Days of Grace

by Arthur Ashe

  McEnroe never fell asleep in the doubles match with Fleming against Noah and Leconte, unlike in his singles match against Noah. In the ten games in which he served, John lost only eleven points. And thus we won the Davis Cup for the second year in a row. Champagne flowed in our locker room. One of the happiest persons in the room was Gene Mayer’s father, Alex Mayer, who had emigrated to the United States from Hungary, where he had played Davis Cup tennis. One of his dreams had been to see one or both of his sons help win the Cup for the United States. At the presentation ceremony I delivered my little speech, jokes and all, in French. The crowd loved it, and even laughed at my jokes. (I hope they weren’t laughing at my French.) I have always believed that learning a second language must be a goal for any educated person. I could never understand why we Americans blithely expect other people to speak English but make little or no effort to learn foreign languages. Years later, I was pleased to see Jim Courier speak French as he accepted the singles trophy at Roland Garros after winning the French Open.

  We had hardly digested our victory before we learned that in the next Davis Cup competition, we had to open by playing the Argentineans in Argentina. The previous year, Argentina had lost to France in the first round, so they were at the bottom of the draw although they were certainly one of the top four teams in the world. And because they had last played us in the United States, they could now play us at home. This was a far cry from the days of old, when the champion nation rested and waited before playing in the Challenge Round of the Cup at home.

  In March 1983—on clay, of course, and outdoors—Argentina crushed the United States, 4–1. Again, McEnroe showed extraordinary heart. Vilas and Clerc, both ranked in the top ten (as were McEnroe and Gene Mayer), called a truce in their endless bickering about who was Argentina’s darling and took full advantage of the blazing Argentinean summer sun. Vilas defeated Mayer 6–3, 6–3, 6–4. Then Clerc bore down on McEnroe. He took the first two sets, 6–4, 6–0, and all seemed lost. John was nursing a bad shoulder, which our trainer and I massaged whenever we could. Under a cloudless sky, his face sunburnt, his nose as red as Rudolph’s, John fought off a relentless Clerc and a heckling, hectoring crowd of 10,000 to take the next two sets.

  At 2–2 in the fifth set, with darkness enveloping us, everyone on our side wanted me to insist that play be suspended for the night. But I let it go on, then spoke up finally when the score reached 5–2, with McEnroe trailing but about to serve. “The most pressure is trying to serve out a match,” I explained later. The next day, I was vindicated. John held his serve, then broke the nervous Clerc. Next, John held his serve to even the score at 5–5. But the effort was too much. The fire went out of McEnroe’s game, and he lost the set 5–7.

  John and Peter won the doubles, but again we played five sets, and with explosions from McEnroe, who had been dubbed “El Irascible” by the national daily newspaper La Prensa. At one point, El Irascible started to climb into the stands to attack one persistently rude fan. He twice loudly denounced the people of Argentina as a nation, and in the process of picking up a penalty point he dismissed Nicola Pietrangeli, the referee and former Italian tennis star, as a “moron” and a “jerk.”

  In the second round of singles, Mayer lost again. So did John, to Vilas. This was the only tennis match I ever saw in which John was utterly dominated. He tried everything he knew, but Vilas was simply better. John was not humiliated, but he was outclassed on a clay court in a foreign country, with a bad shoulder and a severe case of fatigue. By the middle of the third set, he and I understood that there would be no fifth-set miracle, that he was probably going down. McEnroe battled bravely on, but in front of all those hostile, jeering fans, he seemed a lonely figure, yet brave and brilliant, heroic.

  He sealed my feeling for him by uttering a few simple words. As he was about to trudge back to the baseline, down 1–4 in the third set, facing his and our team’s worst defeat in the Cup competition in many years, John turned to me. A smile that mocked us both flirted with a jaunty smirk.

  “Well, captain,” he said, plucking at his racquet strings, “do you have any pearly words of wisdom for me?”

  I smiled, and he went out on the court to be beaten. I thought it was our finest moment together. Sometimes, a defeat can be more beautiful and satisfying than certain victories. The English have a point in insisting that it matters not who won or lost, but how you played the game.

