Arthur Ashe Read online

  Arthur would need both of these qualities to carry the day in his semifinal match against the nation’s #1 ranked junior, Bill Lenoir of Tucson, Arizona. Six months earlier, at the Interscholastic tournament in Charlottesville, Lenoir had outlasted Arthur by relying on a rock-solid two-handed backhand, and the same scenario unfolded in Miami. Bedeviled by poor net play, the upstart Virginian was eliminated in straight sets. Lenoir went on to win the tournament, and to lead the U.S. team to victory in the international team competition.12

  The Orange Bowl competition attracted many of the world’s best Junior players, and Ashe, making his third appearance in the tournament, took the opportunity to renew and deepen several friendships, notably with Charlie Pasarell, the talented Puerto Rican he had met in 1958. The pending selection of the U.S. Junior Davis Cup squad and future college plans were among the major topics of conversation in Miami, as Arthur and his friends took stock of their relative positions on the tennis ladder. All of this was a bit sobering for someone like Arthur who faced a questionable future compared to that of his white counterparts, especially Pasarell, who had numerous college options and the luxury of choosing between the nation’s top two tennis programs, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Southern California (USC). Arthur, by contrast, had received only a few inquiries from major universities—the University of Michigan, Michigan State, and the University of Arizona—and one from the historically black Hampton Institute. At this point, he had no actual scholarship offers. Combined with a strong academic record, his #12 national Junior ranking clearly warranted a spot on a major college tennis team. But since only a handful of African Americans had ever played mainstream college tennis—and not one had ever received a financial aid package from a top program—he was not optimistic.13

  When Arthur left Miami just before New Year’s Day to spend a week with his family before returning to school in St. Louis, he had no idea where he would end up the following fall. He knew that Dr. Johnson and Coach Hudlin had been working feverishly on his behalf, exploiting every possible college contact, in an effort to secure the best possible position for him. Then he received an unexpected telephone call. The forceful voice at the other end of the line belonged to J. D. Morgan, the legendary tennis coach at UCLA. After introducing himself, Morgan got right to the point: “We’re preparing to offer you a scholarship to come out and play for us.” He then began ticking off UCLA’s advantages: “a great education, year-round mild weather, perfect courts to play on, a flock of the nation’s best amateurs and pros to practice with, a big city with every kind of fun you could name, and an unprejudiced student body.” As Arthur later pointed out, this sales pitch was hardly necessary: “Offering me a chance to play there was like offering a football player a chance to play at Notre Dame.” Morgan’s words literally took Arthur’s breath away. “You could have knocked me over with a feather,” he recalled. “I was thrilled beyond belief. I said yes even before he finished his offer.”14

  Unbeknownst to him, Morgan had been monitoring his progress for at least three years. The UCLA coach was not in the habit of recruiting players from the East Coast; he preferred Californians familiar with the hard court game that dominated West Coast tennis. But as he watched Arthur play at the annual USLTA Junior championships at Kalamazoo, there was something about the young Virginian that intrigued him. While the slender boy often struggled against the Californians and other power hitters, there were flashes of brilliance that drew Morgan’s attention. With proper coaching and more experience on hard courts, he might develop into a highly competitive college player, or perhaps even a star who could lead UCLA to future NCAA team championships.15

  Morgan also hoped to lure Charlie Pasarell to UCLA, though he feared that the talented young Puerto Rican was headed for UCLA’s cross-town rival, USC. Year after year, the two schools had gone head-to-head, vying for the NCAA team championship. Together they had won nine national tennis titles in the last eleven years, including UCLA’s victory in 1960. And as the new decade progressed, there would be no letup in either the competition or the recruiting war between them. While UCLA was favored to repeat as champion in 1961, USC’s powerful freshman squad led by Dennis Ralston and Rafael Osuna heralded a probable reversal of UCLA’s dominance in the coming years. At the very least, Morgan faced an uphill struggle, which may have prompted his turn to the East for help.

