“True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.” – Arthur Ashe
Arthur Ashe, Wimbledon-1975
For those of you who do not know the name Arthur Ashe, and I honestly cannot imagine that, let me say that he was a mild-mannered athlete who was gladitorial in his convictions. He has always had a special place in my heart because he is a native son of Richmond, Virginia. Born on July 10, 1943, Mr. Ashe set a stellar example during his lifetime, and he truly left the world a much better place than what it was in when he was born. He left us on this day, 21 years ago at the age of 49 – much too soon! I honor and remember him today as we continue to celebrate Black History Month.
When I was a young girl during the 70's, there were not many sports that I enjoyed watching on televison. Tennis, however, was not among that list. I adored the game, and I loved watching the greats: Billie Jean, Jimmy, Chris, John, Bjorn and then there was Arthur. He was ranked number two in the world in 1975. He was a black man too boot, and that was an unusual sight in the tennis world back in the 70's.
What I remember about watching Arthur Ashe play tennis, aside from the enjoyment of it, was that he always seemed calm – even keeled. Things didn’t rattle him. He had a certain restraint about him that I found amazing, especially when certain calls made during a game were questionable. Later, I learned that his coach trained him to be calm under pressure. It served him well.
I remember when he played at Wimbledon. It was a little over a month before my 12th birthday and a holiday weekend in our country. The year was 1975. The most notable thing about that weekend [July 5th] though was that he was playing Jimmy Connors for the title. No black man had ever won it. My father and I were glued to the television as we watched that Saturday.
The first two sets went by quickly as he put the pressure on. I think he took both of those sets in less than hour. Jimmy Connors was NOT happy! I remember that vividly. Curse words were muttered. Connors rebounded in the third set and took that one – seven games to five. But, it was that last set, when cool-as-a-cucumber, Arthur Ashe broke Jimmy Connor’s serve in the 9th game, I turned around and high-fived my father, knowing that he had it in the bag. He took the match quickly after that — popping a winning volley over the net after he got a weak return by Jimmy Connors. It was history in making, that game. It was a WOW moment! A black man had won Wimbledon – a first.
To his credit, Jimmy Connors stated in a very sportsman-like manner, “I couldn't find an opening. Whether I served wide balls, or kicks he was there. Everything he did was good: fine returns, short and long, and hard serves and volleys.”
In 1979, he suffered a heart attack. Arthur was 36 years old. As a result, he had quadruple by-pass surgery, followed by a second round of corrective heart by-pass surgery in 1983. I think the only thing crueler than a heart attack that forces you into an early retirement, which occurred for him in 1980 from competitive tennis, is contracting H.I.V. from the blood transfusion you received during the by-pass surgery for said heart attack. That’s what happened to Arthur.
He worked as an AIDS activist up to & throughout the last year of his life. He was a class act. A statesman to the world of tennis. He was a man of composure and decency. More importantly, he was a lesson in grace.
The world lost him to AIDS-related pneumonia 21 years ago today. Nelson Mandela wrote to Arthur Ashe as his life's end was approaching. I believe Mr. Mandela’s words summed up best how many of us felt about him, “...I hope you feel my embrace...and that it serves to let you know that we love you and wish you well.”
Amen...
I’m attaching excerpts from a couple of articles here, because I could never say to you as eloquently what they state about Arthur Ashe — things that made him an important figure in history, and there is still more to say and know:
Sportsman of the Year
by Kenny Moore
From Sports Illustrated, December 21, 1992
If you’d like to read the entire article, please go here:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/tennis/features/1997/arthurashe/sport1.html
Arthur Ashe epitomizes good works, devotion to family and unwavering grace under pressure
In 1973, after years of trying, Arthur Ashe wrangled an invitations to play in the South African Open tennis tournament. He wanted to see for himself how the world might help press South Africa to ease its system of racial oppression, its apartheid. In Johannesburg he met a poet and journalist, a black man named Don Mattera. The South African watched when Ashe was confronted by young blacks who hissed that he was an Uncle Tom and told him that his visit only served to legitimize the racist white-minority government, which should be boycotted, made a pariah, until it abandoned apartheid. Mattera heard Ashe defend the use of sporting contacts to chip away at injustice. Allowing one black man to compete in the tournament had been a concession by the government, and, Ashe argued, "small concessions incline toward larger ones."
