Arthur Ashe

Arthur Ashe once said that if he were remembered only as a tennis player, he would consider himself a failure. Ironically, had Ashe's life consisted only of his tennis career; he still would have transcended the white lines in the manner that became his barometer for success.

As the first African-American Davis Cup participant and the first black male to win the U.S. Open and Wimbledon, Ashe was a stark and stoic symbol of the penetration of a lily-white sport. Ashe left his mark on the game viscerally, through his pioneering success, but also financially and philosophically, through his actions as a leader in the formation of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP). Had he done nothing more, he would own a spot among the 100 most important people in American sports history, but as it turned out, his accomplishments on the court paled beside his efforts to defeat social, political and medical injustice.

His sporting legacy is as broad in scope as his convictions were deep. He was a racial symbol, inspiring a generation of blacks to take up a previously uninviting sport. He was a publicist of sorts, joining with the likes of Billie Jean King, Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors to fuel the tennis boom of the 1970s. He was an author; his history of the black athlete, A Hard Road to Glory, and his fifteen years of opinions in The Washington Post exhibiting a brilliant intellect. He was a practical and productive activist. He was a so-called crossover sports hero.

Perhaps most important, Ashe was a reminder of priorities. From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life," he wrote in his memoirs, Days of Grace. With sports serving as a background, Ashe gave us the gift of reflection. He made us think-and think hard-about racism, about health, about education, about charity. When he announced, in 1992, that he was infected with the AIDS virus, he made us think more-about life and death and privacy.

His life was cut tragically short, yet perhaps no athlete has ever fashioned a more useful existence. Other athletes have left the playing fields for greater accomplishment, leaving their outstanding athletic careers as distant memories. Byron White became a Supreme Court justice, Bill Bradley a senator, Paul Robeson an activist and, eventually, a martyr. But, for them, their sports persona was all but incidental in the long run. For Ashe, it remained a vital part of his character: his appeal and his efforts.

In the end, he was simply a tennis player-in the sense that Frederick Douglas was a writer; Abraham Lincoln was a politician, and Martin Luther King Jr. was a reverend-but he was a man who redefined the notion of the athlete as statesman. He was a child of segregation, a product of the worst in America, and yet he was a symbol of the very best.

The world that Arthur Robert Ashe Jr. entered on July 10, 1943, was full of contradiction to-and contempt for-black Americans. A war was being fought against intolerance abroad, but it was flourishing at home. Segregation was the rule in Richmond, Virginia, where he was born, and monuments proudly lionized Confederate generals. Fifty years later, upon his death, Ashe would become the first person to lie in state in the Virginia Governor's Mansion since General Stonewall Jackson.

Ashe's mother died when he was six, a tragedy to which he attributed what many perceived as his icy emotional reserve later in life. His father was the caretaker of the largest playground for blacks in Richmond. His house was next to the playground, and four tennis courts were next to the house. Thus tennis came to Ashe through the realities of segregation, yet it also provided him a means to escape it. His career began at the age of seven, when Richmond's most accomplished black player-a man named, appropriately, Ron Charity-stopped his practice, walked over to Ashe and asked, "Would you like to learn how to play?"

Ashe was barred from playing on most public courts and in most local tournaments involving whites, yet he still managed to earn a tennis scholarship to UCLA, where he then earned a business degree. In 1963, as a 20-year-old, he was asked to become the first African-American on the U.S. Davis Cup team. Over the next fifteen years, he won 28 of 34-Cup matches.

In 1968, Ashe lifted his tennis game to a new level, leading the U.S. to its first Davis Cup win in five years, winning the national amateur title and becoming the first U.S. Open champion in the open era. Ashe turned professional in 1970, won the Australian Open, and then, two years later; became the first American tennis player to exceed $100,000 in annual earnings. Also in 1972, he became a leader of the fledgling ATP the players' union that further transformed the game into its modern professional form by wresting control from the International Lawn Tennis Federation and the governing bodies of the four Grand Slam tournaments. In 1974-1975, he served as the organization's president.

Ashe's greatest tennis triumph came in 1975, when he used a cerebral approach to defeat the game's most dominant player; Jimmy Connors, in the Wimbledon finals. Said Roy S. Johnson, senior editor at Money magazine, "Seeing a black man playing tennis was weird in itself, but seeing him win the most prestigious tournament in the world by himself in a manner that belied everything Americans seemed to hold true about black Americans was something that was pretty indescribable."

Ashe's tennis career ended abruptly when he suffered a heart attack in July 1979, and then underwent a quadruple coronary bypass operation six months later. He officially retired from tennis in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven, telling the press, "The doctors say I will live to be 100, but they won't put it in writing."

His body may have been telling him to simply rest on his laurels, and his accomplishments-thirty-three tournament victories and thirteen straight years ranked among the top five players in the world-were such that to do so would have brought no shame, yet Ashe was still haunted by a gnawing dissatisfaction. "I don't think I wanted to be immortal, not in any literal sense... But I did want to achieve something more than I had accomplished on the tennis court," he explained.

