By Lindsay Ash
THERE is a sign that hangs above the entrance to Centre Court at Wimbledon, or the All England Club to give it the correct title. It’s the words of Kipling and says: “If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” The words came back to me on the Saturday of the Third Round of the FA Cup when Macclesfield Town beat Crystal Palace, the holders of the competition, who in less than a year had gone from triumph (much to the delight of the majority of the nation) when they toppled mighty Manchester City in the final at Wembley, to a laughing stock, ironically much to the delight of much of the nation. In fairness to Palace their supporters and manager did behave in a manner befitting Kipling when others may not have… making no excuses and praising Macclesfield for their efforts.
What it did spark though in pubs up and down the land was discussion as to whether or not this was the biggest upset ever, and while we started with the FA Cup and other football events such as Hereford beating Newcastle and Leicester winning the Premier league, this soon strayed with my group to other sports, covering events such as Cassius Clay, as he was then, beating Sonny Liston, Foinavon winning the National, Botham rescuing England at Headingley at odds of 500-1 and even Churchill losing the general election after the war.
However, the upset I’m going to mention here involves tennis, partly because it has a fascinating back story, partly because no one remembers it and partly because I was there. The event was the 1975 Men’s Singles Final at the aforementioned Centre Court between one James Scott Connors and Arthur Ashe (no relation, as we dropped an E …little narcotics gag for you). They were two players from different eras. Ashe by then was 32 years old and Connors was roughly ten years his junior. Ashe belonged to the old guard of Laver, Rosewall and Newcombe, whereas Connors was brash and played a different brand of tennis, blitzing players off court with raw power. It was a changing of the guard and Connors had destroyed Kenny Rosewall in the 1974 final with a display that, had it been boxing, the match would have been stopped. Ashe had played Connors on six occasions prior to the 1975 final and lost all six. Very few gave him a chance. However, Ashe had worked out a tactical plan which largely involved depriving Connors of the pace he thrived on… in tennis parlance he “slow balled him”.
It worked a treat, with Ashe triumphing in four sets and the old guard showed there was still life in it before it made way for Connors, Borg and McEnroe.
Arthur Ashe had become the first black man to win Wimbledon and, to this day, remains the only one to do so. His route to achieving this was a remarkable one. He was born in Richmond, Virginia, and his mother died when he was only six. He was brought up by his father, who was a caretaker for the recreation department and they lived in a cottage in the grounds of Brookfield Park, which was (hard as it is to believe today) a “blacks only” park under the racial segregation that existed in the US at the time. Within it were four tennis courts where he played and was spotted by the marvellously named Ron Charity. Mr Charity was a part-time tennis coach and he taught Ashe the basics of the game, bringing him to the attention of Robert Johnson, of the American Tennis Association, who not only coached him but taught him the etiquette of the game and, interestingly, taught him to return every out ball that landed within 2 inches of the line so he couldn’t be accused of cheating.
He won a tennis scholarship to UCLA and got to practise with one of the legends of the game (his hero Pancho Gonzales) before serving in the US Army, where he achieved the rank of Second-Lieutenant and was assigned to West Point Military Academy, the US equivalent of Sandhurst – quite a leap from Brookfield Park.
In 1968, he won the US Open and helped the US Davis Cup team win the trophy, beating Australia. Unfortunately, that year also brought his sadness when the South Africans refused him a visa to play there, not the first time of course he had encountered discrimination and he remained a fervent opponent of South African participation in sport, although he would apply for a visa for several years and never opposed South African individuals such as Bob Hewitt and Frew McMillan from participating on tour. It may be that it was this experience that caused him to become politically active in tennis, supporting the founding of the Association of Tennis Professionals and later becoming its elected president.
Unfortunately, a few years after his Wimbledon triumph he suffered a heart attack and needed a quadruple bypass operation. It was the first of several operations he had over the coming years and during one of these it is believed he contracted HIV from blood transfusions and he subsequently formed the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the defeat of Aids. Sadly, in 1993, it was Aids-related pneumonia that killed him at the age of 59.
Jimmy Connors went on to become one of the legends of tennis, winning Wimbledon in 1982, the US Open five times and his record of 109 ATP singles titles still stands to this day. He didn’t retire until 1996.
I’ll leave you with a lovely quote from Arthur Ashe that perhaps we can all take on board: “If I was to say ‘God, why me?’ about the bad things, then I should have said ‘God, why me?’ about the good things that happened in my life.”
Lindsay Ash was Deputy for St Clement between 2018 and 2022, serving as Assistant Treasury and Home Affairs Minister under Chief Minister John Le Fondré. He worked in the City of London for 15 years as a futures broker before moving to Jersey and working in the Island’s finance industry from 2000.
Feedback welcome on Twitter @Getonthelash2
