THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 24, 1995 TAG: 9512220007
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
A new chapter has been added to the long-running debate in Richmond over how best to commemorate the triumphant life of tennis champion Arthur Ashe. Well settled, it seems, is last summer's agreement that a statue of Ashe will be placed on Monument Avenue, long reserved for heroes of the Confederacy. But City Council is challenged to put aside a subsequent decision to accept a particular statue and opt instead for an international artistic competition to produce what petitioners call ``a world-class monument'' to the first African-American man to win at Wimbledon.
One petitioner calls the accepted statue, the work of Richmond sculptor Paul DiPasquale, simplistic and lifeless; it shows Ashe dressed in tennis sweats and holding up a racquet in one hand and books in the other. Even a layman can see the obviousness of the concept and guess that a better idea might, indeed, emerge from a competition.
If memory serves, such was the case with the stunning, touchable wall that commemorates America's Vietnam War dead and that works with subtle powers on the minds and emotions of those who come near it. The idea of that monument was worth all the bitter controversy that went before its creation. Monument Avenue deserves the best. So does Arthur Ashe who, contrary to past arguments, does share something with the Confederate generals. He was a warrior not much concerned with odds.
Even so, there's no guarantee that a competition will produce a concept that captures the qualities of Ashe. On the surface, by all accounts, he was quiet, contemplative, almost reclusive - the hero as anti-hero. But at a disciplined core stung from childhood by the slurs of segregation, the champion was ``cold as ice - dry ice,'' columnist Guy Friddell once wrote.
Such complexities may be too much for sculpture which, in any case, is a daunting thing. It took Michaelangelo three years - and genius - to wrest his David from a 13-foot block of marble abandoned by three previous sculptors who'd failed to make anything of it. Modern sculptors have sought to make their work memorable by chiseling images on the sides of mountains.
It is, in any case, not from their statues on Monument Avenue that we know the lore of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stewart, but from the words of history and poetry.
In John Brown's Body, Stephen Vincent Benet shows Lee as a man of perfect symmetry, the ``head on the Greek coin, the idol-image'' but
This man was not repose, this
man was act . . .
We do not see him reckless for
the calm
Proportion that controlled the
recklessness -
But that attacking quality was
there.
He was not mild with life or
drugged with justice,
He gripped life like a wrestler
with a bull.
And in Stonewall Jackson, an ``awkward, rugged and dour'' figure ``wrapped in his beard and silence,'' Benet saw a
strange, secretive grain of
harsh poetry
Hidden so deep in the stony sides
of his heart
That it shines by flashes only and
then is gone.
It glitters in his last words.
Perhaps the short and splendid life of Arthur Ashe needs the attention of a world-class poet as well as of a sculptor. There's plenty of material for both in the saga of a frail boy kept off white tennis courts who became a world champion in his sport, an activist against ignorance and injustice, and a model for manners. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB