Arthur Ashe Page 8

  At this point, Arthur was beginning to look like a budding champion. During his final year at Graves Junior High—1957 to 1958—his appearance changed dramatically as he shot up in height and even put on a little weight. Though still rail thin, his weight was approaching one hundred pounds by June 1958, the month he left Richmond for his fifth summer in Lynchburg. He had come a long way. Now he had a clearer vision of where he was headed; and he was beginning to realize how hard he would have to work to get there. Most important, he had earned the respect of Dr. Johnson, who had begun to treat him as a rising star.

  There were several young black players, in Lynchburg and elsewhere, who may have had more raw talent than Arthur. But with Dr. Johnson’s help, he had turned himself into a paragon of emotional and physical control. Moreover, no one on the ATA circuit could match his determination and focus. Looking back on Arthur’s rapid development during the mid-1950s, David Lash, the tennis coach at George Washington Carver High School in Durham, North Carolina, recalled: “He couldn’t have weighed more than 80 pounds. But he loved to play. As soon as he finished his match he would find a good grassy spot and read a book. But the first question he asked when he came off the court was ‘When do I play again?’ Some boys didn’t want to play many times a day, but Arthur did. He was always ready.”32

  FOUR

  THE ONLY RAISIN IN A RICE PUDDING

  ASHE’S IMPRESSIVE CAPABILITIES AND enthusiasm were on full display during the summer of 1958. The “biggest thrill of the summer,” he recalled, came at an ATA tournament in Norfolk, where he “beat Ron Charity for the first time.” “It made me feel I was a man at last,” he wrote in 1967. “And I guess Dr. Johnson also realized I was just about full grown, because that was the summer he quit practicing with me. He told me I’d gotten too good for him.” Following this rite of passage, Ashe just got better and better. In June, he won the ATA Interscholastic singles title at a tournament in Durham, North Carolina, and two months later he won two more ATA championships at the national tournament in Wilberforce, Ohio, defeating Willis Thomas for the 15-and-under singles title before pairing with Thomas to win the doubles title. In between his ATA triumphs, Ashe competed in several USLTA tournaments, including the National Interscholastic tournament in Charlottesville, the Maryland Junior Championship (where he won the state title over 150 competitors), the New Jersey Boys’ Tournament in Orange, which he also won, and the National Boys’ Tournament in Kalamazoo, where he made it to the semifinals before losing.

  Ashe’s victories at Kalamazoo over several of the nation’s best young players drew considerable attention—especially from a Wilson Sporting Goods representative who presented him with two free rackets, the first of many commercial gifts he would receive during his career. For an up-and-coming tennis player, receiving free equipment was an important milestone, the equivalent of being “knighted,” as John McPhee once put it. Ashe’s second visit to Kalamazoo was a triumph, and even his loss to future UCLA teammate David Sanderlin of California in a close semifinal match added to his growing reputation. Going into the match against Sanderlin, Ashe feared he would be completely overmatched. The “California boys,” he later recalled, “were the power players. They’d grown up on those fast concrete courts, and they hit hard. The first time I watched Bill Bond I was scared. Big booming serve! Volleys like bullets! Dave Sanderlin and Dave Reed were almost as frightening.” Ashe had a ways to go before he could give the powerful Californians a run for their money. Nevertheless, by the end of the year his national ranking in the 15-and-under Boys division had risen to number five, the best ever for a black male player.1

  The only real disappointment of the summer occurred off the court, when officials of the Mid-Atlantic section of the USLTA rejected his application to compete for the section singles title. Since the racially restricted Country Club of Virginia was hosting the 1958 Mid-Atlantic Championships, Ashe was barred from playing, even though the tournament was being held in his hometown. The fact that he could live at home during the tournament and had no intention of using any of the Country Club’s off-court facilities didn’t matter to the local defenders of white privilege. By 1958, racially integrated tennis matches sanctioned by the USLTA had become commonplace in the neighboring border states of Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia. But in Virginia the prospects for the integration of tennis—or of any other social or cultural institution—seemed dimmer than ever.2

