Days of Grace (10 page)

In 1990, however, we returned to the city. In fact, we came back to an apartment only four blocks away from our old place, so I guess we liked the old neighborhood. We
came back in part because of Jeanne’s preferences, but perhaps the overriding reason was my health. Northern Westchester Hospital Center is an excellent facility, and being on the board certainly assured that I would get extra-special treatment; but with the twin conditions of heart disease and AIDS, I felt more comfortable at New York Hospital.

I have watched and am watching Camera grow. With all my own physical problems, her positive robustness has been a godsend to me, a daily reaffirmation of the power of life. Like all children, she has her naughty side. For example, I am amazed to see how easily a lovely, sweet child can turn unashamedly vindictive. But that is life. I marvel at the way she has no interest in being the center of attention but still enjoys being with other people.

I had no idea that I would love fatherhood as much as I do. I have an acute sense of responsibility for her—to help her, teach her, protect her, and (most of all) to love her.

In matters of discipline, I know I can’t go the way of my father. He was of the old school; his word was law, and he enforced the law with his thick police belt. You disobeyed at your peril. He was never in any way brutal to us, but I don’t think I can be the same kind of father. Times have changed. I am not like my father, and Jeanne is even less so. I also watched my brother, Johnnie, and his wife, Sandra, bring up their daughter, Luchia, and I have tried to learn from them. I have also learned from my stepsister, Loretta, and her husband, David Harris, whose children, LaChandra and David, Jr., are outstanding young people.

Among the youngsters in our family, Luchia is probably the star. She will graduate with excellent grades from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, which is a highly competitive institution. I saw how Johnnie and Sandra tried to expose her to enriching experiences, so that Luchia was able to pursue her love of dance and also to take part, when she wanted to, in beauty and talent competitions. I also watched carefully to see how Johnnie exerted discipline over her—very carefully. Johnnie was a career
Marine officer, but when it comes to a father and his daughter, the Marine tradition often goes right out the window, apparently. Love and compassion take over. If Camera can be like Luchia, we would be very pleased. But she doesn’t have to be. We are simply not going to put undue pressure on her to succeed. She loves her mommy and daddy, and we are ecstatic about her.

I do not take her or her health for granted. Children seem immortal. But I know how quickly they can be taken away. Like many well-known athletes, I have been to my share of children’s hospitals, trying to cheer up the sick. Often you meet kids who are going to be well, but just as often you meet kids who you know are going to die soon. It is heartbreaking.

I have experienced some sad days in my life, but few as harrowing as the day in Westport, Connecticut, only a few years ago when I was a pallbearer at the funeral of Alex Deford, the daughter of my good friend Frank Deford. Alex died of cystic fibrosis, at the age of eight.

So I take nothing about Camera for granted. I guess by now I take nothing about anything for granted. Few things have worked out exactly as I thought they would, and my life has taken curious turns.

This is my middle passage, but because of my illnesses I have to face the fact that it is both a middle passage and probably a terminus. I can’t avoid the fact that AIDS is a terminal disease. No doubt science will one day come up with a vaccine, or even a way to reverse the effects of AIDS itself in the human body. But that will be a cure for other people, too late for me.

Meanwhile, I keep sailing on in this middle passage. I am sailing into the wind and the dark. But I am doing my best to keep my boat steady and my sails full.

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.