ARTHUR ASHE HAS A DREAM FOR TENNIS : He’d Like a Black to Be Next Star

If you have ever experienced them, you never forget incidents of racism, but somehow they seem to hit you harder when you’re a child.

Arthur Ashe, who helped to break the color barrier in professional tennis, still remembers an incident that happened 32 years ago as if it were yesterday.

Ashe, a tennis prodigy, was barred from an amateur tournament in his hometown because he was black.

“When I was 12, I was the best player in Richmond (Va.),” Ashe, 44, recalled. “But I couldn’t prove it. My coach decided that he was going to confirm it. We went to Bird Park, which was for whites only, where the USTA was holding its local tournament. The people knew who I was because I had built a reputation. But they said that I couldn’t play in the tournament because I was black.

“They weren’t mean or malicious. But you don’t forget something like that. My reaction was that I’d never let it happen again.”

And it never did.

Ashe, who is about as controversial as Bill Cosby, has spent much of his life trying to wipe out racism in sports.

He helped integrate tennis in South Africa in 1973, when he became the first black pro to be granted a visa to play there. But he had to stay in a private home because hotels weren’t open to blacks.

Ashe predated the anti-apartheid movement that has swept college campuses here in the 1980s. But like the late Dr. Martin Luther King, he took a quiet, peaceful approach to politics, although he was arrested in a protest outside the South African embassy in Washington three years ago.

And, like King, Ashe has a dream. He’d like to see an athlete as talented as Michael Jordan playing tennis.

“If I could write a scenario, the next Boris Becker would be an American minority player,” Ashe said.

And he’d like to see top athletes of any race consider tennis as a career.

Although tennis isn’t closed to blacks and other minorities, they often have a difficult time breaking into the sport because of the high cost of equipment and travel to tournaments.

“I’m sure Michael Jordan’s parents only had to buy him basketball shoes when he was growing up,” Ashe said. “But if you’re a tennis parent, you’re looking at $5,000 to $10,000 a year. Not too many people can afford that.”

When Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, blacks flowed into the sport. The same thing happened in football and basketball.

But there was no one to follow Ashe after he retired in 1980 because of heart problems.

“What we need is an American Yannick Noah,” Ashe said. “In many respects, I wasn’t a very good role model. We need someone who’s got flair and can play in-your-face tennis. And he should comport himself like Julius Erving.”

Ashe, who won at Wimbledon in 1975, upsetting top-ranked Jimmy Connors, was good, but he wasn’t flamboyant.

Ashe is disappointed that more blacks haven’t followed him into the game, and he’s trying to do something about it. He is the spokesman for a program designed to boost college tennis programs.

Ashe, who graduated from UCLA in 1966, said that college tennis is one of the best kept secrets in sports and that college tennis helped prepare him for the pro tour.

“I turned pro when I was 26, after I’d been to college and spent two years in the Army,” Ashe said. “I don’t know how I would have done if I’d turned pro at 19.”

Volvo, which has a $3-million commitment to the pro tennis tour, is pumping $700,000 into college tennis programs in an effort to improve the quality.

Included in the program are college tournaments, including a stop at UCLA next month.

The program is a result of a United States Tennis Assn. study. The USTA, governing body of the sport in this country, commissioned a panel earlier this year to study ways to improve the game. “This was a watershed move for the USTA,” Ashe said.

Among its recommendations were improving the quality of college tennis.

“We (the U.S.) used to dominate tennis,” Ashe said. “The rest of the world had not caught up to us. We relied on individual effort to produce good players. We’ve never had a national mandate. This is the closest we have come to that.”

The new program will benefit college tennis programs all over the country, Ashe said, adding that he made sure small all-black colleges were included in the program.

“Some parts of the program will be immediately successful and some parts won’t,” he said. “But basically the goal is to make college tennis tougher than it is now.

“All the colleges will get more publicity. The Division I schools will get updated computer rankings every week during the spring semester, when the dual meets begin.

