Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  Throughout the three-hour service, the themes of civil rights and racial justice were in the air. Two of the eulogizers, Richmond’s mayor, Walter Kenney, and Andrew Young, made direct and forceful reference to the freedom struggle that had animated Arthur’s life. After pointing out that Richmond’s white establishment had not always embraced the city’s most famous black citizen, Kenney praised Arthur’s forgiving and generous spirit: “Instead of writing off Richmond for good, he came back to give, to share, to encourage the young people of this city.” Young was even more forthright, describing his old friend as a “race man” and “a black man in a white game” who “had to deal with the race question every day,” gracefully shouldering “the burden of race” and somehow finding a way to “wear it as a cloak of dignity.”

  At the close of the service, Dell, Yannick Noah, Sherry Snyder, and five other pallbearers carried the casket to a hearse that moments later led a cortege to the burial site at Woodland Cemetery, where Arthur was to be interred alongside his mother. All along the three-mile route to the cemetery, individuals and families stood in tribute, some waving or calling out to the passing cortege, and others standing in reverent silence. The burial ceremony that followed was semiprivate, limited to family members, close friends, and a few dignitaries, including Senators Bill Bradley and Chuck Robb and Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, who was representing President Clinton.

  During the past three days, a large crew of city employees had worked feverishly to clean up the cemetery, which had fallen into disrepair, a tangible metaphor for the belated embrace of a native son who had fled the city in discouragement three decades earlier. But no one seemed to pay much attention to the recently manicured grounds and gravesites. The focus was on Arthur and what he had given to the world. After a round of prayers and moving tributes, the service closed with a rousing rendition of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” Swaying in the twilight with arms interlocked, those closest to Arthur gave him a salutation befitting a man of hope and glory.6

  Two days later, many of those present at the burial joined more than five thousand other mourners at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan. The first athlete to be so honored, Arthur joined the ranks of the great African American artist Romare Bearden, the musical giants Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington, and the noted jurist Thurgood Marshall, all of whom had been memorialized at the cathedral. The choice of venue was highly appropriate, presiding Canon Joel Gibson explained, commending Arthur’s forty-nine years as “a grand life that commands a grand space.”

  The date of the memorial service—coincidentally the 184th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth—accentuated the historic feel of the moment. The weather was stormy, with ice and snow blowing through the streets in bracing gusts. To Bill Rhoden, the mood in the hall seemed somber and sad until Dinkins admonished the crowd, declaring: “This is a memorial tribute, not a wake, so feel free to come alive.”

  With the dark mood broken, the service, according to Rhoden, took on “the feel of an intimate gathering . . . despite the cathedral’s cavernous sanctuary with its 12-story ceiling, and despite the almost eerie chill that hung in the air.” This intimacy reflected the deeply personal expressions of love and respect voiced by an array of friends speaking from the cathedral’s ornate raised pulpit. In contrast to the Richmond gathering, this time, Rhoden observed, “there was less focus on what Arthur Ashe meant to the world than [on] what he meant to friends. One by one the friends came up to tell stories about how Ashe . . . had touched their lives.” Charlie Pasarell, Stan Smith, Billie Jean King, Bill Bradley, and several others gave testament to Arthur’s rare talent for deep and abiding friendship. One of the most poignant moments came when Pasarell paid tribute to his fallen friend. “No man has ever loved his friends more than Arthur loved his friends,” he insisted, choking back tears. “And yes, it can be said that no man loved all humankind more than Arthur did. That gift of Love is Arthur’s great virtue. So on this day, I simply want to say to my great friend, ‘I love you, Arthur,’ ” Later in the service, Arthur’s favorite niece, Luchia, Johnnie’s eldest daughter, challenged the audience to follow her uncle’s lead, to go “beyond platitudes and praise” in the struggle to “eradicate man-made fences.”7

  The hope and camaraderie forged during the New York memorial service would be a topic of conversation in tennis circles for months, and anyone fortunate enough to have been there sensed they had experienced something special. Neil Amdur, among many others, was hit hard by his friend’s death. “I don’t think Ashe realized how many people truly loved him,” he wrote the day after the service. “Maybe he wondered but wasn’t sure. After all, he was shy and had been away from the competitive limelight for a decade before being forced back into the public arena last April. No matter. People cared because he made everyone a part of his life. Rich. Poor. Old. Young. Black. White. Americans. Africans. South Africans. Europeans. Australians. He was as comfortable in a board room as a press room, a tennis court or a court of law, Wall Street and Main Street. Muhammad Ali, Pelé, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan were the fiery comets in the sports galaxy, but Arthur Ashe was the guiding light.”

  Amdur chose his metaphor carefully, remembering Arthur had once carried the nickname “Shadow.” Created in jest by his friends, this appellation nonetheless set him apart from his white peers, the young stars fortunate enough to inhabit tennis’s brightest firmament. In the early years and throughout the decade of the 1960s, Arthur alone was on the tour without being of the tour, and gaining full acceptance would take years of patient effort. As Amdur noted, the heartfelt testimonials he and others witnessed at the cathedral confirmed the depth of feeling and commitment that Arthur inspired and shared. “It is not surprising that so many peers considered Ashe their ‘best friend,’ ” he concluded. “He had a knack for putting himself in other people’s shoes, without cramping that person’s style.” So in the end, what truly set Arthur apart was not race or color, but rather his unsurpassed ability to maintain a healthy balance between friendship and competition.

