Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  He even managed to squeeze in an appearance on the actress Lynn Redgrave’s televised interview show, Fighting Back. Deeply interested in health and human rights issues, Redgrave asked him questions about his “life with AIDS,” and about his views on the fight against the disease and the prospects for a cure. Was he resigned to an early death? Had he given up hope? His response was an unequivocal “I will never quit,” though he was quick to add that personal pledges were far less important than institutional responses to AIDS. Even if “there is no cure for AIDS in time for me,” he declared, there is certainly “hope” for those who have not yet made the transition from HIV-positive status to full-blown AIDS.26

  After this televised interlude, he returned to the tournament with a measure of relief, but also with a sense of accomplishment, hoping his candor had opened up a few minds. Back in the broadcast booth, he was pleased to spend several days with Billie Jean King, the person he admired most in the contemporary sports world. Born three months apart, Arthur and Billie Jean had known each other since they were teenagers, and they had worked together in the broadcast booth off and on for several years. Their mutual respect was obvious and genuine and never stronger than during the 1992 Wimbledon fortnight. Since they had not had the chance to spend any extended time together during the three months since the AIDS announcement, they had a lot to talk about when they were off the air.

  They discussed everything from presidential politics to Arthur’s outing, but mostly they reminisced about the past, including an episode at the 1991 Wimbledon tournament that had touched Billie Jean’s heart. Introducing Camera to the sprawling Wimbledon complex, Arthur had, in his words, “strolled with her from one green court to another, telling her (as if at four she could understand me) about my matches on this court and that.” What Billie Jean saw that day was a loving, solicitous father who “couldn’t wait” to hold Camera’s hand and “take her around.” “He loved her, he really loved her,” she concluded, with renewed affection for her old friend. A year later he returned the favor. “More than ever,” he wrote, “I savored the terms of our long friendship, and admired the sharpness of her mind and the resilience of her spirit.”27

  The 1992 Wimbledon fortnight left Arthur with a good feeling about his place in Wimbledon history. “When I left England this time,” he wrote, “I did not feel nearly as pessimistic about my chances of returning . . . as I had in 1991. Perhaps I will be back next year, and even the year after.” Another source of optimism was the healthy state of American tennis. In 1992, three of the four men’s semifinalists were American: the veteran John McEnroe; twenty-two-year-old Andre Agassi; and twenty-year-old Pete Sampras. When Agassi won the title on the closing day of the tournament, he became the fifth American in the last eleven years to capture the singles championship. By contrast, during the decade prior to Arthur’s victory in 1975, only two other American men won the singles title. American tennis was clearly on the upswing, a trend confirmed by Sampras’s unprecedented run of six Wimbledon triumphs between 1993 and 2000.28

  For Ashe, the only discouraging aspect of the competition was the continuing absence of an African American star who could extend his Wimbledon legacy. He did hold out some hope that the highest-ranked black player on the ATP tour, eleventh ranked MaliVai “Mal” Washington, would eventually make a name for himself at Wimbledon. Four years later, in 1996, Washington would indeed become the second African American to reach the Wimbledon finals. Though he lost the championship match to Richard Krajicek of the Netherlands, this near miss represented an impressive achievement, one that the 1975 Wimbledon champion would have appreciated had he lived long enough to see it.

  Washington’s remarkable fortnight was as close as American tennis would come during the 1990s to finding the long-awaited black successor to Ashe. But regrettably Washington’s promising career would be cut short by a severe knee injury, and he would never reach another Grand Slam final. For nearly a decade no one emerged to take Washington’s place, but in 2006 the former Harvard All-American James Blake sparked memories of Ashe when he achieved a #4 ranking and reached the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open. The son of a white British mother and an African American father, Blake played eight years of Davis Cup competition and even upset the great Swiss champion Roger Federer in the quarterfinals of the 2008 Olympic singles competition in Beijing.

