A HARD ROAD TO GLORY: The African...

A HARD ROAD TO GLORY: The African American Athlete by Arthur Ashe, Jr. Baseball (260 pp.); Basketball (264 pp.); Boxing (152 pp.); Football ($336 pp.); Track & Field (135 pp.); (Amistad: $9.95 each). Ashe traces the history of various athletic competitions, describing how and when Afro-American athletes were allowed to enter the sports they now dominate. In addition to providing tables of records, he recounts the careers of now-forgotten performers, e. g. Tom Molineaux, a slave who earned his freedom by boxing, and went on to challenge Tom Cribb, the first man to claim the English heavyweight title in 1807. (Molineaux lost when officials bent the rules in Cribb’s favor.) This valuable series is weakened only by the narrowness of its focus: Ashe occasionally touches on the wider social issues involved without really exploring them.