Authors: Arthur Ashe
This was extraordinary company for an aging jock. The quality of the board was impressive. Make no mistake—I hardly felt an iota of social insecurity. These were powerful, affluent people; but I had met and socialized with many powerful, affluent people in my long career. Moreover, as a professional player I had traveled all over the world, which also put me at ease in elite company. No, I felt little insecurity on the social side. But did I have enough business acumen to make a contribution to this group?
That
was another matter. Bailey set me straight: “Everybody asks what they think of as stupid questions at first. Just ask your questions, like everyone else, and they’ll be answered, and that will be that.” Since I have never been one to feign knowledge I do not have, I at once felt much more comfortable on that score.
But had I been brought in merely for window dressing? Only the most obtuse, self-deceiving black Americans fail to ask this question when they find themselves invited into an otherwise white circle. I knew that I was not the first African American board member at Aetna, but I also knew that I was only the second, and had been asked to serve on the board after the first, Hobart Taylor, had died. Was I merely a token of Aetna’s interest in social and cultural diversity? I wanted to be more than a token; I wanted to be an essential member of the board. Fortunately, I was soon satisfied that the board needed me, or someone like me; someone who was not a chief executive officer, with a gaping chasm between his or her lofty administrative position and the mass of poor or even middle-class people; someone
who brought a different cultural history to discussions; someone who was acutely sensitive to the problems hovering over the health and financial services at the heart of Aetna, for minorities and others as well.
I had never served on the board of directors of a business before, let alone a business with such vast resources. At first, I was impressed by the staggering sums of money we voted on—money transferred from one part of the company to another, or appropriated for a special reason, such as the opening of a new subsidiary in Mexico or Malaysia. However, the novelty of big money quickly passed. I had to come to terms with some of the contradictions involved in the board’s duties. We vote on every important aspect of the company but do not manage Aetna, which has its own managers. We vote on all major decisions affecting the company, but these decisions have been thoroughly screened by the time they reach us; almost all of our votes are unanimous. Are we then simply a debating society and a rubber stamp? No. We serve the stockholders and must answer to them at the annual meetings. In the long term, the company is in our hands.
At almost every board meeting, as polite and as civilized as we are, we feel the sharp tension between abstract ideals and our obligation to perform for the stockholders. We face the phenomenon of redlining, for example, practiced by many banks and insurance companies. The lender draws a red line on a map. He or she lends to people on one side, but not to people on the other. Those on the other side of the red line are frequently people of color. The lender speaks of the need for prudent investment. The people cry for justice.
As an African American, I feel an obligation to speak up for the people across the red line. My special task, however, is to speak so that we come closer to a solution that will satisfy both the lender and the people. Therefore, the task is also to avoid at all times hypocrisy, demagoguery, and insult. In this respect, too, my experience as a board member has been gratifying. I do not have to convince the CEOs
and the superlawyers around me that justice must be for all. From a practical as well as an ethical point of view, they know that justice must be for all. They know better than most that sound business decisions must result in more than an instant windfall of dollars. The long-term consequences of our decisions will also translate into dollars—or a lack of dollars—in the future. If you prick a CEO, he bleeds, too. I will never forget Warren Anderson’s personal agony as he faced the tragic consequences of the accident at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984, when more than 3,000 people were killed.
Probably far more than the color of my skin, my personal assault by heart disease and AIDS has helped me to find my identity as a board member. While I am surely not the first board member to fall seriously ill, my first heart attack, at the age of thirty-six, undoubtedly raised my interest in health insurance and life insurance to an acute pitch. If my interest started to flag, my second heart operation, in 1983, the year after I joined the board, definitely brought me back into line.
