EVER SINCE ONE fateful afternoon in 1950 or 1951, tennis has been at or near the center of my life. On that day, when I was seven, I had spent the greater part of an hour quietly watching Ron Charity, the most accomplished black tennis player in Richmond, practice his serve alone on one of the tennis courts my father supervised at the eighteen-acre Brook Field playground where we lived. At some point, Charity stopped his practice. Walking over to me, he gently asked, “Would you like to learn to play?”
“Yes, I would,” I replied. As casually as that, my life was transformed.
Diligently over the next year or two, Charity laid the foundation on which I built my career through the junior ranks, then as a college player and an adult amateur, then finally as a full-fledged professional. Now, thirty years later, as I retired from the circuit under strict orders from my doctors, I knew that tennis, above all, could provide the sturdiest bridge from my old life to the new. If I could no longer play the game, I could certainly teach it. In my capacity as director of tennis at the Doral Resort and Country Club in Florida, I would continue to do so. But I also knew that my richest reward would come from my continued involvement in the Davis Cup campaigns, where teams represented their country in the most distinguished international competition in tennis.
Once Charity’s lessons and a love of the game had taken hold of me in Richmond, three stars shone brighter than all the others in my sky. One of them was Pancho Gonzalez, who was not only the best player in the world but also an outsider, like me, because he was a Mexican American. The second was the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York, sacred ground to me because it was the home of our national tennis championships. The third star, at least as bright as the others, was the Davis Cup, the international competition in which one day, with luck, I might be allowed to play for my country. (The original thirteen-inch silver cup was named for Dwight F. Davis, an American who donated it in 1900 both to stimulate international competition and to promote goodwill.)
Segregation and racism had made me loathe aspects of the white South but had left me scarcely less of a patriot. In fact, to me and my family, winning a place on our national team would mark my ultimate triumph over all those people who had opposed my career in the South in the name of segregation. As a junior in Richmond, I was barred from playing on most of the public tennis courts, which were reserved for whites; and the most powerful local tennis officials had tried to kill my game by shutting me out of any competition involving whites.
But my game hadn’t died, because other people had given it the chance to grow. Finally, in 1963, when I was twenty years old and a sophomore at UCLA, Bob Kelleher, then the U.S. Davis Cup captain, invited me to join the team. Even as race relations in America became increasingly stormy, and I started to feel the attraction of more militant approaches to segregation and racism, I nevertheless saw my Davis Cup appointment as the outstanding honor of my life to that point. Since no black American had ever been on the team, I was now a part of history. Despite segregation, I loved the United States. That year, I played only one Davis Cup match, a “dead rubber” match (one played after the best-of-five series has been decided), in which I defeated Orlando Bracamonte of Venezuela. And at the moment of my victory, it thrilled me beyond measure to hear the umpire announce not my name but that of my country: “Game: United States,” “Set: United States,” “Game, Set, and Match: United States.”
Over the next fifteen years, I played thirty-two Davis Cup matches and won twenty-seven of them, more than any American in the history of the Cup to that point. I had some stirring victories, but so demanding is Davis Cup play that I remember most clearly my losses, especially two singles defeats against Ecuador in 1967. I remember them vividly because they were national as well as personal defeats, and thus hurt me more. I played my last Davis Cup match in 1978.
To my surprise, the opportunity to lead the team came sooner than I had expected, indeed, the very year I retired. Between 1980 and 1985, I served as captain of the United States team. Although other involvements marked that period of my life, my captaincy was its highlight. My captaincy also proved to be much more challenging than I had anticipated. Those five years turned out to be, on the whole, a disorganized, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes frustrating and even humiliating epic of victories and defeats, excitement and tedium, camaraderie and isolation. At a mature age, I learned a fair amount about my strengths and my weaknesses, my principles and my moods.
I also learned much about other people, including the two finest players in the world, Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, and a generous selection of the other memorable personalities who then made up the elite of men’s international tennis competition. I learned about the sharp differences between individualism and leadership, playing and coaching, the younger generation and the old guard, of which I was rapidly becoming a member. In my middle passage, nothing shoved me along so rudely into the future as my experience as a captain in the Davis Cup wars.
IN THE SUMMER of 1980, I was at the U.S. Open at the National Tennis Center at Flushing Meadows, New York, when I received word that the incoming president of the United States Tennis Association, Marvin P. Richmond, wanted to see me. When I found him, Richmond was with the outgoing president of the USTA, Joseph E. Carrico. They wasted no time.
“Tony Trabert wants out,” Richmond said. “He can’t take it any longer.” Trabert was our current Davis Cup captain. He had been serving since 1976, and there had been no hint that he might step down soon.
“Take what?” I asked.
“The behavior of the players. McEnroe. Gerulaitis. Peter Fleming. They are driving him nuts.”
“Well,” I said. “I’ve been reading a little about all that. But I didn’t think it was all that bad.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Richmond assured me. “Anyway, Trabert’s out.”
“Am I on your short list?” I asked.
The U.S. Davis Cup captain is chosen by the president of the USTA. The captain then chooses the team.
“No,” Richmond replied, a grin on his face.
“What?”
“No, because we don’t have a short list. We want you.”
I felt so happy and proud I could have jumped into the air—the job meant that much to me.
“Gee,” I said, “it’s quite an honor, but this is rather sudden. I need to think about it. Can you give me twenty-four hours?” I was buying time from the inevitable onslaught of the press. I wanted to anticipate the questions and prepare for them, as well as talk to a few players.
I had played Davis Cup tennis under Trabert’s captaincy in 1978 and knew him fairly well, so I sought him out immediately. In his prime, starting at his hometown University of Cincinnati, Trabert had been an extraordinary player. He had won the national collegiate singles title, then had gone on to compile one of the most distinguished records in American tennis. Until Michael Chang won the French Open in 1989, no American had been victorious at Roland Garros since Trabert earned the title, for the second time, in 1955. That year, he also won at Forest Hills and Wimbledon.
Trabert had played Davis Cup tennis for four years, between 1951 and 1955. Then he had turned professional, touring with Gonzalez. Once he turned professional, of course, all the major amateur tournaments and events were closed to him, including the Davis Cup. He returned to the Cup as captain of the team, and under his coaching they won fourteen matches, a better record than any of his predecessors. Trabert is a Midwesterner in the best sense of the term—solid, dependable, principled. He had collided with a generation of players who had a different and far less reverential concept of what it meant to play for the Davis Cup.
“I’m happy for you, Arthur,” Trabert told me. “You would have been my first choice, too. But good luck to you with some of these guys. It’s just not the way we were brought up.”
I liked him for saying that. On the other hand, we really were not of the same generation. Trabert was thirteen years older than me. I considered myself to be one of the younger guys, even though my attitudes and values were more of Trabert’s generation than McEnroe’s.
“Well,” I responded, “some of them certainly are high-spirited.”
“High-spirited? I can take high-spirited. But what’s been going on is really offensive. I find too much of the behavior distasteful. It’s just not fun anymore, Arthur.”
Trabert was progressive and fair, I knew, but he also had the deserved reputation of being a law-and-order man. I myself certainly believed in law and order, if the laws were just; but I thought I could sympathize more readily with the younger players, to whom I was closer in age and with whom I had played. Vitas Gerulaitis, for example, was a good friend. The previous summer, in 1979, Jeanne and I had rented a car with him for a week and driven from Munich to Kitzbühel. I had played against McEnroe twice in the 1979 Masters tournament at Madison Square Garden in New York and admired the sheer genius of his play. “I’m a little closer in age to the players,” I told Tennis magazine, “so I’m hoping that my brand of friendly persuasion will work.” With my fingers crossed, I sincerely believed so.
In my day as a player, and for a long time after, Davis Cup play was the most exciting, the most demanding competition in the world of tennis. It remains probably the most challenging competition for the players involved. Almost every player would readily admit that playing for his country in the Davis Cup is much more nerve-wracking than competing for himself in a Grand Slam final, including Wimbledon. “It takes at least a week to prepare for the thing,” Boris Becker once said about a typical Cup series or “tie,” as it is called, “another week to play it, and a week to recover.”
In Cup play, the captain’s role can be crucial, especially as it has evolved in the United States. In some other countries, a committee chooses the players. The American captain selects the squad of players, and then sets the tone for the entire effort. The strong sense of responsibility I brought to Davis Cup play was keenly supported by my first captain, Bob Kelleher, and indeed by all the others I played under—George MacCall, Donald Dell, Edward Turville, Dennis Ralston, and Trabert. Kelleher, who went on to become a federal judge in Los Angeles, constantly emphasized the lofty ideals inherent in the Davis Cup that I had and still have. In fact, Kelleher seldom passed up a chance to let his players understand that no matter what the event—a Davis Cup match, a Grand Slam event, or a city tournament in the south of France—as team members we represented the United States of America. Therefore, we had an obligation to act accordingly. We not only had to try to win, but we had to try to win with grace. We could not besmirch our country’s honor. My father had brought me up to think exactly like that, and I would not have dreamed of behaving any other way—not in any tournament, but above all not in the Davis Cup, where I was representing all of America.
In 1980, I was well aware that I was taking over the U.S. captaincy at a particularly significant time in the eighty-year history of the Cup, with its national and international prestige waning. The best players did not care to play, and attendance had dwindled at many matches. As much as I regretted its loss of prestige, I knew that I had certainly had something to do with the evolution in tennis that had weakened the Davis Cup. I had been one of the leaders in expediting changes that had altered the face of tennis.
