Authors: Arthur Ashe
He had chosen his scriptural passage well. It was a touching moment, which I appreciated and fully accepted. Over the years, I have shared in several moments of prayer with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and even though I am often skeptical about what he says and does, I know that his faith is real.
Whatever the cause of my heart attack, I left the hospital inclined not to curtail my schedule in any way, provided
that I could carry out my duties well. I was discharged on September 16. I was at my desk at home that night when Bill Clinton telephoned to wish me well and express the hope that we might meet soon. As I sat in my office after hanging up, I thought of him and Hillary Rodham Clinton and the grueling, sometimes humiliating, and still unfinished campaign they were pursuing simply to have his message heard and believed and his integrity accepted, and I was encouraged to continue to carry on my own campaign. I decided to strike nothing from my schedule but to plunge ahead. Four days later I flew to Atlanta to speak to a gathering of officials of community health centers on “Health Concerns of the Uninsured.” Just after my return, I engaged a lively call-in audience on WLIB, the New York radio station. I then flew to Gainesville for a lecture at the University of Florida. The next day I was in Hartford, Connecticut, for an Aetna board meeting, then dined on September 24 at a fund-raiser in Manhattan for Governor Clinton, where I had the opportunity to meet and talk with him. The next day I returned to Hartford by company helicopter for another Aetna meeting, then I flew to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh to give a speech. The last day of September found me in Richmond, discussing with the mayor of the city a project dear to my heart—an African American Sports Hall of Fame to be located there. Then I returned to New York to attend a special showing of the Matisse exhibition at the Museum of Modem Art before heading out that evening to Baltimore, where I was to speak the following day.
All my engagements were satisfying in one way or another, but some were especially appealing. In October, for example, along with Donna de Varona, I was master of ceremonies at a fund-raising awards dinner sponsored by the Women’s Sports Foundation at the Marriott Hotel in mid-town Manhattan. I was happy to see all the athletes there, and especially in the areas, such as fencing, that give so little back to the women in terms of money and recognition but call for at least the same degree of sacrifice as the major
sports. In sports, men have many avenues to big money and fame; for women, tennis stands out almost alone in this respect, although other sports allow a few women a decent financial return. Because I want to see women athletes gain the recognition and prizes they deserve, I was honored to be invited to take part in the event. Among the tennis players, young Lori McNeil was there, and my pal Billie Jean King, whom I had not seen since Wimbledon, and who has done at least as much as anyone else to raise the morale and the prestige of American women athletes. Billie Jean sometimes used to tease me about being too undemonstrative, but this time I gave her a long, close embrace that Jeanne noticed and commented on approvingly.
Tennis, and my own part in its recent history, were very much at the center of a weekend soon after in Jacksonville, Florida, when Jeanne and I attended various events, including a gala dinner, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Association of Tennis Professionals. In 1972, I had played a leading role in its formation, and I had served for one year as president of the body that helped to reconstitute tennis in the open era. The event brought together some of the leading names of the past thirty years of the game, including Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, Stan Smith, Charlie Pasarell, Eddie Dibbs, Bob Lutz, Jaime Fillol, Bjorn Borg, and Ilie Nastase. I could not help notice, after a while, that I was obviously one of the special attractions of the hour, that my old tennis comrades were seeking me out and spending time with me; I seldom sat down without a small group gathering around my chair. The companionship of these men meant and continues to mean a great deal to me. I remember one night during my Davis Cup captaincy, about ten years ago, when I spoke at a gala dinner in Portland, Oregon, and broke down in tears talking about the Australian players and my feelings about them as individuals and as a group. I feel that way about so many of the men with whom I battled during my career. I love them for what we have been through together, and for sharing with me so many of the finest moments of my life.