  Thus, a few months after popping open bottles of champagne following our victory in Grenoble, the United States was bounced from the next Davis Cup competition in the first round.

  ON JUNE 21 of that year, 1983, I underwent a double-bypass heart operation at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan, where my first heart surgery had taken place in 1979. Once again, my surgeon was Dr. John Hutchinson. I had been suffering from chest pains for a while, notably at a business meeting I had attended in April in Hartford, Connecticut, not long after returning from Argentina; after extensive testing, my doctors decided that I needed further surgery. Because of the tough scar tissue from my first operation, entry into my sternum was far more difficult the second time. I also came out of this new operation in worse condition than after the first. I felt weak, even anemic. That was when I made the decision to receive two units of blood. This transfusion indeed picked me up and sent me on the road to recovery from my surgery; it also, unwittingly, set in motion my descent into AIDS.

  Four days after I left St. Luke’s hospital and went home, I turned forty.

  On July 10, Jeanne organized a little birthday party at home for me with a few of our closest friends, including Doug Stein and Donald and Carole Dell. For a birthday present, she gave me a pair of roller skates, which I loved and looked forward to using. To my mortification, however, the main surprise of the party was a performance by a striptease artist who proceeded to bump and grind her way around my living room, dressed in precious little, while I hung my head in sheepish embarrassment. I had loudly scolded every man in the room for inflicting this spectacle on me when the stripper completed her act and read the birthday message from the real culprit: Jeanne.

  Jeanne knew that I needed something unusual to cheer me up. My second operation, coming as it did only four years after the first, was a major physical and psychological setback, one that left me on the brink of depression. I had assumed that my quadruple-bypass surgery would be far more effective and lasting than it turned out to be; was the second but a presage of a decline that would virtually cripple me? More than ever, I became aware of my mortality.

  Tennis, even the Davis Cup, receded from my mind. As for the captaincy, I certainly considered resigning from it. Perhaps I would have done so if my illness had prevented me from carrying out my duties, which it could easily have done. In the previous two years, moreover, my life had taken certain other turns that had led me into satisfying new activities: I had just started serving as a board member of the Aetna Life and Casualty Company, an association that had already proven more rewarding than almost any other I had had outside of tennis; I had taught a course at a college in Miami, where Jeanne and I had a second home; and I was thinking of starting work on a book on black athletes in the United States, which would consume much of my time.

  In the Davis Cup, our loss to Argentina meant that we did not advance to the quarterfinals. Our next match would be in October. Thus I had sufficient time—four months—to recover from surgery and to pursue other matters besides tennis before resuming my duties as captain. I put the thought of resigning out of my mind. By the end of the summer, I was once again eagerly looking forward to the campaign.

  IN OCTOBER, OUR team assembled in Dublin, Ireland, to qualify for the group of sixteen by playing Ireland. Here I saw yet another side of McEnroe. With the Irish emotionally welcoming John as a native son come home, I was prepared to have him play the part, wax nostalgic about the old sod, and milk his visit for what it was worth. As an African American in the 1980s, I knew all about the allegedly magical powers of
one’s “roots.” To his credit, however, John refused to indulge in ethnic romanticism. “I don’t have a special feeling competing here because I’m Irish,” he stated bluntly. “You’re playing for your country and trying to win regardless of where you come from.” Many of the Irish loved him for his apparent dislike of British snobbishness as represented by Wimbledon, but he himself was unsentimental. Dublin, he told one reporter, “looks like London to me, only drearier. I hope the people are nicer.”

  The Irish forgave him his truculence; perhaps they considered it characteristically Irish. I myself didn’t. In the United States, I have had people say to me about McEnroe and Connors’s excesses, “Gee, what do you expect? That’s the Irish in them.” Such ethnic stereotyping makes me uncomfortable. In any event, McEnroe drew a record crowd to watch tennis at the Royal Dublin Society’s Simmonscourt Pavilion—a fancy barn, really, where horse and cattle breeders showed their stock. The place had been cleaned out, fumigated, and a carpet set down for play. It was all a little odd. Still, during and after our victory, the Irish were ebullient, gracious hosts. And with his victories in Dublin, McEnroe broke my record of twenty-seven wins for the U.S. in singles matches. I did not begrudge him the record.

