by Arthur Ashe
No matter how lofty or convoluted my ideas about hard work and fame were, I knew that my first responsibility was to support myself and my family. I did not need money desperately. Far from it. I was in no danger of becoming one of those tragic, or sometimes only pathetic, former professional athletes whose money vanishes even faster than their fame once they retire. Since the start of my professional career in 1969, I had had a financial manager, and I had made it my business to know my finances. After all, my finances were exactly that: my business. Unlike some of my friends in sport, I do not freeze with fright before a column of figures. In college, my major was business administration. I had intended to study architecture, but my coach and mentor, the late J. D. Morgan of UCLA, had wisely advised me that architecture courses probably left far less time for tennis than those in business administration. Later, while I was playing, I learned more, and in a practical way, about business. Now I would have to apply all that I was taught so that I could maintain the level of financial security I wanted for my family and myself. The idea of not working made no sense at all.
However, I was adamant about not giving myself over exclusively to making money. If God hadn’t put me on earth mainly to stroke tennis balls, he certainly hadn’t put me here to be greedy. I wanted to make a difference, however small, in the world, and I wanted to do so in a useful and honorable way. Having thought a great deal about the matter, I recognized that there were only a few ways, practically speaking, for me to begin to make a difference.
Although protesting black athletes like Muhammad Ali and John Carlos had challenged me with their example of defiance and militancy, I also had other models in mind for the kind of life I wanted to live after tennis. Frequently in the 1970s, after New York Knickerbocker basketball games at Madison Square Garden in New York, I would meet the Knicks star Bill Bradley to drink a glass of beer and talk about the game just ended and the important issues of the day; sometimes the Giants’ quarterback Fran Tarkenton joined us. Born only a few days after me in 1943, Bradley had gone to Princeton, become an All-American player there, passed up professional basketball to take a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, dutifully finished his Air Force military requirement, then returned to the United States to play for the Knicks, starting in the 1967–68 season. No longer a dominating force as he had been in college, he nevertheless played a crucial supporting role in two glorious Knicks championship seasons. But despite his fame and success, Bradley lived almost austerely. He also lived purposefully. In 1978, the year after he retired, he was elected to the U.S. Senate from New Jersey, where he has served with distinction ever since.
I hoped I could go on, as he had done, to a life of service and achievement after retirement. I also admired what Paul Robeson had done earlier in the century, after an All-American football career at Rutgers and graduation from the Columbia University Law School; Robeson had become first an acclaimed singer and actor, then grown into a charismatic political leader who in the end sacrificed his career for his beliefs. Yet another model for me was Byron “Whizzer” White, a football star who had become a respected U.S. Supreme Court justice; and Jackie Robinson, who moved on from baseball to a position of leadership both in the corporate world and in the African American community. I wanted to be like these men in what they had achieved beyond sport.
What could I myself do? First, I hoped I could continue to play a prominent role in tennis, although not as a player. Having compiled an outstanding record as a Davis Cup team member, playing for the United States, I wanted sooner or later to become involved in Davis Cup administration, preferably as captain of the squad, which was a great honor and responsibility. Second, I expected to do much more public speaking than in the past; I would try to share with diverse audiences, especially of younger people and people of color, some of my experiences and also my sense of the world. I knew that I also wanted to write, certainly about sport but also about broader social and political issues. Perhaps I could pen a newspaper column. I didn’t think I could write a book—that is, that I would have the time to write one. Having collaborated with three writers on books about me, I suspected that a book would take more time than I could spare.
I might want to teach a course in a college, especially on the subject of sports and society. And I also hoped to become involved in voluntary public service. I don’t like the word philanthropy, which often sounds condescending. But I know that it literally means “a love of humanity,” and that was exactly the sentiment I hoped to express more freely in my retirement. I wanted to indulge and explore my love of humanity, and especially my concern for persons less fortunate than myself.
QUIETLY, FOR THE most part, Jeanne had been listening to me talk about my anxieties concerning this stage of my life as it approached. She had been listening and watching me and anticipating my feelings through the many signals of distress I was obviously sending out, even if I was not fully aware of all or even most of them. In the fall of 1978, on a date that had no special significance for us, she presented me with a gift of a book, The Seasons of a Mans Life, by Daniel J. Levinson and four of his colleagues in the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. She inscribed it, “For my husband, with love, Jeanne.” This was a timely gift.
I still have the book, and I still read it. It is where I found some of my fears and hopes written about with an almost uncanny degree of accuracy, illumination, and understanding. There I discovered, finely articulated, my basic fear: “Adults hope that life begins at forty. But the great anxiety is that it ends there.”
I have kept rereading this book, and will probably do so as long as I live. Although I fastened on the chapter called “The Mid-life Transition,” the book isn’t simply about the so-called mid-life crisis but about all of the “seasons” of a man’s life. Levinson introduced me to ideas I had hardly encountered in my readings in elementary psychology as an undergraduate at UCLA early in the 1960s.
