In 1969 John McPhee wrote Levels of the Game, a daring, imaginative, artful sports book that portrayed the lives of Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner through the prism of a tennis match.
The book is just 150 pages long and the story is told in one seamless chapter, with sporadic line breaks for the reader to draw breath. Stories from their lives are interwoven with passages of play from the match and McPhee crosses from one life to the other like he is playing a rally from both sides of the net.
Graebner was born into an upper middle-class family, the son of a dentist and tennis enthusiast. Ashe’s family traced their arrival in America to a ship that docked in Virginia in 1735 carrying 167 slaves from west Africa. His mother died when Ashe was six; his father was a handyman and caretaker.
Tennis had no place on their side of the tracks. It wasn’t a game for black people.
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As a child Ashe came to the attention of Dr Robert Johnson, a former college football player and physician. In his mid-30s he developed a passion for tennis, but as he got older those feelings evolved into something more powerful.
At his home in Lynchburg, a city in Virginia, Dr Johnson established a summer academy for young black tennis players. He petitioned tennis’s white establishment, respectfully and insistently, until he secured tournament spots for his proteges.
“He [Dr Johnson] had read sports columns in which the idea was advanced that Negro athletes lacked finesse – that they might be good runners or jumpers but could never make it in a game like tennis,” wrote McPhee. “This idea greatly irritated Dr Johnson . . .”
The match at the heart of the book was the semi-final of the 1968 US Open, the first year in which tennis was fully professional. At the time, Ashe was still a lieutenant in the army, on a per-diem of $20 a day to cover his expenses at the tournament.
Ashe won their match, and on September 9th, 1968, he became the first black man to win a Grand Slam singles title. A few days later he became the first athlete to appear on Face The Nation, CBS’s flagship current affairs show. By the end of the week, he was the cover story on LIFE magazine, making waves.
Ashe spoke about the racism he had experienced at tournaments, sometimes mistaken for a waiter or a busboy. “I can make my protest heard by winning,” he told LIFE. “People don’t listen to losers.”
Unlike Tiger Woods many years later, Ashe harnessed the power he now possessed. He didn’t recoil from it; he moved toward it.
“Despite his momentous victory he spoke as an activist weighing in on subjects as diverse as civil rights legislation, the Black Power movement and the role of the African American athlete in the civil rights struggle,” wrote the New York Times about his appearance on CBS.
Wimbledon starts today and Ashe is still the only black man to have won the men’s single. Since Ashe’s triumph in 1975, Mal Washington is the only other black man to have reached a Wimbledon singles final – and the last to reach any Grand Slam final, a staggering 28 years ago. At grassroots level, at the bottom of the pyramid, the game has expanded its reach. But not enough.
In the women’s game, Coco Gauff, Naomi Osaka and Sloane Stephens have won Grand Slam titles on a trail blazed by the Williams sisters. But it is 68 years since Althea Gibson became the first black woman to win a Grand Slam title, and it was more than 40 years before Zina Garrison became the second. Change was slow and difficult and remains incomplete.
“I absolutely experienced racism in tennis and out of tennis,” said Washington in a CNN interview four years ago. “[Growing up] you just knew – or you were told – you weren’t going to play at that particular club. They didn’t allow black players.
“You’ll see a draw for a [junior] tournament – 32 players and three of the players are black. There were times where it was just kind of uncanny how two of the black players faced each other in the first round, and then if you won, you were going to play the third black person in the second round. Every black tennis player, at some point, has seen that.”
Tennis, like golf, has not mastered diversity. You could not watch Wimbledon for the next fortnight, or The Open later in the month, or any other professional tournament in those global, middle-class sports and reach a different conclusion.
Whatever attitudes and norms were disturbed by Ashe, his horizons were much broader than tennis. He deliberately led a life of social and political activism. During his playing career he was sometimes criticised for paying too much attention to his political causes and not enough to his game. He dictated that imbalance.
Ashe was a week short of his 32nd birthday when he beat Jimmy Connors in the 1975 Wimbledon final. Connors was the best player in the world: brash, abrasive, arrogant, loud. Nine years younger than Ashe, he had reached the final without dropping a set and was the overwhelming favourite. They hated each other.
Earlier that year Connors had played a $100,000 exhibition in Las Vegas instead of representing the United States in the Davis Cup. It wasn’t his first time not to turn up. Ashe branded him “unpatriotic”. Connors responded with a libel action, initiated only days before they met in the Wimbledon final. He was suing for millions.
“I swear,” Ashe said years later, “every time I passed Jimmy Connors in the locker room it took all my will power not to punch him in the mouth.”
Ashe arrived on Centre Court wearing his USA jacket and sweatbands, in a silent, premeditated taunt. In three previous meetings he had never beaten Connors, but in one of the greatest upsets in Wimbledon history, Ashe won in four sets. They shook hands at the net, but no words were exchanged.
With no other context, it was a captivating sports story. In Ashe’s life it wasn’t much more than a tennis match. The most pimped concept in sport is heroism. Ashe was a hero. He made a difference.
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