On the other side of the net, the serve hits the grass and, taking off in a fast skid, is intercepted by the backhand of Clark Graebner. Graebner has a plan for this match. He does not intend to “hit out” much. Even if he sees the moon, he may decide not to shoot it. He will, in his words, “play the ball in the court and make Arthur play it, because Arthur blows his percentages by always trying a difficult or acute shot. Arthur sometimes tends to miss easy shots more often than he makes hard shots. The only way to get his confidence down is to get every shot into the court and let him make mistakes.” Graebner, standing straight up, pulls his racquet across and then away from the ball as if he had touched something hot, and with this gesture he blocks back Ashe’s serve.
Ashe has crossed no man’s land and is already astride the line between the service boxes, waiting to volley. Only an extraordinarily fast human being could make a move of that distance so quickly. Graebner’s return is a good one. It comes low over the net and descends toward Ashe’s backhand. Ashe will not be able to hit the ball with power from down there. Having no choice, he hits it up, and weakly—but deep—to Graebner’s backhand.
Graebner is mindful of his strategy: Just hit the ball in the court, Clark. Just hit the ball in the court. But Graebner happens to be as powerful as anyone who plays tennis. He is six feet two inches tall; he weighs a hundred and seventy-five pounds. The firmly structured muscles of his legs stand out in symmetrical perfection. His frame is large, but his reactions are instant and there is nothing sluggish about him. He is right-handed, and his right forearm is more than a foot in circumference. His game is built on power. His backswing is short, his strokes are compact; nonetheless, the result is explosive. There have to be exceptions to any general strategy. Surely this particular shot is a setup, a sitter, hanging there soft and helpless in the air. With a vicious backhand drive, Graebner tries to blow the ball crosscourt, past Ashe. But it goes into the net. Fifteen-love.
Graebner is nervous. He looks down at his feet sombrely. This is Forest Hills, and this is one of the semifinal matches in the first United States Open Championships. Graebner and Ashe are both Americans. The other semifinalists are a Dutchman and an Australian. It has been thirteen years since an American won the men’s-singles final at Forest Hills, and this match will determine whether Ashe or Graebner is to have a chance to be the first American since Tony Trabert to win it all. Ashe and Graebner are still amateurs, and it was imagined that in this tournament, playing against professionals, they wouldn’t have much of a chance. But they are here, close to the finish, playing each other. For Graebner to look across a net and see Ashe—and the reverse—is not in itself unusual. They were both born in 1943, they have known each other since they were thirteen, and they have played tournaments and exhibitions and have practiced together in so many countries and season that details blur. They are members of the United States Davis Cup Team and, as such, travel together throughout the year, playing for the United States—and also entering general tournaments less as individuals than en bloc, with the team.
A person’s tennis game begins with his nature and background and comes out through his motor mechanisms into shot patterns and characteristics of play. If he is deliberate, he is a deliberate tennis player; and if he is flamboyant, his game probably is, too. A tight, close match unmarred by error and representative of each player’s game at its highest level will be primarily a psychological struggle, particularly when the players are so familiar with each other that there can be no technical surprises. There is nothing about Ashe’s game that Graebner does not know, and Ashe says that he knows Graebner’s game “like a favorite tune.” Ashe feels that Graebner plays the way he does because he is a middle-class white conservative. Graebner feels that Ashe plays the way he does because he is black. Ashe, at this moment, is nervous. He is famous for what journalists have called his “majestic cool,” his “towering calm,” his “icy elegance.” But he is scared stiff, and other tennis players who know him well can see this, because it is literally true. His legs are stiff. Now, like a mechanical soldier, he walks into position to serve again. He lifts the ball, and hits it down the middle.
Ashe’s principal problem in tennis has been consistency. He has brilliance to squander, but steadiness has not been characteristic of him. He shows this, woodenly hitting three volleys into the net in this first game, letting Graebner almost break him, then shooting his way out of trouble with two serves hit so hard that Graebner cannot touch them. Ashe wins the first game. Graebner shrugs and tells himself, “He really snuck out of that one.”
Ashe and Graebner walk to the umpire’s chair to towel off and wipe their glasses before exchanging ends of the court. Both wear untinted, black-rimmed, shatterproof glasses, and neither uses any kind of strap to hold them on. “They just stay on,” Ashe will say, shoving them with his forefinger back to the bridge of his nose. Graebner’s glasses have extra-long temples that curl around his ears like ram’s horns. The sun is really fierce. The temperature is in the eighties. Fourteen thousand people are in the stadium. Graebner is mumbling. One of Ashe’s winning serves came as a result of confusion among the officials, who delayed the action while discussing some recondite point, and, because of the delay, awarded Ashe, in accordance with the rules of the game, an extra first serve. Ashe, who seldom says much to Graebner during visits to the umpire’s chair, does use the occasion now to tell Graebner that he believes the officials’ decision was fair and correct. Graebner glares but says nothing. Graebner’s memory for lost points and adverse calls is nothing short of perfect, and months later he will still be talking about that extra serve that turned into an ace, for he can’t help thinking what an advantage he might have had if he had been able to crack Ashe open in the very first game, as he almost did anyway. Ashe, for his part, believes that it is a law of sport that everything that happens affects everything that happens thereafter, and that Graebner can simply have no idea what patterns might have followed if he had won the debated point. Having so indicated, Ashe returns to the court. It is now Graebner’s turn to serve.
To the question who has a bigger serve than Arthur Ashe?, the answer is Clark Graebner. The word most frequently used by tennis players describing Graebner’s serve is “crunch”: “He just tosses the ball up and crunches it.” Graebner’s big frame rocks backward over his right leg, then rocks forward over his left as he lifts the ball for his first serve of the match. Crunch. Ace. Right down the middle at a hundred and thirty miles an hour. Ashe is ten feet from the ball when it crosses the baseline. His racquet is only about halfway back when the ball hits the wall behind him. His face showing no expression, Ashe marches to the opposite side of the court and turns to receive the next serve. At any given moment of action, some thoughts that cross the mind of an athlete are quite conscious and others are just there, beneath the surface. Ashe will remember later on that at this particular moment in this match he is thinking, “Jesus, Graebner really hits the hell out of that first serve. He starts fast. He served nine aces in the first set against Stolle at Wimbledon, and it was over in no time.” Graebner serves again—crunch, ace, right down the middle. Graebner is buoyant with sudden confidence. Ashe marches stiff-legged back across the court. The second game is Graebner’s quickly. Games are one-all, first set.
Ashe lifts the ball and leans in to serve. Graebner sways and crouches as he waits. It must have cost at least two hundred thousand dollars to produce this scene—to develop the two young men and to give them the equipment, the travel, and the experience necessary for a rise to this level. The expense has been shared by parents, sponsors, tournament committees, the Davis Cup Team, and the United States Lawn Tennis Association, and by resort hotels, sporting-goods companies, Coca-Cola, and other interested commercial supporters. The players themselves paid their way to Forest Hills for this match, though—twenty cents apiece, on the subway. Graebner lives in an apartment on East Eighty-sixth Street with his wife, Carole; their one-year-old daughter, Cameron; and their infant son, Clark. Graebner spends much of his time selling high-grade printing papers, as assistant to the president of the Hobson Miller division of Saxon Industries, and he is in love with his work. He knows the exact height and tensile strength of the corporate ladder. His boss likes tennis very much, so Graebner’s present rung is the handle of a racquet. Ashe is an Army lieutenant, working in the office of the adjutant general at the United States Military Academy. He is a bachelor, and during tournament time at Forest Hills he stays at the Hotel Roosevelt. The Army is almost as tennis-minded as Graebner’s boss, and Ashe has been given ample time for the game. But tennis is not, in any traditional sense, a game to him. “I get my kicks away from the tennis court,” he will say. With accumulated leave time, he plans to go on safari in Kenya. It will be his first trip to Africa. In 1735, the Doddington, a square-rigger of eighty tons and Liverpool registry, sailed into the York River in Virginia carrying a cargo of a hundred and sixty-seven West African blacks. In or near Yorktown, the ship’s captain, James Copland, traded the blacks for tobacco. One young woman, known only by a number, was acquired by Robert Blackwell, a tobacco grower from Lunenburg County. Blackwell gave her to his son as a wedding present—in the records of the county, she was listed only as “a Negur girl.” According to custom, she took the name of her owner. She married a man who, having the same owner, was also named Blackwell, and they had a daughter, Lucy, whose value is given in her owner’s will at fifty dollars. Lucy Blackwell married Moses Blackwell, and their daughter Peggy Blackwell had a daughter named Peggy Blackwell, who married her cousin Tony Blackwell. Their daughter Jinney married Mike, an otherwise nameless Indian of the Sauk tribe who was a blood relative of Chief Black Hawk. The preacher who married them told Mike to call himself Mike Blackwell forevermore. Jinney and Mike had a son named Hammett, who, in this chain of beings, was the last slave. Hammett was born in 1839. In 1856, he married Julia Tucker. They had twenty-three children. When he became free, he should have been given forty acres and a mule, of course, but no one gave them to him, so he bought his forty acres, in Dundas, Virginia. On the Blackwell plantation, where Hammett had lived, the plantation house—white frame, with columns—still stands, vacant and moldering. The slave cabin is there, too, its roof half peeled away. Hammett’s daughter Sadie married Willie Johnson, and their daughter Amelia married Pinkney Avery Ashe. His family line reached back, in analogous fashion, to the ownership of Samuel Ashe, an early governor of the State of North Carolina, whose name, until now, has been kept alive largely by the continuing existence of Asheville. Pinkney and Amelia had a son named Arthur, who, in 1938, married Mattie Cunningham, of Richmond. Their son Arthur Junior was born in 1943.
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All these names are presented on separate leaves or limbs of an enormous family tree—six by seven feet, and painted on canvas—that is kept in the home of Thelma Doswell, a cousin of Arthur Ashe. Mrs. Doswell, who lives in the District of Columbia and is a teacher of children who have specific learning disabilities, did much of the research that produced the tree, using vacation time to travel to courthouses and libraries in southern Virginia. There are fifteen hundred leaves on the tree, and one leaf—Arthur Ashe, Jr.’s—is painted gold. Matrilineal in nature, the tree was made for display at annual reunions of the family, which have been held in various cities—Washington, Bridgeport, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh—and have drawn above three hundred people. The family has a crest, in crimson, black, and gold. A central chevron in this escutcheon bears a black chain with a broken link, symbolizing the broken bonds of slavery. Below the broken chain is a black well. And in the upper corners, where the crest of a Norman family might have fleurs-de-lis, this one has tobacco leaves, in trifoliate clusters. Graebner has no idea whatever when his forebears first came to this country.
Graebner has the sun behind him now, and he means to use it. He runs around Ashe’s serve, takes it on his forehand, and drives the ball up the middle. Graebner’s favorite stroke is his forehand, and Ashe thinks that Graebner sometimes hits his forehands about twice as hard as he needs to, for pure Teutonic pleasure. Ashe punches back a deep volley, and Graebner throws a lob into the sun. Ashe moves back lightly, looking for the ball. In a characteristic that is pretty much his own, he prepares for overheads by pointing at the ball as it arcs down from the sky. He is like an anti-aircraft installation. Left arm up, fist closed, index finger extended, he continues to point at the ball until he has all but caught it. His racquet meanwhile dangles behind his back. Then it whips upward in the same motion as for a serve. He picks the ball out of the sun this time, but not well enough, and his shot goes into the net. Graebner plays on according to plan, forcing Ashe into another error, then finding a chance to send another lob into the sun. Ashe drops back, points, smashes—into the net. The score is now fifteen-forty. All Graebner needs is one more point to break Ashe’s serve. Ashe maintains his cool appearance, but he is thinking, “My God, what’s happening? Here he goes. He’s going to get the first set. And if he does, my confidence is going right down the tube. Graebner is a front-runner, very tough when he’s ahead. Someday he’s going to get the lead on me and he’s not going to give it up.” In this game, Ashe’s first serve has not once been successful. Perhaps enlivened by his fears, the next one goes in, hard and wide, drawing Graebner off balance, but Graebner reaches the ball and sends it low over the net and down the line. Ashe picks it up with a half volley and tries to flick it crosscourt at an acute angle, far from Graebner’s reach—a fantastic shot, unbelievable. Other tennis players wonder who in his right mind would attempt something like that, but this is the way Ashe plays the game—the all but impossible shot at the tensest moment. As it happens, the shot goes out. Graebner wins the game. His strategy pays off. Ashe’s serve is broken. If this were a wrestling match, Graebner could be said to have thrown his man.
