Authors: Arthur Ashe
In Grenoble, Yannick was a remarkable sight. At six feet four inches, he had always been commanding and yet sweet and gentle. However, he had just dreadlocked his hair (for his sister’s wedding), and it radically altered his image; the classically featured Yannick now looked like a Rastafarian, rather fierce. McEnroe, of course, was not about to be intimidated by anyone. “The only thing I’m scared about,” he assured a reporter about Noah, “is his hair.”
Against Noah and his dreadlocks, John stared down Medusa and took the first set, 12–10. Then, John lost the next two sets before lifting his game almost effortlessly, winning
the last set 6–2. I was never worried much, even though John did not care for the clay surface. Seeking an edge, our hosts had trucked in about three hundred tons of rock, soil, and crushed brick to simulate the clay at Roland Garros stadium in Paris. Fortunately for us, the surface was not particularly slow. “When it gets to the fifth,” I told reporters later, “I feel confident John’s going to win, on anything—even popcorn.”
Our team spirit was so high in Grenoble in part because our other singles player was Gene Mayer. Gene and his brother Sandy were both fine players, well prepared by their father, a professional coach. Like McEnroe, both brothers had played at Stanford University for coach Dick Gould. Friendly and generous, Gene also possessed one of the sharpest minds I have ever known in the tennis world; he was a brilliant student who excelled at intellectual tests. Far from being bookishly aloof, Gene was a happy chatterer, who lifted his teammates’ spirits with his endless stream of talk. Oddly enough, as a tennis player Mayer was full of little fears and insecurities. The playing conditions had to be just right for him to play his best. They were good enough in his first singles match of the 1982 final and he won easily in four sets against the gifted but erratic teenager Leconte.
McEnroe never fell asleep in the doubles match with Fleming against Noah and Leconte, unlike in his singles match against Noah. In the ten games in which he served, John lost only eleven points. And thus we won the Davis Cup for the second year in a row. Champagne flowed in our locker room. One of the happiest persons in the room was Gene Mayer’s father, Alex Mayer, who had emigrated to the United States from Hungary, where he had played Davis Cup tennis. One of his dreams had been to see one or both of his sons help win the Cup for the United States. At the presentation ceremony I delivered my little speech, jokes and all, in French. The crowd loved it, and even laughed at my jokes. (I hope they weren’t laughing at my French.) I have always believed that learning a second language
must be a goal for any educated person. I could never understand why we Americans blithely expect other people to speak English but make little or no effort to learn foreign languages. Years later, I was pleased to see Jim Courier speak French as he accepted the singles trophy at Roland Garros after winning the French Open.
We had hardly digested our victory before we learned that in the next Davis Cup competition, we had to open by playing the Argentineans in Argentina. The previous year, Argentina had lost to France in the first round, so they were at the bottom of the draw although they were certainly one of the top four teams in the world. And because they had last played us in the United States, they could now play us at home. This was a far cry from the days of old, when the champion nation rested and waited before playing in the Challenge Round of the Cup at home.
In March 1983—on clay, of course, and outdoors—Argentina crushed the United States, 4–1. Again, McEnroe showed extraordinary heart. Vilas and Clerc, both ranked in the top ten (as were McEnroe and Gene Mayer), called a truce in their endless bickering about who was Argentina’s darling and took full advantage of the blazing Argentinean summer sun. Vilas defeated Mayer 6–3, 6–3, 6–4. Then Clerc bore down on McEnroe. He took the first two sets, 6–4, 6–0, and all seemed lost. John was nursing a bad shoulder, which our trainer and I massaged whenever we could. Under a cloudless sky, his face sunburnt, his nose as red as Rudolph’s, John fought off a relentless Clerc and a heckling, hectoring crowd of 10,000 to take the next two sets.
At 2–2 in the fifth set, with darkness enveloping us, everyone on our side wanted me to insist that play be suspended for the night. But I let it go on, then spoke up finally when the score reached 5–2, with McEnroe trailing but about to serve. “The most pressure is trying to
serve out
a match,” I explained later. The next day, I was vindicated. John held his serve, then broke the nervous Clerc. Next, John held his serve to even the score at 5–5. But the
effort was too much. The fire went out of McEnroe’s game, and he lost the set 5–7.
