Days of Grace

by Arthur Ashe

  The tension between McEnroe and me reached a climax not against Australia but at the finals against Argentina in November. We were playing at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, Ohio. Before the match I let it be known that I was prepared to surrender and default the match if we misbehaved again. When word reached McEnroe, he chose to attack the reporters: “Why do you guys write about that stuff? All you want to do is sell newspapers!” John never fully accepted the fact that if he persisted in misbehaving, he could not win battles with the print media.

  Once again, incidentally, Connors had teased and then eluded us. Apparently he had planned a ski trip for the same time as the final; or was it that he needed to rest? He had the cheek to call a cable television call-in talk show where I was a guest and wish us well. “It would be a lot easier,” I told him, “if you were with us.” Which is about my limit in sarcasm. After the match, I said that we would invite Connors again, “but we won’t chase him anymore, that’s for sure.”

  There was great tension among the players in Cincinnati. The glamorous and talented Argentinean stars Guillermo Vilas and Jose Luis Clerc, egged on by their Latin brand of vanity, which seemed almost limitless, made it clear that they could barely stand one another’s presence; yet they were to represent their country not only in singles matches but also as doubles partners. For McEnroe, however, this was a grudge match par excellence. The previous year, in Buenos Aires, he had lost Davis Cup matches to both Vilas and Clerc. He had lost on clay—his least favorite surface—before a tumultuous, heckling crowd that he obviously had not forgotten or forgiven. Now, at home and on a fast synthetic surface, he wanted blood.

  In the first match, he overran Vilas in straight sets, 6–3, 6–2, 6–2. Vilas had trouble with his first serve, and McEnroe pounded his second without mercy. A brilliant player and a famously sensitive man who wrote poetry, Vilas was so wounded by this thrashing that he refused to come to the interview room. Instead, he pouted and sulked in his tent. “Tell him to send us a poem,” one wag in the press corps jibed. Then Roscoe Tanner, fighting hard but with his game clearly unstable against a wily, resourceful opponent, lost to Clerc, also in straight sets. The doubles match became crucial.

  Although Was and Clerc disliked one another, and seldom played together, they stepped on the doubles court primed for the match. They were an artful, intelligent duo. On the fast surface, they decided to try standing back deep when receiving the powerful serves of Fleming and McEnroe and to lob over the Americans at the net. They would try switching sides after each set, as they were allowed to do. And they would also use little tricks of gamesmanship, including subtle delaying tactics and polite but needling remarks. The Argentineans hoped to rattle McEnroe and perhaps even provoke him into a ballistic explosion. They succeeded perfectly. Well, almost perfectly.

  By the end of the third set, with the U.S. leading 6–3, 4–6, 6–4, McEnroe’s temper was at white heat. In addition to needling by Vilas and Clerc, a group of Argentinean fans had goaded him throughout the match with insults in English and Spanish; John seemed to understand insults in both languages. “We’ll see who wins!” he screamed at one point to the foreign fans in a classic display of the passion that drove him both to victories and to unpardonable lapses in behavior. Most of what he said to Vilas and Clerc is unprintable, at least by me. Then, just after the third set, he reached a flash point. Because of an earlier delay to repair the synthetic surface, the referee canceled the usual ten-minute break after the third set, a feature of Davis Cup tennis. Everyone knew that. But as McEnroe prepared to serve, Vilas and Clerc devilishly packed their bags as if on their way to the locker room. McEnroe exploded in anger. “Let me know when you’re ready, all right?” he yelled. “We got all afternoon.” The four players closed at the net, railing at one another and obviously close to exchanging blows. I rushed up to McEnroe, literally to protect him. I also thought of the millions of television viewers who were now momentarily transfixed.

  “John, get to the line and serve! Now!” I pointed at the base line.

  John glowered. No doubt he thought for a split second about smacking me with the racket, then stamped over to the line. He served and won the game. Then, changing ends, Clerc and McEnroe went at it verbally.