One of Ashe's favorite prayers, articulated by W. E. B. DuBois, asked the Lord to "make us not great but busy." In the years following his retirement from tennis, Ashe was both. Along with being an outspoken opponent of South African apartheid and remaining a key figure in professional tennis by acting as the non-playing captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team from 1980-1985, he formed the African American Athletic Association, the Ashe-Bollettieri Cities (ABC) tennis program, Athletes Career Connection, the Safe Passage Foundation, the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, and the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS.
Ashe responded to what Kenny Moore called "a series of summonses from causes close to his heart, one being that heart itself." And, thus, he also devoted his efforts to the American Heart Association, the United Negro College Fund and an U.S. foreign policy think tank, TransAfrica. He taught a college course on "The Black Athlete in Contemporary Society" and then spent nearly $300,000 to hire a team of researchers to help him compile his definitive three-volume history of the African-American athlete.

Passionate yet practical, cool under fire yet full of smoldering convictions, Ashe had forged a legacy of good works and lasting images of transcendence. Said his friend Bryant Gum bel in an HBO special, Arthur Ashe: Citizen of the World, "He was an ambassador of what was right. He was an ambassador of dignity. He was an ambassador of class."

He and a lesson to be learned by us translated even his death into an opportunity for more good works. In the last thirteen years of his life, Ashe had become, in his words, "a professional patient." Following his heart attack and quadruple bypass in 1979, he had required another bypass in 1983, after which he had received a blood transfusion. Five years later; he entered New York Hospital for brain surgery and discovered he had acquired the AIDS virus, almost definitely as a result of the blood transfusion, which had occurred two years before mandatory testing for the HIV virus was required in donated blood.

Believing a public announcement would infringe on his family's right to privacy, particularly that of his young daughter; Camera, he revealed his illness only to his closest friends. But in April 1992, Ashe discovered that USA Today was preparing to follow up rumors that he was HIV-positive. The newspaper's editors disagreed with Ashe's insistence that he was not a public figure and told him that if he would not confirm the rumors, they would attempt to find someone who would.

"Match point had come, and I had lost it," Ashe explained. "All I could do now was try to control the announcement itself, to have it heard directly from me." Just a few months after Magic Johnson's shocking announcement that he was HIV-positive, Ashe told the world that he was already stricken with full-blown AIDS. The fact that Ashe was one of the disease's so-called "innocent" victims put a different twist on the announcement, as did the realization that he had been forced into going public with his private turmoil. Like so many other issues Ashe had taken up, his announcement made people think-about the rights of the press and the rights to privacy.

Ashe was angry that "this newspaper; any newspaper or any part of the media, could think it had a right to tell the world I had AIDS." USA Today, alone, received more than 700 letters, the great majority of them agreeing with Ashe, but an editorial in the national newspaper suggested a "conspiracy of silence has not served the public. Ashe is not a public official, but for many people, young and old, he's probably as influential as any president."

The entire event had hit Ashe hard because, as he put it, "If one's reputation is a possession, then of all my possessions, my reputation means most to me." Yet, to no one's surprise, he turned the stigma of AIDS and the desperate need for research funding into a motivational tool for educating the public and for raising money to combat the disease throughout the world.
"I do not like being the personification of a problem, much less a problem involving a killer disease, but I know I must seize these opportunities to spread the word," Ashe wrote in Days of Grace. He created the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, received the first Annual AIDS Leadership Award from the Harvard AIDS Institute, and addressed the United Nations on World AIDS Day. Despite his personal trauma, however; he still campaigned for the rights of others, and even in his last days, he was arrested, as planned, at a demonstration in Washington, D.C., to protest inhuman treatment of Haitian refugees. Ashe had another heart attack following the event, but it was his inability to fight off pneumonia that finally took his life on February 6, 1993.

More than 5,000 people filed by his casket in the Virginia Governor's Mansion, mourning the loss of a child from the segregated South who had become a gift to the world, a victim of years of illness who had fought to erase decades of injustice, a man who, says Roy S. Johnson, "had the frailest of bodies but moved mountains.

ASHE AND APARTHEID

Memories of a childhood in segregated Virginia had spurred Ashe to fight against South African apartheid as early as 1969. After being denied permission to play there in 1970, he took his fight to the World Tennis Union and the United Nations. In 1973, he competed in South Africa for the first time, requesting and receiving integrated seating at his matches.

He visited three more times over the next four years, changing the life of at least one young black South African who saw in him the possibility for escape and emergence and told Ashe, "You are the first truly free black man I have ever seen." Ashe favored international sanctions against South Africa played a major role in having the country banned from Davis Cup play, became a founding member of Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid, and was even arrested outside the South African embassy in 1985.

Still, Ashe retained a modest perspective of his efforts, even in the face of the martyrdom illness had cast upon him, claiming, "Compared to [Nekon] Mandela's sacrifice, my own ... has been one of almost self-indulgence. When I think of him, my own political efforts seem puny." Yet when Mandela first encountered Ashe in person, after obtaining his freedom, it was he who held Ashe in a warning embrace.

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