Tennis had needed to change, because the world had changed. When my international career began around 1963, very few players earned a living from the sport. Amateurs could not play with professionals, who were shut out from the Davis Cup and from all the major tournaments. After mounting pressure, all of that ended one day in April 1968 in Bournemouth, England, when Mark Cox played Pancho Gonzalez in the British Hard Court Championships, the first sanctioned tournament for both professionals and amateurs. The Open era of tennis began. Later that year, when I won the first United States Open and received only $280 in expense money, I was still an amateur and a gentleman player, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army happy to be able to make the payments on my beloved Ford Mustang. Tom Okker lost to me in the final, and took home $14,000. Tom was a gentleman, too; but he was also a professional who could accept prize money.
Between 1968 and 1981, professional tennis exploded in popularity. As a leader of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the players’ union founded in 1972 (I was president in 1974–75), I saw the fireworks intimately. No one was well prepared for the transition from the closed amateur (or “shamateur,” as some called it) to the open era—not the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF), as it was then called, nor the Big Four (the governing bodies of the American, French, Australian, and British championships). Fearful that they would lose control of the game and the players, the ILTF (later shortened to ITF) and the Big Four pursued a reactionary strategy, impeding us at almost every turn. In my judgment, they resisted change in defense of privilege and a stuffy conception of the traditional. In the end, they lost control.
If the governing bodies were not ready, neither were most of the players. For many of us, the deluge of money led to confusion and an unholy scrambling after dollars. Certain values and standards that had bonded players in my earlier years as a professional—certain codes of honor and a spirit of cooperation and camaraderie—disappeared. In some ways, the youngest players arrived in a world in which the very concept of values and standards was unknown or quaint and obsolete, like wooden racquets or the white tennis balls on which Wimbledon insisted long after the superiority of color had been demonstrated.
I wonder how much we, the leaders of the players during this transition, contributed to the fall. I can’t forget, for example, in light of my concern for the Davis Cup, that one of the main blows struck by the ATP in the name of freedom for players was at the expense of the Davis Cup. In 1973, we boycotted Wimbledon after Nikki Pilic of Yugoslavia was barred from taking part in the tournament by his country because he refused to play in a particular Davis Cup match. The ILTF, reactionary to the core at the time, backed the Yugoslavian Tennis Federation’s banning of Pilic. Our view in the ATP was that a tennis player had the right to play or not to play in the Davis Cup. The ILTF and Wimbledon would not budge from their position of supporting the suspension, and the British courts refused to intervene. We carried out the boycott.
Aided by private promoters such as Lamar Hunt and power brokers such as Donald Dell and Jack Kramer, we prospered. The number of tournaments increased to such an extent that it was difficult to keep track of them. The prize money grew amazingly. (Some people would say obscenely; I wouldn’t. Although I missed out on most of the huge purses of later years, I have never heard of any prize money in tennis that I consider excessive, certainly not compared to what individuals make in other sports and activities, such as rock music.)
Meanwhile, the top players were expected to play Davis Cup for expense money only. Increasingly, they found reasons to be elsewhere or flatly refused to play. At last, starting in 1981, the Davis Cup leadership decided to award prize money. A giant Japanese electronics firm, Nippon Electric Company (NEC), put up one million dollars to sponsor the competition in 1981. This piece of news, striking in itself, was followed by the announcement that NEC intended to give $2.5 million dollars to the Davis Cup in 1983. The winning team would collect $200,000, plus its usual share of the gate receipts. The U.S. committee announced that after meeting our expenses, we would distribute most of the remaining money to the players.
The ancient unwieldiness of the Cup format was also a problem. Up until 1972, the defending champion did not play until the other nations had fought among themselves for the honor of meeting the previous winner. Then the challenger met the defending champion in the final, called the Challenge Round.
Reaching the Challenge Round could take the greater part of a year of sometimes rough campaigning. Matches were normally scheduled without any regard for the players’ plans. Many of the ties were totally uncompetitive (resulting in 5–0 scores) and unprofitable for the more powerful nation involved; yet they had to be played. And after all that effort, the final result was actually quite predictable. From the first match in 1900 until 1973, only four nations had ever won the Cup: the U.S., Britain, France, and Australia. Between 1937 and 1973, only the U.S. and Australia had won it. Under the venerable captain Harry Hopman, the Australians had played in the finals every year from 1950 to 1968. Fortunately for the rest of us, Hopman retired that year. Since 1974, there has been greater diversity among the winners, with the Cup going to South Africa, Sweden, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, as well as to the Aussies and to us.
In 1980, the system was overhauled. When I assumed our captaincy, under the new rules only sixteen countries would play for the Cup—the top four nations in each of four international zones formed for the competition. The following year, twelve of the sixteen spots would be taken by the eight first-round winners from 1981 and the four winners of a relegation match between the eight first-round losers from 1981. The remaining four spots would be taken by 1982’s four zonal winners. Now the winning country would have to play only four ties to claim the Cup. And every effort would be made to schedule matches at sensible times, to avoid any conflicts with lucrative tournaments elsewhere. The main pieces were now clearly in place for a revival of the Davis Cup.
Despite Trabert’s solid record, the United States effort in the Cup also needed revitalizing. Between 1968 and 1972, the U.S. had won the cup five straight times. Since then, we had lost to Australia, Colombia, Mexico (twice), and Argentina. Between 1976 and 1981, the U.S. had won the Cup only twice, most recently in 1979. In 1980, the U.S. had lost to Argentina in Buenos Aires, a defeat that hastened Trabert’s departure. We needed a win in 1981.
MY INITIAL TASK as captain was to select a squad to play the first match, against Mexico in Carlsbad, California. I was determined to field the strongest team possible. I needed two singles players and a pair of doubles players. Everyone knew that the two best singles players in the United States were John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. Whatever trouble Trabert had experienced with the fiery McEnroe, I fully expected McEnroe to be the mainstay of the new team. Connors was a more difficult proposition. McEnroe had committed himself from the start of his career to the Davis Cup concept; Connors had not. He had played in two Davis Cup matches in 1976 but had stayed off the team since then. I soon discovered that he would not be available against Mexico. To play the four singles matches, I named McEnroe and another left-hander (and at that time the possessor of perhaps the fastest serve in professional tennis), Roscoe Tanner. To play the doubles match, I selected Stan Smith and Bob Lutz, who had compiled a Davis Cup record of fourteen victories and only one defeat. When Smith developed arm trouble, I named another veteran duo, Marty Riessen and Sherwood Stewart, to play instead.
As our squad assembled in Carlsbad, I began to see that the job was more challenging than I had imagined. I had to instruct the players but also keep them happy, respond to their questions and requests, supervise practices, and be ready to make instant decisions during the matches. I soon discovered that even players who believed wholeheartedly in the team concept had egos that sometimes required the balm of special favors. The squad was a collection of individuals, each of whom was something of a star in his own right. To emphasize the team concept, I never spoke about “my” team, but always about “our” team and what “we” hoped to accomplish or had accomplished. I found myself being called upon to apply both diplomacy and psychology to keep everyone happy. I also found that I did not enjoy this aspect of my job much. Dutiful myself, I disliked being a nursemaid or a babysitter for my fellow adults.
Assuredly, McEnroe was the center of attention, as befitting the kind of tennis player the world might see only once every fifty years. Several other players also had his amazing array of shots, but no one else could consistently select each shot at precisely the right moment under intense match pressure, execute the shot, and make it look as easy as John routinely did. No one had the disguised swerve of his highly unorthodox left-handed serve, or the tantalizingly soft touch of his volleys and drop shots. No one was more genuinely self-confident, or could raise his game on demand with the smooth, swift overdrive that John commanded.
With relatively little effort, McEnroe won his first singles match. Then Roscoe Tanner lost a long, five-set match to the cat-quick veteran Raul Ramirez. Suddenly the doubles match became far more important than I had anticipated. In selecting my doubles team, I had relied on the theory that the singles players should be kept fresh to play singles; they should avoid playing doubles if at all possible. Thus I had discounted the wisdom of a little joke that had been making the rounds of the tennis world:
“Who is the best doubles team in the world?”
“McEnroe and Peter Fleming.” Fleming was McEnroe’s regular partner.
“Who is the second best?”
“McEnroe and anyone else.”
No matter how good he was as a singles player, McEnroe was probably the best doubles player who had ever lived. His court sense was uncanny. And yet, after the withdrawal of Smith and Lutz, I had stuck to my theory and turned to Riessen and Stewart, who promptly fell in five sets to Ramirez and an unknown seventeen-year-old player, Jorge Lozano. We were down 1–2. What was supposed to be a breeze was now a cliff-hanger. Fortunately, Tanner then won his match and McEnroe easily defeated Ramirez in straight sets to win the tie for us.
We broke out the champagne to celebrate not only the win but also the fact that the tie against Mexico had been a sellout, with the stadium packed for each match. Ever since McEnroe had joined the team, Davis Cup tennis had become a popular attraction once again.
Among those present at Carlsbad was Pancho Gonzalez. At one point, he took me aside for some words of advice concerning my theory about not mixing singles and doubles play.
“Your theory is bulldust, Arthur,” said Pancho. “Nothing but bulldust. You should play your best doubles players even if they are playing singles. If they are fit, they are not going to be too tired. McEnroe would not have lost that match.”
Gonzalez had a point. I needed to be more practical, less dogmatic perhaps.
“And another thing, Arthur.”
“Yes?”
“You’ve got to be more involved in what’s going on on the court.”
“But I am involved, Pancho,” I said. “Sometimes my heart was thumping away out there.”
