Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Arthur would miss the long-awaited moment of jubilee, but he saw Mandela one last time, in New York, in July 1992. The Democratic National Convention was then in full swing, and the two men had no shortage of things to discuss. Arthur told the man he now called Nelson that a lot had happened to the Ashe family since they had last met. He and Jeanne had sold their house in Mount Kisco and moved back to an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Camera had grown into a lively and confident five-year-old kindergartener. And, perhaps most important, Arthur had revealed to the world that he was suffering from AIDS. Nelson had already heard the sad news, but he wanted to know more about his friend’s perilous condition—and how he and Jeanne were coping. “Our main topic was now AIDS,” Arthur recalled, “both as it affected me personally and as an international scourge. I was pleased to see that he knew a great deal about the subject and was free of the prejudices that prevent many political leaders from confronting it.”44

  Arthur was with the African leader long enough to tell him the story of how he had been forced to make his condition public three months earlier. On Monday afternoon, April 6, 1992, the Ashes received a visit from an old friend, Doug Smith, a former ATA tennis player now writing for the national daily newspaper USA Today. When Smith called to arrange the visit, Arthur assumed he wanted to do a news feature on A Hard Road to Glory. But after a brief conversation about the book, Smith turned to a more serious matter. USA Today had gotten a tip—a “lead” on a potential story—concerning Arthur’s health. “We have heard that you are HIV-positive, that you have AIDS,” he blurted out. Though stunned, Arthur immediately shot back: “Can you prove it?” Smith acknowledged he couldn’t, but quickly added: “That’s the point. My editor wants to know, is it true? They sent me to find out. Is it true?” Trying to stay calm, Arthur nonetheless felt his ire rising. As he recalled: “The anger was building in me that this newspaper, any newspaper or any part of the media, could think that it had the right to tell the world that I had AIDS.”

  After several awkward silences, Arthur demanded to speak with Smith’s editor. Smith gave him the phone number of Gene Policinski, the managing sports editor for USA Today, and a few minutes later the editor was on the phone trying to explain his position. He asked Arthur point-blank: “Are you HIV-positive, or do you have AIDS?” Without fully considering the implications of his words, Arthur responded with a coy “Could be.” “I could not lie to him,” he later explained. “Sometimes, indirectly, I had to lie about AIDS. Now and then, I had to lie about it directly. In November 1991, when I wanted to go to South Africa, I lied on the application for my visa and said that I did not have an infectious disease. But I never lied without a sharp twinge of conscience, even in lying to the government of South Africa.”

  After informing Policinski he “had no intention . . . of confirming or denying the story,” Arthur asserted “the public has no right to know in this case.” While he knew public figures forfeited a blanket right of privacy, he insisted he was no longer a public figure: “I don’t play professional tennis anymore. I officially announced my retirement in 1980. I am not running for public office, so my health is no one’s legitimate concern except my own.” Policinski thought otherwise. “You are a public figure,” he maintained. “And anytime a public figure is ill, it’s news. If he has a heart attack, as you did in 1979, it’s news. We have no special zone of treatment for AIDS. It’s a disease like heart disease. It is news.”

  Suspecting that Policinski was right in a legalistic sense, Arthur retreated to an effort “to control the announcement.” He asked the editor for “a little time, say, thirty-six hours, to call friends, talk to other journalists, and prepare a public statement.” Policinski was noncommittal. He would not publish the story without additional confirmation, but neither would he back away from the ongoing investigation. “Policinski and I ended the conversation without coming to any agreement,” Arthur recalled, “except that I stood by my refusal to confirm the story, and he stood by his determination to continue to investigate it, as well as his right to publish it if he could find confirmation. I fully expected to see the story in the next morning’s edition.”45

  When the story did not appear the next morning, he knew he had at least twenty-four hours to prepare and deliver an announcement. Both he and Jeanne had long feared this day would come, and they had already discussed their options. Now the force of circumstances was upon them. Canceling all of his appointments, he sat down with Jeanne to figure out how they could best handle the situation. There were few precedents to guide them. In November 1991, the basketball star Magic Johnson had called a press conference to announce both his HIV status and his retirement from the NBA, but most celebrities suffering from full-blown AIDS—including the actor Brad Davis and the African American clothing designer Willi Smith—had failed to reveal their condition prior to their deaths. Arthur and Jeanne were essentially entering uncharted territory.

