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Ashe brought class, dignity to U.S. Open win

BY JOHN JEANSONNE | john.jeansonne@newsday.com

August 24, 2008

Arthur Ashe is a stadium now, which will have to suffice for tomorrow night's 40-year celebration of tennis' transformative "open era" that dawned in 1968. Of the 40 people - 21 men and 19 women - who won at least one U.S. singles title during that time, all are living except the first male champion, Arthur Ashe.

The 11-year-old structure that carries his name assures a certain immortality, of course, but hardly speaks to the historic figure Ashe was, far beyond his tennis bona fides.

During his 49 years, he was forever linked to significant current events, the rare athlete who actually connected to the real world. The first black male to win a major tournament championship, Ashe became an activist against South African apartheid (since dismantled), a public face in the fight against HIV (now manageable through medication), a guiding force for children's education and a self-described "political nut."

Having contracted HIV through a blood transfusion during open-heart surgery, Ashe died of AIDS-related pneumonia in February 1993. But the previous September, when he sat for a lengthy interview prior to the last U.S. Open he attended as a writer and commentator, he gave what now appears a glimpse of the 2008 presidential campaign.

"I really want to be president," he said. "I think I can be a good president."

A worldly, well-educated black man of enormous calm and grace, Ashe called his opportunity to have sat down with shakers and movers from all stations in life "one of the joys of being a professional tennis player for 10 years." He admitted having felt "out of sorts" to find his picture on the cover of Life magazine when he won that first Open in 1968, yet he jumped at the chance to be the first athlete ever invited to appear on "Face the Nation."

Rather than recalling his breakthrough Open championship with nostalgic glee - he would go on to win the 1970 Australian Open and 1975 Wimbledon - Ashe said 1968 was a year "I wouldn't want to go through again," pointing to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the riots and backlash to black demonstrations at the Mexico City Olympics, Lyndon Johnson "essentially being protested out of office."

During that 1992 chat, Ashe spoke of how he listened to former surgeon general C. Everett Koop declare of AIDS patients, simply and bluntly, "They are going to die." He acknowledged "a strong air of finality. I feel it. It's quite different [from his experience with heart disease]. In all likelihood, time is short ... What are you going to do with your waking hours?"

Five months earlier, USA Today pursued and printed the fact that Ashe had AIDS, something he had known for four years but felt was a private matter because he no longer was an active athlete nor public officeholder. Almost immediately after the news broke, Ashe turned what he perceived to be an injustice into a selfless project, raising money for AIDS research and care - an endeavor that continues with the annual Arthur Ashe Kids' Day and AIDS fundraiser on the eve of the Open.

It was during a children's clinic that Ashe said he first felt at ease with the public's reaction to the news. "One of my fears was with the kids," he said. "I wondered, if I go do this [clinic], is Mrs. Jones going to tell her daughter, 'I don't want you to get too close to him. I don't want you to shake hands with him.' I had this clinic in Miami, and none of that happened. Afterward, I told my wife, 'Everything's fine. If it's OK with the kids, nothing else matters.'

"There is a famous black theologian, Howard Thurman. He implored people, 'How do you want to order your days?' He said you should select subjects and people worthy of your time. And that can't be everything. You have to narrow it to three or four things. So everything I've been involved with is because of some personal, individual involvement."

For tomorrow's "40 years of Open tennis" event, tournament officials are making the usual Then and Now comparisons: The playing service has gone from grass to blue hard courts; the playing site has moved from Forest Hills to Flushing Meadows; the tennis balls have changed from white to yellow; the dress code has evolved from whites only to anything goes; the tournament purse has ballooned from $100,000 to $20.6 million; attendance has jumped from just under 100,000 to more than 715,000.

In a recent commentary on National Public Radio, Frank Deford considered another Then to Now revolution, arguing that, among the incremental factors at work over many decades that could have produced a black candidate for president, "the esteem surrounding the black man in sport has played a significant part ... the way the black athlete has evolved in the public mind has made him something of a precursor for African-Americans in other visible fields."

Deford, who knew the first men's Open singles champion well, pointed to acceptance of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods as the most prominent pitchmen on the planet as a "sea change" in public perception, and the evolved "comfort factor ... must have eased the path for [Barack] Obama voters."

The presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, Deford concluded, "reminds me more of Arthur Ashe than anyone in his own business."

U.S. TENNIS MEN'S SINGLES CHAMPIONS IN THE OPEN ERA:

Arthur Ashe (1968)

Rod Laver (1969)

Ken Rosewall (1970)

Stan Smith (1971)