  “John. Peter. You have to quit now,” I insisted. “This is a disgrace. You cannot continue like this. I do not want to hear another obscenity out here. You are playing for the United States. Remember that!”

  I thought I saw John pull himself together. But then, as he walked onto the court, Clerc looked at him sweetly and lisped, provocatively, “You’re so nice!”

  “Go fuck yourself!” McEnroe screamed.

  I was stunned. I stormed onto the court, and John and I exchanged some bitter words for a few seconds. This time I thought I might punch John. I have never punched anyone in my life, but I was truly on the brink of hitting him. I had never been so angry in my life. I couldn’t trust myself not to strangle him. Of course, if I had, any jury would have acquitted me.

  I was by no means the only person appalled. Philippe Chatrier, the elegant president of the International Tennis Federation and a former Davis Cup captain of France, walked out of the stadium. “I felt so embarrassed for my hosts,” he said, “I eventually got up and left.” McEnroe was out of control. Once he even deliberately insulted a middle-aged black linesman by calling him “boy,” as if he had searched hard to find something unusually insulting to say to an official.

  At the same time, I could hardly believe the quality of tennis John and Peter were playing. Their volleying was spectacular and they refused to die. Vilas served for the match at 7–6, but John and Peter scorched him with four blistering returns, from which he and Clerc never quite recovered. We won the last set, 11–9, to take the match. “If people don’t think Davis Cup is different from a regular tournament,” McEnroe pronounced, “then they didn’t see what happened out there today.” The umpire, Bob Jenkins of Britain, spoke for most of the spectators: “I don’t think I’ve ever been involved in a more exciting match.”

  Still, my anger wouldn’t abate. It was so powerful, it astonished me. I thought of one of my favorite lines of verse, from a poem by John Dryden: “Beware the fury of a patient man.” I tossed and turned that night. Then, getting up at six-thirty the next morning, Sunday, I placed telephone calls to Marvin Richmond and to Gordon Jorgensen, the chairman of our Davis Cup committee. I got them out of bed.

  “I’ve had it,” I told Richmond. Once more, I thought of Tony Trabert. “This cannot continue. What John and Peter did out there was absolutely inexcusable. In thirty years of competitive tennis I have never seen anything like it. Even close to it. It makes us look bad, all of us, including the United States as a nation. I want to forfeit the match if McEnroe acts anything like that again. I need your support.”

  “You have it.”

  A few hours later, when I sat face to face with McEnroe, we were barely polite to one another. In an icy tone, I told him I had spoken to Richmond and Jorgensen and had their backing. If he acted as disgracefully in his match today as he had behaved yesterday, the United States would default the match. I told him flatly that our national honor was at stake.

  McEnroe listened stonily. He never said a word until I was finished. Then he asked, “Is that all?”

  “Yes, that’s all.”

  He got up and left the room. Later, on court, he kept his distance from me, and I from him. We, captain and player, were like total strangers. I wasn’t happy about the situation, but I had no stomach for fake camaraderie or ersatz shows of friendship.

  Secretly I wanted John to act badly again, so that I could lower the hammer on him and forfeit the match. No one had ever stood up to McEnroe, and I was sure that his behavior would have been different if someone had done so when he was younger. Of course, he was still young—only twenty-two years old—which is one reason I thought he could learn something from a default.

  Holding his emotions in check, McEnroe proceeded to pla
y an extraordinarily gutsy, magnificent match against Clerc. John lost the second and the fourth sets, then somehow fired himself up for one last, titanic effort in the fifth. He attacked Clerc’s serve relentlessly, and on his own serve he surrendered only four points in the last set. He won the match 7–5, 5–7, 6–3, 3–6, 6–3.

  Later, I called our differences “intrafamilial fights.” Clearly McEnroe, too, was sorry about the bad blood that had arisen between us. He complained about my demeanor, which he found too placid. “Not too much needs to be said,” he ventured. “But I think there’s a happy medium. You don’t want him to say too much but it’s almost uncomfortable if he says nothing at all.”

