming, is not easy and I thought you handled it with dignity and grace.” In closing, he added: “I hope in 1982 it will get easier based on your 1981 experiences. Certainly, if you can communicate more with McEnroe where he will learn to respect and listen to you, that is a step forward for everyone, and pro tennis as well.”19

  Ashe began his second year as the U.S. Davis Cup captain with Dell’s advice in mind. Establishing a better relationship with McEnroe, he knew all too well, was the key to success. If they could find a way to work together—and a way to bring McEnroe’s intensity to bear on the points at hand, while drawing it away from the verbal sniping at opponents or linesmen—the U.S. team could repeat as champions in a manner that would make all Americans proud.

  Ashe had already decided McEnroe would remain on the team “He’ll be back with us against India the first week in March,” the captain announced on December 14. “We’re learning how to communicate. He wants to play. I want him to play. He know he’s got to behave. He’s trying. . . . He doesn’t have any choice. He either must overcome his temper or be perpetually suspended.” When asked to elaborate, he explained: “It upsets everybody. John knows that. It disrupts but he doesn’t do it to be disruptive. He can’t help himself. It’s not intentional and it’s not gamesmanship. It’s just the way he reacts naturally. We’re trying to get him to change that.” Getting control of his emotions might even bring new life to McEnroe’s career, Arthur ventured. “In Davis Cup, there’s more at stake,” he reminded the reporters. “You play harder, prepare longer and better. They expect court decorum. National pride and national honor are at stake. . . . I think Davis Cup play can be the vehicle by which he learns to control himself.”20

  The first test for McEnroe came in early March, when the U.S. squad faced India on the hard courts at Carlsbad, California. In the opening singles match, he defeated Vijay Amritraj in straight sets, but along the way he was assessed a penalty point for arguing a line call with the umpire. The penalty was warranted since under Davis Cup rules all complaints had to be relayed through the team captain. But to Arthur’s relief, McEnroe kept his cool and finished the set without incident. After Eliot Teltscher won the other opening day singles match, McEnroe and Fleming went on to clinch the tie with a win in the doubles. During the match, McEnroe yelled out a couple of choice comments, but since they were not directed at anyone in particular the umpire gave him a pass.21

  So far so good, but Arthur knew the true test would come when McEnroe found himself in a high-pressure match, possibly when the U.S. squad faced a powerful Swedish team in July. Led by seventeen-year-old Mats Wilander, who had just shocked the tennis world by winning the 1982 French Open, the Swedes figured to give the Americans all they could handle. Fortunately for the Americans, the tie would be played in St. Louis on indoor carpet, not on slow Swedish clay.

  Most tennis observers predicted the Americans would eliminate the Swedes and advance to the semifinals, but concerns about the erratic play of Teltscher and Gottfried forced Ashe to consider possible replacements for the second singles spot. He was still mulling over his options when he arrived at Wimbledon in late June to serve as a color commentator for BBC and HBO.

  One of the major stories to emerge during the first week of the 1982 Wimbledon Championships was the unexpectedly strong play of Chip Hooper, a towering six-foot-five Ashe protégé from Southern California. Three weeks earlier at the French Open, Hooper had fought his way into the round of sixteen, the first African American male to do so since Ashe in 1975. Although Connors ended Hooper’s Paris run, his world ranking rose to #23 by the time he arrived at Wimbledon. Even so, since he had never played on grass prior to the Queen’s Club tournament the week before Wimbledon, no one could have predicted his first-round mauling of the #8 seed, Peter McNamara. On a day when rain postponed most of the opening matches, Hooper’s upset win over Australia’s best player was the big news.

  After commentators marveled at the speed of Hooper’s serve, estimated at nearly 130 miles per hour, Ashe was asked about the possibility of adding the young serve-and-volley specialist to the Davis Cup team. Without painting himself into a corner, Ashe ventured there was indeed “a reasonable chance” he would turn to Hooper as a replacement for Teltscher or Gottfried—if Hooper continued to play well on the Wimbledon grass. Two days later, after Hooper played a sloppy losing match against unseeded Russell Simpson of New Zealand, Ashe reluctantly concluded his young friend from California was not quite ready for Davis Cup play.

