by Arthur Ashe
As far as I am concerned, Billie Jean King is the most important tennis player, male or female, of the last fifty years. Although she was probably not the best woman player ever, she was the most significant of all the players since World War II, easily more important than Jimmy Connors, the most significant male player. King transcends her sport. We were born only two or three months apart, and I have known about her almost as long as I have played tennis. We won our first national singles titles at Forest Hills only a year apart, in 1967 and 1968, and we both won at Wimbledon in 1975. I am truly saddened by the extent to which her career, both on and off the tennis court, has been overshadowed by one major controversy, involving a woman with whom she once lived.
She and I have had our differences. One was about the future path of tennis as the open era evolved. Although both Billie Jean and I resented the stodginess and snobbery of the international tennis establishment, we had different ideas about how best to proceed. Billie Jean favored the team approach, and she and her husband, Larry King (not the broadcaster), started World Team Tennis (WTT), an innovative league made up of various teams playing according to an ingenious format of shortened matches unlike anything ever seen in tennis. However, I thought their timing was wrong; I didn’t think the public was ready to support such a concept. In any event, WTT certainly fractured and segmented those of us who wanted to oppose the old order. I also think team tennis diverted prize money away from the regular tournaments for a long time and kept the prizes from growing more than they did. Nevertheless, Billie Jean and Larry did a fine job in trying to make their concept work, even as she became identified with quite progressive attitudes and positions away from WTT. Using—sometimes sacrificing—her tennis fame, Billie Jean advanced the cause of women and of gay people on a number of fronts, including many where the connection to tennis was not at all apparent. Her victory over the aging male chauvinist Bobby Riggs in September 1973 in their celebrated battle-of-the-sexes challenge match was an enormous boost for feminism and for tennis in general.
Energized as much by the feminist movement as anything else, Billie Jean brings energy and imagination to just about everything she touches. She is rare in combining unquestionable brilliance and success as a tennis player with the passion of a crusader for justice. Quick to anger, she once stung me with a remark that many people took a curious pleasure in repeating to my face. “I’m blacker than Arthur,” Billie Jean had quipped. I suppose she meant that I was not impulsive or explosive enough; the stronger and longer that one protests, it seems, the blacker one becomes. Her remark startled but did not offend me. And whenever it was repeated to me, I usually responded, “That’s just Billie Jean,” perhaps proving her point. Maybe I should have called her a name, or slapped her around a little, and thus demonstrated my “blackness.” Unfortunately, I don’t call people names, and I have never slapped anybody in my life. Besides, she might slap me back.
I understood that Billie Jean’s anger comes from an honorable place, and I truly respect her for what she has accomplished as a feminist. To me, she has earned her place in the pantheon of international modern feminists along with intellectuals such as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer, and political activists such as the late Petra Kelly of the Green Movement in Germany. So few professional athletes accomplish anything beyond their sport that King’s work is quite extraordinary. Billie Jean’s criticism of me came out of the fervor of the feminist movement. Because of that fact, I have never felt the need even to discuss it with her, and she has never brought it up. It has had no effect on our friendship, which blossomed after we both retired. We spent some time together, especially when we worked for HBO at Wimbledon, and I saw her sweetly affectionate side as well as the sharp mind that has made her such a force among us.
Billie Jean’s feminism and her sexual preference must have cost her a fortune in endorsements, which is often the major way to wealth for the famous ex-athlete. I know that corporate America was slow to exploit women’s tennis for the purposes of advertising because, in part, of the fear that details about the private lives of some of the players, if made public, might harm the sponsors. Later, as our moral climate became more permissive, and the popularity of women’s tennis grew, the same companies became more comfortable with this aspect of tennis, and with women’s tennis in general. But individuals still suffer. Navratilova, like King, certainly has not had endorsements commensurate with her superstar success on the court. The same is true of John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors (until recently, when Connors became, in his relative old age, the darling of American tennis). As Davis Cup captain, I had more than one company president and chairman look at McEnroe and tell me, in effect: “That guy’s a player, Arthur. But my company wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.”
The difference, needless to say, is that McEnroe and Connors behaved outrageously in public, while King and Navratilova were almost always polite as players. In a sense, the women were penalized for what they did in private. In reality, however, they were penalized because what they did in private got into the newspapers, although neither woman wanted it there. It makes little sense to take issue with advertisers on this score; they have no obligation to hand out endorsements equitably, without regard to reputation. However, the public may be more forgiving than some corporations. I certainly think that this is the case with both Billie Jean and Martina, who are justly admired by millions of people, and by me.
Then we have the example of Zina Garrison, which has nothing to do with sexual preference. Garrison was once the only player in the top ten in the world who could not find a corporate sponsor. In her case, she was penalized not for bad behavior or bad publicity but, almost certainly, for “bad” skin. She is black.
