The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “A set apiece. I’m still in there,” Graebner thinks. He looks worried.

  Ashe bounces the ball ten times, while applause subsides, and then he pushes his glasses into place, lifts the ball, and hits an uncomplicated ace that splits the court. He hits another ace. And with four additional shots he wins the first game of the third set.

  · · ·

  When Ashe’s alarm clock sounds, he gets out of bed and, sleepily, invariably, says, “What’s happening?” Sometimes he stumbles as he crosses the room, because any number of objects may be on the floor. There is always an open, half-filled suitcase somewhere. Tennis clothes fan out of it like laundry spread to dry. Racquets are all over the place, strung and unstrung—on the floor, on bookshelves, under the bed. “I hate orderliness,” he will say. There are piles of unanswered letters. His conscience tells him to answer them all. Ripped envelopes are so numerous that they should probably be removed with a rake. There is a stack of copies of the Richmond Afro-American. Tennis trophies are here and there like unwashed dishes—West of England Lawn Tennis Championships; U.S. National Clay Court Men’s Singles Winner 1967. His books are more or less concentrated on bookshelves, but some can also be found on or under every other piece of furniture in the room. They have accumulated during the time—fourteen months—he has been living in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters at the United States Military Academy. Under his bed is Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. On a chair near his pillow are Fundamentals of Marketing and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Along the shelves go Human Sexual Response, Black Power, Emily Post’s Etiquette, Contract Bridge for Beginners, Ulysses, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Human Factor in Changing Africa, Paper Lion, Mata Hari, Dynamic Speed Reading, The Naked Ape, The New York Times Guide to Personal Finance, Marketing Management, Analysis and Planning, A Short History of Religions, Elementary French, Spanish in Three Months, Aussie English, and U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Hearings—N.Y., N.Y. 1968.

  The Graebners’ apartment, on East Eighty-sixth Street, is trim and orderly, with comfortable new, non-period furniture and a TV set that rolls on wheels. The apartment is a module many floors up in a modern concrete hive. The hall outside is narrow, and all the doors along it are made of hollow steel and have peepholes. Graebner has been reading The Arrangement (“just for trash”), The Effective Executive (because that is exactly what he would like to be), a biography of Richard Nixon, The Rich and the Super-Rich, Airport (“for more trash”), and The Pro Quarterback. Graebner is less verbal than Ashe. Graebner’s language is casual and idiomatic. A word like “phraseology” will come out of him in four syllables, and if Ashe happens to hear it he is likely to call Graebner’s attention to the error, for Ashe is meticulous about some things, and language is one. Ashe is very literal. In restaurants, for example, the Davis Cup Team trainer is forever asking waitresses for “diet sugar,” and Ashe will say, “Diet sugar? Diet sweetener, maybe.” He says he would like to write. Meanwhile, he does the Times crossword puzzle every day and drives himself crazy until he has it complete and correct. He calls up friends long distance to ask for help if he needs it. When they ask him why he does the crossword with such energy, he will say something like “I’m not sure. It may give me a false sense of intellectual security.”

  The door of Ashe’s clothes closet is always open, and the light in there has been on for fourteen months. Love beads hang on a hook on the door. Ashe looks extremely contemporary when he goes off to New York for a date wearing the beads, a yellow turtleneck, and what he calls his “ru” jacket. More often, he just looks trim and conventional, like Graebner, in a business suit. In uniform, he is the model soldier—salutes and does all the things an officer is supposed to do. He seems to get pleasure out of it. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that he enjoys the West Point life, but he plays the game. He works hard when he is on the post. He gets up at seven and is at his desk by eight. Graebner works even harder. A million dollars must seem a long way off when you can’t even get an American Express credit card. Graebner applied and was turned down, apparently on the ground of insufficient visible income—to the limitless amusement of all the other players on the Davis Cup Team. Ashe and Graebner are both extraordinarily conscious of the stock market, and each thinks he is a shrewd investor. An amateur tennis player at their level can have something to invest, since he can collect in expenses and sundry compensations as much as twenty thousand dollars a year. Ashe never misses the Times’ stock-market quotations, and as his eye runs through them he says, “Too tough….Fantastic….Unbelievable.” Graebner has three brokers. He describes them as “a conservative, a middle-of-the-roader, and a flier.” The conservative is his mother’s broker, in Cleveland. The middle-of-the-roader is a man in Richmond whom Graebner met on the tennis circuit. The flier was a friend of Graebner’s at Northwestern and now works in New York for Smith, Barney & Co. When tennis takes Graebner to a place like Las Vegas or San Juan, he goes to the gaming tables and hangs on every roll of the dice as if he were in the semifinals of the United States Open Championships. Ashe is a few feet up the velvet, behaving the same way.

