by Arthur Ashe
“I remember this room from my early days here as a doctor. In fact, I had a patient in here once. A young senator. John F. Kennedy, no less. That was a long time ago.”
Through one set of tall windows in this corner room I could see, to the south, the skyscrapers of midtown. I could see the silver chevrons of the Chrysler Building; the blunter summit of the old Pan Am Building, now the Met Life Building; the austere, fluted elegance of the Empire State Building. Directly below my window passes the East River. Mainly a somber brown and green, the dark water glitters and gleams here and there when sunlight flickers off its surface. Moving in each direction, boats ply the river. Downstream, they pass under the latticework of the Queensboro Bridge at Fifty-ninth Street. On Roosevelt Island, directly to the east, the fields were damp green. In the early morning, through the haze of the rising sun, I could see mist rising from the grass. In the evening, darkness swept quickly over the island.
By choice, I had few visitors. At first, Jeanne came three or four times a day; after a few days, when I was better, she came less often but stayed longer, hours on end. I saw Camera only twice. We do not want to disrupt her schedule. Once, after Jeanne and Dr. Murray literally smuggled her into the hospital hidden in their cloaks, I spent a wonderful hour with her in a conference room elsewhere in the building. She was fascinated by a plastic model of a heart I brought her, and by the mice in their cages, used by Dr. Murray and his colleagues in medical experiments. A few friends have come by. Cheerfully bearing belated Christmas presents for everyone, Donald Dell came up from Potomac, Maryland, to see me. My two close physician friends, Eddie Mandeville and Doug Stein, stopped by. Frank Deford visited me, and Alvin Schragis, whose wife’s family owns the Doral. Still another friend, Dr. Paul Smith, who is pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn Heights, also came to see me. One day, he brought along Andrew Young, who was visiting New York. Before they left, in a moving moment, Paul, Andy, Jeanne, and I held hands in a circle and prayed.
These are some of my friends, but only a few of my friends, most of whom had no idea I was in the hospital. Jeanne and I kept my illness out of the news, where my name seemed to have been everywhere lately, at year’s end. The honors and awards had come thick and fast. They pleased me, but they were not nearly as consoling as the visits of these friends, and the knowledge that people I have known for a lifetime were thinking about me and wishing me well. Whatever happens, I know that I am not going to be alone at the end. That is not to be my fate. Of course, in a sense, we are always alone at the end.
I have invested in friendship all my life. I have been patient and attentive, forgiving and considerate, even with some people who probably did not deserve it. It did not take an enormous sacrifice, however; for whatever reason, it came almost naturally. I made the investment of time and energy, and now the dividends were being returned to me in kindness.
For once, at Jeanne’s encouragement (or was it her command?), I had left my cellular telephone at home. I made few telephone calls, and received fewer. I remember calling Randall Robinson to tell him that we had to do more about Haiti; we had to press the initiative we had won with President Clinton’s election. The African American community, I thought, had to extend its arms in welcome to the refugees, the same way the Cubans in Miami welcome those refugees fleeing Castro. We had been far too remote from the struggle of the people of Haiti. Randall was in complete agreement with me.
On a table in my hospital room, coincidentally, was an invitation to the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton on Wednesday, January 20. I was touched and grateful to be invited, but I did not plan to go. I would not have attended the event even if I had been well, which I was not. I looked forward to going home to Jeanne and Camera and spending a few days in quiet reading and reflection, while my strength returned. I meant no offense or criticism of the pomp and splendor of the inauguration; I was a Clinton supporter and I am happy to see him president. But I wanted to be in my own home. Of course, I intended to watch the inaugural events on television.
Stan Smith called, and we talked about tennis matters, which had seemed far away until then. We talked about a certain controversial father of a certain promising young woman tennis player; some people find the man offensive, even intolerable, because of his often harsh behavior both to his daughter’s opponents and to the young woman herself. Because of him, the tennis establishment may move to curb the behavior of relatives of tennis players.
After the telephone call, I lay in bed and thought about tennis. The behavior of some adults is quite amazing. I remember one day years ago, at the Doral in Florida, almost coming to blows with a father. We had organized an informal tennis tournament for kids staying at the resort. One boy, about eleven years old, fought hard but lost his match. He walked off the court disconsolately. I watched him go up to his father, who promptly punched him in the head. I was stunned.
“Don’t do that!” I said, quietly but as sternly as I could.
He turned and glared at me. “Who the hell are you,” he said, “to tell me what to do to my kid?”
“Do it again and I’ll have you evicted from this place.”
“How dare you threaten me?” he shouted. “I’ll report you to the manager!”
“I hope you do,” I said. “You’ll be out of here a lot faster.”
People like that sometimes destroy the joy of sport and the joy in the lives of young people. Victory in a tennis match, money won in a tournament: these are not so important as good health, the honest affection and respect of friends, the love of one’s wife or husband, and the spicy innocence of one’s child or children.
