Thirty Years Without Arthur Ashe: In Truth He Never Left Us - UBITENNIS

Thirty Years Without Arthur Ashe: In Truth He Never Left Us

On February 6, 1993, the world lost a star of tennis and humanity.

By Kingsley Elliot Kaye
9 Min Read

By Michelangelo Sottili – Published on Ubitennis.com on 06/02/2023

February 6, 1993, fell on a Saturday, the day Arthur Ashe died of pneumonia related to AIDS, the syndrome he probably contracted from a blood transfusion received during a coronary bypass operation in 1983. Eight years had passed since his third and last Grand Slam title, following the US Open in 1968 and the Australian Open in 1970. His victory at Wimbledon can well be considered his masterwork in sports. In the final, he beat Jimmy Connors, largely favored and nine years younger, in four sets.

Ashe was born July 10, 1943, in Richmond, Virginia, one of those places where he had to go to schools for Blacks only and take buses for Blacks only. As the city’s Department of Health wrote in 2021: “systemic racism had an enormous cost on the health of the Black citizens for generations”.  This was true, for example, for the health of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American who was tortured and assassinated for daring to speak a word to a White woman. It was 1955 and Arthur brought to the tennis court his everyday approach to life. The passwords were prudence, being on the defensive, and thinking above all about keeping it alive – the point and your own body. “In the South, if you’re Black and you do something too fast, your life can be in danger” he stated years later thinking about Emmett’s murder.

A drastic turning point in the career and life of Arthur came in 1960 when he moved to St. Louis for his last year in high school under the encouragement of his father and his coach and mentor, Robert Walter Johnson. A “push” partially, if not entirely, motivated by his hopes to get a tennis scholarship to college. To do so, he needed long periods of “professional training and high-level tournament competition”, as his biographer Raymond Arsenault put it, conditions impossible in the Richmond of racial segregation that prohibited him from using indoor courts. His tennis became aggressive as he strengthened his serve, volley, and forehand. Among other competitions, he won the Junior Indoor Championship and became the first African American to earn a scholarship at UCLA.

Another important year was 1968, which began the Open Era. Although Ashe was unlike Muhammad Ali, who was deprived of his titles for his protests against the Vietnam War and his refusal to take up arms, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar who boycotted the Olympics “because it was useless to win a gold medal for your country to then return to live under oppression.” That year, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had an enormous impact on him, as had the earlier tragedy of the adolescent Emmett. Arthur finally let his voice be heard, as he explained in the documentary Citizen Ashe: “Other Black Athletes used their influence and power to take political positions. At a certain point I said to myself, “Arthur, you can’t just stay on the sidelines while all this is happening, you have to do something.” Arthur’s was a path of slow and complicated activism, very different from the trenchant stands we are used to today. Even then, Billie Jean King is known to have commented “Christ, I’m Blacker than Arthur”. Too White for the Blacks and too Black …? After receiving the Arthur Ashe Humanitarian Award in 2020, Frances Tiafoe wrote: “Nothing you did was for yourself. You simply tried first to be a person and then an athlete. He always looked to help others, and this is a great inspiration”.

In his support of civil rights, Ashe often spoke in favor of Nelson Mandela’s battle against apartheid.  Even though not many understood how his presence could be of help, he played in Johannesburg demanding, “that the bleachers not be segregated for his match, that the public come and go when and where they pleased, that admission not be tied to the status of honorary White”. In 1973, he received a letter of thanks from Winnie Mandela (who reminded him, however, that “the best thing you can do is to ask the South Africans how you can help them in their struggle”). For the first time, the American champion was admitted to the tournament – one of the conditions set by the ITF to avoid a second year of suspension of South Africa from the Davis Cup, a sanction to which Ashe contributed in a determining way. His activism cost him two arrests in Washington: in 1985, during the demonstration in front of the South African Embassy, and in 1992, for protests against the tightening of the immigration policies imposed on Haitian refugees; it may also have cost him the role of Captain of the Davis Cup. This is because there is no “middle road”: if you don’t speak up, you’re criticized for your lack of involvement; if you do, you’re criticized for not concentrating exclusively on tennis.

One of the craziest things about you”, Tiafoe once wrote.“is that everyone knows about the efforts you made to better the world. But you won Slams, brother!”.  

In 1973, when he lost the final in South Africa against Connors, he had already won two. And it was precisely against ‘Jimbo’, as mentioned above, that he played the final at Wimbledon in 1975, at which Connors, class of 1952, had arrived without dropping a set. Ashe instead had left a few sets on the wayside – two in the semifinals against Tony Roche. This was the same Connors who differed strikingly from the always gentile and well-mannered Ashe; this was the same Connors Arthur criticized for not joining the newborn ATP and the same Connors who sued him for three million dollars after Arthur had called him “anti-patriotic” for his refusal to play the Davis Cup. 6-1 6-1 5-7 6-4 was the score in Church Road in favour of the first Black tennis player to win Wimbledon.

Arthur Ashe and his wife, Jeannie Motoussamy, in Florence in 1979 during an exhibit of Jeannie Ashe’s photography held at the Excelsior Hotel. Behind them, the curator of the exhibit, Jodie Mariotti.

Ashe played a number of times in Italy: in Rome, Bologna, Milan, and Florence. He came to the Tuscan capital in 1979 upon the invitation of the director of the tournament, Ubaldo Scanagatta. The spark was an exhibition organised at the Excelsior Hotel featuring the photography of Mrs Ashe, who could not resist the fascinating call of the city.

In 1988, he received the diagnosis of HIV that would lead to his death five years later. It was, however, only just prior to the public announcement of the sickness, in 1992, that Ashe founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, initiating a funding campaign and requesting the government to provide resources for research and education of the populace on the issue. As in his previous battles, in this case, as well, his activism matured slowly. But, as ever, it bloomed as a natural consequence of his will to help his neighbour. Because if you become passionate about a “White people’s sport” in a city that boasts the statue of a general who defended (among other things) the right to enslave people, inevitably you become the first to face certain situations.

Translated by Jodie Mariotti and Kingsley Elliot Kaye

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