On the US street with statues at risk, Ashe’s stands tall
The only black man to win a grand slam offers a dignified lesson to his home state of Virginia, writes Simon Briggs
The tennis charabanc moved to New York this week, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in what feels like a divided country. And after watching those ugly pictures of far-right demonstrators in Virginia, it was reassuring to return to a stadium named after one of sport’s most influential equal-rights pioneers – Arthur Ashe.
The only black man to win a grand slam title, Ashe was born and raised in Virginia. Not in Charlottesville, where Nazi flags were borne aloft in a hate-fuelled rally a fortnight ago, but in Richmond, the state capital that lies just 70 miles down the road.
As the tennis writer Steve Tignor pointed out last week, Richmond has its own complicated racial politics. During the American Civil War, it was the capital of the Confederacy – the group of 11 states that wanted to preserve slavery. Now the city’s mayor has recommended taking down five statues of Confederate generals, lined up along Monument Avenue.
But walk further down the same street, and you come to a very different statue – Ashe, himself, surrounded by a group of children, with a set of books in one hand and a racket in the other.
Tragically, the subject of the sculpture passed away before it was finished – a victim, at just 49, of the HIV virus he had contracted from a contaminated blood transfusion. Even so, as Tignor explains: “Ashe told the artist to sculpt him in the emaciated form he was then – he weighed only 128lb.”
Amid this bronze tableau, Ashe’s shrunken frame gives him the ascetic look of a hermit or a saint. And perhaps there is a kind of truth here. Few people have done more to change perceptions, to open doors, than this mild and meticulous character. Ashe had his critics, too. Some of his more militant contemporaries painted him as an Uncle Tom because he worked within the system rather than meeting it head-on. But he had been brought up to show respect to all, both by his father, also Arthur, and his tennis mentor, Robert Johnson.
In the 1950s, Johnson would gather the best black prospects from around the country and train them for the National Interscholastic Championships – the top tournament for highschool kids. He was so determined to occupy the moral high ground that he told his boys to give their opponents an error margin of two inches on each line call. “We are going into a new world,” he said. “We don’t want anybody to be accused of cheating. There will be some cheating, but we aren’t going to do it.”
From those days on, Ashe’s way was to turn the other cheek and quietly set an example. Before he started winning titles, no black high schools in Richmond had tennis teams. Afterwards, they all did. “Progress and improvement do not come in big hunks,” he said. “They come in little pieces.”
Or in unpredictable, zig-zag paths. American liberals must feel the step forward of the Obama presidency has been followed by two steps back under Trump. Yet, there is hope to be found in Ashe’s story and in the perseverance of Johnson – a tennis fanatic who stumbled across the National Interscholastic Championships in 1949 and finally delivered its first black winner, Ashe, himself, in 1961.
The venue for that august annual event was the same University of Virginia campus, in Charlottesville, that the fascists targeted this month. From the sublime to the senseless, you might say.
Today, Ashe’s inspirational life is commemorated around the nation. In all probability, the thugs will soon be forgotten.
Few people have done more to open doors than this mild and meticulous character