  What he didn’t anticipate was the added bonus reaped from Arthur’s friendship with Pasarell. When the Puerto Rican star learned Arthur had agreed to attend UCLA, he didn’t follow suit immediately as Morgan had hoped he would. But he did lead Morgan to believe he was now leaning toward UCLA. Grateful that UCLA was still alive in the recruiting competition with USC, the coach could look forward to the very real possibility that he would soon have the services of a powerful duo of freshmen capable of advancing the UCLA tennis dynasty. Though nothing was certain, Arthur was confident that Charlie would ultimately choose UCLA. In fact, he was so confident that when Harvard later offered him a scholarship offer, in the hope of luring him away from UCLA, he resisted the Ivy League school’s charms and never seriously considered severing his fate from that of his close friend.16

  Arthur’s enthusiasm for UCLA was tempered only by the school’s remoteness from his family. As he put it, “I’d be a long way from the racial discrimination of Richmond. But I’d be a long way from my family, too.” He knew his father would be reluctant to allow his oldest son to attend college so far away. But with Dr. Johnson’s help, he was able to convince Arthur Sr. that the UCLA offer represented the opportunity of a lifetime, one that would lead, in all likelihood, to a bright future on and off the tennis court. In truth, while he was excited by the thought of attending UCLA, Arthur Jr. harbored some misgivings of his own. Living in St. Louis had already led to occasional bouts of homesickness, and he wondered what it would be like to live nearly three thousand miles from home.17

  In the end, Arthur concluded traveling so far afield was well worth the risk. To him, UCLA was not just the host institution for an elite tennis program, or a university with an enviable academic reputation. It was also the alma mater of two of his most revered role models: Jackie Robinson, Class of 1942, and Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche, Class of 1927. Robinson lettered in four sports at UCLA before moving on to the Negro Leagues and eventually joining the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Bunche was a star guard on the university basketball squad for three seasons. Since the late 1920s, the UCLA athletic program had been a pioneer in recruiting African American athletes.

  No black had ever played tennis for UCLA, and most of the university’s black athletes either played football—as Woody Strode and Kenny Washington did in the 1940s—or participated in track and field, as the decathlon champion Rafer Johnson did in the late 1950s. But black athletes were hardly a novelty at UCLA by the time Morgan recruited Ashe. Indeed, two years earlier Johnson had served as president of the UCLA student body, the third black undergraduate to be elected to the position since 1948. Ashe had no reason to believe that his enrollment at the university, or his addition to the tennis team, would provoke even a ripple of controversy on campus. After all, he later wrote, “Negroes have been doing okay at UCLA for thirty years.”18

  With his college plans settled, Ashe returned to St. Louis in early January for his final five months of high school. He immediately found himself back in the grind, submitting to Coach Hudlin’s tightly controlled training regimen and working on his game with Larry Miller, Jim Parker, and the Buchholz brothers at the armory. To his relief, the knowledge that he would be at UCLA in the fall—and that his stay in St. Louis wouldn’t last forever—lessened the burden and lifted his spirits. “I came out of my shell in St. Louis,” he recalled, “partly because they made such a fuss over me and nobody knew anything about me. I could be a different person, and nobody would ever know the difference. After growing up in a community where everybody knew who I was, either because of my father or because of my tennis, I could
be anything I wanted in St. Louis.” He was clearly straining at the leash and edging toward the independent state of mind that would later be his trademark. “Spending my senior year in St. Louis gave me the chance not only to change my tennis game but also my personality,” he later insisted. “I was always rather shy and studious. I was good in baseball and tennis, but socially I was shy.”19

  Even with the tight discipline imposed by his hosts, the St. Louis experience accelerated Arthur’s transition to adulthood. In addition to launching his new life beyond Virginia, it removed him from the routines of his adolescence: the normal activities with his circle of friends and schoolmates at Baker and Walker; the Sunday rituals of church and community; the extended family gatherings of uncles, aunts, and cousins; the occasional country outings to Gum Spring with his father, stepmother, and siblings; the long hours on the Brook Field courts; and the close mentorship of Charity and Dr. J. Everything seemed different in St. Louis, including the city’s detachment from the surge of political change in the winter and spring of 1961. For all its faults, Virginia was closer to the center of things, especially to the excitement surrounding the early months of President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” administration and to the recent quickening of the civil rights movement.