“I don’t think the yardstick will be the number of pros who come out of the system. It will provide players with an assessment of how good they are so that they can realistically decide whether they should turn pro.”

Ashe thinks that too many young tennis players, lured by the big money on the pro tour, are passing up college tennis and turning pro before they’re ready.

He’d like to see them earn a degree before hitting the pro circuit.

“We’re only as strong as our weakest link,” Ashe said. “We’ve never had a second level to take care of kids after they get that first series of tennis lessons at the park. The other level is the college game.”

In many ways, tennis players who leave college aren’t ready for the demands of the pro tour, he said.

“There are 30,000 college tennis players and maybe only a dozen or so turn pro,” Ashe said. “But they don’t have to be No. 1 to make a good living. They can make good money by just being in the top 100.

“We’ve created a situation where the incentive to improve is not great.”

Ashe said the system also is at least partly to blame for the current crop of tennis players who rant and rave on the court when faced with questionable calls.

“It’s difficult to maintain a sense of perspective when you walk on the court wearing $1,000 worth of tennis clothes and they didn’t cost you a dime,” Ashe said. “After a while, a player may start thinking that he or she is entitled to all this. The system has coddled the players and made them self-centered.”

Tennis players form their bad habits at an early age, Ashe said.

“When a player is 12-14 they’re local hotshots, and that continues until they’re 16-18. Then they go on the pro tour and nobody gives a . . . ,” Ashe said. People are rooting for them to lose. This is a zero sum game because there’s only room at the top for 100 players.”

Ashe was about to get into his white Cadillac limousine after an interview when the hotel doorman stopped him.

“Gee, it’s Arthur Ashe,” the doorman said. “You look as good as you did when you won Wimbledon. You sure look good.”

Although he has been off the pro tour since 1980, Ashe at 6 feet 1 inch and 155 pounds, still looks fit. He works out regularly, riding a stationary bicycle or walking in New York, where he lives with his wife, Jeanne Moutoussamy, a photographer, and their daughter.

Ashe doesn’t miss playing tennis. In fact, he said, he hasn’t picked up a racket since heart problems prompted him to retire in 1980.

“If you play every day for 30 years, you don’t miss it.” he said.

But Ashe isn’t lazy.

In fact, he’s busier than ever. He serves on the national advisory staff for Head rackets and works for a sportswear company. He’s the tennis director for the Doral Country Club in Miami, and he also serves on the board of directors for a national insurance company.

Ashe hasn’t vanished from the tennis circuit either.

He writes tennis columns for the Washington Post during grand slam events and he also serves as a commentator for ABC and the HBO cable TV network.

Ashe’s biggest project, however, was his third book, “A Hard Road To Glory,” a history of black athletes in America. Ashe said that the book, due out in February, was a six-year project. It consists of three volumes, a 1,600 page-long set of records.

“It has anything you’d want to know about black athletes,” Ashe said. “For example, we have a list of every black baseball player who has ever played in the majors and the old Negro leagues.”

Ashe also compiled a list of black All-Americans in every collegiate sport at every school in the nation.

Ashe said he is not jealous of tennis players making big money today.

“I made a lot of money,” he said. “I did extremely well. Certainly no more than a dozen players on the tour make more money than I do now and I haven’t played tennis in seven years.”

Ashe slowed down after his heart attack and two open heart operations and said that his heart problems might have helped him to grow as a person.

Ashe didn’t smoke, drink or use drugs and he was in relatively good shape when he had his heart attack in 1979. There was a history of heart trouble in his family, though.

“Three months after the first operation, I could do anything,” Ashe said. “I never felt a thing. Then one day when I was in Egypt, I had just finished climbing the pyramids and I was getting ready to go for a run and I felt angina. I knew what it was immediately.”

His outlook on life changed as a result of his heart problems.

“For some people, the future is next year,” Ashe said. “But for me it’s this afternoon.”