THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, September 27, 1994 TAG: 9409270034
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LARRY BONKO
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
I WONDER HOW the good people of Richmond will react when they see Home Box Office's documentary about the life and times of the city's famous citizen of the world Arthur Ashe.
Will they be proud of what they see at 10 tonight on HBO? Or will they be embarrassed by it?
There are Richmonders, 5,469 of whom stood in a long line to see Ashe lying in his casket in the Executive Mansion, who will take pride in the retelling of his ascent from the city's playgrounds to the summit of professional tennis.
Others may feel uncomfortable by Frank Deford's script, which reminds viewers of the rigid segregation that Ashe knew when he was growing up in Richmond.
Ashe, who suffered and died with AIDS and endured other health crises in a comparatively short life of 49 years, says the pain brought on by his illnesses were not his worst moments. ``Having to live my life as a black man has been infinitely more challenging,'' Ashe said.
Taking a cue from those words, Deford and director Julie Anderson hammer hard at Richmond's Jim Crow past.
``Ashe grew up in one harsh segregated society where change came grudgingly in the capital of the Confederacy,'' narrator Ossie Davis says as pictures of Klansman on parade and of African-Americans being forced to the rear of city buses in Richmond flash across the screen.
Former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder checks in with a reminder that Virginia shut down its public schools in the 1950s rather than integrate
them. Wilder recalls how Ashe grew up in an atmosphere of ``tension and threats to do violence to black Virginians.''
When producer Ross Greenburg met with TV writers in Los Angeles earlier this year, he suggested that Ashe challenged apartheid in South Africa because he never felt comfortable growing up in a segregated society in Richmond. At the same news conference, Billy Jean King appeared to remind writers that in Richmond, Ashe was kept from playing in tournaments because he was black.
The for-whites-only scenes in the documentary, and the words spoken by King and the others, serve to set up Ashe's heroic rise out of that ``harsh, segregated society'' to world-class tennis. He was the first black man to excel at a white man's game in a white man's world.
Reaching for a bit of irony, the producers of ``Arthur Ashe: Citizen of the World'' remind viewers that Ashe, the black champion, did all of this while wearing the traditional tennis whites.
If, after squirming on their couches through the first few minutes of this documentary, the Richmonders stay with ``Arthur Ashe: Citizen of the World,'' they will be enlightened. They will see the many sides to this man.
Early in his life, Ashe decided that he would use the celebrity achieved as a Wimbledon champion and highly ranked tennis player to confront racism. There are compelling moments in the one-hour presentation when Ashe first visits South Africa ``as a free black man'' and sees the wretched existence forced on blacks by racist policies.
Arthur Ashe, who won at Wimbledon, where they serve champagne and strawberries for breakfast, sees in South Africa the huts where people sleep on the kitchen table because there is no money to buy beds. He tells the organizers of the South African Open, ``I will not play tennis in front of a segregated audience.''
When he left the tennis courts, Ashe put his energies into helping to make life better for kids in the city projects, for Haitian refugees, and for those sick and dying of AIDS.
``Arthur's greatest achievements were outside of sport,'' said Deford. ``He used sports to go way beyond.''
Deathly ill with AIDS, Ashe campaigned on behalf of the Haitians and was arrested for doing it. Not too much later in 1992, he was dead.
Earlier in life, Ashe had been appalled to discover how the city had neglected the cemetery where his mother is buried, letting the gravesite grow over with weeds and brush. He helped to put the place in order.
I hope that somebody in Richmond today is looking after the final resting places of both Ashe and his mother. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
HBO
by CNB