It is really a shame that so many people remember Arthur Ashe as “the black tennis player that died from AIDS.”
To say that the man was so much more would simply be an understatement.
Early Life
Most biographies of famous players always seem to start out with where the person was born, who their parents were, etc. That is in large part due to the significance of those facts in shaping a person’s life.
This article is no different.
Arthur Robert Ashe Jr. was born to Arthur Sr. and Mattie Ashe in 1943. The family lived in Richmond, Va., and Ashe’s father’s job as “Superintendent” provided him with a Caretaker’s Cottage in Brook Park, a “blacks only” area that coincidentally included tennis courts.
Arthur Jr. had been playing tennis for about a year when his mother passed away. Mattie had gone into the hospital for a simple surgery and contracted Toxemia—a form of blood poisoning—and died at the age of 27.
Ashe was just six years old.
A similar fate would befall Arthur, many years later.
Ashe was devastated by Mattie’s death. So much so that he could not bring himself to attend her funeral. He plunged himself into his school work and tennis, trying to alleviate the pain and burden of his mother’s passing.
About this same time, Ashe was introduced to the premier black tennis player in the country, a man by the name of Ronald Charity.
With Charity’s coaching in tennis, Ashe’s father’s rearing in morality, and a black school system full of teachers that instructed Arthur to be better despite the inequities of the system, the groundwork was laid for an extraordinary human being.
In Ashe’s own words:
“Everyday we got the same message drummed into us, ‘Despite discrimination and lynch mobs,’ teachers told us, ‘some black folks have always managed to find a way to succeed. Okay, this may not be the best-equipped school; that just means you’re going to have to be a little bit better prepared than white kids and seize any opportunity that comes your way.’”
Finding Tennis
Ronald Charity recognized two things: Ashe’s extraordinary talent and drive, and his own limitations in developing that talent. So Charity passed the reigns to Dr. Walter Johnson, and extraordinary person himself.
Johnson was in a fact a medical doctor, and was the first black physician to be granted practice rights at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia in the early 1930s.
At the time of his introduction to Ashe, Johnson was already coaching Althea Gibson, the only African-American participating in world ranked tennis—that is until Ashe arrived.
Ashe continued to excel in his school studies, and his tennis prowess grew rapidly. The difficulty Ashe faced at that time was in finding quality opponents.
In those days, much of the country was still segregated, and Ashe was often times limited to playing only the black tennis players in the area. To find quality opponents, Ashe had to travel around the county.
He quickly started racking up tournament championships and national notoriety—Ashe was even featured in the Dec. 12, 1960, issue of Sports Illustrated feature, 'Faces in the Crowd'.
This was to be the first of two such appearances for Ashe in Sports Illustrated, the second time coming in his second year at UCLA (he was also later named the SI Sportsman of the year and graced the cover of the Dec. 21, 1992 issue).
Shortly after the Sports Illustrated article, Ashe graduated first in his class from Maggie L. Walker High School in Richmond.
Impressed with both his academic and athletic accomplishments, UCLA offered Ashe a full ride scholarship to their school—a school with one of the best tennis programs in the country.
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