Days of Grace

by Arthur Ashe

  It helped, too, that for some time in my life I had been ready for nothing so much as the unexpected. Life, I believe, is a succession of often suddenly realized stages, of fresh beginnings for which one has constantly to be prepared. The death of my mother before I was seven had been one of those surprises, and perhaps had instilled in me the notion of life as a succession of sudden changes. I remember being startled to find this aspect of my sense of life beautifully captured in “Stages,” a poem in Hermann Hesse’s famous novel The Glass Bead Game (or Magister Ludi), probably my favorite work of modern fiction. Perhaps Hesse intended “Stages” to be ironic—after all, it was composed in the “student years” of Joseph Knecht, the main character of the novel, which is supposed to be Knecht’s biography. Still, the poem seems to me beyond irony. Just as every flower fades, Hesse writes, so too our virtues, our visions of truth, are transitory. Life itself is change, so we must be ready to take leave of the old and familiar and embark on the new. All beginnings, Hesse insists, have a magical force that can guard and empower us. Indeed, even the hour of death may send us on to “fresh and newer spaces,” for which we should be prepared.

  FOLLOWING MY ANNOUNCEMENT, one of my most urgent decisions was to establish the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS. I was conscious of the possibility that I did not have sufficient time left to mount such a project, but I became determined to move ahead with it, come what may. Although I could have joined an existing organization, I wanted my foundation to be somewhat more international in scope than any I knew, as befits an epidemic that knows no national boundaries and is ravaging some of the poorest countries of the world. According to the Harvard AIDS Institute, by the year 2000 as many as 110 million people around the world may be infected. The plight of patients in Africa is particularly terrible; nations such as the Central African Republic, Uganda, Kenya, Zaïre, and Zambia loom as major sites of AIDS devastation. With death rates soaring across Africa, some experts predict perhaps 10 to 15 million orphans there by the year 2000. With the average cost of treating a patient in the United States now about $100,000 from diagnosis to death, it is clear that many people, perhaps most, will die untreated.

  I decided that my foundation would keep these tragic facts in mind, in the hope that it could contribute to lessening the dimensions of this global disaster. Accordingly, I decided that at least half of the money we raise would go to AIDS research and treatment outside the United States. As a matter of policy, we would work with and through respected organizations such as the International Red Cross and the World Health Organization of the United Nations. We would guard our resources carefully, and do everything we could to ensure that the maximum part of each contribution went to alleviate the suffering of AIDS patients, or to promote some vital aspect of AIDS research.

  By mid-August, helped especially by my friend and colleague Margaret Mahoney, who selflessly shared her time and expertise as executive director of the Commonwealth Fund, the Arthur Ashe Foundation began to take shape. The extensive legal work was complete, as was my selection of board members. In addition to Jeanne and myself, the members are Dr. Henry Murray, Bill Cosby, Donald Dell, and Frank Craighill, a former law and business partner of Dell’s, now with the management firm Advantage International; also, Seth Abraham of HBO, Sheila Foster, a social worker and a family friend (her husband is the former baseball star George Foster), Dr. Irving Chen of the UCLA AIDS Institute, Dr. Machelle Allen, whose practice at Bellevue Hospital in New York is almost exclusively with HIV-positive women, Dr. George Fareed, who has been associated with the U.S. Davis Cup program as a physician, and Dr. Michael Merson, the director of the Global Programme on AIDS of the World Health Organization.

  After some searching, I found an executive director with outstanding credentials, given the special relationship of the foundation to the tennis world: Jacqueline Joseph, a young graduate of Stanford University who not only holds an M.B.A. from Columbia University, but also was a collegiate and professional tennis player. She and I are working closely together to plan the future of the foundation.

  We have set as a goal the raising of between $2.5 million and $5 million in about two years. How realistic this goal is, I do not know. So far, we have done reasonably well. At the end of August, the day before the start of the U.S. Open, we launched our appeal at Flushing Meadows, New York, with an exhibition featuring John McEnroe, Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras, and Jim Courier among the men, and Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, Pam Shriver, and Arantxa Sánchez Vicario among the women. To entertain the crowd, McEnroe even staged a mock tantrum against the umpire, Mike Wallace of CBS-TV. A few months later, the USTA sent the foundation a check for $114,000, our share of the proceeds.

  Above all, I am deeply pleased by the way that the tennis world, often accused of selfishness and snobbery, has responded to the foundation’s challenge. Both at the amateur and professional level, we have had the full cooperation of virtually everyone in a position to help. We are currently planning events in connection with the next Wimbledon and U.S. Open.

  In other ways, public support has been gratifying. Thousands of kind letters have come in, some with donations, some without. Some of our supporters are interested in tennis, but at least as many are not. At our tennis exhibition, I was absolutely astonished when a man approached me in the stands, casually handed me a personal check in the amount of $25,000, then went on his way. Some days later, a check arrived for $30,000, drawn on a North Carolina bank, from a donor who has remained anonymous. The young American tennis player MaliVai Washington, after a tournament in Antwerp, generously sent a check for $10,000. A fifth-grader in Bradenton, Florida, inspired by reading about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s March of Dimes campaign against polio, sent me a dollar. “Can you find a way,” he wrote me, “to ask all of America to send a dollar bill to fight AIDS? I would call it March of Dollars.” I wish we could do so; on the other hand, I am well aware that many worthy causes compete for charity.

