Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Arthur Ashe Jr. relished art. During his travels as a celebrated tennis champion, he roamed the galleries of major cities.
One of his favorite works, exhibited in Amsterdam, was Rembrandt’s “The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq,” better known as “The Night Watch.”
Ashe knew that it was originally painted with figures posed in bright sunshine, but years of soot and grime had darkened the picture and created its alias. “I was sure there was a lesson of some kind to be learned in that,” he wrote in his memoir “Days of Grace.”
Ashe’s impressive winning of 47 career titles in the open era, including the Australian Open, the U.S. Open and Wimbledon, overshadowed his identity, similar to the soot obscuring Rembrandt’s painting.
He desired to leave a legacy beyond the numerous accolades he had received for, as he said, “hitting a ball around.”
‘He Stood for Something’
Ashe and his younger brother, Johnnie, himself an athlete who became a career Marine officer, grew up at 1610 Sledd St., under the watchful eye of their disciplinarian father, Arthur Ashe Sr., whose several jobs included special police officer for Richmond parks and recreation department and entrepreneurial landscaper. Their mother, Mattie Cordell Cunningham Ashe, died in 1950, when Arthur wasn’t quite 7. “I would give anything to stand once again before her,” he wrote in “Days of Grace,” “to feel her arms about me, to touch and taste her skin. She is watching me every day, watching me in everything I do.”
Ashe’s father eventually remarried, to Lorene Kimbrough, and that union produced two more siblings, Robert and Loretta. Ashe lived in Richmond until his junior year at Maggie Walker High School. He spent summers in Lynchburg, to attend the tennis camp of Dr. Robert Walter Johnson, who pushed Ashe to greater opportunities in St. Louis and then in Los Angeles.
Later, Ashe’s boyhood home underwent demolition when Brook Field Park was razed to make way for the Main Post Office on Brook Road.
Ashe visited extended relatives and Walker classmates even after moving away and traveling the world. He wrote that he believed in the African proverb: Hold on to your friends with both hands.
Arthur Robert Ashe Jr., known internationally as an accomplished athlete and author, died on Feb. 6, 1993, at age 49, of complications resulting from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). He contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, through a blood transfusion after heart surgery in 1983. When he experienced right arm paralysis in 1988, physicians suspected a brain tumor. Exploratory surgery revealed toxoplasmosis, a known symptom of AIDS.
When Ashe’s body was brought to Richmond, he was placed next to his mother at Woodlawn Cemetery, her simple headstone paid for by her co-workers at the Miller & Rhoads department store. Ashe’s own jet-black Vermont granite marker received dedication on the 50th anniversary of his birth, July 10, 1993. Poet Maya Angelou described him at that ceremony as “this man superb in love and logic.”
The Richmond Times-Dispatch quoted tearful Henrico County resident Emily Core, watching Ashe’s casket brought into the memorial ceremony at the athletic center near The Diamond. “He wasn’t Martin Luther King, and he wasn’t Malcolm X. But when you saw him, he stood for something. He wasn’t always talking, but he always had something to say.”
Days of Grace
When announcing that he had AIDS on April 8, 1992, Ashe joked: “George Steinbrenner has asked me to manage the Yankees, but I graciously declined.” Ashe recalled that nobody laughed, “which frequently happens with my jokes.”
This press conference was about Ashe trying to gain the advantage. Doug Smith, a boyhood friend who worked for USA Today, had asked Ashe if he had AIDS because the paper was on the verge of publicizing the news. Ashe used his HBO connections, developed in his years as a tennis commentator for the network’s Wimbledon coverage, to organize a televised news conference in order to beat the press. With wife and photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe at his side, he read a statement, referring to the announcement as his “outing.”
Donald Dell, himself a Davis Cup champion, Ashe’s agent and one of his closest friends, says that few people knew of Ashe’s condition. “You have to remember that then, people immediately equated AIDS with homosexual activity or intravenous drug use. Arthur didn’t participate in either. But besides any of that, he felt it wasn’t anybody’s business but his and his immediate family.”
Characteristically, Ashe didn’t retreat. He spoke at AIDS-awareness conferences, organized the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health in Brooklyn, New York, and continued lending his calm but forceful voice to social issues such as public health, education and the treatment of Haitian refugees.
It was better to remain occupied, Ashe thought, than to sit at home waiting to die.
