by Arthur Ashe
“Arthur,” he blurted out, “we’ve got to help those kids! We’ve got to do something for those kids!”
“What do you think we can do?” I asked.
“Well, let’s think about it. I know we can do something!”
We thought about it over several weeks, and slowly came up with a plan. In 1988, we launched the ABC program. Ironically, we launched it the same week that I discovered I had AIDS.
Our idea was to use tennis as a way to gain and hold the attention of young people in the inner cities and other poor environments so that we could then teach them about matters more important than tennis. To start our program, we deliberately chose some tough neighborhoods, the kind of places as far removed as possible from the genteel world of tennis. We decided on our venture into Newark as the centerpiece and prototype of our efforts. Administratively, ABC was first run from Nick’s academy in Bradenton, which helped keep our expenses down—or, perhaps more accurately, quietly passed many of those expenses on to Nick. To do so, we had to have the support of Bob Kain, in charge of tennis at International Management Group, the biggest sports-management company in the world, which owns the Bollettieri Tennis Academy. Kain gave his blessing. As long as we broke even financially, or kept our losses to a minimum, the arrangement could continue.
Eventually we began to see that ABC did not fit in well at the Bollettieri Academy. Working together, Nick and I brought several of our students down to Florida to stay at the academy for various lengths of time. Undoubtedly most of these students benefited from the facilities and the coaching, but in the end we had to concede that the joint effort could not continue. Money was the main problem. To maintain the program, we needed to secure funding from the governments of the cities we served. These cities understood our usefulness, by and large; unfortunately, extracting money owed to us from the City Hall bureaucracies sometimes took many months. At one point, to my embarrassment, ABC (or these city governments) owed the Bollettieri Academy as much as $300,000.
I knew full well that this situation could not continue. Gradually and understandably, the Bollettieri Academy and Nick himself withdrew from ABC, which has changed its way of operating. I was sorry to see Nick go, because he had tried hard to make the connection work. To facilitate the change, I started another organization, the Safe Passage Foundation, which would preside over ABC and another one of my program efforts, Athletes Career Connection, which had been running for some time. Here we worked initially with a consortium of seven colleges and universities (Seton Hall, Fordham, Spelman, Morehouse, American, Howard, and Pennsylvania) to try to redress the terrible attrition rate among black college athletes. I started ACC right after I discovered that only one in four black athletes in football and basketball at Division One schools (the top sporting echelon in the United States) ever graduates from college. This statistic appalled me. My aim was to stimulate the athletes to take their studies seriously and to consider in a realistic way the full range of career options open to them after college.
Athletes Career Connection did well for a while, then foundered during the recession that started across the United States around 1990. Sad to say, as colleges slashed their budgets, a program such as ours was often the first to go.
I intend the Safe Passage Foundation, as the name implies, to continue my efforts to help poor young people, especially poor young black people, make the transition from youth to adulthood without a crippling loss of faith in society and in themselves. Safe Passage can hardly solve the problems of poverty, racism, juvenile delinquency, cynicism, sexual promiscuity, crime, and drug addiction that plague the youth of this country. But, as Nick Bollettieri insisted, we have an obligation to try to do something to counter this social and spiritual plague. Too many people have simply given up.
That is why I am deeply grateful when, for example, veteran tennis champions like Bjorn Borg and Guillermo Vilas play an exhibition match as they did in Mahwah, New Jersey, in the summer of 1992 to raise money for Safe Passage; or when an enlightened, progressive mayor such as Sharpe James in Newark, New Jersey, allows us space in City Hall itself, rent-free, to run our program there. We have almost a thousand Safe Passage kids in the Newark area, from a “tiny tots” tennis program to one for high-school juniors and seniors. We use tennis to attract the kids, but we make sure that we spend about one-third of our time talking about other, more serious matters. I always try to lift the sights of the youngsters to new heights. Trying to be the next Michael Jordan is fine, I tell them; but why not also aim for the goal of owning the team that employs the next Michael Jordan?
