by Arthur Ashe
Two physicians, Dr. Mike Collins and Dr. Virginia Bouchard Smith, had scrutinized the results of a catheter examination of my arteries and heart and had laid down the law. Unless I underwent surgery, I could probably no longer think about playing tennis at the professional level; perhaps I would not be able to play any tennis at all.
I had enjoyed a wonderful career and didn’t want it to end. I had never been the most dominant player the game had ever seen, or the most skilled. For example, my record against Rod Laver, who some experts call the greatest tennis player ever, is, as I have already said, just about all in Laver’s favor. But I had certainly had my moments of triumph. I had been top ranked in the world once in my career and co-holder of the number-one position at another time. I had won three of the four Grand Slam tournaments that constitute the pillars of international professional tennis: the United States Open, the Australian Open, and Wimbledon. I had shared the doubles crown in the fourth Grand Slam event, the French Open, and also won, with Tony Roche of Australia, the Australian Open doubles crown. In the decade since 1968—the start of the open era of professional tennis—I had played steadily and won thirty-three events. That is quite a good record.
Perhaps I was even more pleased by the way I had played than by my results in terms of wins and losses, or even in terms of prize money. I had done nothing, through scandal or bad behavior, to bring the game into disrepute. And I was also proud that fans and other players had found my game adventurous. As a junior player I had been a “pusher,” mainly keeping the ball in play from the back of the court. Then, in my senior year in high school, in St. Louis, Missouri, I had turned myself into a serve-and-volley player. I became adventurous, sometimes even reckless.
I liked being reckless, as long as I was reckless only on the tennis court, and as long as I won. Fans deserve to see a player with flair, someone for whom tennis is an art as well as a craft. Because I became bored fairly easily I would try the difficult shot, or sometimes even the impossible shot, just for the hell of it. I was known for being a winning but frequently erratic player—or “liberal,” as the proudly conservative Clark Graebner once termed it in a genteel disparagement of my approach. I admit that I was capable of following flights of exhilarating tennis with bonehead misses. From time to time, my mind certainly wandered on the court. On the whole, however, I was entertaining, and I liked that.
Because I did not want my career to end in 1979, on December 13 of that year I underwent a quadruple coronary bypass operation. With long, skillful incisions, my surgeon, Dr. John Hutchinson, removed veins from my legs and implanted them in my chest to take over the functions of my clogged arteries. He pronounced the operation a success. If he could not assure me that I would be playing tennis professionally again, he nevertheless gave me hope that my life might be pretty close to normal.
Then, on March 9, 1980, I discovered that my life would never again be perfectly normal. That afternoon, in Cairo, during a long anticipated visit, I left my hotel near the pyramids for what I hoped would be a pleasant run. Three months had passed since I had undergone open-heart surgery. As far as I was concerned, I was completely recovered and only weeks away from a return to professional tennis. I was loping along gently, easing into the main phase of my run, when the angina struck. It hit me relatively softly, but hard enough to stop me dead in my tracks. I felt the world come to a halt. I walked slowly back to the hotel.
“Back already, Arthur?” Jeanne asked, half awake from a nap. “What happened?” She was cool as could be, but I could tell she knew something was wrong.
“Just a touch of angina. I thought I shouldn’t go on with the run.”
“Let’s call Doug.” Douglas Stein, a physician and one of our closest friends, had accompanied us on the trip.
When Doug came, he took my pulse and listened to my heart. Then he asked me to try some exercises, jumping jacks. As soon as I started, the angina returned. He checked my pulse again, and listened to my heart.
“You were right to stop running,” Doug said. “Your heart wants no part of it.”
“Should I be getting back to New York?”
“I think that’s a good idea, Arthur.”
“I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Doug responded. “If your heart is acting up, you should definitely be close to your cardiologist and your surgeon. At the very least, you should be close to top-class medical facilities, where you would be recognized and taken care of at once. There are fine doctors here in Cairo, but we really don’t know anyone. I don’t think this is an emergency, but there is no point in taking chances.”
As we flew out of Cairo, I knew one thing for sure: My career as a competitive tennis player was over.
We decided that instead of rushing back to New York, we would linger awhile in Europe, which I knew fairly well from years of playing tennis there. We stopped in Holland, a country I love. In Amsterdam, at my urging, we headed for the Rijksmuseum and its outstanding collection of Rembrandts.
Of the old masters, the work of Rembrandt moves me more than any other. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on Fifth Avenue in New York City, I have several times studied his celebrated Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer. It evokes in me a wicked sense of the close kinship that exists between admiration and envy. In other museums in other cities around the world, taking time off from the tennis tournaments that usually had brought me there, I used to seek out his quiet, brooding self-portraits, or his wonderful group paintings, or his more modest but accomplished etchings. Having read a little about his life, I thought I saw a great deal of pain and suffering inscribed in those self-portraits. His paintings and etchings move me deeply, and yet I find them sublimely peaceful even in their dynamism. I own one of his etchings, called The White Negress.
