Ashe, Arthur

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    Serena and Venus Williams, Before They Were Champions

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    A wowed Arthur Ashe invited a reporter to watch the Williams sisters. “Wait until you see them play,” he said. They were 10 and 11.Serena Williams announced this month that she will retire sometime after the United States Open. But 30 years ago, the player now considered one of the greatest ever to grace the sport, was merely one half of a promising duo.In April 1992, Arthur Ashe, the three-time major champion and a longtime friend and colleague, invited me to Philadelphia. He wanted to show me something.Arthur and I had worked together for HBO at Wimbledon for several years, and I had interviewed him many times for the magazine, World Tennis.As soon as I arrived at the Arthur Ashe Youth Tennis Center for an exhibition and fund-raising dinner, Arthur took me aside and said, “There are two little Black girls here and wait until you see them play. They’re sisters, their names are Venus and Serena Williams, and they’re from Compton, California. Oh, and they’re only 11 and 10 years old.”That would be the first time I saw the Williams sisters play. Their story had already brought a bit of attention as the girls were top-ranked in Southern California junior tennis.Richard Williams at Serena Williams’ practice during the 2009 French Open.Ryan Pierse/Getty ImagesTheir accomplishments would go on to enthrall tennis fans for the next 30 years, through 23 major championships for Serena and seven for Venus. Even their prescient father, Richard, who reared them to be superstars, predicted they would quit the game in their 20s. For Serena, he was off by two decades. Venus is still playing.But on that afternoon, Arthur, eschewing his typical quiet dignity, had a huge grin on his face as he watched the sisters swat at balls fed by their father in front of dozens of fascinated spectators. They both wore crisp new Reebok outfits and had big white beads woven through the cornrow braids that cascaded down the backs of their necks.Venus had arms and legs that could move in impossible directions. When she propelled her almost six-foot frame toward the net, which she did more than any other 11-year-old I had ever seen, she looked more like a hurdler than a tennis player.Serena, then nearly a foot shorter than Venus, had neither the length nor the finesse of her sister. But boy, could she whack the ball. Sometimes it landed in the court. Serena also had a more pensive on-court presence, as if she had something to prove.I recall being impressed by their on-court bravado, but unsure whether they truly had the goods to be top professionals.When I had a chance to chat with their father, he told me that Serena was the better athlete and would, one day, be the better player. It was a refrain he would repeat many times over the years. He also told me that both girls would be ranked No. 1 and No. 2 in the world. (Ten years later, they were in fact the two top-ranked players in the WTA rankings.) The girls said very little, opting instead to hide behind their dad’s imposing persona.Serena Williams with her father, Richard Williams, and sister, Venus Williams, after winning Wimbledon in 2012.Mike Egerton/PA Images, via Getty ImagesSuddenly, Richard turned to face Arthur. He wanted to assure Arthur that no matter how successful his daughters became in tennis they would never abandon their schooling. That clearly pleased Arthur.Two weeks earlier, Arthur had announced that he had AIDS. He died 10 months later at age 49 and did not live to see the sisters dominate his sport. It would be another seven years before 17-year-old Serena won her first U.S. Open. A year later, Venus captured the 2000 Wimbledon and U.S. Open titles.I have now known Serena for a little more than 30 years. I have praised her, and I have sparred with her as a reporter. I have criticized her behavior toward officials and opponents. But I have also marveled at her fierce determination and her extraordinary ability to hit a 120-mile-an-hour ace out wide when down match point.I wish, on that day in 1992, that I had been wise enough to know where Serena was headed. But on second thought, I’m glad it’s been a big surprise.Cindy Shmerler is a former managing editor of World Tennis magazine. She will be covering her 43rd consecutive U.S. Open. More

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      Wimbledon Needs More Arthur Ashe Moments, On and Off the Court

