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It helped if the good name was accompanied by a serve that sprayed aces and by ground strokes that delivered tennis balls with laser-like precision deep into his opponent's backhand. In fact, his game was the antithesis of his public persona. It was the fire that flowed out from behind an impassive mask and through his fingertips. In John McPhee's 1969 book Levels of the Game, Davis Cup teammate and occasional opponent Clark Graebner described Ashe's game: "He comes out on the court and he's tight for a while, then he hits a few good shots and he feels the power to surge ahead. He gets looser and more liberal with the shots he tries, and pretty soon he is hitting shots everywhere. He does not play percentage tennis." That unorthodox brilliance was never better displayed than on Centre Court at Wimbledon in 1975 when Ashe faced the enfant terrible of tennis, Jimmy Connors. Connors swaggered onto the court as the bookmakers' darling. Ashe turned him into an unexpected runner-up with a four-set lesson in pinpoint placement.
Tantrums took over tennis after that. Connors, John McEnroe and others transformed the courts into arenas where invective upstaged the delicacy of a drop shot, where insulting the umpire became more important than applauding an opponent's cross-court backhand. Ashe would have none of it. The game, like life, of course had to be conducted with passion, but dignity had to be maintained.
The restraint was less apparent in recent years, perhaps because Ashe knew that so much needed to be done in so little time. Referring to the violence that shattered Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict, he preferred to call it a "revolt," knowing full well that the word expressed a more powerful image of response to racial repression than the term most commonly used, "riot." On the other hand, he earned the outrage of many black coaches and educators by supporting a proposition that requires minimum standards of academic performance in exchange for athletic eligibility. Many African- American athletes fell below that threshold. But Ashe also realized the role in which numerous black college athletes are cast. "You really don't care about us as students," he told white administrators. "You care about us as athletes to fill your stadiums and arenas."
In recent months the great champion seemed driven to ensure that his many ventures and works would be tidy when he left them. "I'm getting my life in order, so if something should happen now or five years from now, it won't cause disruption." Unfairly to him and everyone else he touched, it had to be now. Five more years or five more months would have been a gift we all could have cherished.