  In trying to explain Arthur’s unique achievement, Amdur turned to an aphorism attributed to the Romanian star Ion Tiriac: “a true champion is that person who enriches a sport by his presence and leaves the game better for having been in it.” Using this standard, Amdur placed Arthur a notch or two above the best tennis players of his or any other generation. “There was no better world champion than Arthur Ashe,” he observed, “because he not only enriched a sport with his presence but also left a wondrous legacy—true to all, but most important, true to himself.”8

  The prediction that Arthur would leave a “wondrous legacy” was borne out within weeks of his death. His transcendent value as a role model drew much of its strength from an improbable life story marked by barrier-breaking upward mobility, grace under pressure, unblemished ethical behavior, and an almost selfless concern for others. But as Arthur knew all too well, none of this would have mattered if he had not been excellent at his chosen craft. He first came to public attention because he could hit a tennis ball just about as well as anyone, and it was this success that gave him the opportunity to showcase his other strengths—intellectual, literary, political, and moral.

  This attractive package—unprecedented in the American sports scene—lost none of its luster after his death. If anything, it took on mythic overtones as his many friends and admirers tried to adjust to a world without him. “Has any athlete, not to mention former athlete—ever been lionized so at his death?” Frank Deford wrote in a Newsweek essay in late February. “It wasn’t as if Arthur was the best player ever; why, he wasn’t even the best of his time. Rather, he was just a very good tennis player who had come to be recognized as an altogether exceptional human being. I think that, by the time he died, Arthur Ashe had become everybody’s favorite athlete.” This canonization, as Peter Bodo later pointed out, had a lot to do with Ashe’s struggle with AIDS. “Ironically,
if it were not for his illness—his specific illness—Ashe probably never would have gotten the popular widespread recognition and accolades that he deserved,” Bodo observed in 1995. “Not until he disclosed that he was suffering from AIDS did Ashe earn universal recognition as a ‘role model.’ ” In his earlier life, his image had been too “oblique,” too “owlish, complex, dispassionate and even remote” to engender deep attachment or affection in the public mind—even among African Africans, who “respected his achievements without embracing him wholeheartedly.”9

  In Arthur’s case, a certain amount of glorification was probably inevitable, considering the tragic death that framed his saga. But his outsized legacy took on added strength from its embodiment in a seemingly endless string of posthumous honors and awards and accompanying ceremonies. “Almost every week, it seems, some organization or institution wants to celebrate the memory of Arthur Ashe by initiating a scholarship program or renaming a stadium or conferring an honorary degree,” Rachel Shuster of USA Today observed in late May 1993, noting that “more than 1,000 worldwide requests, from street names to leadership awards, have arrived at ProServ offices since Ashe’s death.”

  In May and June alone, he received numerous honors, including posthumous honorary degrees from Yale, Columbia, and NYU; John Henry “Pop” Lloyd Humanitarian Award for Service to the Youth of America (named in honor of a Negro League baseball star); the prestigious Olympic Order from the IOC; the Congressional Medal of Honor, awarded in a ceremony at Ellis Island; and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, conferred by President Clinton at a National Sports Awards ceremony held at Constitution Hall.10

  On July 10—which would have been Arthur’s fiftieth birthday—members of his family joined a large gathering of his friends to dedicate a memorial adjacent to his grave at Woodland Cemetery. Young and Wilder, among other dignitaries, were there to hear the poet Maya Angelou’s tribute to “this man superb in love and logic,” who, she predicted, would be remembered for “the lives grown out of his life.” Later the same week, the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport paid special tribute to its 1985 inductee during its annual induction ceremony. Recounting his exploits on and off the court, the Hall pledged a generous donation to the AAFDA, a gift he would have appreciated even more than the kind words.11

  The printed word also played an important role in shaping and sustaining the legacy. Feature stories by newspaper and magazine writers who admired him continued to appear during the weeks and months following his funeral, confirming his status as an unrivaled darling of the press. Journalists celebrated his virtues for a number of reasons, including the sense that he was one of them—“a man of artistry and letters” and “a journalist and social scholar,” as Amdur put it.

  Ashe’s own writing was crucial to his continuing influence, a fact that became obvious during the first Grand Slam tournament after his death. His absence was conspicuous during the 1993 Wimbledon fortnight—the first time in twelve years he had not held forth in the HBO broadcast booth at Centre Court. But the publication of Days of Grace on June 23, combined with the nearly simultaneous release of a revised edition of A Hard Road to Glory, produced an unprecedented wave of interest in his life. Days of Grace soon rocketed toward the top of the best-seller list, reaching number one among nonfiction titles by mid-July and remaining among the top fifteen until October. No “tennis” book had ever gained such popularity, as tens of thousands of readers gained a new appreciation for what he had gone through—and for what he had accomplished.

