Two nights before he played one of the most important tennis matches of his life, Arthur Ashe had dinner with three of his best friends.
It was in London in 1975, and Ashe was scheduled to play Jimmy Connors, the defending champion and world No. 1, in the Wimbledon final on Saturday. Ashe chose the Playboy Club, where the foursome could sit undisturbed at a table in the back.
That Thursday night, Ashe, Donald Dell, his attorney and manager, Charlie Pasarell and Freddie McNair, both players and friends of Ashe, exchanged pleasantries and then got down to business. They devised a game plan to disrupt Connors, shake up his rhythm and allow Ashe to control points rather than be controlled by an opponent nearly 10 years his junior. It was all antithetical to the big serving, groundstroke-pounding, sometimes reckless style Ashe was accustomed to playing.
“We told him, ‘Arthur, this is what you need to do,’” Pasarell, now 81, who first met Ashe at the Orange Bowl junior championships when the two were teenagers, said by phone this month.
“First, he would serve out wide to Jimmy’s two-handed backhand to pull him off the court. Then he would step in, hit a short ball with little pace to Jimmy’s forehand. Giving dinks and junk to Jimmy would give him fits. All that worked especially well on grass where the ball would skid.”
The next morning, Dell, who was staying at the same hotel as Ashe, grabbed an envelope from the front desk and wrote on the back the three key points they had discussed the night before, including Ashe’s liberal use of the lob whenever Connors would crowd the net. He left the note in Ashe’s hotel mailbox.
“During the changeover after the first game I saw Arthur take the envelope out of his racket bag,” said Dell, now 87, by phone this month. “People thought he was meditating throughout the match, but he was actually rereading the notes. And they worked perfectly.”
It has been 50 years since Ashe defeated Connors, 6-1, 6-1, 5-7, 6-4, in the first all-American men’s Wimbledon final since 1947, just days before his 32nd birthday.
The first set was over in about 20 minutes, with Connors taking only the opening game and Ashe never facing a break point. Backed by a reliable serve that propelled him to the net and allowed for potent forehand volleys, Ashe won the second set 25 minutes later.
Connors won the third set, but Ashe continued to stymie him with his constant changes of pace. Ashe ended the match with the plan that worked best, a serve wide to the forehand followed by a high forehand volley winner.
“It was strange to see Arthur hitting angle serves and softball shots,” said Stan Smith, the Wimbledon champion in 1972, by phone this month. “Jimmy was hoping to have a slugfest, but Arthur mixed it up perfectly.”
Ashe became the first Black man to win the tournament’s singles title. He died in 1993 at 49 of AIDS-related pneumonia. He had been infected with H.I.V. via a tainted blood transfusion after heart surgery.
“That match was huge not just for Arthur but for the entire Black community,” said his widow, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, 73, a photographer who at the time was working in the graphics department of WNBC in New York on the day of the final. (She and Ashe would not meet until a year later.) “It put him in a completely different field for people to know him worldwide. He was everything you expected a Wimbledon champion to be. He was royalty.”
Ashe’s Wimbledon victory over Connors was not his first major championship. He won the U.S. Open in 1968, becoming the first Black man to win the singles title at a major, and the Australian Open in 1970. It was, however, his first and only career win over Connors in seven tries.
There was considerable drama on and off the court before their Wimbledon confrontation. Connors had sued the ATP, the men’s players’ tour whose president was Ashe, for $10 million for restraint of trade after Connors was barred from competing in the 1974 French Open because he had contracted to play World TeamTennis.
Then, just days before the start of Wimbledon, Connors sued Ashe for $5 million for comments Ashe made after Connors declined to play in the Davis Cup for the United States earlier in the year. Connors eventually dropped both lawsuits the next year.
Connors has said little about the match in the last 50 years. Reached via email through his son, Brett, he declined to be interviewed for this article. In his autobiography, “The Outsider,” published in 2013, Connors wrote that, following a slip on Centre Court during his first-round match, he injured his knee with hairline fractures to his shin, which contributed to his loss to Ashe.
Ashe got a measure of cheeky revenge when he walked onto Centre Court for the final wearing red, white and blue wristbands. He accepted his winners’ trophy wearing a Davis Cup team jacket emblazoned with USA.
“I don’t think Jimmy had anything to do with Arthur’s will to win Wimbledon,” said Moutoussamy-Ashe, who more than a decade ago helped found the Arthur Ashe Legacy at U.C.L.A., designed to honor his dedication to social justice and human rights.
“It took a lot of guts. It was an intellectual game. He did what he had to do to win it. The issues with Jimmy probably made it sweeter and made for good locker room banter, but winning Wimbledon was about winning Wimbledon.”
Pasarell agreed.
“There was no love lost between Arthur and Jimmy,” Pasarell said. “All those things were at play. But winning Wimbledon, that’s everybody’s dream. That’s what you play the game for.”
Ashe often sidestepped his on-court accomplishments, especially his impact on Black tennis players. That said, one of the first people Nelson Mandela asked to meet following his release from a South African prison in 1990 was Ashe. Instead, Ashe stressed the importance of education in that meeting.
In 1976, in a BBC television interview just before he defended his Wimbledon title, Ashe was asked how he felt about being “an ambassador for your race.” Ashe looked up, a bit surprised.
“I don’t like it, but I feel it,” he told the interviewer. “I don’t shrug it off. There’s a myth about athletes that they’re all brawn and no brains. Black athletes have even more brawn and less brains. I like to fight that myth, and I assume that role heartily.”
Dell was aware that when Ashe raised a clenched fist to him immediately after the match, it was not about a racial victory as much as it was an acknowledgment that their plan had worked.
“Winning that Wimbledon gave Arthur great credibility tennis-wise,” Dell said. “But his legacy is the person he was. His character mattered most. People don’t know this, all these years later, but Arthur underwrote the expenses for several younger ATP players. Nobody knows who they were. But whenever anyone came for help, Arthur always gave of himself. That’s just who he was.”
In one of the galleries at the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I., sits the Head Arthur Ashe Competition 2 racket that Ashe used to defeat Connors at Wimbledon. Beside it is a necklace made of bone that Ashe wore throughout the tournament. Moutoussamy-Ashe isn’t sure where it came from, but thinks he may have picked it up on one of his South African trips.
Either way, she said, it brought him good luck.
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