Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.
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The current Southern California wildfires have me remembering seven winters past when satanic Santa Ana winds blew the Thomas Fire closer and closer towards my home with frightening swiftness.
Among the keepsake photographs I hurriedly filled a box with for evacuation was an eight-by-ten black-and-white glossy print, half a century old, in a nothing-special silver-painted wooden frame, of tennis legend Arthur Ashe stroking a backhand. A heavy black facsimile of his signature is in the right-hand bottom corner, but above that is a larger authentic autograph in thin ballpoint blue ink.
Its provenance dates to 1971 when Ashe was ranked No. 2 in the world and I was an 11-year-old tennis player with big dreams and a few small trophies in my bedroom bookcase in Columbus, Ohio. That summer, the day before a pro tournament began, Ashe gave a clinic for kids.
As good luck would have it, I was invited to participate. Better luck was to be dropped off an hour early and the only other person already at the courts was Ashe. My even greater fortune was to have him ask me if I wanted to rally – I imagine I nodded “yes” because I was surely speechless – and we proceeded to do so, just the two of us, for 10 or 15 magical minutes.
Afterwards, Ashe gave me a compliment on my game and also gave me the glossy souvenir photo, which he signed courtside.
Even before this masterpiece afternoon, Ashe was already my favorite player – tied with Stan Smith, actually, who a year earlier gave me a racket he broke on an overhead smash when I was a ball boy for one of his matches.
Ashe’s status as my co-hero was likewise secured in 1970 when he played an exhibition with fellow Davis Cup teammate Clark Graebner at a country club in Columbus. Again, I was a ball boy. I still vividly remember one of Graebner’s lightning serves getting stuck deep in the webbing of the net just below the top tape. As I struggled to pry it free, without success, the crowd laughed louder and louder until Ashe strode forward from the baseline to help me.
But here is my most unforgettable memory from that day, albeit sadly so. Beforehand, Graebner and Ashe had not been allowed to change into their tennis whites in the stately golf clubhouse. Instead, because there was no tennis locker room, they had to get dressed in the small green shed that served as the courts sign-up desk and racket stringing pro shop.
The excuse given for the snubbing was that all tennis players were barred from the golfers-only locker room, but that was a lie: Graebner had been welcomed inside the previous year before a match. The ugly truth was this time Graebner was with Ashe – and Ashe was Black.
When the Thomas Fire razed my teen-years home, where my nonagenarian father still lived, the lesson in the ashes was this: people, not possession, matter. And so I did not return the Arthur Ashe photograph to its nail on the wall in my study. Realizing I will always be able to see it in my mind’s eye no matter where it is, I carefully packed it in bubble wrap and mailed it to a dear friend.
More precisely, I gave it to his then-8-year-old son, Ashe – yes, named in Arthur’s honor. To know the old photo has a new home on a boyhood bedroom wall, cherished anew as dearly as my 11-year-old self long ago did, feels as wonderful as rallying with my boyhood hero.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.