The USTA’s biggest challenge was overcoming the traditional barriers of class and race. “We have not done enough to sell the sport at the grassroots level,” he insisted. “The typical tennis family profile is upper middle class. If a family doesn’t earn at least $35,000 to $40,000, you can almost forget it. . . . There are really good athletes at the lower and middle class level who just can’t afford to play tennis.” For poor blacks, of course, the situation was compounded by the lack of facilities and high-level instruction in inner-city neighborhoods. “In essence, a young black has to leave the community and go to a ‘white club,’ ” he pointed out, but “there aren’t enough of them at those clubs for blacks to feel comfortable.”13
Earlier in the year, Ashe’s singular ability to overcome these obstacles had garnered considerable attention. In March, the International Tennis Hall of Fame selected him as one of 1985’s three inductees, and two months later he was honored at Tennis magazine’s twentieth anniversary party as one of the sport’s “top 20” players and “most influential” figures of the past two decades. “During his time in tennis,” the sportswriter Dave Anderson wrote, “he has been the ‘first black’ American male in everything he has done—so much so that there has not yet been a second American black to do what he has done. To appreciate what Arthur Ashe has accomplished, imagine if Jackie Robinson were still the only black to have been voted a most-valuable player award in the major leagues, much less the only black to have been voted into the baseball Hall of Fame.”14
Ashe appreciated the accolades but found the absence of black peers profoundly depressing. “I take no satisfaction in such exclusivity,” he wrote in 1992. “I take no pride in the fact that twenty-five years after winning the U.S. Open, I am still the only black American man to have won a Grand Slam event.” As of 1985, only one other African American man, Chip Hooper, had won a professional tennis tournament of any kind, Grand Slam or otherwise. In 1982, the year his world ranking peaked at #18, Hooper captured a doubles crown in Munich, and two years later he won a second doubles title in Florence. But his best showing in singles, other than two losses in the finals of minor tournaments in France and New Zealand, was making it to the fourth round of the 1984 French Open.
Hooper’s only serious rival among black males on the tour was Rodney Harmon, but his career seemed to fizzle after a promising debut at the 1982 U.S. Open. Other than Ashe, no African American had ever made it as far as the U.S. Open quarterfinals, and this feat would not be equaled until James Blake played Andre Agassi in 2005. The other African American men following in Ashe’s footsteps in the 1980s—Marcel Freeman (#46 in 1986), Todd Nelson (#58 in 1986), Bruce Foxworth (#146 in 1979), and Juan Farrow (#227 in 1985)—generally exhibited more potential than performance. But there was much more success on the women’s side of the tour, starting with the former UCLA star Renee Blount’s singles victory at a 1979 tournament in Columbus, Ohio. She went on to have some success at Wimbledon, reaching the third round of the singles competition in 1981 and the quarterfinals of the doubles three years later.15
Leslie Allen, a former USC star from Cleveland, fared even better, reaching the fourth round of the French Open three consecutive years (1979–81), and achieving a #17 world ranking in 1981, the year she won the singles title at the Avon Championships in Detroit. An accomplished student, Allen was the first black female player to make the transition to the world of tennis administration, preceding Katrina Adams, another Ashe favorite, by several years. Retiring in 1987 at the age of thirty, Allen later served on the WTA’s board of directors and eventually established the Leslie Allen Foundation, which prepared inner-city kids for careers in off-court occupations related to professional tennis.16
To Ashe’s delight, the most successful black female players of the 1980s came out of a public parks program connected to the NJTL. At the age of ten, Zina Garrison and Lori McNeil began playing at the McGregor Park Tennis Center in Houston, where the former ATA standout John Wilkerson ran a tennis program that became a major recruiting ground for talented young black players. Soft-spoken and folksy, with a world of patience, Wilkerson recognized early on that both girls had an enormous amount of raw talent as well as a rare level of grit and determination. Carefully crafting them into powerful serve-and-volley players, he had them ready to play at the U.S. Open by the age of fifteen. Two years earlier, Wilkerson, who first met Ashe in 1965, had invited the Wimbledon champion to conduct a clinic at McGregor Park. As soon as Ashe saw the girls play, he realized their potential was unlimited. Over the next few years, he kept in close touch with both girls and helped Wilkerson—and their other coach, his boyhood friend and doubles partner Willis Thomas—to shepherd them into the world of professional tennis.