Behind every tennis player there is another tennis player, and in Graebner’s case the other player is his father. Clark grew up in Lakewood, Ohio, and played tennis as a boy in Lakewood Park, at Lakewood High School, and at clubs in Cleveland and Shaker Heights. Paul Graebner, Clark’s father, grew up in Lakewood, and played tennis as a boy in Lakewood Park, at Lakewood High School, and at clubs in Cleveland and Shaker Heights. He was the state high-school tennis champion—a title his son would win three times. He was on the tennis team at Kenyon College and played briefly on the tournament circuit in the Middle West. He went to dental school at Western Reserve University and then went into practice with his own father, Clark’s grandfather. From then until now, the major diversion of Dr. Graebner’s life has continued to be tennis. His week revolves around Wednesday-afternoon and Saturday doubles games. When Clark was a beginner, however, Dr. Graebner completely gave up his own tennis for five years, and every Wednesday and Saturday and at all other practicable times he took Clark to a tennis court and patiently taught him the game. Clark was an only child, as Dr. Graebner himself had been. Clark’s mother, Janet Clark Graebner, was an only child, too. Clark was seven when the formal instruction began, but he had regularly hit ground strokes with a squash racquet against a basement wall when he was three years old. Within a short time, his absolutely favorite activity was smashing tennis balls, with a proper racquet, against the door of the family garage. His mother would say to friends, “My one great big weapon over his head is ‘If you don’t take a nap, you can’t hit the tennis ball against the garage door.’ ” The door happened to have windows in it, and little Clark’s already Wagnerian forehand had a tendency to penetrate the glass. That was all right. Dr. Graebner covered the windows with Masonite.
When Dr. Graebner first hit strokes back and forth with Clark, they did not use a net. Dr. Graebner wanted Clark to hit a good flat stroke with follow-through, and not to worry about its altitude. When the foundation was grooved, they began to hit across a net, and to build Clark’s game, shot by shot, through sheer repetition—backhands crosscourt, forehands crosscourt, forehands down the line, backhands down the line, lobs. Gradually, he just grew up into his overhead. “Every shot I hit now is built on the rudiments of my father’s strokes,” Clark acknowledges. “He taught me everything. I don’t think he wanted to make me a champion. He just wanted to make me as good as I wanted to be. He hit balls at me for hundreds of thousands of hours, as if he were a Ball-Boy machine.”
There are in tennis any number of devices that are used as teaching aids, the Ball-Boy machine, a four-hundred-dollar mortar that belches tennis balls, being one. The Graebners used none. “I was the only device. I was the only device,” Dr. Graebner says. “I wasn’t trying to build a champion. I was trying to get him interested in something he could do all his life.”
“We did not push Clark into tennis.” (Mrs. Graebner is talking.) “It was Clark’s idea. No one pushed him. He was good at baseball. He might have been a baseball player. When he was nine and ready for the Little League, his father pointed out to him that he really couldn’t do both baseball and tennis, and said, ‘It’s your decision.’ Clark said, ‘There is no decision,’ and he gave up baseball.”
Dr. Graebner did step in unequivocally when Clark showed an interest in ice hockey. “You have too much at stake, with all that you enjoy so much, to have it stopped by someone with one blow of a hockey stick,” he said.
When Clark was first learning his tennis, Dr. Graebner in winter rented a junior-high-school gymnasium on Saturdays, and, later, took him to the indoor courts at the Cleveland Skating Club. “He hit and hit and hit,” Dr. Graebner says. “He never got tired of it. You couldn’t get him to stop.” Dr. Graebner did what he could to keep Clark on the baseline and force him to learn ground strokes—“Get back! Get back! You’re edging up again. Get back! Get your fanny around. You’re not getting your hips into it”—but Clark showed considerable precocity in his desire to get to the net. Most junior players tap ground strokes at one another for four hours a match, but Graebner, even when he was ten, was playing the Big Game—going for the net, trying for the sudden kill. “From a little tyke on, he had a lot of coördination,” his father says. “He had it. He was a natural.”
When Dr. Graebner and Clark were not on a tennis court together, they hit badminton cocks in their back yard or played ping-pong in the basement—anything that would improve the relationship between hand and eye. Clark shot pool with his mother. Asked what the family did for vacations, Mrs. Graebner says, “Vacations? You’re kidding. We went to Florida so Clark could play tennis.” Lakewood is just west of Cleveland, and almost every summer afternoon in his early playing years Clark went to Lakewood Park—about eighteen acres under big elm and buckeye trees, with a bandstand, bowling greens, horseshoe pitches, and eight cement tennis courts. If his father was not with him, he played with older children, or firemen, policemen, doctors. “When he was ten years old, he travelled across Cleveland to a tournament in Shaker Heights, and this was his first appearance on the East Side. A boy who lived there was Warren Danne, eleven years old at the time and so much in love with tennis that he had decided he wanted to be the best tennis player in the world. Danne would eventually be the captain of the Princeton tennis team, and in the years of early adolescence he would be the doubles partner and inseparable friend of Clark Graebner. But now, as a child, watching Clark for the first time, Warren quietly took in all the grace and power that Clark already had and decided at that moment that he was going to try to become the second-best tennis player in the world.
Graebner is now planing along through the balance of the first set, unstoppable. He hits the ball six times and wins another game. He steps aside and lets Ashe’s service games go by him like fast-moving cars; then he bears down some more. Both players talk to themselves. Tennis players are forever talking to themselves, sometimes out loud, and not infrequently at a volume high enough to be heard in the upper stands.
“I should be trying something bold,” Ashe says. “He’s just booming his serves in there.”
Graebner hits a forehand down the line. “Get in there,” he says.
An Ashe backhand drops eight feet inside the baseline. “Don’t be chicken. Hit the ball.”
“Go through the ball. Don’t come straight up.” . . . “I don’t believe it.” . . . “I didn’t move through that one. I was all arms on that shot.” . . . “Turn your shoulder.” . . . “Jesus, that was close.” . . . “That’s too tough.” . . . “Graebner’s saving himself for the next game.” . . . “I’ve got that shot down pretty well now, that slicing backhand crosscourt.” . . . “Unbelievable!” . . . “Too tough.” . . . “Arthur hasn’t hit a return in the court.”
Graebner is almost correct. In the entire first set, Ashe returns only three of Graebner’s big first serves. Points are over quickly. Only one game goes as far as deuce. The longest point played in the set consists of six shots. The average number of strokes per point is two and a half.
Ashe and Graebner play tennis with an efficiency that is thought by some to diminish tennis itself. Modern power tennis—the so-called Big Game (overwhelming serves followed by savage attacks at the net)—has now had many years in which to evolve, and Ashe and Graebner are among the ultimate refinements of it in the United States. Statistics of tennis published half a dozen years ago gave twenty-four hundred strokes as the expectable number that would be hit by two players playing serve-and-volley tennis in a match of average length (faulted serves excluded). If a spectator closes his eyes while Ashe and Graebner are playing, he is impressed by the cumulative silence. The stretches between points are long compared to the points themselves—sudden detonations quickly over, sporadic fire on a quiet front. This match between Ashe and Graebner will be of average length, and when it is over they will have hit the ball—all faulted serves included—eight hundred and twenty-one times. After matches with Ashe or Graebner, some players have complained that they “didn’t get enough tennis.”
Reformers who remember the Old Game and think something should be done about this one have suggested eliminating the first serve or making the server serve from several feet behind the baseline. Possibly the best suggestion is that the serve be left intact for the sheer spectacle of it—but that the server not play his next shot without first letting the ball bounce. This would tend to keep the server back near the baseline and remove the homicide from his following shot. Breaking serve would not so routinely be tantamount to breaking open a set. However, there are plenty of people who like tennis the way Ashe and Graebner play it. It is the megagame. It has the spectral charm of a Joe Louis stalking a Billy Conn in silence and then dropping him with a few echoing thuds.
Both Ashe and Graebner have a great deal of finesse in reserve behind their uncomplicated power, but it surfaces once or twice a game rather than once or twice a point. Ashe is a master of drop shots, of drop half volleys, of miscellaneous drinks and chips. He is, in the idiom of tennis, very tough at cat-and-mouse—the texture of the game in which both players, near the net, exchange light, flippy shots, acutely angled and designed for inaccessibility. Graebner is a deft volleyer, reacting quickly and dangerously at the net, but in general—although the two players technically have the same sort of game—Graebner does not have the variety of shots or the versatility that Ashe has. Ashe says that Graebner “could use a little more junk in his game.”
Junk is the last thing Graebner needs at this moment. He is hitting so hard and so accurately that there is very little Ashe can do. Graebner says to himself, “Look at him. He’s just slapping at my serves. Graebner is closing out the set. He is serving, and he leads five games to four and forty-fifteen. He lifts the ball. Crunch. Ace. Right down the middle. Set to Graebner. He wins the first set, six games to four. For the second time in a quarter of an hour, Ashe feels his confidence going right down the tube.
From 1946 through 1961, the United States Lawn Tennis Association’s national Interscholastic Championships were held on the courts of the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. One June day in 1949, a doctor from Lynchburg happened to be driving through Charlottesville, and when he saw all the tennis going on he stopped to watch. The high quality of the play—these were the best high-school and prep-school players in the United States—impressed him almost to the point of melancholy. Before he left, he went up to the referee of the matches and introduced himself—Robert Walter Johnson, M.D. He told the referee that he had a tennis court at home and was trying to develop some young players, and that if he could bring them over to Charlottesville sometime there would be no need to feed them or to provide rooms for them, because he would take them home after the matches each day, the distance being only sixty miles. Having said all that, Dr. Johnson asked the referee, E. T. Penzold, of Norfolk, what might be done to get the Lynchburg boys into the Charlottesville tournament.
“Fill out an application,” said Penzold. “Just give me your address, and I’ll send you one this winter.”
Dr. Johnson had built his court in the mid-nineteen-thirties, when tennis had come to assume a priority in his mind second only to medicine. For him, this was the ultimate game in a lifetime accented with sports. He had grown up in Plymouth, North Carolina, and, as a kind of roving athlete, had gone to several universities, including Shaw, Virginia Union, and Lincoln. As a halfback at Lincoln and captain of the football team, he wore no helmet, no shoulder pads. He avoided serious injury by—in his words—“doing most of my tackling by arm.” He was known as Whirlwind Johnson, and he became the highest-scoring player in the records of the Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association. In one game, in which Lincoln was the supposed underdog, he scored forty-eight points. He took his training at Meharry Medical College. When he began his practice in Lynchburg, he was thirty-five. “I knew, from medicine, that I had built up big heart muscles and that they had to have exercise to avoid fatty infiltration. This is why athletes drop dead. I didn’t want to die that way. I tried a little basketball. That didn’t pan out. Then I went all out for tennis. I was self-taught. I learned by watching white players. Tennis was the hardest game to master that I had ever contacted. I was an All-American football player a couple of years, a star baseball player—but tennis I just couldn’t master. I played almost every afternoon at the colored Y.M.C.A.”
