Ignore the Glasses and Thin Body: The Man Was Tough

Arthur Ashe traveled to South Africa in 1973, to play tennis and to see conditions for himself. He called on a Zulu chieftain in the bush and made rounds with Dr. Christiaan Barnard at a children’s hospital. He spoke civilly to government officials but did not close his eyes to segregated restrooms and separated seating sections, and, upon being asked his opinion of Johannesburg, a city eager to improve its image, Ashe responded: “Drop an H-bomb on it.”

That same week, Ashe also befriended a poet, a poor and timid man, father of six, head of a family whose dwelling had no plumbing, no electricity. The man’s name was Mattera and by candlelight he composed a poem, “Anguished Spirit,” that he dedicated to Ashe.

I listened deeply when you spoke

About the step-by-step evolution

Of a gradual harvest

Tended by the rains of tolerance

And patience.

Your youthful face, a mask

Hiding a pining, anguished spirit

And I loved you, brother

Not for your quiet philosophy

But for the rage in your soul.

Arthur Ashe, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Here was a man who fought publicly in his life and sought privacy in his death. Here was not merely a tennis ace but a fighter, through and through; a fighter for rights, for causes, for liberties. A man who spoke so quietly but said so much.

That voice became hoarse in sickness and ultimately was stilled. Arthur Robert Ashe was taken from an ever-changing world Saturday, five months shy of his 50th birthday, a world that he did much to change. He was as much crusader as player, as much spokesman as sportsman. But Ashe’s eloquence was much like his tennis, masterful and understated, pointed and precise.

He was an Army officer who walked with a dignified posture and comported himself as a gentleman, in glaring contrast to the tennis champions of the next generation. Even in that winter of 20 years ago, the Arthur Ashe who was so dismayed at what he saw in South Africa was smart enough to compromise where he saw fit, not opposing a nonwhite seating section as a trade-off to having tickets in all sections of the stadium slipped quietly to black customers when no whites were looking.

He would say later: “There is a concept in economics called comparative advantage, when two nations will trade with each other if they both believe they can gain. Now, I know the (South African) government is using me, but I’m using it, too.”

This was an unsettled period in both domestic and global sociopolitical relations and Ashe retreated from no battle. Already he had boycotted the 1972 and 1973 Wimbledon tennis championships in England as part of a protest by the Assn. of Tennis Professionals that he had helped organize. Two years before that, he had been denied a visa to visit South Africa, which infuriated him nearly as much as the citizens’ plight there did.

By 1975, already pushing his 32nd birthday and given little more chance to win than any other black man who had donned the whites of the Wimbledon before him, Ashe upset third-seeded Bjorn Borg in the quarterfinals and then endured five hellish sets against Tony Roche of Australia, taking the last one, 6-4. So drained was he by this effort that Ashe was not expected by many to take a set off the defending champion, Jimmy Connors, who was nine years younger and a hundred decibels louder.

Ashe’s tactics were inspired. He controlled the pace. He found holes in Connors’ forehand that no one else had noticed. By the time the royals were rising to pay tribute from their box, he was the Wimbledon winner in four sets, and it was indeed as though he had pulled his tennis racquet from a stone, for on this day Arthur truly was king.

How strong he was. That bony frame might have appeared somewhat frail, and those eyeglasses might have fooled an observer or two along the way, but Arthur Ashe was tougher than he looked and smarter than most he faced. It was so hard to accept four years later when, after he had played Wimbledon for the last time, word came that Ashe was in need of heart surgery. Arthur Ashe, who had so much heart.

It was the first part of his body to give out. The surgery of the ‘80s gave way to the scourge of the ‘90s. The grim-reaping creature that is AIDS laid its hand on Arthur Ashe’s shoulder and asked him to come along. It was a sentence Arthur and his family accepted and bore alone until a gray day came when others intruded on their grief.

Some good did come from this. Many were at least able to praise and adore Arthur Ashe in the precious time he had left.

He also lived long enough to see the Earth spin and shift on its axis, to see change come even to South Africa, where once the people of Soweto had draped an amulet around his neck and chanted his name. At the time, the poet, Mattera, was being taken away to prison for five years, without sufficient cause, without even having had a trial. Mattera touched Ashe’s hand one last time that day. He said: “Go well, brother. Go well.”

Go well, Arthur. Go well.