Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  One of the city’s leading heart surgeons, Dr. John Hutchinson III, happened to be a fraternity brother, and Arthur was fortunate to find an opening in Hutchinson’s schedule on December 13, only five days away. The surgery turned out to be a quadruple coronary bypass involving the removal of several veins in his legs. The veins were then implanted in his chest as a replacement for the clogged arteries threatening his life.

  Dr. Hutchinson had performed this operation many times with great success, and Arthur’s experience was no exception. In the recovery room, the surgeon informed his famous patient he could now look forward to a long and reasonably normal life. When Arthur asked him if the prognosis pointed to a possible return to the tour, Hutchison was equivocal. Perhaps hearing only what he wanted to hear, the anxious patient interpreted this as a green light and began planning an ambitious rehabilitation program designed for a return to the court.

  A week later, just before his discharge, Arthur discussed his future at a press conference held in the hospital solarium. With Dr. Hutchinson at his side, he began by showing off his surgical scars. After pulling “open his powder blue pajama top,” he “puffed up his chest and proudly exhibited the incision bisecting his upper body; then he rolled up his trousers to display scars running from knee to ankle.” Don’t be fooled by these surface wounds, he told the reporters; he was supremely confident he would be “back in the gym next week.” After explaining he “would begin with light workouts under the supervision of a team of cardiologists and sports medicine specialists from New York Hospital,” he predicted that within a few months he would be back on the court playing his best tennis in years, adding “I think you’ll see me playing Wimbledon in June.”

  Dr. Hutchinson, who had performed more than four thousand open-heart operations in the last twelve years, confirmed “Mr. Ashe has a lot of things going for him.” But the circumspect doctor stopped far short of predicting that his famous patient, still suffering from postoperative anemia, would ever see a successful return to Wimbledon.12

  Jeanne was just happy to see him breathing and on the mend. Though outwardly supportive of his dream of returning to tennis, she quite naturally feared he was setting himself up for failure and unnecessary disappointment. Whatever her true feelings, she knew she was absolutely essential to his chances of recovery. “Jeanne understood what I was going through,” Arthur later wrote. “She saw me lying on the table in New York Hospital that August day and knew that she had to assume control of the situation. She was frightened for me but also sensed that I was most comfortable in a calm, controlled environment. If I read panic in her eyes, she reasoned, it would not help my attitude.”

  To some extent, Jeanne had been through this before, having dealt with her father’s serious heart attacks in 1974 and her aunt’s open-heart surgery four years later. Moreover, she had started her marriage with a husband on crutches, and for more than two years she had lived with his ongoing convalescence—first from his heel problem and later from his heart condition. While all of this had placed inevitable strains on their relationship, the beleaguered couple seemed to grow closer during the six months leading up to Arthur’s surgery, and the bond between them became even tighter in the weeks and months that followed. The rehabilitation process was demanding and often frustrating, and sometimes Arthur felt and acted like a caged lion. There were also times when Jeanne was nearly overcome by feelings of anxiety and dread. But mostly she feared Arthur was driving himself too hard in a potentially dangerous and self-defeating effort to get back on the court.13

  Many of Arthur’s closest friends shared Jeanne’s concerns and wondered why he was so determined to return to the tour. With all the other things he had going for him, why, they asked, did he feel the need to prove himself on the court at an age when most players had already retired? Among all the players of his generation, he had seemed the most likely to fashion a graceful transition to an active and fulfilling retirement. Yet he insisted on waging a last-ditch effort to extend his career.

  As Arthur later explained, his primary motivation was fairly simple. “I had enjoyed a wonderful career and didn’t want it to end,” he recalled in 1992. It was difficult to imagine a life without tennis. The game had dominated his life since childhood, and he had never tired of the basic rhythms and physical and psychological dictates of the sport—the challenge of hitting a bouncing ball or running down a difficult shot, the endless gamesmanship of risk taking, recovery, and composure.