When the level of Dr. Johnson’s game went up, he began to travel extensively to play in tournaments of the American Tennis Association, the black U.S.L.T.A. Dr. Johnson would become an important figure in the A.T.A., but in the thirties the organization was something less than cohesive and was in the hands of a group that Dr. Johnson describes as “powerful, vicious West Indians in New York.” Tournaments were quite local, and Dr. Johnson and an entourage he annually assembled were among the few touring players. At times, he had two automobiles and as many as eight players in his group, and they hit all the major black tournaments—Orangeburg, Tuskegee, Charlotte, Fayetteville, Durham, Petersburg, Richmond, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, Plainfield, Elizabeth, Montclair, New York. Dr. Johnson invited stars like Jimmy Sides, of Chicago, to stay with him in Lynchburg and help improve his game—and to teach Robert Walter Johnson, Jr. Harmon Fitch, of Johnson C. Smith University, the 1935 A.T.A. intercollegiate champion, lived in Lynchburg with Dr. and Mrs. Johnson the summer he won his championship, and travelled with Dr. Johnson as his doubles partner. Dr. Johnson had come to tennis too late to be a singles champion—these were the years of Reginald Weir, Nathaniel Jackson, Franklin Jackson, Lloyd Scott, Jimmy McDaniel—but his name would eventually appear on the A.T.A. Championship Roll seven times as the mixed-doubles partner of Althea Gibson, for whose development as a tennis player he was in part responsible. The tennis court he had built on his property in Lynchburg was clay at first, and was converted to en tout cas in 1941 by a tennis-court-building firm with headquarters on Park Avenue, in New York. Dr. Johnson held annual invitation doubles tournaments on his court, bringing in players from near and far—the District of Columbia, North Carolina, New Jersey, Michigan. He paid all expenses, and he held these tournaments throughout the nineteen-forties, finally discontinuing them because they contributed nothing to young players’ development, which by 1949 was what interested him most in the game.
In the first few moments as he watched the white schoolboys in Charlottesville that day, he realized that most of them were far better tennis players than the best of the players in the men’s division of the A.T.A. This not only saddened him, it challenged him. From time to time over the years, he had read sports columns in which the idea was advanced that Negro athletes lacked finesse—that they might be good runners or jumpers but could never make it in a game like tennis. This idea greatly irritated Dr. Johnson, and while he was sitting there in Charlottesville that day he could not help remembering it. That winter, an application did arrive in the mail. Dr. Johnson filled it out, and two boys from Lynchburg were entered in the national interscholastics of 1950. Nothing was said about food or shelter, but Dr. Johnson imposed his own restriction. They would go home each night to Lynchburg. Dr. Johnson wanted the tennis, and he did not want to risk losing it for any reason. As it happened, those first two entrants were going home quickly anyway. They were beaten terribly—“just unmercifully,” he says when he talks about it. “They were scared to death and they were slaughtered. We were humiliated.” While Dr. Johnson watched this happening, he promised himself that if it took him the rest of his life he was going to develop a young black tennis player who would play at Charlottesville and go away as the national interscholastic champion.
Before leaving, Dr. Johnson apologized to Mr. Penzold for his players’ poor showing. Penzold suggested that perhaps Dr. Johnson ought to look beyond Lynchburg. Maybe he should organize a Negro national interscholastic championship—say, in May—with the idea of bringing the two finalists to Charlottesville in June. Dr. Johnson did that, in May of 1951. The number of Negro high-school tennis players that could be seined out of American society was less than two dozen, but one of them, Willie Winn, of Wilmington, North Carolina, did achieve two early-round victories at Charlottesville before being knocked emphatically out of the tournament by Donald Dell. Dr. Johnson invited Winn and other young players to live in his house in the summer, so they could practice as a squad and travel to tournaments together. Dispassionately, he culled the unserious and the relatively unsuccessful. He engendered an esprit among the rest. He called them the Junior Development Team. In return for room, board, transportation, and instruction, he made them weed his garden, trim the boxwoods, clip the rosebushes, spray the apple trees. Above the techniques of the game itself, he held certain principles before them as absolute requirements—in his view—for an assault on a sport as white as tennis. Supreme among these was self-control—“no racquet throwing, no hollering, no indication of discontent with officials’ calls.” Since players call their own lines in the early rounds of junior tournaments, he insisted that his boys play any opponents’ shots that were out of bounds by two inches or less. “We are going into a new world,” he told them. “We don’t want anybody to be accused of cheating. There will be some cheating, but we aren’t going to do it.” Many years later, he would say reflectively, “I wanted them to be psychologically prepared for any adversity—not to blow their cool, as they call it now, when things didn’t go right.”
At the Johnson table, two or three meats were served at most meals, and three or four vegetables. Candy, peanuts, popcorn, and soft drinks were forbidden at all times. If the Junior Development Team had a motto, it was “No horseplay”—the Johnson code. They learned to make their beds properly. Without fail, they hung up their clothes. When a lady came into a room, they got up, or wished they had. They learned an advanced etiquette of knives, forks, and spoons. “I want you to be accepted without being a center of attraction,” he said. “I want you to be able to take care of yourself in any situation where habits or manners are important, so that you don’t stand out. We are going into a new world.”
Year after year, two of them went to Charlottesville, and though “slaughtered” and “humiliated” were no longer the terms for what generally happened to them, none got particularly far. Meanwhile, Dr. Johnson got a call one day in 1953 from Ronald Charity, a recent graduate of Virginia Union, in Richmond, and a ranking player in the men’s division of the A.T.A. Charity said he had been working part time teaching tennis in a public park, and for several seasons he had been hitting the ball with a small boy whose physique was not prepossessing but who hit the ball well and seemed to care a great deal about playing tennis. Charity hoped that although the boy was only ten years old the Doctor would let him come to Lynchburg. Dr. Johnson said, “All right, Ronald. I’ll take him for a while, if you want to carry him up here.” Charity drove to Lynchburg on a Sunday, and introduced Dr. Johnson to Arthur Ashe, Jr. The Doctor’s eyes narrowed when he saw him, and he wondered if the child had been a victim of rickets, he was so bony and frail. Arthur hit a few tennis balls, and Dr. Johnson, watching him run, was afraid he would pitch forward and fall.
Graebner waits for Ashe to hit the first serve of the second set. Ashe, in fifteen years, has filled out and has become a trim arrangement of sinews. He is lithe and springy, and his bearing is the bearing of a complete athlete—reactions twice as fast as the imagination, motions graceful and decisive, in balance, under control. Graebner is less believable. He could be a lifeguard, or an ad for a correspondence course in muscle development. Ashe has small ears, a narrow, foxlike face, short hair, and a nose so thin and straight that some Negroes say it is Ashe’s nose that makes him acceptable to whites. His glasses make him look scholarly, which he is not, although he could be. He seems closer to it than most tennis players. His skin is light, but during the summer in the sun it gets darker and darker, and by the time of Forest Hills it is practically black. “I get very tan,” he explains. His voice cracks with youthful throatiness. When he takes off his glasses, the rims of his eyes are light. When he takes off his wristwatch or his sweatbands, the skin that was beneath them is much lighter than that which surrounds it. Graebner, for his part, sincerely wishes that he could play with his shirt off. He is aggressively vain about his tan. “After we played in San Juan two years ago, I was as dark as Arthur,” he says proudly. When he is sunbathing, he will snap at anyone who stands between him and direct sunlight for as much as three seconds. Discounting his natural advantage, Ashe tans better than Graebner does. Graebner has thick, dark hair and a facial bone structure that suggests heroic possibilities. He appears to have been cut out of a Sunday newspaper, for he looks exactly like—that is to say, he bears something far more precise than a striking resemblance to—Clark Kent, the mild-mannered reporter who has occasionally been mistaken for a bird before being positively identified as Superman. “Clark Graebner looks like Clark Kent and he knows it” is a sentence that has been uttered by more than one American tennis player now playing on the world-class, or Graebner, level. Graebner’s nickname in tennis is Superboy. A few people refer to him as Herr Graebner, for he has the posture and the presence of a first lieutenant in the Wehrmacht—absolutely perpendicular when he walks, his arms swinging, a goose step suggested but not quite executed. His general gait has been widely interpreted as a swagger, particularly at moments like this one, with the applause for his performance in the first set still sounding in the air.
Ashe is remembering one of the precepts of Dr. Johnson, who is watching all this from a preferred position—a seat high in the northeast corner of the stadium. Dr. Johnson is seventy now. His hairline has receded and the hair beyond it is swept back. His frame retains the form of a football halfback. Dr. Johnson always told the Junior Development Team that the first point played in any set was of considerable psychological importance. A perceptible edge can go to the winner of that point. As the case may be, that one point can restore, maintain, deflate, or destroy confidence. Confidence goes back and forth across a tennis net much like the ball itself, and only somewhat less frequently. If two players are on about the same level, no matter what that level is, the player who experiences more minutes of confidence will be the winner. Frequently enough, Graebner has heard Ashe quote Dr. Johnson on the importance of the first point in a set. Graebner knows that Ashe wants this one, and Graebner wants it, too. He wipes his right hand on a towel that always sticks out of his pocket. The towel is the sort that is clipped around the necks of his father’s patients (“Open wide, please”). Graebner further dries his hand by blowing on it, and, finally, by rubbing it over the gut of his racquet. Ashe goes up to hit the ball. It is a big serve. Graebner blocks it back. Ashe, trying to pick the ball up with a running half volley, sends it into the net. Love-fifteen.
Ashe is consciously scared. In nervous situations in the past, he has been attacked by stomach cramps that doubled him over. In Davis Cup competition, while Graebner is playing singles, Ashe sometimes gets so nervous that he leaves the scene and listens to the match on the radio. Graebner strides into position. Ashe wins the next point, and the next. Graebner ties the game at thirty-all. Ashe hits a flat serve too deep. Then he spins a second one in. Graebner runs around it and smashes a forehand up the center. Ashe takes it at the service line and, without bending down, flips an underhand volley to Graebner at the baseline. Graebner, on his heels and off balance, hits a powerful backhand at Ashe, who punches a volley deep to the backhand corner. Graebner runs, sets, and hits the ball down the line. Ashe handles it badly, and the point—the longest so far—is over. The score is thirty-forty. This could be the match, right here. If Graebner wins the next point, breaking Ashe, Ashe may very well not recover.
Graebner dries his hand on the gut. Graebner’s hand has two big calluses on it—one just below the little finger, and the other on the butt of the palm. These act more or less as an oarlock for his racquet handle as he shifts his grip for a forehand or a backhand. Graebner is thinking, “If I break him now, his morale has had it.”
Ashe spins his racquet and looks inscrutable. Ashe has a single, enormous callus—a half inch thick—just below his index finger. No matter what stroke he may be hitting, he never changes his grip. He is saying to himself, “This could be serious, Arthur. What’s happening? One little mistake here and it’s curtains. You want to play chicken, but you have to fight it. Hit the ball.” His serve goes down the middle, to Graebner’s forehand side. Graebner swings late and slices the ball across the net at a sharp angle. If it drops in, Ashe cannot possibly get to it. The ball lands one inch out.
On a flood of relief, Ashe jerks Graebner around the court in two commanding points, hitting bullet volleys and a loose, almost mocking drop shot. He now leads, one game to love, second set.
Graebner serves, and Ashe pounds the ball back at him in a way that reminds Graebner that Ashe can not only put down a threat but make one as well. Graebner slugs the ball, and Ashe slugs it back. The reports are loud. Ashe and Graebner are really hitting. Each is advertising his power. Neither is aiming for the corners. They are shooting right at each other. Graebner creams another one, but Ashe’s mood changes and he throws up a light, soft lob into the sun. Blinding rays hit Graebner just before Graebner hits the ball, into the net.
