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Arthur Ashe epitomizes good works, devotion to family and unwavering grace under pressure From Sports Illustrated, December 21, 1992
In 1973, after years of trying, Arthur Ashe wrangled an invitations to play in the South African Open tennis tournament. He wanted to see for himself how the world might help press South Africa to ease its system of racial oppression, its apartheid. In Johannesburg he met a poet and journalist, a black man named Don Mattera. The South African watched when Ashe was confronted by young blacks who hissed that he was an Uncle Tom and told him that his visit only served to legitimize the racist white-minority government, which should be boycotted, made a pariah, until it abandoned apartheid. Mattera heard Ashe defend the use of sporting contacts to chip away at injustice. Allowing one black man to compete in the tournament had been a concession by the government, and, Ashe argued, "small concessions incline toward larger ones." Mattera listened when Ashe cited Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass on how, since power surrenders nothing without a struggle, progress can come only in unsatisfactorily small chunks, and even the tiniest crumb must be better than nothing at all. The South African blacks shouted that Ashe didn't grasp the nature of the police state that bore down on them, that in South Africa his Reverend King would have been thrown into Robben Island prison with their Nelson Mandela. In the face of their seething anger, Ashe had the saintly temerity to warn that if they hoped to exert consistent moral pressure, their emotions were best kept controlled. No minds were changed. Ashe, depressed by the prospect of standing helplessly on the outside while South African blacks suffered, asked Mattera if he, too, felt Ashe shouldn't have come. Mattera answered carefully, saying it was good to know that people in the rest of the world were concerned, but Ashe needed to understand the full extent of Soweto's misery. A few days later the South African Bureau of State Security banned Mattera, meaning that he was declared invisible and inaudible. He could no longer publish, travel, enter a library or even speak with more than two people at a time. Imprisonment, he knew, might follow. After a final word with Ashe, Mattera went back to his tiny house, put his six children to bed, lighted a candle and wrote: I listened deeply when you spoke Mattera's words are an uncanny blueprint of Ashe, a man constructed to hold fast to reason however impassioned his world. Ashe was indeed trained, first by his father and then by a stern coach, to allow rebuke to slide by his ears as if it were birdsong. In the spring of 1955, when he was almost 12, he was turned away from the Richmond city tennis tournament because of his color. By then Ashe's face was a mask, one of wonderful bespectacled mildness. His politesse grew so unbreachable that it ended up as an unnerving weapon against bratty and temper-tossed opponents. And Ashe was trained, by church and family, to be summoned. He was made a vessel for the tradition—"the Colored catechism," he calls it—that holds that every time is a time of need and that those to whom much has been given will be called to share and ameliorate. Ashe used his extraordinary reflexes and his backhand to become a tennis prodigy and win a scholarship to UCLA. He used the scholarship to lift his game and take a business degree. He used the game, after adding a big serve, to win the U.S. Open in 1968, the Australian Open in 1970 and Wimbledon in 1975 and to become a founding father of the Association of Tennis Professionals, the players' union. He used the business degree, along with the advice of his friend and attorney, Donald Dell, to nurture his winnings into financial independence. And he has used that independence to accept a series of summonses from causes close to his heart, one being that heart itself. In 1979, at age 36, he suffered a myocardial infarction, which forced him to have bypass surgery and retire from tennis. Within a year Ashe was serving as national campaign chairman of the American Heart Association. He has raised millions of dollars for a disparate group of organizations but swears that he has never undertaken pro bono work in the manner of a compulsive do-gooder. Each call simply struck him so personally that he couldn't refuse it. College meant the world to him, so there is the United Negro College Fund. He is an athlete, so he established the Safe Passage Foundation. It comprises the ABC Tennis Program, which operates tennis centers in four inner cities, and the Athlete-Career Connection, an organization committed to improving the graduation rates of minority athletes. He also started the African American Athletic Association, which will soon begin counseling New York City high school athletes. As a black citizen of the world, he joined TransAfrica, a think tank that focuses on U.S. foreign policy as it affects Africa and the Caribbean. He was the first eminent black male tennis player, and part of the catechism he learned says, Thou shalt not close a door behind you. So when Ashe, a voracious reader and self-described "information freak," discovered that African-Americans were cut off from their own sporting history because it had never been comprehensively documented, he took five years to produce the three volumes of A Hard Road to Glory (1988). He won an Emmy for cowriting the television adaptation. Somehow he has found the time to serve as an instruction editor to Tennis magazine, write sports columns for The Washington Post and do tennis commentary for HBO and ABC Sports. Through it all he kept one eye, one pining eye, on South Africa. And when he read that more than a hundred unarmed schoolchildren had been shot dead by the police in the Soweto student riots that began on June 16, 1976, the realist in Ashe at last acknowledged that South Africa was different. "South Africa," he says, "was testing the credibility of Western civilization. If you didn't come out against the most corrupt system imaginable, you couldn't look yourself in the eye." Then, in 1983, Ashe and Harry Belafonte cochaired Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid, and Ashe did his damnedest to encourage the embargo of all sporting contact with South Africa. Pinched by these and other sanctions, South African President Frederik de Klerk finally began to enact changes, dropping the racist pass laws, integrating parks and beaches and stadiums, holding talks with the African National Congress and releasing Mandela. When Mandela, 27 years a political prisoner, emerged and was asked whom in the U.S. he wished to have visit, he said, How about Arthur Ashe? Ashe always embodied good sportsmanship on the playing field. But if sportsmanship is also an athlete's ability to shift from being a selfish competitor to being a useful member of society, then Ashe's sportsmanship is unequaled. His gradual harvest has grown into a mountain of good. If sportsmanship is also the ability to transform loss into fresh, competitive, creative fire, then Ashe's has been unparalleled, and his greatest transformation is his newest. For, last April, with his stunning knack for staying topical, he revealed that he suffers from the scourge of our age. He has AIDS, having almost certainly contracted the virus that causes it from a blood transfusion after a second bypass operation, in 1983. Ashe was angry at being forced to tell the public that he has the disease before he was ready, before his daughter was old enough to understand fully. The mask cracked, and he fought back tears when making his statement to the press. But then he controlled his emotion and used its force to create the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, which in three months raised about $500,000 toward its goal of $5 million by the end of 1993. After Ashe and the U.S. Tennis Association staged a day of exhibitions for his foundation the day before the U.S. Open, John McEnroe said it was the first time he could remember the top players working together on anything.
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