Arthur Ashe Page 6

  Penzold proved true to his word, and in the summer of 1951 the interscholastic tournament quietly desegregated. Johnson’s only problem turned out to be his inability to find black high school players who could actually compete with the nation’s best. The two black entrants in 1951, Victor Miller and Roosevelt Megginson of Lynchburg’s Dunbar High School, were both, in Johnson’s words, “annihilated in the first round.” Neither boy won a single game, and Johnson left Charlottesville “embarrassed” and determined to do better the next year. For a time there was no certainty that there would be a next year, but with Darden’s support Penzold managed to weather a storm of criticism. Despite considerable grumbling from conservative whites and even some talk of either removing Penzold from the directorship or giving up sponsorship of the tournament altogether, Johnson and his boys got a second chance in 1952.3

  This time Johnson arrived in Charlottesville with a much stronger contingent, thanks to a year of careful preparation. Following the 1951 debacle, Johnson, at Penzold’s suggestion, had organized a “Negro national interscholastic championship” that would act as a screening mechanism for entrants to the Charlottesville tournament. Run by a newly formed ATA junior development committee, the inaugural tournament was held at Virginia Union in May 1952. Twenty-three players representing ten black high schools participated, with Billy Winn of Wilmington, North Carolina, and Elton King, of Washington, D.C., facing each other in the finals. The finalists won the right to accompany Johnson to Charlottesville. Predictably, they were eliminated in the first round. But both boys played reasonably well, especially Winn, a lightning-quick left-hander who lost 6–1, 6–2 to the highly ranked Ohio star Barry MacKay.4

  Encouraged, Johnson and his ATA colleagues made plans to expand the reach of the Lynchburg junior development camp. The goal of winning a match or two in Charlottesville was beginning to look more realistic, particularly if Winn and some of the other promising juniors could spend a good part of the summer training on Johnson’s court. From 1952 on, the number of players spending at least part of the summer in Lynchburg increased to six or more, and with each passing year there was a noticeable improvement in the quality of play among the best recruits. It would be several years before one of the Lynchburg boys actually won a match and progressed beyond the first round at Charlottesville. But Johnson patiently laid the groundwork for future success by recruiting younger and younger boys.5

  By the mid-1950s Johnson’s belief that early development was the key to success in the tennis world had been confirmed by the apparent limitations of the best older players, including Althea Gibson. His star pupil had continued to play on the USLTA circuit and by 1953 had risen to a #7 national ranking. Yet she had been unable to break through against the nation’s top players. When her ranking fell to #14 in 1954, she became so discouraged that she seriously considered dropping the game altogether, and in 1955 Jet magazine called her “the biggest disappointment in tennis.” By then her token presence on the tour was no longer controversial, and in 1952 and 1953 three black male players—Reginald Weir, George Stewart, and Oscar Johnson—joined her as participants in the national championships at Forest Hills. But none of the male ATA stars fared very well against their white opponents, reinforcing Dr. Johnson’s conviction that the only real hope for black tennis was the youth movement emerging on his Lynchburg court.6

  An important element of Dr. Johnson’s strategy was to give his young players the opportunity to test their skills against older and obviously superior players. Veteran ATA stars were frequent guests at the Lynchburg camp, where they often practiced with and competed against children less than half their age. Dr. Johnson also took the best young players on weekend outings to local and regional ATA tournaments, where they were encouraged to compete against stronger and more experienced opponents. Though bruising to the ego, being overmatched week after week toughened the Lynchburg boys and girls mentally and physically. It also weeded out those who lacked the discipline and drive that Johnson considered essential to long-term survival on the tennis circuit.7

  Fortunately for Arthur Ashe and the game of tennis, Ron Charity was one of the older players invited to the Lynchburg camp. After watching Charity play at an ATA tournament in Richmond in 1953, Dr. Johnson asked the Virginia Union student to spend a few days at his home. Thus began a long friendship that would change both men’s lives. When Johnson drove down to the ATA national tournament in Daytona Beach, Florida, in July, Charity went along, as did Althea Gibson. While it was too late for Charity to develop his talents beyond the middle range of ATA players, he became one of Johnson’s unofficial junior development scouts, charged with looking for young talent appropriate for the Lynchburg camp.

