Authors: Arthur Ashe
I spend very little on clothing. I own only four sport coats, five suits, and five pairs of shoes. They are all items of fairly high quality, but it makes sense to pay more for high quality. I am frugal, as are most professional and ex-professional tennis players. (As players, we receive so many things free, including tennis clothing, shoes, and racquets, that we tend to choke at paying for anything.) However, I rarely hesitate to pay for an experience, whether it is a concert or a vacation to an exotic land. And I try not to impose my own frugality on my wife and daughter, for I see it more as a habit than a virtue.
Perhaps I have left the impression that I am a model of prudence in handling money. Let me dispel that notion, at least a little. From bitter experience, I know that my ability to make money on my own as an entrepreneur or a venture capitalist is limited. My college degree in business and the advice and management of ProServ have not prevented me from making a mess now and then of some idea. I was adventurous on the tennis court, and I have some of that fire in me where money is concerned; sometimes I haven’t been able to keep the fire under control.
My first major business venture on my own, outside of tennis, had a magical appeal to me: it involved Africa. I have never been excessively romantic about the Motherland, but Africa is where most of my ancestors came from and I longed for a chance to build a lasting bridge of my own to the continent. In 1979, in partnership with a friend from Richmond who not only held an M.B.A. but also shared my enthusiasm for Africa, I started a trading company, International Commercial Resources. To the chagrin of Dell and my other advisers, almost all of its capital came directly from my pocket.
We were cautious, very cautious. We began our adventure by negotiating with the government of Liberia, which seemed the safest, most stable place in Africa for an American to do business. Its connections to the United States run deep; in 1821, sponsored by the American Colonization Society, a boatload of freed slaves from the United States reached the area to begin a systematic process of repatriation of Africans who had been slaves or the descendants of slaves in America. In 1847, Liberia formally established itself as an independent state but kept its special ties to the United States. Many of those ties persist today: for example, its official currency is the U.S. dollar.
Our main dealings were with an efficient and apparently principled government administrator, Charles Taylor, who was himself a confidant of the president of Liberia at that time, William R. Tolbert. In an agreement reached with the government, our company was hired to supply the nation with various essential goods and services. We signed our agreement, and I settled back to receive a decent return on my investment. I never saw a penny of the money again. In 1980, Tolbert’s government was overthrown in a violent coup led by a master sergeant, Samuel K. Doe, and Tolbert was murdered, along with several members of his family. By the end of the decade, Liberia was immersed in such bloody strife that half the population fled the country in terror and at least 20,000 people died. The leader of one of two armed factions opposing Samuel Doe was none other than our contact, Charles Taylor. In 1990, Doe himself was killed. In 1992, Taylor’s forces were accused of murdering six American nuns living near Monrovia, the capital. Liberia, an economist friend told me, is now close to being a “pre-Somalia” state.
I lost a six-figure sum on that venture. The key to business speculation, I am told, is to risk only the money you can lose without batting an eye. ProServ was not worried, but, believe me, I batted an eye.
My Liberian disaster did not extinguish the fire of entrepreneurship in me. However, my next independent business
venture was far more modest. With my good friend Doug Stein, I stepped into the clothing import business in gingerly fashion. Doug and I decided to found a company, STASH—a combination of Stein and Ashe—to sell clothes wholesale. He had friends in the rag business (as the clothing industry is called in New York); and I also had friends in the rag business, including connections to certain major department stores. We could not miss. However, no doubt spooked by my Liberian fiasco, I panicked at the first sign of trouble. This time I lost only a thousand dollars. After Liberia, it actually felt like a profit.
