Ashe Tries to Keep U.S. in the Game

Is there something intrinsically wrong with tennis so that it can only be played by ill-mannered, badly behaved young cases of arrested development who throw rackets and tantrums at the drop of a volley?

Will it phase out in this country to where it will only be played by people from the Balkans and Carpathians with unpronounceable names and unreturnable serves? Who or what is a Miloslav Mecir? Is Ivan Lendl a real person or just a robot? Do they do anything else in Sweden besides play tennis?

Is John McEnroe really an athlete? Could Bjorn Borg talk? Is Slobodan Zivojinovic a real name--or did the priest stutter?

Does tennis need the United States? Or are Boris Becker and Steffi Graf enough for it?

Arthur Ashe is worried.

Now, there never was much doubt about Arthur Ashe’s athleticism when he was playing. Arthur just might have belonged as much in a backcourt as in an ad court. Baseball lost a great infield prospect the day he picked up a racket instead of a glove.

He won two U.S. Opens and once at Wimbledon in a career that spanned two decades, and he got to balls so swiftly and invisibly that tour players called him “The Shadow.” The game always had him to beat to reach the final.

Ashe knows that his country is loaded with world-class athletes. He just wonders if tennis is getting any of them.

He has this dream in which he looks over a net and sees Michael Jordan or Larry Bird crouched for a serve instead of a free throw. He looks over the baseball lineup and he drools. Just think of Willie Mays serving, Ozzie Smith getting to shots, Magic Johnson standing at the net with all those arms. Would Wade Boggs ever hit one out? “Danny Ainge would be All-World,” Ashe says.

The schools are full of modern-day Donald Budges, Jack Kramers, Pancho Gonzaleses. Trouble is, Ashe mourns, they’re carrying footballs or baseballs. Or wearing track spikes, not tennis shoes.

Why should Sweden, with a population smaller than New York City’s, produce the best tennis players in the world while we produce only the nastiest?

Ashe winces. “We have never had a national program,” he says. “We have left it to the Perry T. Joneses and the rest of the dedicated individuals to promote tennis. It’s a tribute to the athletic talent available that they were able to do what they did--produce Davis Cups and Wimbledons and Forest Hills championships with little or no financial help.

“If Bjorn Borg was an American, his career might have died in his crib. If Martina (Navratilova) had been a natural-born American, would she be where she is today?

“A little country like Israel can give us lessons on the discovery and development of tennis talent.”

Why don’t American kids hit the tennis courts the way they hit the basketball courts, the ball diamonds, the football fields, even the golf courses?

Arthur sighs. “I had a tournament at Doral recently where 70% of the kids entered came from families where every income was over $65,000 a year. Most of them made a great deal more. In all cases, the families spent at least $10,000 a year on tennis. And most of these kids came from private schools.

“When the family chauffeur drops the kid off at a tennis court, how hungry is he, or she, going to be? How much drive are they going to have? These kids have other alternatives.

“It goes to physical conditioning. An Ivan Lendl wins on sheer talent but he also has the physical reserve to call on in the late sets. Do you see that dedication in our young players?”

There is a traditionally good tournament going on in Los Angeles at the moment, the Volvo/Los Angeles, the old Pacific Southwest, held now at the Los Angeles Tennis Center at UCLA. There’s only one thing wrong with it: Too many Americans.

That is paradoxical because most of what is wrong with the rest of tennis is that there are not enough Americans in it. But the Volvo’s problem is that it doesn’t have Lendl or Mats Wilander or Pat Cash.

It has the best American players, sub-John McEnroe, and its early rounds are really undistinguishable from Wimbledon’s or Flushing Meadow’s. The trouble is, the American players are second-echelon--if, indeed, we have a first echelon anymore. Nobody knows who they are. The tennis at UCLA is good. Stefan Edberg, who is No. 3 in the world, is on hand. For the rest, the identification is murky.

What’s to be done? Will tennis default in this country? Become a Continental sport like soccer or yodeling? Will the sport of Big Bill Tilden, Helen Wills Moody, Kramer, Budge and Gonzales become like polo? Will “Tennis, anyone?” become “Tennis, no one?”

Ashe thinks not. He hopes to found a team that will one day represent America the way the Boston Celtics do--or the Dallas Cowboys or New York Yankees could.

“Look, it’s an expensive sport,” he says. “The rackets costs $100, and you need at least three of them. Strings cost $30, you wear out a pair of shoes a month, the warm-up suit costs $200. It costs you $1,200 worth of equipment for a top junior event, exclusive of transportation.”

You are not likely to entice too many Michael Jordans off the blacktops at those prices but Arthur thinks the program he is national spokesman for, the Volvo Collegiate Series, can go a long way toward recruiting and supporting the type of talent to bring U.S. tennis to the forefront again.

“We have tried to muddle through too much in this country,” he says. “A survey a year and a half ago found that interest in tennis in this country is declining and that it will continue to decline unless something is done about it.

“That is the mandate. We know we have the horses in this country. The problem is to identify them and help them.”

There must be some great tennis players out there, is his point. There might even be some sportsmen who can accept the loss of a point like men and not scream and rant and hold their breath and give the game a reputation as one that is playable only by over-privileged crybabies and not grown-ups at all. What our game may really need is a few adults.