  In early May, Virginia was the backdrop for the first phase of the Freedom Rides, the Congress of Racial Equality’s (CORE) daring direct-action campaign designed to test compliance with two U.S. Supreme Court decisions mandating the desegregation of interstate bus travel. One of the decisions, Boynton v. Virginia, stemmed from an arrest at the Richmond Trailways bus terminal in 1958, and the city was fittingly the first overnight stop of the Freedom Riders’ planned two-week journey from Washington to New Orleans. Indeed, the interracial band of thirteen nonviolent activists spent their first night at a Virginia Union dormitory, almost within shouting distance of the Ashes’ home. The Riders soon proceeded southward to Alabama, where they provoked a savage response from Klansmen and other militant white supremacists. A bus bombing in Anniston and mob violence in Birmingham and Montgomery truncated the original Freedom Ride, but this conflict soon spawned a mobilization of several hundred activists, including many Northern college students willing to board freedom buses bound for the Deep South. Most of the Freedom Rides concentrated on Alabama and Mississippi, but one Ride originated in St. Louis in mid-July, a month after Arthur left the city.20

  What a seventeen-year-old Richmond native living in St. Louis thought of this unfolding civil rights drama is unclear. But by his own account, he had yet to develop the acute political consciousness and deep sense of social responsibility that dominated his later life. As a black Southerner approaching adulthood, Arthur obviously paid some attention to what was going on in the buses, lunch counters, courtrooms, and jails of the South; and Dick Hudlin reportedly did what he could to encourage his pupil’s engagement with issues related to racial discrimination and civil rights. Nevertheless, actual participation in the movement—risking arrest or public identification with the protests—was out of the question for someone living under the tight regime imposed by his mentors and his father. Disciplined and obedient, he was not about to brook this disapproval, nor to jeopardize his career in any way. He had too much to lose, and his insurgent position in the mainstream tennis world was tenuous enough without being branded a troublemaker.

  The closest he came to getting involved in a racial incident during his time in St. Louis occurred when he impulsively accompanied a white friend to a private tennis club traditionally reserved for whites. Predictably, as soon as he and his friend began to warm up, a booming voice ordered him off the court. “Hey, you!” a white staff member yelled out. “Get off there. We don’t allow colored in this club.” Hoping to avoid a major incident, Arthur complied immediately. But he never forgot his brush with the ugly side of St. Louis.

  What Arthur could not avoid, of course, was public commentary on his status as “the first black” to enter the previously lily-white mainstream of men’s tennis. “Those comments always put me under pressure to justify my accomplishments on racial grounds, as if sports were the cutting edge of our nation’s move toward improved race relations,” he complained in 1981. “The fact this kind of accomplishment by a black player got so much attention was an indication that we still had so far to go.” “I played in clubs where the only blacks were waiters, gardeners, and busboys,” he recounted, adding with considerable understatement: “I knew there was apprehension in some circles about my presence.” Alone but hardly invisible, he had, in his words, “moved into the world of tennis that had little in common with the black experience. The game had a history and tradition I was expected to assimilate, but much of that history and many of those traditions were hostile to me.”21

  Whatever private thoughts young Arthur Ashe harbored on civil rights matters, his dual preoccupations with tennis and schoolwork left little time for social or political activism. Heeding Coach Morgan’s warning that UCLA would be academically demanding, he was determined to be as well prepared as possible for the intellectual challenges ahead. So when he wasn’t on the tennis court, he was often studying or reading, even though the formal curriculum at Sumner did little to stimulate him. Realizing he “had already taken subjects in Richmond as a junior that were being taught only to seniors at Sumner,” school administrators made arrangements for him to take independent study courses. But, to his dismay, they could not overlook the multiyear residency requirement when selecting the class valedictorian; even though Ashe had the highest grade-point average in the class and was a member of the National Honor Society, one year of work at Sumner was not enough to establish his eligibility for the valedictory honor.22

