TV Reviews : HBO’s ‘Arthur Ashe’ Jittery but Loving

Like a lovingly assembled scrap album of photos and memento mori, HBO’s “Arthur Ashe: Citizen of the World” declares an affection for one of tennis’ stars that is so righteous yet so sentimental, you have to pinch yourself to recall the Arthur Ashe of memory and legend--the genius of the grass court.

His profoundly developed mastery of the game, his modern playing style that made him the Wilt Chamberlain of tennis and his courtier-like manner were all captured on television. This film, written by the fine sports mind and longtime Ashe friend, Frank Deford, tries to capture what television often missed.

It manages this only sporadically, so it’s good to know that Deford has hopes for a longer film or print biography of Ashe. Here, you sense a frantic urge to cram a rich life into the tight space of an hour. How, for instance, do you travel the course of an athletic career that saw the breakdown of racial barriers in the most segregated sport? How to parallel Ashe’s rise from UCLA stardom to the game’s pinnacle, the Grand Slam, with his rise as a social symbol and spokesman? How to convey the tragedy of his death by HIV-tainted blood, received during a heart operation?

All of this is a tad jittery here, but the film’s beating heart is Ashe’s visits to Africa, especially a controversial tour of South Africa in 1971 that had racists and anti-apartheid activists equally up in arms. Deford accompanied Ashe with a home movie camera, and the footage of young black South Africans craning for a look at Ashe through chain-link fences resembling prison bars speaks to the power of one man against an evil system.

Ashe’s life refutes the Phoenix Suns’ Charles Barkley, who said that athletes shouldn’t be role models: They can, and be heroes as well.

“Arthur Ashe” surely pours on this sentiment too thickly, along with the nonstop drippy music. But as a thinking man and humanitarian on and off the court, Ashe remains a glorious antidote to sports’ legion of jerks.

* “Arthur Ashe: Citizen of the World” airs at 10 tonight on HBO.