Garrison was the first to make a splash, winning both the Wimbledon and U.S. Open Junior singles titles and ending the year as the world’s number-one-ranked Junior. After turning pro in 1982, she promptly reached the singles quarterfinals of the French Open, and followed up with an even stronger showing at the 1983 Australian Open, where she made it to the semifinals. Hailed as “the new Althea Gibson,” she was ranked #10 in the world by the end of the year, even before she won her first singles title in Zurich in early 1984. Many more titles followed—14 in singles and 20 in doubles—before she retired in 1997. After winning two Olympic medals in 1988—a bronze in singles and a gold in doubles—she reached her highest world ranking, #4, in 1989.
Garrison’s greatest triumph, however, came a year later when she defeated the defending champion Steffi Graf in an epic Wimbledon semifinal match. In the final, she lost to the powerful left-hander Martina Navratilova, leaving Ashe as the only African American to win a Grand Slam title during the Open era. But her near miss foreshadowed the later achievements of Venus and Serena Williams.
Lori McNeil, Garrison’s close friend and frequent doubles partner, rounded out the top echelon of black female players during the 1980s. One month younger but two inches taller than Garrison, McNeil took longer to develop her skills, but neither Ashe nor Wilkerson ever doubted her potential for stardom. After turning pro in 1983, she won 33 WTA doubles titles and 10 singles championships, rising to a #9 world ranking by 1988. Her one Grand Slam title came that year when she paired with Jorge Lozano to win the mixed doubles competition at the French Open. But her greatest claim to fame came several years later when she twice shocked Graf with first-round upsets, at the 1992 WTA Tour Championships and at Wimbledon in 1994—the first time a defending Wimbledon singles champion was defeated in the opening round.
Like Allen and Garrison, McNeil grew close to Ashe, whom she considered a trusted friend and role model. Following her retirement from the WTA tour in 2002, she worked for three years at the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, Maryland, before accepting a position as the national coach of women’s tennis for the USTA. She also continued to work with Wilkerson and the youth programs of the NJTL and the ATA, and along the way she established the Lori McNeil Foundation.17
In late May and early June 1985, both Garrison and McNeil were in Paris for the French Open, Garrison as the sixth seed in women’s singles and McNeil as the doubles partner of Kim Sands, a tall twenty-eight-year-old who, with Ashe’s help, had become the first African American woman to win a tennis scholarship at the University of Miami. Born and raised in the Little Haiti section of Miami, Sands had developed her skills through the local NJTL and had later worked closely with Ashe at Doral. “I couldn’t have had a better teacher,” she later said of Ashe.18
Ashe was there, in part, to root for his friends and protégés, but also as a coach scouting prospective Davis Cup players. Realizing the American squad’s next Davis Cup tie would be played on the clay courts of Hamburg, he wanted to see how well Teltscher, Krickstein, and Arias handled the notoriously slow red clay and eccentricities of Roland Garros. The trip to Paris was also a vacation of sorts, a chance for him and Jeanne to enjoy the City of Light without the pressure of either performing on the court or
formally coaching his Davis Cup players. She could revisit the city’s art museums and take pictures of some of Europe’s most beautiful streetscapes, and he could spend time with old friends like Chatrier and Noah.
The opportunity to spend time with Noah was especially welcome. Ashe knew he would see Noah in New York later in the year, both at the U.S. Open and at the scheduled late-November opening of Guignol, the Frenchman’s chic new midtown Manhattan restaurant. But there was something special about a Paris reunion with the man who, more than anyone else, deserved the mantle of “the next Arthur Ashe.” Now twenty-five, Noah had won the French Open singles title in 1983 and the doubles title the following year. In 1985, however, his close friend and perennial doubles partner Henri Leconte eliminated him in the fourth round of the singles competition. Though disappointing, this early exit gave him more time to spend with Arthur and their mutual friend the jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie, who joined them at the stadium’s Le Coq Sportif lounge.