  Indeed, in 1958 racial lines seemed to be hardening all across Virginia as proponents of “Massive Resistance,” the Old Dominion’s self-professed brand of white supremacist reaction, encouraged outright defiance of the Brown school desegregation decision. Brandishing the doctrine of “interposition” popularized by Richmond News Leader columnist James Jackson Kilpatrick, Virginia’s attorney general, J. Lindsay Almond Jr., captured the governorship in November 1957 on a tidal wave of segregationist sentiment as the state capital became the vortex of the gathering political storm over integration.3

  In this tense and uncertain atmosphere, Arthur entered Maggie Walker High School in September 1958 as a fifteen-year-old sophomore. Named for the nation’s first black female bank president, his new school was within walking distance of Brook Field Park. Opened in 1937 as Richmond’s first vocational high school for blacks, the large brick structure was a source of pride for the city’s black residents. But with hordes of students coursing through its long corridors, the sprawling school could also be intimidating for new students accustomed to smaller institutions. While Arthur had no problem adjusting to the academic side of high school life, he felt somewhat out of place socially. “In high school I was pretty much alone,” he recalled. “I’d been away every summer, and even when I was in town, I’d been on the tennis court most of the time. So I didn’t get around much, didn’t make many friends.” Part of the problem was the severe restrictions his father placed on his social life. “Arthur didn’t have a lot of friends,” Ken Wright, one of his Walker High classmates, recalled. “His father had a reputation for being very strict, and there were only a few of us whom Arthur would hang out with. We’d ride our bikes, go swimming, he’d even eat dinner at my house. But whenever it started to get dark, he’d always get on his bike and take off.”

  Throughout his high school years, tennis continued to dominate Arthur’s life, overshadowing the few personal relationships that punctuated his free time. Even so, during his two years at Walker, he made a concerted effort to become involved in activities beyond the tennis court. In addition to getting good grades, he joined several clubs, played second trumpet in the school band, developed a close friendship with the band director’s son Joey Kennedy, and made the starting lineup of the junior varsity basketball team. Judging by his memoirs, he also discovered girls, including his first serious girlfriend, Pat Battles, the strikingly attractive daughter of a prominent black tennis coach from Stamford, Connecticut. After meeting at an ATA tournament in 1959, the young couple maintained an intermittent, mostly long-distance romance until 1967.

  He was also an ardent Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Robinson fan, and in the spring of 1959 he enjoyed a brief stint as a second baseman and relief pitcher on the school baseball team. For several summers, he had spent many pleasant hours at a Brook Field baseball camp run by Maxie Robinson, a history teacher at Armstrong High School and the father of his friend Randall, who many years later would found the anti-apartheid organization TransAfrica. As a teenager Ashe was as passionate about baseball as he was about tennis, but his baseball career ended abruptly when the principal limited him to one spring sport. “I couldn’t play both baseball and tennis,” Arthur explained years later, “so I’d have to make a choice. . . . I never pitched again.”4

  Arthur never regretted his choice, but there must have been moments when he questioned the value of playing tennis for Walker High. In Jackson Ward, as in most black communities, tennis was often dismissed as an insignificant sport. To many of Arthur’s male classmates, tennis was a “sissy” sport,
unlike football, basketball, and baseball, which were associated with the manly virtues of toughness and power. Perceived as a teachers’ pet and “too much of a good thing,” as one observer put it, he found it difficult to be just one of the boys. To make matters worse, the tennis scene at Walker High was less than inspiring. “Tennis wasn’t much at Walker,” he remembered. “The coach was just there because nobody else would take the job. None of the other guys on the team had trained under Dr. Johnson. They didn’t know much about tournaments.” For a serious and experienced player who had his sights set on a top national USLTA ranking, this was a formula for frustration.

  He was also frustrated by a lack of playing time during the late fall and winter months, when cold and inclement weather often made it impossible to play outdoors. Many of the best young players—including the boys he had competed against at Kalamazoo—played all year round, either on the outdoor courts of Southern California or Florida, or on indoor courts. In Richmond, as in virtually all Southern cities, indoor tennis facilities were both scarce and rigidly segregated. While he was cooling his heels in Virginia, the rest of the tennis elite enjoyed the luxury of “off-season” competition.

