Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 11, 1993 TAG: 9302110124
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SCOTT BLANCHARD STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
THOSE GATHERED REMEMBERED MORE THAN A GIFTED ATHLETE
The tennis-court-green ventilation piping, the scoreboard in the rafters above the coffin, the track lanes on the floor only partly covered by blue carpet were reminders: This was an athlete's funeral.But the music - "America," "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," "God Bless America" - and government and political presence, spoke of more. It was a thinker's funeral, a doer's funeral, an important man's funeral. Arthur Ashe's life made any distinction impossible and irrelevant.
A tennis champion and groundbreaker, Emmy Award-winning writer, corporate board member, civil rights activist and AIDS fighter and sufferer, Ashe was memorialized Wednesday at the athletic center named for him.
Several thousand people - well-dressed and not, influential and not - came, about the same number that passed by his open coffin the night before as his body lay in state at the Executive Mansion.
That night, under a great pin oak tree in his front yard, a coatless Gov. Douglas Wilder stood amid the chill and a rapt cluster of about 20 people and talked patiently with smiles about his old friend.
It seemed that Ashe was getting more adulation in death than he ever desired in life.
Pride outdueled sorrow on most mourners' faces. No darkness shrouded the day, no pall prevented the mourners from smiling, laughing, greeting old friends.
At noon the staid organ music gave way to a gospel choir's rollicking "When the Saints Go Marching In." It was the processional song, washing over a long train of family and friends. Some sang along. Some clapped. Some swayed. None cried.
New York City Mayor David Dinkins said Ashe feared he would be an outcast when the public learned he had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion in 1983. He wasn't, Dinkins said. "Maybe that will be part of his legacy, [to] encourage people not to treat people [with AIDS] differently."
In Richmond, U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown praised Ashe for "challenging the stereotypes of and confronting the fear of AIDS."
In Roanoke on Tuesday, Keith Merkey of the Roanoke AIDS Project said Ashe's brief public fight against the disease will have a lasting impact.
"He's lying in state at the governor's mansion, the flags are at half-staff," Merkey said. "It's all a positive image. [His effect] can't be overstated."
Lee Radecke, nurse for the city Health Department's HIV program, has watched seven AIDS patients in her district die since Christmas.
"We're a little shell-shocked," she said Tuesday when asked for thoughts on Ashe. "It really does help people to identify and break down that wall that they're different from us. People have had blood transfusions. . . . He makes it OK for other people to seek out testing."
In Richmond, the Rev. Jesse Jackson remembered arriving at Ashe's bedside in a New York hospital after Ashe's most recent heart attack in September, shortly after Ashe had been arrested in Washington, D.C., in support of Haitian refugees.
"He was lying there in the hospital, hooked up to machines, perspiring, body racked with AIDS," Jackson said, then quoted Ashe: ` "Jess, I'm glad to see you. We've got to keep the focus on Haiti and South Africa.' "
In Roanoke, City Councilman Mac McCadden remembered Ashe as a civil rights activist whose within-the-system methods sometimes were scorned but whose effort never was.
"It's great to see them rally around him when they should have been all the time," McCadden said. "Our African-American heritage needs to examine more closely what he did accomplish."
In Richmond, Randall Robinson, an anti-apartheid activist who grew up with Ashe, remembered a trip to South Africa in 1991 during which he was greeted by Nelson Mandela. "Mandela asked me without preamble: `Where's Arthur?' "
In Roanoke, the Rev. Charles T. Green has an answer. Ashe, he says, is in high company.
"Martin Luther King got more praise after he died than before," said Green, vice president of Roanoke's NAACP chapter. "It'll probably be the same with Arthur Ashe. We never found another leader like Martin Luther King. There will never be in our generation another Arthur Ashe."
In his 49 years, Ashe went to England and made tennis history, went to South Africa and helped push history along, went back in time to write a history of black athletes.
Arthur Ashe went everywhere, it seemed, and did everything for everybody.
And, finally, on a bright, comfortable February day in Richmond, he went home.