Late in 1992, the giant international food company Nestlé became the first major sponsor of the Safe Passage Foundation when it awarded us a grant of $100,000. Although some of my energy must also go to support the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, I intend to keep working to administer and find support for Safe Passage. Through tennis, lives are being changed and spirits reclaimed. I have seen it work in Newark and I know it can work anywhere, as long as we can find selfless adults of goodwill who recognize the dangers facing us and the fact that our young people need our help desperately.
SINCE MY RETIREMENT, I have not become a senator like Bill Bradley, or a Supreme Court justice like Byron White. In part, I have had to curtail my activities and ambitions because of my illnesses. However, I have tried to keep on with my striving because this is the only hope I have of ever achieving anything worthwhile and lasting.
In doing so, I am not driven by an obsession to scratch my name indelibly on the pages of history. The years pass, and the world forgets the efforts of virtually all individual men and women of goodwill. And yet those efforts are not necessarily in vain because they are forgotten. They may bear fruit in myriad unrecognized ways, small but potent—in one life helped here, in a single future brightened there. I know I could never forgive myself if I elected to live without humane purpose, without trying to help the poor and unfortunate, without recognizing that perhaps the purest joy in life comes with trying to help others.
Chapter Seven
The Beast in the Jungle
“JEANNE,” I SAID. “Something is wrong with me.”
It was a beautiful late-summer morning in 1988. I was standing in front of her, in our suite at the Sagamore Resort on Lake George in upper New York state. Camera, who was a year and a half old, was with us. We had just come back from breakfast.
I had wanted to call home and monitor the messages on my telephone answering machine. I raised my hand up to the telephone on the wall and started dialing my number. Or rather, I tried to dial it. My fingers made an attempt to respond to my will, but they struggled in vain to do what I asked. I was trying to put my index finger on the buttons, but the finger wasn’t working very well. Perplexed, I looked at my hand and tried again.
“What is it, Arthur?” Jeanne asked.
“My fingers. I can’t get them to work well.”
“Maybe they are numb because you slept on them?”
“Yes,” I said. “That must be it. But no, they aren’t numb. I can feel them, definitely. I just don’t seem to be able to use them.”
“I’ll dial for you,” Jeanne said. And she did, without giving a hint of alarm.
At this point, in fact, neither of us was alarmed. Mainly because we had both been through some fairly harrowing times with doctors and illnesses, an unresponsive finger did not seem like much to be concerned about.
A month or so before, I had gone to the Sagamore for an Aetna board meeting. We on the board had been seeking some fresh approaches to certain problems, and decided that a change of scenery, away from the company headquarters in Hartford, might inspire us to think creatively. That meeting, everyone agreed, had been a success. Clearly, the quality of the resort and its superb location in the scenic Lake George region in upstate New York had something to do with our results. A month later, when Jeanne and I impulsively concluded that we needed to get away from our Westchester County home in the village of
Mount Kisco, north of New York City, for two or three days, we thought at once of the Sagamore. We would relax there, then return home in time for the start of the most important American tennis tournament of the year, the United States Open. We needed to be rested, because the two-week tournament is typically a happy madhouse.
Then we decided to invite Donald Dell and his wife, Carole, to come along with us upstate. Donald and Carole, who were visiting from Potomac, Maryland, where they live and where Donald’s management firm, ProServ, had its main offices, would also be going to the U.S. Open.
We were having a good time together, until this strange numbness in my hand. I quickly dismissed the idea that what was happening to my fingers could have been caused by sleeping on my hand. Had I suffered a small stroke? That was a distinct possibility. Should I leave the hotel early and head home to my internist? We decided to stay. Frankly, I expected to go to sleep that night and awake to find my fingers back to normal.
