SPORTS WATCH : Gentleman Athlete

In his own intense and meticulously informed way, the late Arthur Ashe, a gentleman athlete, championed justice on and off the tennis court, at home and abroad.

He fought the stigma of AIDS, which he believed he contracted a decade ago from a blood transfusion he received after heart surgery. As tough as that fight was, Ashe insisted that nothing was as difficult as the battles he had faced as a black man.

He fought the cancer of racism on the segregated tennis courts in his hometown of Richmond, Va. The first black man to win Wimbledon, in 1975, Ashe also chronicled the victories and struggles of other African-American athletes in his impressive three-volume history, “A Hard Road to Glory.”

Nowhere was that road harder than in South Africa. Ashe attacked apartheid before that cause was popular in the United States. His fight led to the exclusion of the all-white South African tennis team from the Davis Cup tournament in 1970.

Last year, he demonstrated against the punitive U.S. policy of returning Haitian refugees to their oppressive homeland.

In his final newspaper column, the former UCLA student athlete urged high school and college athletes to excel in the study of books as well as games.

On Wednesday, as his wife, Jeanne-Marie Moutoussamy, his daughter, Camera, and others pay tribute in Richmond, many will note that Arthur Ashe is lying in state at the once-segregated Executive Mansion--which, thanks to American heroes like him, is no longer off-limits.