Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 10, 1993 TAG: 9302100316
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BONNIE V. WINSTON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
HERO GAVE BACK MORE THAN HE GOT
A certain consistency emerges when people in his hometown talk about Arthur Ashe.The words "quiet," "gentle," "dedicated," "disciplined" and "family" come up with the same swift sureness that marked his serve on tennis courts from Wimbledon to Forest Hills.
The words speak volumes about how the 49-year-old tennis champion smashed barriers in his sport and then came home to inspire the city against barriers of ignorance.
Ashe grew up in a Richmond that denied his talent because of his color, forcing him to hone his gifts and find greatness away from family and friends. He will be memorialized today in a sports center that bears his name and be buried as the city's best-loved son.
Rather than shun the city that shunned him, Ashe returned home often as a champion and in retirement to build a legacy that quietly urges children and adults to achieve, even beyond their dreams.
At appearances in Richmond in recent years, his words were like seeds planted in fertile ground.
His talk in 1989 to the Richmond Urban Forum sketched the outline of what has become Virginia Heroes, a program in which Richmonders who have "done good" come home to inspire youngsters with their stories of success. Ashe, its honorary co-chairman, consistently returned to participate, along with dozens of other hometown role models.
Just 2 years old, Virginia Heroes reached more than 600 children last year. This week, according to LaVerne B. Spurlock, a lifelong friend whom Ashe asked to help develop the program, Virginia Heroes becomes a year-round mentoring program, beginning with Richmond's middle-school students.
On Monday night, the City Council unveiled initial drawings for an African-American athletes hall of fame to be located in historic Jackson Ward; Ashe first broached that idea this past fall during one of his final appearances in the city.
Officials now are debating whether to name the center for him or to use the name he suggested: The Hard Road to Glory African-American Sports Hall of Fame.
Two days before his death, Ashe called Spurlock to discuss another idea - a literacy fair to be held in Richmond, focusing on ways to encourage children to read.
Spurlock taught at Maggie L. Walker High School when Ashe was a student there. She recently retired as supervisor of guidance for the Richmond Public Schools.
She said Ashe's presence in his hometown may be as powerful in death as in life.
"One little girl told him as they talked in November that she wanted to be a beautician," Spurlock recalled Tuesday. "He said, `Have you thought about owning the shop?'
"All of those children who have seen him, who have sat with him for the last two years can take away what the older ones already know: Don't stop on the last rung of the ladder. Go all the way to the top," she said.
Many of Ashe's childhood friends and former classmates said they wouldn't have blamed Ashe if he'd turned his back on the city.
They were reared in an area where neighbors bonded like family, where mothers belonged to neighborhood knitting and sewing groups and fathers carefully tended to their children, where joyous summers were spent splashing in the Brook Field pool. But many said they knew as children of the ugly, unspoken truth that lurked just beyond their black, Northside enclave.
"We were growing up in that generation of acceptance, of `that's the way it is,' " said JoAnn Pretlow Ross, 49, Ashe's early neighbor and fellow churchgoer at Westwood Baptist.
It was a generation taught that blacks in the city - and throughout the South - had a "place" at the back of the bus, at segregated schools, in their own restaurants, with their own bathrooms and water fountains, and on the Brook Field tennis courts where Ashe spent hours practicing his volley. He could not play on the better courts at Byrd Park, where only whites were allowed.
And it was a generation that asked questions: "Why can't it change? Why can't it be different? We bided our time until the system changed," Ross said.
Ashe, whose talent was spotted early on by black physician and tennis coach Dr. R. Walter "Whirlwind" Johnson, began when he was 10 to spend summers at Johnson's Lynchburg home. Johnson shepherded Ashe to his first national titles, beginning in 1955 at age 12 in the black American Tennis Association.
Later, just before his senior year in high school, Ashe left Richmond to live in St. Louis, Mo., with another tennis coach and his family. Johnson and Ashe's father determined that there he would have the advantages of stiffer competition against nationally ranked white players and year-round play, neither of which were available in Richmond.
He went on to UCLA, where he became the first black to win an NCAA singles championship in 1965 and the first to make the Junior Davis Cup Team.
Each success took Ashe further from the segregated courts of home.
"It was a tragedy that he had to leave his home, his family and friends to better himself," said Carolyn Rowe Benton, 49, a childhood friend and member of Walker's Class of '61 - the class Ashe would have been part of had he stayed.
"It's heartbreaking. It's a big adjustment," Benton continued. "But that's been Arthur's whole life - a big adjustment."
Charles R. Nicholson, who coached tennis on city playgrounds at the time, remembers how he and other black players, including Roland McDaniel, Dr. John A. Watson, Franklin Crawford and Ronald Charity - all 10 to 15 years Ashe's senior - were getting whipped consistently on the courts by the teen-ager.
"I was happy to see him picked up and taken somewhere where his skills could be developed," said Nicholson, now the retired assistant director of finance for the city schools.
In his memoirs, "Off the Court," published in 1981, Ashe wrote about leaving.
"When I decided to leave Richmond, I left all that Richmond stood for at the time - its segregation, its conservatism, its parochial thinking, its slow progress toward equality, its lack of opportunity for talented black people. I had no intention then of coming back."
But he did come back, beginning with a trip in 1966 to receive the key to the city. City Council had proclaimed it Arthur Ashe Day and there was a banquet in his honor to benefit the junior development fund of the black tennis association that had given Ashe his start.
"People really felt then how Richmond itself had shunned this youngster," Nicholson recalled. "All black Richmonders were proud of him. Very, very proud of him."
Memo: Longer version ran in New River Valley