However, by the time we checked out of the Sagamore, my right hand was hanging from the wrist, almost completely limp. Now I was somewhat alarmed. Nevertheless, when I telephoned my doctor, I did not suggest an emergency. Something seemed to be wrong with my hand; would he look at it? He asked me to come in the next day, Friday, August 26.
In the morning, a television crew came to our house to interview Jeanne and me for the “CBS This Morning” show with Harry Smith. In those days, one feature of the show each Friday was a visit to someone’s home. Our house in Mount Kisco, built before the Civil War, was somewhat special. Thinking about my hand, Jeanne and I had considered for a moment canceling the interview, but finally we decided against it. My appointment with the internist would come soon enough.
The television interview was pleasant in most respects but also something of an ordeal. No matter how hard I tried, I could not move a digit up, down, or sideways. My right hand, now completely limp, literally hung dead from my wrist. As I answered questions and talked about the house, I tried to act as nonchalant as I could; I certainly told no one from CBS that something was wrong. The truth is that I had to prop up my right hand with my left. I still have no idea how I got through the interview without anyone on the crew taking notice. I answered the questions with as much charm as I could muster, but my mind was elsewhere.
Around noon, I drove some eight minutes from our house to the offices of Dr. William Russell at the Mount Kisco Medical Group. I knew the way very well. The group offices were almost across the street from the Northern Westchester Hospital Center, where I served on the board of directors. I had confidence in Dr. Russell, an able internist whom we had consulted professionally in the past. He inspired confidence. Dr. Russell is the picture of the genial suburban family practitioner, someone almost out of Norman Rockwell’s America of a bygone age, but with the latest medical and scientific technology and information close at hand. Mature in years and manner, he is gentle, attentive, reassuring. Whenever I consulted him, he would ask not only about me but about Jeanne and Camera; often he asked about them first, before inquiring about my health. I liked that. He didn’t fumble for their names, but instead showed a genuine concern for their well-being. And he loved to play and watch tennis.
As I entered the office, I sensed such an unusual degree of excitement in the air that I wondered whether or not I was projecting my own nervousness onto the scene. As it turned out, Dr. Russell and his colleagues and staff in the medical group were on the verge of moving out of their old quarters into a new, sparkling facility across the street. But nothing interfered with the courtesy and orderliness of my reception, and I was soon ushered into Dr. Russell’s office.
The sight of my hand, as limp as a flag on a still day, made him sit up. Listening to my complaints, he looked closely at the offending hand. He hefted it, pulled on my fingers, flopped it about.
“Have you been feeling dizzy at all?” he asked.
“No. Not at all.”
“Shortness of breath? Any trouble breathing?”
“No. I feel fine.”
“A fever of any kind?”
“No.”
“Did anything strike your hand? Did you use it in some forceful way?”
“No. Nothing like that happened at all. It simply went dead.”
“Well,” Dr. Russell said, “I think there is only one way to go, and we have to do it right now. Something is interfering with the signals from your brain to the hand. The interference is almost certainly in the area of the brain, because I can’t think of any other likely reason for your hand to stop working.”
“What’s next, then?”
“I am going to arrange for you to have a CAT scan of your brain right away. I don’t want to alarm you unduly, but that’s the main way to proceed right now. And I do mean right now.”
The last time I heard a doctor speak to me with such a sense of urgency was July 31, 1979, when Dr. Lee Wallace, playing tennis on a court near my own, suspected that I was having a heart attack and insisted that I go straightaway from the tennis court to New York Hospital.
Dr. Russell made a telephone call or two. When I went across the street to the CT facility, the attendants were waiting for me. By this time I was more nervous than when I arrived at Dr. Russell’s. I had seen CAT-scanning machines before; they look like a set of timpani drums turned upside down. Keeping as still as I could, I waited while the machine’s X-ray mechanism did its business of photographing the brain at various angles. The entire procedure took about twenty minutes.
When I joined Dr. Russell and a radiologist in an adjoining room, there, up on the light box, were the CT images of my brain, very much like smaller, more familiar X-ray pictures of my chest or my knee.
