Arthur Ashe Page 14
Interestingly enough, Arthur’s newfound interest in Africa and the rapidly decolonizing Third World did not lead to engagement with the domestic civil rights movement. That would come later, in 1967—in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the emergence of Black Power the following year. During his time at UCLA, the campus witnessed an increasingly active student movement, beginning with a brave contingent of Mississippi-bound Freedom Riders in early August 1961. By the time Arthur arrived in mid-September, the local Freedom Riders had returned to campus, fresh from their experiences in Parchman Farm prison and full of energy and enthusiasm for the coming struggle. Soon a reinvigorated campus CORE chapter was challenging UCLA’s older and more conservative student NAACP chapter for primacy among black students. Pushing for a more militant stance, the CORE activists joined forces with some of the same African students that Arthur had come to know through conversations in the student union. But they did so without the help or involvement of UCLA’s black student athletes.19
In December, when a controversy erupted over a series of ugly incidents involving the basketball team’s treatment by racist hotel managers and other whites in Houston, Walt Hazzard and Fred Slaughter consulted privately with the leaders of CORE-UCLA. But neither they nor Ashe, nor any other UCLA athlete, became actively or publicly involved in the ensuing campus controversy. In the wake of the Houston incident, the UCLA Student Legislative Council (SLC) urged Chancellor Murphy to adopt a university policy prohibiting “UCLA athletic teams from participating in events that allowed segregated housing or any form of racial discrimination” and requiring coaches to “withdraw their teams when confronted with any form of racial discrimination.” Following a thorough investigation that technically exonerated John Wooden, who had come under fire for benching Slaughter and Hazzard during a game against Texas A&M rather than withdrawing his team from the tournament, Murphy announced the implementation of a policy that essentially met the SLC’s demands. Interpreted as a major step toward racial equality on campus, the new policy undoubtedly pleased Ashe and UCLA’s other black athletes. But other than a brief public statement by Hazzard, who agreed to speak to a black Los Angeles Sentinel reporter, the black athletes themselves played no public role in bringing about the new policy.
This was hardly surprising. As the sports historian John Matthew Smith has written, “In 1961 most college athletes kept their political views to themselves”—especially if they were black. “Black college athletes,” Smith observed, “were expected to perform on the field, appreciate their educational opportunity, ignore racial insults and humiliations, and behave like ‘good Negroes.’ ” Later in life Ashe would challenge this mandated silence, but during his UCLA years he was too focused on tennis and too intent on fitting in to voice his opinions on race or any other public issue. While he was intellectually curious enough to keep abreast of current events, he didn’t feel he could afford to expend time and energy on matters unconnected to his formal courses or his competition on the court.20
Ashe was at UCLA for two reasons—to get a college degree and to display and develop his skills as a tennis player. Nothing else mattered nearly as much—including his social life. “As I think back,” he wrote a year after his graduation, “I guess I never really felt a part of UCLA. I was gone a lot on lonesome tournament trips. Even when I was on campus, I was usually playing tennis, practicing tennis, or thinking tennis.” At the time, long before the advent of Open Tennis, he had no expectation that this single-mindedness would lead to professional employment or financial security. Intellectually, he knew that eventually he would have to leave the tennis world to find a means of supporting himself. When contemplating the prospect of a long-term career, he had no reason to believe that the tennis world would rid itself of racial discrimination anytime in the foreseeable future. But even if it did there was little likelihood that life as a professional tennis player would be a viable financial choice for any aspiring player, black or white.