  Whatever happens to me, I hope that people will continue to support the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS. As its name declares, it exists not simply to help fight this terrible disease but to help conquer it. How long the foundation will continue to exist, I do not know. The fight against AIDS may take as much as a generation, perhaps even more, although I look for a cure in the next few years. Whether through my foundation or not, however, we must keep up the straggle until the fight is won. And I know that the fight will be won.

  The month of my announcement also saw the formal launching of another project initiated by me and of significance and importance to me. After two years of planning and consultations designed to ensure that the support I needed would be there, I helped to found the African American Athletic Association, of which I am chairman. I conceived of the AAAA in the aftermath of my protracted struggle with other opinionated leaders over academic requirements for black collegians. As the daunting statistics about increased black involvement in sports and the decline in black academic performance mounted, I became convinced that we needed an organization that would create and maintain structures for advising and counseling young black athletes, especially student-athletes. This body would also work to create job opportunities for them in the face of racism and other problems, and to help shape public policy in this general area through both the skilled collection and dissemination of data about sport and the writings of experts on the subject. Aided by Gloria Primm Brown of the Carnegie Corporation, who gave me valuable advice about funding and other financial and legal matters, I began to see more clearly the task that faced me. Dr. Alpha Alexander, a member of the nominating committee of the U.S. Olympic Committee and director of health promotion and sports for the YWCA of America, has been a fruitful source of ideas and opinions about goals for our organization, which she joined as vice-president. Our other officers include Dr. Dick Barnett, the former New York Knicks basketball star, who now holds a doctorate in counseling, and Dr. Roscoe C. Brown, the president of Bronx Community
College. Our executive director, Yolanda Jackson, is a graduate of Columbia University and a specialist in public relations. She and I have worked closely together over the last two years to make the association a reality.

  I believe that the AAAA is at last poised to begin to make an impact on this troubled aspect of American and African American life. I am convinced that the mentoring of student-athletes is crucial not only to our efforts but to the future of the black community in America, and I am delighted to know that Columbia University proposes to join us in this aspect of our effort. With hard work and adequate support, I think we can make a difference in the lives of a substantial number of young people.

  * * *

  TO MANY PEOPLE, especially to people who meet me or even those who merely find themselves in the same room with me, I probably personify the problem of AIDS. When I am there with them, they can avert their eyes but not for long, and must face the problem that has been facing them for years and will face them even more boldly in the future. I do not like being the personification of a problem, much less a problem involving a killer disease, but I know I must seize these opportunities to spread the word. Talking to audiences about AIDS has become, in some respects, the most important function of my life. To all groups I take the message that AIDS is here and growing both in volume and complexity, that it is no respecter of race or privilege, that our health care is insufficient to its challenge, that we must do all we can to defeat it.

  I stepped up my visits to college campuses, starting with a speech and an honorary degree at the end of April from Kalamazoo College in Michigan, where I played many matches in my youth in the annual national junior tennis championships. Before the year was out I had received another degree from Loyola College of Baltimore, and spoken at a host of colleges and universities, including McGill in Canada, Niagara County Community College, Duquesne, Brown, and the universities of Florida, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. I mention these honors and invitations not to boast about them but to underscore the growing concern about AIDS. Everywhere, I found the students eager to hear about my personal experience and about the onerous problems surrounding American health care. Their questions were intelligent, their manner sensitive and mature. In general, I always returned from these visits to colleges and universities impressed by our young people and their teachers and encouraged in my own struggle with AIDS.

  I also found satisfying, although sometimes in a different way, my speeches to a wide range of professional groups, from a luncheon gathering of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in May to a morning speech to five hundred public-school teachers at the Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan in October. I have spoken to groups of pharmacists and employees of drug companies, to journalists on the issue of privacy and press freedom, and to businessmen wanting to know firsthand about the magnitude of the AIDS problem. Every group seems to have a different perspective on the problem, so that I constantly find myself being educated even as I try to teach. One of my most satisfying speeches of the year started with a simple letter to me from a student at Greenwich High School in Connecticut who was disturbed by the apparently cavalier attitude toward the disease exhibited by many of her classmates. On short notice, squeezing my visit between two flights out of town to more formal speaking engagements, I drove up from Manhattan to address an assembly of students there. I hope my talk made a difference, at least to some of them.

  In addition to all my lectures and other addresses, the awards dinners and the like, I kept as busy as ever on my various business interests throughout the year after my announcement. I saw absolutely no diminution in the call for my services from groups such as ABC-TV, HBO, Head USA, Le Coq Sportif, or Aetna; far from it. In a variety of ways, from board meetings to tennis clinics to morale-boosting sponsored public appearances, I continued to work energetically with all of these companies.