“Well, we don’t want your heart to thump too much, Arthur. But you have to look more involved, I guess.”
Far more than my doubles theory, which I was ready to alter, this business of seeming to be involved would be a sore point over the coming years. I did not want to interfere with the play of international tennis stars by seeking to coach them on camera. I had been Tanner’s first doubles partner when he turned professional, and he welcomed my advice; other players seemed to resent it. Tanner, whose powerful game could suddenly become erratic, needed hours of practice to groove his strokes; McEnroe found anything more than two hours of practice redundant. I had to indulge both players. At courtside, I tended to be restrained. I did not intend to leap up at every point during a match merely to assert my presence or authority. And I was determined not to join the players automatically in their protests and tantrums, as football and basketball coaches routinely do. I would back the players if I thought they had a point, but I wouldn’t become enraged on demand.
Connors created a stir when he showed up in Carlsbad and offered to practice with McEnroe and Tanner. We took him up on his offer. His arrival was a significant development because of his repeated refusal to play on the Davis Cup team since 1976, when he lost a deciding fifth match to Ramirez. That defeat of the United States by Mexico had been one of the most ignominious in U.S. Davis Cup history. Soon after I accepted the captaincy, I had called Connors and asked him to join the team, and he had said that he would do so, but not against Mexico. No matter; I knew that he would be invaluable against our next opponent, Czechoslovakia, and its best player, Ivan Lendl, whom he had beaten in all seven of their matches.
Watching Jimmy and John hit at Carlsbad, I was looking at not only the two best players in American tennis but also the two most brash and stormy personalities in our tennis world. In some ways, as a tennis phenomenon, Connors was by far the more extraordinary. Unlike McEnroe, who came from the affluent community of Douglaston, Queens, in the city of New York, Connors had been born in Belleville, Illinois, a town adjacent to East St. Louis, a name now almost synonymous with urban blight. If Connors was sometimes ill-mannered, brusque, and downright truculent, he seemed to have the approval of his mother, Gloria Connors, and her own mother. The women had obviously wanted to shape a fighter, and they succeeded brilliantly.
Physically unprepossessing, even a little frail, Connors nevertheless wore an air of such arrogance that he regularly intimidated his opponents even before he had hit a ball. Then he proceeded to smack the ball with a force that bordered on vindictiveness. His two-handed backhand shot from midcourt, when he had time to play it well, was among the most damaging strokes ever seen in tennis. It rivaled the famed two-handed forehand shot of Pancho Segura, who was once a mentor to Connors. Jimmy’s return of serve was unbridled aggression. His overhead smashes were awkward but decisive. And in his prime he never seemed to tire, much less become despondent on the court. His heart was always in it, and his readiness to fight never left him.
His career was also unusual. In the early 1970s, his clever manager at the time, Bill Riordan, had created an entire mini-circuit around Connors, with the immensely gifted but always mercurial Rumanian player Die Nastase as his comic counterpart. Then, in 1974, Connors launched his first major attack on the tennis citadels of the world. That year, he won Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the Australian Open.
As a player, I admired him. In other ways, Connors disturbed me. He refused to join the ATP even though he, like all the professionals, profited from its labors. He never helped in our ongoing struggles with the national and international governing bodies. He seemed to care little for what most people expected of him—or his advisers didn’t care, and he was loyal to them. Above all, I never did understand his refusal to play Davis Cup tennis. There had never been an American player of his caliber who, when asked, had consistently refused. Jimmy’s stand had antagonized a number of us, including not only the USTA but also players like Stan Smith and Charlie Pasarell, who had grown up with different ideas.
Actually, I considered the Davis Cup his Achilles’ heel, because it raised questions about his patriotism. In 1975, choosing my words carefully, I commented that James Scott Connors was “seemingly unpatriotic” in refusing to play for his country. Connors was outraged. Just before the start of Wimbledon that year, he filed a libel suit against me, requesting damages from the court in the amount of millions of dollars. Obviously Connors considered himself to be a very patriotic fellow. After I defeated him in the singles final at Wimbledon that year, he quietly dropped the suit.
Now, six years later, he was ready to play under me for his country. He seemed not to have forgotten his defeat at the hands of Ramirez and Mexico. “I’d like to help the team win the Cup back,” he announced. “Being on a winning Davis Cup team is important to me, because I haven’t done that.”
In July, at the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, New York, we met Czechoslovakia, the defending champions, in the quarterfinals. Connors agreed to play the second match, against Tomas Smid. McEnroe would play the first, against Lendl, who was then ranked number four in the world. Smith and Lutz would play doubles against Lendl and Smid. A more formidable tennis team had never before represented the United States. Davis Cup tickets, once difficult to sell, suddenly became precious.
Unfortunately, unlike at Carlsbad, McEnroe arrived at Flushing Meadows with his nerves sorely frayed and his emotions drained. The previous Saturday, he had won Wimbledon by defeating Borg. However, he had behaved so execrably during various matches that the Wimbledon committee had fined him $2,250. It had also threatened, in scathing language, to levy an additional $12,500 in fines and to suspend him from playing in the future. The British press had treated him savagely. Then, in some respects the most shocking punishment came later in the week, after his victory. For the first time in the history of Wimbledon, the club refused to grant honorary membership to a reigning singles champion.
I myself would have been devastated by this highly personal form of censure and ostracism. Although John was less affected than I would have been, he was definitely not elated at the news. He was an unhappy young man, hardly ready now to launch himself against powerful Czechoslovakia, when he joined us in New York for the Davis Cup tie.
In the first match, under a fiery July sun and before 17,445 fans, the largest home crowd for a Davis Cup match in American history, McEnroe lost to Lendl. John’s usually lethal serve never locked onto its target and his volleys were often tentative, while Lendl was muscular and imposing. McEnroe behaved impeccably, but good manners were not enough; they seldom are. He lost in three sets: 6–4, 14–12, 7–5. (In those days, tiebreakers were not used in Davis Cup play.) “I wanted to do well,” he explained afterward, a little plaintively. “I tried. It’s hard to explain. In retrospect, I wish we didn’t have to play this particular week.… The mental thing of the last couple of weeks wore me out.”
Connors, perhaps not entirely displeased that McEnroe had lost, proceeded to smash Smid 6–3, 6–1, 6–2. “Knowing John lost made me go out a little more eager, a little more up,” he told The New York Times. Of course, he avoided any suggestion that he had wanted to show up McEnroe. “I didn’t want to end the day 0–2, especially on Arthur’s birthday.”
The next day, Smith and Lutz crushed Lendl and Smid in straight sets. Only once in the match did an American lose a game on his serve.
On Sunday, McEnroe returned to form. He also stayed on his best behavior. The crowd, most of whom must have been his fellow New Yorkers, cheered his every point. Intimidated before the first ball was served, Smid did not put up much of a fight. McEnroe’s mastery was such that in the last two sets, he lost only two points on his serve. “I try my best,” Smid groaned, “but he’s too good for me.”
With that victory, we won the tie and ousted the defending champions. In the “dead rubber” match, shortened to the best of three sets, Connors defeated Lendl 7–5, 6–4.
I was happy for the team, and especially for McEnroe. He and I had fairly different temperaments, but he had been through an ordeal in Britain, even if much of it was of his own making. “I need a rest,” he told a reporter. “I’m going to sit back, relax, and get away from the tennis scene. I’m going to see if people can forget who I am, so I can be left alone like everyone else.”
Connors, too, should have been happy, but he was not. He seemed uncomfortable, even out of place, on the team. He was a great player, with a wide following among the fans. In my opinion, however, he was somewhat envious of McEnroe and hated the fact that John was the center of so much fuss and commotion. As Peter Fleming once astutely observed, “Jimmy might not be able to stand the idea of being star No. 1-A behind Junior.” Jimmy sometimes seemed to want all the publicity for himself, no matter how it was earned. This was part of the reason he was so captivating; under pressure, he was a superb player. As far as I could tell, McEnroe never sought the notoriety that accompanied his outrageous behavior. At heart, he was a shy soul who simply couldn’t control himself at certain times. Connors envied the fame that accrued to McEnroe with his combination of bad behavior and astonishing play. But while Connors could put on a memorable tantrum, he lacked McEnroe’s edge of genius in this department, too. He simply didn’t have McEnroe’s awful gift of rage.
I don’t mean to deny Connors his rightful place in tennis history. Looking back from the early 1990s, with Connors still playing well, I see that he was the greatest male tennis player, bar none, in the two and a half decades since the Open era began in 1968. No top player lasted longer as a major attraction or so thoroughly captured the admiration and sympathy of the public for the same length of time. Only Billie Jean King, with her mixture of dedicated feminism, general gifts of leadership, and athletic brilliance, has been more important among all tennis players since World War II.
After his two victories, I was sure that Connors would be at my side in the Davis Cup for a long time to come. He had promised to play in other matches in 1981. In the hour of victory, however, he packed his bags and strolled away from us. The next time he played Davis Cup was in 1984.
IN OCTOBER, WE played Australia in the semi-finals in Portland, Oregon. In recent years, the U.S. had stumbled badly from time to time, but the decline of Australian tennis had been precipitous. In Cup play, the Aussies showed no sign of fully recovering. We shut them out, 5–0. Once again, with McEnroe (though without Connors), we enjoyed a sellout crowd. In fact, the Portland crowd of 34,900 paying spectators over three days was a U.S. record for Davis Cup attendance.
