Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Several days later, they had calmed down enough to bundle her up and board a plane for Miami, where they spent the next few weeks keeping her safe and warm but out of the sun. Neither Jeanne nor Arthur had ever romanticized parenthood, but both embraced their new roles as mother and father without reservation. Camera was now the center of their universe. “From the first day, she altered the pattern of our lives,” Arthur recalled. “We knew that her coming would do so, but the extent to which she changed things was nevertheless something of a shock.” Another surprise, he confessed, was the intensity of his paternal feelings. As he commented a few weeks prior to her sixth birthday, “I had no idea that I would love fatherhood as much as I do. I have an acute sense of responsibility for her—to help her, teach her, protect her, and (most of all) to love her.”33

  As Camera grew into a crawling infant and later a wobbly but adventurous toddler, the Ashes experienced the normal ups and downs of parental apprenticeship. Gradually, they adopted a loose and indulgent style of parenting at odds with their own upbringings. “In matters of discipline, I know I can’t go the way of my father,” Arthur acknowledged. “He was of the old school; his word was law, and he enforced the law with his thick police belt.”

  In a 1980 interview, Jeanne commented that her famously calm and collected husband had once told her he wanted “to be more emotional, more open, more outgoing.” This was a tall order for a man accustomed to restraint, but Camera’s arrival opened up new possibilities. Several family members later insisted she changed him. From the outset, there was a deep emotional bond. When he was with her, there were no hyper-rational calculations or measured moments of intellectual reserve. He was, in his words, “ecstatic about her.” Citing his brother Johnnie’s tender relationship with his daughter, Luchia, and his sister Loretta’s relationship with her children La Chandra and David, as models, he wanted Camera to experience the same nurturing love as his nieces and nephews.

  Just about everyone in the Ashes’ inner circle noticed Camera’s impact on her father. In a 2005 interview, Billie Jean King even credited Camera with deepening Arthur’s belief in gender equality. As women’s rights and his daughter’s welfare became entwined, the feminism that had emerged under Jeanne’s influence early in their marriage took on new meaning. “What put him over the edge,” King recalled, “was . . . when they adopted Camera. . . . He was totally gone. He was all for girls. . . . You could see that the whole paradigm of his life . . . had been challenged. . . . Everyone noticed it, how much he changed when Camera came into his life.”

  Arthur’s tendency to indulge Camera was perhaps inevitable. But, as he acknowledged, it was clearly enhanced by a sense of insecurity born of his recent medical experiences. “With all my own physical problems,” he wrote in 1992, “her positive robustness has been a godsend to me, a daily reaffirmation of the power of life.” As he thought about his current good fortune as a father, he couldn’t help but recall his earlier visits to children’s hospital wards. “Children seem immortal,” he observed. “But I know how quickly they can be taken away. . . . Often you meet kids who are going to be well, but just as often you meet kids who you know are going to die soon. It is heartbreaking.” With this in mind, he did not take Camera’s good health “for granted.”34

  His own health appeared to be holding up well. To Jeanne’s surprise, he seemed to have more than enough energy to keep up with both his lively daughter and the considerable demands of his public life. Throughout 1987 and the first half of 1988, there was no letup in his work. He even accepted a new assignment as co-chair of the USTA’s Committee on Junior Development.

  He also joined the executive committee of Harry Edwards’s new National Organization on the Status of Minorities in Sport (NOSMS), which focused on one of Ashe’s greatest passions—the need to expand opportunities for minorities in managerial and behind-the-scenes positions in the sporting world. Edwards’s June 1987 appointment by Major League Baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth as a part-time consultant charged with the task of finding “jobs in the sport for black and Hispanic former players” was an encouraging development. But there was still so much left to do along these lines in every major sport.