Born in Leiden, Holland, the son of a prosperous miller, Rembrandt had married into a rich family and risen in the world to wealth and fame. Then, following the death of his first wife, Saskia, he had fallen slowly but irrevocably from that height. His last years found him poor and lonely. He saw his beloved mistress Hendrickje Stoffels, who was much younger, die, as well as his son Titus. But although his last years were unhappy, most critics agree that Rembrandt’s art in this period was not only technically superior to that of his happier years but also much richer in spiritual and psychological insight. I wasn’t surprised to read this judgment, because I have always been a firm believer in the therapeutic value of adversity. Of all people, athletes must reach an accommodation with losing, and learn to make the best of it.
Above all, I wanted to see one of his most famous works, The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq, usually called The Night Watch. One of Rembrandt’s earlier works, The Night Watch was also one of his most controversial. The picture fascinated me as much for the basic confusion surrounding it as for its intrinsic quality. I was always bemused by the fact that because soot and other grime had darkened Rembrandt’s original work, it had been taken for something completely different. Rembrandt had painted the company of soldiers in brilliant noon sunshine, but the world had come to call the picture The Night Watch. I was sure there was a lesson of some kind to be learned in that.
I spent some time in front of The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq, then moved on to other paintings. Unlike many of my friends who love art, such as the former tennis stars Tom Okker of the Netherlands and Wojtek Fibak of Poland, I have always been interested in biblical paintings. Here, too, Rembrandt was impressive. Of his 700 or so oil paintings, about 150 are on biblical subjects. In the Rijksmuseum, I found myself admiring several of his biblical pieces, including The Apostle Peter Denying Christ. Then I noticed one painting, The Prophet Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, that riveted my attention. Its power over me at that particular moment had much to do with what had happened to me in Egypt. Rembrandt was speaking to my ill-fated attempt to jog near the Nile and the collapse of my dreams of returning in glory to the tennis court.
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Jeanne, who is a professional photographer and—after years of classes at the Art Institute of Chicago and Cooper Union in New York—has a much keener eye for art than I do, also knows something about helping me keep my thoughts in perspective. Noticing me linger in front of the painting, she circled the room and came back to join me. She glanced at the painting, then at me.
“Oh my,” she said, a chuckle in her voice. “Are we Jeremiah now?”
“Oh no, no,” I replied quickly. “I just like the way the picture is laid out. Very interesting use of light and shade.”
“Really, Arthur?”
“Really,” I insisted, a little feebly. I didn’t move. “Of course, Jeremiah does look a little depressed with this turn of events, doesn’t he? I would say he is not entirely resigned to the destruction of Jerusalem. He is taking it pretty hard. In fact, I see a hint of disgust on his face.”
“You know how he feels?”
“I know exactly how he feels.”
“Let’s go, Arthur. There are other paintings to see.”
We joked about the end of my tennis career because the joking helped to take something of the sting out of the moment, which was painful. It hurt more than a little again when, later that month, in New York, I confirmed to the press that I had retired from playing the game as a professional.
In fact, I merely confirmed then what I had already admitted in a letter to twenty-two friends and associates. “A long time ago in my Sunday school classes,” I had written, “I learned that ‘for every thing there is a season.’ From today on, I will end my nonstop Odyssey in search of the perfect serve and retire from competitive tennis. In case you were wondering about my health, I plan to live to be 100 years old.”
When a reporter telephoned me about the letter, I was equally jaunty about how long I would live. “The doctors say I will live to be 100,” I assured him, “but they won’t put it in writing.”
ONE LIFE HAD ended, and another had not yet quite begun. For some years I had known this moment would come, but now it was here in earnest. I had to negotiate the middle passage between the old and the new. Quite consciously, I gave myself a period of about three months simply to think about the past and about the future. At this crucial point in my life, I did not want to make any major mistakes.
Looking back on that period, I see only one thing clearly: that it seemed to me quite possibly a developing crisis. I felt a subtle but pervasive dissatisfaction with my life up to that point, and a deep confusion about what the rest of it would, and should, look like.
How could I be dissatisfied, even subtly, with my life to that point? I had lived, many people would say, a fantasy of a life. I had won a measure of international fame many people would die for. I had traveled all over the world, and often in grand style. Relatively speaking, I had made a great deal of money. I had won a large number of friends. How could I be dissatisfied?
But I was dissatisfied. Who knows what force gnaws at us, telling us that our accomplishments, no matter how sensational, are not enough, that we need to do more? Some psychologists, and some poets, talk about the rage for immortality that operates like a dynamo in the hearts and minds of men and women despite all we know about the transience of glory and the inevitability of death. I don’t think I wanted to be immortal, not in any literal sense. Although I enjoy receiving honors and awards, I am not obsessed by the question of whether or not people would know my name a hundred years from now. But I did want to achieve something more than I had accomplished on the tennis court.
For one thing, I had been a professional athlete, and as far as I was concerned, few people took professional athletes seriously. At that time—perhaps it is somewhat different now—I thought that professional athletes were the modern counterpart to minstrels or jongleurs in the Middle Ages. All we needed, I sometimes believed, was the pointed hats and the curved shoes tipped by little balls to be complete fools. From start to finish we were entertainers, with essentially clownish roles assigned to us, for which we were handsomely paid. But the lavishness of the payment did not change the role.
