Arthur Ashe Read online

  His spirits rose temporarily in early August when he, Pasarell, and Reed were renamed to the U.S. Junior Davis Cup team, and when he took time out to participate in his last ATA national tournament, winning his third consecutive men’s singles title. On the more competitive USLTA circuit, however, his fortunes continued to flag. By the end of the summer tour, he was roundly discouraged, but at least he now knew just how difficult it was going to be to climb the national tennis ladder.25

  Before returning to UCLA to begin his sophomore year, Arthur had time for an extended visit with his family in Virginia and a week of play at the U.S. National Championships at Forest Hills. This was his fourth appearance at Forest Hills, so breaching the color line at the West Side Tennis Club was no longer a novelty. Even so, he was more determined than ever to play his best at America’s most famous tennis venue. In the first round, he defeated a familiar foe, Butch Newman, in a close match. But in the second round he had the misfortune of coming up against the defending champion, Roy Emerson.

  The Ashe-Emerson match took place on the Stadium Court, where no black had played since Althea Gibson in 1958. The umpire was Titus Sparrow, the first black person to preside over a Forest Hills match, and the contest was the fifth and last match of the day on the Stadium Court. Only a modest crowd was on hand to witness what was expected to be a rout, but during the first two sets Ashe displayed flashes of brilliance, even though he lost both sets. In the third and final set, Emerson kicked it up a notch, and Ashe failed to win a game. The next day Al Danzig of The New York Times, the dean of American tennis writers, praised Ashe as an erratic but talented newcomer. “The slender youth is a stylist of imagination and daring,” Danzig wrote, “with strokes that will be a real challenge once he has acquired better control.”26

  Arthur had heard this type of criticism before—that he was as erratic as he was talented. But he didn’t mind, preferring the image of a flashy risk taker to that of a plodding baseliner. At least some people in the tennis world had begun to notice he was capable of creative and innovative play. More than anything else, he wanted to be thought of as a young Pancho Gonzales, a shotmaker with power who could invent dazzling new strokes whenever he needed them. Gonzales had been Arthur’s hero since he had first seen him play in Richmond in 1954, and earlier in the year he had taken instruction from the aging but still hard-hitting pro at the UCLA courts. At Coach Morgan’s invitation, Gonzales and other touring professionals sometimes practiced on the Bruins’ courts, affording Arthur and his teammates the rare opportunity to get to know and learn from some of the world’s best players. Arthur emerged from these informal workshops determined to hit his serves and groundstrokes like Gonzales—harder than he had ever hit them before.27

  By mid-September, Ashe was back on campus and glad to be there, realizing his second year of college would almost certainly prove less stressful than his first. He now had a much better sense of what to expect both on and off the court. No longer an innocent freshman, he had begun to embrace both the responsibilities and freedom of early adulthood. While he still looked several years younger than his age, he was clearly growing up—intellectually as well as emotionally. Those who knew him best detected a new openness in his social and interpersonal relations. He was more confident and assertive, and less rigid in his daily routines. His sophomore roommate, teammate David Reed, actively encouraged this new attitude, and their oversized room in Sproul Hall soon became a gathering place for a widening circle of friends. “Our room was probably the best room in the place, intended originally for visiting big shots. It was extra large, with wood paneling,” Arthur recalled. Putting the insecurities of his Virginia background behind him, he was fast becoming one of the self-assured “California boys” that he had once feared and envied as a young player.

  Arthur’s growing sophistication and maturation had a lot to do with the deepening bonds of trust among his teammates. As he reflected upon this part of his life several years later, he stressed the platoon-style “band of brothers” experience that created a surrogate family. “I guess being part of that small sociable squad,” he wrote, “was the closest I’ve ever come in my whole life to feeling that I really belonged—even though we all were rivals for the top spots on the team.” Race placed certain limits on this sense of belonging, he conceded, and at the deepest level he remained “different from the other tennis players.” “I could always feel it,” he recalled, “rather like being alone in a tribe of red Indians or South Sea Islanders.” Nevertheless, he came to rely on several close interracial friendships that encouraged feelings of inclusion and eased his transition to adulthood.