I felt honored by their gestures of friendship; and indeed the fall of 1992 was a season of being honored; bashfully but gratefully I accepted a number of awards. Early in November, I received the Helen Hayes Award, and, a few days later, another award from the National Urban League, an organization that has labored for decades on behalf of economic opportunity for blacks. Later that month, I received the first Annual AIDS Leadership Award of the Harvard AIDS Institute, at the Carpenter Center at Harvard. Senator Edward Kennedy spoke on the topic of leadership in combating AIDS, and Maurice Tempelsman, chair of the advisory council of the institute, presented the award. Early in December, I received the American Sportscasters Association Sports Legend Award. Days later, an afternoon press conference at the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue revealed that I was to receive unquestionably the most publicized of my awards of the year. The editors of
Sports Illustrated
magazine named me its Sportsman of the Year, obviously not because of what I had done on the court but away from sports. The award was presented at a gala dinner that evening at the Jockey Club in Manhattan.
On December 1, at the invitation of Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, I had addressed the United Nations on the occasion of World AIDS Day. I considered that speech one of the most significant of my life, perhaps even the most significant. In it, I stressed the formidable power of AIDS but also deplored the weakness of the effort against it. “It has been the habit of humankind,” I noted, “to wait until the eleventh hour to spiritually commit ourselves to those problems which we knew all along to be of the greatest urgency.” In the face of a pandemic, we could hesitate no longer. Although 80 percent of the new cases would arise in developing countries, 94 percent of the funds to treat AIDS patients are spent in industrialized nations. This imbalance must be corrected, I urged. “All of us world citizens—Eastern and Western, developed and developing, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, or geographic origin—must see AIDS as
our
problem. Developed countries must
do more, not only out of a moral sense of purpose but because it is in their own selfish economic interest to do so.”
In the United States and around the world, a variety of reactionary attitudes impeded the fight against AIDS. “Nevertheless,” I insisted, “we must try and we must succeed or our children and grandchildren will one day rightfully ask us why in the face of such a calamity we did not give our best efforts. What shall we tell them—and their mothers in particular—if we don’t measure up? How shall I answer my six-year-old daughter and what do we say to the estimated ten million AIDS orphans by the year 2000? That their parents’ generation was so racked with political and cultural and religious discord that it was willing to needlessly condemn millions of medical refugees?”
Commending both the United States and the United Nations for recent decisions, however belatedly, to intervene in hunger crises in Africa and Eastern Europe, I reminded the delegates that “the AIDS pandemic has an even greater urgency.” I ended by expressing optimism that AIDS would finally be defeated: “We want to be able to look back and say to all concerned that we did what we had to do, when we had to do it, and with all the resources required.”
Two days later, in Brooklyn, I announced the creation of the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health at the Health Science Center of the State University of New York there. Earlier in the year, after my AIDS announcement, I had visited the center with the Reverend Paul Smith, who is affiliated there, then met later with him and some other officials, including Donald J. Scherl, the president of the Health Science Center. I found the major aim of the center, to develop innovative approaches to the problems facing residents of Brooklyn and other urban areas across the nation, to be closely in line with some of my pressing concerns. After some deliberation, I agreed to the creation of the institute in my name, and to serve as the first chairman of its board. However, the most unforgettable aspect of that visit was my tour of a ward at the center devoted to children stricken with AIDS. I was touched to see a banner,
signed by all of the children, welcoming me. “I know what you are going through,” I told them, “because I, too, have AIDS. I hope we can one day eradicate this disease through the work of the institute.”
Aside from my own AIDS foundation and this center, I expect to lend my name to only one other project: the funding of the Arthur Ashe chair in pediatric AIDS research at St. Jude’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. This project is independent of the work of the Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS. Again I must try to persuade friends and well-wishers to contribute money to this fight. Anyone who had been with me at that hospital in Brooklyn, and at any of the hospitals I have visited in the past year, where children stricken with AIDS are increasingly commonplace, would recognize the urgency of this need to conduct research into the effects of AIDS on children.