  This ruling, plus the absence of his family from the June graduation ceremony, brought Arthur’s high school career to a disappointing end. But with UCLA and a busy summer of tennis looming, he had little trouble putting the difficulties of the past year behind him. “After graduation everything changed,” he later wrote. “I left the Hudlins and hit the tournament circuit again—with some of my expenses paid by tournament promoters now, since I was so highly ranked. I was somebody instead of nobody, and pretty much my own boss.”

  The summer tennis season of 1961 marked an important turning point in Arthur’s young career. His status as a legitimate contender for national preeminence was now undeniable. Displaying a new versatility and power on the court, he was no longer just an object of curiosity who could be dismissed as a racial anomaly or as an overachiever with limited talent. Ranked among the five best Junior players in the nation at the beginning of the summer, he was poised to rise even higher.

  Two weeks after leaving St. Louis, Arthur fulfilled Dr. J’s decade-long dream of seeing a Lynchburg-trained boy win the USLTA National Interscholastic singles championship. With his beaming mentor looking on, he won the title without losing a set, defeating Jim Parker, one of his St. Louis practice partners, in the finals. Arthur was jubilant, even though his triumph was preceded by an unfortunate incident earlier in the week. One evening three of his white friends—Butch Newman, Cliff Buchholz, and Charlie Pasarell—invited him to join them at a movie being shown at a downtown Charlottesville theater. “I turned them down because I knew I wouldn’t get in,” he recalled, “but the guys wouldn’t take no for an answer. When we got to the theater, the reaction was predictable. ‘You can’t go in,’ the woman in the ticket booth said. I wasn’t surprised by her statement.” He was, however, somewhat surprised by his friends’ reaction. “Well, if he can’t go in none of us will go,” Buchholz declared. Asked about the episode years later, he remembered Arthur complaining to the ticket lady: “What do you want me to do, paint myself with whitewash?” The four friends left the awkward scene shaking their heads and nervously assuring each other that they had just undergone a bonding experience. Arthur would long remember the humanizing solidarity of that night, which confirmed not only the wisdom of leaving Virginia but also the potential for true friends
hip across the color line.23

  If Arthur had any lingering doubts about his decision to leave the Old Dominion, they were probably gone by early July, when an article in Sports Illustrated revealed that several months prior to the 1961 tournament the University of Virginia had unexpectedly “asked to be excused from an agreement with the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association to hold the Interscholastic tennis championship on the University’s courts through 1963.” UVA officials, including the university’s athletic director Gus Tebell, insisted their request was based on financial considerations and had nothing to do with Arthur’s probable victory or the increasingly visible black participation in the tournament in recent years. But the editors of Sports Illustrated—who titled their editorial commentary “Tennis the Menace”—were not the only observers who suspected otherwise. Later in the year, when the USLTA announced that the tournament would be moved to Williams College in western Massachusetts in 1962, Virginia’s well-deserved reputation for racial intolerance was intact. The relocation led the Sports Illustrated editors to speculate that in Williamstown “the sight of a Negro in white flannels does not upset white citizens as it apparently does in Charlottesville.”24

  Arthur himself did not dwell on the implications of the tournament’s abrupt relocation. He was too busy traveling from city to city, and playing match after match against tough opponents. After Charlottesville, he only had time for a brief visit with his family in Richmond before heading for the Eastern Clay Court Championships in northern New Jersey. Though seeded fifth, he won the clay court singles title and finished second in the doubles. Four days later, he was in Omaha for the Missouri Valley Junior Championships, where he captured the singles title, defeating the number three seed, his friend Cliff Buchholz, in the finals. Three weeks later, in early August, he would face Buchholz again in the semifinals at Kalamazoo. This time the stakes would be much higher.