I had also discovered, by this time, exactly what had sent Trabert over the edge and out of the captaincy the previous year. In various little ways that added up to a chronic headache, McEnroe was difficult to take at times. As captain, I was for protocol; he was not. John showed up for his matches but seemed to wait three minutes before starting play even if he was ready; it was a matter of utter indifference to him if he kept an international television audience waiting. And yet he was our heart and soul, the model of dedication to the Cup, and a patient, attentive, forgiving teammate. The following year, Gene Mayer, one of his teammates, published a tribute to John’s sterling qualities as a team player: “He’s there trying to do whatever he can, he’s helpful, sincere, not cocky or carried away with himself as many of the young players are when they start to play so well at a young age.” I would endorse all of those accolades. But McEnroe hated any form of authority, at least in tennis. I wasn’t a linesman or an umpire or a referee, but as captain I represented authority, and he clearly felt an obligation to rebel.
I responded at first by keeping some distance between myself and John; I thought he needed room to commune with his demons and keep them at bay. In the doubles match that October against Peter McNamara and Phil Dent, however, the demons were all over the court. McEnroe and Fleming behaved so badly and uttered so many obscenities and profanities, and so insulted their opponents, the officials, and some spectators, that I was left embarrassed, enraged, and bitter. When I told the two of them that they had behaved disgracefully, they were unapologetic. I found myself withdrawing even more from them. In World Tennis magazine, the writer Richard Evans speculated about “the seemingly unbridgeable gap that existed between Ashe and two of his players—a gap that had more to do with upbringing than difference in age.” (I thought about Trabert when I read that remark.) Evans ventured that I might be “simply too low-key for McEnroe—and, it must be said—for other members of the team as well.” McEnroe, on the other hand, “was operating at a pitch of emotional endeavor that Ashe could barely understand.”
Perhaps Evans was right, but John knew that he had been out of control, simply outrageous. After the match, he showed a twinge of remorse, although he did not share it directly with me. “We blew it,” he told Evans. “I know, don’t tell me, man, we blew it.”
As much as possible, I avoided trying to coach John, or John and Peter when they were playing doubles, during a match. At one point, during a changeover, Fleming had told me flatly not to try.
“John and I have played a million doubles matches,” Peter said agitatedly, as he himself later recalled. “We don’t need advice or coaching.”
I took him at his word, and kept my mouth shut. I coached players who wanted to be coached, and kept my distance from the others. I found it hard, however, to desist from coaching but perform as a cheerleader, which all the players evidently expected of me. It wasn’t, I hope, a matter of pique. I had enormous respect for John’s court intelligence; I couldn’t imagine that he or anyone else needed me to cheer him on. But a number of people, including finally John and Peter themselves, thought I should have become more active during the matches. Eventually this criticism reached the magazines. “Maybe I didn’t expect Arthur to take me so literally,” Fleming remarked. So much for obedience.
The tension between McEnroe and me reached a climax not against Australia but at the finals against Argentina in November. We were playing at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, Ohio. Before the match I let it be known that I was prepared to surrender and default the match if we misbehaved again. When word reached McEnroe, he chose to attack the reporters: “Why do you guys write about that stuff? All you want to do is sell newspapers!” John never fully accepted the fact that if he persisted in misbehaving, he could not win battles with the print media.
Once again, incidentally, Connors had teased and then eluded us. Apparently he had planned a ski trip for the same time as the final; or was it that he needed to rest? He had the cheek to call a cable television call-in talk show where I was a guest and wish us well. “It would be a lot easier,” I told him, “if you were with us.” Which is about my limit in sarcasm. After the match, I said that we would invite Connors again, “but we won’t chase him anymore, that’s for sure.”
There was great tension among the players in Cincinnati. The glamorous and talented Argentinean stars Guillermo Vilas and Jose Luis Clerc, egged on by their Latin brand of vanity, which seemed almost limitless, made it clear that they could barely stand one another’s presence; yet they were to represent their country not only in singles matches but also as doubles partners. For McEnroe, however, this was a grudge match par excellence. The previous year, in Buenos Aires, he had lost Davis Cup matches to both Vilas and Clerc. He had lost on clay—his least favorite surface—before a tumultuous, heckling crowd that he obviously had not forgotten or forgiven. Now, at home and on a fast synthetic surface, he wanted blood.
In the first match, he overran Vilas in straight sets, 6–3, 6–2, 6–2. Vilas had trouble with his first serve, and McEnroe pounded his second without mercy. A brilliant player and a famously sensitive man who wrote poetry, Vilas was so wounded by this thrashing that he refused to come to the interview room. Instead, he pouted and sulked in his tent. “Tell him to send us a poem,” one wag in the press corps jibed. Then Roscoe Tanner, fighting hard but with his game clearly unstable against a wily, resourceful opponent, lost to Clerc, also in straight sets. The doubles match became crucial.
Although Was and Clerc disliked one another, and seldom played together, they stepped on the doubles court primed for the match. They were an artful, intelligent duo. On the fast surface, they decided to try standing back deep when receiving the powerful serves of Fleming and McEnroe and to lob over the Americans at the net. They would try switching sides after each set, as they were allowed to do. And they would also use little tricks of gamesmanship, including subtle delaying tactics and polite but needling remarks. The Argentineans hoped to rattle McEnroe and perhaps even provoke him into a ballistic explosion. They succeeded perfectly. Well, almost perfectly.
By the end of the third set, with the U.S. leading 6–3, 4–6, 6–4, McEnroe’s temper was at white heat. In addition to needling by Vilas and Clerc, a group of Argentinean fans had goaded him throughout the match with insults in English and Spanish; John seemed to understand insults in both languages. “We’ll see who wins!” he screamed at one point to the foreign fans in a classic display of the passion that drove him both to victories and to unpardonable lapses in behavior. Most of what he said to Vilas and Clerc is unprintable, at least by me. Then, just after the third set, he reached a flash point. Because of an earlier delay to repair the synthetic surface, the referee canceled the usual ten-minute break after the third set, a feature of Davis Cup tennis. Everyone knew that. But as McEnroe prepared to serve, Vilas and Clerc devilishly packed their bags as if on their way to the locker room. McEnroe exploded in anger. “Let me know when you’re ready, all right?” he yelled. “We got all afternoon.” The four players closed at the net, railing at one another and obviously close to exchanging blows. I rushed up to McEnroe, literally to protect him. I also thought of the millions of television viewers who were now momentarily transfixed.
“John, get to the line and serve! Now!” I pointed at the base line.
John glowered. No doubt he thought for a split second about smacking me with the racket, then stamped over to the line. He served and won the game. Then, changing ends, Clerc and McEnroe went at it verbally.
“John. Peter. You have to quit now,” I insisted. “This is a disgrace. You cannot continue like this. I do not want to hear another obscenity out here. You are playing for the United States. Remember that!”
I thought I saw John pull himself together. But then, as he walked onto the court, Clerc looked at him sweetly and lisped, provocatively, “You’re so nice!”
“Go fuck yourself!” McEnroe screamed.
I was stunned. I stormed onto the court, and John and I exchanged some bitter words for a few seconds. This time I thought I might punch John. I have never punched anyone in my life, but I was truly on the brink of hitting him. I had never been so angry in my life. I couldn’t trust myself not to strangle him. Of course, if I had, any jury would have acquitted me.
I was by no means the only person appalled. Philippe Chatrier, the elegant president of the International Tennis Federation and a former Davis Cup captain of France, walked out of the stadium. “I felt so embarrassed for my hosts,” he said, “I eventually got up and left.” McEnroe was out of control. Once he even deliberately insulted a middle-aged black linesman by calling him “boy,” as if he had searched hard to find something unusually insulting to say to an official.
At the same time, I could hardly believe the quality of tennis John and Peter were playing. Their volleying was spectacular and they refused to die. Vilas served for the match at 7–6, but John and Peter scorched him with four blistering returns, from which he and Clerc never quite recovered. We won the last set, 11–9, to take the match. “If people don’t think Davis Cup is different from a regular tournament,” McEnroe pronounced, “then they didn’t see what happened out there today.” The umpire, Bob Jenkins of Britain, spoke for most of the spectators: “I don’t think I’ve ever been involved in a more exciting match.”
Still, my anger wouldn’t abate. It was so powerful, it astonished me. I thought of one of my favorite lines of verse, from a poem by John Dryden: “Beware the fury of a patient man.” I tossed and turned that night. Then, getting up at six-thirty the next morning, Sunday, I placed telephone calls to Marvin Richmond and to Gordon Jorgensen, the chairman of our Davis Cup committee. I got them out of bed.
“I’ve had it,” I told Richmond. Once more, I thought of Tony Trabert. “This cannot continue. What John and Peter did out there was absolutely inexcusable. In thirty years of competitive tennis I have never seen anything like it. Even close to it. It makes us look bad, all of us, including the United States as a nation. I want to forfeit the match if McEnroe acts anything like that again. I need your support.”
“You have it.”
A few hours later, when I sat face to face with McEnroe, we were barely polite to one another. In an icy tone, I told him I had spoken to Richmond and Jorgensen and had their backing. If he acted as disgracefully in his match today as he had behaved yesterday, the United States would default the match. I told him flatly that our national honor was at stake.
McEnroe listened stonily. He never said a word until I was finished. Then he asked, “Is that all?”
“Yes, that’s all.”
He got up and left the room. Later, on court, he kept his distance from me, and I from him. We, captain and player, were like total strangers. I wasn’t happy about the situation, but I had no stomach for fake camaraderie or ersatz shows of friendship.
Secretly I wanted John to act badly again, so that I could lower the hammer on him and forfeit the match. No one had ever stood up to McEnroe, and I was sure that his behavior would have been different if someone had done so when he was younger. Of course, he was still young—only twenty-two years old—which is one reason I thought he could learn something from a default.
