Days of Grace

by Arthur Ashe

  Did I feel a sense of shame, however subdued, about having AIDS, although I was guilty of nothing in contracting it? Very little. I could not shake off completely that irrational sense of guilt, but I did my best to keep it in check, to recognize that it was based on nothing substantial.

  I was glad, in this context, that I had not concealed my condition from certain people. I had reminded myself from the outset that I had an obligation to tell anyone who might be materially hurt by the news when it came out. I have been both proud of my commercial connections and grateful to the people who had asked me to represent them or work for them in some other way. Several of them had taken a chance on me when they knew full well, from the most basic market research in the early 1970s, that having an African American as a spokesman or an officer might cost them business.

  Among these organizations, the most important were the Aetna Life and Casualty Company, where I was a member of the board of directors; Head USA, the sports-equipment manufacturer that had given me my first important commercial endorsement, a tennis racquet with my very own autograph on it; the Doral Resort and Country Club in Florida, where I had directed the tennis program; Le Coq Sportif, the sports-clothing manufacturer; Home Box Office (HBO), the cable-television network for which I worked as an analyst at Wimbledon; and ABC Sports, for which I also served as a commentator.

  Not one of these companies had dropped me after I quietly revealed to their most important executives that I had AIDS. Now those executives had to deal with the response of the public. I would have to give them a chance to put some distance between their companies and me because I now carried the most abominable and intimidating medical virus of our age. In business, image is everything. And one would have to go back to leprosy, or the plague, to find a disease so full of terrifying implications as AIDS carries. AIDS was a scientific mystery that defied our vaunted claims for science, and also a religious or spiritual riddle—at least to those who insisted on thinking of it as possibly a punishment from God for our evil on earth, as more than one person had publicly suggested.

  As far as I am concerned, these companies did not owe me anything. They had products and services to sell, and employees and stockholders and their families who were dependent on them. If I hurt their business, I believe, they would be obliged to revise our arrangements. I would not have waved my contract in anyone’s face, or hidden behind an ingenious lawyer. I understand business and free enterprise. My university degree is in the field of business administration, and I have profited from business and the free-enterprise system.

  I waited for the phone calls and the signs that my services were no longer needed. None came.

  I READ SOMEWHERE that in the two weeks following his announcement that he was HIV-positive, Earvin “Magic” Johnson received thousands of pieces of mail, and that months later he was still receiving hundreds of letters a week. Well, I received nothing approaching that volume of correspondence following my press conference, but I certainly had a mountain of reading and writing to do in its aftermath. And every time I appeared on one of the few television interview shows I agreed to do, such as with Barbara Walters or Larry King, there was another surge of correspondence. I heard from the famous and the completely unknown, people I knew and people I had never met.

  The most moving letters, without a doubt, came from people who had lived through an AIDS illness, either their own or that of a loved one. Often the loved one was now dead. These writers, above all, understood why I had made such a fuss about the issue of privacy. Many probably understood better than I did, because they were more vulnerable than I am, and had suffered more. One Manhattan woman wrote to tell me about her father, who had received HIV-tainted blood, as I had, through a blood transfusion following heart surgery. Without knowing it, he had passed the infection on to her mother. For some years, they had kept their illness a secret from their daughter. After they could keep the secret from her no longer, she in turn had worked to keep their secret from other family members and friends, and from the world. Although both parents were now dead, she wrote, “I share your anger at that anonymous person who violated either your trust or their professional ethics.”

  Another woman, writing from Toronto, told of her husband’s similar infection. He, like me, had received a transfusion during his second bypass operation. One summer five years later, he was plagued by unaccountable bouts of fatigue and flulike symptoms. In the winter came a cough that would not go away. The spring brought pneumonia, and death. Virtually to the end, his illness seemed inexplicable. Only three days before his death was he finally tested for AIDS. The test was positive.

  A grandmother in New England, HIV-positive after a transfusion, shared with me her terror that the company she worked for would dismiss her if they found out; she was awaiting the passage of a law that might protect her. From Idaho, a mother told me about her middle-aged son, who had tried to keep his AIDS condition a secret even from her: “My son kept it to himself for six months before he told me and I’ll never forget that day as we cried together.” His ordeal included dementia, forced incarceration in a state asylum, and ostracism by relatives and friends. But mother and son had spent his last “four difficult months” together. “I’m so thankful to have had those days with him.”

  I heard from people whom I had not thought of in years, and some of them had been touched by their own tragedy. A woman I remembered as a stunningly beautiful UCLA coed, as we called them in those days, told me about her younger brother, who had been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS about five years before. “He is gay,” she reported, “and I saw how he lost so much self-esteem and hope” because of intolerance. “No one can speak as eloquently as you and Magic to allow the stigma to disperse regarding this situation.” Another letter illustrated the power of the stigma. Signed simply, “Sorry I can’t identify myself, but you understand,” it came from a man who had been diagnosed with HIV three years ago. “I’m the father of six children and many grandchildren. I’m not into needles or the gay life. Don’t know where it came from (really).”

