Arthur Ashe by Raymond Arsenault

Author:Raymond Arsenault
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

He also continued to come up with roughly the same results. Despite his lingering heel problem, he had played well during the six months prior to Wimbledon, and he did the same afterward. He spent the rest of 1975 playing and often winning on the Commercial Union Grand Prix, a lucrative forty-two-tournament circuit that had begun in May. Offering $4 million in total prize money, the 1975 Grand Prix stretched across nineteen different countries, ending in December with the Grand Prix Masters round-robin championship in Stockholm. The top eight players qualified for the Masters tournament, and by the end of September, when Ashe defeated Guillermo Vilas at a tournament final in San Francisco, he was second in the total point standings. The $16,000 in prize money raised his 1975 on-court earnings to $256,850, one of the highest figures in tennis history. And he was not done yet.9

Scheduled to play in five more tournaments before the end of the year, he now had the $300,000 milestone in his sights. But it wasn’t going to be easy. The 1975 Grand Prix was one of the most grueling and tightly packed tours in the annals of tennis, and Ashe and his rivals were growing weary by the time they arrived in Paris in late October. Week after week, the competition was as rigorous as the travel schedule, even though only half of the best players were present at any one tournament. While Ashe was playing in Paris, for example, Rosewall and Newcombe were playing halfway across the world in Manila.10

In Paris, Ashe expected Ilie Nastase to be his toughest competition. In the semifinals, he tried to outlast the Romanian baseliner in a contest of “long rallies from the backcourt” but soon found himself two sets down. Switching to a serve-and-volley strategy in the third set, he turned the tide and pulled off one of the greatest comebacks of his career, winning the last three sets 6–3, 6–3, 6–4. By the end of the nearly three-hour match, both men were exhausted, and it showed the next day when Ashe faced Tom Okker in the final. After winning two of the first three sets, he faded noticeably and lost in five.11

A week later, at the Swedish Open, he once again played well but lost to Adriano Panatta of Italy in the quarterfinals. From Stockholm, he traveled to Edinburgh and then on to London, where he lost to Eddie Dibbs in the semifinals. A late addition to the schedule and sandwiched between Stockholm and Johannesburg, the London tournament led to frayed nerves and a general unraveling of the tour’s traditional decorum. Nastase, after losing his passport in a Stockholm nightclub, arrived in Edinburgh twenty-four hours late, and Tanner, who arrived after midnight and suffered a forty-one-minute straight-set loss to Buster Mottram later the same morning, labeled the tight scheduling “ridiculous,” accusing the sponsors of “clearly breaking the rules by scheduling play on weekends at both the beginning and end of tournaments.” Surprised by his easy win,

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