“People say that Arthur lacks the killer instinct.” (Ronald Charity is commenting.) “And that is a lot of baloney. Arthur is quietly aggressive—more aggressive than people give him credit for being. You don’t get to be that good without a will to win. He’ll let you win the first two sets, then he’ll blast you off the court.” Ronald Charity, who taught Arthur Ashe to play tennis, was himself taught by no one. “I was my own protégé,” he says. Charity is approaching forty and is the head of an advertising and public-relations firm in Danville, Virginia. Trim, lithe, in excellent condition, he is still nationally ranked as one of the top ten players in the A.T.A. In 1946, when he began to play tennis, as a seventeen-year-old in Richmond, there were—male and female, all ages—about twenty Negroes in the city who played the game, and none of them played it well. Charity, as a college freshman, thought tennis looked interesting, and when, in a bookstore, he saw Lloyd Budge’s “Tennis Made Easy” he bought a copy and began to teach himself to play. When he had absorbed what Budge had to say, he bought Alice Marble’s “The Road to Wimbledon,” and, finally, William T. Tilden’s “How to Play Better Tennis.” “It just happened that I could pull off a page and project into my imagination how it should be done,” he says. Blacks in Richmond could play tennis at the Negro Y.M.C.A., where Charity developed his game, and a little later courts were built at Brook Field, a Negro playground about two miles from the heart of the city, where there were four hard-surface courts. Arthur Ashe, a Special Police Officer in charge of discipline at several Negro playgrounds, lived in a frame house in the middle of Brook Field. When Arthur Ashe, Jr., was six years old, he spent a great deal of time watching Ronald Charity play tennis, and would never forget what he felt as he watched him: “I thought he was the best in the world. He had long, fluid, graceful strokes. I could see no kinks in his game.”
“I guess by that time I was about the best in Richmond—you know, black tennis player,” Charity continues. “One day, Arthur asked me if I would show him how to play. He had had no tennis experience. I put the racquet in his hand. I taught him the Continental grip. That’s what I was playing with. At first, I would stand six feet away from him, on the same side of the net, and throw balls to him while he learned a stroke. The little guy caught on so quickly. When the stroke had been taught, I would cross the net and hit it with him. We practiced crosscourt forehands, forehands down the line, crosscourt backhands. We played every summer evening. There was a little backboard there. All day long, he would practice. We had a club—the Richmond Racquet Club, all grown men—and we let him join it. His game improved. One day, when he was playing someone his own age, he kept looking around after he hit good shots, to see who might have been watching. I bawled him out for it. I told him if he continued to do anything like that I wasn’t going to be bothered with him anymore. He never did that anymore. He was a quiet child, observant. He took in everything, and read a lot. He was very disciplined. The level of his game kept going up. Finally, I called Dr. Johnson in Lynchburg. In fact, I carried Arthur up there. It was on a Sunday. He was ten years old.”
Dr. Johnson’s house, two stories, frame, painted brown and white, is about twice the size of any other house in the neighborhood. It has four upstairs bedrooms, one of which Arthur shared with another boy. The basement playroom appears to be a copy of a small night club on a busy highway. The columns that support the floor above are encased in blue mirrors. Red leatherette couches and lounge chairs are set about in groups. Glass doors, which are generally locked, close off a bar that is commercial in grandeur and is fully appointed and equipped. Tennis trophies shine from every shelf. There is a ping-pong table, for hand-eye coördination. Off the lounge is a shower room. A basement door and stairwell lead to a formal garden, and across the garden is the tennis court, surrounded by a rusting fence and high telephone poles that support floodlights. The tennis court abuts the sidewalk that runs in front of the Doctor’s house, and is several feet above the sidewalk level, held there by a retaining wall of poured concrete. People walking by have a sneaker’s-eye view of the action. On the other side of Pierce Street is a small general store, and next to the store are two narrow, vacant houses that have no doors and few windowpanes. Boards nailed on a slant across the doors carry boldly lettered but apparently ineffectual warnings against vandalism and trespass. Behind Dr. Johnson’s house is a combined garage and tool shed that contains a curious device. From a bracket on the floor to a beam above runs a vertical elastic cord, drawn fairly taut. About two feet off the floor, the cord passes through the center of a tennis ball. The height of the ball is adjustable. The developing tennis players hit this ball with pieces of broom handle cut twenty-six inches long, the exact length of a tennis racquet. The device, known as the Tom Stow Stroke Developer, was invented by the teacher of Sarah Palfrey, Helen Jacobs, Margaret Osborne, and J. Donald Budge. Dr. Johnson has almost every teaching device known to the game. On the court are two Ball-Boy machines, a rebounding net, and a service stand, which holds a ball in perfect position overhead for practicing serves. Players who are new to the Junior Development Team swing broom handles at the Tom Stow Stroke Developer until they can connect consistently with the ball and not the cord. Then they take their broom handles to the court and use them instead of racquets. Dr. Johnson calls this “learning how to see the ball.” When they can play proficiently with the broom handles, actually rallying, they are advanced to the use of strung frames. The Junior Development Team has generally had eight or ten members. In recent summers, white boys have applied for admission, and Dr. Johnson has let some in. Dr. Johnson’s effect on his neighborhood has been analogous to his effect on the outside world. In the living room of his next-door neighbor’s house, a small, one-story place on the far side of the tennis court, is a table on which are twenty-nine tennis trophies. Near the table is a television set. Two teen-age boys, the winners of the trophies, are watching Ashe and Graebner, at Forest Hills, on television. Graebner hits a serve that splits the court, landing on the line between the service boxes and almost instantly thereafter smashing into the stadium wall. Ashe does not even lift his racquet. He is not bothered by an ace that is perfect. “If the ball goes right on the line in the center, there is nothing you can do,” he will say. “There is something in your mind that says you can’t get there.” The score is fifteen-all, second game, second set. One of the boys watching television sighs audibly through his teeth: “Shhhhh . . .”
When Arthur first saw Dr. Johnson’s place, it looked much as it does now. The houses across the street were occupied then. The fence around the court was less rusty. There was no night lighting. But the training gadgets were there, and a group of high-school boys were intently learning not only how to play but, more important, how to win. “My ambition was to develop somebody who could win the U.S.L.T.A. Interscholastic Championship—that was it, pure and simple,” Dr. Johnson says. “I had so many players right on the verge. Then they would fall off.” When Arthur had been there less than three days, Dr. Johnson decided he was unteachable, and told him he was going to send him home. Arthur’s trouble was that he responded to the Johnson method by telling Dr. Johnson—and Dr. Johnson’s son Robert, who did a lot of the teaching—how Ronald Charity would have done things, with the implication that Ronald Charity knew more than they did. Dr. Johnson called Arthur Ashe, in Richmond, and suggested that he come and get his son. Among the talents of Arthur Senior, the discipline of children was not the least. Once, at Brook Field, when Arthur Junior threw his racquet in exasperation, he heard the screen door of his house slam before the racquet hit the ground. His father was on the tennis court three seconds later, and Arthur Ashe, Jr., has not to this day flung a racquet in anger again. Now Arthur Senior drove straightaway to Lynchburg, stepped onto Dr. Johnson’s tennis court, and asked his son if he wanted to stay with Dr. Johnson. When Arthur Junior said he did, his father said, “Then you do everything he says, no matter what he tells you.” Assuring Dr. Johnson that the problem no longer existed, Arthur Senior left Lynchburg. Dr. Johnson would always thereafter praise Arthur Ashe as the most unquestioningly obedient tennis player he had ever coached. If Dr. Johnson told Arthur to hit to an opponent’s backhand and nowhere else, Arthur would hit to the backhand even if the other player edged over so far that ninety per cent of the court was on his forehand side. “Whatever strategy you gave him to play, he wouldn’t change to save his life,” Dr. Johnson says. “He did what you told him, even if he lost at it.”
Training time was divided among the players, and Arthur, lowest in age and seniority, had to spend a lot of time standing around watching the older boys play, much as Rodney Laver, a few years earlier, had spent a lot of time standing around the tennis court on his family’s farm in tropical Australia waiting for his older brothers to finish playing. The boys in Lynchburg would take turns hitting against a Ball-Boy until they missed, or until they had hit a hundred times—always concentrating on one stroke until they had it under control. They rarely played points. “I believe in practice,” Dr. Johnson told them. “You can learn more” There was one boy there near Arthur’s age level. His name was Horace Cunningham. He lived just across the street from Dr. Johnson, and, as the Doctor continues the story, “He could beat Arthur’s socks off. Arthur was the worst player. He was always the last one to leave the court—that was one thing in his favor. But everybody could heat him.”
In Arthur’s eyes, the Doctor was an imperial figure—“an immensely rich Negro, with his tennis court and his Buick, and his seemingly endless supply of money. At ten and eleven years old, I was always rather awed by the guy. The world is very small then. To tell you the truth, I hated everything about Dr. Johnson’s at that time, except playing tennis. I hated weeding the gardens, cleaning the doghouse. I was the youngest, and I had to clean the doghouse every day.”
Dr. Johnson to this day takes visitors out back, shows them the concrete-floored pen where he keeps his hunting dogs, and demonstrates how easy the enclosure is to clean. “All he had to do was use a water hose,” he says. “Some kids are lazy. The least they can do is to weed the garden, roll the court, clean the doghouse—when I am paying for their room and board. Arthur’s trying to have some fun, griping about that.” Standing there with the hose in his hand, Dr. Johnson looks away toward the tennis court and forgets all about the dog pen. “Even when Arthur started going off to play in the tournaments, Horace could beat him—on this court. But Horace could not beat Arthur in the tournaments. That was a different situation.” They travelled in the Buick—Baltimore, Washington, Durham—and when Arthur was a little older and began to go to some tournaments on his own, Dr. Johnson called him, wherever he might be, to talk over his matches. Arthur was based in Lynchburg every summer until he was eighteen, the fixed element in a squad whose personnel changed frequently, as Dr. Johnson did his own kind of weeding. The Junior Development Team functioned in part on contributions from interested people in the A.T.A., but Dr. Johnson put thousands of dollars of his own specifically into Arthur’s career. Three white businessmen in Richmond—an insurance broker, a department-store executive, and a legitimate-theatre executive—contributed significant amounts, and Arthur’s father gave more than he could afford. Arthur once overheard him saying that he was a little sorry his son had chosen a sport as expensive as tennis. The cost of equipment alone was more than a thousand dollars a year.
When Arthur was fifteen, Dr. Johnson tried to enter him in the junior tournament of the Middle Atlantic Lawn Tennis Association, at the Country Club of Virginia, in Richmond. The Middle Atlantic L.T.A., a semi-autonomous subdivision of the U.S.L.T.A., refused to process the application. So Arthur could earn no ranking among boys in his home section of the country, although by now he was ranked fifth among boys in the United States. The following summer, 1959, the Middle Atlantic Championships were held at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, and Arthur’s application arrived “too late.” In 1960, Arthur won the junior championship of the A.T.A. and the A.T.A. men’s-singles championship. He was seventeen. He has sometimes been compared, in his sport, to Jackie Robinson in baseball, but the analogy is weak and foreshortens the story. Jackie Robinson was part of a pool of many hundreds of first-rate baseball players, and was chosen from among them to cross the color line. Arthur, at the age of seventeen, had beaten and far outdistanced all the Ronald Charitys there were. Already he stood, as he has remained, alone. Even at that time there was not one Negro in the United States who could effectively play tennis with him, and there is none now. In June, 1961, he went to Charlottesville in the Buick with Dr. Johnson, and he won the U.S.L.T.A. national Interscholastic Championship without losing a set. He remembers what he thought at that moment in his life: “I saw that it was conceivable that I might win someday at Forest Hills.”