  As for my daughter, Camera, more than one writer underscored my fears about what she might have to undergo from insensitive people in the future. A woman whose son had died of AIDS about a year before, following the death of his wife, was now bringing up their young son: “I struggle with how this little child is going to deal with the insults and rejections that people will inflict on him when they find out that his father died from AIDS.”

  Perhaps the most unusual letter I received from someone with an ailing relative came from a woman in Florida who offered an anguished apology to me and others who had been infected from blood transfusions. As she told it, her mother had become HIV-positive two years before, following a personal history of drug addiction. “I realize that your situation, and [that of] many others who have contracted the virus, has been caused by people like my mother who have lived their lives with such disregard for the sanctity of human life.”

  Needless to say, I am grateful to all those who have taken the trouble to write. Most of the letters left me humbled. Among those famous people who wrote immediately after my announcement was Nelson Mandela, who is one of my genuine heroes, and whom I had met both in South Africa and here at home. He sent a long letter on the stationery of the African National Congress of South Africa. “I can never forget my own joy at meeting you,” he wrote. “I hope you feel my embrace across the continents and that it serves to let you know that we love you and wish you well.” Elizabeth Taylor, whose work on behalf of AIDS sufferers is to her eternal credit, sent a bouquet of tulips, and a lovely note: “My thoughts, prayers and admiration are with you and your family.”

  (I had never met her. Some months later, I read a story about her AIDS work in Vanity Fair and was startled to see my name. She had been annoyed when a colleague in their AIDS foundation, American Foundation for AIDS Research [AmFAR], contacted Magic Johnson after his announcement, to try to get him to join their effort. “I don’t want to
use him,” she said about Magic. “It’s the same with Arthur Ashe.” She called my press treatment “appalling. The way [somebody] chooses to die is their own goddamn business.”)

  In addition to the telephone call from President Bush, I also received kind letters from former presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. An avid sportsman, Nixon had credited a meeting with me years before with stirring his interest in tennis. Given his wars with the press, I was not surprised that he backed my position against USA Today: “Your privacy should have been respected.” Ford evidently concurred: “Betty and I congratulate you on your superb handling of a very difficult and personal matter. You and Mrs. Ashe have our highest admiration and affection.”

  Much more surprising to me was a letter from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whose own television ordeal I had watched with dread fascination, and without being convinced of his guilt or, indeed, his innocence. “You have been an inspiration to me for most of my life,” he wrote. “I admire & respect you; I will continue to remember you & your family in my prayers.”

  A woman who had cleaned my hotel room during a tournament in Tucson, Arizona, fifteen years before in 1975, wrote to Frank Deford after reading a story of his about me in Newsweek. She praised my “kindness, gentleness, and serenity.” I was glad to get her letter.

  Many tennis players called or sent me cards, notes, and letters, including Charlie Pasarell, one of my best friends from tennis and someone I’ve known since I was fourteen, and Pam Shriver, who generously sent a contribution in my name to the United Negro College Fund. I also heard from Tracy Austin, Brian Gottfried, Jeff Borowiak, Tom Okker (who had watched my news conference on CNN in Holland), and Rod Laver. I was a little surprised at the intensity of Laver’s reaction. Rod and his wife, Mary, wrote about their “concern, emptiness, and yes, also anger” at the news. Since my tennis victories over him had been rare—two wins in twenty-one matches—I was pleased to be saluted by “the Rocket” now as a “great champion, both on & off the court.”

  A telegram came from the soccer star Pelé—Edson Arantes do Nascimento; two messages from the boxer Sugar Ray Leonard; a touching note from Lynn Swann, who had been a star wide receiver with the Pittsburgh Steelers football team and who always impressed me as being so much more than a professional athlete. John Thompson, the renowned basketball coach at Georgetown University, with whom I had sparred at one point on the telephone over the question of academic requirements for black student athletes, expressed the “good feeling that you’ll be around to irritate me for a long time; this is my very sincere prayer.” I received a card from the tennis team at the University of Chicago, and from Terry Donahue, the football coach, and various athletes at UCLA, my alma mater. I was pleased to hear from students at various elementary schools, including some I had visited, as I often do.

  Many of these letters brought back powerful memories or associations, as did one from the outstanding golfer Gary Player. We had had our differences about his country, South Africa, where I had been banned twice, and about apartheid, which he could never bring himself to attack and which I found impossible for anyone to defend. Telling me about an educational foundation he had started in South Africa, he sent his sympathy and kind wishes: “Whilst we have perhaps at times had different views on South Africa in the past, I think we have both shared a common interest in people and mankind and have tried to contribute to society as a whole.”

  Race and politics crossing medicine and disease. One card I received called me “an inspiration to many people during your career. Our thoughts and prayers are with you and your family as you face this new challenge.” It was signed: “A white family in Mississippi.”

