Telegenic Blue and Arthur Ashe

When Arthur Ashe won the US Open at Forest Hills in 1968, the courts were made of clay and the players dressed in white. Only one other African-American, Althea Gibson, had risen so high in this white-dominated sport. A continent away, apartheid was law in South Africa. When Arthur Ashe applied for a visa to play in the South African Open in Johannesburg, he was turned down because of his skin color.

Decades after Ashe's death from AIDS, the courts are telegenic blue, players dress in multi colors, and African-American children dream of becoming the next Venus Williams or James Blake. Middle-aged white ladies who learned to serve at clubs that excluded African-Americans volunteer at Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day.

Now in its fifteenth year, Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day draws some 30,000 young fans who flock to the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Queens, New York. Sponsored by a corporate entity (this year it was Hess) in partnership with the United States Tennis Association, the event is free, and requires the volunteer services of 550 adults.

I am proud to report that I was one of those volunteers, having applied to the United States Tennis Association many months in advance as well as attended a mandatory meeting in the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan, where I picked up my logo-emblazoned white cap and matching shirt.

So how do you insure that all 550 volunteers show up very early on a Saturday morning in their designated locations in a remote corner of Queens? You hold out the carrot of a meal card, worth $12.50 (which doesn’t get much, as one veteran AAKD volunteer sourly pointed out), and dispensed no later than 8:30 a.m.

There is nothing like the threat of missing a free lunch to light a fire under one’s middle-aged butt. After getting hopelessly lost in Queens, this AAKD volunteer found herself racing from remote parking area “G” to a shuttle bus to the South Gate, upon which she hurried through the security check-in to present herself, considerably out of breath, at the East Gate check-in table at 8:25.

On Court 7, Laura Puryear, a young woman in a safari-style hat from Oklahoma, was mobilizing our group of volunteers to the six mini-courts set up within the blue and white squares. Laura explained that all children would be given hand-ball-sized racquets, divided up into groups of four or five, and assigned to each mini-court, where volunteers would place two children on one side of the set, and two on the opposite side. The volunteer would then hand each child a large, foam-filled tennis ball from a hopper of similarly sized foam balls and instruct him or her to start rallying. As soon as one child made an error, he or she would step out and the next player would rotate in.

“It’s really a form of controlled chaos,” Laura joked. By ten o’clock, kids were jumping up and down as they waited in line behind the chain link fence, ready to prove to the world (or at least to their parents, who stood by with digital cameras) that they were Serena-and-Roger-wannabees. Some children had brought their own racquets, and some had the practiced strokes of longtime players. There was one six-year-old African-American boy with a metallic blue bandana and a wicked backhand who boasted that he had been playing since the age of two.

By noon, between the heat, the shrieks, the standing on achy feet, the disputes about what was in or out (with so many mini-courts, we were instructed to take a relaxed approach to line-calls), this volunteer was pooped. Laura suggested that I retrieve balls on the opposite side of the court, where there was less bedlam as well as some shade.

I did as I was told, and fell into conversation with two retirees from Long Island City. Neither played tennis—their grown-up kids had once been swimmers--but the couple were volunteer junkies. “We’ve done Ronald McDonald, United Way, you name it,” the husband said, to which the wife pointed out that studies showed that volunteering is good for you, and helps you live longer.

At 12:45, it was time to pack up the nets, racquets, and balls. Laura thanked each of us with a hearty high-five, and pronounced us free agents: we could have lunch, wander into Ashe stadium, or hang out among the outer courts, where various US Open qualifying matches would soon begin.

I had a second gig in Westchester doing dog-and-chicken sitting, and so after standing in a long line for a goat cheese salad from Stonyfield Farm, after watching a few of the women qualifiers warm up on Court 14, women with tree-trunk-like legs who screamed like Sharapova and made me feel a howl of regret that I was no longer so strong or so young, with such melancholy thoughts, I made my way to Parking lot “G.”

Then a young African-American man who was wearing the AAKD shirt and hat stopped me to ask about buses to Manhattan. He said he had to be back at the Grand Hyatt Hotel for a coaches’ meeting. I said I remembered something about buses at the East Gate, and pulled out my map.

We fell into conversation, where we were from, what we’d done for AAKD—he had been assigned to the “Beat the Pro” session on Court 17. His name was Kobe—his name was actually much longer but it was too hard for people to pronounce and everyone just called him Kobe. He was from Zambia, had been ranked in the top ten in the juniors and now taught tennis at a club in the Riverdale section of Manhattan. He loved the experience of being a volunteer at AAKD; he said it was important “to give back” as Arthur Ashe had done.

