Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 18, 1993 TAG: 9308250332
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
When AIDS claimed the tennis great, it took from our midst more than a superb black athlete who reached the top of his game. That would have been a loss.
More, it took a man of strong and thoughtful character, someone who could speak to all races with an authority derived from living a life of integrity and self-respect.
Advance publicity for ``Days of Grace,'' the memoir he wrote with Arnold Rampersad, highlighted Ashe's rather harsh, but valid, judgments on two fellow athletic superstars.
Ashe felt ``pity'' for Wilt Chamberlain, who claims to have slept with 20,000 women, and worried that Magic Johnson, forced to retire from basketball after testing positive for HIV, was boasting about his sexual past even as he warned about the link between promiscuity and the risk of contracting AIDS.
Ashe is gone, but his clear-eyed recognition of the problem with this kind of behavior - and his willingness to talk about it - are sorely needed still. And not only because of the risk of AIDS, a growing threat to sexually active teen-agers. Irresponsible sex by children too young and, often, simply unwilling to handle the burdens that come with its pleasures is also the source of a host of social ills.
The National Commission on Children reports that 350,000 of the 1 million babies born each year to unwed mothers are born to teen-agers; in 1989, 90 percent of black babies and 55 percent of white babies born to teen-agers were born outside marriage.
Those statistics translate into poverty: Almost 75 percent of children growing up in single-parent families are poor during at least part of the first 10 years of their lives.
Ashe expressed dismay that Chamberlain and Johnson, two powerful role models for young black men, in particular, ``do their best to reinforce the stereotype'' of black Americans as ``sexual primitives.''
His dismay is more than just moral finger-wagging. The commission's analysis of marital status, poverty and race concludes that ``differences in family structure between white and black families account for almost two-thirds of the difference in child poverty rates between those families.''
Ashe was in an ideal position to question the choices of his basketball counterparts. He, too, faced the difficulties of a black man in a society still harboring racism. He, too, faced the temptations of a sports star in a sports-worshipping society. But he lived a life worth emulating.
A devoted family man, Ashe used much of his memoir to speak to his 6-year-old daughter, Camera. Realizing he wouldn't be alive to share his wisdom and offer his advice, he wrote her a letter that is a touching effort to be with her spiritually while she grows up.
Undoubtedly, Camera Ashe will wish on occasion, as the years go by, that he could be there in the flesh. So will others.
by CNB