In 1962, the Interscholastic Championships, which had been held in Charlottesville for sixteen consecutive years, were moved to Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Ashe wants to level things. He is uncomfortable looking uphill at Graebner, who hits another serve of almost unplayable force but just close enough to be reached. Ashe dives for it and stops it with his racquet. His return floats across the net and drops near the sideline. Graebner has difficulty believing that the ball has come back. He is not reacting. “Unbelievable,” he says to himself. “Too tough.” After this momentary lapse, he sprints for the ball, and is completely off the court when he gets to it. Despite Graebner’s hesitation, and despite the inconvenient location of Ashe’s shot, Graebner has reached the ball in time not only to hit it but to drive it. Many players think Graebner is slow, for somehow, to an athlete’s eye, he looks slow, and they will say something like “From the waist up, Graebner is the fastest in the world, but his feet are in his way.” Ashe does not wholly agree. “Graebner is mechanically fast,” he wil1 say. “He’s not that agile. He can’t reverse directions well, but once he gets rolling in one direction he is fast. You’ve got to finesse Graebner. He’s as strong as an ox. Get the ball anywhere within a two-step radius of his body and you’re dead. You can’t go through him. You’ve got to go around him or over him.” Graebner says, “I don’t look fast, but I get to the ball.”
Graebner’s drive is deep to Ashe’s backhand corner, and Ashe intercepts it with a beautiful, fluid crosscourt stroke. In the follow-through, he is up on his toes, arms flaring. Ashe’s backhand is one of the touchstones of modern tennis. Graebner is disturbed. He is thinking, “There it is. There Arthur goes, swinging freely.” Arthur swinging freely is something that scares players of all nations. When he is behind, or otherwise in trouble, he reacts by hitting all the harder, going for a winner on every ball. Graebner moves to cover the shot. Graebner may not be technically agile, but he is moving like a cat right now. Ashe is a little surprised, and thinks, “Good God! Clark is covering that net like a blanket.” Graebner gets the ball with a lunging backhand volley, his shoes slip on the grass, and he breaks his fall with his left arm. The volley is deep. Ashe detonates another splendid backhand, down the line. But Graebner recovers his balance and stops the ball at the net, dinking a shot that Ashe, sprinting, cannot reach. “What a greasy shot!” Ashe says to himself. “He just greased it. I hit two great shots, then he greased one. It barely got over the net, and it died in the grass.”
Now, for the first time in the match, Graebner double-faults. He scowls angrily toward the Marquee, the sheltered stands at the eastern end of the stadium, where his wife, Carole, is sitting with Ashe’s father and Robert J. Kelleher, president of the U.S.L.T.A. Carole is the trim in Graebner’s racquet—the extra bit of nylon stringing that determines rough or smooth. Graebner’s anger look seems to say that he believes it was Carole who served the double fault. She absorbs this, by grace and by agreement. “I tell him to look over at me when he gets mad, because I would rather have him get mad at me than at anyone else—or at himself,” she explains. For one reason or another—not always anger—Graebner looks at Carole about a hundred times a match. “I try to give him an opportunity to meet my eyes after each point, if he wants to,” she goes on. “If he needs a little pick-me-up, I am there.” If she is not there, he may fall apart. Once, in Australia, in a tight moment, he looked for Carole and she had gone off momentarily for refreshments. “Where’s Carole? Where’s Carole?” he said, and he ran around behind the grandstand looking for her. Now, at Forest Hills, she raises one hand and makes a patting motion, as if she were soothing an invisible horse. This signal means “Calm down.” If she raises two clenched fists, It means “Come on, now. Get your second wind. This is a big point.” If she puts one hand on top of her head and shakes her head, it means “Unbelievable!”—or, in translation, “Good shot.” Graebner responds to these messages in part because his wife, whose maiden name was Carole Caldwell, is a world-class tennis player. She is ranked sixth among women players in the United States. She plays very little now, but she has been ranked as high as fourth in the world, and might be there still if she did not have two children under two years of age. “I think these are the only times that Clark publicly acknowledges me as a knowing player,” she says. “Off the court, he does not acknowledge that I know much about the game. I live my tennis through Clark now, so I don’t miss it so much. During matches, I’m perfectly frank with him. If he’s not playing well, I’ll let him know. I think he could be the best there is. Up to now, I don’t think he has really worked at it. He is a natural player, not a made player. I think he sometimes thinks, ‘Oh, what the hell. If God didn’t give it to me, why go after it?’ He sometimes loses faith in himself. As soon as he starts to lose, or get depressed, his shoulders drop. I don’t think Clark would admit this, but in some respects I am his self-confidence. He will not admit that he is the biggest baby in the world, and he is by far. You wouldn’t exactly call him docile. If he makes a great point, I clap hard. He’ll turn and smile sometimes.” At Forest Hills in 1965, Carole and Clark won the national husband-and-wife doubles championship, and she says she will never enter it again, because they fought constantly and Clark complained that she wouldn’t do what he told her to do. “I’ve won a lot of tournaments. Let me play my own game,” she said to him. A few minutes later, Clark told her to lob, so she hit the ban down the line. Even recreationally, they almost never play together now, except when Clark has not played for a long time and wants to regroove. Men frequently hit with women to regroove their strokes. Carole is a good-looking blue-eyed brunette, attractively selfless, gifted with discipline, constantly starving herself to control the figure that gave her the big tennis game that made her fourth in the world. She grew up in Santa Monica. She has girlish animation, and, blushing through it, she discloses that she was named “for Carole Lombard, who was married to Clark Gable.”
Ashe is thinking, “Graebner just looked at his wife.” And behind Arthur’s impassive face—behind the enigmatic glasses, the lifted chin, the first-mate-on-the-bridge look—there seems to be a smile. Progress against Graebner in any given match, many players believe, can be measured directly by the number of times Graebner has looked at his wife.
Ashe tries to pass Graebner, and hits the ball into the net a foot and a half below the tape. Graebner has him forty-thirty. Ashe looks within himself angrily, thinking, “You choked on that one, boy.”
As Graebner gets ready to serve for the game, Ashe tells himself, “You . . . better . . . be . . . tough . . . now.”
Crunch. Ashe flails and misses. “Fault!” cries Frank Hammond, who is the service linesman on the side of the court where Ashe is at the moment playing. There are thirteen officials around the court, and Ashe and Graebner know them all. Frank Hammond’s job is particularly sensitive—watching the service line in a match between two players whose styles revolve around their ballistic serves. Both Ashe and Graebner specifically asked for Hammond today, in part because they like him, and in part because they consider him the best service linesman at Forest Hills. Unconsciously, they may also feel drawn to Hammond because he is—literally—Santa Claus on a grand scale. He is a large, jolly man of national reputation, who, purely for his own amusement, is an itinerant Santa Claus, appearing in a different city each Christmas season. This year, he plans to be at Lord & Taylor, in New York. Ashe mumbles, “Good call, Frank.” Ashe is still alive in this game, thanks to Santa Claus’s photoelectric eyes. The serve was a half inch long.
Graebner’s second serve curves in. Ashe meets it with a graceful, underspinning backhand. Graebner leans forward to volley from his shoetops. The ball is floating before Ashe now. Graebner is at the net, astride the center line, perfectly balanced and ready, but he has given Ashe too much time. Ashe hits another backhand—a hard, rolling, top-spin backhand, with unimprovable placement. It slants past Graebner so fast he can take only one step in its direction, and it skips through the chalk of the sideline—a duster, as players call a shot that stirs the chalk. For the first time in the match, Ashe has forced Graebner, serving, to deuce. “Oh, God! His play will pick up from here,” thinks Graebner, who has read this sort of tea leaf before. Ashe’s great shot does not necessarily mean that others will immediately follow, but it reminds Graebner of what can emerge, suddenly, from beneath the general surface of play. Moments later, Graebner, moving with extraordinary anticipation, picks off a forehand drive and, with an adroit, slicing drop shot off his steel racquet, puts the ball away. “I actually have more touch with the steel than anyone else,” Graebner will say. “Graebner grips the racquet so tight he can feel the ball,” Ashe observes. “He must get writer’s cramp.”
Advantage Graebner. Crunch. The serve is too much—unplayable. Game to Graebner. Games are one-all, second set.
The match, for a time, becomes a simple exhibition of the service stroke. Ashe may not have quite Graebner’s power, but his serves—in the vernacular of the game—move better than Graebner’s do. They follow less predictable patterns, and they come off the grass in less expectable ways. “I can feel my serve from my toes to my fingertips,” he will say. “I don’t have to look. It just flows.” In two games against Ashe’s service, the only point Graebner wins is given to him in the form of a double fault. This, to Arthur Ashe, Sr., is a sign of impatience on the part of his son. He says, “When Arthur Junior rushes himself, he gets into trouble.” Mr. Ashe is an axiomatic man. When he says things like that, he does not seem to be making a comment so much as he seems to be promulgating a law of the universe. Somewhat darker than Arthur Junior, he is just under six feet tall and has a small mustache and a full, round face. He wears bifocal glasses with black metal rims. He is a disciplinarian by profession, and he has a kind of stern, forthright self-assurance that is not put on for the job. In several ways, he differs notably from his son. Arthur Junior is particularly articulate, and Mr. Ashe is not particularly articulate. His education stopped when he was eleven years old. Arthur Junior’s personality is contained, controlled, withheld. In Arthur Senior there is no studied cool. His smile is quick. He jokes a lot. He is easy to know.
For some years now, he has lived in the country near Gum Spring, thirty-five miles northwest of Richmond. He gets up at five-thirty in the morning. He drives into Richmond in a white Ford pickup that has an aluminum enclosure behind the cab and contains a chain saw and dozens of other tools, which equip him for his three jobs and his various categories of responsibility. He wears, typically, a red shirt, gray cotton trousers, a gray cap. A bunch of keys hangs from one hip. He has his own landscaping business and his own janitorial business, and he seems to specialize in medical centers, banks, and office buildings in the new industrial parks of Richmond’s west end. “You’ve got to scramble,” he says. “You’ve got to give from one hand to gain on the other.” He has eight employees. Some of them irritate him by following customs that run counter to his axioms—for example, when he gives them eighty dollars’ pay on a Friday and they borrow two dollars from him on Monday. From 2 p.m. until 10 p.m. each day, he works for the city. In the Department of Recreation and Parks, he is not only a Special Police Officer but also a pool engineer and the supervisor of tennis courts. He carries a night stick, handcuffs, and a gun, but he wears no uniform. His primary duty is to maintain order, and he doesn’t seem to mind that his work has made him from time to time unpopular. Humor spills out of him wherever he goes. He goes into a hardware store during the hunting season and asks for a three-gun rack for his car. The salesman says, “Why do you need a three-gun rack, Arthur?” and the answer is “You always need a third gun so you can shoot your wife.”
Mr. Ashe has five houses—four in Richmond and the one in Gum Spring—and he says that he maintains all these dwellings less for the rents than as a form of self-protection. “I’m like a groundhog. Shoot at him and he has another home to scurry off to.” He built his house in Gum Spring with his own hands, using materials that he salvaged from houses and other buildings that were razed when Interstate 95 cleaved Richmond some years ago. His property is isolated among cornfields and woods of oak and pine on a narrow asphalt road. The house is one-story, thirty-six by forty-six feet, with walls of cement block painted aquamarine. Mr. Ashe is an adept carpenter, plumber, electrician, and mason, and for a number of years he regularly took Arthur Junior to Gum Spring to work on the new house.
“Arthur Junior toted boards, mixed mortar, pulled nails, helped set the block. He did any damned thing I told him to do.”
“Daddy is a jack-of-all-trades, but that’s not my bag. I hated it, but I never let him know. We went out every weekend. I had no choice.”
“You give from one hand to gain on the other.”
