Days of Grace

by Arthur Ashe

  “PASSIONATE AND COMPELLING.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “The late Arthur Ashe scarcely needed the prospect of his imminent death to concentrate his mind wonderfully.… Its hard to accept that this is the last we’ll hear from him.”

  —Newsweek

  “A genuinely affecting testament … A class act.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “What DAYS OF GRACE eloquently demonstrates is that if death is part of living, then self-awareness is part of dying.”

  —The New York Times

  “No matter how tear-resistant you may think you are, it will take superhuman effort to avoid swelling in the throat when reading the last chapter of this brave and beautiful book.”

  —New York Newsday

  “Inspirational, eloquent.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1993 by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and Arnold Rampersad

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Howard Thurman Educational Trust for permission to reprint material from Meditations of the Heart by Howard Thurman, New York: Harper & Row, 1953. Paperback edition, Richmond, Indiana: Friends United Press, 1976. Copyright renewed 1981 by Sue Bailey Thurman.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-54919

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78820-7

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  v3.1

  To the memory of my father and mother,

  and to

  Jeanne and Camera

  … since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us …

  —HEBREWS 12:1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  1. My Outing

  2. Middle Passage

  3. Stars and Stripes: A Captain in the Davis Cup Wars

  4. Protest and Politics

  5. The Burden of Race

  6. The Striving and Achieving

  7. The Beast in the Jungle

  8. Sex and Sports in the Age of AIDS

  9. Stepping Up

  10. The Threads in My Hands

  11. My Dear Camera

  Acknowledgments

  ARTHUR ROBERT ASHE, JR., died of pneumonia on the afternoon of Saturday, February 6, 1993, at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, in Manhattan. He was buried the following Wednesday at Woodland Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.

  This memoir began with a telephone call from Arthur to me in June 1992. His call came as a surprise, because we had not been in touch with one another since our first meeting, at a children’s book fair the previous November in Princeton. Arthur called to ask whether or not I would be interested in writing a book with him. In this book, he hoped to express his views on certain issues of importance to him, such as race, education, politics, and sports, as well as to give an account of his experience as a patient with heart disease and AIDS. I immediately agreed to do so. Such was the spirit of cooperation between us, and my sense of urgency, that we worked without a formal agreement from July until November, when we signed our contract with Knopf.

  Although this book was nearly complete before Arthur’s death, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe has worked heroically since then to try to ensure not only its timely publication but also its accuracy and general soundness. I am grateful to her for her sacrifice in a time of profound bereavement.

  My greatest additional debt, as was Arthur’s, is to Jonathan Segal of Knopf. Although his interest was intense from the start, he took pains to ensure us freedom to write the book we wanted to write. He edited the text with sympathy and respect, and also suggested the title of the book.

  I was truly fortunate to have as a copy editor Stephen Frankel, whose meticulous work on the manuscript improved it from start to finish.

  For the transcription of many of my conversations with Arthur, I thank Judith Ferszt of the American Studies program at Princeton University. I also wish to thank Bruce Simon, also of Princeton University, who showed both zeal and imagination in researching a variety of issues arising from the manuscript. At Tennis magazine, Debra Fratoni assisted us enormously by providing many reports on Arthur’s career as captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team.

  I thank my wife, Marvina White, for her help and support in a time of intense activity.

  Not least of all, I am indebted to Fifi Oscard and Kevin McShane of Fifi Oscard Agency, Inc.—Arthur’s literary representative of many years—for providing invaluable advice that helped to facilitate the writing of this book. Although, sadly, Arthur did not live to participate in these acknowledgments, I feel certain I speak here for him as well.

  ARNOLD RAMPERSAD

  Princeton, New Jersey

  March 1993

  Chapter One

  My Outing

  IF ONE’S REPUTATION is a possession, then of all my possessions, my reputation means most to me. Nothing comes even close to it in importance. Now and then, I have wondered whether my reputation matters too much to me; but I can no more easily renounce my concern with what other people think of me than I can will myself to stop breathing. No matter what I do, or where or when I do it, I feel the eyes of others on me, judging me.

  Needless to say, I know that a fine line exists between caring about one’s reputation and hypocrisy. When I speak of the importance to me of my reputation, I am referring to a reputation that is deserved, not an image cultivated for the public in spite of the facts. I know that I haven’t always lived without error or sin, but I also know that I have tried hard to be honest and good at all times. When I fail, my conscience comes alive. I have never sinned or erred without knowing I was being watched.

  Who is watching me? The living and the dead. My mother, Mattie Cordell Cunningham Ashe, watches me. She died when I was not quite seven. I remember little about her, except for two images. My last sight of her alive: I was finishing breakfast and she was standing in the side doorway looking lovingly at me. She was dressed in her blue corduroy dressing gown. The day was cool and cloudy, and when I went outside I heard birds singing in the small oak tree outside our house. And then I remember the last time I saw her, in a coffin at home. She was wearing her best dress, made of pink satin. In her right hand was a single red rose. Roses were her favorite flower, and my daddy had planted them all around the house; big, deep-hued red roses.