My last memorable business venture was sentimental, like my Liberian gamble, and even more costly. It involved family—my brother, Johnnie Ashe, a warrant officer in the U.S. Marines, with experience in construction. We decided to build an apartment complex in Jacksonville, North Carolina, that would serve Marines in the Parris Island-Camp Lejeune complex. I would put up much of the money in cash and personally guarantee bank loans to cover other costs. Cautiously, we made the decision to build the complex in various stages. My brother put his experience as a Marine engineer to good use and oversaw the construction of the first stage, then the second. I flew down to the site frequently, and came to enjoy the sound of hammering and sawing. To me, it sounded like money—the money I was about to make. However, the project meant more than money to us; it was a brotherly venture. Accordingly, we named the complex Cordell Village, after our late mother, Mattie Cordell Cunningham Ashe.
When Cordell Village reached the size of sixty-five apartment units, some strains in the business began to show. Our rents were falling short of expenses, and we put off our plans to expand. My brother and I were struggling to stay afloat, hoping against hope to succeed, when without any warning Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. At first, I saw no connection between Saddam and my investment in Cordell Village. Soon, however, the link was clear. When President Bush ordered the buildup of forces in the Persian
Gulf in August 1990, we, the owners of Cordell Village, were on our way to ruin. Overnight, half of the apartments at Cordell Village emptied as our resident Marines headed for the sands of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
In autumn 1990, not a moment too soon, we sold the complex to the people who had been managing it for us. They were happy with the deal; I was ecstatic to be getting out, because my financial loss was huge and growing steadily. It easily exceeded my Liberian disaster. Once again, my managers at ProServ took my failure calmly. But once again, I batted an eye.
I suppose the word must be out that I fancy myself as an entrepreneurial type, because hardly a week passes without a new business offer coming my way. Most involve tennis. I listen politely and refuse almost all. Surprisingly few are unethical, and these I reject out of hand. The last thing I would want to do is to contribute to the current crisis in business ethics in the United States. I remember my shock when I learned that a benefactor had given $20 million to the Harvard Business School to start a program in business ethics—not to increase productivity, or to improve worker knowledge, but for ethics. That is a selfless gift, but also a sad commentary on the state of affairs.
Although I still believe that I have the makings of a captain of industry, my record has been much better when I have worked for other people, including as a consultant. I am proud of the length of my association with my key employers, and I like to think that I have returned in kind their faith in me. For twenty-two years I have been with Head USA, the manufacturer of ski and tennis equipment and clothing; Head stuck with me even after losing a few accounts in the South because of my race. Since 1970, also, I have been with the Doral Resort and Country Club, the largest resort in southern Florida. I cannot forget that the Doral made me its director of tennis only nine years after the Admiral Hotel nearby refused to house me during the Orange Bowl tournament in Miami, although all the other junior players—who were white—stayed there. For more
than sixteen years, I have been a consultant or columnist with
Tennis
magazine. My relationships as a columnist with the Washington
Post
and a consultant with Le Coq Sportif, the sports-clothing manufacturer, also go back many years. The longevity and human quality of these connections mean far more to me than the money they bring.
WITHOUT QUESTION, MY
single most fascinating and satisfying involvement outside of my family since my retirement has been as a board member of the Aetna Life and Casualty Company, where I have served for the past ten years. Membership on a board probably seems like a fairly humdrum business connection, but it is not. Tennis led me to Aetna, but my work with Aetna has taken me far away from the life of a tennis professional. From the inside, I have looked into the heart of a major American commercial enterprise, but one of a special kind, involved in the crucial matters of health, welfare, and finance. More than a hundred years old, and with 45,000 employees, Aetna is one of the giants of the American corporate world. Its assets total just under a hundred billion dollars; its income in 1991 was around nineteen billion. Aetna is the largest diversified financial-services firm in the United States.
At some point in the 1970s, Aetna took over sponsorship of the World Cup, a tennis competition that pitted the United States against Australia, when the Australians were still a major power. The first Aetna-sponsored Cup tie in the Hartford area was memorable for me most of all because, after eighteen straight losses to Rod Laver, I finally beat him. But at least one other feature of the competition as sponsored by Aetna made the tournament worthwhile. Each year, before the first match, a private dinner brought the players together with Aetna’s top executives. For four or five consecutive years, I sat at dinner next to Aetna’s president, William “Bill” Bailey. Not once did he and I talk about tennis. Instead, we explored social and political matters, including the issue of health care.