Mattera listened when Ashe cited Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass on how, since power surrenders nothing without a struggle, progress can come only in unsatisfactorily small chunks, and even the tiniest crumb must be better than nothing at all. The South African blacks shouted that Ashe didn't grasp the nature of the police state that bore down on them, that in South Africa his Reverend King would have been thrown into Robben Island prison with their Nelson Mandela. In the face of their seething anger, Ashe had the saintly temerity to warn that if they hoped to exert consistent moral pressure, their emotions were best kept controlled.
No minds were changed. Ashe, depressed by the prospect of standing helplessly on the outside while South African blacks suffered, asked Mattera if he, too, felt Ashe shouldn't have come. Mattera answered carefully, saying it was good to know that people in the rest of the world were concerned, but Ashe needed to understand the full extent of Soweto's misery.
A few days later the South African Bureau of State Security banned Mattera, meaning that he was declared invisible and inaudible. He could no longer publish, travel, enter a library or even speak with more than two people at a time. Imprisonment, he knew, might follow. After a final word with Ashe, Mattera went back to his tiny house, put his six children to bed, lighted a candle and wrote:
I listened deeply when you spoke
About the step-by-step evolution
Of a gradual harvest,
Tendered by the rains of tolerance
And patience.
Your youthful face,
A mask,
Hiding a pining, anguished spirit,
And I loved you brother —
Not for your quiet philosophy
But for the rage in your soul,
Trained to be rebuked or summoned. . . .
Mattera's words are an uncanny blueprint of Ashe, a man constructed to hold fast to reason however impassioned his world...
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0710.html ~ NYTimes Obituary
Nelson Mandela, Arthur Ashe, and the Transformative Power of Sports
by Bill Simons
To read the entire article, go here:
http://www.insidetennis.com/2013/08/nelson-mandela-arthur-ashe-transformative-power-sports/
***
Whimsical tennis paintings are delightful, but Mandela’s fateful connection with Arthur Ashe—the athlete who campaigned most strongly against apartheid—was a whole other matter.
For decades, anti-apartheid politics was intense and contentious. Should one follow the pleas of activists and the UN to isolate South Africa’s apartheid rulers by boycotting the nation or instead, should one say that art, sport, and economics have their own dynamic, above the fray and independent of politics? Many, like Paul Simon, the Supremes, McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, and Brad Gilbert, became involved in the harsh controversy.
At first, Ashe wasn’t even aware of the reach of apartheid, and he presumed he could play the South African Open. But his South African friend Cliff Drysdale quickly informed him that he wouldn’t even be allowed into a land where racial rules prevailed. In his book
Days of Grace, Ashe recalls that another South African pro, Ray Moore, thought there just might be a way out of the morass. “I think,” Moore suggested, “There is one man in South Africa capable of leading my country out of this mess”
“Is he white?” Ashe asked.
“No,” Moore replied. “He is a black man, a lawyer imprisoned on Robben Island … His name is Nelson Mandela.”
“Mandela? I’ve never heard of him.”
“Well, you will,” Moore insisted. “In fact, I think he will become president of South Africa one day.”
Over time, Mandela and Ashe proved to have much in common. Both were renaissance thinkers with deep wells of calm, possessing a quiet reflective nature that allowed them to adeptly evolve, change course, master a range of challenges, and quietly inspire. And both shared a burning desire for justice that exceeded their deep appreciation of decorum. Over the years, both Mandela, from inside his jail cell, and Ashe, from outside and using his platform of fame, campaigned against apartheid.
Ashe would go through two phases. He began by fighting for years to get a visa to visit South Africa in order to be the first black to ever play the South African Open—on the condition that the stadium be open to both blacks and whites. From 1973 through 1977, Ashe would visit South Africa four times. There, while briefly integrating sports events, he “looked apartheid directly in the face, [and] saw the appalling WHITES ONLY and NONWHITES ONLY signs, the separate and drastically unequal facilities very much like those of my childhood in Virginia. I saw the sneer of superiority on the faces of many whites, and the look of obsequiousness, fatalism, cynicism, and despair on the faces of many blacks.”