Kobe said his dream was to help kids in Africa learn how to play the game, that he had a scheme to send back used balls and tennis racquets to children in Zambia. We exchanged e-mail addresses and I said that I knew pros at Amherst College with whom I could connect him.

“Who knows,” I said, “Maybe my 16-year-old son and I will go to Zambia some day and work with you.”

“That would be awesome,” he said.

Then we shook hands and said goodbye, and I walked away, filled with love for life and tennis and New York. (Where else but in New York could such an encounter take place?) I thought of Arthur Ashe and the adversities he had overcome, beginning with struggling with racism in the South and ending with contracting AIDS from a blood transfusion in the North and how his life had not been about dejection and defeat but about triumph and generosity and goodness.

“From what we get,” Ashe once said, “we can make a living; from what we give, however, makes a life.”
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Acing the Blues

The funeral home sits so close to Rally Point that when my teammate and I were driving there from Massachusetts, her global positioning system cheerily announced, as we passed the sumptuous blue-and-white striped awnings, that we had arrived at our destination. This foot-faulting technological glitch made us laugh, soothing our nerves as we lugged our racquet bags and water coolers into the club, ready to play our first match at the United States Tennis Association’s New England District Adult League Championships in Greenville, Rhode Island.

Tennis in America began in Rhode Island—in nearby Newport, where the United States Lawn Tennis Association held the first Men’s Singles Championships on grass courts at the Newport Casino in 1881 (the event was not open to women but ladies’ competitions were held at the Philadelphia Cricket Club in 1886). The Newport and Philadelphia championships added doubles competitions and evolved into the current U.S. Open at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Flushing Meadow, New York, played on DecoTurf II courts that were painted blue in 2005, in order to make the matches more telegenic.

Tennis, which was first played in the Middle Ages by monks during religious ceremonies and taken up by the French royal family in the 16^th century, gets its name from the French nobility’s habit of shouting, “Tenez,” or “Heads Up,” before starting the game. In the late 19^th century, tennis had overtaken croquet at the sport of choice for the leisured rich on both sides of the Atlantic. Lawn tennis courts, which could be grafted onto smooth croquet courts, appeared on estates owned by European barons and American robber barons alike, as well as on the grounds of watering holes and spas throughout Europe. Edith Jones Wharton learned to play tennis on her family’s private court at Pen Craig, one of the immense ‘cottages’ on Newport Sound. In 1876, a 14-year-old Edith Jones, writing to her governess, Anna Bahlmann, described the newfangled sport as “difficult, tiresome, destructive to pretty dresses and to the complexion, but nevertheless delightful.”

Not that I was focused on the history of tennis as I was playing the number two singles spot for the Aces Wild Tennis Team on court six. But I was thinking, during a long, sweat-soaked rally--indoor tennis in Rhode Island in mid-August can be punishingly hot--which ended when I whipped a cross-court forehand to a remote corner near the baseline where my opponent’s coltish 33-year-old legs would not take her, that there is nothing like tennis to free the mind from morbid thoughts of depression, failure, and death.

I have been playing tennis for most of my life—my mother, in the summer months when she wasn’t in bed with her mysterious colds, teaching me to play on hot, lazy afternoons at the Pittsfield Country Club, a sprawling, many-porched 19^th century mansion that Edith Wharton herself could have belonged to. I had a wooden racquet in those days, and the courts we played on were red clay, which turned everything—the service and base lines as well as our white Treetorn tennis balls, white tennis shoes, and white ankle socks with fuzzy pom poms at the heels--a rusted, dried-blood-colored pink. I had a two-fisted backhand (still do, though it was more of a lethal weapon in those days) in the manner of my heroine Chrissie Evert, who was already making a name for herself as a junior, and who would win the U.S. Open Women’s Singles in 1975, when it was played on Har-Tru clay courts at the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills.

When my mother was well enough not to be indifferent to the fortunes of her daughters, she used to brag about how good I was. She saved all the trophies I had won in tennis tournaments throughout New England, and displayed them in the living room of our home on West Street. When she moved to Florida, she took them with her, proudly displaying them in the all condos and bungalows she inhabited. The story she liked best was the time I was in the finals of a 14-and-under tournament in New Haven--it was at the New Haven Lawn Club, founded in 1891, in the posh East Rock section of the city—and the club pro started watching me and told my mother I was good, that I could be really good, and that if she wanted to develop my game, she should send me to California to work with Pancho Segura, who had been number one in the world in 1952 and who was now coaching promising juniors, including legend-to-be Jimmy Connors.