Holding his emotions in check, McEnroe proceeded to play an extraordinarily gutsy, magnificent match against Clerc. John lost the second and the fourth sets, then somehow fired himself up for one last, titanic effort in the fifth. He attacked Clerc’s serve relentlessly, and on his own serve he surrendered only four points in the last set. He won the match 7–5, 5–7, 6–3, 3–6, 6–3.
Later, I called our differences “intrafamilial fights.” Clearly McEnroe, too, was sorry about the bad blood that had arisen between us. He complained about my demeanor, which he found too placid. “Not too much needs to be said,” he ventured. “But I think there’s a happy medium. You don’t want him to say too much but it’s almost uncomfortable if he says nothing at all.”
LOOKING BACK ON my Davis Cup captaincy more than ten years after it started, I think I am starting to understand exactly what McEnroe and his fiery personality may have meant to me. Neil Amdur, who collaborated with me on my book Off the Court, suggested in an essay in 1983 that McEnroe and I were poles apart in personality, perhaps even irreconcilable, because he freely expressed his rage while I repressed mine. Neil traced my repression back to the death of my grandfather and mother in the span of one year during my childhood, and especially my father’s grief when my mother died when I was seven. “The sight of adult family members sobbing and wailing,” Amdur wrote, “admittedly frightened Ashe. To protect himself, he built an emotional wall that extends to his friends, family and tennis. Each time McEnroe loses control on the court in a Davis Cup match, it forces Ashe to deal with the most delicate frames in his psyche.”
Perhaps this is true. I suspect now that McEnroe and I were not so far apart, after all. Far from seeing John as an alien, I think I may have known him, probably without being fully aware of my feelings, as a reflection of an intimate part of myself. This sense of McEnroe as embodying feelings I could only repress, or as a kind of darker angel to my own tightly restrained spirit, may explain why I always hesitated to interfere with his rages even when he was excessive, although I sometimes had to do so. Now I wonder whether I had not always been aware, at some level, that John was expressing my own rage, my own anger, for me, as I never could express it; and I perhaps was even grateful to him for doing so, although his behavior was, on another level, totally unacceptable.
Perhaps my sense of kinship with him also explains the trance—totally inappropriate in a captain, I’m sure—that I sometimes slipped into when I watched John play, and that many people took to be remoteness or indifference, which it could never have been. At one point, speaking to a reporter who was intent on probing the nature of our relationship and who was puzzled by my apparent aloofness at courtside, I used some telling words (unconsciously, I am sure) to describe my odd state of mind as I watched John. “I know it looks funny when John’s playing and I’m just sitting there, staring into space most of the time,” I told the reporter. Then I quickly had to cancel out the image of myself as a dreamer. “But what am I supposed to do, put on a show and ask him the time, or what the weather’s like?”
I developed a deep affection for McEnroe, and also a genuine respect for his character and integrity that defused my outrage at behavior often so different from my own. I found ways to forgive him, and I tried to give him what he asked for. Some critics chose to interpret my attitude as obsequiousness before a star. I was blamed for indulging McEnroe instead of cracking the whip—as if one could crack the whip on a multimillionaire genius of a tennis player. The charge of obsequiousness makes no sense to me. I myself had been a star. I had never been a star of John’s magnitude, but I can’t imagine myself being obsequious to another tennis player. What bound me to McEnroe was not simply his rage but also his selflessness in making sacrifices to play for our country, and his artistry on the tennis court. I couldn’t resist that combination. I began to see him as a brother. He was, in some ways, an incorrigible brother; but our fights were indeed, in my mind, “intrafamilial.”
OUR NEXT CAMPAIGN, in 1982, was far less controversial, yet it had its share of drama. With McEnroe again loyal, together with an excellent supporting cast, we were supposed to be almost invincible against most nations. We duly defeated India easily. We were then supposed to roll over Sweden in the quarterfinals in July in St. Louis, Missouri. The commanding Borg, after all, had retired. Unfortunately, no one told Mats Wilander and Anders Jarryd that they were supposed to lose.
Five days after losing a long match in the singles final at Wimbledon to Connors, McEnroe beat Jarryd in the first match. Then Wilander, seventeen years old and the recent victor in the French Open, scored an upset over Eliot Teltscher, then one of the top ten players in the world. The United States won the doubles, to make the score 2–1. During the night, however, Teltscher developed severe back spasms. I replaced him with Brian Gottfried, also in the top ten. His opponent, Jarryd, was in the top forty. Although he tried hard, Gottfried then played the worst Davis Cup match of his career as Jarryd prevailed 6–2, 6–2, 6–4. The tie came down to McEnroe against Wilander.
This deciding match lasted 6 hours, 39 minutes, as Wilander and McEnroe played 79 games. If anyone could fully appreciate what the players were enduring, I certainly could. In 1970, I had played in the longest singles match in Davis Cup history: 86 games, against Christian Kuhnke of West Germany. That match was an ordeal I will never forget. Once again, the sustaining element for me was the fact that I was representing my country. I couldn’t lower the flag because of physical fatigue or a lack of willpower. I was determined that the United States would prevail. I won that match.
McEnroe won the first two sets, then Wilander took the next two (the third went 15–17 against John). The struggle in the fifth was wondrous to behold. This was one of the few times when I ventured to advise McEnroe about his playing. “I know you’re tired but you’ve got to be patient,” I told him. “Don’t come to the net and try to hit a crazy shot like you would against somebody else in some other match. You’ve got to be patient and wait to hit a good shot.” John listened intently, as in fact he always did on those few occasions when I offered him tennis advice.
Both men held serve until the fourteenth game, when McEnroe broke Wilander’s serve and closed out the fifth and deciding set. We embraced, he wept, and I whispered my congratulations.
“John, that’s the greatest match you have ever played in the Davis Cup.”
To the press, he was generous in praise of Wilander, and characteristically modest and self-effacing about his own effort: “I thought this match would go on forever, and it was frustrating. I should have won the match easier. It was a mental effort just to stay out there.”
I was certain that my admiration for McEnroe’s mental resilience could not possibly grow after that match. Then he took my breath away against Australia, down under in Perth. After enduring a terrible three-day flight from San Francisco, he and Fleming arrived at Perth two days behind schedule, at night. At midnight, he went out and practiced. Then he defeated Peter McNamara in four sets, teamed with Fleming to take the doubles, and dispatched John Alexander to complete a 5–0 rout of Australia by the United States. Playing well, Gene Mayer won the other singles matches.
The 1982 final took place indoors in a happy, festive atmosphere in Grenoble, France. Although the French were justifiably proud of their young team, which included the ascendant Yannick Noah and the promising teenagers Henri Leconte and Thierry Tulasne, they adored McEnroe and above all were happy to be in the Cup final. I was happy to see the French doing well. Philippe Chattier, who had been a very good friend to tennis professionals and the ATP when the old guard still obstructed our path, had almost singlehandedly reversed the French fortunes in tennis. When I telephoned him one day in 1971 with the news that I had just seen a remarkably gifted eleven-year-old boy playing on a court in Africa, Chatrier responded in his typically generous way. He acted on the tip, and the brightest star in French tennis since the famed “Musketeers” of the 1920s was born: Yannick Noah.
In Grenoble, Yannick was a remarkable sight. At six feet four inches, he had always been commanding and yet sweet and gentle. However, he had just dreadlocked his hair (for his sister’s wedding), and it radically altered his image; the classically featured Yannick now looked like a Rastafarian, rather fierce. McEnroe, of course, was not about to be intimidated by anyone. “The only thing I’m scared about,” he assured a reporter about Noah, “is his hair.”
Against Noah and his dreadlocks, John stared down Medusa and took the first set, 12–10. Then, John lost the next two sets before lifting his game almost effortlessly, winning the last set 6–2. I was never worried much, even though John did not care for the clay surface. Seeking an edge, our hosts had trucked in about three hundred tons of rock, soil, and crushed brick to simulate the clay at Roland Garros stadium in Paris. Fortunately for us, the surface was not particularly slow. “When it gets to the fifth,” I told reporters later, “I feel confident John’s going to win, on anything—even popcorn.”
Our team spirit was so high in Grenoble in part because our other singles player was Gene Mayer. Gene and his brother Sandy were both fine players, well prepared by their father, a professional coach. Like McEnroe, both brothers had played at Stanford University for coach Dick Gould. Friendly and generous, Gene also possessed one of the sharpest minds I have ever known in the tennis world; he was a brilliant student who excelled at intellectual tests. Far from being bookishly aloof, Gene was a happy chatterer, who lifted his teammates’ spirits with his endless stream of talk. Oddly enough, as a tennis player Mayer was full of little fears and insecurities. The playing conditions had to be just right for him to play his best. They were good enough in his first singles match of the 1982 final and he won easily in four sets against the gifted but erratic teenager Leconte.
McEnroe never fell asleep in the doubles match with Fleming against Noah and Leconte, unlike in his singles match against Noah. In the ten games in which he served, John lost only eleven points. And thus we won the Davis Cup for the second year in a row. Champagne flowed in our locker room. One of the happiest persons in the room was Gene Mayer’s father, Alex Mayer, who had emigrated to the United States from Hungary, where he had played Davis Cup tennis. One of his dreams had been to see one or both of his sons help win the Cup for the United States. At the presentation ceremony I delivered my little speech, jokes and all, in French. The crowd loved it, and even laughed at my jokes. (I hope they weren’t laughing at my French.) I have always believed that learning a second language must be a goal for any educated person. I could never understand why we Americans blithely expect other people to speak English but make little or no effort to learn foreign languages. Years later, I was pleased to see Jim Courier speak French as he accepted the singles trophy at Roland Garros after winning the French Open.