  LOOKING BACK ON my Davis Cup captaincy more than ten years after it started, I think I am starting to understand exactly what McEnroe and his fiery personality may have meant to me. Neil Amdur, who collaborated with me on my book Off the Court, suggested in an essay in 1983 that McEnroe and I were poles apart in personality, perhaps even irreconcilable, because he freely expressed his rage while I repressed mine. Neil traced my repression back to the death of my grandfather and mother in the span of one year during my childhood, and especially my father’s grief when my mother died when I was seven. “The sight of adult family members sobbing and wailing,” Amdur wrote, “admittedly frightened Ashe. To protect himself, he built an emotional wall that extends to his friends, family and tennis. Each time McEnroe loses control on the court in a Davis Cup match, it forces Ashe to deal with the most delicate frames in his psyche.”

  Perhaps this is true. I suspect now that McEnroe and I were not so far apart, after all. Far from seeing John as an alien, 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, although I sometimes had to do so. Now I wonder whether I had not always been aware, at some level, that John was expressing my own rage, my own anger, for me, as I never could express it; and I perhaps was even grateful to him for doing so, although his behavior was, on another level, totally unacceptable.

  Perhaps my sense of kinship with him also explains the trance—totally inappropriate in a captain, I’m sure—that I sometimes slipped into when I watched John play, and that many people took to be remoteness or indifference, which it could never have been. At one point, speaking to a reporter who was intent on probing the nature of our relationship and who was puzzled by my apparent aloofness at courtside, I used some telling words (unconsciously, I am sure) to describe my odd state of mind as I watched John. “I know it looks funny when John’s playing and I’m just sitting there, staring into space most of the time,” I told the reporter. Then I quickly had to cancel out the image of myself as a dreamer. “But what am I supposed to do, put on a show and ask him the time, or what the weather’s like?”

  I developed a deep affection for McEnroe, and also a genuine respect for his character and integrity that defused my outrage at behavior often so different from my own. I found ways to forgive him, and I tried to give him what he asked for. Some critics chose to interpret my attitude as obsequiousness before a star. I was blamed for indulging McEnroe instead of cracking the whip—as if one could crack the whip on a multimillionaire genius of a tennis player. The charge of obsequiousness makes no sense to me. I myself had been a star. I had never been a star of John’s magnitude, but I can’t imagine myself being obsequious to another tennis player. What bound me to McEnroe was not simply his rage but also his selflessness in making sacrifices to play for our country, and his artistry on the tennis court. I couldn’t resist that combination. I began to see him as a brother. He was, in some ways, an incorrigible brother; but our fights were indeed, in my mind, “intrafamilial.”

  OUR NEXT CAMPAIGN, in 1982, was far less controversial, yet it had its share of drama. With McEnroe again loyal, together with an excellent supporting cast, we were supposed to be almost invincible against most nations. We duly defeated India easily. We were then supposed to roll over Sweden in the quarterfinals in July in St. Louis, Missouri. The commanding Borg, after all, had retired. Unfortunately, no one told Mats Wilander and Anders Jarryd that they were supposed to lose.

  Five days after losing a long match in the singles final at Wimbledon to Connors, McEnroe beat Jarryd in the first match. Then Wilander, seventeen years old and the recent victor in the French Open, scored an upset over Eliot Teltscher, then one of the top ten players in the world. The United States won the doubles, to make the score 2–1. During the night, however, Teltscher developed severe back spasms. I replaced him with Brian Gottfried, also in the top ten. His opponent, Jarryd, was in the top forty. Although he tried hard, Gottfried then played the worst Davis Cup match of his career as Jarryd prevailed 6–2, 6–2, 6–4. The tie came down to McEnroe against Wilander.

  This deciding match lasted 6 hours, 39 minutes, as Wilander and McEnroe played 79 games. If anyone could fully appreciate what the players were enduring, I certainly could. In 1970, I had played in the longest singles match in Davis Cup history: 86 games, against Christian Kuhnke of West Germany. That match was an ordeal I will never forget. Once again, the sustaining element for me was the fact that I was representing my country. I couldn’t lower the flag because of physical fatigue or a lack of willpower. I was determined that the United States would prevail. I won that match.