  AIDS is a formidable enemy, one that can demoralize the strongest individual if it touches that person intimately enough. In November, I had a sad reminder of that power. After Jeanne and I had agreed to host a forum at New York Hospital for hemophiliac AIDS patients and their families, approximately two hundred invitations went out. When we arrived at the hospital, we found almost no one present. In the end, only seven people attended. I was stunned. But I know that it is hard for many people who are caught up in such suffering, either directly or as family members, to expose their emotions. I did my best to make the evening as warm and productive as I could. I tried to draw out individuals who needed to talk about their problems, and I shared with them aspects of my own experience. The evening was a success, I think, for those who came. Nevertheless, the poor attendance was hard to ignore.

  I was happy to speak to small groups, but I also sought chances to maximize the impact of what I have to say. Late in the spring, I was in a taxi going to La Guardia Airport when I heard the news on the radio that, with only a few days left before the event, Magic Johnson had canceled an appearance and speech at the commencement ceremonies of the Harvard Medical School, because his wife was about to give birth to their first child. From the taxi I placed a telephone call to the school and offered to replace Magic. Normally I do not solicit speaking engagements, but the Harvard Medical School commencement is such a splendid opportunity to speak about AIDS and health care that I was willing to risk being turned down.

  On an afternoon early in June, offering myself “more as a thirteen-year professional patient than just as someone with AIDS,” I addressed the graduating class. My talk had its light moments, but its core was serious, as I outlined the most pressing issues as I saw them. Doctors, I argued, need to communicate much more sympathetically with their patients. Health care is far too expensive in America, with much of the expense incurred unethically, in padded bills and other inflated charges. The serious decline in ethics, in fact, has become a pervasive scandal within the profession. As medical costs soar, the huge fees and salaries earned by most physicians might have to be reduced, especially if AIDS continues to spread as expected. Whatever their individual attitudes toward treating AIDS patients (and some, perhaps even many, would refuse such work), doctors must not be aloof from the public discussion of the issue of sex education for young people in the age of AIDS. “You must enter the fray,” I urged. “You, as healers, must become part of the debate.”

  The absence of a coherent national health-care policy is, in my opinion, one of the major disgraces of American life. Greed should not blind doctors to the devastating effect of the absence of such a policy on the American poor and the middle class. I offered to sum up, in exactly fifty words, what our goals should be in facing the national crisis in health care: “Through a prudent combination of federal assistance and private enterprise, America will ensure appropriate, adequate, and sufficient physical and mental health care for all its citizens. Furthermore, America acknowledges its preeminent moral position in leading combined global efforts to assist, share information, and seek solutions for our common medical concerns.” I urged the graduates to accept all of these challenges and to meet them with all the skill and knowledge at their command.

  A few days later, around the middle of June 1992, Jeanne, Camera, and I flew to England for Wimbledon, where I would again broadcast for HBO. I left New York with a happy heart, because I thought of this trip as a true bonus. The previous year, I had flown to London for Wimbledon thinking that it would surely be my last visit to the scene of my greatest triumph in tennis. One misty afternoon, just before the start of the tournament, I had even taken Camera by the hand and strolled with her from one green court to another, telling her (as if at four she could understand me) about my matches on this court and that. Now, in 1992, feeling myself reprieved, I returned once again to a place I dearly love.

  The typical HBO day at Wimbledon is grueling. Leaving home at 8:30 in the morning, I usually would not return before 10:30 at night or even later. I found the tough schedule a challenge but also invigorating. Fortunately, our contract does not allow us to broadcast o
n the weekends. And Wimbledon is a wonderful gathering of the tennis clan. I enjoyed spending time, especially in the long delays brought on by wet weather, with old friends and opponents from all over the world, some back as mere spectators, others, like myself, working for the press. In the HBO facility, I spent many pleasant rainy hours with my colleague Billie Jean King as we waited for play to resume or to start; more than ever I savored the terms of our long friendship, and admired the sharpness of her mind and the resilience of her spirit. On television, I watched Agassi win the men’s singles crown, and Graf take the women’s; but I was even more pleased that McEnroe, still struggling with his demons but still a marvelous player, won the men’s doubles title, with Michael Stich.

  On June 27, I took time off from tennis to appear on a television interview show, “Fighting Back,” hosted by the actress Lynn Redgrave. I was glad for this chance to speak directly, as it were, to the people of Great Britain, a country I love. A thoughtful interviewer, Redgrave touched me with her questions about my life with AIDS. Toward the end she asked me for a message to the viewers. “Apropos of this show,” I said, thinking of its title, “Fighting Back,” my message was that “there is always hope, and you must live your life as if there is, or there will be some hope.” Moreover, this hope “should not be a selfish hope.… For me, the hope is that maybe there is no cure for AIDS in time for me, but certainly for everyone else.” That fact alone, I suggested, “should be sufficient to maintain this hope.” Redgrave ended by quoting Jeanne to the effect that I would never give up. “That’s right,” I assured her and our audience, “I will never quit.”