The living room at Gum Spring is full of tennis plaques and trophies, won by Arthur and his brother John, who is five years younger. On one wall hangs a copy of the Twenty-third Psalm stamped in brass and a portrait of Christ painted on a china plate. Above the psalm and the plate is the head of an eight-point stag. “The first time Arthur Junior went deer hunting was in King William County.” (His father gets inordinate pleasure from telling this story.) “He was just a boy. I put him on a stump and told him to wait for deer. He was nervous, just like his mother. He’s got over it now, but he was nervous. And seven deer came toward him, and he shouted, ‘Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!’ I shouted, ‘Shoot that damn gun.’ He killed two.” The house is heated with wood fires, and the stove in the kitchen is also fuelled with wood. In every room is the scent of burning oak. As Mr. Ashe drives around the countryside near Gum Spring, he turns in to a fanatic for neatness and tidiness, and gets visibly angry at the sight of houses surrounded by automobile parts, miscellaneous cordwood, old oil drums, piles of scrap lumber. He says that people have no right to mess up the landscape that way. Then he drives into his own property, which is bestrewn with automobile parts, miscellaneous cordwood, oil drums, scrap lumber, and gravel, and he explains that things are different here, because he knows exactly what and where everything is and the use to which he intends to put it.
There are six in the family. Arthur Junior and John have a stepsister, Loretta, and a stepbrother, Robert. Soon after John was born, his mother (and Arthur’s) died. Several years later, Mr. Ashe married Lorraine Kimbrugh, a practical, witty, conversational woman, who frequently keeps Arthur up until two or three in the morning talking about his travels and the worlds he plays in. Robert and Loretta are in high school. John is a Marine sergeant, recently home from Vietnam. More solid in build than his older brother, he is an excellent general athlete, but not a specialist. In high school in Richmond, he won letters in football, basketball, baseball, track, and tennis. Nonetheless, in finding his own way he is inevitably encountering the inconvenience of being so closely related to Arthur Ashe. A football scholarship is open to him at Duke, but he is thinking of staying in the Marine Corps.
Some people have criticized Mr. Ashe for “hustling” lumber to build the Gum Spring house. “It’s against their pride,” he explains. “But they have notes on their houses, and I don’t.” He still makes regular calls at the Richmond city dump to look for scrap lumber and other materials. He has built a large combined garage and tool shed using heavy-gauge tin highway signs—“Fredericksburg 25,” “Williamsburg 90”—as siding. In this building is a twenty-one-foot aluminum-hulled power boat with a 100-horsepower engine. With his family, he cruises and fishes the rivers and tidewaters of Virginia. Arthur Junior is never reluctant to go on these trips, for fishing is his bag, too.
Graebner serves the fourth game of the second set, and in the entire game there are eight shots. Two are misfired serves. Two are aces. Ashe gets his racquet on the ball only twice. Dr. Graebner, on the edge of his chair, is pleased. “He’s taking his time. He’s reading Arthur nicely. He’s hitting well.” As it happens, Dr. Graebner is not at Forest Hills but at his home, on Wimbledon Road, in Beachwood, Ohio, where, with Clark’s mother, he is watching the match on a television screen that seems almost as large as the huge picture window behind it. Through the window is an awning-shaded terrace, and beyond that a compact lawn. “I just wish he’d learn to smile on the court, because he looks so grim, and he just isn’t,” Mrs. Graebner says. When Clark moves with correct anticipation to cover a shot, Dr. Graebner says, “He read that well.” The houses of Wimbledon Road appear to be in the fifty-to-seventy-thousand-dollar class and almost too big for the parcels of land allotted to them. They are faced with stratified rock, lightened with big windows, surrounded with shrubbery, and lined up in propinquous ranks like yachts at a pier. Arthur Ashe has visited the Graebners’ house several times, and he remembers it in blueprint detail. “You walk in the front door. You face steps. The dining room is on the left-hand side. The living room is on the right, and beyond it a den. Beyond the dining room, the kitchen. Big back yard. Four bedrooms.” The Graebners’ living-room shelves are filled with tennis trophies, in place of books. The room has big furniture—big couches, big easy chairs, big lamps, big coffee tables. Mrs. Graebner is a large woman with a strikingly attractive face, curiously like Carole’s, and she, too, is a dieter of fearful discipline. Mr. Graebner is extremely dental. He has bright-white, flawless teeth—a kind of self-portrait—in an open face that smiles readily. He speaks quickly and nervously, often in an engaging monologue. Tennis players who visit his home uniformly like him, and find him amusing because he asks them questions (“How are you? How was your trip? How is your game?”) and, not waiting for replies, answers all the questions himself (“It’s nice to see you so well. There’s nothing like a good, smooth flight. You’re having your best year”). Attentively, he worries over his guests. “That’s all right. We’ll get a towel. It will be O.K. All right. There will be no difficulty,” he says, and he all but concludes by saying, “Relax, now. It won’t hurt a bit.” After thirty years of close contact with temporarily muted people, he has mastered the histrionisms of his craft. He winks, interviews himself, speaks always reassuringly, and couples his skeins of language with “but”s and “and”s, never stopping. Crunch. Ace. Right down the middle. “He’s taking his time. He’s hitting well.” Dr. Graebner is almost completely absorbed in Clark—in everything from the mechanical functioning of his game to the general politics of tennis, which can take on cinquecento overtones when powers meet to set up a tournament draw—and many of Dr. Graebner’s long-standing, old-Clevelander patients have learned that the last thing they want to say as they sit down in the chair is “How’s Clark?”
Dr. Graebner’s hair, crew cut, is speckled salt-and-pepper gray, but he looks so much like Clark that the two could be mistaken for brothers. He is just over six feet tall. Like Clark, Dr. Graebner has a quick, hot temper. “He and I are very similar. He is tight, keyed up, a perfectionist, a hard worker. He does orthodonture—everything but surgery. He’s a nervous person, I guess. So am I. We keep a lot inside ourselves. He doesn’t drink, smoke, or swear. I don’t do anything to an extreme, but I am not a puritanical soul.”
“My father can barely read and write. In his own simple way, though, he is very broad-minded. He is receptive to new ideas. He shows little concern for social conventions. He is a benevolent man. He gives money and clothes to the poor. He was always strict, but fair. He doesn’t drink. So far as I know, he has never bought a bottle of liquor. We do have homemade wine—peach wine, blackberry wine. If my father had a trillion dollars, he wouldn’t change. He is not by any means a social climber. I’m convinced of that.” Mr. Ashe was born on a farm in South Hill, Virginia. He had eight brothers and sisters. His father, Pink Ashe, was a carpenter-bricklayer-farmer who grew tobacco and corn. When Arthur Senior was twelve, he went to Richmond to make his living, but he had been working part time almost all his life—cleaning yards, carrying wood, cleaning chicken houses. In Richmond, he became a butler-chauffeur. He was thirteen when he got his driver’s license. For five years, he worked for Mr. and Mrs. Charles Gregory, of 2 River Road, driving them around the city, or answering the door as butler or waiting at table in a white coat. He describes Gregory as “a wealthy dude.” Mrs. Gregory paid him two dollars and fifty cents a week, of which he unfailingly sent all but the fifty cents to his mother in South Hill. He was still in his teens when he went to work for the city.
At a program one evening at the Westwood Baptist Church, Arthur Senior met a tall, good-looking girl with long, soft hair and a face that was gentle and thin. Her name was Mattie Cunningham. People called her Baby. He soon married her. “She was just like Arthur Junior. She never argued. She was quiet, easygoing, kindhearted. She had a very strict mother, too, brother. She worked at Miller & Rhoads’ department store.” Asked if she sold things behind a counter, he asks back, “Are you kidding? In those days, that was impossible. . . . She read a lot. She was serious—a very serious-minded person, especially with that boy when he was first born.” Arthur Junior carries his birth certificate in his wallet—July 10, 1943, “born alive at 12:55 p.m.” All he remembers of his mother is an image of her standing by a door of the house in Brook Field, in a blue corduroy bathrobe, on a day when she was taken to a hospital. His father tells a story surrounding the events that followed: “In one of the oak trees outside the house, there was a bluejay bird singing up a storm. I carried Arthur Junior’s mother to the hospital that morning. The bird sang for a week. I threw rocks at it. I shot at it with a .38, but not to kill it. The bird sang for a week and would not stop. A call came at five-twenty one morning from the hospital, and the bird stopped singing.” His wife had been twenty-seven.
Becoming a lone parent seemed to increase in Arthur’s father his already rigorous sense of discipline. When Arthur entered first grade, at the Baker Street School, near Brook Field, Mr. Ashe walked with him at the boy’s pace and timed the journey. Arthur had exactly that many minutes to get home from school each day or he was in trouble. If he was late, his father took it for granted that something was wrong. In time, when Arthur wanted to work a paper route, his father would not let him do it. He thought it was too dangerous. “I kept the children home pretty close,” he says. “My children never roamed the streets. A regular schedule was very important. A parent has got to hurt his own child, discipline him, hold him back from things you know aren’t good for him. I don’t believe in arguing and fussing. I can’t stand it and never could. I don’t believe in speaking two or three times, neither.” He set maxims before his son like stepping stones. “You don’t get nowhere by making enemies,” he said. “You gain by helping others.” And “Things that you need come first. Foolishness is last.” “I told Arthur these things for his future, for his own good,” Mr. Ashe goes on. “I told him I wanted him to get an education and get himself qualified so people could respect him as a human being. I wanted him to be a gentleman that everybody could recognize, and that’s what he is right now.”
It was a five-minute walk from the house in Brook Field to the house of the nearest neighbor, and to see his boyhood friends Arthur Junior would walk around the tennis courts, around the pool, through the parking yards of the Manhattan For Hire Car Company, and into the neighborhood beyond. Brook Field was encircled with light industry—the Bottled Gas Corporation of Virginia, the Valentine Meat Juice Company. “I didn’t live in a so-called ghetto situation. I never saw rat-infested houses, never hung out on corners, never saw anyone knifed. I wasn’t made aware of it all until I went to college. We were never poor. Not even close. Things weren’t that tough for me. I’ve never had a job in my life. In a way, I envy people who have had. The field behind my house was like a huge back yard. I thought it was mine. Brook Field was just an athletic paradise, a dream world for a kid who likes to play sports. Tennis, baseball, horseshoes, basketball, football, swimming—you name it. The pool was so full of kids in the summer you couldn’t see the water. I had no problems at all. There was really no reason in the world for me to leave the place. Everybody came to me. The athletic equipment was kept in a box in my house.” Mr. Ashe spent half his time encouraging athletic games and the other half breaking up crap games. Brook Field, which has since been bulldozed and turned into the site of Richmond’s new general post office, was lined and interspersed with oak trees, and Arthur, lying in bed at night during summer thunderstorms, kept waiting for lightning to shiver the big limbs, but it never did. And there was some latent fear, which surfaced now and again in remarks of Arthur Senior’s, that the bottled-gas company might blow up, and that if it did the family would go with it. One night, something leaked at the gas company and two-hundred-foot flames raced into the sky. The big tanks, however, did not explode. “And that might have been the best thing that ever didn’t happen to me.”
Arthur’s mother had taught him to read when he was four. He was an A student all through school. He never read detective stories, Westerns, or comic books. “I didn’t want to waste a dime on comic books. Ridiculous. The dime would be gone in five minutes.” For the most part, he read biographies and general factual writing, and he went through the World Book Encyclopedia. He read books beside the tennis courts when he wasn’t playing, and he would continue this habit during tournaments in later years. In high school, he played the trumpet in a combo called the Royal Knights, but he actually mixed very little with his classmates, for his tennis increasingly took him out of their milieu. He was a good pitcher and a good second baseman, but his high-school principal, impressed by his development in tennis under Dr. Johnson, kept him from playing on the high-school baseball team. Black high schools in Richmond, in his era, had no tennis teams. Before long, and because of him, they would all have tennis teams.
Mr. Ashe’s curfew during those years was 11 p.m. “Arthur, when Daddy says eleven o’clock, I mean in the house at eleven o’clock. See that car out that window? You’re going to be driving that soon. You’re going to wreck it trying to get home by eleven. You had better show me what you can do on foot before I let you drive that car.” Arthur’s father pondered all invitations that came Arthur’s way, and screened out most of them. (“If I let him go to all the parties he was invited to, he wouldn’t be where he is today.”) Once, Arthur was invited to a party by a young lady whose father was a school principal and whose mother was a teacher. Arthur Senior approved of that one, and Arthur went. He was not home by eleven. His father went after him. When Mr. Ashe appeared in the doorway, the girl called out, “Hey, Art. Here is your antique father.” Mr. Ashe tells this story without a smile.