Ashe’s trips, including his run to the final of the 1973 South African Open, were sensational happenings. While an angry few raged and called him an Uncle Tom, claiming his presence gave legitimacy to the apartheid regime, most saw him as a role model and beacon—a successful African-American in a black culture too familiar with failure.
Black writer Mark Mathabane said Ashe was “the first truly free black man” he had met, and wondered, “How could a black man play such excellent tennis, move about the court with such self-confidence, trash a white man, and be cheered by white people? …The more I read about the world of tennis and Ashe’s role in it, the more I began to dream of its possibilities. What if I too were someday to attain the same fame and fortune as Ashe? Would whites respect me as they did him? Would I be as free as he? The dreams were tantalizing.”
But the real world struggle to abolish apartheid was daunting and bloody. Amidst heated debates, Ashe became a fierce advocate for the international boycott of South Africa. Invoking Mandela’s position, he convinced the ATP to prohibit the creation of two new proposed South African tournaments. Ashe also moved to have South Africa banned from Davis Cup play, and convinced John McEnroe’s father to stop his son from playing a $600,000 exhibition against Bjorn Borg in Bophuthatswana, South Africa.
Then, in a move that Ashe felt probably cost him his job as Davis Cup captain, he took to the streets and participated in an anti-apartheid demonstration outside the UN, joining the likes of Coretta Scott King and Harry Belafonte as one of 3,000 demonstrators arrested outside of the South African embassy in Washington.
All the while, Mandela was reading Ashe’s writings and telling the world that, once he got out of prison, the first person he wanted to talk to was a tennis player—Arthur Ashe.
Eventually, when apartheid at last tumbled, Mandela told the world, “I stand before you not as a prisoner but as a humble son of a free people.” Soon after, New York City celebrated the triumph with a ticker-tape parade and a town hall meeting at City College. There the circle was completed. Ashe recalled the intimate moment:
“I watched [New York City mayor David Dinkins] go over to Mandela and whisper in his ear. I saw Nelson’s head raise abruptly, and he broke into a beautiful smile.
“Arthur is here?” he asked, with obvious surprise and delight.
“He’s right here,” David said, turning to me.
“Oh my brother,” Nelson said, looking straight at me. “Come here!”
He threw his arms around me and held me for a moment in a most affectionate embrace. He told me that in prison, he had read my three-volume work A Hard Road to Glory, about black American athletes.”
Ashe noted what so many felt, that for Mandela, “to have spent twenty-seven years in jail … to have been deprived of the whole mighty center of one’s life, and then to emerge apparently without a trace of bitterness, alert and ready to lead one’s country forward, may be the most extraordinary individual human achievement that I have witnessed in my lifetime.”
The connection between Mandela and Ashe had evolved into the most significant international bond ever between a politician and an athlete. After all, the two agreed that, as Mandela wrote, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, the power to unite that little else has … It is more powerful than government in breaking down racial barriers.”...
• Ashe was also an active civil rights supporter. He was a member of a delegation of 31 prominent African-Americans who visited South Africa to observe political change in the country as it approached racial integration. He was arrested on January 11, 1985, for protesting outside the Embassy of South Africa, Washington, D.C. during an anti-apartheid rally. He was arrested again on September 9, 1992, outside the White House for protesting on the recent crackdown on Haitian refugees.
• In 1973, Arthur Ashe became the first black pro to play in South Africa’s National Championships. Prior to his arrival, Ashe told the South African government that he would not play in front of a racially segregated audience and would not accept limitations on his free speech while in South Africa.
Circa 1965
Two GREATS: Arthur Ashe & Nelson Mandela
Amazing Fact: Did you know that after spending 27 years in prison, upon Nelson Mandela's release and prior to his visit to the United States, when asked if there was anyone who HE would like to meet, he replied, "Arthur Ashe."
• Ashe continued to work even though he was weak from the disease of AIDS. During his last ten months of life, he continued to help children. He also demonstrated to support Haitian refugees, continued to fight racial injustice and battled AIDS. He said,
“. . . Living with AIDS is not the greatest burden I’ve had in my life. Being black is.” He said in his last speech given the week he died. He said further,
“AIDS is killing my body, but racism is harder to bear. It kills the soul.”
“You come to realize that life is short, and you have to step up. Don't feel sorry for me. Much is expected of those who are strong.” –Arthur Ashe, July 10, 1943-February 6, 1993
