Arthur Ashe

Arthur Robert Ashe Jr. was born on July 10, 1943, in Richmond, Virginia, at a time when the city's public facilities, schools, and playgrounds were strictly segregated ^[1]. His father, Arthur Ashe Sr., worked as a caretaker for Brookfield Park, a recreation area reserved for Black residents, and the family lived in a house on the grounds. His mother, Mattie Cunningham Ashe, died in 1950 when Arthur was six, a loss he later described as shaping his reserved temperament ^[2].

The courts at Brookfield gave the slight, bookish boy his start. He began hitting balls there at age seven and soon caught the attention of Ronald Charity, a part-time instructor who recognized unusual promise. Charity introduced him to Dr. Robert Walter Johnson, a physician in Lynchburg, Virginia, who ran a summer program developing Black junior players and had earlier mentored Althea Gibson ^[1][3]. Johnson drilled his students in strokes and in strict on-court etiquette, insisting they give opponents the benefit of every close line call, a discipline meant to protect them in a sport that offered Black players few allies.

Because Richmond's tournaments and indoor courts were closed to him, Ashe moved to St. Louis for his senior year of high school so he could compete and train year-round. He graduated from Sumner High School in 1961 with the highest grades in his class and accepted a tennis scholarship to the University of California, Los Angeles ^[2].

At UCLA, Ashe developed into one of the best amateurs in the United States. He won the NCAA singles and doubles titles in 1965 and helped the Bruins to the team championship, all while serving in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps ^[2][3]. In 1963 he became the first Black player selected for the United States Davis Cup team, beginning a long association with the competition as both player and, later, captain ^[1].

After graduating with a degree in business administration in 1966, Ashe was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army and stationed at West Point, where he ran the academy's tennis program. Military obligations limited his tournament schedule, yet his game kept improving, built on a big serve, a flat backhand, and a calm, analytical style that contrasted with the era's more emotional stars ^[2].

Anyone tracing an Arthur Ashe biography finds 1968 at its center. Still an amateur and still an Army officer, he won the first US Open of the open era at Forest Hills, defeating Tom Okker of the Netherlands in a five-set final. Because of his amateur status he could not accept the winner's prize money, taking only daily expenses while Okker collected the check ^[1][4]. The victory made him the first Black man to win a Grand Slam singles title, and that same year he anchored the American team that won the Davis Cup.

Ashe's list of Arthur Ashe achievements grew steadily after he turned professional in 1969. He won the Australian Open in 1970, again becoming the first Black man to take that title, and captured dozens of tour events across the following decade ^[3]. He was also an organizer off the court: in 1972 he helped found the Association of Tennis Professionals, the players' union that still governs the men's tour, and he served a term as its president ^[1][5].

His most celebrated single match came at Wimbledon in 1975. Facing Jimmy Connors, the defending champion and heavy favorite, the 31-year-old Ashe abandoned his usual power game for soft, angled shots that disrupted Connors's rhythm. He won in four sets, becoming the first Black man to win the Wimbledon singles championship ^[1][4]. That season he was ranked among the top players in the world, and many observers rated 1975 as the finest year of his career.

Beyond the trophies, Ashe used his standing to press political causes. Denied a visa by South Africa in 1969 and 1970 because of his race, he campaigned for the country's exclusion from the Davis Cup and, when finally admitted in 1973, insisted on playing before integrated crowds at the South African Open ^[5]. He remained a persistent public opponent of apartheid for the rest of his life, and in 1985 he was arrested outside the South African embassy in Washington during an anti-apartheid protest ^[1].

Ashe married Jeanne Moutoussamy, a photographer and graphic artist, in February 1977. The ceremony was performed by Andrew Young, then the United States ambassador to the United Nations ^[2]. The couple adopted a daughter, Camera, born in 1986, and Moutoussamy-Ashe later documented their family life, including her husband's final months, in her photography ^[6].

Away from competition, Ashe was a committed writer and student of history. He published memoirs including Advantage Ashe and Portrait in Motion, and he spent years researching A Hard Road to Glory, a three-volume history of African American athletes published in 1988, a project he sometimes called more important than any of his titles ^[1][6]. He also taught a seminar on the Black athlete at Florida Memorial College, work that exposed how little scholarly material existed on the subject and helped motivate the book.

His health shaped everything after his mid-thirties. Ashe suffered a heart attack in July 1979, at age 36, and underwent quadruple bypass surgery that year. A second bypass operation followed in 1983. During one of these procedures he received blood transfusions, which were later determined to be the source of his HIV infection ^[4][6].

Heart disease forced Ashe to retire from competition in 1980. He stayed close to the game as captain of the United States Davis Cup team from 1981 to 1985, leading squads that included John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors to championships in 1981 and 1982 ^[3]. He wrote columns for The Washington Post, worked as a television commentator, and founded programs that used tennis to reach inner-city young people, including the National Junior Tennis League cities network he had helped start in the late 1960s ^[1].

Ashe learned in 1988 that he was HIV positive, after doctors investigating numbness in his hand discovered an AIDS-related infection. He and his wife kept the diagnosis private until April 1992, when he announced it at a news conference after learning that USA Today was preparing to publish the story. The forced disclosure prompted a national debate about the privacy of public figures ^[4][6].

He spent his remaining months in relentless activity. He founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, addressed the United Nations General Assembly on World AIDS Day in December 1992, and was arrested that September outside the White House while protesting United States policy toward Haitian refugees ^[1][4]. Sports Illustrated named him its Sportsman of the Year for 1992. Ashe died of AIDS-related pneumonia in New York City on February 6, 1993, at age 49. His body lay in state at the Virginia governor's mansion in Richmond, an honor rarely granted, and thousands filed past ^[2].

Ask who was Arthur Ashe and the answers reach far past a tennis record. His memoir Days of Grace, completed in his final months with Arnold Rampersad and published soon after his death, became a bestseller and fixed his reputation as an athlete who thought and wrote seriously about race, illness, and responsibility ^[6]. In June 1993 President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously ^[1].

His name is attached to durable institutions. The main court at the US Open site in Flushing Meadows, opened in 1997, is Arthur Ashe Stadium, the largest tennis venue in the world, and the tournament opens each year with Arthur Ashe Kids' Day ^[3]. ESPN presents the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at its annual ESPY ceremony, and a statue of Ashe holding books in one hand and a racket in the other was erected in 1996 on Monument Avenue in Richmond, a boulevard previously lined only with Confederate memorials ^[1][2]. In 2019 Richmond renamed the Boulevard, a major city street, Arthur Ashe Boulevard.

Among the plain Arthur Ashe facts, three Grand Slam singles titles and 33 years of life after a segregated childhood in Richmond, the harder thing to measure is example. Players, public health advocates, and historians of the civil rights era continue to cite him as proof that an athlete's influence can outlast the scoreboard ^[5][6].