AS CHRISTMAS DREW
near, I had every reason to be happy. The
Sports Illustrated
award brought a spate of publicity, including appearances on ABC’s “Good Morning America” show and with Tom Brokaw on NBC. On December 21, Camera celebrated her birthday with a party that I not only attended but also videotaped. The party proved something of a strain, however. Walking through the streets lugging the videocamera proved more onerous than I had thought; at least, I was sure that the weight of the videocamera was the source of my discomfort. I was left feeling weak and tired, so that I did little for the next two days. Then on Christmas Eve, around noon, tired of being housebound, I went out for a walk in the neighborhood. I was startled by how freezing cold the air was. I walked for about twenty minutes, but after five minutes I began to regret having come out at all. I was frozen to the bone and gasping for air.
Christmas found me not very well, but I was buoyed by the joyous reaction of Camera to her presents, and by the telephone calls that came from family and friends. Still, I was not well enough to do what has become for me, in
some respects, the most important ritual of the day. When I was a boy, on Christmas, my father always took me late in the day to visit families who were less fortunate than we were. We brought food and toys—and Daddy always insisted that we give away not simply old toys but one or two of the new toys we had just received. I have continued this tradition with Camera. For the past three Christmas Days we have gone to Harlem late in the day and visited the hospitals and given away toys, old and new. But I couldn’t do it this year. I was not well enough.
So I was glad the next day, when Jeanne, Camera, and I flew south to Miami and the Florida sun. Down there, at the Doral Resort and Country Club, with our friends and family, we would ring out the old year, which has been so packed with events, some of them momentous. And we would ring in 1993, with kisses and hugs and sips of wine and the hope, always the hope, for a bright and healthy and prosperous New Year.
THE YEAR
1993 did not start well. In fact, New Year’s Day found me ill at ease, hurting, coughing, and feverish, on an airplane bringing my family back a day early from Miami.
I had planned to work hard while in Florida. My main task there would be to teach my annual Christmas tennis clinic at the Doral, where I am now international tennis director—having relinquished my leadership of the main tennis program some time ago. I looked forward to working diligently with the guests. But I also hoped to squeeze in as many rounds of golf as I could, on one or another of the four excellent courses at the Doral.
A cold front was pushing its way south across the eastern United States, but near Miami we were bathed in sunshine and warm weather. Although Camera had been reluctant to leave her Christmas tree and most of her presents behind, she seemed ecstatic to be in the sun. Her happiness made Jeanne and me feel all the more blessed.
In fact, I was out on the golf course with Jeanne’s father, John Moutoussamy, and a Canadian friend, Stanley Kivenko, when I first noticed that I was having some difficulty breathing. I couldn’t understand why; we were riding comfortably from tee to tee in a golf cart, so there was no reason for me to feel tired. Then I started to cough. The
cough persisted. From the seventh green, as I waited to putt, I took out my cellular telephone and called my main AIDS physician, Dr. Henry Murray, in New York. He advised me to see a doctor as soon as possible.
Later that day, I went to see my AIDS physician in Miami, Dr. Barry Baker. After examining me, he ordered a chest X ray. It revealed nothing out of the ordinary.
The next morning, I went to Miami Baptist Hospital to seek the advice of Dr. Michael Collins. Fourteen years ago, in New York, Dr. Collins had treated me for the heart disease that had started my sorry medical record. He examined me, and ordered an echocardiogram, which uses sound waves to study the action of the heart. At this point, I still assumed that the cause of my shortness of breath was a lack of blood going to the heart, depriving the heart of oxygen. In New York, I had found out that one of the arteries leading to my heart had virtually shut down, and I had thought of having it opened in Miami. Dr. Collins and I would have to decide on one of three procedures. In an angioplasty, he would insert a balloon into the artery and then inflate the balloon. He could use a laser beam to melt the deposits clogging the artery. Or he might perform yet another invasive procedure, using a sort of Roto-Rooter on the deposits.