Tennis was at the top of the news in sports this week with the finals of the U.S. Open in New York City. It stirred up memories of great moments from past U.S. Opens, and of former champions.
Donald Dell was an accomplished tennis player at Yale and the captain the U.S. Davis Cup team that won the world championship in 1968 and 1969. An attorney in Washington, D.C., Dell was one of the first professional sports agents and the founder of sports marketing and management firm ProServ.
Among the professional tennis players he represented was Arthur Ashe, about whom Dell wrote, “Ashe embodied the traditional qualities of what makes a tennis champion: He was elegant, graceful, calculating, and most of all, a gentleman.”
I once asked Dell if some of those attributes have been lost among today’s professional athletes.
“We have gotten away from those qualities,” Dell said. “One thing that should have been added in there was that Arthur was tremendously competitive. But Arthur believed you did it with your racket — the wins and losses — not with your mouth. He believed hat very strongly. And he lived his life that way.”
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