  Ashe regretted he had raised Hooper’s hopes only to deflate them. But knowing the tough twenty-three-year-old as he did, he was confident that there wouldn’t be any lasting damage to his promising career. He was more worried about the fragile psyche of another young star. Still only twenty-two years old, McEnroe had suffered through a tough early summer. Eliminated in the early rounds of the French Open, he fought his way into the final singles match at Wimbledon only to lose to Connors in five sets. Squandering a 2–1 set lead, he couldn’t overcome Connors’s pinpoint service returns in what was then the longest Wimbledon final on record, four hours and fifteen minutes. A day earlier, he and Fleming, the defending champions, had lost the doubles final to Australians Peter McNamara and Paul McNamee.22

  When McEnroe showed up in St. Louis a week later, he was in a foul mood, still smarting from his European defeats. But somehow he found a way to channel his frustrations into a superior performance on the court. In the opening singles match, he made short work of Anders Jarryd, with the only glitch coming when he momentarily lost his composure and angrily swatted a ball into the roof. In the second singles match Teltscher lost a tough five-set struggle to Wilander, suffering an acute muscle strain in the process. This loss, plus the injury, put added pressure on McEnroe and Fleming to win the doubles competition, and they rose to the occasion with a solid win over Jarryd and Hans Simonsson.

  Prior to the tie, Ashe had considered replacing the McEnroe-Fleming duo with the Mayer brothers—Gene and Sandy—to reduce the pressure on his young star. But at the last minute he decided to stick with his talented but temperamental doubles team, whose strong performance soon confirmed the wisdom of the decision. After Gottfried lost a second-round singles match to Jarryd, the team score stood at 2–2.

  This set the stage for a dramatic winner-take-all battle between McEnroe and Wilander. With both men playing at the top of their game, the result was one of the longest matches in Davis Cup history: seventy-nine games and five sets stretching across six hours and thirty-five minutes. After McEnroe won the first two sets, Wilander came back to win the third and fourth. The third set lasted two hours and thirty-eight minutes, with the Swede finally prevailing 17–15—though not before McEnroe, in the words of one observer, vented “his frustrations at every line call he felt was wrong.” At one point, he kicked one of ESPN’s courtside cameras, and after one alleged missed call he sent a ball whizzing by a startled linesman’s head. Cool and reserved, Wilander did his best to ignore his opponent’s outbursts, but standing nervously on the sidelines Ashe worried that McEnroe would go over the edge before the match was
over. To his relief, McEnroe held it together and eventually outlasted Wilander 8–6 in the fifth set.

  The picture of the exhausted winner embracing Arthur at center court and then resting his head on the relieved captain’s shoulder was worth a thousand words. “At one point I thought it was going to go on forever,” McEnroe confessed. Pushing aside any objections to his star’s emotional outbursts, Ashe was exultant in victory. “That’s the best match you’ve ever played in your life,” he told the man who had single-handedly saved America’s chance of retaining the Davis Cup.

  Speaking to Amdur in New York the next day, he had nothing but praise for McEnroe: “It was a very satisfying weekend . . . seeing John overcome what was an obvious emotional, trying situation for him.” His relationship with McEnroe would always be complicated, he explained, but he had great respect for him both as a player and as a human being. “We’ll always have differences,” he acknowledged. “But that doesn’t stop us from working together. It’s hard for the public to understand John. He’s 23 years old. People expect the maturity of a 30-year-old because he’s No. 1 in the world. They ask the guy to dig deeper than anyone else. He had to go deeper than he’d ever gone before yesterday because he’d never gone that long before.”23

  Not everyone was willing to cut McEnroe so much slack. In the aftermath of the St. Louis tie, there were renewed calls for his removal from the team. “When the match between Wilander and McEnroe determined the outcome we accepted ‘victory’ with shame,” a man from New York City informed Ashe. “To be ashamed of McEnroe’s behavior on court is nothing new, but . . . to see you, our coach, smiling in amusement, that hurt the most.” One letter writer called McEnroe “a disgrace to the American people,” and another claimed his tantrums were “at best embarrassing: at worst, repulsive.” “Surely,” she reminded Ashe, “winning is not the sole goal of the Davis Cup competition.”

