Arthur Ashe in action at the ABN World Tennis Tournament in the Netherlands on March 1, 1975 (Photo by Rob Bogaerts / Fotocollectie Anefo / Nationaal Archief)
In the new, nine-years-in-the-making biography, “Arthur Ashe: A Life,” award-winning historian Raymond Arsenault recounts how, three months before dying in 1993, the tennis legend and humanitarian was the only celebrity athlete protesting the treatment of Haitian refugees in front of the White House. “The next day, he had a heart attack. But it was his sense of responsibility,” Arsenault says. “He shouldn’t have been there, but he felt that he had to be there.”
The author of the best-selling books “Freedom Riders” and “The Sound of Freedom,” Arsenault says that his exhaustive, often deeply moving, biography was born out of a longtime fascination with his Richmond-born subject, a Wimbledon and U.S. Open champion who spoke out against injustice and was eager to break down society’s color barriers.
Image courtesy Simon & Schuster
“I’ve also been fascinated by the connections between race and sports,” says Arsenault, a professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. “And particularly that kind of romantic racialism during the Jim Crow system when blacks were put in another kind of box by being told that they were ‘natural athletes’ — they weren’t being celebrated for their minds or the difficult training that it takes to be a great athlete.”
Articulate, intellectual and politely argumentative, Ashe dispelled that notion. Arsenault’s 700-plus page tome threads together a rich and complicated life, from the tennis prodigy’s days growing up in Richmond — where he learned to play at the former Brook Field courts and was barred from city tournaments because of racial discrimination — to his work as a human rights advocate, philanthropist and AIDS activist.
And, yes, there is tennis, too, with evocative recaps of Ashe’s classic battles against opponents such as Jimmy Connors, Björn Borg and his nemesis, Rod Laver. “I’m not sure if there’s another book quite like it, for better or for worse,” Arsenault says about the mixture of sports and social history. Here, he answers a few questions about the book, set for release by Simon & Schuster on Aug. 21, just before the 50th anniversary of Ashe winning the U.S. Open.
Richmond magazine: Was it difficult to convince the Ashe estate that you were the guy to write this?
Arsenault: When I approached Jeanne, his wife, about a book, I told her I was interested in him as a public intellectual, a civil rights activist, a writer [and] a person deeply invested in public affairs. If I had been a sports writer, I don’t think she would have talked to me. In fact, she told me that.
RM: Talk about the research.
Arsenault: I worked with and interviewed Jeanne, interviewed his family, his friends … 150 interviews in all. Plus I had access to 95 boxes of personal papers housed in the [New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Researchin Black Culture]. A huge collection. But I couldn’t have done it without him. Arthur Ashe wrote four autobiographies at four different times in his life, all in his own voice. Yes, he had co-writers, but he was so honest and candid, revealing his soul, which is interesting because he had this reputation of being kind of cool and aloof. He was way Obama-esque. I swear sometimes that they were separated at birth. [Laughs.]
"He wanted to leave a legacy that would mean something, to leave the world a better place and to be a role model."
RM: What was the big challenge in telling his story?
Arsenault: Frankly, at first I was worried that he might be too good. [Laughs.] Was there ever any creative tension? I mean, he seems too good to believe, really. But it turned out that he was a more complicated man. I tried to be balanced — I didn’t want him to be a cartoon character and wanted to present all sides. Even though I love the tennis, too, and there’s plenty of tennis in the book, half of it is not about the sport at all.
RM: He certainly wasn’t a cookie-cutter tennis player.
Arsenault: No, he was kind of wild —he loved to take chances. He probably would’ve won more tournaments if he’d kind of compromised with himself. He loved to hit the impossible shot, and I think that tells you something. Beneath that calm exterior, he loved fast cars, he loved speed, he had a motorcycle.
RM: In the book, you spend some time knocking down rumors.
Arsenault: Early on, I talked to an African-American historian, and he said that to some, it was always assumed that Arthur was gay, and that it was not the blood transfusion that gave him the AIDS virus that killed him. … But of all the things that I studied, the one thing I’m most sure of is that Arthur was not gay. In fact, he was relentlessly heterosexual. Before he married Jeanne, he had a rich bachelor life dating some of the most beautiful women in the world.
RM: Racism marked his early years in Richmond.
Arsenault: He wrote on more than one occasion that he wasn’t the kind to hold grudges, but when he left Richmond [to go to St. Louis for his senior year of high school, to escape Jim Crow rules], he thought he was leaving forever the segregation and all that nonsense. But he felt a bond with Richmond in the end — he tried so hard to get the African-American Sports Hall of Fame there.
RM: What are your lasting impressions about him?
Arsenault: Two things stick out. First, his independence of mind. He always insisted on making up his own mind on issues. He never followed convention. He was so pro-sportsmanship and gentlemanly, but he also was a truth teller, deeply philosophical and always searching. … The other thing was his social philosophical agenda. He wanted to leave a legacy that would mean something, to leave the world a better place and to be a role model.
If anybody was a hero, he was.
