On Sept. 9, 1992, police arrested Arthur Ashe and others in Lafayette Park, across from the White House. They were protesting the George H.W. Bush administration’s refusal to accept Haitian refugees as political asylum seekers. (Photo by Greg Gibson / AP / Shutterstock)
When Arthur Ashe died, I was a lot younger, and the idea that one of the legitimate saints of this world could be taken from us before we were ready was a fresher phenomenon, and therefore more devastating.
I adored Ashe, and in the aftermath of his sad (and unfortunately public) death, whenever I talked about what I felt for him, people would nod and say, “great player,” and, if they were knowledgeable about his career, would go on to recount a favorite match.
But it wasn’t Ashe the tennis player I adored — tennis bored me: the dull white shorts, the overweening gentility.
It was Ashe the social critic, Ashe the man.
It was through tennis, of course, that I learned of him, because that was how Ashe became a public figure.
When he won his 1968 U.S. Open title, he seemed such an improbable athlete. Too shy, too slight, too bookish, with those thick, black-rimmed glasses that became his signature and that he seemed to be perpetually squinting behind, as if registering every moment of unease in that world.
An outsider in every way, and his blackness — conspicuous in the all-white world of tennis, a fact that he seemed to bristle at — only made him more of one.
I was instantly drawn to him, the beginning of a lifelong attraction to outsiders and to outsiderness as a moral stance, an ethical code, in a false and corrosive culture.
And then I heard him speak for the first time.
His eloquence was commanding. More than that, though, was the sincerity and humility that gave ballast to his words. Addressing the existential quest of a subjugated people to reach a real and lasting freedom after nearly 400 years, he never rose for rhetorical flourish, never thumped the table. The effect was, counterintuitively, to make his words more urgent, not less.
Some of Ashe’s black critics have argued that too often he sought to mollify whites, to make them feel safe with him. Billie Jean King once claimed, cringingly, that she was blacker than he was. I know others who found his quiet dignity to be a source of inspiration, ennobling.
It was less for me that he seemed safe than that, to my Jewish eyes, the studious, almost nebbishy way he comported himself was entirely familiar and relatable. This was an athlete? Hell yeah.
I was by then going to junior high school in a black neighborhood, as part of the first wave of court-ordered busing in the Washington, D.C., area. Mary McLeod Bethune, my school, was named for a prominent black educator and situated in an African-American neighborhood, right on the line separating Maryland from the nation’s capital.
That was not the only line I crossed every day.
My friends were black, and that rankled the whites I rode to and from school with.
Being too slight, too shy and too bookish, I was punished, repeatedly, for my transgressions.
It was from Ashe (and from those writers my love of him had led me to) that I learned that difficult moments do not arise in life, that life is itself difficult, and either we act with courage (and with humility, and decency) or we succumb — and many others succumb with us also.
As Ashe’s activism came to supplant his career on the court, his work expanded to other quests for liberation, to South Africa, to Haiti — contextualizing the quest for black freedom as a larger, global struggle. And many of the people who had championed him as a leader turned on him, telling him that his 1973 visit to South Africa had normalized the regime and set back the cause. Ashe never caved or relented, his quiet dignity concealing a steeliness of will that his opponents across the net knew all too well.
•••
By the time Ashe died, I had so internalized his moral and ethical example that I assumed that anyone in possession of a public platform — particularly anyone who wasn’t white — was obliged to use it for a greater good.
It was a dangerous assumption (Why blacks and not whites? Why were they meant to shoulder a greater social burden?), and I of course was continually disappointed — not that so many failed to live up to Ashe’s admittedly saintly standard, but that so many hadn’t even thought to try.
When Michael Jordan declined to take a stand against the virulently and openly racist Jesse Helms in his tight 1990 Senate race against the black mayor of Charlotte, Harvey Gantt, it appeared that the baton that had passed from Jim Brown and Tommie Smith and John Carlos to Ashe had been dropped.
Which only made Ashe seem that much more powerful, and that much more resonant. The end of the line.
But the line did not end. What looked for a long time like a period turns out to have been an ellipsis.
•••
I’m not a Richmonder, but I spent a good bit of time here researching my first book, “The Wild Vine,” part of which is set in the city, and for the past couple of years, it has become a kind of second home.
I come down several times a month, to report, research and write. And every time I take the turn off 95 onto Belvidere, and especially every time I step into The Graduate — which honors the man in everything from a case of eyeglasses similar to those he wore to the line drawings that hang on the walls — I think of him.
Richmond, for me, is not the city of Poe, it is the city of Ashe.
And it is not lost on me that I have been coming down to Ashe’s city, a complicated, fraught city suspended between past and present, at a time when the union sometimes seems to be teetering toward a civil war.
As Trump has literalized the bully pulpit, widening and deepening our divides in the hope that a radically leaner society might emerge out of the disorder, many apolitical or apathetic athletes are beginning to discover their voice — as Ashe himself did.
LeBron James, a star basketball player whose most powerful public utterance was “I’m taking my talents to South Beach,” has evolved over the years to speak pointedly about civic engagement, and to demonstrate that involvement by opening a school for disadvantaged kids. In the past year, however, he has become markedly more pointed in his outspokenness, publicly rebuking talk show host Laura Ingraham’s sneering dis of his criticism of Trump, “Shut up and dribble,” by turning that into the title of a documentary series on Showtime that covers basketball players’ political activism.
But James is by no means alone. The WNBA’s Breanna Stewart joined protests against the travel ban. Football stars Malcolm Jenkins and former teammate Eric Reid continue to use their platforms to agitate for economic and racial justice.
Even the tight-lipped have become outspoken. When San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, a graduate of West Point and a Russian history buff, excoriated the president’s callow ignorance, many fans and even many journalists were surprised, given Pop’s penchant for terse brushoffs of reporters. It was an Ashean reminder that men of substance save their words for that which is meaningful.
And, of course, there is Colin Kaepernick. The writer Touré, himself a lifelong tennis player, recently anointed Kaepernick as the inheritor of Ashe’s legacy, pointing to the quietly principled statement that was his kneel, as well as his dignified refusal to cave to death threats.
It’s hard to compare different men, and across different eras. It only ends up slighting them both.
It’s not a slight to say that Kaepernick lacks Ashe’s eloquence; most people lack that. But Kaepernick does not lack for poetic power.
The most vitalizing thing about his act of conscientious objection, at least for me — a man who has lost faith in political movements, but not in the power of expression, and not in the dignity of one person to stand up to what is meant to subjugate him — is that Kaepernick did not refuse simply to stand for the national anthem; he also refused to resort to mere rhetoric to explain himself.
There is something distinctly — hauntingly — Ashean in that.
Todd Kliman is an author, essayist, cultural critic and food writer.