  USTA and Davis Cup officials tended to be more forgiving than traditionalist fans. After a decade of allowing Nastase, Connors, and others to test the limits of on-court behavior, the tennis establishment had lost its innocence, choosing notoriety and commercial success over adherence to rigid rules. What had once been shocking was becoming an acceptable form of entertainment that boosted television ratings and exploited celebrity. The only holdouts, it seemed, were the keepers of tradition at the All England Club and several national Davis Cup committees. Now even the world of Davis Cup was adopting a more permissive approach to player behavior, the irony being that one of its most celebrated traditionalists, Arthur Ashe, was caught up in the transition.24

  Arthur had plenty of time to puzzle over all of this as he waited for the next round of Davis Cup in the fall of 1982. For the Americans, the semifinal tie would take place in southwestern Australia, in the isolated seaside city of Perth. The opponent, an Australian team that the United States had defeated 5–0 the previous year, did not figure to put up much resistance. But Arthur was taking no chances. In early September, he added the Mayer brothers to the team as replacements for Teltscher and Gottfried. Though controversial, the move seemed to give Arthur more options since the Mayers were adept at both singles and doubles.

  Even so, he remained uncertain about the team’s overall strength in singles, and a week later he made a last-minute attempt to recruit Connors. Now thirty, Connors had just won his fourth U.S. Open singles title, defeating Lendl in the final, and his stock had never been higher as far as Ashe was concerned. “I think I understand Jimmy,” he told one reporter, implicitly referencing his own background. “His mother and his grandmother raised him with the idea that they were from the other side of the tracks. They were never part of the country-club set and they will never feel they are. . . . Jimmy works at his image. He relishes it. He’s just like Pancho Gonzales, who right to the end relished the role of the tough Mexican-American. It works and it sells. It distinguishes him from everybody else.” Arthur was even willing to overlook Connors’s notorious on-court antics and unrestrained gamesmanship. “Eighty percent of it has been good for tennis,” he insisted. “We were stuck in an emotional straightjacket for 50 years. Nastase made it easier for everybody and then Jimmy came along. He doesn’t do much harm except maybe to a few ladies in the front row.”25

  For those familiar with Arthur’s long-standing advocacy of gentlemanly behavior, this praise for Connors sounded like pandering, and perhaps in part it was. In any event, his plea to Connors went unanswered, and the public statement praising the notorious “bad boys” of tennis could not be taken back. This is fortunate for those searching for clues to Arthur’s inner life, as his statement reveals a complex position on the dictates of tennis etiquette. It seems he may not have been as much of a tennis traditionalist as his public image suggested. When it came to on-court behavior, he maintained a strict, inviolable standard for himself but not for others. He recognized that the game of professional tennis, as a commercially viable enterprise, benefited greatly from colorful characters that could attract fans and light up a crowd with their expressive personalities. At the same time, he knew he could never become one of these characters. Formed early in his career under Dr. J’s mentorship, his primary role would always be to uphold the best traditions of sportsmanship.

  This double standard not only made commercial sense; it also saved Arthur from an isolating, priggish absolutism. Despite his strong opinions and sense of purpose, he never took himself too seriously. His openness to different points of view was a key element of his popularity among his fellow touring pros, including McEnroe and the other bad boys of tennis.

  Arthur’s take on all of this is instructive. From his perspective, the roots of what amounted to a love-hate relationship with McEnroe were psychological as well as pragmatic. As Davis Cup captain, he stuck with McEnroe because he needed his skills, and he wanted to win. But there was also something deeper sustaining their partnership. The bond between them, at least for him, involved an inner transference of roles. As he explained near the end of his life, the “Superbrat” expressed his own deeply hidden impulse to be wild and free to experience a vicarious escape from his persona of coolness and control.

