The Odd Couple—Ashe and McEnroe
Tennis has largely been a sport without a conscience for as long as I’ve covered it—which dates back 40 years. It is run by bickering alphabet organizations and by agents whose only goal is to make every dollar they can, regardless of what’s good for the game that has helped make them wealthy.
Until his death in 1993, the one exception to that rule was Arthur Ashe. He was the sport’s first male Black superstar and a person who always stood up for what he thought was right.
In 1968, he won the first U.S. Open at Forest Hills. The final was played on a Monday afternoon and I was lucky enough to be there. Ashe was in the United States Army at the time and when he won a game, the chair umpire would say, “Game, Lieutenant Ashe.”
He beat a Dutch player named Tom Okker that day and Okker walked off with the $14,000 first prize (a massive amount back then) since Ashe was still an amateur. He received $20 in travel expenses from the Army each day he competed in the tournament. He then went on to win the Australian Open and, in 1975, at the age of 32, he won Wimbledon, stunning Jimmy Connors in the final. Connors hadn’t lost a set in six matches and was a massive favorite to win a second straight championship.
Ashe’s tennis career was cut short in 1979 when he had a heart attack while conducting a tennis clinic in New York City. He had quadruple bypass surgery and hoped to play again, but persistent chest pains forced him back into surgery.
He became very active post-playing-career as Davis Cup captain; as a writer and as a Civil Rights leader. He was arrested twice while taking part in protests in Washington, D.C.
It was during his days as Davis Cup captain (1981 to 1985) that I got to know Arthur well. Since he also wrote occasionally for The Washington Post, he was more than willing to give me time. In those days, the Davis Cup was a very big deal.
We became friends, someone I talked to even when I wasn’t working on a story. In 1990, while I was working for The National Sports Daily I found out that he had AIDS, the result of faulty blood transfusions during his second heart surgery. I went to see Frank Deford, who was my editor at The National, and told him what I head learned.
Frank was very close to Arthur—he’d covered tennis longer (and better) than I had. He knew too. We decided not to write the story. Arthur was, no doubt, dying. We decided to protect his privacy.
Two years later, Arthur announced he had AIDS after USA Today told him it was ready to print the story. Arthur knew that Frank and I had decided against writing the story and was grateful.
I sat down with him at the ’92 U.S. Open. He was trying desperately to finish a book, Days of Grace, before he died. It wasn’t a matter of if, only when.
I asked a difficult question, but one I needed to ask. “When you’re gone, is there anyone in tennis who can begin to take your place?”
Arthur smiled. “There is,” he said. “It’s John.”
He was NOT, by any stretch, talking about me. He was talking about John McEnroe, the sport’s longtime bad boy. Believe it or not, I wasn’t stunned. I’d come to know McEnroe well and like Arthur, I knew, he had a conscience and wasn’t only about chasing down every possible dollar.
Years earlier, I’d done a magazine profile on John and we’d talked about what he wanted to do when he was finished playing. We both knew he’d be good on television (actually, he’s GREAT) but he wanted to do more than that.
“I’d like to get involved with doing some of the things Arthur does, clinics, maybe even open some kind of academy in New York someday,” he said back then. “It bothers me that the best tennis player in history might never pick up a racquet.”
John has always had a unique way of putting things. After he beat Bjorn Borg in a five-set U.S. Open final in 1980, I asked him how he felt after Borg won the fourth set and the entire crowd was on its feet cheering for a Swede playing a New Yorker—in New York. “I felt,” he said back then, “like my whole body was going to fall off.”
Saying he worried the best tennis player in history might never pick up a racquet meant that the lack of minorities in the sport, specifically Black youngsters from the U.S., bothered him. As it turned out, the best player in the history of golf—Tiger Woods—did pick up a golf club. The best players in tennis history: Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer picked up racquets in Europe, not the U.S.
McEnroe had played on Davis Cup teams captained by Ashe. The two men had clashed often, notably in 1981 when Ashe got so fed up with McEnroe’s on-court antics that he said if John acted out during the final against Argentina that he would simply walk up to the umpire’s chair and say, “the United States defaults.”
McEnroe was furious with Ashe for saying that publicly (to me) but he got the message, behaved (mostly), and won a tense deciding singles match to clinch the Cup for Ashe’s team.
Ashe took the time to get to know McEnroe, to sit and talk with him about issues that, as it turned out, were important to both men. McEnroe had turned down a $1 million guarantee to play in South Africa while Apartheid was still in place. Ashe was impressed.
“How many tennis players do you know who would turn down that kind of money because he found the South African government’s policies appalling?” he asked rhetorically that day in 1992 at the Open.
Arthur died on February 6, 1993 at the age of 49. Picking up his mantle has been impossible—there was only one Arthur Ashe—but McEnroe and his brother Patrick have done their best. They now run a tennis academy on Randalls Island—in the shadow of New York City’s Triborough Bridge—and many of their pupils are inner city kids who come to the academy for free.
They haven’t found the Tiger Woods of tennis yet, but they’re searching.
In 1998, after the U.S. Tennis Association had built a mammoth new stadium court, at The National Tennis Center, it decided to name it, “Arthur Ashe Stadium.”
The emcee on the night the stadium was dedicated was John McEnroe and included an on-court “phone call” from Arthur to John telling him what he wanted the stadium to stand for and what he wanted it to mean to the sport of tennis.
As I watched and listened, I could almost hear Arthur’s voice talking to John that night. He was there representing Arthur. I’m sure that’s exactly the way Arthur would have wanted it.
John Feinstein is one of the world’s most prolific and respected sports journalists, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, and a member of six Halls of Fame. His 47 books include two #1 New York Times bestsellers; a third, Caddy for Life, which became an award-winning documentary on Golf Channel; and a fourth, the novel Last Shot, which won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for mystery writing in the Young Adult category. He also a does color commentary for VCU, George Mason, and Longwood basketball, the Navy radio network, and is a regular on The Sports Junkies. John lives in Potomac, Maryland, about 10 miles northwest of Washington, D.C.
Wonderfully written. Arthur Ashe moved with Grace.