Imagine that we could travel back in time to the Richmond, Virginia of the early 1950s and meet the young Arthur Ashe, but know nothing of who he was. We would meet a skinny kid who loved books and music and who, due to segregation, was excluded from playing at any of the local tennis clubs and camps. It would have been hard to so much as imagine that he could become a US Open, Australian Open, and Wimbledon champion. Arthur Ashe needed extraordinary qualities to become a champion, and those qualities ended up giving us much more than memories of a great athlete.
Arthur learned to play in the local public park. His father and a local coach, Ronald Charity, noticed his talent and arranged for him to work with Dr. Walter Johnson, who coached Althea Gibson, the first black player ever to win a Grand Slam title. Dr. Johnson gave Arthur a foundation that carried him through an outstanding high school tennis career that earned him a tennis scholarship at UCLA. He became UCLA's top player, which led to his selection in 1963 as the first ever black player to join the US Davis Cup team. In 1965, Arthur won the NCAA singles title and led UCLA to the team championship.
Arthur graduated UCLA in 1966. In 1968, still playing as an amateur, he won the US Open, becoming the first black man to win a Grand Slam title and to be ranked at number one by the USLTA (now USTA). He would go on to win the Australian Open in 1970 and, in one of the most memorable upsets in tennis, to defeat Jimmy Connors in the 1975 Wimbledon final. A 1979 heart attack forced him into retirement, and surgery for a second heart attack in 1983 is likely to have been where he contracted the HIV virus that would eventually take his life.
Arthur's athletic talent bore fruit in his fifty-one career titles (singles and doubles). His intelligence, sportsmanship, and integrity also received recognition from the tennis world as he won the 1964 Johnston Award, was elected ATP president in 1974 and Davis Cup captain in 1980, and was named Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year in 1992.
Few athletes have used their public prominence as effectively for the greater good as did Arthur Ashe. In 1968, he helped create the USTA National Junior Tennis League, which has since introduced tennis to thousands of inner-city junior players. In 1970, to bring world attention against apartheid, he called for South Africa to be expelled from the International Lawn Tennis Federation, and to further make his point, he applied for, and was denied, a visa to travel there. South Africa yielded to pressure in 1973, allowing Ashe, the first black pro ever, to play in its national championship. Arthur's activism for civil rights never ceased. In 1992, he protested the expulsion of Haitian refugees and was arrested in front of the White House.
Arthur's early love of reading evidenced itself as he took up writing. He spent six years researching the material for his 1988 book, A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African American Athlete. Nelson Mandela was among those who found this a compelling look at civil rights in the world of sport. He also wrote, with a co-author for each, Arthur Ashe on Tennis, Days of Grace, and Arthur Ashe, Portrait in Motion.
In 1992, shortly after being forced to announce his HIV infection, Arthur founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS. Later that year, he addressed the UN General Assembly, urging increased funding for AIDS research. His Arthur Ashe AIDS Tennis Challenge, a fundraiser which was part of the US Open kickoff celebrations, has evolved into Arthur Ashe Kids' Day at the stadium now named in his honor. Arthur died of AIDS in 1993.
The Arthur Ashe monument, erected in 1996, stands on Monument Avenue in Richmond, surrounded, ironically, by the city's heroes of the Confederacy. Much of what Arthur Ashe did for us is represented by the fact that the city where he was once forbidden to play tennis with white children now counts him as one of their greatest citizens.
