I thought back on that last Wednesday, in Richmond, a century later, when Arthur Ashe, the Virginian, was monumentalized. I tried to imagine how ever I could have explained that to my grandfather-how the hero that came next to Richmond after Robert E. Lee, general in chief, Confederate States of America-that next Virginian was merely a tennis player, who was also, of all things, black.
As much as that would have confounded my grandfather, it is also still difficult for me to understand quite how deeply Arthur Ashes death touched so many people. Bill Rhoden, who is black, a sports columnist for The New York Times, even observed that the outpouring overshadowed that which had been bestowed upon Thurgood Marshall-not to mention surpassing the affection granted to those other distinguished world citizens who have left us, one after another, in these first sad weeks of 1993: Dizzy Gillespie, Rudolf Nureyev, Audrey Hepburn. Has any athlete-not to mention former athlete–ever been lionized so at his death? It wasn’t as if Arthur was the best player ever; why, he wasn’t even the best of his time. Rather, he was just a very good tennis player who had come to be recognized as an altogether exceptional human being. I think that, by the time he died, Arthur Ashe had become everybody’s favorite athlete. Not just All-American, more just all ours. Obviously, there was some rare chord that Arthur plucked on people’s heartstrings. Probably, too, that twang reveals more about our society right now than it does about the man himself. Andrew Young, eulogizing Arthur at the service in Richmond, may have drawn closest, saying that Ashe had come to represent “the role of innocence in our time.” And innocence, like love, sometimes is found in funny places-even in professional athletics.
It was the tennis player who came to triumph in society even as he was grotesquely defeated by fate, the tennis player who was the one who exhibited the dignity and decency that we simply no longer expect from people of consequence. Jesse Jackson characterized it in an intriguing way, saying that Arthur managed to “build a code of conduct for the gifted.” Somehow, the public correctly divined that essential goodness of Ashe, so that he really was honored more for his nobility than for his celebrity-which is truly amazing in these Warholian times. That’s what a lot of last week was about: us saying, we will pause now for just a moment to honor honor. It felt good, so we were even more profligate in our giving.
Nothing, of course, distinguished Ashe so much as the way he handled adversity. It was enough to suffer a heart attack when still in his 30s–while still, for that matter, ranked in the top 10 of tennis players. But then, to contract AIDS from a blood transfusion given after heart-bypass surgery … well, that was just impossibly unfair. The intensity of anger that the public feels about how he was subsequently violated by the media, when he was forced to reveal his condition or be “outed” by USA Today, remains palpable. Anybody in the press who dismisses the public’s disgust at the encroachment upon a private man’s privacy does so at their future peril.
But above all, race was forever crucial to understanding the way in which the world dealt with Arthur Ashe. He was, I came to think, in matters of race, The Universal Soldier, some kind of keystone figure we need if ever brothership is to triumph. He was black, but he perfectly infiltrated white American society as much as he needed to, and even beyond that he was just terribly interested in everybody everywhere in the world.
Those legions who paid tribute last week kept talking about how Ashe was a “transcendent figure” above tennis, mere sports, but, I’m sorry, the much greater, dearer point was quite the opposite: he was the sort of person who was always down in the ditches, connecting things, tying people together. Arthur would have been mortified to have been reduced to being labeled transcendent.
Anyway, even if we throw around high-falutin’ words like “transcend,” most everybody really sensed otherwise; by the end, all the world wanted to associate itself closely with Arthur. The International Olympic Committee made him the first athlete member of the Olympic Order never to have had anything to do with the Olympics. The bell was sounded 10 times for him at the Bowe-Dokes championship fight, the first time that any but a fallen fighter had ever been so honored. African-Americans exalted him as one of theirs, even though there were occasions in the past when Arthur was painted as effete for failing to scream out and an elitist for failing to go along with politically correct racial dogma. And whites, of course, loved to cozy up to Ashe and cite him as the black ideal-why can’t they all be like him?-missing the point that there are precious few whites that live up to that standard, either.
As a matter of fact, nothing blindsided some whites as much as Ashes recent comment that, as difficult as it was having AIDS, that wasn’t nearly as trying as being black. “No question,” he snapped.
Arthur Ashe said that? Certainly not Arthur. Not the man who was always so civil and understanding. But the thought wasn’t anything new with him. I can remember him years ago instructing me that “equal” though things may seem, he could never achieve that estate because so much of his time–of any black person’s time-must be spent simply thinking about race. “You can get up in the morning and just walk outside and start your day. I can’t do that. I always have to think: well, here goes a black guy walking outside. So, you see, you’ll always have an advantage over me.”
But the fact that Arthur Ashe could say things about race, however passionately, without bitterness, is what made them so meaningful. Obviously, Arthur Ashe meant more to black people, but, notwithstanding, he was capable of engaging white people; he was capable of causing change in them and their world. In the end, the outpouring of emotion we gave to him spoke selfishly to our hope that if we could not save his life, what he stood for might help save us.
Although this adulation Arthur received this past week would have embarrassed him terribly, he must have sensed the effluence of affection that would flow with his death. In a way, you see, the revelation of last April that was wrenched from him produced the first draft of his obituaries while he was still alive to read them. His pre-death also, he recognized, made him a more valuable advocate of the causes he cared about, so he could make us cosign for his borrowed time. He wanted to steal a few more months, too, and he thought he would, but he was accepting of what would come of him, whenever it did.
The last time I saw him was only a couple weeks before he died, but it preceded any sense of urgency. Still, he was in the hospital, so he wanted to put me at ease. “You know,” he said, “everything in my life is just wonderful now–except for the hospital stuff.”
When I looked a little skeptical-as if to say out loud: excuse me, you are reducing AIDS to “hospital stuff”?-he added: “Really, everything is almost perfect.”
I left almost believing him. Arthur Ashe had a very good attitude, and it was catching. He was a more infectious person even than what incidentally killed him.
