He carries a large spiral notebook, and he prints in it often. You see topics and great chains of subheads, and space left to fill in supporting facts. A second panel, of youth-program directors, has taken over from the kids. There are questions from the grant makers about how to design counseling and job programs attractive enough to woo the young from drug dealing, and about whether some kids are damaged beyond all reach.

Ashe raises his hand. "I haven't heard anyone speak of national service," he says, "of taking a group of young men to an Army base and straightening them out." Panelists jump all over him for proposing to remove kids from their communities and for suggesting such authoritarian discipline. "I see it more as a need for job training," Ashe says, "and the need to guarantee a job, so young men can connect their work with a reward."

You feel a little chill for him; his life is running out like sand while he sits in meetings such as this. However, during a break for a box lunch, he assures you that he is such a policy wonk that he feels well occupied. "I've put in quite a bit of time in the last decade trying to be a catalyst in things like this," he says. "And in those 10 years the problems have all gotten worse."

While he is being introduced as the keynote speaker, he is still gulping fruit salad and a chicken sandwich. "My appetite is back," he says. "A new medicine, DDI, did that for me. Of course, one of an AIDS patient's biggest fears is that image of wasting down to nothing. What's come out is that a lot of patients are dying of malnutrition."

He's on. He places his notebook on the podium. "African-American males are disconnected, ostracized and feared," he says. "I've wrestled with that emotionally, because in my youth it was the other way around. Then, we feared them."

(Later he will say, "After the riots—I should say the revolt—in L.A. this spring, I saw Crips and Bloods interviewed on CNN, and someone called in and asked what they thought of the man, Reginald Denny, who was dragged out of his truck and beaten, and they didn't think anything at all of it. I kept saying to my wife, 'That's not us. That's not us.' What happened to the collective shame the black community used to experience? 'Yes, white society did you wrong,' my uncles would say. 'But you do not, ever, lower yourself to their level.' ")

Ashe tells the symposium that the cause is not lost, and he sketches the approaches taken by the counseling and mentoring programs he has started on the roughest playgrounds of Newark and in Richmond's schools. He says his sense of desperation is so great that he is willing to experiment with all sorts of educational reforms, which leads him to his position on the NCAA's three-year-old requirement that freshmen have SAT scores of at least 700 to receive athletic scholarships.

"What wasn't discussed when this was adopted, except in the cloakrooms, was how that number was decided," says Ashe. "They had to set a level that, quote, even black athletes could pass, unquote. That stung me. That was one of the most disturbing things I had heard in my life. I know black kids are just as bright as anyone else, and if you expect more, you'll get it. And 700 was laughable when you get 400 for signing your name, and when you consider the international competition. Can you imagine the Japanese saying 700 is good enough? Black educators were incensed at the proposal. I was incensed that they were incensed, because they said the requirement was going to cut black athletic opportunity. They should have complained that the number wasn't higher."

The shape of his speech, his catalytic work, suddenly becomes clear. He is rebuking and summoning. He is being true to his father and to Dr. Johnson. He asserts that sports are critical to saving "the most vulnerable group in American life, 13-year-old black boys. With sports they are part of a team, they connect effort and reward, they accept fair play, they deal with losing. Too many of them associate losing with failure and embarrassment, and embarrassment in front of their peers is what leads young African-American men to get out their knives."

"There's never any unanimity in those meetings," says Ashe with no apparent dismay. He is back in his study, fresh from having seen Malcolm X.

"Malcolm was, to me, a little frightening before he went to Mecca, even though you knew he meant to add backbone and a rationale for collective self- defense," says Ashe. "I gave no thought in those days to becoming a Muslim. I was never recruited. But I saw how it galvanized others. I don't think Cassius Clay would have refused induction into the Army in 1967. But Muhammad Ali did. I wonder what Malcolm would think today? I never met him or Dr. King. I got a letter from King once. I remember that my friends and I figured, sooner or later, they'd be assassinated: JFK, Malcolm, Martin, Bobby." And Arthur, mild and brave.

"I'm getting my life in order, so if something should happen, now or five years from now, it won't cause disruption," he says. "I'm always juggling time spent on family, work and pro bono activities. I'm always torn. Just one more minute with my child. But the AIDS issue shoved itself to the top of the list, and it's not unrelated to what I was concerned with before. The pathologies of the inner city also generate AIDS cases."