“Hmm,” Dr. Russell said. At least, that’s what I remember him saying, as a look of genuine concern settled over his face. Stunned might be too strong a term, but he was obviously taken aback. I looked quickly at him, then looked again at the pictures. He was as professional as any doctor could be, but I could tell that he did not at all like what he was seeing. Doctors are trained to be dispassionate, since they see sick people all the time. However, trained or not, it is not always easy to react stoically to bad news.
I peered at the images, looking for clues to what had rattled him. I did not think I knew what to look for. I had never seen CAT-scan images of my brain before. Then I saw that the two hemispheres of my brain, which should have been nearly identical, were not. The right side of the brain was clear. The left side showed an irregularly round shape—a splotch. If the rounded brain looked like the moon, then the splotch looked like one of those arid lakes or seas on the moon. This splotch, I thought, looks exactly like the Sea of Rains. What was it doing on my brain?
As we sat and stared, I could feel Dr. Russell becoming more nervous, more uncomfortable.
“What is that?” I asked, pointing at the splotch.
“Look,” he said. He spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully. “I don’t want to steer you wrong. I’m not a neurologist or a neurosurgeon.” The radiologist with us wasn’t sure, either; we clearly needed some more opinions.
“Could you find someone at New York Hospital?” My heart surgeries had both been at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital on the Upper West Side in Manhattan; but my cardiologist, Dr. Stephen Scheidt, was attached to New York Hospital, on the Upper East Side.
“Of course.”
The drive back home, although it took only eight minutes, was pretty awful. Up until the moment of seeing the CAT scan, I had not felt extreme anxiety. What had triggered my anxiety now was not the CAT scan itself but the jolting effect of the image on Dr. Russell. Obviously he thought that I had something serious to fear.
Was it a stroke? A small one now, but the precursor of a massive one? A massive stroke that might leave me unable to care for myself? Was it a tumor of the brain? Cancer of the brain—inoperable? Would I face months of extreme pain and then certain death? Or would an aneurysm snuff out my life in a split second, as it had snuffed out Grace
Kelly’s life as she drove her car with her daughter Stephanie in the beautiful hills of Monaco?
I knew a little about the brain from what I had learned in high school and in a course on physiological psychology I had taken at UCLA. Even the medical terms were somewhat familiar to me. Of course, while my knowledge of medicine was not negligible, most of it was limited to the subject of the heart. The brain was new territory.
In our kitchen, Jeanne listened to me explain what had happened. I talk about her now as my “co-patient,” and she has been exactly that for a long time.
Around three-thirty that afternoon, carrying the CAT-scan images and trying to remain calm, I entered the office of Dr. John Caronna, a neurologist at New York Hospital. A woman, one of his colleagues, gave me a sort of rudimentary preliminary examination.
“Stand up, please,” she instructed me. “Hold your arms out. Follow this object with your eyes.” She needed to make sure what was functioning and what was not. My hand was definitely not functioning, but the rest of me seemed fine.
I watched as Dr. Caronna looked closely at the pictures of my brain. Thinking about it now, I realize that the splotch on the left side of my brain was by no means an entire mystery to him. He already had his preliminary diagnosis, or at least his informed suspicions. However, like Dr. Russell, he was cautious.
“Something is in there. We can see that. But what? I don’t think we can know for certain without a biopsy.”
“You mean a brain operation?”
“Yes,” he replied. “We need to look at the tissue, examine it. I think we have to talk to a neurosurgeon. He can explain your options.”
Now it was his turn to make telephone calls. Soon we were joined by a neurosurgeon, Dr. Russell Patterson, and Dr. Stephen Scheidt, my cardiologist. They looked at the images. They, too, were cautious.
“Mr. Ashe,” Dr. Patterson assured me, “we don’t have to do anything right away. Obviously something is going on, probably an infection of some sort. We can simply wait and see what happens next.”