Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Ashe’s urge for rapprochement became manifest during the May 1992 visit. In his first public statement, he declared: “It’s nice to be home.” But he also wanted to reach out to the city in a more concrete and lasting way. For several years, he had quietly harbored a desire to create an African American Sports Hall of Fame that would reflect the accomplishments he had chronicled in A Hard Road to Glory. He envisioned a museum that would not only reenshrine the black athletes already inducted into existing Halls of Fame—such as those in Cooperstown, Springfield, Canton, and Newport—but also memorialize the achievements of the many other black champions who, because of racial restrictions, had never attained this status. Initially, he thought the best prospects for the host city were Atlanta, Indianapolis, St. Louis, or Durham, but after a discussion with Joseph James, the director of Richmond’s Office of Economic Development, he decided he wanted to put the museum in his hometown.

  For three decades and more, Richmond officials had been searching for ways to combat what one local historian called “the city’s gritty rust-belt realties,” but a series of high-profile urban renewal and redevelopment projects had not solved the problems of a decaying downtown. Richmond officials had not given up, however, and by the early 1990s historical and heritage-based tourism had emerged as the city’s best hope for economic renewal. So when Ashe told James about his dream of building an African American Sports Hall of Fame, there was considerable enthusiasm about building the Hall in Richmond, where adding African American historical sites to the city’s traditional Confederate venues was an increasingly attractive option.

  Ashe and James agreed the best means of getting started was to “hold a Gala Benefit Dinner to honor every African-American ever inducted into a major pro-sports Hall of Fame.” On June 17, Ashe ran the idea by Walter T. Kenney Sr., Richmond’s black mayor, who as a city councilor since 1977 had allied with Henry Marsh, the city’s first black mayor. It would be a “black-tie affair,” and he anticipated “inviting over 600 national leaders in business, communications, entertainment and the arts as well as over 130 African-American Hall of Fame inductees.”

  It would be several months before Ashe received official approval and seed money from the City Council, and by the time the date for the gala was scheduled—for November 1993—he wasn’t sure he would be around to attend. But that didn’t stop him from doing everything he could to advance the project. He was convinced the hall would serve as an important legacy perpetuating the influence of A Hard Road to Glory, especially after the City Council agreed to place the proposed 68,000-square-foot building in Jackson Ward, three blocks away from the site of Ashe’s boyhood home on Sledd Street.16

  The campaign for the Hall, as important as it was to Ashe, did not push his AIDS work to the side. For better or for worse, he had joined Magic Johnson as a poster boy for the campaign against the dreaded disease. “To many people, especially to people who meet me or even those who merely find themselves in the same room with me,” he explained, “I probably personify the problem of AIDS. When I am there with them, they can avert their eyes but not for long, and must face the problem that has been facing them for years, and will face them even more boldly in the future. 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. Talking to audiences about AIDS has become, in some respects, the most important function of my life.”17

  To serve this function, he had to maintain a certain level of health and emotional well-being, and he had no way of knowing how long he would be able to do so. As he told the journalist B. Drummond Ayres Jr. in May, he knew sooner or later his blood tests would tell him he was on the “ ‘downhill’ side of the disease,” that, in effect, he was nearing the end and would have to “reassess” what he could do in the public arena. But he preferred to focus on his present condition. “I’ve been rock solid with my tests for the past three and a half years,” he told Ayres, “and I’m not down yet.” Ayres came away from the interview marveling at Ashe’s capacity to maintain a positive attitude in the face of adversity. The ailing tennis star, he concluded, “seems anything but angry and focused on himself. In the worst year of his life, so far, he is pushing on, promoting tennis, talking up racial equality, spreading the word about the killer disease he carries.”18

  By late spring, Ashe was growing increasingly confident in his ability to develop an agenda for attacking the disease. Sharply critical of the Bush administration’s unwillingness to address the crisis in any meaningful way, he aligned himself with Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination and a strong advocate of a national health care system that would, among other advantages, facilitate extended treatment of AIDS victims. Ashe had grown increasingly disenchanted with Bush on a number of fronts, but the president’s refusal to take a strong and consistent position on AIDS issues was especially disappointing.

  He made this point in no uncertain terms in a commencement address delivered at Harvard Medical School in early June. After Magic Johnson, the scheduled commencement speaker, had been forced to cancel, Arthur volunteered to take his place. The expected topic was AIDS, and he did not disappoint his audience of medical school graduates and their families on that score. Demonstrating his command of the subject, he cast his speech as broadly as possible placing the AIDS crisis in the context of a woefully inadequate national health care system.