“I taught her how to play myself,” my mother boasted to the pro, which wasn’t strictly true as I also played with my dad, particularly when I got good enough to beat my mom. In addition, I took several summers’ full of group and private lessons from Dudley Bell, who all the kids called Dud, and who had the good humor and patience of Segoo himself as he drilled me for hours in the split step.

“I know she’s good,” my mother went on, “But she’s only 14. I’m not taking her out of school and sending her to California. Anything could happen to her. She could be sold into ‘white slavery.’”

The pro wisely chose to ignore this bit of melodramatic foolishness and proposed that my mother accompany me to southern California.

“And let my husband fend for himself?” my mother said. “Not on your life.”

Chrissie Evert probably would have begged her mother to send her out west to play tennis—although it’s a moot point as Evert grew up in Florida and was coached from an early age by her tennis pro dad--but I didn’t argue with my mother. When you’re 14, you pretty much do what you’re told, especially if you’re a girl. Then, when the United States Lawn Tennis Association’s New England division rankings came out the next year (the organization dropped the snooty-sounding ‘lawn’ from its moniker a few years later), I had my first identifiable-as-such crisis of confidence. The number one player in the 14-and-under girls’ division was a big, muscular girl from Westerly, Rhode Island, and I had lost to her 6-0, 6-1 in another tournament several weeks after New Haven, barely even winning that one game. I had achieved the number five spot, which was hardly anything to cry about, but I knew very well that I was miles away from being number one. Maybe all the talk about Segura and California was just that—talk. Even if my mother had been willing to send me, I wasn’t sure I had what it took to be the best.

Then I did something only a crazy teenager could justify: I gave up tennis. I gave up the very thing that gave my emerging life passion and purpose. My reasons were as silly as a toddler’s: if I couldn’t get what I wanted, i.e., the number one spot in my age group, then I wouldn’t play. As the years passed and I found increasingly unwholesome activities to fill up the hours that tennis had occupied—taking up with a series of druggie boyfriends, who would have sold me into white slavery in a heartbeat if given the chance—I developed new reasons to spurn tennis. Tennis was a rich girl’s game, the mindless diversion of Republicans and Nixonites and corporate drones. Never mind that a smart, soft-spoken black man named Arthur Ashe, who learned to play tennis on segregated public courts in Richmond, Virginia, was busy winning majors and breaking the color line and speaking out against racism and apartheid.

I took up competitive tennis again when the Williams sisters started to dominate the women’s tour. I was moved by their story—how they grew up in the projects of Los Angeles and hit hundreds of balls every afternoon from an old shopping cart, how their parents heaped positive encouragement upon them, telling them, from an early age, that they were destined for greatness. There was really no connection between me, a middle-aged, overweight mom trying to adjust to a second marriage and working off her post-baby weight while playing in a local 4.0 USTA League in northern Vermont…and Venus and Serena, their dread-locks encased in white beads, screaming as they hit their 120-mile-an-hour serves, reaching the finals of the U.S. Open at 17 and 19, respectively. Then again, maybe Venus and Serena’s success--thanks to Venus’ efforts, women pros are now, for the first time in tennis history, making as much as men--made me believe that there was something about the game that whispered of hope and transformation, even to an old duffer like me, who wanted to drop twenty pounds and get a break from feeling like such a loser.

The Aces Wild Tennis Team did not ace the Districts in Rhode Island. In fact, we beat only one other team (and they were from western Massachusetts, and we had already trounced them three months ago so it hardly seemed like a real win). Most of the players on the other teams were younger, fitter, and steadier. Though many of us lost in nail-bitingly-close third-set tiebreakers—on Day two, I was taken out by a much younger woman in a match that went on for nearly three hours--it wasn’t enough to send us to the next level of competition—the Sectionals in South Hadley, Massachusetts. But as we headed home past the blue-and-white awnings of the Anderson-Winfield funeral home, stopping for ice cream at the Newport creamery just beyond the town green (not to be confused with the Blue Hills Crematory, whose services were being offered through the funeral home), we talked about how, next year, we were going to start practicing earlier, organize more scrimmages, maybe even do some clinics with the Amherst College assistant tennis coach.

Next year, we vowed, wiping the soft-serve, anti-oxidant-rich blueberry ice cream from our sweaty fingers and high-fiving one another, we were going to do it, advance to Sectionals, and, maybe, with a little luck and a lot of PMA (positive mental attitude), even to Nationals.