  Every day since then I have thought about her. I would give anything to stand once again before her, to feel her arms about me, to touch and taste her skin. She is with me every day, watching me in everything I do. Whenever I speak to young persons about the morality of the decisions they make in life, I usually tell them, “Don’t do anything you couldn’t tell your mother about.”

  My father is watching me, too. My father, whose mouth dropped open when he first saw Jeanne, my wife. She looked so much like my mother, he said. He is still a force in my life. Some years ago, before he died of a stroke in 1989, I was being interviewed by the television journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault in her home.

  “Tell me, Arthur,” she said, laughter in her voice, “how is it that I have never heard anyone say anything bad about you? How is it that you h
ave never cursed an umpire, or punched an opponent, or gotten a little drunk and disorderly? Why are you such a goody-goody?”

  I laughed in turn, and told the truth.

  “I guess I have never misbehaved because I’m afraid that if I did anything like that, my father would come straight up from Virginia, find me wherever I happen to be, and kick my ass.”

  When I told that story not long ago on Men’s Day at the Westwood Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, everyone smiled and some folks even laughed. They knew what I was talking about, even those few living in that little enclave of blacks surrounded by whites in Richmond who had never met my father. They knew fathers (and mothers) exactly like him, who in times past would come up and find you wherever you were and remind you exactly who you were and don’t you forget it. You were their child, that’s who.

  My father was a strong, dutiful, providing man. He lived and died semi-literate, but he owned his own home and held jobs that were important to him and to people in the community where we lived. His love and his caring were real to me from that Sunday morning in 1950 when he sat on the bottom bunk bed between my brother Johnnie and me and told us between wrenching sobs that our mother had died during the night. From that time on he was father and mother to us. And the lesson he taught above all was about reputation.

  “What people think of you, Arthur Junior, your reputation, is all that counts.” Or, as I heard from so many older people as I grew up, “A good name is worth more than diamonds and gold.”

  What others think of me is important, and what I think of others is important. What else do I have to go by? Of course, I cannot make decisions based solely on what other people would think. There are moments when the individual must stand alone. Nevertheless, it is crucial to me that people think of me as honest and principled. In turn, to ensure that they do, I must always act in an honest and principled fashion, no matter the cost.

  One day, in Dallas, Texas, in 1973, I was playing in the singles final of a World Championship Tennis (WCT) tournament. My opponent was Stan Smith, a brilliant tennis player but an even more impressive human being in his integrity. On one crucial point, I watched Smith storm forward, racing to intercept a ball about to bounce a second time on his side of the net. When the point was over, I was sure the ball had bounced twice before he hit it and that the point was mine. Smith said he had reached the ball in time. The umpire was baffled. The crowd was buzzing.

  I called Smith up to the net.

  “Stan, did you get to that ball?”

  “I did. I got it.”

  I conceded the point. Later, after the match—which I lost—a reporter approached me. Was I so naïve? How could I have taken Smith’s word on such an important point?

  “Believe me,” I assured him, “I am not a fool. I wouldn’t take just anybody’s word for it. But if Stan Smith says he got to the ball, he got to it. I trust his character.”

  When I was not quite eighteen years old, I played a tournament in Wheeling, West Virginia, the Middle Atlantic Junior Championships. As happened much of the time when I was growing up, I was the only black kid in the tournament, at least in the under-eighteen age section. One night, some of the other kids trashed a cabin; they absolutely destroyed it. And then they decided to say that I was responsible, although I had nothing to do with it. The incident even got into the papers. As much as I denied and protested, those white boys would not change their story.

  I rode to Washington from West Virginia with the parents of Dickie Dell, another one of the players. They tried to reassure me, but it was an uncomfortable ride because I was silently worrying about what my father would do and say to me. When I reached Washington, where I was to play in another tournament, I telephoned him in Richmond. As I was aware, he already knew about the incident. When he spoke, he was grim. But he had one question only.

  “Arthur Junior, all I want to know is, were you mixed up in that mess?”

  “No, Daddy, I wasn’t.”

  He never asked about it again. He trusted me. With my father, my reputation was solid.

  I have tried to live so that people would trust my character, as I had trusted Stan Smith’s. Sometimes I think it is almost a weakness in me, but I want to be seen as fair and honest, trustworthy, kind, calm, and polite. I want no stain on my character, no blemish on my reputation. And that was why what happened to me early in April 1992 hit me as hard as it did.