Dr. Levinson takes issue with Freud’s basic contention that the truly formative part of our lives is our early childhood and that our later life is mainly a reenactment of childhood conflicts, of which we are largely unconscious. For Levinson, a man’s life is a succession of stages, and each stage involves its own conflicts and dramas. (The major underlying problem facing many athletes is that they wish to remain “forever young,” which is impossible.) “Each phase in the life cycle,” he writes, “has its own virtues and limitations. To realize its potential value, we must know and accept its terms and create our lives within it accordingly.” Childhood is important, but so are the other stages. “No season,” Dr. Levinson writes, “is better or more important than any other.”
For most men, the basic long-term enterprise of life is the task of “Becoming One’s Own Man.” And at mid-life, we assess our success or failure in achieving this goal.
In the “Mid-life Transition,” which is certainly where I was, three major tasks face a man as he prepares for the future. One task is to close out the period of early adulthood, and to assess what has been achieved in it. For an athlete, retirement dramatizes this moment. The second task is to begin to take steps toward the coming change of life, which I was doing, especially in terms of altering existing negative patterns. And the third task facing a man, according to Levinson, is “to deal with the polarities that are sources of deep divisions in his life.” There are four of these polarities.
In the first polarity—Young/Old—a man must deal with the fact that he feels himself to be both young and old, and must resolve the conflicts involved. This was the most important polarity; Dr. Levinson calls it the one “most central to all developmental change.” The terms young and old have little to do with actual age levels. After all, old people can and do feel young, and becoming old begins at birth itself. “Young” has to do with “growth, openness, energy, potential,” and the like. “Old” has to do with “termination, fruition, stability, structure, completion, death.” In this context, to have AIDS is to be instantly “old.”
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Complicating the Young/Old polarity for me was the fact that I had just retired from my career, which made me feel old; and the fact that I had undergone open-heart surgery, which made me feel older still. But I wanted to feel young; and in some ways I did feel myself young. “In all beginnings dwells a magic force,” wrote Hermann Hesse in his poem “Stages.”
In the second polarity—Destruction/Creation—a man is aware as never before of the pain and affliction that other people have wrought on him and also the pain and affliction that he has wrought on others, including his family. At this point, aware of his own mortality as never before, he also has a strong and assertive desire to become more creative. Dr. Levinson puts it this way: “In middle adulthood, a man can come to know, more than ever before, that powerful forces of destructiveness and of creativity coexist in the human soul—in my soul!—and can integrate them in new ways.”
“Arthur,” a friend asked me once, “do you regret having been mean to certain women in your life?”
“Mean to certain women? What are you thinking about?”
“Well, you must have been mean to some women. That’s part of being a man.”
“Look,” I said to him, “I can’t recall being mean to anybody, much less to women. Unless you and I have completely different ideas about what being mean is.”
“Arthur, I don’t believe you.”
Still, I understand that one doesn’t have to be overtly mean to other people to be destructive to them. As for creativity: Yes, I wanted to create. But what had I created thus far? How creative was winning Wimbledon?
The third polarity—Masculine/Feminine—asserts the need for a man to come to terms with the mixture of genders that exists in every human being. This polarity is not about homosexuality, latent or otherwise, but about the biological fact of gender blending that exists in each individual, and the changing social response to this blending. During my tennis career, I knew many people who thought that the feminine had no place in the masculine world. Feminine meant weak, to be dominated and despised; masculine meant strong, to dominate and despise. Gentleness was feminine. Reading and reflection might be feminine, too. I knew that, according to these reckonings, some of me is feminine. I like being gentle and reflective. I want to hurt no one. I consciously looked forward to probing this aspect of my life even as, in the 1970s and early 1980s, the words feminist and feminine took on radically new meanings.
And in the fourth polarity—Attachment/Separateness—a man must deal with the need and desire to attach himself to others and at the same time the need and desire to be apart and alone. All of my life I have been acutely aware of this polarity. I married at the age of thirty-three, and for the reason many people do so: I had found the perfect partner, and I no longer wanted to be alone. My marriage was working, but who knew what the next few years and pressures would bring?
The Seasons of a Man’s Life gave me much to think about. I had always been an avid reader, but the life of a professional athlete is not always conducive to much reflection. Athletes should be smart, but thinking too much can be a handicap on the court or on the field. So, too, with feeling too much. Emotionally, one had to rise to certain moments but also be able to act on instinct in a nanosecond and to be placid, detached, coldly analytical in moments of danger. I knew a lot of physically gifted athletes whose volatile minds and emotions prevented them from achieving lasting success in sports.
Two close friends of mine, whose advice meant and still means a great deal to me, thought that my habit of reading and thinking, and the activities related to them, were bad for my career. Back in the 1970s, they were always urging me to be more single-minded. Now, however, with my playing days behind me, and the “real” world ahead, I had to try to tap into the depths of my intellectual and emotional powers, whatever they were.
Why couldn’t I be satisfied with what I had done, with my tennis accolades and other rewards?