  Believe me, these letters helped. I think I know better than to accept that all or even most of the praise heaped on me is deserved; but I felt good to know that so many people thought so highly of me. On the other hand, I know that sympathy clouds the judgment, especially when the object of sympathy has an illness we think of as terminal. Or an illness that is terminal. I began to have a sense in reading many of the letters and the essays on me in newspapers and magazines that I was reading my obituary, but I could not say, as Mark Twain did, that the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. Exaggerated, but not greatly.

  The sportswriter S. L. Price, in the Knight-Ridder newspapers, showed me that I was not imagining the funereal undertone. Price wrote:

  … People talk about beating cancer. No one talks about beating AIDS. These victims talk about living a full life, about the new treatments. They hope for a cure. But everyone else—even the wives and the parents and the good, close friends who want to believe—they cannot help but to begin placing them gently into the past.

  It began for Arthur Ashe on Wednesday. Testimonials. Tributes. Words on a tombstone. He was a great champion. He battled apartheid, he spoke eloquently on black issues, he was a fine man. All in the past tense. He was.

  One Sunday evening that fall, I was reading to Camera when she was in bed, as I do every night when I can, and now she was drifting off peacefully to sleep. Then she opened her eyes, looked directly at me, and asked: “Daddy, how did you get AIDS?”

  I shuddered. I hadn’t expected the question at all, certainly not now, not dredged up, as it were, from her subconscious, where it obviously had been stirring awhile. In the wake of my public announcement—in fact, that very evening in April—Jeanne and I had tried to talk to Camera about my illness. As I said, we did not want her to find out about it through the taunts of a classmate or through the blunderings of some well-meaning adult.

  Now and then she had asked Jeanne some casual questions about my medicine and my illness. But this was her first expression of arguably the most intimate question anyone could ask me about the illness.

  “Well,” I told her. “It was like this. I was in the hospital. I had to have an operation. During an operation, you can lose a lot of blood. And after the operation, to feel better, I got a blood transfusion to replace some of the blood I had lost. I was given blood that somebody had given to the hospital for people like me. The blood turned out to be bad.”

  “And the person had AIDS?”

  “Yes.”

  Camera said nothing for a moment. Then she spoke again.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Camera. I’m sure. That’s how I got it.”

  Her eyes remained open for a moment or two, and then she faded to sleep.

  Chapter Two

  Middle Passage

  ON JULY 25, 1979, in the picturesque Austrian hilltown of Kitzbühel, I played the last tennis match of my professional career, and also one of the last tennis matches of my life. At the time, I had no idea that it would be so important. I lost, in only the second round of the tournament, to a virtually unknown French player named Christophe Freyss. Certainly I had recognized for some time that my career was winding down. The previous month, I had been ignominiously defeated in the first round at Wimbledon by Chris Kachel, another player of whom nobody but his family, his friends, and a few local fans had ever heard. And this early Wimbledon exit repeated what had happened to me there the previous year. The end was clearly in sight. Nevertheless, I saw no reason why I couldn’t continue to play professionally, with mixed success to be sure, for at least two or three more years.

  Less than a week after losing to Freyss, I was in bed in New York, asleep before midnight, when I was jolted awake by the most intense chest pain I had ever suffered. After about two minutes, the pain subsided. Telling myself that I was suffering from nothing more than a severe case of indigestion, I tried to go back to sleep. I was almost there when the pain returned even more intensely than before. Breathing hard, I sat up in bed. I could not remember an attack of indigestion so acute. Again, the pain subsided; again I relaxed; and again, after about fifteen minutes, I was jolted by an excruciating pressure in my chest. Finally the pain ebbed and I returned to sleep.

  The next day, July 31, I was conducting a tennis clinic just across the Eas
t River from Manhattan when the pain struck again. This time, it was far more intense and gave no sign of abating. A physician, Dr. Lee Wallace, who happened to be playing on a court nearby, asked me a few urgent questions. Then he insisted on escorting me personally to New York Hospital. Since then, I have come to know that institution well.

  “I want Mr. Ashe admitted as a possible heart attack patient,” he informed a resident physician.

  This was my first indication that the pain I was suffering was the result of a heart attack. At New York Hospital, I spent two days in the intensive-care unit and most of the following eight days in the coronary-care section.

  When I was released, I still hoped to resume my professional career. I missed the travel to foreign lands, the camaraderie of the players, the excitement of the matches themselves, and the prize money. In 1968, as an amateur, I had received exactly $280 in expense money after winning my country’s most prestigious tournament, the first United States Open. Eleven years later, the stakes were much higher, and we were all professionals now. Most of all, though, I missed the camaraderie and the competition. In spite of my heart problem, and although my game was not what it once was, I still hoped to serve and volley a few more times against the mightiest names in professional tennis—Borg and Nastase, Vilas and Newcombe, McEnroe and Connors.

  “Sorry, Arthur. Unless you have an operation, you can forget about playing tennis again. Certainly not professional tennis.”