  Describing himself as “a thirteen year professional patient,” he took the system to task for being unnecessarily expensive, ethically corrupt in its billing practices, too dismissive of patients’ concerns, and inattentive to the needs of the poor and much of the middle class. In the future, he counseled, physicians’ salaries and hospital fees would have to be reduced to accommodate a larger proportion of the public, “especially if AIDS continues to spread as expected.” Terming “the absence of a coherent national health-care policy” as “one of the major disgraces of American life,” he prescribed a set of initiatives that would transform American medicine into a more compassionate and caring institution, one driven not by greed but by the urge to serve. “Through a prudent combination of federal assistance and private enterprise,” he maintained, “America will ensure appropriate, adequate, and sufficient physical and mental health care for all its citizens.” In his idealized conception, American medicine would also acknowledge “its preeminent moral position in leading combined global efforts to assist, share information, and seek solutions for our common medical concerns.”19

  This final point was of great importance to Ashe. Behind the scenes, he was already laying the basis for an organization later known as the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS (AAFDA). The foundation’s charter mandated that at least 50 percent of its funds would be sent abroad. Since the magnitude of the AIDS crisis was especially appalling in Africa, he felt that it should receive a significant proportion of whatever funds could be raised.

  The AAFDA’s initial goal was to secure between $2.5 and $5 million within two years, and by mid-August the structure of a foundation with that capacity was in place. Ashe leaned heavily on his friend Margaret Mahoney, the executive director of the Commonwealth Fund, for advice and direction, and together they put together an impressive board of directors that included Dr. Irving Chen of the UCLA AIDS Institute; Dr. Machelle Allen, an AIDS specialist at New York’s Bellevue Hospital; and Dr. Michael Merson, the director of the World Health Organization’s Global Programme on AIDS. Ashe and the board hired Jackie Joseph, a former Stanford tennis star with an MBA from Columbia, as executive director. A talented journalist and publicist who later created the popular website TennisCountry.com, Joseph would remain at the helm of the foundation for several years.

  Eager for the AAFDA to begin its work, Ashe acknowledged he and Jeanne had discussed the eventual creation of such a foundation long before his April 1992 AIDS announcement; and now that he had revealed his condit
ion, he wanted to make up for lost time. While he soon discovered it would be several weeks before his fledgling foundation was ready to launch its first official appeal for funds, he looked forward to the eventual kickoff—a daylong benefit tournament held at the National Tennis Center in late August.20

  The summer of 1992 brought other important developments for Ashe. In late June, while at Wimbledon, he made a fateful call to Arnold Rampersad, a Princeton English professor he had met eight months earlier at a children’s book fair. A native of Trinidad and Tobago who had migrated to the United States in 1965 at the age of twenty-four, Rampersad had recently won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowship, largely on the basis of an award-winning two-volume biography of the black poet and intellectual Langston Hughes. Impressed by the literary excellence of the Hughes biography and by Rampersad’s personal charm, Ashe left their first meeting hoping they would reconnect in the near future.

  For several months, Ashe had been thinking about writing a final memoir that would supplement and supersede his 1981 autobiography, Off the Court. He now felt ready to go beyond the standard narrative genre by recasting his life story as a moral and philosophical journey. He wanted to explicate “his views on certain issues of importance to him, such as race, education, politics, and sports.” And with the end of his life drawing near, he also wanted to devote part of the time he had left to a searching discussion of his experiences as an AIDS sufferer. To do so would require a collaborator, one who could start immediately and work under considerable time pressure. When Ashe asked Rampersad if he would be willing to join him on this breathless autobiographical and philosophical adventure, the Princeton professor said yes, commencing a successful collaboration that would produce one of the decade’s best-selling autobiographies, Days of Grace, A Memoir.

  Ashe would not live long enough to see the book in print or even to complete the manuscript, which ultimately stretched to nearly five hundred pages. But a series of lengthy taped interviews conducted during the summer and fall of 1992—combined with Rampersad’s skilled writing—fashioned most of the content and structure of what would become a book of distinction. Working without a formal contract from July to November, Rampersad turned Ashe’s recollections and reflections into polished prose.21

  Organized thematically rather than chronologically, Ashe’s memoir begins with an interpretive account of his April 1992 outing, before flashing back to two chapters on the 1980s, one commenting on his heart problems and the aging process, and a second detailing his experiences as captain of the U.S. Davis Cup squad. The fourth chapter, titled “Protest and Politics,” traces his turn to civil rights activism in 1968 and the subsequent evolution of his interest in South Africa, and the fifth and longest chapter, titled “The Burden of Race,” drills deeper into the sometimes baffling and confounding connections among race, politics, power, education, and sports. The sixth chapter, “The Striving and Achieving,” discusses matters of money, commercial endorsements, and board service as a potential contribution to social justice and equal opportunity, whether the service is on a corporate board such as Aetna’s or on nonprofit, philanthropic boards such as those overseeing ABC and SPF.

  The final five chapters, accounting for a little more than a third of the text, offer a highly personal perspective of the AIDS crisis, from Ashe’s 1988 diagnosis to a closing letter to “My Dear Camera.” The letter—perhaps the most poignant section of the book—presents a familial and moral legacy to a beloved daughter who will soon be without a father. It begins: “By the time you read this letter from me to you for the first time, I may not be around to discuss with you what I have written here. . . . You would doubtless be sad that I am gone, and remember me clearly for a while. Then I will exist only as a memory already beginning to fade in your mind. Although it is natural for memories to fade, I am writing this letter in the hope that your recollection of me will never fade completely. I would like to remain a part of your life, Camera, for as long as you live.”22

  Writing passages like this may have been therapeutic, but pushing the project forward was an enormous challenge. Fortunately, unlike many of his commitments, preparing Days of Grace did not take him away from home—or unduly complicate his effort to maintain a balance between family time and the demands of his public life. “I travel a great deal now, sometimes flying three times or even more in a single week,” he explained. “But I seldom stay away more than a single night from my family. I cannot bear to be away so long from Jeanne and Camera.”