We had hardly digested our victory before we learned that in the next Davis Cup competition, we had to open by playing the Argentineans in Argentina. The previous year, Argentina had lost to France in the first round, so they were at the bottom of the draw although they were certainly one of the top four teams in the world. And because they had last played us in the United States, they could now play us at home. This was a far cry from the days of old, when the champion nation rested and waited before playing in the Challenge Round of the Cup at home.
In March 1983—on clay, of course, and outdoors—Argentina crushed the United States, 4–1. Again, McEnroe showed extraordinary heart. Vilas and Clerc, both ranked in the top ten (as were McEnroe and Gene Mayer), called a truce in their endless bickering about who was Argentina’s darling and took full advantage of the blazing Argentinean summer sun. Vilas defeated Mayer 6–3, 6–3, 6–4. Then Clerc bore down on McEnroe. He took the first two sets, 6–4, 6–0, and all seemed lost. John was nursing a bad shoulder, which our trainer and I massaged whenever we could. Under a cloudless sky, his face sunburnt, his nose as red as Rudolph’s, John fought off a relentless Clerc and a heckling, hectoring crowd of 10,000 to take the next two sets.
At 2–2 in the fifth set, with darkness enveloping us, everyone on our side wanted me to insist that play be suspended for the night. But I let it go on, then spoke up finally when the score reached 5–2, with McEnroe trailing but about to serve. “The most pressure is trying to serve out a match,” I explained later. The next day, I was vindicated. John held his serve, then broke the nervous Clerc. Next, John held his serve to even the score at 5–5. But the effort was too much. The fire went out of McEnroe’s game, and he lost the set 5–7.
John and Peter won the doubles, but again we played five sets, and with explosions from McEnroe, who had been dubbed “El Irascible” by the national daily newspaper La Prensa. At one point, El Irascible started to climb into the stands to attack one persistently rude fan. He twice loudly denounced the people of Argentina as a nation, and in the process of picking up a penalty point he dismissed Nicola Pietrangeli, the referee and former Italian tennis star, as a “moron” and a “jerk.”
In the second round of singles, Mayer lost again. So did John, to Vilas. This was the only tennis match I ever saw in which John was utterly dominated. He tried everything he knew, but Vilas was simply better. John was not humiliated, but he was outclassed on a clay court in a foreign country, with a bad shoulder and a severe case of fatigue. By the middle of the third set, he and I understood that there would be no fifth-set miracle, that he was probably going down. McEnroe battled bravely on, but in front of all those hostile, jeering fans, he seemed a lonely figure, yet brave and brilliant, heroic.
He sealed my feeling for him by uttering a few simple words. As he was about to trudge back to the baseline, down 1–4 in the third set, facing his and our team’s worst defeat in the Cup competition in many years, John turned to me. A smile that mocked us both flirted with a jaunty smirk.
“Well, captain,” he said, plucking at his racquet strings, “do you have any pearly words of wisdom for me?”
I smiled, and he went out on the court to be beaten. I thought it was our finest moment together. Sometimes, a defeat can be more beautiful and satisfying than certain victories. The English have a point in insisting that it matters not who won or lost, but how you played the game.
Thus, a few months after popping open bottles of champagne following our victory in Grenoble, the United States was bounced from the next Davis Cup competition in the first round.
ON JUNE 21 of that year, 1983, I underwent a double-bypass heart operation at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan, where my first heart surgery had taken place in 1979. Once again, my surgeon was Dr. John Hutchinson. I had been suffering from chest pains for a while, notably at a business meeting I had attended in April in Hartford, Connecticut, not long after returning from Argentina; after extensive testing, my doctors decided that I needed further surgery. Because of the tough scar tissue from my first operation, entry into my sternum was far more difficult the second time. I also came out of this new operation in worse condition than after the first. I felt weak, even anemic. That was when I made the decision to receive two units of blood. This transfusion indeed picked me up and sent me on the road to recovery from my surgery; it also, unwittingly, set in motion my descent into AIDS.
Four days after I left St. Luke’s hospital and went home, I turned forty.
On July 10, Jeanne organized a little birthday party at home for me with a few of our closest friends, including Doug Stein and Donald and Carole Dell. For a birthday present, she gave me a pair of roller skates, which I loved and looked forward to using. To my mortification, however, the main surprise of the party was a performance by a striptease artist who proceeded to bump and grind her way around my living room, dressed in precious little, while I hung my head in sheepish embarrassment. I had loudly scolded every man in the room for inflicting this spectacle on me when the stripper completed her act and read the birthday message from the real culprit: Jeanne.
Jeanne knew that I needed something unusual to cheer me up. My second operation, coming as it did only four years after the first, was a major physical and psychological setback, one that left me on the brink of depression. I had assumed that my quadruple-bypass surgery would be far more effective and lasting than it turned out to be; was the second but a presage of a decline that would virtually cripple me? More than ever, I became aware of my mortality.
Tennis, even the Davis Cup, receded from my mind. As for the captaincy, I certainly considered resigning from it. Perhaps I would have done so if my illness had prevented me from carrying out my duties, which it could easily have done. In the previous two years, moreover, my life had taken certain other turns that had led me into satisfying new activities: I had just started serving as a board member of the Aetna Life and Casualty Company, an association that had already proven more rewarding than almost any other I had had outside of tennis; I had taught a course at a college in Miami, where Jeanne and I had a second home; and I was thinking of starting work on a book on black athletes in the United States, which would consume much of my time.
In the Davis Cup, our loss to Argentina meant that we did not advance to the quarterfinals. Our next match would be in October. Thus I had sufficient time—four months—to recover from surgery and to pursue other matters besides tennis before resuming my duties as captain. I put the thought of resigning out of my mind. By the end of the summer, I was once again eagerly looking forward to the campaign.
IN OCTOBER, OUR team assembled in Dublin, Ireland, to qualify for the group of sixteen by playing Ireland. Here I saw yet another side of McEnroe. With the Irish emotionally welcoming John as a native son come home, I was prepared to have him play the part, wax nostalgic about the old sod, and milk his visit for what it was worth. As an African American in the 1980s, I knew all about the allegedly magical powers of one’s “roots.” To his credit, however, John refused to indulge in ethnic romanticism. “I don’t have a special feeling competing here because I’m Irish,” he stated bluntly. “You’re playing for your country and trying to win regardless of where you come from.” Many of the Irish loved him for his apparent dislike of British snobbishness as represented by Wimbledon, but he himself was unsentimental. Dublin, he told one reporter, “looks like London to me, only drearier. I hope the people are nicer.”
The Irish forgave him his truculence; perhaps they considered it characteristically Irish. I myself didn’t. In the United States, I have had people say to me about McEnroe and Connors’s excesses, “Gee, what do you expect? That’s the Irish in them.” Such ethnic stereotyping makes me uncomfortable. In any event, McEnroe drew a record crowd to watch tennis at the Royal Dublin Society’s Simmonscourt Pavilion—a fancy barn, really, where horse and cattle breeders showed their stock. The place had been cleaned out, fumigated, and a carpet set down for play. It was all a little odd. Still, during and after our victory, the Irish were ebullient, gracious hosts. And with his victories in Dublin, McEnroe broke my record of twenty-seven wins for the U.S. in singles matches. I did not begrudge him the record.
For our next match, in the first round of the 1984 Davis Cup, against Rumania, in Bucharest, we finally had the services of Jimmy Connors. Since the last time Connors had played for us, Donald Dell had become his manager. Dell, a former Cup captain, had argued to Jimmy and his mother, Gloria, that no American had ever achieved legendary status in tennis without playing Davis Cup, and so Jimmy agreed to play. But he had evidently heard negative remarks about my captaincy. We had a meeting at a tournament before Bucharest, and he was blunt.
“Look, Arthur, I don’t need anyone sitting on the sidelines telling me how to play tennis.”
“I understand, Jimmy.”
“One thing I want to know, though, Arthur. Are you going to fight for me?”
“What do you mean, Jimmy?”
“I mean, am I going to be out there by myself? Will I be doing my own arguing?”
“I’m out there, Jimmy,” I replied. “I’m on your side. I’m going to be working for you.”
Twice during Jimmy’s first match I made sure that I jumped up and made my presence known to Jimmy and the assembled gathering. I am not sure what I accomplished by these moves, except for making Connors happy. But that was reason enough, I suppose.
Connors’s effervescence, the stellar quality of his magnetism and drive, lifted everyone. “That Connors doesn’t like losing in practice,” Jimmy Arias said to me one day as we watched Connors go after McEnroe on the court. I thought I saw a remarkable spirit of camaraderie, of genuine affection, kindle between Jimmy and John, and ignite among the other players. Then Connors’s old discomfort with the Davis Cup began to surface. To Mac and me, that silver cup was the Holy Grail. To Jimmy, it seemed that it might have been made of Styrofoam, he had so little sense of, or interest in, Davis Cup legend and lore.
One day, at practice just before the opening match, he yelled out to me with a question. “Arthur, this match is best of three sets, isn’t it?”
I could hardly believe my ears. “You mean this practice?”
“No, I mean the matches.” He was serious. Stupefied, I shook my head and looked up into the empty stands.
