Ashe So Much More Than A Tennis Legend

NEW YORK - Think of a stereotype; Arthur Ashe has shattered it. As an athlete with a sense of history. A jock interested in education. A black tennis player. Who wore horn-rimmed glasses.

"He is one of the great thinkers in sport," said Richard Lapchick, head of the Northeastern University Center for the Study of Sport and Society in Boston. "He is someone who, from the first time he stepped on a tennis court, was conscious of where he'd come from, and where he - and his people - were going, and conscious of the fact that racial problems weren't limited to this country. He is an eloquent spokesman. He must make white people, who think that blacks are less intelligent than they, feel very uncomfortable."

He won Wimbledon. That was in 1975, when he was seeded only sixth, and Ashe made aggressive Jimmy Connors, then the reigning prince of the sport, look like a blockhead in the process. Ashe blunted Connors' power with perfectly placed, off-pace shots in the middle of the court, picking at Connors' weakness without mercy. Yet there are stories of Ashe waiting patiently while his opponents attended to injuries during matches.

He worked tirelessly against apartheid in South Africa. From an original trip there in the early 1970s, to play tennis and give clinics and prove that a black man could go anywhere he pleased, Ashe later joined protesters such as Lapchick, who insisted that complete sports isolation was the better weapon against apartheid.

"I believe that I was destined to do more than hit tennis balls," Ashe wrote in his 1981 autobiography, Off The Court. "The abrupt end of my tennis career only accelerated my search for another way I can make a contribution. I don't want to be remembered mainly because I won Wimbledon."

Picking battles he felt were important, Ashe has become more than a tennis champion.

"I plan to continue doing and being active in those things I've been doing all along," the former tennis star said Wednesday after announcing he has AIDS.

Ashe wrote magazine articles on tennis and South Africa, and an exhaustive book on black sports history, "A Hard Road to Glory." He grew up in segregated Richmond, Va., the son of a city playground guard and caretaker, and won a tennis scholarship to UCLA. Frank Deford wrote in Sports Illustrated in the late 1960s that Ashe was "possessed of a mature balance and a discerning appreciation of the ironies about him."

In fact, Ashe himself has added to the ironies. He has suggested that some young tennis players would be better off turning professional rather than continuing with college eligibility. Yet he has preached education to young athletes and last year set up an African-American Athletic Association to deal with that issue, through high schools in the New York metropolitan area.

"He may be the only hero I have," said Dewey Blanton, who first met Ashe when he interviewed him for a college journalism project in 1978 and now works for publishing arm of the marketing firm ProServ. "He epitomizes everything I'd want to be: Extremely intelligent and not afraid to learn more about anything. Interested in every subject under the sun. Obviously a great athlete, great competitor, but without being surly, without being rude, without having to hate his opponent. And, it's such an overused term, but Arthur Ashe is class." Said Blanton: "He can talk about literature, art, politics, anything. And with Arthur playing, you always thought that the handshake at the end of a tennis match meant something."