  “Far from seeing John as an alien,” he wrote in 1992, “I think I may have known him, probably without being fully aware of my feelings, as a reflection of an intimate part of myself. This sense of McEnroe as embodying feelings I could only repress, or as a kind of darker angel to my own tightly restrained spirit, may explain why I always hesitated to interfere with his rages even when he was excessive. . . . Now I wonder whether I had not always been aware, at some level, that John was expressing my own rage, as I could never express it; and I perhaps was even grateful to him for doing so, although his behavior was, on another level, totally unacceptable.”

  Ashe’s relationship with Connors was different. While he respected his skills, he couldn’t abide his selfishness and lone wolf ways. Unlike McEnroe, who thrived on Davis Cup play and who could always be counted on to give his all for the team, Connors rarely showed interest in anyone but himself. Although Connors’s standoffishness obviously had a lot do with his background and upbringing, Ashe grew tired of self-serving excuses. Thus, any disappointment that the talented left-hander would not be part of the squad in Perth was tempered by the likelihood that his presence would pose a threat to team morale.26

  When the Americans traveled to Perth, the only bad boys on the squad were McEnroe and Fleming, and for a few anxious hours over the Pacific there was some doubt that either of them would actually make it to the tie. After McEnroe defeated Connors in a Grand Prix final in San Francisco, he and Fleming boarded a Boeing 747 for Australia with a refueling stop in Honolulu. Leaving Honolulu, the plane experienced an aborted takeoff and later, during a second attempt to take off, a blown tire that wasn’t discovered until the plane had already flown two hours to the west. The plane eventually returned safely to Hawaii, and McEnroe and Fleming, with nerves frazzled, boarded another plane that made it to Perth without incident, deliverin
g the Americans two days late. Ashe greeted the weary travelers at 9:30 p.m. with open arms and a sigh of relief. But with McEnroe’s first match scheduled for the following morning, the captain insisted on a few minutes of practice before bedtime. When McEnroe didn’t put up a fight, other than mumbling about being exhausted, Ashe sensed their relationship had entered a new, more cooperative stage.

  The next day, braving jet lag and a raucous Aussie crowd, the intrepid American star defeated McNamara in four sets. But along the way he was assessed a conduct warning and a penalty point by the umpire, Patrick Flodrops of France. At one point, he argued vehemently with both Flodrops and referee Jacques Dorfman after an alleged missed call on the baseline cost him a service break. Although Ashe agreed with McEnroe, he pleaded with him to accept the ruling and move on.

  Following the match, McEnroe acknowledged he and his captain had radically different “philosophies concerning conduct in Davis Cup matches.” “I really felt I got some bad calls,” he insisted. “At break point in the fourth set I thought the ball was well inside the line, and Arthur thought so, too. But he didn’t say anything. I wanted his support.” Ashe also had to deal with carping from Gene Mayer, who, after defeating John Alexander in the other singles match, complained that his “ranking and record” justified a much earlier selection to the team. “I always made myself available,” he pointed out, “but Ashe picked others.” The U.S. team went on to blank the Australians 5–0, but clearly Ashe had some fences to mend before the Americans squared off against the French in the final tie scheduled for late November.27

  Fortunately, the Davis Cup schedule allowed Ashe to spend a few days away from the pressures of his captaincy. But, in typical fashion, he used the time to attend to several of the other commitments that marked a frenetic lifestyle beyond anything one would expect of a man with a recent history of heart disease. “Consider Arthur Ashe,” Joseph Durso wrote in The New York Times on November 10, two weeks before the final tie. “There may be busier people in sports . . . but probably not many. His tennis-playing career . . . was shortened by heart surgery. But he returned to become captain of the United States Davis Cup team, which meets France in the final round, starting Nov. 26 in Grenoble. So, Captain Ashe will fly to Europe next week for that. First, though, he must return from Japan, where he gave a series of clinics on tennis. He will do that today. Then, he can sit in front of a television screen to catch himself in yet another role: star on a daytime soap opera, ‘The Doctors,’ on NBC-TV.”