The professional tennis circuit had been around since Arthur’s childhood, and some of the world’s most talented players, including the great Australians Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall and Arthur’s idol Pancho Gonzales, had left the amateur ranks to play for pay. But even the best players had found it difficult to make a decent living on the pro tour. Despite the best efforts of the tour’s tireless promoter Jack Kramer, the pro game limped along throughout the 1950s, disparaged by the national and international federations as a threat to the integrity of amateur tennis. One of the world’s greatest amateur players in the late 1940s—and the first man to win the Wimbledon singles title wearing short pants (in 1947)—Kramer was both innovative and aggressive, so much so that he became public enemy number one among the guardians of the traditional tennis establishment. Nevertheless, by 1960 he had won over a number of influential converts to the idea of Open Tennis—a system that allowed all comers, amateur and professional, to play against one another.
To the horror of the old guard, a proposal to sanction between eight and thirteen Open tournaments per year was put to a vote at the 1960 annual meeting of the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF). To the surprise of many, including the pro-Open delegations from the United States, Great Britain, France, and Australia, support for the proposal fell five votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority. Later in the meeting, the French federation introduced an alternative reform measure “calling for the creation of a category of ‘registered’ players who could capitalize on their skill by bargaining with tournaments for appearance fees higher than the expenses allowed amateurs,” but this halfway measure was promptly tabled, in part because the USLTA opposed it. Roundly disappointed by the ILTF’s rejection of Open Tennis, Kramer responded, as the tennis commentator Bud Collins put it, by “taking out his wallet and waving it in front of practically every player of moderate reputation.” Before long, it was clear Kramer’s all-out recruitment effort had backfired as the ILTF declared a virtual war on the professional tour.
Caught in the middle, Open Tennis seemed further away than ever by 1961, when a new proposal for a limited number of “experimental” Open tournaments lay buried in an ILTF committee and a USLTA-sponsored “home rule” proposal allowing individual federations to use their own discretion in sanctioning Open Tennis went down to defeat. Realizing his controversial reputation had become a sideshow hindering the cause of Open Tennis, Kramer stepped down in 1962. But this gesture only emboldened amateur tennis’s old guard, especially the leaders of the USLTA, who in 1963 overruled the organization’s pro-Open president Ed Turville, ordering its delegates to the annual ILTF meeting to vote against both Open Tennis and home rule.
The biggest losers were the fans, who would have to wait six more years for Open Tennis, and the players—the professionals who, more isolated than ever, took to small-venue barnstorming to survive—and the amateurs like Ashe who faced an uncertain future of inadequate under-the-table support. The prospects for Open Tennis did not look good in 1962, but having dedicated himself to the game since childhood, eighteen-year-old Ashe couldn’t imagine any other life course.21
Tennis-wise, he entered UCLA with high hopes and more than a little pressure. But early bonding with his seven freshman teammates and Coach Morgan got him off to a good start. While the Balboa Bay Club incident was a temporary setback, it didn’t seem to affect his performance on the court. As one of the two highest-ranked players among UCLA’s freshman recruits, he was expected to play well, and for the most part he did. With the intercollegiate season scheduled to begin in January, the fall semester was devoted to long practices, conditioning sessions, and occasional participation in invitational tournaments. The first four months of Arthur’s collegiate career were little more than a warm-up season designed to get the new recruits ready for the official dual meets to follow. He made good use of this time by demonstrating his work ethic to Morgan and by gaining confidence that he could more than keep up with the flashy, high-style
California boys on the other side of the net.