  April 7, 1992, was one of the most difficult days of their life together. With considerable justification, they feared revealing Arthur’s condition would reach well beyond simple embarrassment and an end to the family’s privacy. In addition to the inevitable rumors of closeted homosexuality, there would also be severe restrictions on employment and international travel. “I wondered if I would ever see Wimbledon again,” Arthur later wrote. “I wondered about my commercial connections, my consultantships and other jobs in television, in the manufacture and sale of sports equipment in clothing, and in coaching. All of these connections went back a long way, and represented a tremendous investment on my part as well as on the part of those companies. Would these connections survive the news?”46

  Their first test was a call to Seth Abraham, the president of HBO Sports’s parent company Time Warner Sports. Over the years Abraham had become a close friend, and he was one of the few who already knew about Arthur’s battle with AIDS. After describing his conversation with Policinski, Arthur asked Abraham for permission to hold a press conference at HBO’s headquarters at 1100 Sixth Avenue. Abraham agreed without hesitation and reserved a room on the fifteenth floor large enough to handle a throng of reporters.

  With the venue set, Arthur began calling friends and family members to warn them about the upcoming announcement scheduled for the following afternoon. In the eleven hours between 3:15 Tuesday afternoon and 2:45 Wednesday morning, he made nearly three dozen calls, many to those learning about his condition for the first time. “Hearing the news that I had AIDS, two or three people burst into tears,” he recalled. “I hastened to tell them, and others that I was fine, that my spirits were up, that they should not worry about me.” Among the calls were one to Dr. Louis Sullivan, the secretary of health and human services, and another to the head of the National Commission on AIDS, who was asked to invite medical reporters to the news conference. But most of the calls were to close friends and long-standing colleagues—people like Donald Dell, Charlie Pasarell, and Frank Deford, all of whom agreed to be part of Arthur’s official entourage on Wednesday afternoon.

  Deford also volunteered to edit Arthur’s draft of the opening statement to the press. The celebrated Newsweek feature writer and his best friend from the world of tennis had been through a lot together—coauthoring a book, traveling to Africa, and mourning the loss of Deford’s daughter Alex—but putting the AIDS statement together represented the toughest challenge of their many years of friendship. Both men were veteran writers, but nothing either had ever written seemed as important as these few paragraphs.47

  As Arthur composed the first draft, he was interrupted by a series of calls. Even without the help of a press conference, news of his condition was spreading. Andrew Young called from Atlanta, David Dinkins from the New York mayor’s office, Doug Wilder from Richmond, and even President Bush from the White House. All expressed their support and sympathy, and promised to stick by him. The support that counted most, of course, came from Jeanne, who remained a tower of strength as the day’s events unfolded. An
d there was also five-year-old Camera, prancing around the apartment with only a vague sense of what was happening. So far she had been shielded from the knowledge that her father was seriously ill, but both parents realized it was time to tell her what was going on. As Arthur later explained, “We had to tell her before someone, most likely some other child, taunted her with the fact that her father has AIDS.”