  Coupled with the difficulty and expense of traveling to more hospitable Northern venues, this race-based disadvantage constituted a serious impediment to Ashe’s development as a top-flight player. As he once explained, by 1957 he had begun to realize what he was up against. Most obviously, he had no access to the “white Tennis Patrons Association in Richmond” which “sent white boys to all the national tournaments, with all expenses paid and all arrangements made.” “For a while I felt a little bitter about that,” he conceded, “—because by this time I was getting good enough to beat almost anybody my own age. . . . I was now ranked fourth among all boys in the Mid-Atlantic Section, and 31st in the nation. That was frustrating. I felt I could be ranked much higher if I ever played against those ranked above me.”5

  Arthur’s first experience with winter play revealed what he had been missing. At Dr. J’s urging, the organizers of the Orange Bowl International Junior Cup Tournament invited two Lynchburg boys, Arthur and Horace Cunningham, to participate in its December 1958 competition in Miami. This was a momentous development—the first time a USLTA-sanctioned tournament held in the South had included black players. The two boys were too young to comprehend the full significance of this milestone, but they were certainly happy to participate in a prestigious tournament that brought together young players from fifteen nations and served as a testing ground for the selection of the U.S. Junior Davis Cup team.

  Arthur was thrilled by the invitation to play against international competitors, and even more by the prospect of becoming the first black player to represent the United States in Junior Davis Cup competition. He was, however, a bit disappointed to learn he and Cunningham would have to stay in a private home (owned by D.C. Moore, a local black tennis enthusiast) removed from their fellow competitors—all of whom were being housed in a whites-only hotel. Miami was racially segregated, yet, as Arthur sensed almost immediately, the Magic City’s status as a tourist town made it more cosmopolitan and less obsessed with white supremacy than the cities of Virginia and the Deep South. A decade later, in the early 1970s, he would grow to love Miami and to consider it his second home. So it was fitting that one of his first major experiences with a measure of freedom took place among the swaying palms of South Florida.

  Arthur’s performance in Miami, though certainly creditable, was not quite good enough to earn him one of the two U.S. team positions in the Orange Bowl competition, or a spot on the Junior Davis Cup squad. Nevertheless, his spirited victories in the first four rounds of the Boys 15-and-under division turned more than a few heads before he ran into trouble in the semifinals against Charlie Pasarell, a talented fourteen-year-old from Puerto Rico. At this point, Arthur did not have the consistency or the experience to keep up with Pasarell, or with the ultimate winner of the Boys competition, Clark Graebner, whom he had met at Kalamazoo in 1957. But he left Miami with a much better sense of what to expect from the world’s best young players.

  Perhaps even more important in the long run, he had also acquired several budding friendships, including a special bond with Pasarell, his future college roommate. “He came from a lot of money, he was cultured and sure,” Arthur later said of Pasarell, “and I was an insecure southern black kid out on my own. There were no blacks and no friends to speak of. And Charlie, I found out, was always there. I don’t know whether he did it out of sympathy, but when I did seek out his friendship, he never refused it.”

  Known as “Charlito” in his native Puerto Rico, Pasarell was born into the island version of tennis royalty. His father, Charles Pasarell Sr., won the Puerto Rican singles championship no fewer than six times in the 1950s, his mother, Dora, was for a time the best women’s player on the island, and as early as 1939 his uncle José Luis Pasarell won the island singles title. From early childhood, Charlito was groomed for tennis greatness, training not only with his father and uncles but also with Welby Horn, the celebrated teaching pro at San Juan’s posh Caribe Hilton Hotel. By the time he was eleven, Charlito had already appeared on the cover of World Tennis magazine and was widely considered to be one of the most promising young tennis talents in the world. With his elegant strokes and strong serve, he could be a ferocious opponent on the court. But his off-court personality was famously warm and welcoming, so much so that he became “Possum” to his friends. He was a gentle, fun-loving soul destined to become Arthur’s lifelong friend and confidant.6

