Rex Miller and Sam Pollard (2021)

Sam Pollard is well known for cinema and television documentaries about major Black figures in American public life, most recently MLK/FBI (2020).  Rex Miller, the less famous co-director of Citizen Ashe, was there (in Pollard’s absence) to introduce this London Film Festival screening.  It was clear from the little Miller said beforehand (I didn’t stay for the post-screening Q&A) that he’s a tennis fan; the film’s account of Arthur Ashe is a pretty good balance between sport-star biography and portrait of a social and political activist.  Citizen Ashe isn’t formally inventive or imaginative but it’s an intelligently admiring commemoration of a true hero.

I remember first becoming aware of Arthur Ashe at Wimbledon in 1968 – the first Wimbledon of the Open Era – where he reached the semi-finals, losing in straight sets to the top seed and eventual champion, Rod Laver.  (The match is briefly dealt with in Citizen Ashe.)  I was only twelve but recall being struck by how different Ashe was, and not just in skin colour.  In television interviews – fewer in those days but they still happened – he was super-articulate:  he sounded brainier than sportsmen usually did.  This wasn’t a mistaken impression.  Miller and Pollard are greatly helped by an abundance of interview footage, during and after Ashe’s playing career, on which to draw.  His verbal fluency and command, not least the effortless avoidance of sporting cliché, is even more striking now.

Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1943, Ashe, with his brother Johnnie (whom Miller and Pollard also interview), was raised by their widowed father, a park-keeper whose duties included looking after the tennis courts.  Arthur’s talent was spotted early:  in the late 1950s, he became the first African American to compete in the Maryland boys’ championship; by the time he was awarded a tennis scholarship to UCLA in 1963, he’d become the first Black winner of the National Junior Indoor tennis title.  After graduating with a degree in business administration, he joined the US Army in 1966 and became a commissioned officer, based at West Point.  He was still an army lieutenant when he won the inaugural US Open in 1968; he was discharged from service in early 1969 to pursue a full-time professional tennis career.  The clips of Ashe interviews – a mixture of contemporary and retrospective – convey well the gradual growth of his political consciousness over the course of his military service, at the dawn of Open tennis.

For those of us who followed the sport closely in the late 1960s and the 1970s, there are niggles in Citizen Ashe.  A good amount of screen time is devoted to the Wimbledon final of 1975, in which Ashe’s tactical astuteness undid the power game of defending champion and hot favourite Jimmy Connors.   To the astonishment of nearly everyone (Connors included), Ashe won the first two sets 6-1 6-1.  It seemed too good to be true and it was.  As a voiceover in Citizen Ashe says, ‘Then Connors began to fight back’.  But the rally used to illustrate this initial turning of the tide took place – as the Wimbledon scoreboard makes clear – when Connors had already taken the third set 7-5 and was a break of serve up in the fourth.  (Ashe quickly broke back, broke again two service games later, and served out to win the fourth set 6-4 and the championship, so becoming the first Black winner of the Wimbledon Men’s Singles.)

Viewers who don’t care about sporting historical accuracy to this level of detail will see this as hair-splitting.  I admit they’re not entirely wrong but another instance of the film-makers’ occasional tendency to sacrifice chronological correctness in favour of visual rhythm or instant impact (or both) is more significant.  In a clip in which Ashe talks about preparing for the US Open in 1968, he says, ‘There was a lot going on’.  An understatement:  there’s coverage of and comment on, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in the first half of the year.  But Miller and Pollard’s montage of what was ‘going on’ includes shots of the Black Power salute on the Olympic medal podium in Mexico City.  The Olympics were held in October 1968, a month after the US Open that Ashe won.  Given his acute political awareness and the intense media interest, in the build-up to the US Open, in his colour as well as his tennis prowess, what Tommie Smith and John Carlos did in the Olympic stadium would have been for Ashe an unignorable issue if it really had happened in advance of Forest Hills.  It can’t be argued that these inaccuracies matter more than the film’s account of his exceptionally difficult later life.  Citizen Ashe would be better without them, even so.

The heart disease that Ashe developed in his mid-thirties not only abruptly ended his life on the tennis court but also led to the illness that killed him.  It’s believed he contracted the AIDS virus from blood transfusions received during heart surgery in 1983:  he died ten years later, a few months before his fiftieth birthday.  As a high-profile sportsman, Ashe spoke out against social and racial inequality within and beyond the tennis world.  Following his second heart bypass operation, he became a notably active campaign chair for the American Heart Association.  He was reluctant to go public on his AIDS diagnosis:  after eventually doing so, he set up the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of Aids, and addressed the UN General Assembly on the need for increased AIDS awareness and research funding.

Citizen Ashe includes an excerpt from an interview late in his tragically short life in which Ashe depreciates the importance of his sporting achievements.  That view is very understandable:  he hadn’t played tennis for more than a decade and had taken on greater challenges in the meantime.  But he’s so extraordinary a figure in the history of his sport that I wish Citizen Ashe had taken a bit more time to describe his career.  It’s fair enough for Miller and Pollard to major on Ashe’s US Open and Wimbledon wins but there’s not even a mention of his intervening third Grand Slam, the Australian in 1970.  Half a century on, he remains the only Black male to have won any of those three championships (the only other Black winner of a men’s Grand Slam is Yannick Noah, the French champion in 1983).

The film unsurprisingly links the public positions that Ashe took with the ‘speaking out’ of more recent tennis champions of colour, on the women’s side of the game.  It seems relatively easy, though, for Serena Williams to assert that ‘The day I stop fighting for equality is the day I’ll die’ or for Naomi Osaka to wear a T-shirt bearing the names of Black American victims of white American police violence – compared with what Ashe dared to do when, for example, he played in apartheid-era South Africa.   There’s a brief appearance late in Citizen Ashe by Barack Obama, who singles out Muhammad Ali and Ashe as the two African-American men who most impressed him in his politically formative years.  Seeing Obama naturally makes you wonder if Ashe’s intellect and articulacy might have taken him into a successful political career if he’d chosen to go in that direction.

As it was, he showed himself a skilled politician within his own sporting sphere, as well as a player whose conduct on the court was exemplary.  As non-playing captain of the US Davis Cup team, Ashe did a remarkable job of handling John McEnroe.  The latter is one of Miller and Pollard’s talking heads:  despite his admiration for Ashe, it’s vexing to listen to McEnroe – even more vexing to hear people in the audience for this screening chuckle at clips of his you-cannot-be-serious routine at Wimbledon, and so on.  It’s poignantly instructive, however, when Arthur Ashe talks about McEnroe.  Ashe admits that the deplorable court conduct both annoyed him and made him envious of a young white man’s ‘emotional freedom’ to misbehave.  This incisive candour at least stopped the laughter in NFT2.

11 October 2021