Once again, as much as he tried, Connors couldn’t stomach the fact that everyone was in McEnroe’s shadow, as far as publicity and fame were concerned. McEnroe welcomed Jimmy, but I sensed that he also nursed a lingering resentment about the fact that Jimmy had indicated that he would play Davis Cup in 1981 and then changed his mind. Still, John had such a genuine interest in our fortunes as a team that he wanted Connors to play. The previous year, he had even accused me of not being firm enough with Connors. “He says he’s a friend of his,” John told a reporter about Connors and me, “but I don’t think he pushed Connors enough. Arthur doesn’t press him.” Of course, I believed that I had pressed Connors as much as I could, or should, have. I was not going to force anyone to play Davis Cup tennis.
Bucharest in 1984 was a dreary city, with shops that had nothing to offer, and with a repressive, intrusive secret police that resulted in our party, including wives, attending a briefing at the U.S. embassy in a room draped with aluminum foil, or some similar substance, to frustrate eavesdropping. The only spark of warmth and friendship emanating from Rumania came from the unforgettable personality of Ilie Nastase. Still a member of the national team, Nastase evoked bitter memories of the Davis Cup tie in Bucharest in 1972 between the U.S. and Rumania, when cheating by local officials reached an abysmal low. In the decisive match between Stan Smith and Ion Tiriac, judges called foot faults to negate Smith’s aces, Tiriac orchestrated crowd noises to disturb Smith’s game, and a linesman at one point openly massaged Tiriac’s cramping legs and urged him on. Smith, always the epitome of self-control, kept his temper in check and eventually won the match. At the end, he gravely shook Tiriac’s hand. “Ion,” Stan said, “I must tell you that I will always respect you as a player. But I will never again have any respect for you as a man.” Tiriac was left speechless.
Nastase had been, in his prime, fantastically gifted as a player, almost on a level of uncanny ability with McEnroe. He was also given to outrageous behavior on the tennis court, including crude and vicious teasing of opponents, such as accusations about their sexual preferences and abilities. He liked to call me “Negroni,” and once, in the heat of battle in a tournament in Hawaii, even called me a nigger. I myself didn’t hear the remark but was told about it. In 1975, at the Masters tournament in Sweden, I had walked off the court in a match against him after his taunting had become unbearable. Refusing to answer him in kind, I deliberately defaulted. (The supervising committee decided later that day to award me the match, 6–0, 6–0. After the tournament, which he nevertheless won because its format did not allow for elimination after one loss, Nastase sent me a bouquet of roses.) Since then, I have always counted Nastase as a friend. In 1977, he showed up at my wedding. “You didn’t invite me,” he said, grinning and offering his hand in congratulations. “But I came anyway.”
Nastase was always a little mad. Now, thirty-seven years old and fifteen pounds above his best weight, he showed flashes of his genius of old, firing thirteen aces past McEnroe in the opening match. He stalled and argued, abused the umpire, and was duly penalized. To our cadre of supporters from the U.S. embassy who waved little American flags to encourage our effort, he genially offered the finger from time to time. He worked on McEnroe, seeking to arouse him; but John remained calm. The Rumanians did not win a set until the last match of the tie.
We beat Argentina and Australia, and then in mid-December, faced the Swedes in the Cup final in Göteborg. This encounter turned out to be one of the more dismal points of my tennis career. From our arrival, nothing seemed to go right. Inside the Scandinavium, the nation’s largest indoor facility, the Swedes had prepared a clay court to give themselves an advantage. We needed to accustom ourselves to the surface, but none of us seemed ready to make the supreme effort. Meanwhile, everyone on the Swedish team except Mats Wilander diligently arrived in Göteborg ten days before the tie and worked out hard for four hours daily. Wilander was away only because he was chasing his second Australian Open, which he won. Then, match fit, he hurried home.
In contrast, McEnroe and Connors were both badly off their stride. Unshaven and unkempt, McEnroe looked exhausted and depressed. He had recently been suspended for twenty-one days for outrageous behavior in a tournament in Stockholm. Viewers around the world had seen the film clip of McEnroe engaging in a vile, murderous tirade, smashing racquets and cups and abusing officials. Now, rusty from his enforced rest, he had to return to Sweden to play Davis Cup tennis. With the press he was first testy, then surly, and finally bitter and contentious. Connors, too, hadn’t played competitively in a while. With his wife, Patty, expecting their second child any day, he was also distracted. He asked me if he could arrive a day late and I agreed, which was a mistake. When he got there, all his hostility to the Davis Cup and to team play seemed to return. Everything about our arrangements appeared to anger him, and nothing I said made any difference.
Relations between us crumbled after an incident one night. Practice was scheduled for seven in the evening between Connors and Arias, whom I had selected as an alternate singles player all year. Connors, on time, was already at the stadium; I was supposed to bring Arias over. Our car was late in arriving, and we reached the stadium about ten or fifteen minutes after seven. By this point, Connors, who is nearly always punctual (when he shows up for an event), had worked himself up into a sweaty rage. As I walked through a door onto the court, I saw a message he had scrawled in large letters in the soft clay, presumably for me. His message read: FUCK YOU.
I felt exactly as if he had slapped my face. I wanted to replace him on the spot and send him home, but I knew our chances of winning would have dropped precipitously. I swallowed my pride and endured the insult.
In the tie, played before enthusiastic, sellout crowds, the Swedes defeated us decisively, 4–1. Wilander, tanned, lithe, and fleet of foot after his Australian campaign, crushed Connors 6–1, 6–3, 6–3. Jimmy was sadly out of shape, and the clay court set up by the Swedes caused a few odd bounces that frustrated him as he struggled to find his form. At the end of the first set, he resorted to unspeakably vile language, cursing both the umpire and referee Alan Mills (who was also later the Wimbledon referee). Mills was outraged. Connors was fined $2,000 and came within a penalty point of being defaulted. Mills let us know that he was thinking seriously of recommending that Connors be banned from further competition.
Donald Dell, who had come in for the matches, convinced Connors to apologize to Mills. As Donald put it, Jimmy had to apologize to preserve the honor of the United States. I don’t know if Jimmy fully appreciated this concept, but he understood it sufficiently to make what Mills called a “very genuine and personal apology” to both him and the umpire.
By this time, Henrik Sundstrom had defeated McEnroe, who also found the clay surface daunting. McEnroe’s rustiness showed, and he had also injured his wrist. The next day, in the doubles, McEnroe and Fleming fell to Jarryd and nineteen-year-old Stefan Edberg in four sets—and we had lost the Cup. We had prepared shabbily, and had paid the price accordingly. For this I bear most of the blame.
The tie now decided, Connors asked to go home to his wife. I gave him permission to do so, and Arias finally had his chance to play. I had named Arias to our team after he had become one of the top ten in the world, then stuck with him when his ranking slid into the twenties. Then I heard from agents for other players who couldn’t understand why he was on the team and they were not. I believed that I had to be loyal to Arias, and not dump him simply because he had slipped a little. Meanwhile, Arias himself made it clear that he did not enjoy being a backup player, even to Connors and McEnroe. He wanted to play singles. Now he had his chance in a best-of-three-sets “dead rubber” match.
Against Sundstrom, Arias took the first set and seemed on his way to an easy triumph. Then, inexplicably, with no sun or wind to contend with, and on his favorite surface, clay, Arias began to hyperventilate. He simply became too excited. As I watched in deepening embarrassment, he began to cramp up badly. Sundstrom won, 3–6, 8–6, 6–3.
THE WAY WE had lost to Sweden, more than the loss itself, truly hurt me. Whatever their reasons, Connors and McEnroe had not come prepared to play at their best. I suppose I could have demoted them just before their matches, but I don’t think anyone else would have done so. Above all, I hated being associated with the vile language Connors flung about on the court, and the flagrant abuse of the officials. I was also taken aback at the awards dinner when Hunter Delatour, the president of the USTA in 1983 and 1984, apologized to the Swedes for the Americans’ conduct during the tie. I know that I would not have done so, and some of the American players were livid. I took it as another rebuke, although one not unjustified, when the incoming president of the USTA, J. Randolph Gregson, promised to make a “complete evaluation” of our Cup effort. Then Harry Merlo, chairman of the Louisiana-Pacific Corporation, the sponsor of our national team, threatened to withdraw its support if such misconduct continued. “Unless we can be assured that such constructive changes will be made,” he insisted, “we will move to withdraw our sponsorship.”
We were heading toward a crisis. Public criticism of the players became widespread; I received about fifty letters asking me to banish McEnroe and Connors, at least for a year. In a syndicated column, William E. Simon, a former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, called their behavior in Sweden “one of the most disgusting and vulgar displays of childishness ever seen in a world-class sporting event.” The column was entitled “America’s Punks.” A highly respected Washington Post sportswriter called for the two players to be “kicked off the U.S. Davis Cup team immediately.”
Then Merlo and Gregson came up with a plan. In January 1985, the USTA sent out letters to the top thirty or so American players asking them to apply for Davis Cup selection only if they were prepared to abide by a list of guidelines for good behavior. If they applied for a spot and were chosen, they would have to sign a Davis Cup “contract” that required them to behave like gentlemen.
To me, the idea seemed like a loyalty pledge. The U.S. Davis Cup committee had a right to expect good behavior, but umpires and referees already had the power to discipline players. Some players were scornful. “I could have written the proposed guidelines in third grade,” Fleming jeered. “They aren’t exactly revolutionary.” And one prominent tennis writer compared them “to the Pledge of Allegiance sleepy kids recite every morning in school.”