  He also loved the tour, with all its faults and complications, and he cherished the lifestyle that came with it. “When I played tennis,” he wrote in 1981, “I loved the idea of waking up, feeling nervous about the consequences of winning or losing, enjoying the pressures of staying on top.” On another occasion, he contrasted the void of retirement with the continuing allure of the tour: “I missed the travel to foreign lands, the camaraderie of the players, the excitement of the matches themselves.” “Where would I be?” he wondered, without “the glitter and glamour of the tennis world . . . the endless stroking of the ego, the copious episodes of pampering and privilege.”

  He also fixated on his last chance to counter certain negative characterizations that had dogged his career. From time to time, critical observers had charged he lacked a killer instinct, that he often lacked focus as his wandering mind led him into erratic play, and that his many off-court interests ensured he would never reach the top of the tennis world. These charges still rankled him, and he remained determined to dispel them. Many observers saw his grand plans as unrealistic, even outlandish. But, as he reminded them, there had been similar expressions of doubt before his great victory at Wimbledon in 1975—and before his unexpected Australian Open doubles title two years later.14

  During the early months of 1980, as the wounds of the operation healed, he acted as if he had every expectation of resuming his career. Eager to shed his invalid status, he acted more like his normal energetic self with every passing day. Although Jeanne did her best to slow him down, he soon felt confident enough to raise the level of his physical activity and, on occasion, to leave the security and familiarity of his cardiologists and the New York medical enclave. At this point, his only major concession to his medical condition was to avoid long-distance travel.

  Resuming most of his normal activities, he was often out and about in New York attending to ATP and endorsement business, giving press interviews on the current state of the tennis world, campaigning for Senator Kennedy, visiting friends, and working out at the Sports Training Institute on 49th Street. He even found time to resume his writing for The Washington Post, penning articles on subjects as varied as sports betting and the proposed Olympic boycott. All of this activity in the face of adversity gained notice and earned him serious consideration for the International Award for Valor in Sport, presented in London on February 5. In the end, he lost out to an intrepid French hang-glider blinded during an ascent of K2, the world’s second highest peak. But the nomination enhanced his image as a stalwart figure worthy of respect and admiration.

  One exception to his temporary travel ban was a sad mid-January journey to Westport, Connecticut, where he served as a pallbearer at the funeral of Alex Deford, Frank Deford’s eight-year-old daughter, who had succumbed to cystic fribrosis. Deeply attached to Alex and her family, Arthur later described the funeral as one of the most “harrowing” experiences of his life. His only other midwinter venture outside of New York came in February, when he flew across the country to attend an ATP board meeting in Palm Springs. As a morale-boosting gesture, the reunion with his ATP comrades turned out to be just what he needed. Staying with the Pasarells, he even got the chance to meet their new baby daughter, Fara.15

  After his return from California, Arthur started swimming almost daily, and he even began a series of semisecret tennis workouts at the East River Tennis Club in Queens. Butch Seewagen, the same club pro who had witnessed his attack the previous summer, reportedly put the former U.S. Open champion through his p
aces without any apparent ill effects. By early March, he was encouraged enough to schedule more on-court workouts. But first he and Jeanne, accompanied by their longtime friend Dr. Douglas Stein, flew to Cairo, Egypt, for a late-winter vacation. Having missed his annual Doral sojourn in December, he was eager to feel the warmth of the subtropical sun. Encouraged by the Egyptian star Ismail El Shafei, who promised that a few days of balmy North African weather would do wonders for mind and body, he boarded the long flight to Cairo with high expectations.

  Part of Egypt’s attractiveness for Arthur was the softening of its relations with Israel since the signing of the August 1978 Camp David Accords, an agreement that produced a joint Nobel Peace Prize for Prime Ministers Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. Having heard about the “new Egypt” from both El Shafei and Andrew Young, who had defended the Accords before the General Assembly of the United Nations, he wanted to see it for himself.