Ironically, I had just attended an Aetna board meeting in Hartford in April 1983 when this second round of heart trouble began. After the meeting, I was in a limousine with other board members, on our way to catch the company helicopter for a swift ride back to New York City, when a pain in my chest became so uncomfortable that I knew I could not get on that aircraft. When we had arrived near the helicopter, I got out of the car without raising an alarm, then spoke casually to everyone else after they had gotten out. “Sorry, guys,” I said. “I just realized I forgot to do something. I have to take care of it. Go on without me.” Then I turned to the driver. “Please take me to Hartford hospital. Right now.” Two months later, in New York City, I underwent my double-bypass operation.
My discovery that I had AIDS complicated my concern with health care in ways that I could never have anticipated. Once I found out I was infected, I informed the chairman of Aetna, Jim Lynn, and later passed the word to
his successor, Ron Compton. I also revealed it in confidence to Bayliss Manning, the senior member of the board in length of service, and my mentor there. I would have resigned if they had suggested it, but all were eager for me to continue to serve as long as I could.
More than thinking of myself as a spokesman for racial minorities and the poor in the inner sanctum of this mighty life-insurance company, I perhaps more acutely believe that I represent the army of the sick in America and around the world. In a way, I also represent all male gays, all hemophiliacs, and all intravenous drug users who might become infected with HIV. And perhaps I also represent the dying.
Without becoming morbid or unduly sentimental, I try to respond practically to these feelings. I accept my board membership on a giant insurance company as a trust. Thus in 1992, I was distressed to read in
The Village Voice
, a newspaper I read regularly and respect, an article attacking Aetna and me, by name. The writer accused Aetna of cruelly denying insurance policies to people who are either HIV-positive or suffering from AIDS. I was accused of colluding with the company despite my own condition. The truth is that I would never have remained on the Aetna board if it had such a policy; but I have certainly voted in support of prudent and sensible changes in connection with individual life-insurance policies. At a certain point, Aetna decided to stop selling
individual
health-insurance policies to anyone. No individual is exempt from this decision. We did so for a simple, sufficient reason: we were losing money on individual policies. To make a profit, we would have had to raise premiums sharply. We insure groups of people. We absolutely do not require these groups to test its members or its prospective members for AIDS. And most groups do not require tests for basic individual coverage, only for excessive amounts of coverage.
I am proud of Aetna and of my association with the company. In Hartford, the company has enjoyed for many years the reputation of being an excellent employer and a conscientious citizen. In fact, many people there used to
talk about “Mother Aetna,” who takes care of her children and is a concerned neighbor. It has also developed the reputation of being a fair employer of minorities, including blacks.
In the absence of a national health-care program, which I hope will come one day to the United States, Aetna and companies like it stand between many people and the destitution caused by the runaway cost of medical treatments. That fact is very important to me.
MY LAST IMPORTANT
area of work since my retirement has been in the world of social programs and foundations—that is, those programs and foundations I have started or helped to start. The first was the Ashe-Bollettieri Cities program, or ABC. Then came, with a somewhat different focus, an organization called Athletes Career Connection (ACC). Still later I formed the Safe Passage Foundation. And most recently, I established a foundation in my own name to fight AIDS. These are my main ventures into the world of public service.
As the name suggests, I started ABC with Nick Bollettieri, who is probably the most famous tennis instructor in the world and the head of the Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida. Nick has a gift for working with the young. At the academy and elsewhere, he has nurtured and trained some of the finest players in tennis, including Jimmy Arias, Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Monica Seles, and Aaron Krickstein. I myself have known Nick since I was fifteen years old. Originally from Pelham, which borders the Bronx in New York, Nick likes to stress that despite his fame he is basically an average guy from a neighborhood where Italians, Jews, Irish, and blacks lived together in harmony. If so, he is above average in almost all other ways. A master salesman, promoter, and teacher, he is a man of high energy and practical enthusiasms.
ABC had its germination one day at Roland Garros Stadium in Paris in 1987, when Nick and I sat together watching one of his charges play a match at the French Open.
Between points, we were talking about the deteriorating conditions in American cities, about violent crime and drug abuse and rampant juvenile delinquency, when Nick turned to me almost explosively.