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      Nick Kyrgios and Ons Jabeur brought a fresh diversity to the men’s and women’s singles finals.WIMBLEDON, England — For the first time in nearly a half-century, a weekend at Wimbledon felt, and looked, different.Nick Kyrgios and Ons Jabeur brought a fresh diversity to the men’s and women’s singles finals. Jabeur, of Tunisia, became the first North African player to make it to a singles final. Kyrgios, an Australian with Malaysian roots and a well-documented swagger that marks him as something wholly different from his peers, was playing in his first Grand Slam final. Jabeur and Kyrgios each ended up losing, but that is beside the point.Not since 1975, when Arthur Ashe and Evonne Goolagong made it to their finals, had both championship matches combined to be as diverse. Tennis evolves in fits and starts, and nowhere does that feel more true than at Wimbledon.To look at the Centre Court crowd these past two weeks was to see how hard change is to pull off, especially when it comes to race.In the stands, an all-too-familiar homogeneity. Aside from a dappling of color here and there, a sea of whiteness. To me, a Black guy who played the game in the minor leagues and always hopes to see it move past its old ways — to see a lack of color always feels like a gut punch, particularly at Wimbledon in London.After Saturday’s women’s final, I stood beside a pillar near one of the Centre Court exits. Hundreds walked by. Then a few thousand. I counted roughly a dozen Black faces. This grand event plays out in one of the most diverse metropolises in the world, a hub for immigrants from across the globe. You wouldn’t know that by looking at the spectators. There were some Asian faces. A few Muslims in hijabs. The Sikh community is huge in London. I saw only one of the traditional Sikh turbans at the court.When I pulled a few of the Black fans aside and asked them if they felt aware of how rare they were in the crowd, the reply was always as swift as a Jabeur forehand volley or a Kyrgios serve. “How could I not?” said James Smith, a London resident. “I saw a guy in a section just above me. We smiled at each other. I don’t know the man, but there was a bond. We knew we were few and far between.”The fans see it.And the players, too.“I definitely notice,” said Coco Gauff, the American teen star, when we spoke last week. She said she is so focused when she plays that she barely notices the crowd. But afterward, when she looks at photographs of herself at Wimbledon, the images startle. “Not a lot of Black faces in the crowd.”Gauff compared Wimbledon with the U.S. Open, which has a more down-to-earth feel, like the world’s greatest public parks tournament, and a far more varied crowd.“It’s definitely weird here because London is supposed to be such a big melting pot,” Gauff added, pondering for a while, wondering why.Going to Wimbledon, like going to big-time sporting events across North America and far beyond, requires a massive commitment. Tried and traditional Wimbledon pushes that commitment to its limits. You can’t go online to buy tickets. There’s a lottery system for many of the seats. Some fans line up in a nearby park, camping overnight to attend. The cost isn’t exactly cheap.“They say it is open for all, but the ticket system is designed with so many hurdles that it’s almost as if it’s meant to exclude people of a certain persuasion,” said Densel Frith, a Black building contractor who lives in London.He told me he’d paid about 100 pounds for his ticket, about $120. That’s a lot of money for a guy who described himself as strictly blue collar. “Not coming back tomorrow,” he added. “Who can afford that? People from our community cannot afford that. No way. No way. No way.”There’s more to it than access and cost. Something deeper. The prestige and tradition of Wimbledon are its greatest assets, and an Achilles’ heel. The place feels wonderful — tennis in an English garden is not hyperbole — but also stuffy and stodgy and stuck on itself.“Think about what Wimbledon represents for so many of us,” said Lorraine Sebata, 38, who grew up in Zimbabwe and now lives in London.“To us it represents the system,” she added. “The colonial system. The hierarchy” that still sits at the foundation of English society. You look at the royal box, as white as the Victorian era all-white dress code at this tournament, and you cannot miss it.Sebata described herself as a passionate fan. She has loved tennis since the days of Pete Sampras, though she does not play. Her friend Dianah Kazazi, a social worker who came to England from Uganda and the Netherlands, has an equal passion for the game. As we spoke, they looked around — up and down a corridor just outside the majestic, ivy-lined Centre Court — and could not find anyone who appeared to have the African heritage they shared. They said they had many Black friends who enjoyed tennis but did not feel they could be a part of Wimbledon, situated in a luxurious suburb that feels exclusive and so far from the everyday.