  New balls come into the match. Graebner hits three unmanageable serves. He quickly raises the score to one–all, third set.

  As amateurs, Ashe and Graebner qualify for none of the prize money that is available to professionals in this tournament. Noting this, an anonymous woman feels such pity for Ashe that she sends him a hundred shares of General Motors common. One evening, Graebner learns about it from Ashe.

  “A hundred shares of General Motors!” Graebner says, and his vocal cords seem tight.

  “That’s right,” Ashe tells him. “From an anonymous donor.”

  “White or Negro?”

  “I don’t know. She saw me play and felt sorry for me.”

  “How much is it a share—forty dollars?”

  “Hell, no. Ninety-five.”

  “She gave you nine thousand five hundred dollars?”

  “You better believe it.”

  “That’s too tough. Why didn’t she give it to me? I deserve it as much as you. You son of a bitch, you owe me four thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars.”

  Graebner appears to be somewhat tense under the pressure of not being able to do much against Ashe’s serve, which is becoming perceptibly stronger. In the last ten games that Ashe has served, Graebner has won only nine scattered points. Ashe double-faults. Graebner looks happy. Ashe takes four straight points, including one on a loose, liberal, infuriating touch shot. Graebner mutters, “Arthur, you lucky bastard. How can you hit that shot?” Game to Lieutenant Ashe. He leads, two games to one….

  · · ·

  By the umpire’s chair, Graebner unfolds a fresh towel, puts it in his pocket, rubs sawdust all over his racquet handle, returns to the court, and slams back Ashe’s first two serves of the fourth set. Love-thirty. It is an inaccurately auspicious beginning, for Ashe now begins to hit shots as if God Himself had given them a written guarantee. He plays full, free, wind-milling tennis. He hits untouchable forty-five-degree volleys. He hits overheads that skid through no man’s land and ricochet off the stadium wall. His backhands win everywhere—crosscourt, down the line—and one of them, a return of a second serve, is almost an exact repetition of the extraordinary shot that finished the third set. “When you’re confident, you can do anything,” Ashe tells himself. Both he and Graebner are, for the most part, hitting the ball even harder than they have been previously, and the average number of shots per point, which rose slightly in the second and third sets, is down again, to 2.5. Graebner is not in any sense out of the match. His serve seems stronger. His volleys are decisive. Ashe sends a big, flat serve down the middle, and Graebner, standing on the center mark, hits the ball off his forehand so hard that Ashe cannot get near it—an all but impossible shot from that position, requiring phenomenal power. Ashe serves again to Graebner’s forehand. Graebner drives an
other hard return, and runs for the net. Ashe is now playing almost consistently on the level he stepped up to in the last three shots of the third set. Moving fast, he intercepts, and sends a light and graceful putaway past Graebner, down the line.

  There are very few places in the world where Ashe feels at ease or at home. One, of course, is around his family’s place in Gum Spring, Virginia, where the milieu he moves in is entirely black. His defenses are alert everywhere else he goes, with only four exceptions—Australia, the islands of the South Pacific, Sweden, and Spain. “A Negro draws stares in Australia, but you can pretty much tell they’re not malicious. They only mean ‘What the hell is he doing here?’ I don’t look like an aborigine. When I first played in Spain, I could tell by the way the Spanish tennis players acted that I had nothing to worry about. The Spaniards would just as soon hustle my sister, if I had one. They don’t care. It’s a great feeling to get away from all this crap in the United States. Mentally and spiritually, it’s like taking a vacation. It’s like going from New York to the black world of Richmond and Gum Spring. Your guard goes down. Everywhere else I go, my sensors are out. Everywhere. It’s a waste of energy, but maybe I can do two things at one time—think about something else and have my sensors out, too.”