  Spending time with Camera was his highest priority, and he seemed to find pleasure in the simplest and most mundane parental activities. “I love getting Camera ready for school in the morning, or helping her go to sleep at night,” he wrote. “I love sitting on the floor with her and her coloring books or playing games or simply talking with her.” Most of their time together was spent at home, but as a proud father he also liked to take her to public events, perhaps in part to show her off but mostly to enrich her childhood. Two days after the AIDS announcement, with Jeanne home sick, he took her to the Essence magazine awards show as his date. “I entered the hall with her on my shoulders, so she could see everything and everyone,” he recalled, “and the crowd kindly gave us a standing ovation as we made our way to our seats near the front. At one point, Denzel Washington, who has four daughters of his own, came down from the stage to say hello to Camera, and she slunk in embarrassment to the floor.”

  While Camera was probably too young to appreciate the full meaning of such experiences, they meant the world to him. “I feel strong when I am with her,” he insisted, “I feel the power of her youth and vitality. She taxes me at times, to be sure, but I pay the tax willingly.” He also derived strength and comfort from Jeanne, whom he termed his “co-patient.” The bond between them had never been stronger, as she gracefully adjusted to the ceaseless demands of her multiple roles—wife, lover, mother, nurse—demonstrating an unusual combination of strength and tenderness, discipline and empathy, realism and hope. “What may have rent apart other marriages,” Arthur observed in June, “has only strengthened ours,” which made him “feel better already about Camera’s future.” Thanks to Jeanne’s patient guidance: “She knows that Daddy has AIDS and she knows what to say if the subject comes up.”23

  During the months following the disclosure, Arthur and Jeanne also drew upon the love and support of their extended family. In early May, they traveled to Chicago to celebrate Mother’s Day with Jeanne’s mother and other members of the Moutoussamy clan, and in mid-August they hosted an Ashe-Cunningham family party at the Manhattan apartment. Originally planned as a small gathering, the party, in Arthur’s words, “grew and grew, out of love and caring for me, and I was glad for that. I had no way of knowing when I would see many of them again.” Eventually the crowd of twenty-four became a bit much for the host, who, by his own admission, was beginning to wilt with exhaustion, prompting two aunts—as the reigning family matriarchs—to bring the festivities to a close.

  The following weekend, Arthur and Jeanne and Camera traveled south to Gum Spring to spend a few days with his stepmother, Lorene. Returning to the house his father had built with his help was an emotional experience, heightened by the possibility that this would be his last visit. He had nothing but fond memories of his years with Lorene, the woman who had done so much to nurture his transition from childhood to adolescence. He tried to write a little while he was there, thinking that being close to home and hearth would inspire him, and at one point during the weekend he visited the graves of his mother and father. But mostly he just relaxed, as he and others “rocked and reminisced easily on the porch.”24

  Surprisingly enough, the six months following the AIDS announcement—especially June through August—was a period of relative contentment for Arthur. “Apart from those few days when my medical problems sapped my strength, when my mornings were an ordeal of listlessness and diarrhea,” he revealed, “the summer of 1992 was a joy.” Adjustments in his medication gav
e him renewed hope and boosted his mood as the season progressed. He felt strong enough to exercise regularly, and he played a lot of golf that summer—usually in Scarborough-on-Hudson at the Sleepy Hollow Country Club, where he had been a member since March.25

  Arthur had begun to take an almost childlike delight in his golf game, partly because he was shooting the lowest scores of his life. Maintaining some meaure of athletic skill was important to him as a symbol of vitality and normalcy, and he took pride in his continued involvement in the sports world, both as an amateur golfer and an influential figure among retired tennis stars. In June, when a nominating committee advanced his name as a candidate for a spot on the U.S. Olympic Committee, he did not object. And later in the month, he insisted on fulfilling his contract as a color commentator for HBO at Wimbledon. Returning to Wimbledon, probably for the last time, meant a great deal to him. “I left New York with a happy heart,” he later explained, “because I thought of this trip as a true bonus. The previous year I had flown to London for Wimbledon thinking that it would surely be my last visit to the scene of my greatest triumph in tennis.” Prior to his arrival in 1992, he expressed concern that the infamous British tabloid press would pander to curiosity about his medical condition. But he was pleasantly surprised by the tabloids’ uncharacteristic restraint.

  Determined to enjoy his last hurrah, Arthur made the rounds from Centre Court to the broadcast booth to the locker rooms as if he were on a holy pilgrimage. It had been three decades since his first visit, and some of the traditions that had made Wimbledon so special were no longer in evidence. But for him the glorious green expanses of the All England Club had lost none of their charm. Even a spate of heavy rain failed to dampen his enthusiasm; indeed, the rain delays were welcome in that they gave him more time to reconnect “with old friends.”