Ashe looks hale, eats like a horse, climbs stairs two steps at a time and has a steady blood count. Yet only he could have written this paragraph, which appeared in The Washington Post after he suffered a mild heart attack following his arrest in September during a protest in Washington, D.C.: "Did my participation in a demonstration for Haitian political refugees . . . precipitate this MI [myocardial infarction], and was this AIDS- related? The answer to both is no." Even so, his doctors told him to knock off the civil disobedience.

"He's all ho-hum acceptance and grace," says 1978 U.S. Open finalist Pam Shriver, who works with Ashe on ABC tennis telecasts. "You just hope, when it's your turn to face it, you can do half as well." The eternal example.

Ashe has known he had AIDS since 1988, when doctors found an abscess on his brain caused by toxoplasmosis, an infection that is often a marker for AIDS. He and his wife, Jeanne, a fine photographer, decided not to go public with his illness for the sake of their daughter, Camera, who was two at the time. Ashe told a few close friends, who kept quiet. However, after USA Today informed Ashe this spring that it was pursuing the story, he felt that to maintain his privacy, he would have to lie about his health.

"I was angry," he says. "I felt it was an unwarranted intrusion. I'm not a politician." Did he consider asking USA Today editors simply to hold the story? "No," he says quickly. "That would have been begging."

Neither would he rage. "Things don't always have rational answers," he says. "You have to ask exactly what your alternatives are. There comes a time, after the long good fight, when you put the Dylan Thomas on the shelf and go to sleep."

That time is a way off, and the fight will be easier because Magic Johnson preceded Ashe in revealing his HIV infection. "He is so known and loved," says Ashe, "that there was a phalanx of doctors and articles explaining HIV transmission and treatments. You couldn't ask for better public education."

As a result, the stigma of having AIDS, something Ashe had assumed he would face, has not been much of an issue. Camera has not been taunted. "She's taking it well," he says. "When she feels like asking something, she does. We don't try to hide anything. About three weeks ago she said, 'Daddy, how did you get AIDS?' She hasn't asked about the future yet. We've decided to be judiciously truthful, to go into nothing that's not obvious. It makes a difference that I work at home. I'm around, sometimes for days on end. I get Camera up in the morning, and twice a week I shampoo her hair. That's Daddy's job. She's at an age when who does what is very important to her."

In Ashe's presence you find yourself adopting, gratefully, his brisk, academic tone, the offhand mask. It is only later that the fullness of some of his words strikes, so that, say, walking down Lexington Avenue and looking at department-store Christmas windows, you find that your forehead is inclined against the cool plate glass, and you are seeing Ashe's long, slender fingers moving in the beautiful child's soapy soft curls.

The next time you talk with him, you ask how he can possibly account for all the suffering of innocent people in the world. "Howard Thurman, the theologian, had a theory on that," says Ashe. "He thought that in the universal scheme of things, the innocent must suffer to pay for humanity's way through existence. The view has a lot of precedents, including human sacrifice. The souls offered up had to be untainted, so the gods would know that people were surrendering what they most valued."

Ashe chuckles when you try to imagine him as a sacrifice. "There is no definitive answer," he says. "Thurman's interpretation is just one way of talking about it."

Another is to ask after Ashe's personal faith. "No, my faith hasn't been shaken," he says. "These things just happen. Earthquakes, storms, innocent people get killed. But it does shake one's faith in the causality between good works and just rewards."

The logical question, then, is, What good are good works to him now? Why not just go canoeing with Camera? Ashe's sporting answer is that you play out your match, you pound away as hard as you can at what you care about until it's over, for the perfectly practical reason that we are not here in a vacuum. "Each of us comes up with his or her own social contracts," he says, "agreements with our group or our nation, or just ourselves. Those Crips and Bloods, those kids who showed no remorse, had no contract with America, just with raw, primeval, individual survival."

Ashe signed his contract with the whole society of man. His good is the common good. He doesn't need to create a little society so that he can agree not to cheat in it. He doesn't cheat in the big one. He delights in whatever mends and perpetuates the widest community, whether it is a student's decision to set worthy goals, a gene-splicing technique to combat HIV or a South African election open to members of all races.

There are, he insists, only two alternatives. If enough human beings do not ; advance the common good, we cannot go on; we shall move from suffering a chain of sustainable losses to suffering extinction. But if enough do, if enough coaches find the grace to hold the guilt-stricken athlete who just lost the title and tell him that it's just a game, that he has nothing to be ashamed of, that he can leave his knife in his pocket, then Arthur Ashe will always be on cloud nine.