Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 8, 1993 TAG: 9302080091
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN B. BLACKISTONE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
HARDLY JUST ANOTHER ATHLETE
If Arthur Ashe had been just another athlete, I would remember him mostly for his able-bodied achievements, especially his performance one day in 1975. That Saturday after the Fourth at the All-England Club at Wimbledon, Ashe became the first black man to capture the most coveted championship in a sport reserved mostly for the wealthy and white.But I don't remember Ashe mostly for that occasion, as historic as it was, or any of the 32 other tennis titles he won. I remember him mostly for his able-minded courage and the victories he won away from the court.
Ashe wasn't just another athlete. Sadly, he was one of just a few of his kind.
He was among the first of only a small number of athletes - such as Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith and John Carlos - to risk their platforms of fame and fortune by using them as podiums for the good fight, too. Little more than a week had elapsed after Ashe won at Wimbledon when he accepted a plea from South African poet and activist Dennis Brutus to join the struggle against apartheid as he asked world tennis officials then to expel South Africa from competition.
Unlike many athletes of his time, Ashe never forgot whence he came. No matter how easy it was to soothe himself in the elite, lily-white world of professional tennis, he always remembered the pain of being chased off a segregated court in his hometown of Richmond, Va. He never forgot the sting of being denied a visa by the South African Embassy to compete in the 1970 South African Open. And, of course, he could not hide, though he tried, from the wrongful indignity of becoming an AIDS sufferer.
"He celebrated the many championships he won, the many records he set," said New York Mayor David N. Dinkins, a longtime Ashe friend and playing partner. "But day in and day out, always he wondered about and worried for those less fortunate than he."
For inner-city youth, Ashe created Virginia Heroes Inc., a program in Richmond that brings sixth-graders face to face with people of local and national fame from the sports world and beyond.
For the oppressed, he testified before the United Nations Committee on Apartheid in the midst of his career. He subjected himself to arrest in a picket line at the South African Embassy in Washington in 1985 while holding the title of U.S. Davis Cup captain. He pulled himself out of a hospital bed last year after suffering a heart attack to demonstrate against this country's imprisonment of Haitian refugees.
For the damned, he joined the fight against AIDS without fanfare, first pushing Aetna, as one of its board members, to fund research and finally establishing the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS.
For the unenlightened, he wrote an acclaimed three-volume history of the black athlete in America rather than seek just the simple biography all too trite in sports.
Most athletes have not been inclined to fight the good fight at all or, certainly, with the same gusto they do the games they play, save a visit to a local school or an appearance at a charity golf tournament. Not that they should be expected to do any more than those from most other walks of life who do nothing, but they do have a platform most among us do not. And so many athletes know firsthand the unfairness that exists.
For Ashe, however, what he was, a sports legend in his own time, didn't matter. All that did matter was how he could use the prestige his talent bore to help others who suffered the same injustices he once did. His spectacles, sinewy build and meek demeanor belied what roared inside him.
"Tirelessly, he battled against discrimination in sports," Dinkins said of Ashe. "Tirelessly, he battled against apartheid in South Africa. Tirelessly, he battled on behalf of those, like him, who had been stricken by AIDS. I only wish he and millions of others had not had to become a victim in the battle he lost. There were so many more victories for him to win and for us to celebrate."
That is what I remember most about Arthur Ashe. I wish I could remember more athletes and everyday folk, especially those who share Ashe's legacy, the same way.
\ Kevin B. Blackistone is a sports writer for the Dallas Morning News.