  His teammates still teased him about being “the Shadow,” and there was no letup in the racial banter that punctuated courtside and locker room conversations. But over the years he had learned to fend off these casual indignities without anger, even though he seldom saw any real humor in them. Giving as good as he got, he was slowly but surely developing survival skills that would serve him well in the years to come. Here his even temper and cool demeanor proved useful, promoting an easy sociability that often protected him from the worst excesses of racial insensitivity and misunderstanding. Outwardly at least, he was just one of the guys, darker skinned to be sure, but safely inside the circle of friendship.28

  As his sophomore year progressed, Arthur became increasingly relaxed and open in his dealings with other students, so much so that he eventually felt secure enough to challenge one of American culture’s fundamental taboos. Interracial dating had become increasingly common on the UCLA campus since the mid-1950s, and Ashe himself had dated Susan Ikei during his freshman year. Nevertheless, as he was well aware, a romantic, interracial relationship with a white girl remained a daring and potentially dangerous transgression. The safest course, even at UCLA, would have been to suppress any urge to reach across the color line. But he was too curious to ignore the white coeds who sometimes smiled at him in class or at social gatherings, and he was too attracted to them to let race stand in his way for very long. In his earlier days, he had been afraid to approach or even make eye contact with a white girl. But as a red-blooded nineteen-year-old man about campus, he was ready to follow his emotions and take his chances exploring the unknown.

  Arthur’s first experience with living on the edge began innocently enough with a sideways glance at a beautiful girl standing on the edge of a dance floor in Sproul Hall. Two decades later, he recalled the excitement of the moment: “She was absolutely stunning, with coal-black hair, a tight green skirt, and dark green turtleneck sweater. And white. I was unable to take my eyes off her. She caught me looking at her and stared back boldly. . . . After twenty minutes of glances across the dance floor, I summoned enough nerve to go over and mumble the usual, ‘Hello, What’s your name?’ It turned out she was a friend of a friend. I asked her to dance. I had never danced with a white girl before.” Later, sitting in the moonlight on an outdoor patio, they talked for three hours, ending the evening with a peck on the cheek and a vow “to see each other again.”

  As Arthur walked back to his room alone, his mind raced with thoughts of how shocked his friends and family back in Richmond would have been to see him dancing with and kissing a white girl. “Talk about old southern taboos coming back to haunt you,” he later wrote. “I was scared, thrilled, excited, sweating and numb—all at the same time.” Looking back, he acknowledged the obvious: “the fact that she was different was part of my attraction to her.” “Each of us brought our own perceptions and life experiences to UCLA,” he continued. “We tried to mix and reconcile, probe and experiment with our different values and judgments. I don’t think many of my white classmates ever dated a black woman. When you’re in the majority, you don’t feel you have to make any accommodation. Assimilation, if any, is for the minority. So is experimentation. . . . For someone like me, from the small stifling world of Richmond, the opportunity to try something new—unknown and forbidden—could not be squandered.”29

  Arthur’
s infatuation with his first white girlfriend, Phyllis Jones, lasted for several months, long enough for him to reflect upon the likely ramifications of their relationship. “At first, I worried about what my family would think, what J.D. would think,” he recalled. “But everyone that mattered was so far away. I talked to Susan Ikei. She thought I was dumb to worry so much.” Eventually Phyllis told her mother that she was dating Arthur Ashe, a member of the UCLA tennis team; somehow she failed to mention that her new boyfriend was black. Several weeks later, when Mrs. Jones happened to see him on a television sports report, the reaction was predictable. “You didn’t tell me he was a Negro!” the devastated mother screamed. “I don’t ever want him in my house, do you hear?” Phyllis sheepishly agreed but continued to date Ashe anyway, continuing the relationship until, as he put it, the novelty “wore off.”