I also remember one evening with Jeanne and Camera at a hotel in Eleuthera, the Bahamas. We were under the stars, the hour was late, way past ten o’clock, and Camera was still up, but what did we care? She was happy after a day in the sun and the sea, and now she was dancing to the music of a calypso band with a little friend she had just met. Jeanne was happy, too, talking easily to the wife of a musician she had met earlier in our stay and liked at once. I was with them, but alone. As I sat in an armchair watching my little daughter dance and my wife’s face sparkle with life and joy, a wave of emotion like one of the waves of the ocean a few feet away from us washed over me, and I started to cry. I cried quietly, but Jeanne turned her face and saw me. The smile left her face but then it quickly returned, not the same kind of smile but another, because she knew that at that moment I was happy. She knew I was crying not only out of sorrow but also out of joy, and that the joy was so powerful that it hurt. My joy was that I was there, on that beach under those stars listening to that music and watching the two people I loved more than anyone or anything in the world, and I did not want that feeling of perfect joy ever to end.
THERE, IN THE corner room on the sixteenth floor of the hospital, as I kept company with the memory or the spirit or perhaps only the ghost of John F. Kennedy, I knew that what matters are the genuine consolations of life. What else will sustain you in the dark hours?
These days I read even more than usual, and I listen to music much of the time. I have always been an avid reader of books and also of newspapers and magazines of all types. I have always craved information, and my strong interest in national and international affairs has only intensified in recent years. I like to know something about everything, from economics and geography to science and philosophy. I want information, not to enliven exchanges at dinner parties or in some other way to show off my collection of facts before less-informed people but because—as I tell myself—if I am proud to be a citizen of the world I must know as much as possible about the world. So I love to read several newspapers a day and several magazines a week, and books fascinate me. I read relatively little fiction, but I like poetry. Biography is a favorite area of mine, and politics, sociology, psychology, and anthropology also appeal to me strongly. Lately, however, I have spent more time reading the Bible than any other single book. I began reading the Bible while I was young, a long time before my
illnesses. Now, not surprisingly, its words appeal to me more than ever.
I love almost all kinds of music. Certainly I love the symphonies of Beethoven, which comfort and inspire me. I remember an idyllic day many years ago, an autumn day in Essen, Germany, when I spent the long, serene afternoon playing golf, and then listened in the evening, as if I had never heard the strains before, to Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony. Germany in the fall, and Beethoven’s Sixth: the right music in the right place at the right time. I listen to jazz, too, which I love; the trumpet playing of Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, both of whom I had known personally, both now gone. Also from my past, from the 1960s, when such music gained a hearing in America, I turn to the recordings of the Red Army Chorus singing religious songs of the Russian Orthodox church. I love to listen to Eric Clapton playing his guitar; the man is a master.
In the end, however, the music that moves me most now, as in my youth, is gospel music. To listen to gospel music is to be invited deep into the roots of African American history and culture, past the blues and the spirituals of the nineteenth century and beyond even that era into our African past. My grandmother used to tell me that some of the black elders in her youth would gather in a circle for what they called a “ring-shout,” accompanied by the beating of a drum in a slow, steady cadence as the elders slowly shuffled about, releasing their rage and frustration in music and dance. I hear those sounds, that rage and that beauty, in gospel music.
Music links me effortlessly to religion and philosophy, or at least to reflection and meditation, which I prize. When I played the trumpet as a boy, I used to think of its place in the Bible, of the playing of Joshua, whose trumpets made the walls of Jericho fall down, and of Gabriel, whose trumpet would announce the end of the world and the coming of Judgment Day.
In the end, as much as I love reading and music, and although love given and received by human beings is perhaps the only sure token of God’s love and God’s grace, I understand that the deepest consolation comes from one’s relationship to the divine.
Some people have curious ideas about God. Many letters I receive speak of passages in the Bible that are supposed to have almost miraculous potential. Read this chapter or this verse and you will surely be saved! Study this book of the New Testament and feel the power of God sweep over you! In the summer of 1992, I had just finished dinner at the Sleepy Hollow Country Club when a man came up to our table. Holding a baby in his arms, he knelt down beside me.
“You are Arthur Ashe, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Arthur, have you taken Jesus Christ as your savior?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I sincerely hope that you have, Arthur. Only Jesus can save you.”
“The church is a very strong influence in my life,” I said.
“Are you a Christian, Arthur? I hope you are a true Christian.”
“I’ve been a Christian all my life. A practical Christian. All my life. I’m fine, thank you.”
With the qualifying word “practical,” I slipped past that man’s zealotry, which was possibly the zealotry of the recently converted. He may be burning with more religious zeal than I can muster, but I do not believe he is any more of a true Christian than I.
As I told him, religion has been a part of my life since my youth. Before I finished high school, I had worshiped for appreciable lengths of time at the churches of at least four different denominations. I had started at my father’s church, First Presbyterian, at the corner of Monroe and Catherine streets in Richmond. At the same time, while my mother was alive, and later, when she was dead, I often went out to her church, Westwood Baptist in Westwood. Shortly after she died, my father brought in a respectable woman of mature years, Mrs. Otis Berry, to take care of us. Mrs. Berry was Episcopalian—not AME, but Episcopalian—and even more devout than my father and mother. She often took me to St. James Episcopal, at that time one of a handful of Episcopal churches in Richmond. Then, in my senior year in high school, in St. Louis, Missouri, I attended a Roman Catholic church. I did so because the people with whom I lived, Richard Hudlin and his family, were Catholic.