He worked on his memoir, “Days of Grace,” and spent time with his 6-year-old daughter, Camera. Ashe was keenly aware that he had lost his mother at Camera’s age and of how that abrupt loss affected him emotionally, closing him off to all but the few who penetrated his cultivated aloofness.
Which isn’t to say that he was a stiff. “One thing’s been forgotten about Arthur,” said the late Sports Illustrated writer and frequent National Public Radio commentator Frank Deford. “He had a terrific sense of humor and laughed a lot; he wasn’t some serious nerd. And he wasn’t Saint Arthur, either. … People have some view of him that he was at home reading the Good Book. And, yeah, there was some of that, but he managed to have plenty of fun, too.”
‘You Need to Remember This’
Future Gov. L. Douglas Wilder once chased Arthur Ashe off the courts at Brook Field Park. The spindly, 6- or 7-year-old Ashe wanted to play with a large wooden racket “almost as big as he was,” and Wilder shooed him off because he wanted to use the courts by himself.
Wilder recognized Ashe because he also frequented the Brook Field playground, and everybody knew Ashe’s father, who kept an eye on it. Wilder now laughs about the incident. “I don’t know any more now about tennis than I did then.” This initial meeting later matured into a warm acquaintance.
In 1990, Wilder became the first elected African-American governor in the nation. Around that time, Ashe was married and living in New York City, parlaying his tennis victories into a different life as an HBO sports commentator, Washington Post columnist, memoirist, speaker and social activist. After Wilder’s election, Ashe came to visit Richmond.
Wilder met Ashe at a luncheon and invited him to the mansion for dinner. A few hours later, as Wilder tells the story, Ashe called. He shyly asked if Wilder thought it “all right if he brought some family with him to dinner.” Wilder eagerly said, “Of course. Bring whoever you want.”
Dinnertime arrived, Ashe was announced and Wilder came downstairs to greet his guests. “Just as I got to the door, it opened, and in came Arthur Ashe with 15 people,” nieces and nephews and cousins.
The staff scurried, places were set and dinner proceeded. “And then at a quiet portion of the dinner, Arthur remarked, ‘Doug, who’d ever thought that we’d ever be here in Virginia, in this place, having dinner at our own invitation?’ Then he told the younger members of his family, ‘You need to remember this, to see how far we’ve come.’ ”
In February 1993, Wilder arranged for Ashe to lie in state in the same dining room at the Executive Mansion. “I did not know when it happened that this was the first time a public viewing had been held in the mansion since Stonewall Jackson was there,” Wilder says.
Portrait in Motion
When Ashe became interested in a topic, he quickly learned all he could. While working on “Portrait in Motion,” which he co-authored with Ashe, Deford joined the tennis champ’s unprecedented 1973 trip to South Africa, and he called it the most important story he covered in his long career.
Ashe made the visit on his terms: He wouldn’t play for a segregated audience nor come as an “honorary white,” and he’d go anywhere. Ashe knew, too, that South Africa wanted to participate in the Olympics.
“People said, ‘Ashe is getting used by the system,’ ” Dell recalls. “In fact, Arthur was using the system. This was international news — a black man playing against whites in South Africa.”
Ashe had repeatedly requested a visa to travel to South Africa and was denied until 1973.
“There is a concept in international trade called comparative advantage,” Ashe wrote. “Two nations will trade with each other if each believes it can gain. My going to South Africa is a trade. … If nothing else, my presence signals a pause in apartheid … a pause of maybe for only five minutes — but maybe next time 10.”
Ashe resided in the opulent Spanish-style mansion of a wealthy insurance/real estate broker. He realized he was opening himself to charges of hypocrisy for staying in a rich white man’s house. But living in Soweto, deliberately built distantly from the center of town, wasn’t practical.
The mansion was fully staffed. When Ashe asked for a cold drink, he was startled when Anna, the maid, lowered her eyelids and replied, “Yes, Master.”
“Please don’t call me Master,” Ashe insisted. “You can call me Arthur.”
He later told his host he didn’t want the servants showing him such deference. Ashe struck up a friendship with Anna, learning about her family and background. Finally, on his last day in Johannesburg, she called him Arthur.
Ashe traveled the 17 miles to Soweto, “just a bureaucratic abbreviation for the Southwest Township,” he noted, describing it as not a “city so much as an urban reservation.”