  For our next match, in the first round of the 1984 Davis Cup, against Rumania, in Bucharest, we finally had the services of Jimmy Connors. Since the last time Connors had played for us, Donald Dell had become his manager. Dell, a former Cup captain, had argued to Jimmy and his mother, Gloria, that no American had ever achieved legendary status in tennis without playing Davis Cup, and so Jimmy agreed to play. But he had evidently heard negative remarks about my captaincy. We had a meeting at a tournament before Bucharest, and he was blunt.

  “Look, Arthur, I don’t need anyone sitting on the sidelines telling me how to play tennis.”

  “I understand, Jimmy.”

  “One thing I want to know, though, Arthur. Are you going to fight for me?”

  “What do you mean, Jimmy?”

  “I mean, am I going to be out there by myself? Will I be doing my own arguing?”

  “I’m out there, Jimmy,” I replied. “I’m on your side. I’m going to be working for you.”

  Twice during Jimmy’s first match I made sure that I jumped up and made my presence known to Jimmy and the assembled gathering. I am not sure what I accomplished by these moves, except for making Connors happy. But that was reason enough, I suppose.

  Connors’s effervescence, the stellar quality of his magnetism and drive, lifted everyone. “That Connors doesn’t like losing in practice,” Jimmy Arias said to me one day as we watched Connors go after McEnroe on the court. I thought I saw a remarkable spirit of camaraderie, of genuine affection, kindle between Jimmy and John, and ignite among the other players. Then Connors’s old discomfort with the Davis Cup began to surface. To Mac and me, that silver cup was the Holy Grail. To Jimmy, it seemed that it might have been made of Styrofoam, he had so little sense of, or interest in, Davis Cup legend and lore.

  One day, at practice just before the opening match, he yelled out to me with a question. “Arthur, this match is best of three sets, isn’t it?”

  I could hardly believe my ears. “You mean this practice?”

  “No, I mean the matches.” He was serious. Stupefied, I shook my head and looked up into the empty stands.

  Once again, as much as he tried, Connors couldn’t stomach the fact that everyone was in McEnroe’s shadow, as far as publicity and fame were concerned. McEnroe welcomed Jimmy, but I sensed that he also nursed a lingering resentment about the fact that Jimmy had indicated that he would play Davis Cup in 1981 and then changed his mind. Still, John had such a genuine interest in our fortunes as a team that he wanted Connors to play. The previous year, he had even accused me of not being firm enough with Connors. “He says he’s a friend of his,” John told a reporter about Connors and me, “but I don’t think he pushed Connors enough. Arthur doesn’t press him.” Of course, I believed that I had pressed Connors as much as I could, or should, have. I was not going to force anyone to play Davis Cup tennis.

  Bucharest in 1984 was a dreary city, with shops that had nothing to offer, and with a repressive, intrusive secret police that resulted in our party, including wives, attending a briefing at the U.S. embassy in a room draped with aluminum foil, or some similar substance, to frustrate eavesdropping. The only spark of warmth and friendship emanating from Rumania came from the unforgettable personality of Ilie Nastase. Still a member of the national team, Nastase evoked bitter memories of the Davis Cup tie in Bucharest in 1972 between the U.S. and Rumania, when cheating by local officials reached an abysmal low. In the decisive match between Stan Smith and Ion Tiriac, judges called foot faults to negate Smith’s aces, Tiriac orchestrated crowd noises to disturb Smith’s game, and a linesman at one point openly massaged Tiriac’s cramping legs and urged him on. Smith, always the epitome of self-control, kept his temper in check and eventually won the match. At the end, he gravely shook Tiriac’s hand. “Ion,” Stan said, “I must tell you that I will always respect you as a player. But I will never again have any respect for you as a man.” Tiriac was left speechless.

