#94, December 24, 2005

Dust on Ashe

Arthur Ashe was one of my heroes for a long time. I learned a few things about race from him; I probably learned more about sportsmanship. But first, before saying anything about him, I first need to make a confession. I was an Ilie Nastase fanatic, much to my own detriment. This meant I was a great stylist on the court, and learned to do a number of trick shots – my Yannick-Noah-between- the-legs shot is a winner; Noah made this shot famous when he won the French Open, but I had seen Nastase do this shot (or one similar) many years earlier in his victory over Rod Laver at Wembley – but it also meant that my attitude sucked. I was at the other end of the spectrum from the Borg god-like capacity for concentration. I didn’t complain about line calls, I was English (that’s a joke), but the slightest irritation and I would lose a set against a lesser opponent before you could even say Evonne Goolagong. I remember reading about Nastase’s victory over Ashe at Forest Hills (was that 73?), and I was delighted, even though it sounded like Nastase had used all his nasty tricks to disrupt Ashe in order to secure the victory.

My view of Ashe changed considerably when I played against him. Oh, alright, that’s a little grandiose. I was a snotty-nosed boarding-school kid just turned 13. Arthur Ashe had come down to the Malvern Tennis Club to run a clinic, in the week preceding Wimbledon. I knocked up against him in front of lots of other snotty kids English kids, and I think I probably hit everything into the net, since it was a little nerve racking. I wondered at the time why it was that this African American tennis professional would be wasting his time with us, when he should have been preparing to play at Wimbledon, but I came to see that this was just the way Arthur Ashe was – he was a man who frequently put this kind of outreach before his own performance.

I think at the time of the clinic I was acturally a Newcombe supporter and was happy that he beat Stan Smith to win on Wimbledon that year, and for a couple of years after that I worshipped at the cracked altar of Nastase. However, the year Ashe won Wimbledon was a memorable one for me. That year Jimmy Connors had been dominating everybody all the way through to the final. He had so easily destroyed Ken Rosewall (he of the great, but wooden, backhand) the previous year, that it seemed inconceivable that anyone could beat him. But, I knew he could be beaten, and I knew that Ashe would do it. The way to beat Connors that year was to slice the serve wide to the backhand and come in behind it to volley into the open court; and if Connors was established in the rally on his own serve, take all the pace off the ball and drop it in front of him down the middle – Connors was prone to hitting his approach shot into the net. Ashe did exactly what I thought he needed to do, and played the game not just of a champion, but of someone who was potentially the greatest player of his age. He wasn’t, of course, but I think he would have been if he hadn’t been African American, carrying the burden of race, and if he hadn’t felt the urge to give back to the people who helped him along, in just the way that he did when he decided he should come to play against me.

He was an unlucky man: heart attack victim, only to get AIDS from the transfusion. That’s pretty unlucky. But I don’t think he ever projected that. He projected statesmanship, beauty, composure, decency, class. How many tennis players can you say that about? How many people? Not many.

These things came flooding into my head when I went looking through some old files for an entry I had written on sports and gender for the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Culture. I came across this 200-word Ashe entry I had written:

Born 1940 Died 1993

Eight years after being turned away from the Richmond City Tennis Tournament in 1955 because of race, Ashe became the first African American on the U.S. Davis Cup team, where he remained for fifteen years. His two Grand Slam triumphs included the 1968 US Open at Forest Hills and the 1975 Wimbledon.

Ashe’s dominance in tennis was limited by his commitment to social and political issues off the court. In 1973 Ashe was allowed into South Africa to play in its Open, but received criticism from the African National Congress. Later, he became an outspoken critic of the South African government and in 1985 was arrested at a protest rally against Apartheid in Washington, D.C. He was also arrested while protesting the Bush administration's treatment of Haitian refugees. Other public work included support for the NCAA’s introduction of minimum requirements for college athletes (Proposition 48).

Ashe’s playing career ended in 1979 because of heart problems. After by-pass surgery in 1983, he contracted AIDS, from a blood transfusion. After his death, ironically, controversy arose as citizens and the city administration moved to place a memorial statue on Monument Row in Richmond, which had generally honored white Confederate heroes.

A tear came to my eye as I read this, not really sure why, and it wasn’t because I had failed to mention that great day when we had met among the Malvern Hills, the oldest hills in the British Isles, and no doubt the hills that project the wisest vibes imbibed by humankind.