I couldn’t bring myself to take a resolutely hard line against the players even if they needed it, and even if they behaved in ways that I detested. In January, at an event I attended to promote a new line of sports clothing, most of the questions put to me were about the players’ behavior. I tried to put the burden of disciplining them on the umpires and referees. “If I feel a player is wrong,” I told a reporter, “I’ll let the umpire nail him. Then, if it gets too embarrassing, I’ll tell the players to stop or we’ll roll down the nets. But if the umpire doesn’t nail the player, then …” Even I could see that this was hardly an adamant statement.
McEnroe hated the pledge and made it clear that he would not sign it. “I don’t see why I should have to sign it,” he said, “simply because they [the USTA] were backed into a corner by some sponsor who wasn’t even involved the first six years that I played.” Earlier, he had announced that he would skip our next match, against Japan—the first Cup tie he would miss in seven years. His aim, he said (and I believed him), was to give other players a chance to shine. He would then return to the team, if selected. But he would not sign the pledge. “What if I signed,” he asked insouciantly at one point, “then went on a rampage in the next match? Would I have to sign again?”
In the final analysis, I faced the fact that I had been chosen captain by the president of the USTA and had an obligation to enforce its decisions or else resign. And I did not want to resign in apparent defense of the right of players to misbehave. Publicly I called the guidelines enforceable, and looked to the future: “A more disciplined U.S. team should emerge.”
As for coarse language on court, I tried to point out that “all athletes curse at times—at themselves, at opponents, at officials, and sometimes at the public.” However, tennis players would have to realize that the presence of microphones on the court, as well as the traditional gentility of tennis, meant that the players would have to learn to restrain themselves, although their tirades boosted television ratings for tennis matches. “Tennis players are not going to stop cursing,” I said, “but they are going to have to learn to do it sotto voce or else they will be defaulted. In the future, audible coarse language will not be tolerated from our team members.” I believed I had taken as firm a stand as I wanted.
IN MARCH 1985, in Kyoto, Japan, and in the absence of Mac and Jimmy, I named Eliot Teltscher and Aaron Krickstein to play singles, and Ken Flach and Robert Seguso to play doubles. Now I had to endure the anger of Arias and his agent.
“You kicked Jimmy in the teeth!” he screamed at me. “In the teeth!”
“I gave him a chance in a match that didn’t really matter,” I countered. “And he blew it.”
In Tennis magazine, Arias complained bitterly (but not very effectively, I thought) about me. “I went to Bucharest in the middle of the winter,” he said. “I’ve attended every single match as a water boy, practically. I just felt I’d paid my dues.” He would play Davis Cup tennis again, he offered, “but with Arthur as captain, it’s questionable.” (He failed to mention, apparently, that he was paid $60,000 as a team member for the year.) Teltscher, too, criticized me. My “indecisiveness” annoyed him. “He asked me if I’d be available to play,” Eliot explained to the press. “I said, ‘Are you asking me to?’ He said, ‘No, I just wanted to see if you’d be available.’ I just want him to make a decision and let me know.”
I didn’t take such criticism too much to heart. Most players want to play, even if they don’t deserve to do so ahead of other players. Rookies seldom like watching veterans enjoy the fruits of their years of labor. I thought John had earned the right to expect a favor or two, but lesser players often complained about that. I remember one heated exchange with Arias.
“How come Mac can show up a day late for the tie,” Jimmy fumed, “and I have to be here on time? How come, Arthur?”
“Go win three Wimbledons and four U.S. Opens like John,” I snapped back, “and then we’ll discuss it.” (In 1986, Arias redeemed himself by winning the decisive fifth match against Ecuador.)
In Kyoto, we dropped only one set and moved past Japan, 5–0.
Next we faced a tougher opponent, West Germany. We needed to field our best possible team. The USTA still stood by its pledge, and McEnroe and Connors still refused to sign it. I made it clear that I wanted McEnroe. “If John doesn’t sign,” I told a New York Times reporter in May, “there may be other ways to put him on the team. His willingness to play might be acceptable. And if he makes himself available, I’ll pick him whether he signs or not.” Although I knew that this statement would not sit well with the USTA or with Harry Merlo of Louisiana-Pacific, I wanted to make it clear that I thought we should have McEnroe with us.
Connors’s refusal was more symbolic than substantial. He had never really been one of us. Then he announced that he would not play Davis Cup anymore. At least he was honest enough to admit his shortcomings. “I’ve never been a team man,” he conceded. “That’s why I never joined the Association [of Tennis Professionals] and why I don’t play doubles anymore. I’ve always taken full credit for my success and full controversy for my failures.”
Later in the year, in World Tennis magazine, my journalist friend Bud Collins stoutly defended McEnroe and Connors: “It was an insult to be asked to sign.” He went further: “I guess I’m even more disappointed by captain Ashe and the Davis Cup players other than McEnroe and Connors. Their failure to stick together against the imposition of a loyalty oath, and in defense of their comrades, Mac and Jimmy, by refusing, en masse, to sign the undemocratic pledge, tells me that the team was not really a team.”
In August 1985, in Hamburg, I assembled the same team that had defeated Japan: Teltscher, Krickstein, Flach, and Seguso. (We didn’t have McEnroe, but we received a telegram from his family wishing us luck.) The Germans had an ace waiting for us: redheaded Boris Becker, who had electrified the tennis world the previous month by winning Wimbledon at the age of seventeen. I had never seen a tennis prodigy built like Becker; he reminded me of some overgrown high-school basketball superstar suddenly thrown in with the top professionals, making some mistakes but dazzling his elders all the same. Six feet three inches tall, powerful, athletic, and impetuous, he promptly subdued Teltscher, 6–2, 6–2, 6–3. Like some infant unaware of his own strength, Becker marveled afterward at how easily he had disposed of a higher-ranked player. “I thought it would be a tougher fight,” he said. “Like maybe four sets.”
Then followed one of the most frustrating matches of my Davis Cup captaincy.
As a tennis player, young Krickstein had a great deal going for him. Blessed with big shoulders (he had started out as a swimmer), Krickstein had mighty groundstrokes, excellent control, and abundant stamina. He had everything except the so-called killer instinct, if the killing had to take place at the net. He was a decent volleyer, but even on drop shots, Aaron would often rush in to retrieve the ball, then scurry back to the baseline, where he felt much safer. The result was that he seldom finished points quickly—or games, or sets. In fact, he didn’t finish matches quickly. In a mixture of respect and derision, Aaron came to be known among the players as “the King of the Five-Setters.”
In Hamburg, against low-ranked Hansjörg Schwaier, Aaron played his royal game. He won the first set (6–2), dropped the second (1–6), won the third (6–2), dropped the fourth (1–6). Midway through the fifth, however, he started to cramp up, and then lost the match. He had dominated most of the points but refused to come to the net to finish them off. A win in the doubles and the first of the reverse singles kept our hopes alive, but then Becker blasted Krickstein, 6–2, 6–2, 6–1. Becker started the match wearing a sweater, and never bothered to take it off. Urged on by cries of “Bravo, Boris!” and “Deutschland!,” he needed only an hour and a half to win.
West Germany, hardly a major power in world tennis just two months before, had beaten us. For the third straight year, I had led the United States to defeat in the Davis Cup. I understood that my days as captain were numbered.
THAT SUMMER, IN a personal consolation, I was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame at Newport, Rhode Island. As happens only on rare occasions, the committee inducted me as soon as I was eligible, five years after my retirement. I would like to think that my heart operations had nothing to do with their decision. Inducted along with me were Fred Stolle of Australia, an old tournament companion from my playing days who excelled above all in doubles play, and Ann Haydon Jones of Britain, who had won a Wimbledon singles crown in 1969. I made a family affair of this honor of a lifetime. Jeanne and her parents attended the event with me in Newport, as did my father and stepmother, as well as my brother Johnnie, his wife, Sandra, their daughter, Luchia, and other members of our large family.
On October 22, The New York Times carried a story headlined: “Ashe to Be Dropped as Davis Captain.” The usual “informed sources” said I had been advised that I would be let go, and that Randy Gregson had lost confidence in me “for a perceived lack of discipline and organization on the team.” The sources were well informed. A few days previously, at a meeting in midtown Manhattan, Gregson and Jorgensen had informed me that I was finished. I made it clear that I wanted to stay on, but they had made up their minds.
At noon on the day after the Times story appeared, I called Gregson in Arizona and tendered my resignation. I underscored my continuing loyalty to the Davis Cup competition by accepting the essentially ceremonial position of vice-chairman of the Cup committee.
Not long afterward, Tom Gorman, an old friend and former Davis Cup player, was named to replace me. I wished him well, although I was a little hurt by the headline of an editorial (by Steve Flink) in World Tennis magazine: “Can Gorman Raise the Cup From Ashe?” Had I really brought it so low? Looking back on my career as captain, I can point with some pride to my record of 13 wins against 3 losses. I am also proud to be only the second captain in thirty years to lead the U.S. team to consecutive victories (1981 and 1982). However, as I had led some of the most talented teams ever fielded by the United States, we should have done better, and some of the blame must rest on my shoulders.
To be more effective, I suppose, I should have been more gregarious at times, and at other times more aggressive. I should have tried harder to impose my will on the players. But I couldn’t do that, and I have to live with the consequences. I accepted the fact that as much as I want to lead others, and love to be around other people, in some essential way I am something of a loner.
Nevertheless, that knowledge did not make me more reclusive. My setbacks in connection with the Davis Cup helped me to understand that to be effective, I would have to step more boldly into the spotlight, especially if I wished to be effective in the crucial area of social and political progress. My Davis Cup captaincy was a rich, challenging, and also satisfying experience, not least of all because of that simple lesson.