  The heady trip to Miami whetted Arthur’s appetite for competition at the highest level. In July 1959, he would turn sixteen and move up to the Junior division. So he knew that in the near future he would have to step up his game to have any hope of entering the top echelon of mainstream tennis. His play that spring was limited to high school and ATA competition, which he dominated with little effort. As the ATA and Virginia Interscholastic Union champion, he was guaranteed one of the four black positions in the draw at the USLTA Interscholastic national tournament held in Charlottesville in mid-June. He had not fared very well in Charlottesville the previous year and was eager to demonstrate to himself, and to Dr. J, that he was now ready to compete at the highest level.

  His first serious test of the year, however, came not in Charlottesville but in Baltimore in early June, when he competed in the Maryland State Junior Championships. Dr. J was banking on a good performance from Arthur in Baltimore, which he felt would guarantee an invitation to the Mid-Atlantic Junior Championships to be held at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, in July. Still smarting from Arthur’s exclusion from the 1958 Mid-Atlantic tournament held in Richmond, he was bound and determined to place him in the 1959 tournament. Arthur did his part, winning the Maryland state title in convincing fashion in a four-set final that saw him win 18 of the last 20 games. But to the dismay of both Dr. J and his talented protégé, the expected invitation to the Mid-Atlantic tournament did not materialize. Describing the incident eight years later, Ashe could not conceal his lingering bitterness: “They said my entry was filed too late and they had all the players they could handle. We knew that wasn’t the reason. . . . To the tennis fathers there I was an untouchable, a nothing, and always would be.”7

  Before the summer of 1959 was over, the twists and turns of a society experiencing partial and involuntary desegregation would propel Arthur down a roller coaster of emotions. For a sixteen-year-old who prided himself on control and composure, the unpredictability and seeming irrationality of white behavior was a continuing source of confusion and frustration. All of these emerging themes were on full display when he accompanied Dr. J and four other Lynchburg boys to the USLTA Interscholastic tournament in Charlottesville in mid-June.

  This was the ninth year of black participation in the tournament, and Dr. J was still waiting for one of his boys to make a serious run at the title. Once again he would be disappointed, as all of th
e Lynchburg boys were eliminated in the early rounds of the 1959 tournament. Even so, he and his charges did witness progress of another kind, or so it seemed for a few hours. Earlier in the month, Robert Bland had become the first black student to receive a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia, and this tentative move toward inclusion, however grudging, prompted a change in the tournament’s housing policies. For the first time, Dr. J’s contingent was invited to stay in a university dormitory rather than being forced to return home each night to Lynchburg. To Johnson’s amazement, Arthur and the other boys were also invited to use the university’s dining facilities, and even to take in a movie at the campus theater.

  Unfortunately, but predictably, not everyone at the tournament entered into the spirit of this newfound tolerance. As one of the Lynchburg boys, Charles Brown of Durham, recalled, the “integrated” Charlottesville experience of 1959 turned into an almost tragicomic series of “strange happenings.” “We arrived late that first night,” he remembered. “They assigned us to a dormitory that had about 15 other guys who were already there and asleep. When we awoke the next morning, we were the only ones there. They had moved their beds out. Also, they gave all the players passes to go to the theatre, but we had to sit upstairs. Strange.”8

  Virginia’s racial situation in the late 1950s was as tense as it was contradictory, even on the campus of a university claiming principles of moderation. The legally codified hegemony of white supremacist values was still very much in evidence everywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line. Segregation was also common in the North, of course, but as a matter of custom, not law. Arthur discovered the difference during the summer of 1959, when he expanded his range of experience beyond the familiar, traveling to the Northeast on three separate occasions. He had already been to Kalamazoo and Ohio with Dr. J, and to Chicago on a brief trip with his grandmother; and he had already played in one Northeastern tournament, the 1958 New Jersey State Boys Championship held at the Berkeley Tennis Club in Orange. But the summer trips of 1959 represented his first meaningful experience with the metropolitan culture of greater New York.