IN GENERAL, THE sex life of an individual should be nobody’s business but his or her own. Nevertheless, the sexual behavior of a famous athlete, when widely publicized, may have a powerful and deleterious impact on young people in particular. Add the factors of AIDS and rampant unwanted teenage pregnancy into the equation, and the sex life of individual star athletes may become a matter of public concern.
Sexual promiscuity has often been a feature of the behavior of athletes, or at least of male athletes. In recent times, in keeping with our collapse of standards, or our increasing commitment to candor, we have had a better understanding of what constitutes promiscuity for some athletes. The former basketball player Wilt Chamberlain, in his autobiography, has numbered his sexual “conquests” at about 20,000 women. (I don’t believe him about the number.) By comparison, Earvin “Magic” Johnson has been almost monkish, with a mere 2,500 partners, according to one estimate. Many women wanted him, he once explained with his beautiful smile, and he tried to “accommodate” as many of them as he could. However, Johnson may have made up for his lack of numbers, compared to Chamberlain, with revelations of kinkiness. According to him, he has responded to the desire of various women by having sex in an elevator, sex on a desk in a business office (while a board meeting was going on next door), sex with six women in one night.
As much as I like Wilt and Magic, I must say I did not enjoy reading these accounts. I must also admit candidly that part of my reaction to Wilt’s and Magic’s revelations was a certain amount of racial embarrassment, an affliction to which I hope never to become immune. African Americans have spent decades denying that we are sexual primitives by nature, as racists have argued since the days of slavery. Then two college-trained black men of international fame and immense personal wealth do their best to reinforce the stereotype. And Chamberlain and Johnson merely bolstered the substance of an article in Esquire magazine about promiscuity among players in the National Basketball Association (NBA), which is predominantly black. Magic even repeated “an old joke in the NBA” in his book. “Question: What’s the hardest thing about going on the road? Answer: Trying not to smile when you kiss your wife goodbye.”
Of course, I also know from experience that men’s professional tennis, for all its whi
te, upper-class associations, is also a haven of promiscuity and easy sex, as perhaps all male professional sports are. Even in my day as a player, we had our camp followers. Top players traditionally stayed not in hotels but in the homes of local patrons of the sport, and our hostesses now and then gave us bed and board and insisted on sharing the bed with us. We had our Lotharios and Casanovas among the players, and group sex was not hard to come by, if that was your taste. It was never mine.
And, as I said, I did not enjoy reading about Wilt’s and Magic’s escapades. I felt more pity than sorrow for Wilt as his macho accounting backfired on him, in the form of a wave of public criticism. This admission (or exaggeration?) will probably haunt him for the rest of his life. He did not seem to understand that many people would find his behavior dehumanizing, or that it might lessen his attractiveness to women. After all, how many would want to be No. 20,001 in Wilt’s ledger? I was also uncomfortable watching Magic talk on television about his own sexual adventures, just after the publication of his book. With his insouciant smile, he seemed to be boasting about them, as at least one television reporter suggested to him; and yet Magic had also preached restraint as part of his laudable efforts at AIDS education. Making what he hoped was a careful distinction, he anticipated this criticism in his book. “I’m not writing about the women in my life in order to brag,” he declared. “I’m no Wilt Chamberlain.”
Along with just about everyone else, I too am fond of Magic as a person, beyond his commanding skills as a basketball player. I was happy for all his successes, from his victories as a college player to his Olympic Games triumph in Barcelona. I was in favor of his return to professional basketball after his retirement following his announcement that he was HIV-positive. I was disappointed by the reaction of those other players, notably Karl Malone of the Utah Jazz, who apparently helped to drive him back into retirement by expressing fears about possible contamination by him. What puzzled me especially, on this score, was a question I did not see raised anywhere. If Malone and others were so fearful of being contaminated by Magic, why were they not insisting on mandatory testing of all athletes? After all, Johnson wrote candidly of sharing the bodies of certain women with other players. Who else is infected in the NBA?
However, Magic may have missed one opportunity in his commendable campaign to fight AIDS. Although he doubtless was caught up in the business of promoting his book (an obligation he certainly owes to his publisher), he probably went too far as a salesman. Unconsciously, no doubt, promotion of the book took momentary precedence over his sense of the dangers of promiscuity. In addition, while Magic is certainly a good, honest man, his discussion of promiscuity seldom had anything to do with morality or religion. As far as I can tell, nowhere in his book does Magic ever address the question of religion and morality in relationship to sex. When he discusses problems concerning promiscuity, they have to do with lawsuits alleging his paternity of children or spreading the AIDS virus, or with embarrassing Cookie Johnson, whom he married in 1991. In his book, he is discreet in not revealing the names of his partners, but he also offers “no apologies.” He declares only: “In the age of AIDS, unprotected sex is reckless. I know that now, of course. But the truth is, I knew it then, too. I just didn’t pay attention.”