Every Sunday, Arthur had to go to the Westwood Baptist Church. He refers to the experience as “a chore.” “It’s very tough to tell a young black kid that the Christian religion is for him,” he says. “He just doesn’t believe it. When you start going to church and you look up at this picture of Christ with blond hair and blue eyes, you wonder if he’s on your side. When I got to college, I quit going to church. I go every once in a while now, out of curiosity.” The ceramic Christ on the wall at Gum Spring has blond hair and brown eyes.
Dr. and Mrs. Graebner go to services every Sunday and to prayer meeting every Wednesday at the Cedar Hill Baptist Church, and they think that Clark is not as religious as he should be. They try to do whatever they can to bring Clark closer to God, and they always have tried to. He was a malleable child—in his mother’s words, “a really nice boy, not difficult to handle, active but not mischievious.” He fished for crawdads in the Rocky River, and he roller-skated around and around the blocks of Lakewood with a little neighbor named Nancy Gallo. There were no boys for him to play with, but he didn’t seem to mind. He would always be more at ease with women than with men. In his teens, he began to dress with what he took to be suavity; he affected a camel’s-hair coat and looked like a mannequin from Rogers Peet. He and his doubles partner Warren Danne chased girls together, and Warren was as impressed with Clark in this form as he was with Clark the tennis player. “Girls really liked him. He was very much at home with them,” Warren says. When Clark was sixteen and going steady with a girl called Bubbles Keyes, he had “total use” of the family Imperial—in effect, his own car. When he needed money, he just asked for it, and if the purpose was reasonable he got it. “I was probably spoiled to some degree, as are most only children. Now that I have mine, I can see how easy it is to spoil a child. You love them so much.” Clark’s intense concentration on tennis worried his mother a little. She felt that he should have another outlet, and the one she chose to encourage was figure skating. Clark was trained at the Cleveland Skating Club by the best available professionals, and, with his natural sense of rhythm and his gyroscopic balance, he became an outstanding performer. But he could leave skating alone. He eventually had enough of “judges dumping all over you if you were off by one-tenth of a second—I couldn’t stand that.”
The Cleveland Skating Club had four cement indoor tennis courts and ten en-tout-cas outdoor courts, so Clark spent a high proportion of his formative years there, making the trip every afternoon on “the rapid,” and going home, after office hours, with his father. (The tennis facilities are now called the Cavalry Tennis Club and are a separate, integrated organization, because “a citizen do-gooder,” as Mrs. Graebner describes him, noted some years ago that the courts were on public land rented from the city, and therefore membership should be open to all. The solution was to create the Cavalry Club. Skating Club members could join Cavalry or not, as they chose, and the Graebners immediately signed up.) In his early teens, Clark became good enough to play with his father and his father’s friends—“people I would consider hackers now”—and Dr. Graebner and Clark became a doubles team, competing in father-and-son tournaments. In the Western Championships, in Cleveland, they played several times against Dr. Robert Walter Johnson, of Lynchburg, and his son Robert. Clark was so young the first time that the Johnsons felt sorry for him, according to Dr. Johnson, so they eased up and gave him one game. That gave Clark the lift he needed, and the Graebners beat the Johnsons. Meeting in the same tournament in another year, the Johnsons beat the Graebners. Twice, the Graebners were national finalists in the U.S.L.T.A. father-and-son tournament. Tennis players remember how solicitous Dr. Graebner was toward Clark, and how he tried artfully to coach Clark along when he made an error. “Don’t worry, honey. Don’t worry, honey,” Dr. Graebner would say. “Forget it. Concentrate on the next one.” In later seasons, when Clark had become much the stronger player of the two, it was he who carried his father in these tournaments, and other tennis players remember that Clark used to get irked and impatient when his father missed shots, and he would grit his teeth and say to his father, “Just get me one point, will you?”
Clark’s companion on the rest of the circuit was his mother, for Dr. Graebner had his practice and generally had to stay home. In a Chrysler New Yorker and, later, Imperials, singing along on snow tires all summer, because she felt they were safer in rain, she drove Clark and Warren Danne from Cleveland to St. Louis to Springfield to Louisville to Champaign—the cities of the tennis big-little league, where boy tennis players of the highest levels compete with one another as the season advances toward Kalamazoo. In the mind of a new American tennis player, Kalamazoo is Wimbledon. The national championships for the very young are held in August in Kalamazoo. Clark, when he was twelve, met Arthur Ashe at Kalamazoo, but, in the patterns of the draw, did not play against him. “I thought I was pretty good at twelve,” Clark says. “Then I went to Kalamazoo and lost love and love in the first round. Actually, I played well. All the games went to deuce. I just didn’t win them. Ray Senkowski, a six-footer who was shaving—a big Polack guy, you know—he just annihilated me, score-wise.”
Clark won at Kalamazoo two years later, but meanwhile something of tangential but considerable importance would happen to him there, and to Arthur as well. Kalamazoo is often the scene of what in the career of a young tennis player is the equivalent of the day of the alternativa in the life of a young bullfighter—the day of his doctorate, his confirmation, his bar mitzvah. If a boy tennis player is good enough to show the slightest signs of world-class potential, a man inevitably approaches him at some moment at Kalamazoo and says, “Son, I’m from the Wilson Sporting Goods Company, and I’d like to give you a couple of racquets.”
It could be Dunlop, Bancroft, Spalding. They’re all there. It was Wilson that knighted Arthur Ashe. He was fifteen when Wilson gave him, in his words, “two racquets and a couple of covers that first time, no shoes, no strings.” Since then, he has never used another kind of racquet. When he is in Chicago, he goes to the Wilson factory and picks out several dozen frames, which are put aside and sent to him, usually in lots of four, as he requests them. His Tony Trabert model used to be the Barry MacKay model, and before that the Alex Olmedo, and before that the Don Budge. It has always been the same racquet, and Ashe has used it in its various incarnations because he thinks it is the stiffest racquet that Wilson makes. “I’m a flippy player anyway. Any racquet that gives me more flip gives me trouble.” He picks them out at the factory because he wants the stiffest of the stiff. He seldom breaks one, but after he has used one for a while the head gets floppy—the racquet becomes something like a riding whip—and he throws it away. He has his racquets strung at sixty pounds of tension, but no two stringing jobs are alike, so he hits with several racquets and picks out favorites. When he comes onto the court for a match, he brings two incumbent favorites, spins them, and picks one, mystically. He plays through the match with one racquet. So does Graebner. Both Ashe and Graebner say that only Pancho Gonzales and a few others change racquets frequently during a match, and they both say that Pancho is “psycho” about it. Both Ashe and Graebner use four-and-five-eighths-inch handles. Ashe is not sure what his racquet weighs. “I don’t know. I don’t care. Some players worry about their racquets to the quarter ounce. And they have to be strung just so. Christ, in my opinion if you worry about that crap you go out there and you can’t play. You’ll seldom find me with more than four racquets. I run through them, and that’s it.”
Graebner was anointed by Wilson, too. He was only thirteen when, at Kalamazoo, the Wilson man hit a few balls with him, then gave him two racquets and two covers. The following year, he reached the five-racquet category, and after that he went into the unlimited class. Graebner, too, has been loyal to Wilson, but Dunlop once nearly achieved him. He tried the Dunlop Maxply Fort, the racquet Rod Laver uses, and its touch impressed him. He told Wilson all about it and suggested that Wilson custom-make for him a racquet exactly like the Dunlop and paint “wilson” on it. Wilson craftsmen built mock Dunlops for Graebner for years—until he changed to steel. This happened when Graebner, pounding away with his wooden racquet in the 1967 National Clay Court Championships, in Milwaukee, had such a bad case of tennis elbow that his elbow at the time included everything from his wrist to his shoulder. His arm felt as if it were about to fall off. He lost in singles, but he had a particular desire to hang on in the doubles, because he and his partner, Marty Riessen, had won the National Clay Court doubles twice before and could keep the trophy permanently if they won again. Graebner called Wilson in Chicago and had steel racquets rushed to Milwaukee. The steel racquet, invented by René Lacoste, was something new and unproved, but it was easy to swing, less resistant to air. It was as if a scalpel had been designed to replace a hunting knife. For Graebner, though, it was more like the sword in the stone. He and Riessen won in Milwaukee and retired the trophy; then Graebner’s arm stopped hurting, and Graebner, totally committed to steel, went on to be a finalist that season at Merion, Orange, and Forest Hills—his best year ever. The tennis circuit began to glitter with steel racquets. Billie Jean King gave up wood, and to Pancho Gonzales the new racquet meant that his playing life might be extended by a couple of hundred years. The steel racquet bends like a whip when it hits, and that was just the complement Graebner needed for his firm, wrist-locked strokes. “It made me serve harder. The ball comes off the racquet so much more quickly. The stringing is different. The gut is suspended inside the frame, like a trampoline. It is a little harder to control a volley, but I shortened my backswing, because the ball climbs off the racquet so much more quickly, and now I seldom miss a return of serve. The steel racquet is the greatest thing since candy.” Multitudes of hacks are now hacking with steel, but the boom that Graebner prominently helped to begin has not reached everywhere. Steel seems to have been used therapeutically where therapy was needed, but Laver still hits with his Dunlop, Ken Rosewall uses wood, and so does Arthur Ashe, who says, “Most people don’t know what they’re talking about when they talk about steel racquets. I’m doing fine with the wood racquet. Why should I change?”
Kalamazoo was also the probable place for initial contact between young players and the haberdashers of tennis. Ashe has been styled in free Fred Perry shirts and shorts since he was a schoolboy, and for at least as many years Graebner’s couturier has been the versatile René Lacoste. Mrs. Graebner observed all this, and everything else at Kalamazoo, with some detachment. It occurred to her that there might be reasons that eleven- and twelve-year-olds ought not to be assembled to play for national championships. She noticed that many of the young players wept when they lost. “I thought they were a terribly intense, very emotional bunch of little boys. Arthur never showed it. He had been trained not to. But the others complained about everything. They complained about what courts they were assigned to play on. I wondered if Kalamazoo was good for them, and I still wonder. Now that I look at Clark, I think the weighing was in his favor. But if he had not got this far, I wonder if he would have been hurt.” Meanwhile, she made many friends among the tennis mothers and, from sheer exposure, learned a lot about the game. She did not play it then, but she began to coach Clark with some effectiveness, because she could watch him play and tell him accurately what he was doing wrong. “You’re not tossing the ball high enough. You’re breaking your wrist on your forehand. On your backhand, you’re swinging late.”
Clark was sixteen when, at Kalamazoo, he suddenly felt such pain in his back that he could hardly hit the ball. He refused to default, and he lost, hitting a kind of crippled half stroke. His mother drove him home, and when they arrived his difficulty was so severe that he had trouble getting out of the car. He had osteochondrosis. Two of his lower vertebrae were not calcifying rapidly enough and had become, in Mrs. Graebner’s words, squashed flat. Osteochondrosis characteristically attacks the upper vertebrae of prodigious young piano players, whose spinal columns bend like canes toward the keyboard. In Clark’s case, the vertebrae in the small of his back were affected. Reaching high for serves had probably made the situation acute. For nearly two weeks, he had to be flat on his back while a device was made that would surround his body like a steel birdcage from armpits to hips, held in place by a tight leather-and-canvas corset. The physician said that in the brace Clark could do anything, but when he did not wear it he would have to lie still, in bed. The day the brace came, Clark put it on and played tennis, but he could make only pathetic moves. The next day, he lost, love and love, to one of the worst players at his club. For some time after that, he played against women, and the fatigue produced by the strain of fighting the brace put circles under his eyes. Time and again he crashed to the ground, but he kept playing, and five weeks after he acquired the brace he played a match against a fairly good male opponent and—despite numerous falls—won. “That’s it. I can do anything,” he said to his mother. When he eventually returned to the circuit, she massaged him regularly with salve or alcohol. Other tennis players rather unsympathetically began to classify him as a “mama’s boy.” He wore the brace every day for fourteen months. In it, on a debilitatingly hot day—105°—in Midland, Texas, he won the National Jaycee junior-singles championship. Because he was an adolescent just coming into his full growth, the brace would influence his bearing for the rest of his life. It forced and fixed his posture. In it, he could not bend at the waist. He still doesn’t. When he brushes his teeth in the morning, he places his feet apart and leans like an A-frame against the mirror. He is capable of bending at the waist, but he is out of the habit. He rarely bends to volley. He walked in the brace, as he still does, like an Etruscan warrior—his spine in absolute plumb, his chin tucked in, his implied plume flying. Graebner’s walk, famous in tennis, has been almost universally interpreted as a strut.