  Blake was a class act on and off the court, and he rarely missed an opportunity to thank Ashe for serving as an exemplary role model. “It’s an honor any time I hear my name linked to Arthur Ashe,” he once declared. On the court, he fell short in his effort to follow in Ashe’s footsteps, but otherwise he fulfilled his famous predecessor’s goals, compiling a public service record that earned him ATP’s Arthur Ashe Humanitarian of the Year Award in 2008. Nearly a decade later, he honored Arthur’s legacy with Ways of Grace, an inspiring book of essays on activist athletes courageous enough to speak out on public issues. “Ashe taught me that despite the situation you are in, no matter how grave, how embarrassing, or how devastating,” Blake wrote movingly in the introduction, “you can try to find a positive way to affect the world.”29

  Tennis-wise, neither Blake nor any other African American male has approached the success of the incomparable Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, who together won 30 Grand Slam singles championships in a nineteen-year span from 1999 to 2017. But no one could have predicted in 1992 that the duplicable black tennis champion was Althea Gibson, not Arthur Ashe. During Arthur’s lifetime, the dream of sharing the limelight with other male tennis stars arising out of the black community remained alive, if largely unfulfilled.

  Failure almost always leads to a certain amount of recrimination, and the unsuccessful search for the next Arthur Ashe was no exception. Some of the most disgruntled black tennis players, those who had fallen short of their expectations, sometimes complained that Arthur had done little to help them, intimating that he secretly enjoyed his singular status as America’s only black tennis champion. Expecting support based on racial solidarity, they felt entitled to personal intervention that would hasten their climb up the tennis ladder. Such expectations misjudged the motivations of a man who believed all success should be earned. Arthur knew from experience that there were no shortcuts on the road to true success; that is why he placed so much faith in hard work—and so little in any form of favoritism, racial or otherwise.

  At the end of his life, Ashe still believed in virtually all of the precepts he had learned many years earlier either from his father or Dr. J. To be successful at the highest level, an aspiring player had to develop both the right attitude and the right skills early on in the educational process. That is why he put so much emphasis on the work of the NJTL and other tennis institutions designed for children and adolescents. Even when health considerations might have dictated less involvement with kids, he honored all of his commitments to youth organizations.

  On July 20, less than two weeks after his return from Wimbledon, he presided over a benefit match in northern New Jersey between Bjorn Borg and Guillermo Vilas, two Ashe admirers who had agreed to do what they could to raise funds for the Safe Passage Foundation program in Newark. A testament to Ashe’s elevated stature, the Borg-Vilas match raised more than $10,000 for the Newark program and helped set the stage for a $100,000 sponsorship granted by the Nestlé corporation later in the year.

  Nothing could have made Ashe happier. He believed in the SPF mentoring program, which valued education and character development above all else. “We use tennis to attract the kids,” he explained, “but we make sure that we spend about one-third of our time talking about other, more serious matters. I always try to lift the sights of the youngsters to new heights. Trying to be the next Michael Jordan is fine, I tell them; but why not also aim for the goal of owning the team that employs the next Michael Jordan?”30

  The Borg-Vilas benefit match boosted Ashe’s morale, as had his meeting with Nelson Mandela a week earlier. But the high point of the summer came on Augus
t 30, when the professional tennis community rallied behind his effort to raise funds for his new foundation, the AAFDA. Held the day before the first round of the U.S. Open, the Arthur Ashe AIDS Tennis Challenge drew a huge crowd and the participation of nine of the game’s biggest stars. The outpouring of support was unprecedented, leading one reporter to marvel: “The tennis world is known by and large as a selfish, privileged world, one crammed with factions and egos. So what is happening at the Open is unthinkable: gender and nationality and politics will take a back seat to a full-fledged effort to support Ashe.”