I don’t think I was more devout as a child than any other normal boy. I chafed at going to church on Sunday when the sun was shining and summer was at its height, but I had no choice; my father, who himself went only from time to time, and my stepmother, who never missed a Sunday, insisted that I go. At home, the Bible was always at hand.
As I grew older, but still a boy, class and race began to affect my religious zeal. The class divisions among the black denominations and within the black denominations began to bother me. If God and religion were involved, how could churches divide along socioeconomic lines? Why were the Episcopalians more prestigious than the Presbyterians, and the Baptists less? I was also perplexed by the fact that the lower one went on the economic scale, the more demonstrative and impassioned the worshiping often became.
Every Sunday morning I could see and hear on television Dr. Theodore F. Adams, minister of the huge, white First Baptist Church. That church confirmed its domination and its strict racial identity by its presence on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, the avenue of Confederate heroes, with its statues of Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, J. E. B. Stuart, and Robert E. Lee. Didn’t we in the black churches read the same Bible as the whites in First Baptist? Didn’t the whites know how Jesus felt about the equality of human beings, about justice, and about the meek inheriting the earth?
By the time I reached junior high school and took the ponderings of our Sunday school more seriously, such thinking began to complicate my faith, though not to wreck it. Still later, I reached the point where I knew I was hearing nothing new spoken in the pulpits, that the preaching had ceased to provoke me intellectually or emotionally. At some point I decided that all the moral instruction of the churches I attended, especially the Protestant churches, came down to loyalty to the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. If one needed that rule developed, turn to the Ten Commandments. If one wished a deeper explication, read and study the Sermon on the Mount. However, I know that I was never so arrogant as to disparage the preachers or their churches. I simply put them into perspective, while continuing to respect their authority.
When I started playing tennis seriously, I tried to follow my father’s wishes about churchgoing and made it my business to be aware of the place of religion in the lives of most of the people I played with. I found out that American players were mainly Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Methodist. I couldn’t play in the South, where the preponderance of white Baptists lived, so I didn’t meet many Baptist players. Of course, almost all the Latin American players, and many of the Europeans, were Catholic. Because of my year in St. Louis, I thought I understood something of their lives away from the tennis court. I thought I had some degree of entry into their psychology; certainly they were more familiar for my having attended mass.
My first trip abroad as a player, to England to play at Wimbledon in 1963, was the beginning of years of religious exploration for me. I discovered for the first time the close connection between the Church of England and the Episcopalians back home. However, the fact that Queen Elizabeth II was not only the head of state of Great Britain but also the head of the Church of England jolted me into my first true bout of religious skepticism. How could a secular ruler also be, ex officio, the head of a religion? It made little sense to me, but this seemingly illogical arrangement was part of the grandeur of Great Britain and its culture, which I greatly admired.
On the tour, I made a point to visit not only museums but also historic places of worship. I went to St. Paul’s in London and St. Peter’s in Rome. I visited celebrated Islamic places of worship in Cairo, Teheran, and elsewhere, and Buddhist temples in Thailand. The more non-Western the religion, the more I was fascinated by its places of worship and its tenets. My good friends and fellow tennis professionals Torben Ulrich of Denmark and Jeff Borowiak, an American li
ke me but one gifted (he is a fine pianist) and curious, were crucial to my development of a broader understanding of religion. Borowiak and I read The Three Pillars of Zen and sought to probe into its meanings. We even tried to apply the lessons of Zen to tennis, as did a popular book, The Inner Game of Tennis; I certainly think it helped me to concentrate.
I was able to compare the beliefs of other peoples in other parts of the world to what I was taught growing up in Richmond. I think I grew, but I also came to know the feeling of alienation, when you come home and your family and friends expect you to be the same but you are not.
As powerful and persistent as the African American church has been in my life, its influence has been tempered by my own life experiences. That is an essential part of the pragmatism I try to bring to my life. I do not have the rock-solid, literal belief of my aunts, but I do not think of myself as being incapacitated as a result. My aunts had probably never known anyone who was Buddhist or Shinto. Like my aunts, I believe in God, in a Supreme Being, and I believe in the Bible. I also choose to dwell on the common areas shared by the religions I have known, rather than their differences. Meditation, contemplative states of mind, personal reflection, prayer—all are part of Catholicism and of Buddhism, Methodism, and other religions.
I suppose that the religion I practice now is some mixture of all these influences. I do not place dogmatic faith in any single religion. Each one claims authenticity and uniqueness, as far as I can tell; which means that many of them are bluffing, since they cannot all be the religion of God. I do not hold their grand claims against them, but I cannot imagine shifting from Presbyterianism to another on the basis of its credibility. No; I would rather see myself as open to all religions, even if each religion seems to demand my exclusive attention.
One thing I know for certain is that I cannot know much. My mind clearly has a scientific bent but I know the limits of both science and my mind. Some time ago, Life magazine published a feature story about religion. “Is there a God?” the cover asked. Chosen as one of the respondents, I tried to make two main points.