Some days later, he taught a tennis clinic there before an estimated crowd of 1,500 people. Ashe speculated that many of them hadn’t seen tennis played before. Some hissed and called him an Uncle Tom; others cheered, and black lawyer Reggie Ngcobo exalted Ashe. “You epitomize sportsmanship,” he stated, “for the essence of sportsmanship is to experience happiness in the happiness of others — and to feel their pain and suffering, too. God bless you for coming, Arthur, our Arthur.”
For the record, Ashe won the men’s doubles with Tom Okker, becoming the first black man to win a title in the South African Open.
Ashe continued his anti-apartheid activism, even getting arrested during a 1985 anti-apartheid protest in Washington, D.C. Later, on a visit to South Africa after the dissolution of apartheid, Ashe was warmly greeted by President Nelson Mandela, who described himself as “an Ashe fan.”
Wimbledon
London bookmakers made 23-to-5 odds against Ashe taking the Wimbledon title from defending champion Jimmy Connors on July 5, 1975. Nobody expected victory — except Ashe.
That year, Connors ruled the tennis world after winning at Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and the Australian Open the previous season. Ashe and others tried persuading him to join the Davis Cup team, but Connors stubbornly refused. Ashe, who had served in the U.S. Army from 1966 to 1969, remarked in 1975 that Connors was “seemingly unpatriotic” by refusing to play for the United States team. On the eve of Wimbledon, Connors slapped Ashe with a $3 million libel suit.
Down two sets to one in the final, Connors was up a break and leading 3-0 in the fourth set when Ashe ultimately decided “to continue feeding him junk, force him to the net and lob.” The strategy paid off. Ashe won six of the next seven games to take the championship, startling Connors on match point with a slice serve wide to his trademark two-fisted backhand that produced a limp return Ashe easily put away into the open court. For Ashe, he’d reached the pinnacle of an effort that began with tennis instructor Ron Charity in 1950 on a Richmond playground.
Ashe turned to the special friends’ box where sat Donald Dell, and filled with elation and gratitude, Arthur Ashe Jr. raised his fist in victory.
Connors dropped his lawsuit. Six years later, he finally joined the Davis Cup team with Ashe as captain.
Arthur Ashe and Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe on their holiday card (Image courtesy Lou Einwick Collection)
‘Just Plain Better’
On Oct. 14, 1976, at a United Negro College Fund benefit in Madison Square Garden, Jeanne Marie Moutoussamy was one of many photographers. She’d recently graduated from the Cooper Union, and was working for NBC. Ashe saw her and said, “Photographers sure are getting cuter.”
“I thought it was soooooo bad,” she recalled in an Ebony interview. She rolled her eyes at him, then accidentally stepped on his foot as the herd of photographers shifted away. Ashe learned who she was and asked her out. About four days later, she invited him to her NBC cubicle, and pulled out her portfolio.
“And he genuinely liked my photographs and the stories behind them. He got big points for that.”
On Feb. 20, 1977, ordained minister and Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young married the couple. The groom was on crutches from an operation on his left heel. Those crutches, Ashe noted in “Days of Grace,” “were a portent of other maladies to come.”
Ashe referred to his July 1979 heart attack, which necessitated a quadruple-bypass that December, followed by a corrective double-bypass in June 1983. After that surgery came the fateful blood transfusion that led to his HIV infection.
Ashe’s busy calendar and apparent stable health persuaded people he’d win his match against AIDS, too, just like he did against Connors at Wimbledon. He wryly told reporters he planned on living to 100, but his doctors wouldn’t guarantee it.
On Feb. 5, 1993, suffering from pneumonia, Ashe was admitted to New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, where he died the next day. Physicians and friends gathered by his bedside said he raised his hand, index finger and thumb, forming the “OK” sign just before his death.
Six thousand people attended Ashe’s memorial service. Notables included U.S. senators Charles S. Robb and Bill Bradley, a former basketball player. Tennis greats Charlie Pasarell, Stan Smith and Donald Dell attended. French Open champion Yannick Noah was a pallbearer.
New York City Mayor David Dinkins boldly eulogized, “We routinely describe as ‘great’ folks who were better at self-promoting, instead of folks who were just plain better. Arthur Ashe was just plain better than most of us.”
Editor's note: Originally published in 2003, this article has been updated.
Ashe at a Glance
Selected achievements, honors and awards of a life lived in full