  The dreaded conversation with Camera would have to come soon, but Arthur could not bring himself to do it prior to the news conference. “I could hardly look at her,” he remembered, “without thinking of how innocent she was of the import of this coming event, and how in one way or another she was bound to suffer for it.” At one point, she interrupted his writing with a hug around his knees and an outstretched but closed right hand hiding something special. When she opened the hand to show her father the gift, the “bright silver wrapper” of a Hershey’s chocolate Kiss was revealed. Fighting back tears, he kissed her cheek before returning to his keyboard.48

  Several hours later, long after Camera had gone to bed, he completed a draft and ended what seemed to be the longest day of his life with a final round of phone calls. Crawling into bed a few minutes before three in the morning, he closed his eyes to try to get as much rest as he could. But he found it impossible to sleep “except in fits and starts.” Mostly, he twisted and turned, periodically opening his eyes and aimlessly gazing through the darkness. “From my windows on the fourteenth floor of my apartment building in Manhattan I saw the lights of the city, and watched for the sun to come up through the murk and mist of Brooklyn and Queens to the east,” he recalled. “Before six o’clock, with the sky still dark, I was dressed and ready to go, ready to hunt for a newspaper, to discover if my secret was out, exposed to the world.”

  Walking across the street to a small shop, he found a freshly printed copy of USA Today. A quick scan of the front page and the sports section, the logical places for a sensational story about a sports celebrity, told him his secret was intact. “There was not a word about me,” he later reported. “I felt a great relief. And then I knew that the relief was only temporary, that it was now up to me to take the matter into my own hands and break the news to whatever part of the world wanted to hear it. And I would have to do it that day, Wednesday, because the days—maybe the hours—of my secret were definitely numbered. I had to announce it to the world that, I, Arthur Ashe, had AIDS.”49

  Returning to the apartment, he spent part of the morning making changes to his prepared statement. He then shared the changes with Jeanne and Frank, both of whom gave their approval to the revised draft. Soon Doug Smith came by to record an interview. The focus was supposed to be AIDS, but Arthur began by demanding to know the names of both the reporter who took the call at USA Today and the paper’s informant. He suspected the informant was Dr. J’s son, Bobby Jr., who had long held a grudge against him. But Smith refused to divulge any information. Eventually Arthur let the matter rest and turned to an account of his illness, and later in the morning Jeanne granted Smith a second interview. A hurried lunch followed, after which Arthur took a few minutes to get ready for the ride to the press conference.50

  The press conference was scheduled for 3:30, and the Ashe entourage arrived at HBO headquarters just a few minutes before the appointed time. Ross Levinsohn, HBO’s head of publicity, met them in the lobby and accompanied them to the fifteenth floor. As the elevator whisked them up to the room, Arthur, perhaps looking for a bit of encouragement, read the first paragraph of his statement out loud. But when he got to the end of the paragraph, which revealed that he was “HIV-positive,” Dr. Murray offered a stern correction: “No, Arthur, you have AIDS. That’s what you have to tell them.” After an awkward silence, the chastened patient nodded his assent, and by the time they reached the room he was more or less ready to say what had to be said.51

  Familiar to fight fans, the room had hosted many pre-fight announcement events over the years, a fact Arthur wryly judged to be morbidly appropriate for what he was about to do. When he entered the room accompanied by Jeanne, Dell, Dinkins, and three doctors—Mandeville, Scheidt, and Murray—he saw a packed house of reporters. As he later put it, “I half expected to hear the bell sound for Round One.”

  Hoping to lighten the mood, he began with a joke. “George Steinbrenner has asked me to manage the Yankees,” he said with only a hint of a smile. “But I graciously declined.” When “nobody laughed,” he knew he couldn’t delay any longer. He began by reminding the reporters that “rumors and half-truths have been floating about, concerning my medical condition since my heart attack on July 31, 1979.” He then went right to the heart of the matter: “I had my first bypass operation six months later on December 13, 1979, and a second in June 1983. But beginning with my admittance to New York Hospital for brain surgery in September 1988, some of you heard that I had tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. That is indeed the case.”