  Arthur clearly knew that at one level he was defying convention, that in his words “a black man could have gotten killed for dating a white woman in Richmond,” where antimiscegenation statutes still outlawed racial intermarriage. But he also knew that sexual permissiveness, even across racial lines, was the norm at UCLA, where, as he later wrote, “the atmosphere was definitely anything goes.” This was especially true, he insisted, for athletes: “Some women thought that a good athlete was also probably good in bed.” “This fascination,” according to Arthur, “was a powerful force,” to the point where “most black athletes could have any woman they wanted, black or white.” UCLA was an anomaly, of course: “Once you went away from Westwood . . . the situation changed. I had never been stared at like that before, as if was doing something morally wrong.” He was so unnerved at one point that he bravely called his father to ask if it would be a serious problem if he happened to marry a white woman. “Don’t make no difference to me,” Arthur Sr. responded, “as long as she’s a good person.”30

  As a new member of the UCLA varsity, Arthur found himself climbing up the tennis ladder. One of the secrets of his success was actually an off-campus opportunity that took him into a world where tennis, celebrity, and social privilege were conjoined. During their second year in Los Angeles, he and Pasarell began to spend more of their time at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, where they cultivated a growing friendship with two of the world’s most inventive and colorful tennis pros, Francisco “Pancho” Segura and Richard Alonzo “Pancho” Gonzales. Segura was the teaching pro at the club, and Gonzales, who was still playing on the professional tour, was a frequent visitor. Both Panchos developed a strong affinity for Arthur, whom they regarded as a fellow outsider. Taking considerable interest in his career, they considered him one of “the brown bodies,” their term for players of color who had breached the barriers of race and class to enter the virtually all-white world of the American tennis elite.

  Segura, a native Ecuadoran who had come to the United States in 1941 to play under the famed University of Miami coach Gardnar Mulloy, was a savvy pro known for his highly unorthodox two-handed forehand. Though often overshadowed by several of his contemporaries, he had his moments of glory, defeating Gonzales twice in consecutive U.S. Pro singles finals in 1951 and 1952.

  A Californian, the hard-hitting Gonzales emerged from the barrios to become the reigning king of the professional tour throughout the mid- and late 1950s, winning the U.S. Pro singles title eight times between 1953 and 1964. In 1969, at the age of forty-one, he would somehow outlast Pasarell in the longest match in Wimbledon history, 112 games played over five hours and twelve minutes, an ironic twist considering that he had helped mentor his Puerto Rican friend for the past seven years.

  Gonzales was sometimes as imperious as Segura was mellow, but both men were generous with their time and advice. Going beyond his flashy performances at the UCLA courts—which had demonstrated how to hit hard but not necessarily how to keep the ball between the lines—Gonzales worked on the technical aspects of the boys’ shotmaking, especially their serves. “Toss the ball more to the right—into the court,” he told them. “Lean into the shot. You serve with your body, not with your arm. If you serve with your arm, you’ll get tired.” In Segura’s case, the help often went beyond technique and strategy as he introduced the two college boys to a host of tennis-playing Hollywood celebrities and sometimes even farmed out his scheduled lessons to provide them with a few extra dollars. “Segura charged fifteen dollars an hour,” Arthur recalled. “I kept ten and gave him five.”

  The friendship’s real payoff came on the court, where both he and Pasarell began to strike the ball with greater force. They were soon hitting serves and groundstrokes “Gonzales style,” which meant their pace rivaled that of the world’s strongest power hitters. With this new pace came an inevitable decline in accuracy, but over time this became less of a problem.31

  By the fall of 1962, it was clear that Ashe and Pasarell were already as good, and perhaps even a bit better, than any of the team’s upperclassmen—and by the end of the year this was confirmed by their national rankings, #10 for Pasarell and #18 for Ashe. Once the spring semester season began, the two sophomores assumed the team’s top two singles positions, playing ahead of several talented but envious teammates, including David Reed, David Sanderlin, Paul Palmer, and Thorvald Moe. Over the next four months, with Ashe and Pasarell leading the way, the 1963 Bruins managed to win the vast majority of their dual matches. But even with this infusion of talent they could not keep up with their crosstown rival USC. Led by Dennis Ralston and Rafael Osuna, the Trojans were more powerful than ever and virtually unbeatable on the fast concrete courts of Southern California.