“Often a man looks forward to a key event,” Levinson says about the mid-life transition, “that in his mind carries the ultimate message of his animation by society.” The big score. I suppose that one might think that winning Wimbledon in 1975 must have been such a culminating event for me. Well, it wasn’t. The victory was tremendously important, but not important enough to stop that nibbling in my soul. Perhaps that was so because I had been preparing almost all of my life to win Wimbledon, even though my career was almost finished when I finally won it, and could easily have ended without a victory there. More likely it was so because my “culminating event” could never be physical, never something athletic.
My “culminating event” had to be less personal and materialistic, more humanitarian and inclusive. As I approached forty, I could think of nothing important that I had ever achieved of that sort. I had been a professional athlete, strictly defined and recognized as such. That’s what I put down on my income-tax form as my occupation: professional athlete. It was as simple as that. Perhaps I would never have that truly satisfying “culminating event.” Nevertheless, I knew that, at the very least, I had to probe the roots of my dissatisfaction with what I had achieved as a tennis player. I had to examine the sources of my fixation on those “higher” goals that had so little to do with my life as I had lived it to that point.
And while I may not be the most profoundly self-aware person alive, I knew I had to start with that figure of a woman dressed in a blue corduroy bathrobe who watched me eat breakfast one morning in 1950 and then went off to die and left me alone. In search of her, I found myself going where I thought I would never set foot: into a psychiatrist’s office.
“Dr. Aaron’s office. May I help you?”
“Ah, yes,” I replied, even though I felt distinctly like hanging up. “I would like to make an appointment to see the doctor.”
“Very well. Who referred you to us?”
I gave her the name of a friend of mine, a doctor, who had suggested Dr. Aaron to me. “I live nearby,” I also told her. “I walk by your office all the time.”
“I see. Your name, please?”
This was my last chance to hang up.
“Arthur Ashe.”
There was a distinct pause on the line. A tennis fan, I thought. “Would Wednesday at three be okay, Mr. Ashe?”
“Wednesday at three is fine.”
When I was younger, I shared the suspicion of psychotherapists and psychotherapy that many people have. African Americans, in particular, seem to take a dim view of what goes on in the world of psychiatry. I had heard all the objections, including the opinion that all our problems could simply be traced back to racism. True, many of our problems can be traced back to racism; but many cannot.
In the macho world of men’s tennis, too, as perhaps in every corner of the sporting world where men are involved, anyone who admitted being in psychotherapy risked being drummed out of the fraternity. You simply would not admit, under normal circumstances, that you had been to see a “shrink.” Come to think of it, the prejudice goes well beyond African Americans and athletes in general. A report that a presidential or a vice-presidential candidate had undergone therapy would just about finish his chances, as happened with Senator George McGovern’s first nominee for vice-president, Senator Thomas Eagleton, during the 1972 presidential race. In fact, such a report would hurt anyone running for any public office in the United States.
In spite of that nonsense, I went to consult Dr. Aaron not because I was depressed, but because I was curious about myself at a time I thought could easily become a crisis if left unexplored.
At the first session, I brought up the main topic on my mind: my mother. I wanted to know what Dr. Aaron thought had been the effects on me of my mother’s death when I was just short of seven years old. I told him how I had heard my relatives, especially my aunts, say that I had withdrawn after her death. One of my aunts even went so far as to say, “Arthur was so small and pathetic. He looked like a motherless child. It about near broke my heart.” But I don’t remember grieving
over my mother. She died, and life moved on. My father told people how my response to the news, as he sat crying his eyes out between my brother Johnnie and me, was simple enough. “Don’t cry, Daddy,” I consoled him. “As long as we have each other, we’ll be all right.” I don’t remember any of that. I only remember the last time I saw my mother, the fact that she died, and that life was going on.
Throughout my life, various people have called me cold. The idea has almost haunted me. In 1968, when I was honored with my picture on the cover of Life magazine, the accompanying line read, “The Icy Elegance of Arthur Ashe.” I don’t like being called cold, and I don’t agree with it as a fair description of me. Before I was married, I would start relationships with women, then grow out of those relationships. When I broke them off, some of the women involved accused me of being cold and remote.
I would rather be seen as being aloof, which is not much better, but which I probably am sometimes. Certainly I am somewhat detached. For a long time now, I have understood that this quality of emotional distance in me, my aloofness or coldness—whatever the name I or others give to it—may very well have something to do with the early loss of my mother. I have never thought of myself as having been cheated by her death, but I am terribly, insistently, aware of an emptiness in my soul that only she could have filled.
As I considered the new beginnings I was facing, I felt the emptiness acutely. I also guessed that only my mother’s return to me, which was an impossibility, could have filled the emptiness. In going to a psychiatrist, I was on a fool’s errand, in a sense. I had no real hope of relief for whatever was aching in me, only for a plausible explanation.
I had never intended to be, nor did I become, a long-term patient of Dr. Aaron’s. I visited him about ten times, which was enough to satisfy my curiosity. He didn’t put up a fight. He didn’t say that I should stay, that I had some sort of neurosis or psychosis and that we needed to work it out. He understood that I was there because of a curiosity on my part, and that I would move on with my life.