  For ten-year-old Arthur Ashe, the stage was set for a life-changing opportunity. In the spring of 1954, Virginia Union hosted the annual CIAA tournament, and both Charity and Johnson, who served as the tournament director that year, were on hand to watch the nation’s best black collegiate players. Ashe was also there, and during a break between matches he wandered out on to one of Brook Field’s empty courts to hit a few practice serves. After a few minutes, Charity approached the court and yelled out: “Somebody wants to meet you.” Years later Ashe recalled what happened next:

  I followed him to a table that was under the tree outside the side door of my house. Seated at the table was the tournament director, recording scores and directing players to the proper court. . . . “Dr. Johnson,” Ron Charity said, “this is Arthur Ashe, Junior.” He shook my hand and looked me over quizzically. “I understand you’re ten years old.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ve been playing three years.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You like tennis?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded, asked a few more questions, and dismissed me. I went back to the empty court, but felt him watching me as I played. When I glanced over, he was talking to Ron. Later that day, he talked to my father for a long time.8

  At this point, Dr. Johnson was skeptical that the scrawny, sixty-pound child that Charity was so high on deserved a spot at the Lynchburg camp. He wanted young recruits, but he wasn’t sure a boy who looked like he was suffering from rickets had much of a future in a game that required strength and stamina. Charity continued to press Ashe’s case, however, and a few weeks later Johnson consented to a tryout in Lynchburg. The audition revealed the boy’s quickness and enthusiasm, but also a slingshot stroke obviously developed to compensate for his lack of size and strength. The camp would have to rebuild his game from scratch, breaking bad habits and instilling the fundamentals of proper form. But Johnson was intrigued enough by the challenge to agree to let Ashe come to the camp for a two-week trial.

  The adventure began a few weeks later when Arthur Sr. put his excited son on the bus to Lynchburg. The three-hour bus ride turned out to be a memorable initiation for an innocent child with little knowledge of the world beyond his own neighborhood. As he remembered vividly two decades later, his educational experience began long before he reached Lynchburg. “Anyone who’s ever sat in a Greyhound bus knows that the best seat is the one right across the aisle from the driver, the first seat on the right-hand side,” he wrote in 1974. “You’ve got a clear vista looking out the front window. I sat there because I wanted to see the country. . . . The driver just looked over at me, and very nicely, he said: ‘Now son, you know you can’t sit there.’ And so I got up and went to the back.” With a less congenial bus driver, Arthur Jr.’s breach of racial etiquette might well have turned into a serious incident. The U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was barely a month old, and many white Southerners were on edge anticipating challenges to their authority.9

  Even at the tender age of ten, Arthur had some sense of the formal restrictions imposed by the laws and customs of Jim Crow culture. “I can remember segregation,” he later explained, “the hard, legal segregation of that time in Richmond. I suppose I was always awa
re of it, but it was not a concern to me. I can clearly recall the white line on the floor of the bus—it was just to the front of the rear door—and I understood that I was required to stay behind it. I don’t ever remember discussing it; it was just understood.” For him a more pressing reality was the code of behavior imposed by his father. Indeed, Arthur’s initial excitement about the opportunity to spend part of the summer in Lynchburg undoubtedly involved a vision of temporary liberation from paternal control.10

