Deep Tennis: Gentleman Rebel

The more things change, the more they stay the same, right? Maybe the new phrase should be: The more things change, the less we notice.

Before this week is over and we turn our attention to Rotterdam and Paris, let me take a minute to note that on Sunday, a black tennis player, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, won the South African Open in Johannesburg.

My first reaction to that news was something along the lines of, “Maybe Tsonga can keep up his momentum this year.” But looking at the photos from the post-final trophy ceremony, where he posed with local fans, it struck me that not long ago his win would have been (1) of incredible political significance, and (2) impossible.

This was the first year that an ATP event has been held in South Africa since 1995. Before that, “Jo-burg” had been a staple of the tour for decades, a regular stop—there were two tournaments in the city each year in the 70s—in one of the traditional Anglo hotbeds of the sport. After scouring the ATP archives, I believe Tsonga is the first black player to win the tournament. (Which isn’t too surprising, since none entered it until 1973.) But I didn't see that mentioned in any of the reports on his win.

In '73, Arthur Ashe made a deal with South Africa’s apartheid government to be allowed into the draw. He had first tried to enter it in 1970 and was denied, which led him to call for SA’s ouster from the ITF, and for other nations to boycott Davis Cup ties against the country. That eventually led to South Africa winning the Cup by default over India in 1974, a low point in the competition’s history, but a high point for political commitment in sports.

Four years after his inital attempt, Ashe finally made the trip to Jo-Burg. He was criticized from both sides for playing the tournament. As Cliff Drysdale, an opponent of apartheid and friend of Ashe, said at the time, there were those in SA who thought the whole thing had to end in violence anyway, and that by coming there Ashe was actually making the government look humane and prolonging the inevitable (Drysdale himself didn’t buy this argument). On the other side was Bob Hewitt, a great South African doubles player, who thought Ashe should mind his own business, because the blacks in his country were “happy.” Ashe went anyway, determined to see the system for himself and to show blacks there what one of their own could do if given the chance.

Ashe’s trip was a sensation in the country, to the point where it surprised even him. (For the on-the-ground report, read Frank DeFord’s great Sports Illustrated article about it from that time.) Ashe was nicknamed “Sipho” in the black township of Soweto, meaning “a gift.” His matches were mini-Super Bowls, where he was cheered by black and white alike (he had forced the tournament’s promoter to allow blacks to sit anywhere in the stadium; normally, apartheid was enforced at sporting events like anywhere else). One day Ashe found himself being followed by a young black man. When Ashe asked him what he wanted, he said that he’d never seen a free black person before. Ashe was surprised and moved by the statement. As the week went on, he noticed that his car was being tailed.

Ashe recorded his reactions to the trip in his 1975 book with DeFord, Portrait in Motion. Like his fellow amateur era tennis player-scribe, Gordon Forbes, Ashe proved to be one of the most thoughtful athletes you’ll ever read. In its searching quality and calm perceptiveness, the book has parallels to Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, which ends with his own trip to Africa. Ashe’s descriptions are notable for their depth and intelligence, but also for their lack of political ponderousness. He says that he was almost happy to see “Whites Only” signs on public restrooms in South Africa, because not seeing them in that country would have been like not seeing the Eiffel Tower on a trip to Paris. But he also ends with a chilling conversation with a group of whites who continually vote for apartheid candidates. The easy life that the system affords them is so hard to give up, its artifice so hard to confront, that it leads them to justify it by telling themselves that blacks are “children” who need to be taken care of.

The SA Open was an eventful tournament on court for Ashe as well. In an early round, he beat Drysdale and sensed that the whites in the crowd were rooting for him, and against their home-country favorite, because Cliff was a critic of apartheid. In the final Ashe faced—who else?—Jimmy Connors, the all-purpose tennis villain of the era. Connors, the punk kid in his second year on tour, took out Ashe in straight sets. As DeFord says, by the third set the crowd was completely silent as it saw that its hero was going to be outmatched on this day.

Thirty-five years later, Tsonga, a Frenchman whose father is African, went all the way to the title. South Africa is hardly a utopia 15 years after the end of apartheid. And this era of sports has its own troubles as well. As proud as Ashe would have been to see Tsonga win in Jo-Burg—Ashe, who was later arrested in anti-apartheid protests, died the year before South Africa became a democracy—he might not have loved the fact that this year’s SA Open was held at a casino, the same week that tennis was facing another match-fixing controversy elsewhere.

The most famous tennis event of 1973 was the Battle of the Sexes, another example of the sport as a social force for change. Ashe’s trip to South Africa, which was perhaps even more significant, has been overshadowed by it. They’re really flip sides of the same coin. Ashe and Billie Jean King were born in the same year, and each was a product of tennis’ amateur era, a kind of sporting apartheid in some way. They reacted to its exclusivity in opposite ways but ended in similar positions. In populist California, King chaffed at women’s second-class status in the sport and became its resident outspoken feminist rebel. In Old South Richmond, Va., Ashe was schooled by his coach in the amateur sporting code and became tennis’ consummate gentleman rebel.

Isn’t it interesting that the transition from the amateur era to the Open era of tennis produced perhaps the two most politically significant athletes of the last four decades in any sport? There were injustices then, just as there are discouraging aspects to today’s pro era—we produce great champions and people now, but nobody with the stature or conscience of Ashe and King. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. If nothing else, Ashe’s legacy is someone like Tsonga, a charismatic international superstar, potent symbol of success for a continent, and all-around good guy who, rather than being banned from Jo-Burg, was probably paid a whopping fee just to come there. The fact that his title was hardly a blip on anyone’s radar screen shows just how thoroughly things have been transformed, from a sporting perspective, since the 1970s. The next World Cup, in 2010, will be held in South Africa.

It wasn't always that way. The twin universes of sports and culture were up for grabs in the late 60s and early 70s. Tennis should be proud that it had a player like Arthur Ashe, who, in his gentlemanly way, did some of the grabbing. You know you’ve succeeded as a rebel when nobody even notices what you changed.