Three weeks after his teammates traveled to the Balboa Bay Club tournament without him, he participated in a tournament at the equally famous Racquet Club in Palm Springs. This time the host club—known as a desert watering hole for Hollywood’s show business elite—went out of its way to make him feel welcome. Charley Farrell, a movie actor and television personality who along with the actor Ralph Bellamy had founded the club in 1934, and Julie Copeland, the club’s official hostess, made a point of approaching him before the first match. “We’ve followed your tennis, Arthur,” they assured him, “and you’re always welcome.” Among the notables in the crowd were the singer Dinah Shore and model and showgirl Barbara Marx (the future wife of Frank Sinatra), both of whom invited him to play at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. This was Arthur’s first brush with celebrity, and he had difficulty keeping his mind on the match at hand. But he played well enough to impress the small crowd that had gathered to witness the club’s voluntary desegregation. There would be many such moments in the years to come, but Arthur would never forget the kindness he encountered as a vulnerable college freshman breaching the barriers of race, class, and fame in the desert.22
As the fall semester progressed Arthur grew increasingly comfortable with his West Coast surroundings, and by the time intercollegiate play began in early January the quiet confidence that had always been his trademark was on full display. Ranked 28th in the nation—just behind Pasarell at #27—he wasted no time in demonstrating that the skinny kid from the East was a rising star with a bright future. In a four-month season of dual meets, he dominated the freshman singles competition without losing a match, and he was nearly as strong in doubles, teaming with David Sanderlin and occasionally with Pasarell to finish the season with only one loss. The high point came in late April when the UCLA freshmen beat archrival USC 9–0, losing only 11 games in nine matches, as Arthur won all of his matches without losing a game. By then, at least one sports reporter was calling Arthur and his teammates “one of the greatest college freshman teams of all time,” and even predicting that the young star from Richmond would eventually become the “top U.S. net player.”23
While such talk made Coach Morgan nervous, he couldn’t hide his growing optimism about the future of UCLA tennis. As Arthur and his freshman teammates knew all too well, in less than a year Morgan would call upon them to sustain the Bruins’ tradition of winning national championships. College tennis in Southern California had long been a pressure cooker stoked by the fierce rivalry between the Bruins and the USC Trojans. During the past twelve years, USC had won three national team championships in men’s tennis, and UCLA had won seven, including the last two. Clearly, it was a thrilling time to be a Bruins tennis player, but the pressure to win a third straight championship—matching UCLA’s great run of 1952–54—was fierce.
Even as a freshman, Arthur became deeply involved in the crosstown tennis wars, cheering for the UCLA upperclassmen from the sidelines and dreaming of the day when it would be his turn to do battle on the varsity level. While he and other Bruins rooters were cautiously optimistic, it was clear from the outset that the 1961–62 varsity squad faced an uphill struggle in its quest for a third straight NCAA championship. Led by captain Larry Nagler, the 1960 NCAA singles champion, the squad had been weakened by the graduation of Allen Fox, the 1961 singles champion. The loss of Fox, the #4 ranked men’s singles player in the nation, left the Bruins vulnerable to the rise of several teams capable of challenging them for the 1962 title. Predictably, the most formidable challenger was the USC Trojans. Led by the sensational sophomores Ralston and Osuna, USC was expected to field one of the strongest teams in NCAA history.
Coach Morgan feared his team lacked the skill and experience needed to keep the Trojans at bay, and he was right. Despite the freshman triumphs that had brought Arthur a measure of glory, his first year at UCLA ended in bitter disappointment. Having lost both dual (two teams) matches to USC earlier in the season, the UCLA varsity went into the tournament as a clear underdog to its cross-town rival. No one, however, could have predicted the thorough thrashing the Trojans administered on the Stanford courts. USC dominated the nine-team field from start to finish, winning 22 points, an all-time NCAA-record. (Team points were awarded based on individual performance in singles and doubles.) UCLA finished a distant second with 12 points, and no UCLA player made it into the finals in either the singles or doubles competition. Osuna, USC’s diminutive Mexican star, outlasted Marty Riessen of Northwestern for the singles title, and then teamed with Ramsey Earnhart to win the doubles title for the second straight year. When it was announced that no doubles team had won consecutive NCAA championships since 1925, Arthur and the Bruins knew that USC’s victory was complete. The dream of a third straight team championship for UCLA had dissolved into the nightmare of USC’s obvious superiority.24
Mercifully, Arthur had little time to think about the disappointing results at Palo Alto. School was out, and by June 24 he was making his way eastward to the first stop of the summer tennis circuit. Prior to his nineteenth birthday in early July, he was still technically a Junior, but he had already gained enough national attention to draw invitations and traveling money from tournament organizers eager to attract the nation’s best players. With the recent liberalization of the USLTA’s stance on racial integration, he was able to participate in the tour with little fear of outright hostility or official rejection, taking advantage of the fact that virtually all of the summer tournaments were held outside the South. As much as he missed his family, he had no desire to spend more than a few days in what he now realized was the confining, almost suffocating atmosphere of the Jim Crow South. Perhaps even more important, improvement on the tennis court was his number one priority, and the only reliable way to move to the next level was, as he later put it, “hard continuous tennis.”