I myself do not want to appear self-righteous in writing about morality in the context of sex; I know that I risk seeming pretentious and, worse, out of date. I also know, as Magic does, that to ask typical teenagers to see the moral dimensions of sex in any practical way is an act of futility. “Just Say No” is a catchy but quixotic slogan. The Nike company’s “Just Do It” is the call to which most teenagers will respond. Tell the average inner-city kid about sexual abstinence and he or she will guffaw in your face; I feel sure the same is true of most suburban adolescents. That is why I am for praising the Lord and passing the ammunition, which in this case consists of condoms and thorough education about sex.
I know what young men and women go through, with even the best of intentions and the best of home training. I remember my own sexual initiation, one night not long after I earned my driver’s license. I had proudly driven my father’s car to a party, and was even more proud and happy to offer to drive three friends home. The last one, a young woman who was not my girlfriend, decided to reward me in her own way. She suggested a visit to Byrd Park, a lovely woodland setting with a fountain that changed colors every few seconds. I knew Byrd Park only moderately well, because the tennis facilities there were for whites only; but I drove as deep into its recesses as I could.
We stared at the fountain, and no doubt each of us made a wish. I think we wished for the same thing. Before I knew what was happening, my companion had unbuttoned my pants and was sliding the zipper down. Her speed took me by surprise; until that moment, she had been rather shy.
Suddenly I thought about my girlfriend. I had been having a mild and completely chaste flirtation with a classmate. We certainly had never gone this far. What if she found out about us?
“I hope you don’t tell my girlfriend about this,” I blurted out.
“She won’t find out from me, Arthur,” my partner muttered impatiently, even as she shoved me up under the steering wheel of Daddy’s car. “She won’t know nothing unless you tell her. I ain’t going to tell her nothing, that’s for sure.”
Only much later, after I got home depleted and in a daze, did I begin to wonder about the police patrolling Byrd Park. Then I began to think about the possibility that my partner might get pregnant. Suppose I became a father? I would have to marry her, and maybe give up my tennis! But when I met her on Monday morning, she seemed not worried at all. Neither did she say anything about seeing me again. I remained nervous for a week or two, then forgot all about the dangers we had courted. I remembered only the unbelievably sweet new feeling of sex.
Facing the problem of young people as ignorant and as unprepared for sex as I had been, I want them to know the moral and religious aspects of sexuality. I want them to be familiar with the teachings of the Bible and with other religious doctrines. Because of AIDS, however, I am equally committed to the policy of giving condoms, as well as the bare, unvarnished facts about sex and AIDS, to students. I want adolescents caught up for the first time in the sizzling heat of sex to know scientifically about the penis, the vagina, and the rectum; about blood, sperm, and mucous membranes; about pregnancy, viruses, and the fatality of HIV. In the midst of an epidemic that will only grow worse, I have no time for evasions and euphemisms or other timidly genteel deceptions in teaching young people who are either sexually active or on the brink of becoming so.
Many people, however, cannot bring themselves to face the facts. When Magic, in a book about AIDS aimed squarely at adolescents, deliberately used certain terms and expressions that many young people would readily understand, more than one bookseller chain and several individual stores refused to sell the book because they considered the language too vulgar. When Dr. Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration, moved to institute a complex study of sexual practices among teenagers, an alliance of the religious right and the Republican party killed the idea almost at its birth. And late in 1992 came word that, to avoid offending conservatives, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) routinely deleted information concerning AIDS from its materials aimed at the public. The CDC censored terms such as oral sex, anal intercourse, and vaginal intercourse; it even dropped the use of the term condom from its announcements. Surely this is discretion gone too far. A spokesman for the CDC declared that they wished to make the material “broadly acceptable”—even if, apparently, these deletions caused people to die.
We need to know all we can about sex and AIDS. A report such as that compiled by the New York State Department of Health, released late in 1992, in which sex acts were rated according to their degree of danger, contains information that can save lives. Some of the findings did not surprise me, but others certainly did. For both men and women, anal intercourse of
fers the highest risk of infection. Next comes vaginal intercourse for women. Third is vaginal intercourse for men. In vaginal intercourse, women are twice as likely to get AIDS as men. If an infected woman is also menstruating, the man is at greater risk than if she is not. Despite myths to the contrary, oral intercourse presents a risk of infection, although it is slight compared to anal and vaginal intercourse. More open to debate is the risk offered by mutual masturbation and passionate kissing. The report defines the latter as “a kiss lasting a few minutes, with vigorous rubbing of the oral mucosa” (the inside of the mouth) in the process. “In a study of ninety subjects,” the report states of researchers, “they found [that] blood was normally present in the saliva of 50 percent of the subjects and increased significantly after teeth brushing and after passionate kissing.”