  In addition to recounting the milestones of a remarkable life, the book featured a number of revealing and even shocking statements about racism, suffering, and survival. One observation that stunned even some of his closest friends was his claim, voiced initially to a reporter for People magazine, that “AIDS isn’t the heaviest burden I have had to bear.” “Race is for me a more onerous burden than AIDS,” he reported. “My disease is the result of biological factors over which we, thus far, have had no control. Racism, however, is entirely made by people, and therefore it hurts and inconveniences infinitely more.” Continuing in this vein, he insisted that, despite all of his success and good fortune, “a pall of sadness hangs over my life and the lives of almost all African Americans because of what we as a people have experienced historically in America, and what we as individuals experience each and every day.”12

  The unblinking honesty of Days of Grace made it an indispensable coda to the Ashe canon. But other publications also helped to illuminate the shadows of his complicated life. One such piece was Pasarell’s moving tribute to his dear friend, published as “Unforgettable Arthur Ashe” in the September 1993 issue of Reader’s Digest. “A life ends, but values endure,” he maintained, and Arthur’s values were the kind worth remembering and following. “Arthur Ashe was the most courageous man I ever knew,” he wrote, “holding himself and others to the highest standards. . . . Ours was a friendship based on more than tennis. If I marveled as he scaled the heights of professional sports, what impressed me more was how he used dignity and restraint as weapons against opponents, whether childish tennis players or the cruel purveyors of racism. With his poker-faced courage, he stared down social injustice, three heart attacks and AIDS, and became a conscience for a nation.”13

  A literary tribute of a different kind appeared on December 1—World AIDS Day—in the form of Daddy and Me, an extended photo essay featuring Jeanne’s family photographs. Conceived in 1992 with the expectation that Arthur would live long enough to see it in print, Daddy and Me was, in Jeanne’s words, “a family project from the beginning.” As she explained: “We were sitting at the dinner table when Camera was about 5, talking about the best way to describe to her friends what it is like to live with someone who is ill. We decided to explain it in her words and use the photographs I had been taking of their relationship to illustrate to kids that you can love someone with an illness, that you can live with them and have a full happy life.” The result was a touching reminder of an innocent child shielded by an indomitable and generous spirit cloaked in fatherhood. Despite the inevitable tears of loss and remembrance, the book helped Jeanne and Camera to get on with their lives.14

  Twelve years later, on the eve of the 2005 U.S. Open, the U.S. Postal Service issued an Arthur Ashe postage stamp bearing his likeness. But of all the tributes to Arthur’s memory, the most exotic was undoubtedly the tattoo that appeared on the left biceps of the former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson in late 1993. As Robert Lipsyte reported, “Arthur Ashe’s likeness gazes somberly at us from books, awards, solicitations and now from Mike Tyson’s arm.” Serving a six-year prison sentence for rape, Tyson vowed to earn an early release by channeling the virtues of a man he had come to admire. Bemused, Lipsyte observed: “what could be a greater symbol of rehabilitation for a parole board hearing than Ashe’s face and the title of his book, ‘Days of Grace,’ tattooed on a convicted rapist’s biceps?” What Arthur would have made of this gesture is anyone’s guess, but it seems likely he would have found some way to give the troubled ex-champion the benefit of the doubt.15

  In 1994, Arthur’s public profile received another boost when his longtime employer HBO produced a stirring documentary on his life. Titled Arthur Ashe: Citizen of the World, the ninety-minute telefilm featured narration written by Deford and dozens of interviews with a range of people representing all aspects of Ashe’s life. Interviews with Arthur himself provided some of the film’s best footage, especially when he talked about his struggle with AIDS. Produced under the aegis of Seth Abraham, the HBO Sports president who had hired Arthur as a broadcaster in the early 1980s and who later became one of his most trusted friends, Citizen of the World captured the essential elements that made his life so meaningful: the improbability of his rise to stardom, the nobility with which he conducted himself, and the courage displayed as he approached the end of his life.16

  The real key to sustaining Arthur’s legacy was institutional longevity. If his life were t
o have a lasting influence, at least some of the institutions that he helped to create and foster would have to survive. The continuing strength of the National Junior Tennis League (NJTL), the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the Safe Passage Foundation (SPF), and the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS (AAFDA), among other Ashe-related organizations, would be the best index of his continuing presence in American life.

  Keeping all or even part of this philanthropic and organizational empire going was an enormous task, and much of the burden fell, at least initially, on Jeanne’s shoulders. Fortunately, she proved to be a highly effective steward of her late husband’s social capital. A beloved figure in her own right, she was also able to draw upon the skills of a number of talented and committed individuals willing to do almost anything for her. This was especially true of the AIDS- and health-related initiatives—the AAFDA, the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, and the Arthur Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center established at UCLA in 1995—which required personalized fund-raising efforts. Jeanne and her many friends were crucial, especially after she established the Arthur Ashe Learning Center (AALC) in 2007. Essentially a clearinghouse for all things Arthur Ashe, the AALC maintains both the website www.arthurashe.org and a popular booth open during the U.S. Open. Among other initiatives, the AALC distributed educational materials inspired by Arthur’s writings and sponsored exhibitions featuring personal and historic photographs.17