“Look at him. He thinks he’s Superman.”
“Look at the way he walks.”
“Look at the cocky bastard.”
Certain aspects of Graebner’s personality that occasionally surface tend to support these views, but his physical silhouette, the distinctive figure he cuts, is more relevant mechanically than psychologically. It is the signature of the osteochondrosis.
Arthur Ashe, who seems to like Graebner well enough but would not ordinarily put himself out to defend him, rises quickly when he hears unfair remarks to the effect that Graebner’s success has gone to his head and then into his imperial bearing. “He appears to strut,” Ashe will point out, “but he can’t walk any other way.”
“People have their jealousy streaks in them,” Arthur’s father will say. The effects upon him of his son’s fame have been considerable. He says that a number of people in Richmond have become cold toward him. They never mention Arthur’s success; in fact, they seem to resent it. “Some whites don’t recognize Arthur Junior, and the colored are still worser. It’s getting tougher and tougher all the time, in a way of speaking. I think I’ve lost a lot of friends. But I think I’ve gained some. About fifty-fifty. Some people think Arthur Junior is getting his daddy a lot of money. They say, ‘That tennis player you got has really set you up, hasn’t he?’ ” Ashe regards this as jokeworthy. His summation of the whole of Arthur’s development as a tennis player is “It hung me for some money.” His present landscaping and janitorial businesses grew out of odd jobs he took to help pay for Arthur’s tennis. He cut grass, scrubbed floors, washed windows, and when he still didn’t have enough he borrowed from the Southern Bank & Trust Co., whose branch banks he now keeps clean. Asked why he bothered to do all that, he gives an uncomplicated answer: “Why? Because Arthur was out there doing good.” He told Arthur, “Do what you want to do, as long as you do it right. But the day you slack up is the day Daddy is going to slack up with his money.”
Mr. Ashe says what he thinks, and he shouts when he talks about human relationships. “You respect everybody whether they respect you or not!” he bellows. “Never carry a grudge! I’ve seen Negroes wreck their lives through hatred of whites!” He believes out loud in law and order. “There’s a certain class of people—there’s a certain class of people you’ve got to handle by judge.” For tennis tournaments in Richmond involving Arthur Junior and other high-level players, Mr. Ashe, as supervisor of tennis courts for the Department of Parks and Recreation, has set up the nets. Certain Negroes—by no means a small number—have offered him all sorts of abuse for that. They say that he is a V.I.P. and should be prominently displayed in a box seat, and should not degrade himself by working as a flunky. Driving through northside Richmond in his pickup truck past solid-looking brick houses close together on compact lots, he says that this is where the “hank-to-do,” or upper-class, Negroes live, and he says that he himself is a “crooked-knees” Negro, which he defines as someone who has no class at all. “I don’t have any picks and pets,” he will say. “I make everybody come by me, rich or poor. If you school it out and then think back on it, you can figure that out. I respect you the same way I respect the President of the United States. If he came to my house, I’d give him the same bed you slept in. If he didn’t like it, he could get the hell out. I just want people to treat me as a human being. I’m sure my son is the same.”
Ashe returns serve with a solid forehand, down the line. Graebner, lunging, picks it up with a backhand half volley. The ball floats back to Ashe. He takes a three-hundred-degree roundhouse swing and drives the ball crosscourt so fast that Graebner, who is within close reach of it, cannot react quickly enough to get his racquet on it. Hopefully, Graebner whips his head around to see where the ball lands. It lands on the line—a liner, in the language of the game. “There’s Ashe getting lucky again.”
Ashe does a deep knee bend to remind himself to stay low. Graebner hits a big serve wide, and a second serve that ticks the cord and skips away. Double fault. Carole pats the air. Calm down, Clark. Graebner can consider himself half broken. The score is love-thirty. Ashe thinks, “You’re in trouble, Clark. Deep trouble.”
“I’ll bet a hundred to one I pull out of it,” Graebner tells himself. Crunch. His serve is blocked back, and he punches a volley to Ashe’s backhand. Ashe now has two principal alternatives: to return the ball conservatively and safely, adding to the pressure that is already heavy on Graebner, or to cut loose the one-in-ten shot, going for the overwhelming advantage of a love-forty score by the method of the fast kill. Ashe seems to have no difficulty making the choice. He blasts. He misses. Fifteen-thirty.
Graebner serves, attacks the net, volleys, rises high for an overhead—he goes up like a basketball player for a rebound—and smashes the ball away. Thirty-all.
Now the thought crosses Graebner’s mind that Ashe has not missed a service return in this game. The thought unnerves him a little. He hits a big one four feet too deep, then bloops his second serve with terrible placement right in to the center of the service court. He now becomes the mouse, Ashe the cat. With soft, perfectly placed shots, Ashe jerks him around the forecourt, then closes off the point with a shot to remember. It is a forehand, with topspin, sent crosscourt so lightly that the ball appears to be flung rather than hit. Its angle to the net is less than ten degrees—a difficult, brilliant stroke, and Ashe hit it with such nonchalance that he appeared to be thinking of something else. Graebner feels the implications of this. Ashe is now obviously loose. Loose equals dangerous. When a player is loose, he serves and volleys at his best level. His general shotmaking ability is optimum. He will try anything. “Look at the way he hit that ball, gave it the casual play,” Graebner says to himself. “Instead of trying a silly shot and missing it, he tries a silly shot and makes it.” If Ashe wins the next point, he will have broken Graebner, and the match will be, in effect, even.
Again Graebner misses his first serve. Ashe, waiting for the second, says to himself, “Come on. Move in. Move in. I should get it now.” When Ashe really feels he has a chance for a break, the index of his desire is that he moves in a couple of steps on second serves. He takes his usual position, about a foot behind the baseline, until Graebner lifts the ball. Then he moves quickly about a yard forward and stops, motionless, as if he were participating in a game of kick-the-can and Graebner were It. Graebner’s second serve spins in, and bounces high to Ashe’s backhand. Ashe strokes it with underspin. Graebner hits a deep approach shot to Ashe’s backhand. Ashe hits a deft, appropriate lob. Graebner wants this point just as much as Ashe does. Scrambling backward, he reaches up and behind him and picks out of the sun an overhead that becomes an almost perfect drop shot, surprising Ashe and drawing him toward the net. At a dead run, Ashe reaches for the ball and more or less shovels it over the net. Graebner has been moving forward, too, and he has stopped for half a second, legs apart, poised, to see what will happen. The ball moves toward his backhand. He moves to the ball and drives it past Ashe, down the line. Graebner is still unbroken. But the game is at deuce. It is only the second time Ashe has extended him that far.
After this game, new balls will be coming in—all the more reason for Ashe to try to break Graebner now. Tennis balls are used for nine games (warmup counts for two), and over that span they get fluffier and fluffier. When they are new and the nap is flat, wind resistance is minimal and they come through fast and heavy. Newies, or freshies, as the tennis players call them, are a considerable advantage to the server—something like a supply of bullets. Graebner meanwhile serves wide to Ashe’s forehand, and Ashe hits the return with at least equal velocity. Graebner is caught on his heels, and hits a defensive backhand down the middle. It bounces in no man’s land. Ashe, taking it on his backhand, has plenty of time. His racquet is far back and ready. Graebner makes a blind rush for the net, preferring to be caught in motion than helpless on the baseline. But Ashe’s shot is too hard, too fast, too tough, too accurate, skidding off the turf in the last square foot of Graebner’s forehand corner. Advantage Ashe.
“Look at that shot. That’s ridiculous,” Graebner tells himself. He glances at Carole, who has both fists in the air. Pull yourself together, Clark. This is a big point. Graebner takes off his glasses and wipes them on his dental towel. “Stalling,” Ashe mumbles. While he is waiting, he raises his left index finger and slowly pushes his glasses into place across the bridge of his nose. “Just one point, Arthur.” Graebner misses his first serve again. Ashe moves in. He hits sharply crosscourt. Graebner dives for it, catches it with a volley, then springs up, ready, at the net. Ashe lobs into the sun, thinking, “That was a good get on that volley. I didn’t think he’d get that.” Graebner reaches for the overhead and smashes it directly at Ashe. Ashe, swinging desperately, belts it right back at him. Graebner punches the ball away with a forehand volley. Deuce. Ashe is rattling the gates, but Graebner will not let him in. Carole has her hand on the top of her head. Unbelievable.
Graebner serves, moves up, and volleys. Ashe, running, smacks an all-or-nothing backhand that hums past Graebner and lands a few inches inside the line. Graebner says to himself, “He’s hitting the lines, the lucky bastard. The odds are ten to one against him and he makes the shot. That bugs me.” Advantage Ashe.
Jack Kramer, broadcasting the match, says that this is the best game not only of this match but of the entire tournament so far. Again Ashe needs just one point and he will be leading four games to two. Graebner serves. Ashe returns. Graebner half-volleys. Ashe throws a lob into the sun. Graebner nearly loses it there. He can only hit it weakly—a kind of overhead tap that drops softly at Ashe’s feet. This is it. Ashe swings—a big backhand—for the kill. The ball lands two feet out. Graebner inhales about seven quarts of air, and slowly releases six. It is deuce again.
Donald Dell, the captain of the Davis Cup Team, is sitting in the Marquee. He says, “Arthur has hit five winners and he hasn’t won the game. He looks perturbed.” Dell knows Ashe so well that he can often tell by the way Ashe walks or stands what is going on behind the noncommittal face. But Ashe is under control. He is telling himself, “If you tend to your knitting, you will get the job done.” Graebner’s first serve, which has misfired seven times in this game, does not misfire now. Ashe reacts, swings, hits it hard—a hundredth of a second too late. The shot, off his backhand, fails by a few inches to come in to the sideline. Advantage Graebner.
Carole’s fists are up. Clark adjusts his glasses, wipes off his right hand, and bounces the ball. He serves hard to Ashe’s forehand. The ball, blasted, comes back. Disappointment races through Graebner’s mind. “I’m serving to his forehand. His forehand is his weakest shot. If the guy returns his weakest shot all the time, he’s just too good.” Graebner tries a drop shot, then goes to his right on the sheer gamble that Ashe’s response will take that direction. It does. Graebner, with full power, drives an apparent putaway down the line. But Ashe gets to it and blocks the ball, effecting what under the circumstances is a remarkably good lob. Graebner leaps, whips his racquet overhead, and connects. The ball hits the turf on Ashe’s backhand and bounces wide. Ashe plunges for it, swings with both feet off the ground, and hits the ball so hard down the line that Graebner cannot get near it. Graebner can be pardoned if he cannot believe it. For the fourth time, the game is at deuce.
“Arthur is just seeing the ball better, or something,” Graebner tells himself. But Graebner sees the ball, too, and he hits a big-crunch unplayable serve. Advantage Graebner.
Serve, return, volley—Ashe hits a forehand into the tape. Ashe has not been able to get out from under. Games are three-all, second set. ♦
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