“There is an establishment and a history behind this tournament that keeps things status quo,” Kazazi said. “You have to step outside of the box as a fan to get around that.” She continued: “It is the history that appeals to us as fans, but that history says something to people who don’t feel comfortable to come.” For many people of color in England, tennis is simply not seen as “something for us.”I understood. I know exactly where these fans were coming from. I felt their dismay and bitterness and doubt about whether things would change. Honesty, it hurt.Maybe it helps to know what Wimbledon means to me.I get goose bumps whenever I enter the gates, off leafy, two-lane Church Road. On July 5, 1975, when Arthur Ashe defeated Jimmy Connors, becoming the first Black man to win the Wimbledon singles title and the only Black man to win a Grand Slam tournament title except Yannick Noah at the French Open in 1983, I was a 9-year-old whose sports love was the Seattle SuperSonics.Seeing Ashe with his graceful game and keen intelligence, his Afro and skin that looked like mine, persuaded me to make tennis my sport.Wimbledon didn’t alter the trajectory of my life, but it did change the direction.I became a nationally ranked junior and collegiate player. I spent a little over a year in the minor leagues of the professional game, reaching No. 448 on the ATP rankings list. Nonwhite players were nearly as rare in my time as in Arthur’s.Today, as we just witnessed this weekend, there is a budding new crop of talent. Serena and Venus Williams combine as their North Star. And yet there’s a lot of work to be done. Not only on the court, but in drawing fans to the game and getting them into the stands at a monument to tennis like Wimbledon. A whole lot of work that will take a whole lot of time. More

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      Where Have You Gone, Arthur Ashe? LIV Tour Golfers Need You.

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      Our columnist asks whether players who have defected to the Saudi-financed golf series will use their platform to bring awareness to human rights violations. Don’t hold your breath.Maybe some good for the world can come out of the lavish new golf tour backed by Saudi Arabia, among the most repressive governments in the world in the eyes of human rights groups.Maybe Greg Norman will use his perch to speak loudly about the Saudi’s crackdown on dissent.Maybe Dustin Johnson will challenge the Saudis to create an open justice system that follows the rule of law.Maybe Phil Mickelson will stand at a podium and demand the Saudis give a full accounting of what happened to Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist brutally murdered by henchmen on orders, the Central Intelligence Agency has said, from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Yes, the same Prince Mohammed now using the LIV Golf series to distract from the truth about his homeland.Don’t hold your breath. None of the golfers who signed on to the LIV tour in exchange for staggering sums will speak up. They are too spineless and too compromised, working as they do for a tour funded by a government that tramples human rights.Sure, in February, Mickelson had to turn tail and hide after admitting to the journalist Alan Shipnuck that the tour he was about to join was funded by “less than savory individuals.” And yes, in a wince-worthy news conference last week, Mickelson hailed LIV Golf in one breath and then, in another, said he did not condone “human rights violations.”But Mickelson wasn’t about to take the risk of saying anything specific or truly challenging. He went for the one-inch putt and moved on. Don’t expect any of these golfers, or the others who have decided to jump aboard despite banishment from the PGA Tour, to use their fame as a bullhorn and their newfound ties to Saudi Arabia to effect change on the international stage.If you want a potent example of someone who did that, look up Arthur Ashe, his controversial visits to play in apartheid-era South Africa in the 1970s, and how he used his celebrity and gravitas to shame the racist regime while playing the South African Open.There were plenty of activists who disagreed with Ashe’s decision to visit a country where the Black majority lived under the boot of racist whites. But right or wrong, he went, believing engagement would bring more reform than cutting South Africa off. He took with him the guts to confront power — right up until 1977, when he realized real change was not happening and vowed to never play again while the nation was ruled by apartheid.The tennis star Arthur Ashe during hearings of the General Assembly’s Special Committee on Apartheid in 1970.As a frustrated Ashe wrote at the time: “What good is it, the grand scheme of human rights and dignity, to say to a Black South African, ‘You can run in this track meet,’ when he still