Arthur’s financial situation had not reached the point where he could contemplate the ultimate summer tennis experiences—playing on the hallowed grass at Wimbledon or on the red clay at Roland Garros in Paris. But his disappointment in not joining Pasarell and several other American players on the trip to Europe was tempered by the prospect of traveling independently during a summer of personal liberation. Hackensack, New Jersey, the first stop on the summer tour, was a far cry from Wimbledon. But being there represented an important step on the path to both adulthood and full participation in the world of competitive tennis.
The Eastern circuit gave Arthur just what he needed, plenty of competition and a growing sense of inclusion and validation. Yet the summer of 1962 was also inevitably a season of confusion and some frustration for a young, relatively inexperienced player. The transition to the adult tour was not for the faint of heart, and Arthur faced additional barriers of race, class, and culture. He had played in integrated tournaments before, and after a year of intercollegiate matches he was accustomed to being the only black player in sight. But somehow playing on the summer tour was different. This was the real world, and he was on his own, without teammates, and without a coach to guide or protect him. The broad age range of older and younger players, the size of the crowds, the likelihood of daily interaction with a wide variety of players, officials, sponsors, reporters, and fans—all of these factors posed a challenge to a newcomer trying to establish himself.
For Arthur, racial isolation was often the toughest test. “To me those tournament trips were like exploring unknown country that could be unpleasant or even booby-trapped,” he recalled. “Sometimes everything would be smiling and friendly on the surface, but I wasn’t sure whether the friendliness was more than face-deep. I’d always been among my own kind when I was at home in Richmond or in Dr. Johnson’s summer training camp. And at UCLA I had plenty of friends and no enemies. But the tournament trips were something else. There were weeks at a time when I never saw another Negro, except maybe waiters and locker-room attendants. You can imagine the feeling—traveling away from home and never seeing a
nybody of your own race. You’re not scared but you’re always on guard.”
Although he knew it would take time and effort to adjust to the personal and social demands of the tour, he was less prepared for his lack of success on the court. Week after week, he found himself overmatched by older and more experienced opponents. He was fit, and at times seemed to be playing as well as he had ever played. Yet he discovered even his best wasn’t quite good enough against the nation’s top players. While he usually prevailed in the early rounds, he rarely made it beyond the quarterfinals. His first disappointment came at the beginning of the tour, in northern New Jersey, at the Eastern Clay Court Championships, a tournament he had won the year before. Coinciding with the first week of Wimbledon, the tournament traditionally drew a weak field of clay court specialists, and as the defending champion he was the number one seed. Brimming with confidence, he breezed through the first three rounds, but then ran out of steam against the former Princeton star Jim Farrin in the quarterfinals, 2–6, 7–5, 6–0. This “rude awakening,” as The Chicago Defender put it, set him back on his heels.
The pattern continued throughout July, at the Detroit Invitational, where he lost in the semifinals, and at the prestigious United States Clay Court Championship in Chicago, where he lost in straight sets to Fred Stolle, a former Wimbledon doubles champion. At the end of the month, the tour moved to grass courts, a faster surface better suited to his game. But he continued to struggle, losing to Graebner in the second round at the Merion Cricket Club in Haverford, Pennsylvania. Teamed with Nagler, he won the doubles title at Merion, but a few days later he lost to Whitney Reed in the second round at South Orange, New Jersey.