arthur ashe kids day 2009
Arthur Ashe is more than the name on the stadium with all the luxury boxes. He is more than the inspiration for the Eric Fischl statue at the south gate to the United States Open.
Lately, Ashe’s widow has come to think of him as a Bodhisattva — “a beautiful Buddhist term for a person who is dedicated to the ultimate welfare of other beings,” as Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe put it the other day.
She considers the possibility that Arthur achieved Buddhahood, either during his 49 years or after his life was cut short in 1993 by AIDS from a blood transfusion.
Arthur Ashe remains the only man of color to win the United States Open (in 1968), the Australian Open (in 1970) or Wimbledon (in 1975). He is also the inspiration for the annual Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day, which will be held at the expensive bazaar on Saturday. And he is one of the founders of the National Junior Tennis and Learning network, which prepares young people for sport and for life.
He remains a presence. Every time I hear his name, I think of the slim young player, peering owlishly at the clubby world of the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills, which he had worked so hard to reach, and I also think of the wan retired athlete, stricken by the heart trouble that would indirectly kill him.
In the late 1980s, Ashe would wear a naval-officer-style cap with a gold braid on it — never asked him why — and he would sit in the press box and schmooze with the regulars. I miss him. Miss the stuff he would teach us, in a kind way. Books. Concepts. History.
“I began to see Arthur’s life journey as caring about all sentient beings,” Moutoussamy-Ashe said recently. “So much of Buddhism reminds me of Arthur’s goals in life, but while he certainly knew about Buddhism he was not a student.”
Moutoussamy-Ashe does not live in the past. She keeps her name (“Just like me: I could have a name with four letters but I choose to have one with 15,” she said) and continues to work as a photographer, her path when they met. He dropped the world’s worst line — “Photographers sure are getting cuter” — but he did not let her get away.
As an artist still taking stylish photographs in black and white, she has published three books, but does not yet work with a digital camera. (“I am a Neanderthal,” she said.) She had input into the statue the United States Tennis Association placed at the south end of the National Tennis Center, now named after Billie Jean King.
The statue by Fischl, known for his ability to shock, depicts a man, a nude man, coiled into the serve position, but with only the handle of a racket in his hand. Some people gasp or titter when they see the statue for the first time.
“This is a figure — serving,” Moutoussamy-Ashe said, patiently. “The message is service. There is no racket. It’s so metaphorical.” She paused and added, “I voted for it.”
A ball that Arthur tossed deftly into the air in 1969 remains in play. He and Charlie Pasarell, his college teammate and friend for life, and Sheridan Snyder, another friend, formed the National Junior Tennis League for children like Ashe, who had moved from Virginia to Missouri so he could play tennis beyond the bounds of overt segregation. Recently the word “league” has been replaced by “learning,” which was always part of the program.
In 1999, the network began a contest for the best essay about the life of Ashe. The winner was 12-year-old Blake Strode from St. Louis, who this year graduated from the University of Arkansas with a 3.972 grade-point average. Strode has delayed his entrance to law school at Harvard to try the tennis circuit for a year.
“The N.J.T.L. gave me a kick-start,” Strode said the other day. “I had already started playing tennis, but at 9 my mom dropped me off every morning in Forest Park. The clinics and the tennis were the highlight of my day.” He said the racial picture has improved greatly since the days of Ashe and Althea Gibson, the first black female champion, but added that tennis still presented economic and social barriers.
The junior tennis league, backed by the U.S.T.A., reaches an estimated 220,000 youths each year. “It’s family,” Moutoussamy-Ashe said. “It’s Thanksgiving. It’s Christmas. There may be some people you don’t want to see, but it’s family. It’s always there. It’s never not a part of me.”
Moutoussamy-Ashe told how she slipped 6-year-old Camera (now a student at Hunter College in Manhattan) into the hospital, against the rules, and how the little girl recoiled at the grim reality. Her bed-ridden father held her and called her Precious and told her it was all right to be scared.
“Arthur was a mixture of common sense, kindness and doing,” Moutoussamy-Ashe said. And she added, “Now everything is about you.” Ashe came from a time and place when people had a glimmer of some communal good. Only now is his wife able to put a name on what she thinks he achieved: a state of Buddhahood.
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