NEW YORK — On the second of two occasions when he had the privilege of a conversation with Arthur Ashe, MaliVai Washington, having just become the country’s No. 1 college player as a Michigan sophomore in 1989, happened to mention that he was thinking of turning pro.
Ashe did not exactly tell him what he wanted to hear. “I don’t think he thought it was a very good idea,” Washington said.
Ashe won the first U.S. Open at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, 50 years ago to the day of Sunday’s men’s final, to be played in a stadium named for him. He also won the 1970 Australian Open and a third and final major in 1975 at Wimbledon.
After all these years there are the formidable but not mutually exclusive legacies of Ashe: as the only African-American man to win a Grand Slam tournament and as a venerated humanitarian. Washington came tantalizingly close to living up to the former and has found a contextual purpose in the latter.
Washington, who made it to the Wimbledon final in 1996, can recall some self-imposed pressure to hoist the trophy Ashe had claimed there 21 years earlier because “when you’re the No. 1 black player, you feel a sense of responsibility.”
That said, Washington was admittedly more focused on the biggest payday of his career, potential lifetime membership in the All England Club and a permanent engraving on its champions wall.
“I’m honestly not thinking then that much about history and social issues, about how this is going to impact on America, what impact is it going to have on kids,” he said of the final, which he lost to Richard Krajicek of the Netherlands in straight sets. “But at 35, 45, OK, I can think more intelligently about it and understand the impact.”
Washington is now 49, the age at which Ashe died in 1993 of AIDS after getting HIV through a blood transfusion. Family life in northern Florida is good for Washington, with a wife, two teenage children, a real estate business and an eponymous foundation in an impoverished area of Jacksonville that for 22 years has provided a tennis introduction for children unlikely to find a private pathway into the sport.
Washington’s program is affiliated with the National Junior Tennis League, which Ashe co-founded in 1969 to promote discipline and character through tennis among under-resourced youth. If, in the process, another Ashe happened to emerge, so much the better. But that was not the primary function, or point.
“We’re not a pathway to pro tennis by any stretch of the imagination,” Washington said. “At my foundation, we don’t have that ability, that capacity, never had an interest in going in that direction. We highly encourage kids to play on their high school team, go on to play or try out for their college team.
“But our biggest bang for our buck is teaching life skills. Stay in our program, and you’ll have a focus on high school education, be on a good track when you leave high school. You’re not going to leave high school with a criminal record, or with a son or daughter.”
Why there was no African-American male Grand Slam champion successor to Ashe in the years soon after his trailblazing is no great mystery, Washington said.
Fifty years ago, tennis was largely the province of the wealthy and white, lacking a foundational structure to facilitate such an occurrence. Which doesn’t mean that Ashe didn’t influence the rise of a Yannick Noah, the French Grand Slam champion whom Ashe himself discovered in Cameroon. Or the likes of Richard Williams and Oracene Price, whose parental vision birthed the careers of Venus and Serena Williams. They have been followed by a raft of African-American female players, including the 2017 U.S. Open women’s champion, Sloane Stephens, and the runner-up, Madison Keys.
This year’s women’s final featured Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, a half-Japanese, half-Haitian player whose father used the Williams family as a model for his own daughters’ tennis ambitions.
Looming over the lack of an African-American Grand Slam successor to Ashe is the vexing question of why the United States hasn’t produced a male champion since Andy Roddick won his only major title in New York in 2003. That most of the men’s titles have been claimed by a small handful of European players might be more of a tribute to them than a defining failure of the U.S. Tennis Association’s development capabilities.
But on the home front, the issue is a pressing one, especially during America’s Grand Slam tournament, year after year.
Washington retired in 1999 with four tour victories and a 1994 quarterfinal Australian Open result in addition to his Wimbledon run. He was followed by James Blake, who rose to No. 4 in the world during a 14-year career that included 10 tour titles and three Grand Slam quarterfinals, including two at the U.S. Open.
Martin Blackman, the USTA’s general manager for player development, agreed that a breakthrough by one or two young Americans — white or black — in the foreseeable future could help trigger a wave of next-generation stars from an expanding landscape of prospects at a time when African-American participation has significantly declined in baseball, and football is confronted with health concerns.
“With tennis starting to be recognized as a really athletic sport, I think we do have a unique opportunity to pull some better athletes into the game,” said Blackman, an African-American man who played briefly on tour and once partnered with Washington to make the junior doubles semifinals of the 1986 Open. “So now it comes down to what can we do at the base to recruit and retain as many great young players as possible, make the game accessible and then get them into the system to stay.”
Even with better intentions, and greater investment, it still took a set of circumstances worthy of a Disney script to land Frances Tiafoe, one of the more promising young American players, on tour.
The son of immigrants from Sierra Leone, Tiafoe, 20, was introduced to the sport at a club in College Park, Maryland, where his father, Frances Sr., had found custodial work. Talent and a noticeable work ethic attracted well-heeled benefactors and helped Tiafoe climb to his current ranking of No. 44.
He gained his first victory at the U.S. Open over France’s Adrian Mannarino, the 29th seed, in the first round before losing next time out. His father watched from the player’s box on the Grandstand court, high-fiving Frances’ coaches and trainer when the Mannarino match ended, and soon after contended that his son wasn’t all that unique.
“There have to be thousands of kids like Frances out there, thousands who don’t have the same opportunities,” Frances Sr. said. “I’m not just talking about going to college, but going to the pro level, or just to have that chance, see if it’s possible.”
This is where Washington holds up a metaphorical sign for caution, if not for an outright stop.
Most people, Washington said, have little understanding of just how forbidding the odds are of becoming a pro, much less a champion.
Like the Williams sisters, Washington — who was born in Glen Cove, New York, but grew up in Michigan — had the benefit of a tennis-driven father, William, who saw four of his five children play professionally. MaliVai, who typically goes by Mal, had by far the most success.
“When I was a junior player, I was playing seven days a week and there were times when I was in high school where I was playing before school and after school,” he said. “It is so very difficult to win a major. I tried to win one, came close.”
Then, speaking of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, he added: “Federer and Nadal, they’ve won 20 and 17. What makes them so great is hard to understand. You just can’t throw money at kids and think it’s going to happen.”
So how is it done? Where does one start?
With smaller social achievements, Washington said. With helping young people love the game recreationally, while pursuing a better life than those in less affluent African-American communities have been dealt.
He talked of a young female graduate of his program who recently finished college without any debt, thanks to a tennis scholarship. And for the foundation’s head tennis pro, he hired Marc Atkinson, who began playing at Washington’s facility in sixth grade and walked onto the Florida A&M tennis team.
“He’s married with three kids, and at some point, I imagine he’s going to introduce the sport to his kids,” Washington said. “You know, I often think back to my ancestors and the challenges they had, whether it’s my parents growing up in the Deep South in the 1940s and 1950s, or my great-great-grandpa who was born a slave. I can trace my lineage back to people who were getting up and getting after it, who were trying to make a better life for themselves and their kids.
“So with the thousands of kids that we’re helping, that tennis champion may be part of that next generation, or the one after that. You don’t know, but maybe 20 years from now, or 50 years from now, you’ll be able to look at a kid and track back a lineage to my youth foundation and that would be really cool.”
Told that he sounded more like Ashe the humanitarian than Ashe the Grand Slam champion, Washington nodded with approval. His two meetings with Ashe produced “no deep conversations,” he said, and he did not heed Ashe’s advice on staying in school, though he eventually earned a degree in finance from the University of North Florida.
A voice was nonetheless heard, and still resounds.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.