  One of NOSMS’s strongest supporters was Jesse Jackson, and for a time in late 1987 and early 1988, Ashe became marginally involved in his second campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Ashe liked Jackson’s platform, which combined elements of the New Deal and the Great Society with the interracial ideal of a “Rainbow Coalition.” But he was less enamored with the candidate’s flamboyant personality, and he had never fully trusted him since his refusal to repudiate the anti-Semitic, black separatist leader Louis Farrakhan.

  Pitted against Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, Jackson won seven primaries and four state caucuses—an unprecedented showing for a black candidate. But in the end Dukakis won the nomination; this left Ashe in a difficult position. Though a lifelong Democrat, he disliked Dukakis, and after a period of soul-searching he decided to vote for the Republican nominee George H. W. Bush. It was a decision he later regretted, and by 1992 he would find himself walking a picket line in front of the White House.35

  Both before and after the election, Ashe made a concerted effort to maintain his status as a public intellectual. Expressing his opinions on a variety of issues related to sports, education, race, and equal opportunity, he continued to contribute occasional columns to The Washington Post and The New York Times. He also remained active as a guest lecturer at colleges and universities, and occasionally at high schools, youth centers, and public libraries. Almost all of his public comments tried to balance contemporary concerns with a historical perspective on the roots of inequality and injustice. In November 1987, for example, he delivered a lecture at the New York Public Library, presenting not only a preview of his forthcoming book but also a stinging commentary on the continuing lack of black coaches and executives in professional sports.

  The book project was never far from his mind, as work on the final revisions and edits proceeded apace. Month after month, he attended to matters of content and style, often shuttling back and forth between Mount Kisco and the Lexington Avenue office. Packaged under the title A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete, the roughly 1,400-page manuscript was now divided into three prospective volumes organized chronologically: 1619–1918; 1919–1945; and 1946 to 1988. Originally scheduled for publication in February 1988, the three volumes ultimately required editorial tweaking that delayed release for nine months.

  After nearly six years of research and writing, Ashe was more excited than ever about the project. But he was also nervous about how the books would be received. Not normally given to boasting, he betrayed his insecurities by assuring Tennis magazine’s Barry Lorge that A Hard Road to Glory would be a smashing success. “There is no question in my mind,” he told Lorge, “that it will be the bible on the subject. . . . The record section alone will blow people away.”36

  While he waited for his magnum opus to hit the bookstores, Ashe kept busy with a multitude of activities, including a mid-July Aetna board meeting held at the Sagamore Resort on the shores of Lake George in upstate New York. Normally the board met at Aetna’s corporate headquarters in Hartford, but company president Bill Bailey had decided that a change of scenery might trigger a much needed burst of creativity.

  Arthur in particular was captivated by the resort’s physical beauty and calming atmosphere, so much so that he returned to the Sagamore a month later for a family vacation. With a week to go before the start of the 1988 U.S. Open, a few days of lakeside relaxation proved irresistible. Jeanne, who was recovering from a case of Lyme carditis that had forced her to miss a recent family reunion in New Orleans, loved the idea, and she and Arthur decided to invite the Dells to join them. For three glorious days, the four friends who had been through so much together could temporarily escape the pressures of the real world—the rhetorical combat of the national election, the latest ou
trage in South Africa, the constant demands of ProServ’s clients, the seemingly dismal prospects for American men at the upcoming U.S. Open. All of this seemed far away as they sipped drinks on the Sagamore’s grand veranda, pretending not to have a care in the world.37

  TWENTY-FIVE

  DAYS OF GRACE

  THE FIRST TWO DAYS at the Sagamore were full of laughter and easygoing companionship, marred only by Jeanne’s lingering illness. Bouncing twenty-month-old Camera on their knees and trying to keep up with the boundless energy of a toddler, the Ashes and the Dells could not help but feel the fullness of life. Arthur had felt this way many times before, yet he knew from experience that health and happiness were fragile commodities susceptible to change at a moment’s notice. He had encountered this truth repeatedly during the past nine years, and on the third day at the Sagamore—August 24, 1988—he learned yet another cruel lesson about the vagaries of life.