  McEnroe won the first two sets, then Wilander took the next two (the third went 15–17 against John). The struggle in the fifth was wondrous to behold. This was one of the few times when I ventured to advise McEnroe about his playing. “I know you’re tired but you’ve got to be patient,” I told him. “Don’t come to the net and try to hit a crazy shot like you would against somebody else in some other match. You’ve got to be patient and wait to hit a good shot.” John listened intently, as in fact he always did on those few occasions when I offered him tennis advice.

  Both men held serve until the fourteenth game, when McEnroe broke Wilander’s serve and closed out the fifth and deciding set. We embraced, he wept, and I whispered my congratulations.

  “John, that’s the greatest match you have ever played in the Davis Cup.”

  To the press, he was generous in praise of Wilander, and characteristically modest and self-effacing about his own effort: “I thought this match would go on forever, and it was frustrating. I should have won the match easier. It was a mental effort just to stay out there.”

  I was certain that my admiration for McEnroe’s mental resilience could not possibly grow after that match. Then he took my breath away against Australia, down under in Perth. After enduring a terrible three-day flight from San Francisco, he and Fleming arrived at Perth two days behind schedule, at night. At midnight, he went out and practiced. Then he defeated Peter McNamara in four sets, teamed with Fleming to take the doubles, and dispatched John Alexander to complete a 5–0 rout of Australia by the United States. Playing well, Gene Mayer won the other singles matches.

  The 1982 final took place indoors in a happy, festive atmosphere in Grenoble, France. Although the French were justifiably proud of their young team, which included the ascendant Yannick Noah and the promising teenagers Henri Leconte and Thierry Tulasne, they adored McEnroe and above all were happy to be in the Cup final. I was happy to see the French doing well. Philippe Chattier, who had been a very good friend to tennis professionals and the ATP when the old guard still obstructed our path, had almost singlehandedly reversed the French fortunes in tennis. When I telephoned him one day in 1971 with the news that I had just seen a remarkably gifted eleven-year-old boy playing on a court in Africa, Chatrier responded in his typically generous way. He acted on the tip, and the brightest star in French tennis since the famed “Musketeers” of the 1920s was born: Yannick Noah.

  In Grenoble, Yannick was a remarkable sight. At six feet four inches, he had
always been commanding and yet sweet and gentle. However, he had just dreadlocked his hair (for his sister’s wedding), and it radically altered his image; the classically featured Yannick now looked like a Rastafarian, rather fierce. McEnroe, of course, was not about to be intimidated by anyone. “The only thing I’m scared about,” he assured a reporter about Noah, “is his hair.”

  Against Noah and his dreadlocks, John stared down Medusa and took the first set, 12–10. Then, John lost the next two sets before lifting his game almost effortlessly, winning the last set 6–2. I was never worried much, even though John did not care for the clay surface. Seeking an edge, our hosts had trucked in about three hundred tons of rock, soil, and crushed brick to simulate the clay at Roland Garros stadium in Paris. Fortunately for us, the surface was not particularly slow. “When it gets to the fifth,” I told reporters later, “I feel confident John’s going to win, on anything—even popcorn.”

  Our team spirit was so high in Grenoble in part because our other singles player was Gene Mayer. Gene and his brother Sandy were both fine players, well prepared by their father, a professional coach. Like McEnroe, both brothers had played at Stanford University for coach Dick Gould. Friendly and generous, Gene also possessed one of the sharpest minds I have ever known in the tennis world; he was a brilliant student who excelled at intellectual tests. Far from being bookishly aloof, Gene was a happy chatterer, who lifted his teammates’ spirits with his endless stream of talk. Oddly enough, as a tennis player Mayer was full of little fears and insecurities. The playing conditions had to be just right for him to play his best. They were good enough in his first singles match of the 1982 final and he won easily in four sets against the gifted but erratic teenager Leconte.