  In 1960, Arthur was sent to St. Louis for his senior year of high school, and it is generally assumed that this arrangement was made (by Dr. Johnson) because Arthur was not allowed to compete with white tennis players in Richmond. This was true but not relevant. By that time, there was no tennis player of any color in or near Richmond who could play points with him. Tennis is a game of levels, and it is practically impossible for a player who is on one level to play successfully with a player on any other. Arthur needed high-level competition the year around, and St. Louis was full of McKinleys and Buchholzes and indoor courts. There were a few problems. One young St. Louis tennis player took Arthur to a private tennis club one day that spring, and as Arthur was beginning to hit, a voice called out to him, “Hey, you! Get off there. We don’t allow colored in this club.” Arthur left. He was graduated from Sumner High School with the highest grades in his class. On the summer tennis circuit, he went to every length to attract no attention, to cause no difficulty. Moving in and out of expensive white atmospheres, he used the manners that his father and Dr. Johnson had taught him, and he noticed that the manners of the white players, and much of their general behavior, tended to suggest a lower standard. “When an experience is new, you’re not sure of yourself mentally, but basic politeness got me through.” Meanwhile, he would look down at his plate and find two steaks there. He knew what was happening. A message had come from the kitchen, on the Afro-American telegraph.

  While he was at U.C.L.A., the level of his game became so high that he was made an honorary member of the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, where he played with people like Hank Greenberg and Charlton Heston. Of Heston he says, “He’s not that coordinated. He plays tennis like he drives a chariot.” Of Greenberg he says, “He’s a tennis buff. He covers the court well. He’s a big guy. A big, big guy. Jesus!” On a street in the Bronx, Ashe once played tennis with John Lindsay (“Good forehand”), and in the Washington ghetto he played with Bobby Kennedy (“Another good forehand”). In tennis, the nearest black was light-years below him now, and he became, in his own words, “a sociological phenomenon.” He has been kept extremely busy on the U-Rent-a-Negro circuit. He has been invited to the White House four times. Only two years ago, he was very hesitant about walking into the dining room of the West Side Tennis Club, in Forest Hills. Sometimes when his phone rings in his rooms at West Point, he picks it up and an anonymous voice says to him, for instance, “You have your God-damned black nerve running around the country playing tennis while my son is fighting in Vietnam.”

  Ashe leads two games to one in the fourth set. He moves in on Graebner’s second serve and tries one more backhand crosscourt megablast. Out. By inches. Fifteen-love.

  Graebner’s next serve is wide to Ashe’s backhand. Ashe drives the ball down the line to Graebner’s forehand, following to the net. Ashe admits to himself, “In effect, I’m saying to him, ‘O.K., Clark, I can beat you on your forehand.’ I’m being a little arrogant.” Graebner catches the ball at the limit of his reach and sends back an unforceful volley. Ashe wipes the point away with his backhand. Fifteen-all.

  Graebner’s big serve goes down the middle. Ashe leaps for it and blocks it back. Graebner hits a low, underspun crosscourt backhand. Ashe runs to it and answers with a backhand even more acutely angled. Graebner has to dive for it, but he gets it, hitting a slow deep volley. Ashe, on the backhand again, drives the ball—much too fast to be contested—down the line. “Get in there!” he shouts, and the ball gets in there. Fifteen-thirty. Graebner thinks, “If I had his backhand and he had my forehand, we’d be invincible.”

  Ashe’s forehand is something to see as it is. Graebner rocks, goes up, and—to Ashe’s forehand—smashes the ball. Ashe slams it back through the service box and out the side of the court. “Most players hit a shot like that once in a lifetime,” says Donald Dell. Fifteen-forty.

  Ashe now has two chances to break Graebner. He looses a heavy backhand return, but Graebner stops it and hits it to the baseline. Ashe lobs. At the service line, Graebner moves in under the overhead and brings down the paper cutter. The shot goes within four feet of Ashe but is too powerful to be as much as touched. Thirty-forty.

  Break point No. 2. Graebner rocks, and lifts the ball. Crunch. Unmanageable. Right down the middle. Deuce.

  Graebner serves. Fault. Again. Double fault. Advantage Ashe.

  Graebner faults once more, then hits a wide slice to Ashe’s backhand. Ashe moves to it and explodes another all-time winner down the line. Game to Ashe. Games are three–one, fourth set. Graebner is broken.

