Arthur Ashe Page 10

  FIVE

  THE GATEWAY

  TO HAVE ANY HOPE of reaching his potential as a tennis player, Arthur needed professional coaching and sustained competition at the highest level possible, neither of which was available to him in his home state. “Anybody, white or Negro, who had a strong tennis game,” he concluded, “had to get out of Virginia if he wanted to keep climbing.”1

  Encouraged by Dr. Johnson, Arthur had set his sights on securing a scholarship from one of the nation’s top college tennis programs. But doing so was easier said than done, especially for a player from an all-black high school with a weak tennis program and a questionable academic reputation. As good as he was, he would have to continue to improve during his senior year to have a legitimate chance. Chasing a moving target, he had to find a way to keep pace with the California boys and the other nationally ranked Juniors who seemed to get better every time he played them. Nearing six feet, and a lean but solid 140 pounds, he was finally big enough to compete with the nation’s best Juniors. But he also needed training conditions and competitive playing experiences that were comparable to those of his white opponents.

  In tennis, timing is everything, not just in striking the ball but also in exploiting the opportunities of youth. And in the summer of 1960 Dr. J feared his seventeen-year-old star was running out of time. Frustrated with the racial situation in Richmond, and convinced Arthur could not afford another winter of enforced idleness or another spring of unproductive, high school play, Johnson, with the help of his old friend Dick Hudlin, concocted a plan for a transitional year at Charles Sumner High School in St. Louis, Missouri. Hudlin, the former University of Chicago team captain who had helped Oscar Johnson break the color line at the USLTA National Junior Indoor tournament back in 1948, was a teacher and longtime tennis coach at Sumner. Like Dr. J, he lived and breathed tennis, was passionate about Junior development, and had a private court in his backyard. He was also a strict disciplinarian, cut from the same cloth as Dr. J and Arthur Ashe Sr. Only after Arthur Sr. became convinced Hudlin would keep his son in line was the deal set. These three men, “the men who planned my life,” as Arthur later called them, worked out an arrangement that provided for room and board at the Hudlins’ house and a rigorous daily training regimen.

  Arthur himself was never consulted about the arrangement and only heard about it definitively in late August, barely two weeks before the beginning of the school year. Earlier in the summer, during the Eastern Junior Championships in New York, Cliff Buchholz made an offhand comment about Arthur “moving to St. Louis,” but at the time he assumed Buchholz “was kidding.” A few weeks later, when he learned it was true, he could hardly believe it. “Near the end of the summer Dr. Johnson phoned me and said, ‘I’ve made arrangements for you to live in St. Louis,’ ” he recalled, with a touch of resentment. “He didn’t ask me, he just told me.”2

  The decision to send him to St. Louis made sense—from a strictly tennis point of view. As Dr. Johnson assured him, and as Arthur himself later confirmed, “There were good indoor courts. I could play year-round with stars like Cliff Buchholz and his brother Butch, Chuck McKinley, Dick Horwitz, and Jim Parker. It would be great for my tennis. And it would give me a better chance of getting into one of the good universities, which usually don’t accept certification from segregated high schools.” Even so, he wasn’t happy about leaving his friends and family on the eve of his senior year. He had done well at Walker and fully expected to be named the class valedictorian at the spring commencement. Tennis considerations aside, he was concerned about how he would fare living as a boarder in a teacher’s home and trying to fit in at a new school in a strange city.3

  Despite his misgivings, Arthur decided, in characteristic fashion, “to make the best use of the opportunity” presented to him. Fortunately, his anxiety-filled trip to St. Louis was preceded by the diversion of a second appearance at the U.S. Nationals in New York. This time he was fortunate to draw a less formidable first-round opponent than Laver—Robert Bowditch, whom he defeated in straight sets. He was less successful in the second round, winning only eight games in three sets against Eduardo Zuleta of Ecuador. The loss to Zuleta confirmed what he already knew, that his patient baseline game was especially vulnerable on fast surfaces like grass. One of the advantages of relocating to St. Louis, Dr. Johnson had assured him, was the opportunity to play indoors on a fast, hard surface.4

  The Hudlins gave Arthur a warm welcome and did their best to ease his transition to a new home, school, and community. But living with them proved to be less than ideal. To Arthur’s dismay, the household situation in St. Louis allowed him little privacy or personal freedom. Coach Hudlin was a stern taskmaster with a controlling personality, even by the strict standards of Dr. Johnson and Arthur Ashe Sr. “He planned everything as if I had no brain,” Arthur later complained. “He felt that tennis was the one big pleasure in life, so he gave me massive daily doses of it. I hinted a hundred times that I thought he was a bit domineering, but I never got through to him.” The daily routine was grinding: “I did pushups every morning, went to school until noon, then played tennis all afternoon,” and “every evening, after tennis, I ran a mile.” The meals were plentiful enough, with “plenty of steak and rice,” but they came with absolute restrictions—“no ice cream, no sodas, only fruit juice, only certain foods for breakfast.” While Hudlin’s rules all made sense as a boot-camp training regimen, this was not the way Arthur had hoped to spend his senior year. There was no escape, even on Sundays when he was required to attend mass with his devoutly Roman Catholic host family.

