Arthur Ashe Has Class, Dignity and Insight Despite Misfortune

There were those long nights into morning Arthur Ashe remembers when he’d sit in the bar after New York Knickerbocker games with Bill Bradley and Joe Theismann and they’d ask each other what they could do to make a difference after they had grown up. “Something to put the enormous credibility of the athlete for the common good,” was the way he puts it.

Ashe is politically incorrect these days. He believes in shame--as in a little old lady in Virginia telling a rebellious teen-ager: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

He remembers that growing up black and talented in Virginia in the early ‘50s was a terrible trial, but there was a strong sense of what was right and what wasn’t--and no excuses. “I feel there are too many excuses made for behavior that should not be excused,” he said. “There is so much less shame.”

He recalled watching a TV interview after “the revolt in Los Angeles” and seeing a member of the Crips and a member of the Bloods interviewed. “They were asked what they thought of the beating of the truck driver, Reginald Denny,” Ashe said. “They said they didn’t think about it one way or the other--no guilt, no remorse, no shame.

“I said to my wife, ‘That’s not us. That’s not us.’ On TV, most of the rest of America thinks that’s us.”

These are old values buried by the welter of psycho-socio-economic rationalization, but Ashe will give himself to show those old values still work. For black people and white people.

Few athletes in our lifetime have combined the class, dignity and insight Ashe has. Fewer have had his dedication to find role models and try to pattern himself after them.

Ashe Tuesday was named Sportsman of the Year by Sports Illustrated, which is as close to a Nobel Prize as we have in sports. He got it not because outrageous misfortune has branded his life with AIDS, but because of what he chose to do with his life before and after. In the privacy of his life as husband and father, he may curse the darkness, but he’ll kid about the risk of placing the Grecian amphora in an apartment child-proofed for a 6-year-old and get on with trying to do the right thing.

When he speculated, as athletes do in December, who would win this award and that award, he thought first that Magic Johnson would win this one. The athlete in Ashe considered that Magic’s Olympic appearance had put basketball in line to replace soccer as the world’s sport.

The measurement of Ashe is taller, broader and deeper. He won the U.S. Open in 1968 and Wimbledon in 1975. He captained the U.S. Davis Cup team and had the courage to tell John McEnroe, if he had another one of those tantrums the United States would forfeit rather than shame itself again. That’s a man with standards.

He’ll work for AIDS awareness. He says he wishes Magic Johnson hadn’t let the fears of other players convince him to abandon his comeback. “I think his fellow players would have come to the conclusion that there was no danger to them,” Ashe said. “It would have been terrific.” He feels Magic would have dispelled the withered images of Ryan White and Rock Hudson; that will take several more heterosexual victims.

Ashe contracted the AIDS virus from a blood transfusion during heart surgery in 1983. He would have preferred to hold his mortality within his family until he was ready, but overzealous journalism deprived him of that privacy. He disagrees, but he does not rage.

His stronger identification comes from being talented and black and aware, selecting role models in Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Whizzer White, Bill Bradley, Tom McMillen and Muhammad Ali--not being limited by their arena. Ashe feels his social contract.

The Virginia of his childhood reacted to the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision with “massive reaction.” He remembered that he was permitted to play only once in a sanctioned match, the national high school tennis championship. “There were real formidable racial barriers,” he said.

And there was, of course, anger. “Quite muted,” Ashe said. “You handled it or you ended up dead, in jail quite quickly, seeing a shrink, or you had to leave--which I did.” He went to UCLA.

There was a time, which has not yet passed, of what Ashe calls “unbridled greed.” Athletes have little time for the community, and the community has little time for its young people. In Ashe’s time in Richmond, black people of all strata were crammed into one section, so Ashe was exposed to Supreme Court aides and loafers. He chose his standards.

It took him over five years to research and write the three volumes of “A Hard Road to Glory” on the uphill road of black athletes. He won an Emmy for the TV adaptation. He continues to work with young people who may not know enough to be ashamed when Vince Coleman says, “I don’t know no Jackie Robinson.” Ashe thinks the minimum standard of a 700 SAT score is embarrassingly low.

And he thinks the “fuzzy” distinction between right and wrong is today’s curse, and he’ll fight it. “Poverty and bad schools and kids who don’t have fathers are factors, of course,” Ashe said. “Still there’s no excuse for some moral outrages. There are not enough people of influence who will stand up and say, ‘That’s wrong.’ ”

And that’s right. We ought to have more people like Arthur Ashe, white and black.