“Arthur,” he blurted out, “we’ve got to help those kids! We’ve got to do something for those kids!”
“What do you think we can do?” I asked.
“Well, let’s think about it. I know we can do something!”
We thought about it over several weeks, and slowly came up with a plan. In 1988, we launched the ABC program. Ironically, we launched it the same week that I discovered I had AIDS.
Our idea was to use tennis as a way to gain and hold the attention of young people in the inner cities and other poor environments so that we could then teach them about matters more important than tennis. To start our program, we deliberately chose some tough neighborhoods, the kind of places as far removed as possible from the genteel world of tennis. We decided on our venture into Newark as the centerpiece and prototype of our efforts. Administratively, ABC was first run from Nick’s academy in Bradenton, which helped keep our expenses down—or, perhaps more accurately, quietly passed many of those expenses on to Nick. To do so, we had to have the support of Bob Kain, in charge of tennis at International Management Group, the biggest sports-management company in the world, which owns the Bollettieri Tennis Academy. Kain gave his blessing. As long as we broke even financially, or kept our losses to a minimum, the arrangement could continue.
Eventually we began to see that ABC did not fit in well at the Bollettieri Academy. Working together, Nick and I brought several of our students down to Florida to stay at the academy for various lengths of time. Undoubtedly most of these students benefited from the facilities and the coaching, but in the end we had to concede that the joint effort could not continue. Money was the main problem. To maintain the program, we needed to secure funding from the governments of the cities we served. These cities understood
our usefulness, by and large; unfortunately, extracting money owed to us from the City Hall bureaucracies sometimes took many months. At one point, to my embarrassment, ABC (or these city governments) owed the Bollettieri Academy as much as $300,000.
I knew full well that this situation could not continue. Gradually and understandably, the Bollettieri Academy and Nick himself withdrew from ABC, which has changed its way of operating. I was sorry to see Nick go, because he had tried hard to make the connection work. To facilitate the change, I started another organization, the Safe Passage Foundation, which would preside over ABC and another one of my program efforts, Athletes Career Connection, which had been running for some time. Here we worked initially with a consortium of seven colleges and universities (Seton Hall, Fordham, Spelman, Morehouse, American, Howard, and Pennsylvania) to try to redress the terrible attrition rate among black college athletes. I started ACC right after I discovered that only one in four black athletes in football and basketball at Division One schools (the top sporting echelon in the United States) ever graduates from college. This statistic appalled me. My aim was to stimulate the athletes to take their studies seriously and to consider in a realistic way the full range of career options open to them after college.
Athletes Career Connection did well for a while, then foundered during the recession that started across the United States around 1990. Sad to say, as colleges slashed their budgets, a program such as ours was often the first to go.
I intend the Safe Passage Foundation, as the name implies, to continue my efforts to help poor young people, especially poor young black people, make the transition from youth to adulthood without a crippling loss of faith in society and in themselves. Safe Passage can hardly solve the problems of poverty, racism, juvenile delinquency, cynicism, sexual promiscuity, crime, and drug addiction that plague the youth of this country. But, as Nick Bollettieri insisted, we have an obligation to try to do something to
counter this social and spiritual plague. Too many people have simply given up.
That is why I am deeply grateful when, for example, veteran tennis champions like Bjorn Borg and Guillermo Vilas play an exhibition match as they did in Mahwah, New Jersey, in the summer of 1992 to raise money for Safe Passage; or when an enlightened, progressive mayor such as Sharpe James in Newark, New Jersey, allows us space in City Hall itself, rent-free, to run our program there. We have almost a thousand Safe Passage kids in the Newark area, from a “tiny tots” tennis program to one for high-school juniors and seniors. We use tennis to attract the kids, but we make sure that we spend about one-third of our time talking about other, more serious matters. I always try to lift the sights of the youngsters to new heights. Trying to be the next Michael Jordan is fine, I tell them; but why not also aim for the goal of owning the team that employs the next Michael Jordan?