  To make matters worse, he also had to deal with the Hudlins’ troublesome ninth-grade son, Dickie. The Hudlins had hoped Arthur would serve as a role model for Dickie. But he had no luck in countering the boy’s utter disdain for tennis or his mounting jealousy of the intruder posing as his surrogate older brother.5

  “St. Louis,” he later concluded, “was the worst nine months I ever spent.” Part of the problem was the disappointing nature of the city itself. Prior to his arrival, he had envisioned his new home as a Midwestern river city located safely beyond the boundaries of the Jim Crow South. But it didn’t take him long to detect the Gateway City’s distinctively Southern tinge. Missouri lacked Virginia’s codified statewide system of segregation, and there was a liberal faction on the St. Louis Board of Aldermen that actually managed to pass a local antidiscrimination ordinance in 1961. Nevertheless, St. Louis’s traditional patterns of residential segregation, reinforced as they were by deep class divisions and pervasive economic inequality, produced a divided community that, in Arthur’s words, “was de facto virtually as segregated as Richmond.”6

  Sumner High School, where Arthur spent much of his time during his year in St. Louis, was located in the heart of The Ville, an all-black neighborhood on the north side of the city. Originally known as Elleardsville, the area had once hosted an ethnically diverse population plus a sprinkling of former slaves. But in the years prior to World War I substantial black in-migration initiated a period of white flight that eventually transformed the area into a predominantly black community. Sumner High School, established in 1875 as the first all-black high school west of the Mississippi River, moved to The Ville from its original downtown location in 1910.

  Soon thereafter the introduction of several black churches and the growth of a thriving black business district turned The Ville into St. Louis’s most fashionable black neighborhood. The cornerstone of The Ville’s development as a black cultural and commercial center was Poro College, established in 1913 by beauty products entrepreneur Annie Malone. By the 1930s, Poro College was just one part of a large cluster of important black institutions, most notably Homer G. Phillips Hospital, Lincoln Law School, and Stowe Teachers College. The bustling nightlife in The Ville’s jazz and dance clubs added to the neighborhood’s citywide reputation as the “cradle of black culture.” By then, despite the advent of hard times, the Ville had become a tightly packed communit
y of ten thousand; though nearly 90 percent black, the neighborhood was dominated by fully employed homeowners, many of whom considered themselves part of a rising black middle class.

  Prior to the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer, strictly enforced restrictive covenants made it all but impossible for blacks to buy homes in “white” neighborhoods. Yet once the Court forbade the use of such covenants, the halcyon days of neighborhoods like The Ville were numbered. During the 1950s, The Ville began to lose its critical mass of middle-class residents, a depopulation and “ghettoization” process that would only accelerate during the following decades, especially after the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. By the time Arthur arrived in the late summer of 1960, the area surrounding Sumner High retained little of the vital character that had made it such a desirable place to live in the pre–World War II era.

  Interestingly enough, one of the solid, middle-class citizens who had already moved away from The Ville was Dick Hudlin. Several years prior to Arthur’s arrival, the proud University of Chicago graduate had bought a home in the virtually all-white, upscale suburb of Richmond Heights, originally named in the 1850s by Robert E. Lee, who found the township’s topography to be strikingly similar to the environs of Richmond, Virginia. But whatever its etymological origins, Richmond Heights was demographically and culturally far removed from the inner city.

  Hudlin faced stiff challenges as one of the first blacks to live in Richmond Heights. Despite his impressive educational background and his considerable accomplishments as a teacher and a coach, he encountered open resistance and cold stares among his white neighbors. Geographically, Richmond Heights was located eight miles southwest of The Ville, but racially it was a world apart. The daily drive to Sumner High took Hudlin and his young boarder past the sprawling grounds of Forest Park and through a variety of communities, white and black, suburban and inner city, all of which added to their worldly education.7

  Arthur sensed The Ville’s distinctive identity the moment he walked into Sumner High School. He had traveled eight hundred miles from Richmond only to discover that the South had no monopoly on racially segregated education. Even though the St. Louis school system was legally integrated, Sumner was an all-black school located in a virtually all-black neighborhood. “It was a different sort of neighborhood from Richmond’s North Side,” he observed. “The kids were more street-wise, and you had to be tougher to survive. There were more kids in the school, and you didn’t get that feeling of community that you did at Maggie Walker.”