  The regimentation at Dr. Johnson’s camp was, however, severe and unbending, even by the standards of the Ashe household. Dr. J, as he was known to the Lynchburg boys, had a detailed plan for each day’s activities, on and off the court, and he expected all of his charges to follow his orders to the nth degree. As Willis S. Thomas Sr., the father of one of Ashe’s camp mates, recalled, “He’d send you home in a minute if you didn’t measure up to what he wanted.” It was rare for a camper to get a second chance to challenge Dr. J’s authority, and in Arthur’s case a rude initiation into this closed system came on his second day in camp. Years later he described “the only disagreement I had with Dr. Johnson in eight summers at his home”:

  I was the youngest and smallest of the six kids in camp—in fact, I was so tiny and skinny Dr. Johnson thought I had rickets—and the racket I’d brought from home still looked almost as big as me. Of course it was too heavy. But under Ronald Charity I had developed a knack of almost slinging it at the ball, like a midget Irishman tossing a caber. . . . On my second day, his son Bob was instructing me on how to hit. I kept using the swing Ronald had taught me, and Bob kept trying to correct me. But I got as stubborn as a mule. Finally I told Bob right out, “Mr. Charity told me to do it this way.” I wouldn’t change. Dr. Johnson wasted no time. He phoned my father. Daddy wasted no time either. He dropped everything and took the bus to Lynchburg that same afternoon. When he arrived he told me, “Son, Mr. Charity fixed it for you to come here so you could get better coaching. He’s done all he can for you. Dr. Johnson has had more experience and isn’t going to teach you wrong. If you don’t want to obey him, come home.” I stayed. “Mr. Charity” was never mentioned again in camp.11

  Following this early confrontation, Arthur became a model of obedience and discipline. Once he learned the rules of the house, he began to develop a close bond with Dr. J and his son, as well as with his fellow campers. Their time together was as intense as it was carefully orchestrated, from the “machine that would fire tennis balls at us in a steady stream” to the “ ‘dressing room’ in the basement where the boys hung their clothes on hooks when they changed into tennis whites.” As Arthur later explained, “Dr. Johnson wanted us always to look immaculate and correctly dressed when we played, even for practice.” The daily regimen, as he remembered it, was jammed with organized activities:

  We’d get up about 8 every morning, cook our own breakfast, straighten our bedrooms, then hustle out on the courts by about 8:45. We’d take turns hitting with each other—four at a time, usually—all morning, without keeping any scores. . . . In the afternoon we’d drill on whatever Dr. Johnson had told each of us we needed to practice—like 100 serves or 100 backhands, overheads, crosscourts. During our turns off the court, we’d do chores around the house. Somebody had to cut the grass, tend the 150 roses. Somebody had to clean out the doghouse—with lye. That was the worst. . . . Dr. Johnson figured we didn’t need an overseer standing by us with a whip. He trusted us to practice all day, mostly unsupervised, and to get the chores done. But now and then during the day he’d drop in to see how we were doing, and from about 4:30 he’d be with us constantly. . . . Dr. Johnson always fed us a hearty dinner . . . and . . . insisted on perfect table manners. . . . After dinner we were always too full or too tired to want to go out. We’d drift down to the basement party room where Dr. Johnson would talk to us about strategy, or show us tennis films. He had slow-motion pictures of all the strokes. Other evenings we’d listen to records, or read. There were hundreds of World Tennis magazines, and tennis rulebooks. We had to know all the tennis rules cold. Dr. Johnson gave us exams in them.12

  This modified boot camp model posed a stiff challenge for all of Dr. J’s pupils, but Arthur faced the added burden of being the proverbial runt of the litter during his first summer. This forced him to try “harder and harder,” to compensate for his lack of size and experience. “If I couldn’t outmuscle or outrun the other kids,” he reasoned, “I could outwork them. I was first on the courts every morning, last to leave at night. And I was so enthused about the whole idea of the training camp that I took over odd jobs like cleaning up the court that weren’t anybody’s particular assignment.” Enthusiasm aside, Arthur remembered the initial two-week stint in Lynchburg as “dull, and wearisome for me—especially since he didn’t enter me in any tournaments.” While Dr. J allowed him to join the older boys on two brief road trips, he gave him little encouragement. In Arthur’s words, “that first summer, nobody would have thought I had any future in tennis.”13