  Following a pleasant and uneventful breakfast, Arthur, Jeanne, and Camera returned to their suite. While Jeanne attended to Camera, Arthur walked over to the telephone to call home to see if he had any messages on his answering machine. Grabbing the wall phone with his left hand, he started to dial the numbers with the fingers of his right hand. What happened next surprised and shocked him. “My fingers made an attempt to respond to my will,” he recalled, “but they struggled in vain to do what I asked. I was trying to put my index finger on the buttons, but the finger wasn’t working very well.” Frustrated, he yelled out to Jeanne, “Something is wrong with me. . . . My fingers. I can’t get them to work well.” “Maybe they are numb because you slept on them?” she suggested. “Yes, that must be it,” Arthur responded, but a few moments later he told her, “No, they aren’t numb. I can feel them, definitely. I just don’t seem to be able to use them.” Thinking he was suffering from a pinched nerve or some other temporary condition, Jeanne dialed the numbers for him and went back to tend to Camera.

  As the day progressed, Arthur tried to stay calm and patiently waited for his fingers to return to normal. But by late afternoon he began to worry that he had suffered a small stroke. At one point he suggested it might be best if they packed up the car and immediately returned to Mount Kisco, where he could see his internist, Dr. William Russell. After some discussion they decided to spend Wednesday night at the Sagamore and drive home in the morning. Arthur later remembered he had gone to bed that night with the expectation that he would “awake to find my fingers back to normal.” But Thursday morning brought no such relief, and by the time he checked out, his “right hand was hanging from the wrist, almost completely limp.”1

  Alarmed but not sure he was facing an emergency. Arthur made an appointment with Dr. Russell for Friday afternoon. A morning appointment wouldn’t work because a film crew from the CBS This Morning television show was scheduled to arrive at the Ashes’ house by 9 a.m. to conduct one of its celebrity home interviews. Both Arthur and Jeanne thought about canceling, but in the end they decided to proceed as scheduled—and to avoid any mention of Arthur’s hand problem.

  As Arthur recalled the experience, “The television interview was pleasant in most respects, but also something of an ordeal. No matter how hard I tried, I could not move a digit up, down, or sideways. My right hand, now completely limp, literally hung dead from my wrist. As I answered questions and talked about the house, I tried to act as nonchalant as I could; I certainly told no one from CBS that something was wrong. The truth is that I had to prop up my right hand with my left. I still have no idea how I got through the interview without anyone on the crew taking notice. I answered the questions with as much charm as I could muster, but my mind was elsewhere.”

  By early afternoon, both his mind and body were at Dr. Russell’s office. Arthur had been Russell’s patient for several years, and he had grown to trust the man he once characterized as “someone almost out of Norman Rockwell’s America of a bygone age.” Russell was also an avid tennis player who relished caring for one of the tennis world’s most prominent figures. Accustomed to worrying about Arthur’s heart, he was initially caught off guard when he saw his patient’s limp right hand. After examining the fingers, palm, and wrist, he asked if Arthur had been dizzy or short of breath. Had he had a fever? Had anything struck his right hand? When the answer to all of these questions was no, he suspected his famous patient was suffering from a potentially serious condition. “Something is interfering with the signals from your brain to the hand,” he told Arthur. “The interference is almost certainly in the area of the brain, because I can’t think of any other likely reason for your hand to stop working.”2

  Minutes later Arthur, with Jeanne by his side, traveled across the street to a CAT scan facility. When the twenty-minute procedure was over, the Ashes joined Dr. Russell and a radiologist in a nearby room where the CT images of Arthur’s brain were displayed on a light box. As the doctors examined and reexamined the images, their concern became apparent. They didn’t say much at first, leaving Arthur and Jeanne to stare at the images in a frantic attempt to see what they were seeing. “I had never seen CAT-scan images of my brain before,” he later revealed. “Then I saw that the two hemispheres of my brain, which should have been nearly identical, were not. The right side of the brain was clear. The left side showed an irregularly round shape—a splotch. . . . What was it doing on my brain?”

