Ashe’s Days of Grace Erasing Barriers of Race

Of all the athletes I have known, there was none whose intellect I had more respect for than Arthur Ashe’s. You could get right down to the nitty-gritty of any subject with Arthur, and that included racial harmony--of which he was a passionate advocate.

I remember once, we were having lunch and the discussion turned on what he termed indissoluble differences between blacks and whites in America and it was suggested that one group could never understand the other because the differences went all the way to the glandular in nature.

I remember sucking up my breath and plunging in, taken aback by my own audacity and fearing I may have overstepped our friendship.

“Arthur,” I chanced it, “you know as well as I do that the so-called ‘black’ race in America is hardly homogeneous. For one thing, take Sherman’s army. There are an awful lot--hundreds of thousands--of ‘blacks’ who are descended from his March to the Sea, which was often sidetracked to slave quarters, to say nothing of the 10 or so other Union armies.”

I held my breath. But, to my intense relief, Arthur not only cheerfully agreed, he added anecdotal lore of his own to the mix. Arthur was a well-read man.

When he died this year, we lost a voice of reason and reconciliation we can ill afford.

Arthur wrote a book, “Days of Grace,” and left a legacy to his people--us Americans. In a way, it was his deathbed advice. So we know it was heartfelt, devoid of artifice or self-service. But with Arthur, we would have known that anyway.

Arthur went through life the way he played tennis--coolly, warily. With great style and dignity. He played the most mistake-free tennis of any great player. Not for Arthur Ashe was the “unforced error.”

He was as meticulous in his private life. No scandal ever touched Arthur Ashe. Arthur had no problem being a “role model.” He considered it a privilege. He was militant without being strident, crusading without being contumacious. Not for him the street-corner rhetoric of the rabble-rouser. He got things done quietly but effectively, simply another forehand down the line. His motto was the same as that French philosopher’s, “There is no use getting angry at facts, it is a matter of indifference to them.”

Arthur faced facts. Without blinking. His interest, the last weeks of his life, was in the NCAA propositions, 42 and 48, concerning the academic qualifications of athletes. College basketball coaches such as John Thompson (interested in smuggling 7-foot centers through the eye of this needle) saw them as “culturally biased.”

Wrote Ashe in his last testament: “My own position is different from Thompson’s. Can one attribute a low test score to socioeconomic bias? Perhaps. Can one invoke cultural bias to explain a 700 (bare minimum) SAT test score? Ridiculous!”

Arthur felt that, by not forcing their athletes to meet the academic challenge, they were underestimating them.

Said Arthur: “To Thompson’s objection that black athletes would be barred by the new standards, I asserted my belief that any loss in numbers would be short term. In response to the new standards, black youngsters would simply rise to the challenge and meet them.”

Arthur meets what he calls the “ethos of entitlement” head-on. He recalls a “distressing” visit to a Connecticut high school to meet and debate varsity athletes on Props. 42 and 48.

“I asked the kids--mostly black and male--if they thought it fair that persons who performed weakly in academics should be given athletic scholarships. The response of every black male was that he was entitled to a scholarship even if someone more qualified academically would be deprived of one.

“Not one suggested that athletes should be held to the same standard as non-athletes. They argued they had spent endless time in training, that blacks had been discriminated against (historically) and so on.

“On display was the increasingly dominant African-American adolescent ethos of entitlement, of ‘You owe me,’ which I consider monstrous. One can be sure that an adolescent with such an attitude will make no particular effort at scholastics. Why should he? His teacher owes him a passing grade.

“I can understand the argument that blacks should have been paid reparations for slavery and segregation. By an Act of Congress, Japanese-Americans interned in World war II received $20,000 per family. Germany is paying reparations to Jews . . . but our sense of entitlement is taken too far. Should we now give up because of an oppressive sense that we have not been compensated for historic wrongs done to us? Absolutely not.”

Continues Arthur: “What I and others want is an equal chance, under one set of rules, as on the tennis court. While rules are different for different people, devices like affirmative action are needed to prevent explosions of anger. But I would not want to know I received a job simply because I am black. . . . Such is human nature, why struggle to succeed when you can have something for nothing?”

What Arthur suggests is that he wants a level playing field, academically as well as athletically. No one ever had to make a black basket count three while a white basket counted only two. No one ever had to give a black runner a head start in a 100-meter dash. No one had to make a black single count as a double or give a black batter four strikes.

Arthur suggests blacks don’t need an artificial advantage off the field, either.

He was not emboldened to speak out by his intimations of foreshortened mortality. He had written scathing essays--”Coddling Black Athletes”--on that point for the New York Times years before he found out he was ill.

Arthur might have been heartened by a statistical report issued only this week by the NCAA on the progress of Prop. 48. It showed improved graduation rates for athletes who had begun college after the policy was put in effect. Black football players at Division 1-A schools and black male basketball players showed the largest increases in graduation rates.

There is still work. At 100 of the nation’s institutes of higher learning, only 26% of black male basketball players graduated, and 39% of black football players did. But this was an improvement, up from 23% and 33% in a previous survey.

The graduation rate for all black male athletes was 41%, higher than the rate for the black non-athlete population, 30%. The figure for white male athletes was 57%, with a 56% rate for all white males.

Arthur would be pleased, but not satisfied.

“The critics of Prop. 42 seriously underestimate the psychic value that black athletes place on their athletic success and how that could be used to motivate them academically,” he wrote. “Prop. 42--or something like it--would motivate high school coaches and their players to take education seriously. More important, that dedication . . . would set a tone in the schools that would inspire non-athletes to study harder, too.”

Arthur, as usual, has left us after winning, love-love. And, as usual, the count is advantage, Ashe.