In the late 1970s, I became a consultant to Aetna. Previously,
I had served as a consultant to Philip Morris, the tobacco company, along with my fellow tennis players Roy Emerson, Manuel Santana, and Rafael Osuna. Philip Morris’s president, Joseph Cullman III, became a second father to me, an invaluable mentor; and to this day, I remain close to him. I remember that almost from the start of my consultantship I had been troubled by the link between tobacco and lung disease; yet, unquestionably, tobacco had helped tennis when tennis needed help. The first sponsor of the U.S. Open in 1968, when I won it, was Marlboro cigarettes. Virginia Slims played an even more decisive role in the rise of professional women’s tennis. This link between smoking and disease troubled some of us among the players, but it did not become a major issue until later.
I had also served as a consultant to the U.S. Army, after the Army suffered through some unpleasant incidents of racial friction among servicemen, in West Germany in particular. With Aetna, my task was somewhat different. I assisted Bill Bailey and his colleagues with minority recruitment, and especially the recruitment of employees who might become mid-level management and rise even higher within the company. At that point in the history of American race relations after the civil-rights struggle of the 1950s and ‘60s, many firms were competing to secure the most promising black American prospects in business. Aetna was eager to do well here, and I tried to help as best I could.
Evidently, Aetna was satisfied with my effort. One day in July 1982, I was with the Davis Cup team in St. Louis, where we were playing Sweden. It was the day McEnroe and Wilander played their unforgettable match lasting more than six hours. I had returned exhausted to my hotel, ready to fall asleep, when I found a note to call Bill Bailey in Hartford. I returned his call at once.
“Arthur, there is a matter of some urgency I need to talk to you about.”
“Can we talk about it now, Bill?”
“No, I don’t think so. When you are back in New York,
in the city, I’ll come down at your convenience and we’ll meet at your apartment and we’ll have a talk.”
“At my apartment?”
“Yes, that would be best, I think.”
“Can’t you give me a hint what you want to talk to me about, Bill?”
“Sorry, Arthur,” he replied. “I can’t. It has to be face to face.”
My first reaction was one of panic—a relatively mild attack, but panic nevertheless. What had I done wrong? What gaffe had I committed? What terrible rumor or report had Bailey heard about me that he wanted confirmed or denied? I was completely on the wrong track. When Bailey finally settled down in an armchair in the living room of our apartment on East Seventy-second Street, he did not complain about a gaffe or question me about a rumor.
“Arthur,” he said, “we want you on the board of directors of Aetna.”
I was flabbergasted. As the nature of his offer finally sank in, I became more and more elated at the prospect. I was happy for two reasons above all. First, the company had nothing to do with sports. Second, although it would take me into the corporate world, it also had everything to do with serving the basic needs of the masses of people. For me—as I sought to find ways of maturing and expanding the range of my activities and usefulness, my striving and achieving—this was almost the ideal assignment. I stood for election to the board. As Bailey assured me would probably happen, I was duly elected a director; and I have served on the board ever since.
At our first meeting at the headquarters in Hartford, I had fresh reasons to marvel at the fact that I had been asked. At the age of thirty-nine, I was by far the youngest member of the board. And virtually everyone else was a superstar of American business. I sat in the company of Warren Anderson, the president of Union Carbide; David Roderick, chairman of the board of U.S. Steel; Randolph Blatz, chairman of the board of Insilco; William Donaldson, founder of
the asset-management firm Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette; Bayliss Manning, the former dean of the Stanford University Law School and a partner at the prestigious law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Barbara Franklin, who served as the second Secretary of Commerce in the Bush administration, and her husband, Wallace Barnes, who heads a $500 million company called the Barnes Group; and Jack Donahue of Pittsburgh, the owner of Federated Investors and the largest single stockholder in Aetna.