I wanted to be taken seriously. In part, I had been instructed by the efforts of other athletes who had begun to tear themselves out of the clown’s costume in my own time. From the social and racial remove of the almost entirely white, upper-class stratum that is the tennis world, I had looked with fascination on athletes who had stood up defiantly and protested against social injustice. Cautious about getting involved in politics and protest myself, I couldn’t help but admire impetuous men such as Muhammad Ali, who struck me as menacing and purposeful even when he was amusing, a charming man but also unmistakably defiant; or the somber, black-gloved athlete-protesters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who turned the victory stand at the Olympics in Mexico City in 1968 into a sacrificial altar, as they surrendered their victory to the greater good of downtrodden black people; or more scholarly but in some ways equally militant protesters such as Dr. Harry Edwards of the University of California at Berkeley.
Although I did not always agree with everything these men had said and done, I respected the way they had stood tall against the sky and had insisted on being heard on matters other than boxing or track and field, on weighty matters of civil rights and social responsibility and the destiny of black Americans in the modern world. For many years, even as I built my career in tennis, I had guiltily nursed the suspicion that I had not done as much as I should have in the arena of protest and politics, civil rights, and social reform. On the other hand, another part of me did not need a cue from other athletes, no matter how militant, about my duties as a citizen. I had been brought up to think that I myself was obliged to be a leader, and especially to help my fellow blacks. After years of caution, and with my tennis career over, I needed now to respond to those imperatives.
As I drew close to forty, I was aware of the special bind I was in, the dilemma that almost all professional athletes face when they come to retire. Most professional athletes leave their sport when they are in their twenties, brusquely cut by their teams or, in non-team sports, driven out by recurrent losses. The more successful, far fewer in number, leave professional sports in their thirties. A handful of stars remain into their forties. Then we all are gone, except for the “senior circuits” that have become more and more popular and viable. (I’m not sure that I could have brought myself to play any senior circuit in a serious, dedicated way.)
For most of the people in the world, retirement comes when old age or even death itself is on the horizon. Retirement then seems natural. At that point, the body and the mind are in relative harmony, both worn down from a lifetime of use. But athletes retiring at the age of thirty (or even at thirty-seven, as I was) are taking part in an unnatural rite. We may be tired of our individual sport or even injured, but our bodies are often, on the whole, still fundamentally fresh and vigorous. In no sense are we old. And with the amazing strides in scientific health care today, when men can look forward to living into their eighties, and women even longer, the retirement of a professional athlete is truly an anomaly as retirements go.
Most athletes, no matter how intelligent they may be, are almost totally unprepared to retire, as they are forced to do, while they are in their physical prime. I was at least as cautious and reflective as the next professional, but I know that I was not adequately prepared to take the step. Remove the glitter and glamour of the tennis world, I wondered, the endless stroking of the ego, the copious episodes of pampering and privilege, and where would I be? Would I end up like so many other ex-athletes I knew or have read about? Would I be haunting bars and picking up women, or loafing in my “den,” swilling beer and playing videocassettes of the highlights of my career over and over to my “buddies,” or to myself? That was not what I wanted.
Doubtless I wasn’t the most intelligent person on the tennis tour, or the most sensitive; but my ideas and my feelings, as well as my principles, were at all times important to me. I guess I was different from most other
athletes, especially in tennis, because I knew that a lot of people expected much from me, and that if I disappointed them, it would be extremely painful to them and to me. Some had sacrificed so that I might go forward with my tennis career. Most, however, I had never met. They were simply the masses—I suppose I was thinking mainly of the masses of poor black people—who idealistically expected a great deal from those, like myself, who had been given so much.
“Lord,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, perhaps quoting someone, “make us not great but busy.” I have long savored that little prayer. My father also believed in being busy, and he left his stamp on me. Not simply because he needed or wanted money, but because he believed in the therapy or balm of labor. When he was not on duty in his salaried job as a special policeman, he was working either as a caterer, cooking and waiting on tables in the homes of wealthy white families, or he was involved in the landscaping business, which meant taking care of the gardens of some of those people. No job was beneath Daddy, as long as it was honest. He took pride in being self-sufficient. And I know that my father did each job not merely to the best of his ability but very well.
He even erected a temple to his busyness: his home in Gum Spring, Virginia, some thirty miles from Richmond, where his widow, my stepmother, Lorene Kimbrough Ashe, still lives today. With my help, such as it was, Daddy built that house almost entirely out of scrap material, mainly cinder blocks and bricks, discarded when Interstate 95, which runs from Maine to Florida, cut its way in the 1960s through Richmond. Following in the wake of the destruction, Daddy picked up what he needed. To complete his house, he bought only certain material, such as tubing and wiring, when he absolutely had to. If he worshiped any deity in his temple besides his Presbyterian God, it was the god of hard work. And if Daddy took pride in what he had achieved, it was a quiet pride, the kind that is always wary of a fall, and that only more work appeases.