  * * *

  THE NIGHT BEFORE I met Jimmy Connors in the men’s singles final at Wimbledon in the summer of 1975, I went to bed and slept soundly. That match was the biggest of my life. It was also one that just about everybody was sure I would lose, because Connors was then the finest tennis player in the world, virtually invincible. In fact, the match was supposed to be a slaughter, and I was to be the sacrificial lamb. Before going to bed I had talked and talked with various friends about strategy and tactics, but when it was time to go to sleep, I shrugged off all the nervousness and the worrying, as I usually do, and slept peacefully—as peacefully as that proverbial lamb.

  The night of Tuesday, April 7, 1992, was another matter altogether. Try as I could, I was not able to deliver myself to sleep. Once again I had talked and talked, this time mainly with my wife at home but also with friends on the telephone. Once again we discussed strategy and tactics as I tried to make myself ready for another ordeal, but one far more threatening to me than four sets in the final at Wimbledon against Connors. This time I could not bring myself to sleep, except in fits and starts. From my windows on the fourteenth floor of my apartment building in Manhattan I saw the lights of the city and watched for the sun to come up through the murk and mist of Brooklyn and Queens to the east. Before six o’clock, with the sky still dark, I was dressed and ready to go, ready to hunt for a newspaper, to discover if my secret was out, exposed to the world. I knew that once that happened, my life and the lives of my family would be changed forever, and almost certainly for the worse.

  In a shop across the avenue I found the newspaper I was waiting for, USA Today. I scanned the front page, then flipped back to the sports section. There was not a word about me. I felt a great relief. And then I knew that the relief was only temporary, that it was now up to me to take the matter into my own hands and break the news to whatever part of the world wanted to hear it. And I would have to do it that day, Wednesday, because the days—maybe the hours—of my secret were definitely numbered. I had to announce to the world that I, Arthur Ashe, had AIDS.

  The afternoon before was supposed to have been a normal time for me: a visit from a boyhood friend; a medical appointment at the Westchester Diagnostic Center in nearby White Plains, Westchester County; a tennis clinic; then back home in time to play with my daughter, Camera, and then to have dinner with her and Jeanne. The medical appointment was all too normal for me. Since December 1979, when I had undergone a quadruple-bypass heart operation in New York, I had become a professional patient, although only my wife and closest friends, as well as my physicians, knew the full story of my career as a patient. So the medical appointment was normal, with me undergoing an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) of my brain, which is like the better-known CAT scan (computerized axial tomography) but uses magnetism, not X rays, to capture its images.

  Normal, too, was the visit from my boyhood friend Doug Smith. I make it a point to keep in touch with friends from my childhood in Richmond; I cannot help but think that childhood friends are the bedrock of all one’s future relationships, and that you move away from them at your risk. There is an African proverb in which I believe: Hold on to your friends with both hands. I try to stay in touch. Doug was a longtime friend, newly remarried, and I was glad he was coming to visit. We had played tennis as teenagers. He had gone to Phoenix High School in Hampton, Virginia, and I had gone to Maggie Walker in Richmond, but we had remained friends. He had gone on to Hampton Institute, as it was then called, and I had gone on to UCLA; but tennis had kept us together. Doug is a tennis writer for USA Today. When he called to
ask if he could come to see me, I assumed that he wanted to discuss with me my three-volume work on African Americans in sports, A Hard Road to Glory. And we did talk about it for a while, sitting in my office at home. Then it became clear that something else was on his mind.

  “Arthur, I’ve got to ask you something,” he said. I could see that he was in pain, agonizing and wanting to be doing almost anything else than to ask me that question. “We have just gotten a lead at the newspaper, something about you, and my boss has asked me to follow up on the lead. I’m supposed to talk to you and ask you to confirm or deny it.”

  “What sort of lead, Doug?”

  He didn’t rush to answer, but he finally came out with it. “We have heard that you are HIV-positive, Arthur. That you have AIDS.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “No. That’s the point. My editor wants to know, is it true? They sent me to find out. Is it true?”

  Doug was a good friend and a good man, but right now he was the press, and I was not about to deliver myself to the press on this question without a struggle. In fact, I could feel my anger rising, slowly but steadily, although it was not aimed at Doug himself. I am not one to be plagued by fits or gusts of rage, and I try hard to keep calm and subdued at all times. I was taught to remain calm on the tennis court, no matter what the score or how questionable the call or discourteous my opponent. But the anger was building in me that this newspaper, any newspaper or any part of the media, could think that it had a right to tell the world that I had AIDS.

  “I want to talk to your editor, Doug.”

  I could see that Doug was relieved at that point, happy to turn the matter over to his boss. From my office, as we sat there at home, I telephoned Gene Policinski, managing editor of sports for USA Today. Policinski couldn’t talk right then, and Doug and I waited for him to return my call. He did so promptly enough, around four-thirty. We talked for between twenty and thirty minutes. He was fairly direct.