  For an eleven-year-old boy about to enter the sixth grade, the Lynchburg initiation was a grueling test that might have soured him on the game of tennis, but fortunately Charity provided ample encouragement. During the fall of 1954, he continued to coach and counsel his young protégé, who was more determined than ever to excel on the tennis court. Even in his life off the court, Arthur seemed to be coming into his own, shedding some of his shyness and displaying more confidence. As a sixth grader in his final year at Baker elementary, he achieved a certain status, particularly after he was elected president of the student council. Studious and conscientious, with a quiet and polite manner, he stood out among his peers and was popular with his teachers. Nearly five years after his mother’s death, he appeared to have overcome the trauma of his early loss, as his life had gained a certain stability and strength based on family, school, and tennis.

  This stability would be shaken, at least temporarily, in the spring of 1955, by his father’s remarriage. On March 20, three days before the fifth anniversary of his first wife’s death, Arthur Sr. married Lorene Kimbrough, a widow with two small children: Loretta, born in 1952; and Robert, born a year later. Unbeknownst to his two sons, Arthur Sr. had been seeing Lorene since 1951, and Robert and Loretta were actually his children. Suddenly, Arthur Jr. and Johnnie had acquired a new family—a stepmother, a half sister, and a half brother. “At first, I was extremely upset,” he recalled. “I was only eleven years old. Daddy moved back into his bedroom with Lorene, Mrs. Berry moved into our room—her snores replaced Daddy’s—and we now had to call both women ‘mother.’ ” Fortunately, both Ashe boys soon warmed to the new arrangement. Lorene proved to be a patient and caring stepmother, and Robert and Loretta, who lived with their grandparents twenty-five miles north of Richmond in Gum Spring, did not have much contact with Arthur and Johnnie until several years later.

  The marriage also seemed to brighten Arthur Sr.’s personality, especially after Lorene’s father gave the couple a five-acre tract of land in Gum Spring as a wedding present. Over the next decade, Arthur Sr., with the help of his sons, constructed a second home on the Gum Spring property. Built with odds and ends and scrap materials—many taken from the ongoing construction of an interstate highway running through east Richmond—this rural retreat would become a source of pride and an almost sacred haven for the Ashe family. It was also where Arthur Jr. first explored the great outdoors, traversing the woods and streams of Louisa County where his father taught him how to hunt and fish.14

  During the spring of 1955, adjusting to a new family situation dominated Arthur Jr.’s life. But he was also worried he wouldn’t be invited back to Lynchburg for a second summer of training. When he finally received the invitation in July, the summer was half gone. He was relieved and anxious to prove himself as a full-fledged camper, but once he arrived in Lynchburg, he found himself clinging precariously to the bottom of Dr. J’s tennis ladder. He was still the youngest and smallest camper, and for a time Dr. J
hardly seemed to notice that he was back.

  In the intervening year between Arthur Jr.’s first and second camps, Dr. J and his son Bobby Jr. had become preoccupied with a sensational new prospect from California, fifteen-year-old Willis Fennell. At the 1954 ATA National tournament in Daytona Beach, Fennell had blasted his way to the 15-and-under championship without losing a set, convincing everyone present, including the Johnsons, that they had just seen the future of black tennis. Fennell obviously had a world of talent, and Dr. J wasted no time in recruiting him for the 1955 summer camp. The only question was whether the young Californian had the right temperament for success or even survival in Dr. J’s authoritarian system. High-strung and cocky, Fennel sometimes had difficulty controlling both his temper and his ego. Things started well enough in June, when he became only the second Lynchburg boy to win a match at the Interscholastic tournament in Charlottesville. Although Fennell lost his second round match, Johnson predicted that he would eventually win the Charlottesville tournament—if he could stay focused and keep his ego in check.15