  Because Ashe is black, many people expect him to be something more than a tennis player—in fact, demand that he be a leader in a general way. The more he wins, the more people look to him for words and acts beyond the court. The black press has criticized him for not doing enough for the cause. He has repeatedly been asked to march and picket, and he has refused. Militant blacks have urged him to resign from the Davis Cup Team. Inevitably, they have called him an Uncle Tom. Once, in Milwaukee, he was asked to march with Stokely Carmichael but said no, and on the same day he visited a number of Milwaukee playgrounds, showing black children and white children how to play tennis. The demands of others have never moved him to do anything out of character. He will say what he thinks, though, if someone asks him. “Intrinsically, I disapprove of what black militants do. Human nature being what it is, I can understand why they have such a strong following. If you had nothing going for you and you were just a black kid in a ghetto, you’d have historical momentum behind you and it would be chic to be a black militant—easy to do, very fashionable. You’d have your picture and name in the paper because you’d be screaming your head off. They sound like fire-and-brimstone preachers in Holy Roller churches. But you must listen to them. You can’t completely ignore them. Their appeal is to the here and now. If I were a penniless junkie, I’d go for it, too. I’d have nothing to lose, nowhere to go but up. But you can’t change people overnight. If you took a demographic survey of blacks, you’d find, I think, that the farther up the socio-economic scale you got, the fewer people would be behind Stokely. I’m not a marcher. I’m not a sign carrier. I’m a tennis player. If you are a leader in any field, and black, you are a hero to all blacks, and you are expected to be a leader in other fields. It’s beautiful. People in Richmond look upon me as a leader whether I like it or not. That’s the beautiful part of it. The other side of the coin is that they expect the same of some light-heavyweight boxer that they do of me. But he doesn’t have my brain. He tries to get into politics, and we lose some leverage.

  “Guerrilla warfare is going to start. Businesses will burn. There will be more riots. More nationally known political figures may be killed. But eventually more middle-cl
ass blacks will become involved in human rights. Extreme militants will lose their power and influence. So I am cautiously optimistic. I define the cause as the most good for the most people in the least amount of time, and that has absolutely nothing to do, specifically, with color. Anything I can do to help the cause is good. Nobody listens to a loser. If I put myself in a position where I can’t compete, I am merely a martyr. We don’t need any more martyrs right now. One must separate the emotional from the practical. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. A little bit is better than nothing, no matter how you may feel. Progress and improvement do not come in big hunks, they come in little pieces, and the sooner people accept this the better off they’ll be. I wouldn’t tell my son to content himself that things will come gradually. You’ve got to push. You’ve got to act as though you expect it to come tomorrow. But when you know it’s not going to come, don’t give up. We’re outnumbered ten to one. We’ll advance by quiet negotiation and slow infiltration—and by objective, well-planned education, not an education in which you’re brainwashed. Education reflects a culture’s values. If that culture is warped, you get a warped education, with white Janes and Dicks in the schoolbooks and white pale-faced guys who made history. There are so many insidious ways you can get brainwashed to think white equals good—white Howdy-Doody, white Captain Kangaroo. I didn’t feel like a crusader once. I do now. I’ve always been fair with all people. I always wanted to be a solid citizen. I went to college. I graduated. I have put in time in the armed services. I treat all people equally—rich, poor, black, white. I am fairly generous. Nobody can find fault with that. But in the spirit of the times—in some people’s eyes—I’m an Uncle Tom. The phrase is empty.”

  “His racquet is his bag,” Ronald Charity’s wife, Ruth, says. “Arthur has to fight in his own way.” Arthur’s sensors are still extremely active. He boils within when he hears a white man call him “boy” or “son.” He says, “Do I look like your son?” He also can’t stand blacks who tell him not to trust whites, and he says he feels sorry for Negroes who become upset when they see a Negro woman with a white man. At U.C.L.A., he was fond of a white girl, and he saw her with some frequency until her mother saw him on TV. He laughs out loud when he tells the story. “It’s funny now,” he says. “It stung then.” He uses “black” and “Negro” interchangeably. In hotels, somewhat inconsistently, he often asks, “Where’s the boy for the bag?” He thinks there is a certain inherent motor superiority in black athletes. “At an early age, we seem to be a little looser, a little more athletic than white kids. You go through Harlem and you’ll see kids less than five feet tall with pretty good jump shots and hook shots. White kids that age don’t have those shots.” He is suspicious of Greek standards in art. He wonders where all the other races were when Polyclitus was shaping his canon. He urges white American friends to refresh their perspectives by living in Asia, he pays his annual dues to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and he is not at all troubled by men like Alabama’s George Wallace. “Wallace is beautiful. He’s doing his own thing. He’s actually got a little bit of soul. What I worry about is people who say one thing and do another. Wallace is in his bag, and he enjoys it.” Ashe’s particular hero is Jackie Robinson—“because of what he went through, the self-control, the perseverance.” Asked if he has any white heroes, he says, “Yes, I have. John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Benjamin Franklin, and Pancho Gonzales.”