  Nastase had been, in his prime, fantastically gifted as a player, almost on a level of uncanny ability with McEnroe. He was also given to outrageous behavior on the tennis court, including crude and vicious teasing of opponents, such as accusations about their sexual preferences and abilities. He liked to call me “Negroni,” and once, in the heat of battle in a tournament in Hawaii, even called me a nigger. I myself didn’t hear the remark but was told about it. In 1975, at the Masters tournament in Sweden, I had walked off the court in a match against him after his taunting had become unbearable. Refusing to answer him in kind, I deliberately defaulted. (The supervising committee decided later that day to award me the match, 6–0, 6–0. After the tournament, which he nevertheless won because its format did not allow for elimination after one loss, Nastase sent me a bouquet of roses.) Since then, I have always counted Nastase as a friend. In 1977, he showed up at my wedding. “You didn’t invite me,” he said, grinning and offering his hand in congratulations. “But I came anyway.”

  Nastase was always a little mad. Now, thirty-seven years old and fifteen pounds above his best weight, he showed flashes of his genius of old, firing thirteen aces past McEnroe in the opening match. He stalled and argued, abused the umpire, and was duly penalized. To our cadre of supporters from the U.S. embassy who waved little American flags to encourage our effort, he genially offered the finger from time to time. He worked on McEnroe, seeking to arouse him; but John remained calm. The Rumanians did not win a set until the last match of the tie.

  We beat Argentina and Australia, and then in mid-December, faced the Swedes in the Cup final in Göteborg. This encounter turned out to be one of the more dismal points of my tennis career. From our arrival, nothing seemed to go right. Inside the Scandinavium, the nation’s largest indoor facility, the Swedes had prepared a clay court to give themselves an advantage. We needed to accustom ourselves to the surface, but none of us seemed ready to make the supreme effort. Meanwhile, everyone on the Swedish team except Mats Wilander diligently arrived in Göteborg ten days before the tie and worked out hard for four hours daily. Wilander was away only because he was chasing his second Australian Open, which he won. Then, match fit, he hurried home.

  In contrast, McEnroe and Connors were both badly off their stride. Unshaven and unkempt, McEnroe looked exhausted and depressed. He had recently been suspended for twenty-one days for outrageous behavior in a tournament in Stockholm. Viewers around the world had seen the film clip of McEnroe engaging in a vile, murderous tirade, smashing racquets and cups and abusing officials. Now, rusty from his enforced rest, he had to return to Sweden to play Davis Cup tennis. With the press he was first testy, then surly, and finally bitter and contentious. Connors, too, hadn’t played competitively in a while. With his wife, Patty, expecting their second child any day, he was also distracted. He
asked me if he could arrive a day late and I agreed, which was a mistake. When he got there, all his hostility to the Davis Cup and to team play seemed to return. Everything about our arrangements appeared to anger him, and nothing I said made any difference.

  Relations between us crumbled after an incident one night. Practice was scheduled for seven in the evening between Connors and Arias, whom I had selected as an alternate singles player all year. Connors, on time, was already at the stadium; I was supposed to bring Arias over. Our car was late in arriving, and we reached the stadium about ten or fifteen minutes after seven. By this point, Connors, who is nearly always punctual (when he shows up for an event), had worked himself up into a sweaty rage. As I walked through a door onto the court, I saw a message he had scrawled in large letters in the soft clay, presumably for me. His message read: FUCK YOU.

  I felt exactly as if he had slapped my face. I wanted to replace him on the spot and send him home, but I knew our chances of winning would have dropped precipitously. I swallowed my pride and endured the insult.

  In the tie, played before enthusiastic, sellout crowds, the Swedes defeated us decisively, 4–1. Wilander, tanned, lithe, and fleet of foot after his Australian campaign, crushed Connors 6–1, 6–3, 6–3. Jimmy was sadly out of shape, and the clay court set up by the Swedes caused a few odd bounces that frustrated him as he struggled to find his form. At the end of the first set, he resorted to unspeakably vile language, cursing both the umpire and referee Alan Mills (who was also later the Wimbledon referee). Mills was outraged. Connors was fined $2,000 and came within a penalty point of being defaulted. Mills let us know that he was thinking seriously of recommending that Connors be banned from further competition.