Arthur had good reason to commiserate with his friends that night. Among the American Davis Cup prospects only Krickstein survived beyond the third round, and his tournament soon ended with a devastating straight-set loss to Lendl in the fourth. With three of the eight quarterfinalists from Sweden, Ashe could not help but have flashbacks of the 1984 disaster at Göteborg. As long as the American squad was forced to play without McEnroe and Connors, the future of the U.S. Davis Cup program looked bleak.19
After Paris, Ashe was committed to spending two weeks at Wimbledon as a color commentator for HBO. But first he returned to New York to deliver the commencement address to the graduating class of the United Nations International School. Addressing 102 seniors representing forty-one different nations and twenty-seven different languages, and their families, was not a burden for a man who styled himself as an internationalist, even if it required him to cross the Atlantic twice in one week.20
This grueling international travel schedule was a bit insane for a man who had already suffered two heart attacks. But nothing could have kept him away from Wimbledon during the tenth anniversary of his epic victory over Connors. Pretty much everyone he encountered at the All England Club, or in downtown London, wanted to reminisce about the remarkable decade-old triumph, and in most cases he politely indulged their curiosity. Billie Jean King—who as the winner of the 1975 Wimbledon women’s singles title had danced the first dance with Arthur at the post-tournament ball—was no exception. In recent years she had grown increasingly close to Jeanne and Arthur, who had come to revere her not only as an all-time great on the court but also as a heroic bisexual feminist willing to stand up for the rights of women and the LGBT community.
Both considered her to be a model of personal courage and integrity virtually unequaled in the world of sports. “As far as I am concerned,” Arthur would write in 1992, “Billie Jean King is the most important tennis player, male or female, of the last fifty years.” While he admired her skills as a player, he felt her true greatness could be found in her ability to combine athletic accomplishment and social activism. “Billie Jean brings energy and imagination to just about everything she does,” he observed. “She is rare in combining unquestionable brilliance and success as a tennis player with the passion of a crusader for justice.”21
For Ashe the best aspect of the 1985 Wimbledon fortnight, other than sharing a broadcast booth with King and Barry McKay, was the appearance of three African American men—Harmon, Hooper, and Todd Nelson—in the singles draw. While only Hooper made it beyond the first round, losing to Edberg in the third, the unprecedented black presence at Wimbledon was encouraging.
On the negative side, virtually all of Ashe’s leading Davis Cup prospects suffered a repeat of their disappointing performances in Paris. One of the few Americans to survice beyond the opening round was the doubles specialist Robert Seguso, who surprised Ashe and everyone else by making it to the fourth round in singles. The biggest surprise among the “American” entrants, however, was twenty-seven-year-old Kevin Curren, a white South African who had become an American citizen earlier in the year. Though unseeded, Curren made it all the way to the championship match, upsetting both Connors and McEnroe in the process.
Although Curren lost in the finals to the seventeen-year-old German sensation Boris Becker, his near miss captured just about everyone’s attention. Aside from his performance on Centre Court, Curren’s ambiguous status—along with that of Johan Kriek, another white South African who had recently obtained American citizenship—was a major topic of conversation and controversy both during and after the Wimbledon fortnight. The question of their eligibility for selection to the U.S. Davis Cup squad was unclear, and there were sharp differences of opinion on the matter.