  On one occasion, during a mid-April dual match, the Bruins flirted with an upset as Pasarell upended Osuna, winning a marathon second set 21–19; and later in the day, after winning the first set, 9–7, Ashe seemed to be on his way to doing the same against Ralston. But the fiery Trojan from Bakersfield came back to win the final two sets. At the end of the singles competition the team score was 3–3, but after USC swept the doubles the day belonged to the Trojans.

  Even though he lost to Ralston several times during his first varsity season and came to see him as a nemesis, Arthur gradually raised the level of his game during the winter and spring of 1963. He played especially well in special and invitational tournaments, winning both the singles and doubles titles at the first annual All-University of California championships in February, a week after upsetting the nation’s #4 ranked player, Ham Richardson, in the third round of the Thunderbird Invitational tournament in Phoenix. UCLA’s Athletic News Bureau soon began touting him as “one of America’s coming amateur greats” and “the finest Negro prospect in the history of the game.” “Ashe has fine speed and a flowing assortment of strokes, including a big serve and a solid backhand,” a slightly hyperbolic press release explained. “Needs only to become physically stronger and to consolidate his game with emphasis on improving the consistency and ‘percentage’ of his play.” In sum, the author of the press release concluded: “The sky is the limit for the personable Mr. Ashe.”32

  By early May the press was touting Ashe and Pasarell as likely selections to the U.S. Davis Cup team scheduled to play a first-round tie (the traditional term for a Davis Cup competition between two nations) against Iran in Tehran in mid-June. Both were eventually added to the team, along with Ralston and Chuck McKinley, but not before being drawn into a controversy that threatened Arthur’s relationship with J. D. Morgan. With the exception of McKinley, all of the top American players selected by Captain Bob Kelleher were collegiate players scheduled to participate in the NCAA championship tournament to be held at Princeton University the same week as the U.S.-Iran tie. Since the contest against Iran was expected to be a walkover, UCLA and USC officials refused to release their top players from the obligation to play at Princeton. Arthur himself was not expected to be asked to play in Tehran, but Pasarell was Kelleher’s clear choice as the “third man” to back up Ralston and McKinley in the singles competition.

  Thrilled by the prospect of representing the Un
ited States, Pasarell made no secret of his preference to skip Princeton so he could play in Tehran. But Coach Morgan refused to grant him a release. This decision, as controversial as it was, probably would have been the end of the episode if an enterprising student journalist, the sports editor of the Daily Bruin, had not conducted an interview with Arthur, asking him what he thought about the Pasarell situation. Having little experience with the press, he did not hesitate to defend his closest friend, stating unequivocally: “I think the Davis Cup is far more important than any collegiate championship.”

  Predictably, Morgan exploded as soon as he read Arthur’s words: “J.D. called me into his office and tore into me at the top of his voice for 45 minutes.” “Sure the Davis Cup is more important,” the coach pointed out. “But we’ll beat Iran no matter who we send! So it is more important for Pasarell to play at Princeton!” A long lecture on school loyalty followed. As Arthur remembered the scene, Morgan was so forceful that “I didn’t say three words.” “As usual,” he acknowledged in 1967, “J.D. was right.” In the end, the U.S. team of Allen Fox, Donald Dell, and Gene Scott did not miss Pasarell—or Ralston and McKinley for that matter—as they dispatched the overmatched Iranians in short order.33

  Arthur’s verbal indiscretion was soon forgotten. By the time the UCLA team competed at Princeton, he was back in Morgan’s good graces, especially after he played his heart out in a losing effort against Ralston in the semifinals. According to Al Danzig, who had been covering NCAA tennis for several decades, the Ashe-Ralston match had “hardly been surpassed for many years in this tournament in the quality of the play.” To win, Ralston had to produce “the greatest tennis in his career in the fifth set.” Ashe, after losing the first two sets, came back to win the third and fourth before simply running out of steam. Although losing such an important match was disappointing, he left the court with his head held high, knowing he had just played the best single set of his college career. “No other Negro player in the men’s ranks,” Danzig declared, “has ever remotely approached the tennis Ashe put forth.” Ralston went on to win the singles championship, and several of his teammates also raised their game when it counted most. USC was once again the NCAA champion, scoring 27 points to second-place UCLA’s 17.34