Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 8, 1993 TAG: 9302080068
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: George Vecsey
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A FRIEND IS GONE
We have nine years and 363 days to come up with a stamp. Shall it be the dignified and lean young Arthur Ashe, or shall it be the dignified and lean middle-aged Arthur Ashe?Shall it be the let's-not-call-attention-to-ourselves short hair of the '50s, or the modified black-is-beautiful Afro of the '70s, or back to the boardroom short hair of the '90s again? That's the only decision to be made about the mandatory Arthur Ashe stamp, as soon as he is eligible, the stamp that will honor an American hero who never got to see his daughter graduate, or cheer the next black tennis champion, or become president of the United States.
Arthur Ashe never got to grow old gracefully, which of course is the only way he would have grown old. AIDS got him Saturday afternoon. It had invaded him when he wasn't looking, when he thought he was going in for a heart operation.
So now the United States and the rest of the world is deprived of an international resource, an activist and a writer and a gentle man - two words, gentle man.
This was a black man who did not lose his dignity when confronted by racism, overt or subtle. His demeanor reminded us that it has generally been black Americans who have taught white Americans how to be dignified in the face of frustration. He earned the right to be anguished at the sight of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, to cry out, "That is not us," because by and large it was not.
This was a man who did not lose his dignity when dealing with two egomaniacs like John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors on the very same Davis Cup team. And he was a role model in big things like dying of an uninvited plague.
We are all diminished by the loss of our modest hero, which leads me to the subject of the National Research Council. Last Friday, this private adviser to the government released a study that said, "the AIDS epidemic will have little impact on the lives of most Americans or the way society functions," according to a recent article.
We should not necessarily blame the messenger. The National Research Council may indeed be right. The United States might continue to produce cellular telephones and situation comedies and to fight wars for helpful oil suppliers as if nothing had happened.
But it is my distinct impression that in the first generation of AIDS, our national gene pool has been lowered, particularly among people in the arts who made us laugh and cry and care. I defy this National Research Council to say our lives are not in some way lessened.
Now the world has lost Arthur Ashe. Until recently, I suspect, AIDS was psychologically written off by some in big government and big industry and big medicine because it affected only "them" - the "socially invisible," as the National Research Council called them, the gay men, the needle-sharers, the poor, the people of color.
Arthur Ashe was of color, a black man from Virginia, but in his death he was bring-it-all-home mainstream. A celebrity, a man of some means, who apparently caught AIDS from big-time heart surgery. You couldn't even pass him off as merely an athlete, because he had long since transcended his accomplishments in the privileged playgrounds of Wimbledon and Forest Hills. He had become a historian, an organizer, a voice, a conscience. He was Arthur Ashe, for goodness' sakes, and AIDS got him, too.
He said he wanted to live 10 more years with AIDS, but his last major realistic goal was to finish his book, with the help of Arnold Rampersad. The book will be called "Days of Grace" and will be published by Knopf in early July.
On Thursday, Arthur finished the revisions to the last two chapters and he walked around the corner and he mailed the pages to Rampersad. On Friday, he went to the hospital. On Saturday, he died.
Oh, yes, I wanted to tell you about the first and last times I met Arthur Ashe. The first time was at Forest Hills, when I was a young reporter, and I tried to interview him about being a black tennis player, and he politely pointed out that he was walking to a court to play a match. Politely, that was the key word.
The last time was last summer at Flushing Meadows, a few days after he had been arrested in a demonstration in Washington. ("All arranged," he reassured us. "No problem.") He sat weakly in the press box and chatted with me for an hour, and then politely gave interviews to French and German broadcasters he surely could have ducked. Politely, that was the key word.
Now I want to know this: With whom am I going to schmooze in the press box when I really want to understand tennis - or life? He wrote for The Washington Post, but he would explain things to a guy from The Times. That was Arthur Ashe. Please do not tell me he was socially invisible.
\ AUTHOR GEORGE VECSEY is a sports columnist for The New York Times.