  Celebrity participants included Mike Wallace of CBS and Mayor Dinkins, who read a pronouncement designating August 30 as Arthur Ashe Day in New York. Agassi and McEnroe later entertained the crowd by clowning their way through a long set, and, to Ashe’s delight, the man once known as Superbrat “even staged a mock tantrum against the umpire.” Several days earlier, on a more serious note, McEnroe had spoken for many of his peers in explaining why he felt passionate about Ashe’s cause. “It’s not something you can even think twice about when you’re asked to help,” he insisted. “The fact that the disease has happened to a tennis player certainly strikes home with all of us. I’m just glad someone finally organized the tennis community like this, and obviously it took someone like Arthur to do it.”

  Arthur was thrilled with the response to the AIDS Challenge, which raised $114,000 for the AAFDA. And that was only the beginning. During the Challenge, one man walked up and casually handed him a personal check for $25,000, and later in the week the foundation received a $30,000 check from an anonymous donor from North Carolina. Such generosity was what he had hoped to inspire, and with his encouragement, the AAFDA staff began to plan fund-raising events connected to the 1993 Wimbledon and U.S. Open tournaments. Perhaps the lofty goal of raising $5 million by the end of 1993 was realistic after all, he thought. And when virtually all of the players in the 1992 U.S. Open draw complied with the foundation’s request to attach a special patch—“a red ribbon centered by a tiny yellow tennis ball”—to their tennis outfits as a symbolic show of support for Arthur and other AIDS victims, he knew he had started something important.31

  The willingness of so many individuals to answer the call to action on AIDS issues was gratifying. Arthur’s belief in active citizenship was a bedrock principle that had guided his life since the late 1960s, and before the Open was over he was able to demonstrate just how seriously he regarded calls for personal commitment to social justice. When Randall Robinson asked him to come to Washington to participate in a joint TransAfrica/NAACP protest march scheduled for September 9, he immediately said yes.

  The issue at hand was one with which he had become increasingly concerned—the Bush administration’s racially discriminatory treatment of Haitian refugees seeking asylum in the United States. Along with more than two thousand other protesters, Ashe marched in front of the White House to seek justice for the growing mass of Haitian “boat people” being forcibly repatriated to their native land without a hearing. In stark contrast to the warm reception accorded Cuban refugees fleeing Fidel Castro’s communist regime, the dark-skinned boat people had fallen victim to the administration’s harsh policy of denying refuge to individuals and families adversely affected by conditions in Haiti.

  The blanket ruling that the Haitians, unlike the Cubans, were essentially economic refugees undeserving of political asylum seemed to fly in the face of the political realities of both islands. To many observers, including Ashe and the organizers of the White House protest, this differential policy smacked of racism. “The argument incensed me,” Ashe wrote. “Undoubtedly, many of the people picked up were economic refugees, but many were not. According to U.S. law, all were entitled to a hearing, and this step was routinely denied them.”

  Arthur knew a great deal about Haiti: he had read widely and deeply about the nation’s troubled past; during his college years one of his closest friends had been Jean-Edouard Baker, a light-skinned islander who would later chair the Haitian Olympic Committee; he had visited the island on several occasions; and he and Jeanne had even honeymooned there in 1977. More recently, he had monitored the truncated career of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a self-styled champion of the Haitian poor whose regime had been toppled by a military coup. The Bush administration’s collusion with the anti-Aristide forces was obvious, highlighted by its policy of interdiction on the high seas. All of this was too much for Arthur, who felt compelled to speak out against the administration’s blatant disregard for freedom and fairness. “I was prepared to be arrested to protest this injustice,” he stated bluntly.32

  Considering his medical condition, he had no business being there; certainly no one would have blamed him if he had begged off—no one, that is, but himself. At the appointed hour on Wednesday morning, September 9, there he was standing in Lafayette Square clad in jeans, T-shirt, and straw hat. The big, bold letters on his shirt read: “Haitians Locked Out Because They’re Black.” He did his best to blend in with the crowd, a near impossibility for a man so famous and so revered. He didn’t want to be treated as a celebrity protester; he simply wanted to make a statement about the responsibilities of democratic citizenship. While he knew his presence at the protest was largely symbolic, he hoped to set an example for others to follow. Putting yourself at risk for a good cause, he assured one reporter covering the march, “does wonders for your outlook. I am sure it released a torrent of endorphins. Marching in a protest is a liberating experience. It’s cathartic. It’s one of the great moments you can have in your life.”