John and Peter won the doubles, but again we played five sets, and with explosions from McEnroe, who had been dubbed “El Irascible” by the national daily newspaper
La Prensa
. At one point, El Irascible started to climb into the stands to attack one persistently rude fan. He twice loudly denounced the people of Argentina as a nation, and in the process of picking up a penalty point he dismissed Nicola Pietrangeli, the referee and former Italian tennis star, as a “moron” and a “jerk.”
In the second round of singles, Mayer lost again. So did John, to Vilas. This was the only tennis match I ever saw in which John was utterly dominated. He tried everything he knew, but Vilas was simply better. John was not humiliated, but he was outclassed on a clay court in a foreign country, with a bad shoulder and a severe case of fatigue. By the middle of the third set, he and I understood that there would be no fifth-set miracle, that he was probably going down. McEnroe battled bravely on, but in front of all those hostile, jeering fans, he seemed a lonely figure, yet brave and brilliant, heroic.
He sealed my feeling for him by uttering a few simple words. As he was about to trudge back to the baseline, down 1–4 in the third set, facing his and our team’s worst defeat in the Cup competition in many years, John turned to me. A smile that mocked us both flirted with a jaunty smirk.
“Well, captain,” he said, plucking at his racquet strings, “do you have any pearly words of wisdom for me?”
I smiled, and he went out on the court to be beaten. I thought it was our finest moment together. Sometimes, a defeat can be more beautiful and satisfying than certain victories. The English have a point in insisting that it matters not who won or lost, but how you played the game.
Thus, a few months after popping open bottles of champagne following our victory in Grenoble, the United States
was bounced from the next Davis Cup competition in the first round.
ON JUNE
21 of that year, 1983, I underwent a double-bypass heart operation at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan, where my first heart surgery had taken place in 1979. Once again, my surgeon was Dr. John Hutchinson. I had been suffering from chest pains for a while, notably at a business meeting I had attended in April in Hartford, Connecticut, not long after returning from Argentina; after extensive testing, my doctors decided that I needed further surgery. Because of the tough scar tissue from my first operation, entry into my sternum was far more difficult the second time. I also came out of this new operation in worse condition than after the first. I felt weak, even anemic. That was when I made the decision to receive two units of blood. This transfusion indeed picked me up and sent me on the road to recovery from my surgery; it also, unwittingly, set in motion my descent into AIDS.
Four days after I left St. Luke’s hospital and went home, I turned forty.
On July 10, Jeanne organized a little birthday party at home for me with a few of our closest friends, including Doug Stein and Donald and Carole Dell. For a birthday present, she gave me a pair of roller skates, which I loved and looked forward to using. To my mortification, however, the main surprise of the party was a performance by a striptease artist who proceeded to bump and grind her way around my living room, dressed in precious little, while I hung my head in sheepish embarrassment. I had loudly scolded every man in the room for inflicting this spectacle on me when the stripper completed her act and read the birthday message from the real culprit: Jeanne.
Jeanne knew that I needed something unusual to cheer me up. My second operation, coming as it did only four years after the first, was a major physical and psychological setback, one that left me on the brink of depression. I had assumed that my quadruple-bypass surgery would be far
more effective and lasting than it turned out to be; was the second but a presage of a decline that would virtually cripple me? More than ever, I became aware of my mortality.
Tennis, even the Davis Cup, receded from my mind. As for the captaincy, I certainly considered resigning from it. Perhaps I would have done so if my illness had prevented me from carrying out my duties, which it could easily have done. In the previous two years, moreover, my life had taken certain other turns that had led me into satisfying new activities: I had just started serving as a board member of the Aetna Life and Casualty Company, an association that had already proven more rewarding than almost any other I had had outside of tennis; I had taught a course at a college in Miami, where Jeanne and I had a second home; and I was thinking of starting work on a book on black athletes in the United States, which would consume much of my time.
In the Davis Cup, our loss to Argentina meant that we did not advance to the quarterfinals. Our next match would be in October. Thus I had sufficient time—four months—to recover from surgery and to pursue other matters besides tennis before resuming my duties as captain. I put the thought of resigning out of my mind. By the end of the summer, I was once again eagerly looking forward to the campaign.