  Clearly shaken by what he had seen, Dr. Russell spoke as calmly as he could. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to steer you wrong. I am not a neurologist or a neurosurgeon.” The radiologist nodded in assent, prompting Russell to ask Arthur if he could “find someone at New York Hospital?” Arthur answered “of course,” but he left the CAT scan facility uncertain about his future. “The drive back home, although it took only eight minutes, was pretty awful,” Arthur recalled. “Up until the moment of seeing the CAT scan, I had not felt extreme anxiety. What had triggered my anxiety now was not the CAT scan itself but the jolting effect of the image on Dr. Russell. Obviously he thought I had something to fear.”3

  Back at home, Arthur and Jeanne agreed he should get a second opinion as soon as possible. Later that afternoon, he walked into the New York Hospital office of Dr. John Caronna, a distinguished neurologist with almost twenty years of experience in his field. After looking at the CAT scan images, Dr. Caronna confirmed Arthur’s fears without being alarmist. “Something is in there,” he acknowledged. “We can see that. But what? I don’t think we can know for certain without a biopsy. . . . We need to look at the tissue, examine it. I think we have to talk to a neurosurgeon. He can explain your options.”

  A few minutes later, Dr. Russell Patterson, a neurosurgeon, and Dr. Stephen Scheidt, Arthur’s cardiologist, joined the consultation. Patterson tried to soften the blow by offering two options. “We don’t have to do anything right away,” he insisted, adding: “Obviously something is going on, probably an infection of some sort. We can simply wait and see what happens next.” Faced with the specter of an entire arm going dead, or worse, Arthur inquired about the second option. “We could go in right now,” Dr. Patterson told him. “As soon as possible. That way, we would know exactly what we are dealing with. And we can get as much of the infected tissue out as we can.” Gulping hard, Arthur reluctantly chose the second option.

  The next day, an MRI confirmed Dr. Patterson’s general diagnosis, and later in the week a consultation with doctors at the Brunswick Hospital in Amityville, where his good friend Dr. Doug Stein conducted his practice, provided further confirmation that surgery was the best option. On Wednesday, August 31, the third day of the 1988 U.S. Open, Arthur entered New York Hospital for a “fresh battery of tests, including a spinal tap and a blood test.” All of this was prep work for the biopsy and brain surgery to follow, but it turned out to be much more than that.4

  The doctors at New York Hospital received the test results on Thursday, but they could not bring themselves to deliver the news to their famous patient right away. The results were far worse than they had an
ticipated, so they decided it would be best if Arthur and Jeanne learned the hard truth from personal friends. The go-betweens were Stein and Eddie Mandeville, close friends who had been making daily visits to Arthur’s bedside. After talking to Arthur’s doctors, Stein gathered himself for what would almost certainly be the most difficult conversation of his life. On Friday morning, he asked Mandeville to join him, and together they waited solemnly for Jeanne to arrive at the hospital. When they told her the news, she gasped and nearly fainted.

  When he saw his wife and two of his closest friends enter the room, Arthur knew something was up. After a nervous greeting, Stein fought through his tears and uttered words no one wants to hear: the blood test results indicated that Arthur was HIV-positive. Like most Americans, Arthur had paid intermittent attention to the AIDS pandemic during the past five years, and he knew enough about this frightening new disease to know that contracting it was tantamount to a death sentence. In early 1988, he had heard the stark warning issued by C. Everett Koop, the surgeon general of the United States: “If you contract AIDS, you will die.” For a few seconds, he remained silent before asking plaintively, “What does this mean about Jeanne?” Before anyone could answer, she leaned forward to embrace him. As he later described the anguished scene: “She reached out quickly, put her left arm around my shoulders, and squeezed my hand hard. ‘You and me, babe,’ she said. ‘You and me.’ ”