  Despite the promising signs at the recent AIDS challenge, the scene in Washington repeated a traditional pattern. When he arrived at the Shiloh Baptist Church, the staging ground for the protest, he saw no other professional athletes, active or retired, black or white, among the protesters. The throng did include a handful of celebrities from other walks of life, most notably wheelchair-bound black dancer and choreographer eighty-three-year-old Katherine Dunham, a longtime resident of Haiti who had just completed a forty-seven-day hunger strike in protest of American interdiction policy. But Arthur alone represented the sports world.

  Since federal law prohibited large demonstrations in close proximity to the White House, the organizers expected arrests even if the picketers remained peaceful. Following the nonviolent direct-action tradition of the 1960s, they welcomed mass arrests as a means of publicizing their cause. The District police did not disappoint them. As soon as the crowd assembled in Lafayette Park, the police ordered them to disperse. But no one moved. At first the police did nothing, but a few minutes later, following a second refusal to disperse, nearly a hundred demonstrators, including Arthur, were arrested, handcuffed, and carted away in a convoy of paddy wagons. At the U.S. Superior Court building in southwest Washington, each defendant was assessed fines of $50 before being released. Arthur, despite his physical condition, asked for and received no favors as he went through the same process as everybody else. After paying his fine and calling Jeanne to assure her he was all right, he took the late afternoon train back to New York with a sense of personal satisfaction—but also with limited expectations that the Bush administration would change its policies. Politics, like life, he had learned early on, was a never-ending struggle carrying no guarantees of success.

  The next night, while sitting on his couch watching the nightly news, he felt a sharp pain in his sternum, and later in the evening, when the pain intensified, he asked Jeanne to take him to New York Hospital. Tests soon revealed he had suffered a mild heart attack, the second of his life. Prior to the trip to Washington, Jeanne had worried something like this might happen if he didn’t scale back his schedule. But she knew her husband was never one to play it safe when something important was on the line.33

  On the tennis court, he had always been prone to fits of reckless play, going for broke with shots that sometimes defied logic or good sense. Similarly, in his life off the court, particularly in his later years, he almost a
lways went full out, filling every day with as much activity as he could. He did so, not because he craved activity for its own sake, but rather because he wanted to make a difference in the lives of others. He wanted to be a great and good man, to live a virtuous and productive life, and to leave a legacy of independent vision and moral purpose that transcended the world of sports. While tennis was the primary source of his celebrity, the pursuit of greatness on a much larger stage was the force that ultimately propelled his life.

  That is why he embraced a dizzying array of roles beyond his career as a tennis star. Social justice and civil rights activist, athletic administrator, coach, author, historian, teacher, lecturer, philanthropist, entrepreneur, diplomat, and public intellectual—he was all of these things and more. Even near the end of his life, when his body was ravaged with AIDS, he still wanted to do it all. That is why he felt he had to be there at Lafayette Park to make yet another gesture on behalf of simple justice and human rights.

  While nearly everyone was justifiably concerned about this latest physical setback, both Arthur and his cardiologist tried to downplay the gravity of the situation. “He really isn’t very sick,” Dr. Stephen Scheidt told reporters, adding that the recent heart attack had nothing to do with his patient’s struggle with AIDS. The doctor foresaw an early release from the hospital and announced Arthur was already “on the telephone conducting his affairs as usual,” albeit from a hospital bed. Betraying a wry smile, he described his indefatigable patient as metaphorically “charging the net.”34