  The first day in Cairo was everything he had hoped for, but on the second day his Egyptian vacation ended in near tragedy. After leaving his hotel near the Great Pyramid for an afternoon run, he suffered an attack of angina. “I was loping along gently, easing into the main phase of my run,” he recalled, “when the angina struck. It hit me relatively softly, but hard enough to stop me dead in my tracks. I felt the world come to a halt. I walked slowly back to the hotel.” A few minutes later Doug Stein did a cursory examination, taking his friend’s pulse and listening to his heart. He then asked Arthur to do a few jumping jacks. Almost immediately the angina pains returned. “You were right to stop running,” Stein told him. “Your heart wants no part of it.” He advised his ailing friend to return to New York for a full examination. Arthur now knew he had come to a crossroads. “As we flew out of Cairo,” he later confessed, “I knew one thing for sure: My career as a competitive tennis player was over.”16

  Surprisingly enough, he and Jeanne did not fly directly back to New York. Instead, they lingered in Europe for a few days, mostly in Amsterdam. A trip to the famous Rijksmuseum was his gift to Jeanne in compensation for their ruined trip to Cairo. Her love of art exceeded his, but he had a special attachment to Rembrandt. He was especially fond of Rembrandt’s most celebrated painting, The Night Watch, but on this particular visit he found himself concentrating on another Rembrandt masterpiece, The Prophet Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem. As he pointed out to Jeanne, Jeremiah’s obvious depression spoke to him. The painting’s “power over me,” he later explained, “had much to do with what had happened to me in Egypt . . . my ill-fated attempt to jog near the Nile and the collapse of my dreams of returning in glory to the tennis court.” Somehow this great piece of art helped the frightened couple to put their fate in context, allowing them to share the burden of a difficult but inevitable decision.17

  Over the next month he had a few second thoughts about his decision, but after consulting with his cardiologists he realized he had to face reality. During the second week of April, just after publishing a poignant Washington Post piece on the life and recent death of the Olympic hero Jesse Owens, he composed a letter and mailed it to twenty-two of his closest friends and associates. “Long ago in my Sunday school classes,” he began the letter, “I learned that ‘for everything there is a season.’ . . . After many hours of hard thought and soul-searching, I have decided from today on, to end my nonstop globetrotting odyssey in search of the perfect serve and retire from competitive tennis. In its place, I hope to begin another exciting season of writing, talking, listening, reading, and assisting.”18

  A week later, on April 16, he followed with a formal public announcement. “I won’t be entering any more tournaments,” he told a group of reporters, assuring them “there will be no great transition because I have been in the process of doing this for years.” When asked “why now?” he explained: “It is time. Health is a factor, but that’s not the only reason.” In fact, he added: “I feel pretty good. My doctors say I will live to be 100, but they won’t put it in writing.”19

  The reaction to Ashe’s retirement was swift. Within days his mailbox overflowed with expressions of affection and respect, and almost immediately glowing tributes began to appear in the press. Some reporters pointed to his gaudy statistics: ten years as a professional; 304 tournaments played and fifty-one singles titles earned during the Open era; a finalist in 32 percent of the Open tournaments in which he played; a career match winning percentage of over 75 percent; eleven years in the American top ten; three Grand Slam singles titles and two Grand Slam doubles titles; one NCAA team championship and one NCAA national singles championship; ten years as a Davis Cup team member and the highest percentage of Davis Cup singles victories, 84.4, of any American player in history. Others stressed his leadership roles in the ATP and the development of Open tennis, and still others highlighted his gritty and heroic effort to extend his career.