IN OCTOBER, OUR
team assembled in Dublin, Ireland, to qualify for the group of sixteen by playing Ireland. Here I saw yet another side of McEnroe. With the Irish emotionally welcoming John as a native son come home, I was prepared to have him play the part, wax nostalgic about the old sod, and milk his visit for what it was worth. As an African American in the 1980s, I knew all about the allegedly magical powers of one’s “roots.” To his credit, however, John refused to indulge in ethnic romanticism. “I don’t have a special feeling competing here because I’m Irish,” he stated bluntly. “You’re playing for your country and trying to win regardless of where you come from.” Many of the Irish loved him for his apparent dislike of British snobbishness
as represented by Wimbledon, but he himself was unsentimental. Dublin, he told one reporter, “looks like London to me, only drearier. I hope the people are nicer.”
The Irish forgave him his truculence; perhaps they considered it characteristically Irish. I myself didn’t. In the United States, I have had people say to me about McEnroe and Connors’s excesses, “Gee, what do you expect? That’s the Irish in them.” Such ethnic stereotyping makes me uncomfortable. In any event, McEnroe drew a record crowd to watch tennis at the Royal Dublin Society’s Simmonscourt Pavilion—a fancy barn, really, where horse and cattle breeders showed their stock. The place had been cleaned out, fumigated, and a carpet set down for play. It was all a little odd. Still, during and after our victory, the Irish were ebullient, gracious hosts. And with his victories in Dublin, McEnroe broke my record of twenty-seven wins for the U.S. in singles matches. I did not begrudge him the record.
For our next match, in the first round of the 1984 Davis Cup, against Rumania, in Bucharest, we finally had the services of Jimmy Connors. Since the last time Connors had played for us, Donald Dell had become his manager. Dell, a former Cup captain, had argued to Jimmy and his mother, Gloria, that no American had ever achieved legendary status in tennis without playing Davis Cup, and so Jimmy agreed to play. But he had evidently heard negative remarks about my captaincy. We had a meeting at a tournament before Bucharest, and he was blunt.
“Look, Arthur, I don’t need anyone sitting on the sidelines telling me how to play tennis.”
“I understand, Jimmy.”
“One thing I want to know, though, Arthur. Are you going to fight for me?”
“What do you mean, Jimmy?”
“I mean, am I going to be out there by myself? Will I be doing my own arguing?”
“I’m out there, Jimmy,” I replied. “I’m on your side. I’m going to be working for you.”
Twice during Jimmy’s first match I made sure that I
jumped up and made my presence known to Jimmy and the assembled gathering. I am not sure what I accomplished by these moves, except for making Connors happy. But that was reason enough, I suppose.
Connors’s effervescence, the stellar quality of his magnetism and drive, lifted everyone. “That Connors doesn’t like losing
in practice,
” Jimmy Arias said to me one day as we watched Connors go after McEnroe on the court. I thought I saw a remarkable spirit of camaraderie, of genuine affection, kindle between Jimmy and John, and ignite among the other players. Then Connors’s old discomfort with the Davis Cup began to surface. To Mac and me, that silver cup was the Holy Grail. To Jimmy, it seemed that it might have been made of Styrofoam, he had so little sense of, or interest in, Davis Cup legend and lore.
One day, at practice just before the opening match, he yelled out to me with a question. “Arthur, this match is best of three sets, isn’t it?”
I could hardly believe my ears. “You mean this practice?”
“No, I mean the matches.” He was serious. Stupefied, I shook my head and looked up into the empty stands.
Once again, as much as he tried, Connors couldn’t stomach the fact that everyone was in McEnroe’s shadow, as far as publicity and fame were concerned. McEnroe welcomed Jimmy, but I sensed that he also nursed a lingering resentment about the fact that Jimmy had indicated that he would play Davis Cup in 1981 and then changed his mind. Still, John had such a genuine interest in our fortunes as a team that he wanted Connors to play. The previous year, he had even accused me of not being firm enough with Connors. “He says he’s a friend of his,” John told a reporter about Connors and me, “but I don’t think he pushed Connors enough. Arthur doesn’t press him.” Of course, I believed that I had pressed Connors as much as I could, or should, have. I was not going to force anyone to play Davis Cup tennis.