can’t vote, own a home, make a decent living, attend a school, change his residence without government permission or even walk the streets without carrying that loathsome pass?”After Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, he was asked if he wanted to meet anybody in the United States. His response: How about Arthur Ashe?What matters most is that Ashe tried to make change. He spoke up. He made demands. He took an American news crew to South Africa to document what was really going on. These golfers won’t do anything close. They seem bent on silence while making a fortune stained by blood.Fattening their already fattened wallets is the only concern. And in this regard, they appear to have made a prudent decision. Their rogue tour promises to host the richest tournaments in golf history. Mickelson is reportedly making $200 million to play in the LIV Golf series. Johnson is said to be earning $150 million, no matter how he fares.The tour’s inaugural event, held in London, ended Saturday. Five events will be held in the United States this year. The South African Charl Schwartzel, 37, whose career peaked with a win at the Masters in 2011, finished first in both the individual and team competitions in the opening event, and took home $4.75 million.In a news conference after the tournament, he deflected criticism of the Saudi-backed windfall, saying “where the money comes from” is not something he has ever considered in his career.There are 4.75 million reasons he won’t start now.“I think if I start digging everywhere where we played,” he added, “you could find fault in anything.”Ah, the all-too-typical response. Imagine Ashe saying the same thing when visiting Schwartzel’s homeland at the height of its racist depravity. Cynics claim no one has the high ground, so it makes little sense to mix sports with politics and human rights — as, for instance, Wimbledon did this year when it barred Russian and Belarusian players because of their nations’ war against Ukraine.A Quick Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 6A new series. More

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      A Trip to the U.S. Open Forever Changed Me

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      A father-son tournament gave our columnist almost unfettered access to players at the 1983 U.S. Open, changing the course of his life.There slouched John McEnroe, the top-ranked tennis player in the world, dolefully reading a newspaper in a corner of the locker room.There stood Ivan Lendl, the second-best player in the world, only a few feet from me in the cramped quarters. In a few hours, he would be on center court, but now he talked to another player about golf.I took it all in, a fly on the wall amid tennis royalty. Mats Wilander ambled by. I could hear Jimmy Connors telling his ribald jokes.Was this really happening? Was 16-year-old me in the locker room at the United States Open of 1983? Even today, I pinch myself when I think of it.That year, my dad and I made up a doubles team representing the Pacific Northwest in the father and son division of the Equitable Family Tennis Challenge. We had flown to New York, all expenses paid, to compete against amateur tandems from across the county in the popular tournament. Its championship rounds were held at Flushing Meadows, smack in the middle of America’s tennis grand slam.Kurt Streeter and his father, Mel Streeter, after the Equitable event in 1983.Courtesy Kurt StreeterEver since, the U.S. Open has been special to me in a way I feel down to the marrow. Without it, I would be a different person. And I would not have a cherished memory with my late father.What a different time that was. In 1983, total prize money for the male and female pros stood at $1 million. Fans and players mingled on the grounds. Entering through the gates, nobody checked your bags.As part of the Equitable event, teams of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives and siblings played matches on the same courts where the pros played. We had passes that let us into the locker room, right there with the best players in the world.During the Open’s second week, after playing a match in our little tournament where the big prize was a silver plaque, I showered next to a small clutch of pros in the shower room. There I was — soaping up in the buff — when one of the pros walked in to take his shower. It was France’s Yannick Noah, my favorite player, who had slashed his way to victory at the French Open that summer, becoming the first Black player to win a Grand Slam tournament championship since Arthur Ashe won Wimbledon in 1975.Noah kindly asked about me in his accented English. I explained that I was a nationally ranked junior, one of the few Black players at that level in the United States, and told him about the Equitable tournament. I asked if he was ready for his next big match that night in the quarterfinals. He said he could not wait.