There were so many long odds and so many graceful triumphs in the lifetime of Arthur Ashe. More than seem plausible for a black youngster from segregated Richmond, Virginia, whose ticket to worldwide renown and recognition was punched in a sport that was almost the definition of a game for whites. More than seem reasonable for a man who suffered the first of several heart attacks at age 36, while at the peak of his considerable game. More than seemed attainable to stunned observers who wept with him in April of last year when he announced (under the pressure of a pending newspaper story) that he had AIDS -- probably the result of a blood transfusion after a second bypass operation, in 1983.
The tears did not last. Ashe, the pragmatist, wiped them away and set out to teach the ignorant lessons about ourselves. He set up an AIDS foundation. He became active in AIDS research at Harvard and at his alma mater, the University of California, Los Angeles. He spoke to scores of gatherings on the nature of his disease, on race relations, on the lessons of life lived in the shadow of mortality. Along the way, he hugged his wife Jeanne and daughter Camera. The hugs and dignified discourse ended prematurely last week as Ashe, 49, succumbed to the disease in New York City.
Of the protean figures responsible for the integration of sports in America, Ashe stood in the first rank. Jesse Owens proved that white men do not run faster or jump farther than blacks. Jackie Robinson disproved with a fiery passion that whites have a stronger desire to win. Muhammad Ali demonstrated in the ring that speed and power were only the obvious ways in which a black athlete could be agile and courageous. There have been other pathfinders: decathlete Milt Campbell, golfer Charlie Sifford, and in Ashe's own sport the lithe and graceful Althea Gibson.
But none of them possessed the combination of attributes that made Ashe a paradigm of understated reason and elegance. In 1973 Ashe went off to play in the South African Open to see if he could chip away at the foundation of apartheid. Militants in the African National Congress did not welcome the visit, castigating him as an Uncle Tom and telling him he should go home. Ashe listened and replied evenly, "Small concessions incline toward larger ones."
He could demonstrate that was so. Postwar Richmond was a city where African Americans still knew their place and kept to it. In 1955 Ashe was turned away from the Richmond city tennis tournament because of his color. But that merely presented an opportunity to turn the other cheek: "Drummed into me above all, by my dad, by the whole family, was that without your good name, you would be nothing."