Ashe, in a Washington Post essay published on the last day of the tournament, took the position that the former South Africans should receive the same consideration as any other American players. This judgment, at odds with the view held by many anti-apartheid activists, was in keeping with his long-standing insistence that banning South African national teams from international competition was warranted but the routine banning of individual athletes was not. Only in Kriek’s case was Ashe’s support somewhat surprising, since the South African had embarrassed himself in an ugly incident involving Arthur Sr. during a practice session at the 1980 Richmond Open. Unaware that the black man working courtside was Arthur’s father, Kriek spoke rudely to him and ordered him around like a child. That Arthur Jr. did not hold a grudge undoubtedly surprised Kriek, but the decision to take the high road was a matter of personal pride and integrity. His support for individual South Africans was not unconditional, however. If a South African player refused to repudiate his government’s policies on apartheid, the player, in Ashe’s view, no longer had the right to play internationally.22
Following the close of Wimbledon on July 7, Arthur and Jeanne flew home to New York, where two days later they celebrated their birthdays—his forty-second and her thirty-fourth. The next day he took the train to Washington, where he joined Dell, Pasarell, and six other members of the Player’s Enterprises, Inc. board of directors for a bittersweet meeting. Since its inception in 1969, PEI had amassed an array of tennis-related businesses, but everyone agreed the time had come to sell virtually all of its properties and interests in preparation for the liquidation of the corporation. The financial arrangements agreed upon at the meeting were complicated, providing for the sale of the Le Coq Sportif sportswear company and the Potomac Tennis Club, reimbursements to ProServ, and the transfer to Charlie Pasarell of the rights to run the La Quinta Super Series Tournament.
After the meeting adjourned, Ashe and his fellow board members retired to a local watering hole to discuss their many years of collaboration and what they had just done to bring it to an end. Over the next three days, several board members remained in Washington to participate in a “35 and Over” mini-tournament connected to the Sovran Bank Classic. But Ashe was not one of them. He had just enough time to pick up Jeanne in New York and drive to Newport, Rhode Island, where his induction into the International Tennis Hall of Fame was scheduled for Saturday, July 13. When he arrived in Newport on Friday, a dozen members of his family—including his parents, Jeanne’s parents, his two brothers, his sister, and assorted nieces, nephews, and cousins—were already there.23
Normally, Ashe would have been embarrassed by all this fuss; indeed, he had never put much stock in awards and honors. The previous week at Wimbledon, he had told Bud Collins: “I’m not a guy for trophies. You wouldn’t know I have a tennis background if you came to my apartment in Manhattan. You’d have to look hard to find a small replica of the Davis Cup and the Wimbledon trophy.” Instead, he revealed, “My wife’s pictures are all over the place.” When Collins had a follow-up conversation with Ashe in Newport a few days later, the honoree conceded that being inducted into the Hall of Fame was “a great honor,” but he insisted “these things are celebrations of the past, and I don’t give much thought to the past. I’m
more interested in the future.” Collins found this to be a strange statement for someone who had spent the past two years working obsessively on a comprehensive history of black athletes, but he chalked it up to nervousness about the impending ceremony.
On the day of the induction there was no escaping the historical magnitude of the moment. The scene at the venerable Newport Casino, built in 1880 with Victorian excess and aptly characterized by Collins as “a delightful antique playpen,” was dripping with history. In his brief acceptance speech, Ashe reflected on his curious journey to the Hall. “Twenty years ago, if I told anybody I’d be in the Hall of Fame,” he declared with a wry smile, “an awful lot of people would have given me some very strange looks.” He had gotten there, he acknowledged, through a combination of hard work and faithful mentoring from several dedicated coaches and advisors. Two days earlier, in a conversation with a UPI reporter, he had singled out Dr. J as the key figure in his rise to stardom: “If there is any one person I wish could be there at Newport, it would be Dr. Johnson. He is not alive now, but he would be very pleased about it.”24
While Ashe’s famous coolness was on display, he could not hide his satisfaction that he “had been elected to the Hall both as a player and as a contributor to the game.” As he told one reporter, “I always made a conscious effort not to have wins and losses on the tennis court determine my self-esteem.” He was also proud he was being inducted in his first year of eligibility—only five years after retirement—a special tribute that he acknowledged repeatedly in his remarks to reporters. In the three decades since the establishment of the Hall, only a handful of players had been so honored.
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