  All of this was disappointing for someone who had expected more from his new school. To his surprise, he encountered very few challenging courses at Sumner and easily finished the year with the highest grade-point average in the senior class—partly, according to him, because there was “little social activity to distract me from studying.” As he put it, “I was almost a stranger in that school. I would have much preferred to graduate with my friends at Walker, I pined and sighed a lot.” Aside from a brief stint on Sumner’s cross-country team and his activities as captain of the tennis squad, he generally kept to himself. According to Cliff Buchholz, who grew close to Arthur during his year in St. Louis, the quiet, bookish kid from Virginia spent most of his off-court time reading in his room at the Hudlins’ house.8

  Looking back on the situation years later, Arthur concluded that the improvement in his game more than compensated for the social sacrifices and loneliness he experienced. During his first three months in St. Louis, he practiced on the outdoor courts at Washington University, an elite private institution located in one of the city’s most fashionable neighborhoods. The opportunity to play almost daily with the talented Buchholz brothers, Jim Parker, and other highly competitive players gradually lifted the quality of his play. But the most noticeable change came a bit later, after the weather forced him to play indoors. St. Louis’s only indoor tennis facility was the 138th Infantry Armory, a public facility legally open to all. As with many institutions in St. Louis, a long-standing tradition of de facto segregation informally barred blacks from playing on the armory’s courts, and Arthur was not surprised to learn that he was “only the second Negro ever to play there.” Fortunately, the armory’s resident pro, Larry Miller, had assured Coach Hudlin and Dr. Johnson that their talented prospect would have full access to the armory’s five courts. Later, after catching a glimpse of the young Virginian’s potential, Miller volunteered to help coach him.9

  Arthur worked with Miller on the armory courts throughout the winter of 1960–61. The first test of his St. Louis sojourn came in late November, just before the winter makeover, when he entered the National Junior Indoor Tournament held at the armory. This was the same tournament that had temporarily invalidated Oscar Johnson’s registration twelve years earlier, but the times had changed and no one questioned Arthur’s right to compete. Nevertheless, no one expected a baseliner to fare very well on the armory’s slick surface against big hitters adept at the serve-and-volley game.

  Both Miller and Hudlin were amazed when Arthur fought his way into the semifinals, where he faced the number three seed, Butch Newman of San Antonio. And even after he dispatched Newman in straight sets 6–2, 6–4, his chances of defeating the number one seed, Frank Froehling, seemed remote. Nicknamed the “Spider Man,” the long-legged Froehling was four inches taller and two years older than Arthur—and he possessed the most powerful serve in Junior tennis. Arthur’s only hope was to move Froehling around the court with passing shots and lobs, but to do so he had to adapt to a lightning-quick surface that played to his opponent’s strengths. This was a tall order, but after winning the first two sets and losing the third and fourth, Arthur closed out the match 6–1 against a thoroughly exhausted Froehling. It was the longest match of his young career—a grueling four hours and ten minutes—proving that Hudlin’s merciless conditioning regimen had paid off. The shocking upset victory over the towering Spider Man brought Arthur his first national USLTA title, which he later remembered as “the biggest thrill of my life up to then.”10

  Another unexpected development was Ashe’s transition to a new style of play. Under Miller’s guidance—with some added help from the Buchholz brothers’ father, Earl Buchholz Sr., the director of St. Louis’s highly successful public parks tennis program—Arthur all but reinvented himself as a tennis player. “That winter in the Armory remade my whole game,” he later acknowledged. The complete transformation from flat strokes and straightforward baseline play to a multidimensional combination of power serving and topspin artistry would entail several years of experimentation and trial and error. But the process clearly began in St. Louis. The catalyst, according to Arthur, was a “fast and slick” wooden surface that caused balls to “skid off the floor and accelerate after they bounce,” which forced him to shorten his backswing. “With my old round-house backswing,” he insisted, “the ball would have been in the back fence before I started moving my racquet forward.” Stripping the choice down to its essentials, he explained on another occasion: “Wood is a fast surface, so I had to build the big serve-and-volley game. Playing for years on a clay surface had made me a retriever, a pusher. But you don’t win by pushing the ball on hardwood or cement.”

  At his coaches’ urging, Arthur also began “to lean forward and put more muscle into my service motion,” and, in an effort to compensate for the speed of incoming serves, “to return serve differently.” “Usually, I would stand just behind the baseline and wait for the ball,” he explained. “Now I dropped back a yard and a half or so and charged the ball when my opponent served. I had never been comfortable charging the ball because of my clay-court background, but with my new aggressiveness, I developed new techniques to catch the ball on the rise. In the course of some weight-shifting drills suggested by Larry, I developed a topspin backhand, which worked very well for moving the ball cross-court as I charged forward.” At the same time, he also changed from an Eastern to a Continental grip (also known as the “chopper” or “
hammer” grip, where the player holds the racket as he or she would hold a hammer). When Tom Chewning hit with Arthur at Brook Field Park during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, he noticed the differences right away. Though still slim, Arthur had become a hard-hitting beast on the court.11

  By the time Arthur made his third annual trek to the Orange Bowl tournament in late December he felt reasonably comfortable with his new, more aggressive approach. Charging the net—a tactic all but prohibited under Dr. J’s regime—was the most difficult challenge for a reformed baseliner, both physically and psychologically, and Arthur would continue to struggle with his inconsistent volleying throughout his career. In Miami he played well enough to reach the semifinals, overcoming a match point in his quarterfinal match against eighteen-year-old Rodney Mandelstam of South Africa, the 1960 Wimbledon Junior champion. Unfazed by the potential controversy surrounding a match pitting an African American against a white South African, both boys took Arthur’s upset victory in sportsmanlike stride. And even though most of the fans were presumably segregationists of one stripe or another, there seemed to be at least grudging recognition that the black boy from Richmond possessed both grit and talent.