  As a murmur of reaction filled the room, he continued with a brief description of the origins and evolution of his condition, from a transfusion of HIV-infected blood to toxoplasmosis to four years of treatment for AIDS. Anticipating being asked why he had not revealed his condition to the public in 1988, he tried to explain and justify the delay. “The answer is simple,” he argued. “Any admission of HIV infection at that time would have seriously, permanently, and—my wife and I believed—unnecessarily infringed upon our family’s right to privacy. Just as I am sure that everybody in this room has some personal matter he or she would like to keep private, so did we. There was certainly no compelling medical or physical necessity to go public with my medical condition.”

  He then thanked those who had kept his condition a secret. “I have it on good authority,” he declared, “that my status was common knowledge in the medical community, and I am truly grateful to all of you—medical and otherwise—who knew but either didn’t even ask me or never made it public.” He acknowledged this “silent and generous conspiracy to assist me in maintaining my privacy. That has meant a great deal to me and Jeanne and Camera.” With this mention of family, he was overcome with emotion and began to cry. As he later described his momentary breakdown, “I felt the tears flooding my eyes, and my throat simply would not open to let out the words.” The silence in the room deepened his embarrassment, but try as he might he was unable to regain his voice.

  Seeing her husband’s distress, Jeanne moved to the podium, and Arthur stepped aside and handed her his prepared text. Somehow Jeanne managed to fight back her own tears as she read a section on the announcement’s probable impact on Camera. With Arthur’s words, she told the gathering: “Even though we’ve been preparing Camera for this news, beginning tonight, Jeanne and I must teach her how to react to new, different, and sometimes cruel comments that have little to do with her reality.” Seeing Arthur had regained his composure, she stepped back from the podium to let him finish. For several minutes, he held forth on a series of matters, including his displeasure with USA Today. The paper’s editors, he pointed out, “put me in the unenviable position of having to lie if I wanted to protect our privacy. No one should have to make that choice. I am sorry that I have been forced to make this revelation now.”

  In closing, after assuring the audience that both Jeanne and Camera had tested negative for HIV, he talked about his past—and his future. “I have been an activist on many issues in the past—against apartheid, for education and the athlete, the need for faster change in tennis,” he said. “I will continue with those projects in progress, and will certainly get involved with the AIDS crisis.” After promising to work on AIDS education and fund-raising with other HIV-positive individuals, including Magic Johnson, he ended with a few sobering remarks. “The quality of one’s life changes irrevocably when something like this becomes public,” he insisted. “Reason and rational thought are too often waived out of fear, caution, or just plain ignorance. My family and I must now learn a new set of behavioral standards to function in the everyda
y world, and sadly, there was really no good reason for this to have to happen now. But it has happened, and we will adjust and go forward.”

  Forty-five minutes of questions followed. The reporters wanted to know about his current physical condition, about his medication, and about whether or not he planned to sue the hospital that had given him infected blood. One reporter asked if he had been forcibly outed by USA Today. “Absolutely,” he responded. “If the person hadn’t called the newspaper, I’d still be leading a normal life.” When asked if he had any advice for fellow AIDS patients, he counseled perseverance and continued hope—“because you never know what breakthrough lies around the corner.” On this positive note, he brought the most difficult public experience of his life to a close.

  The news conference had been painful, to be sure, but as he later revealed, he also felt “a certain sense of relief.” Earlier in the day he had predicted as much in a conversation with Doug Smith. Comparing his impending revelation to a Roman Catholic confession, he hoped for the same feeling of release that many parishioners experience coming out of a confessional booth. “You’re supposed to come out feeling better,” he told Smith, adding: “there’s a self-imposed burden when you keep something like this to yourself. It’s one of those things that cry out for revelation, just to tell someone.” Of course, Arthur had not told someone; he had, in effect, told the whole world. And for better or worse, he and those he loved would have to live with the consequences of that expansive revelation.

  As he and Jeanne left the room to begin their new life, the confessional metaphor came back into his mind. Despite all the distractions of the moment, he could not resist contemplation of moral lessons to be learned. Even in situations that drove him to tears, or that tested his faith in himself, he continued the quest for wisdom of the highest order—something he would surely need in the coming weeks and months.52