  Nearly all, of course, mentioned the strength of his character, his exemplary sportsmanship, his commitment to social justice, and his determination to make a difference in the real world. One of the most moving tributes, penned by Barry Lorge of The Washington Post, praised Ashe as “a self-proclaimed ‘citizen of the world.’ ” “Thoughtful and knowledgeable on numerous subjects,” Lorge wrote, “Ashe has long been respected as much for his sportsmanship, eloquence, and deportment as for his electric serve and backhand. In a sport overpopulated with crybabies and greedy opportunists, he became a millionaire without ever forgetting his sense of responsibility to the public and the game.”20

  Lorge and other admirers set the stage for formal recognition of an extraordinary life and career. To Ashe’s embarrassment, special awards and accolades began to pile up. The first came from his hometown of Richmond, where the school board named a new $3 million school gymnasium after him and where he received the city’s Community Service Award. At a racially integrated awards banquet held on May 9, Arthur Ashe Sr. was on hand to accept the award on behalf of his son, who was en route to Europe to cover the Italian and French Opens for ABC television.21

  In Paris, on May 31, Arthur’s old friend Philippe Chatrier hosted a special dinner for Arthur, Jeanne, “and some friends” at Tour d’Argent, one of Paris’s finest restaurants. “They gave me a silver plate very suitably inscribed: ‘To Arthur from the French. Thanks for the memories,’ ” he reported rather drolly, “which is about as close as I’m going to get to winning anything here.” He was touched by Chatrier’s kind gesture, but the high point of the French Open was watching their shared protégé, twenty-year-old Yannick Noah, fight his way into the fourth round.22

  A week later, Arthur was back in the States at Dartmouth College, where he received an honorary Doctor of Arts degree, the first of more than a dozen such degrees he would acquire over the next decade. In July, he received a tribute of another kind when the American Heart Association asked him to be the chairman of its national fund-raising campaign, and later in the summer a poll of professional tennis players identified him “as the person who has made the greatest contribution to the game.”23

  Arthur undoubtedly appreciated all of the plaudits that marked his retirement. But in general such things, he confessed, didn’t do much to soothe his soul. On the surface he appeared to be a reasonably happy person, yet, as his close friends came to realize, he also harbored a complicated inner life of struggle and striving. He had always been a person of substance and independent mind. But during the 1970s, he had become increasingly engaged with social and political issues, especially matters of race and class. Indeed, by the time of his retirement, he had become what would later be known as a public intellectual—a role that, for him, carried a heavy burden of social responsibility.

  Since his mid-twenties his conscience had become ever more prodding, to the point where he could no longer turn away from perceived injustice. His days as a self-defined, and sometimes self-absorbed, athlete were over, and he now saw himself, first and foremost, as a truth seeker, albeit one who was not above leveraging his sports cel
ebrity on behalf of worthy causes. As such, he often felt he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. Accordingly, his inner life took on a somber complexity born of unmet expectations. This dissatisfaction—nourished by self-criticism and seemingly at odds with his calm, easygoing demeanor—was brought to the surface by the health crisis that precipitated his retirement.

  Yet, to some extent, his complicated new persona simply represented an amplification of a seriousness that had always been a part of his character. “The abrupt end of my tennis career only accelerated my search for another way I can make a contribution,” he wrote in 1981. “I don’t want to be remembered mainly because I won Wimbledon.” As a convalescing thirty-seven-year-old facing his own mortality, he found himself embracing social action and engaged citizenship with a new urgency and a new sense of purpose. Despite all of his accomplishments and accolades, he knew he could do better, both as a role model for African Americans and as a caring human being worthy of the “Citizen of the World” moniker that appeared on his favorite T-shirt.24

  Having only a vague sense of what lay ahead, he dedicated the late spring and early summer of 1980 to reflection and repurposing. He later remembered this season of soul-searching as an attempt “to negotiate the middle passage between the old and the new,” a negotiation prompted by a profound sense of incompleteness. Looking back on this crisis of confidence twelve years later, he wondered why he had been so discontented. “How could I be dissatisfied, even subtly, with my life to that point?” he asked rhetorically. “I had lived, many would say, a fantasy of a life. I had won a measure of international fame many people would die for. I had traveled all over the world, and often in grand style. Relatively speaking, I had made a great deal of money. I had won a large number of friends. How could I be dissatisfied?”