“I hope you and your father are there,” he added before wishing us luck.When our columnist met Yannick Noah at the 1983 U.S. Open, Noah had just won that year’s French Open, becoming the first Black player to win a Grand Slam championship since Arthur Ashe won Wimbledon in 1975. Focus on Sport/Getty ImagesAs great and lucky as they were, those rare moments in the locker room were not what sticks with me most about that Open. What sticks out are encounters with two other tennis luminaries. Encounters that changed my life.One afternoon on the Flushing grounds, I spotted Nick Bollettieri, the former Army paratrooper turned supercoach whose Florida tennis academy produced many of the world’s best young players.I sidled up to Bollettieri. I asked about his academy, and told him I dreamed of attending one day but that my family, struggling after my parents divorced and dad’s small business faltered, could not afford the extremely steep price. Luckily, one of Bollettieri’s assistant coaches was nearby. The assistant said he had seen me put up a good fight against one of the top seeds at the boys’ 16-and-under nationals in Kalamazoo, Mich. I needed polish, the assistant said, but I had game.Bollettieri thought for a moment, then he motioned for me to come closer. “Find Arthur,” he instructed, “and ask if he will help.” Bollettieri meant Arthur Ashe, whose Wimbledon win had sparked my tennis ambition. The two had teamed up to help other minority players attend the academy.If Arthur would fund part of it, Bollettieri said he would also help.I ended up asking my father to find Ashe and broach Bollettieri’s idea. It seemed too daunting a task for me to pull off. But dad always pushed me, always looked for ways to help me stand on my own two feet. He had taught himself tennis after his college basketball career ended, and pretty much insisted I learn tennis too. Now he told me it was my job, and mine alone, to make the pitch.So began my search for Arthur Ashe. I was not usually this gutsy, but I waited for him to finish a news conference near center court at the old Louis Armstrong Stadium. When he finished, I tepidly approached.I can still feel Ashe’s welcoming handshake, still sense his patience as he listened carefully to what I had to say. I remember him promising to see what he could do to help.Arthur Ashe after winning the U.S. Open in 1968. He was the first Black male player to win a Grand Slam tournament.Authenticated News/Getty ImagesThe next day, as my father and I played one of our matches on the Flushing grounds, Ashe stopped by to watch a few points.At first, I was so nervous that I clunked a few easy returns. But when it was time to unleash my one true weapon, a left-handed serve I could blast like a fastball or bend in a spinning arc, I cranked it up.Ace. Ace. Winner.My dad and I did not win the tournament, but we won that match. And Ashe knew I was for real.A few months later, at home in Seattle, I received a phone call. “Hello, Kurt,” said the voice on the other end, “this is Arthur Ashe.”He had struck a deal with Bollettieri to help pay for my stay at the Florida academy. I went there for the last semester of my senior year in high school. The place swarmed with tennis talent. My first bunkmate? Andre Agassi.Fate holds a mysterious sway in our lives. If I had not been at the U.S. Open that year, I would not have ended up at Bollettieri’s academy.If I had not attended the academy, I would not have had the confidence to attend the University of California, Berkeley, a perennial collegiate tennis power and the university that shaped my adult life. At Cal, I played my way from lowly recruit to a full scholarship and became the first African American to captain the men’s tennis team.Fate has its way with us all.My brother Jon and I ended up treating dad to a trip to New York for the 2004 U.S. Open, our first time back since the Equitable tournament.It was there that I noticed he was sick. He struggled for breath and had lost not just a step but also a measure of his mental sharpness. On one sweltering afternoon, he wandered off and got lost.Not too long after that, my father lay in a hospice. He was dying of amyloidosis, a blood disorder that attacked his brain, lungs and heart.As he struggled for life, we often held hands. I searched for any trace of his familiar, comforting strength. When he summoned the energy to talk, sports was the cord that once again bound us together.We spoke of memories. We recalled our shared love for the Seattle Sonics and Roger Federer, and all the beautiful years we spent together playing tennis from the time I was a toddler.“We’ll always have the Open,” he told me, gripping my hand firmly.Yes, I assured, we always will. More