The Man on the Building: Who Arthur Ashe Actually Was

Sometime in the next three weeks you will hear the name a hundred times without really hearing it.

It will be printed on your ticket, if you are lucky enough to be going. It will sit in the corner of the television graphic. Commentators will say it the way people say the name of a railway station, as pure location: we are live from Arthur Ashe Stadium. On 30 August, when the US Open main draw begins, twenty-three thousand people will climb into the largest tennis arena on earth, buy a drink that costs more than it should, find a seat somewhere up in the weather, and settle in.

Almost nobody will be thinking about the man.

That is not a criticism. Stadium names go soft with use. They become directions rather than tributes, and there is no reason a person watching a first-round match should be expected to hold a biography in their head. But Arthur Ashe is worth twenty minutes of your attention, and not for the reason you might assume. The tennis is the least interesting thing about him, and he won three Grand Slam titles.

The park his father looked after

He was born on 10 July 1943 in Richmond, Virginia, and he grew up inside a park because his father ran it.

Arthur Ashe Sr was the caretaker and supervisor of Brook Field, the largest public park in Richmond that Black residents were permitted to use. It had baseball diamonds, a big swimming pool, and four tennis courts. The family lived on the grounds. Across town was Byrd Park, the good one, the showpiece, with better courts and better everything. Byrd Park was for white people. That was not an atmosphere or an attitude. It was the written rule.

So the geography of his childhood was very simple: the sport he would eventually be world-famous for existed for him in a four-court patch of grass that his dad mowed, and the proper version of it was ten minutes away and legally out of reach.

His mother died in the spring of 1950. He was not yet seven. Around the same age, a young Black player and coach named Ron Charity noticed the skinny kid hanging around the courts and started showing him what to do with a racket, which is one of those small human decisions that turns out to have consequences nobody could have priced at the time. From 1953 Ashe spent his summers at the training camp Dr Robert Walter Johnson ran in Lynchburg, a place built specifically to give talented Black juniors a route through a sport that had no intention of giving them one. Johnson taught tennis. He also taught his players to give away close line calls, to say nothing when they were provoked, to be so unimpeachably polite that no tournament could find an excuse to exclude them. It was survival strategy dressed as etiquette, and it shaped Ashe's public manner for the rest of his life.

He was good enough for a tennis scholarship to UCLA. In 1963, at twenty, he became the first Black player ever selected for the United States Davis Cup team. He was, by then, permanently a first, permanently an exhibit, permanently being watched for how he handled it.

September 1968: the champion who could not take the cheque

Here is the fact that makes people sit up.

The 1968 US Open was the first one of the Open Era, the first time professionals and amateurs played the same tournament for the same trophy. Ashe was twenty-five, a lieutenant in the United States Army, and an amateur. He had stayed an amateur deliberately, because that was what Davis Cup eligibility required of him at the time.

He won the whole thing. In the final he beat the Dutchman Tom Okker across five sets, 14-12, 5-7, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3. Read that first set again: fourteen games to twelve, before tie-breaks existed to put anyone out of their misery. He became the first Black man to win a Grand Slam singles title.

And because he was still an amateur, he could not accept the first prize of 14,000 dollars. The money went to Okker, the man he had just beaten. Ashe went home with a per diem, the daily expenses allowance paid to Davis Cup players, which in the currency of a Grand Slam champion amounts to roughly nothing. If you have ever wondered how tennis got from there to the enormous cheques handed over on court today, how tennis prize money actually works is a decent map of the distance travelled.

He won the Australian Open in 1970, beating Dick Crealy 6-4, 9-7, 6-2. Two majors by twenty-six. And then, for five years, the biggest one stayed out of reach.

The afternoon he out-thought Jimmy Connors

5 July 1975. Wimbledon final. If you only ever watch one old tennis match, make it this one.

Jimmy Connors was twenty-two, the defending champion, and playing like a man who had solved the sport. He hit the ball flatter and harder than anyone and he fed on pace; give him something quick and he sent it back quicker. Ashe was thirty-one, ranked below him, and widely expected to be an afternoon's work.

What Ashe did instead was borrow a plan from boxing. The previous autumn Muhammad Ali had beaten George Foreman in Zaire by refusing to fight the fight Foreman wanted. Ashe, working it through with people he trusted, arrived at the tennis version: give Connors nothing to hit. So he chipped. He sliced. He dinked the ball short and soft and low, mostly to the forehand, and dragged Connors from one side of the court to the other looking for a rhythm that never came. Between points he sat with his eyes closed.

It was 6-1, 6-1 in about the time it takes to make a sandwich. Connors, to his enormous credit, worked out enough of it to take the third set 5-7 and then broke early in the fourth. This is the part that tells you who Ashe was. He did not panic and start hitting, which is what almost everybody does when a plan starts leaking. He kept dinking. He won it 6-4.

Final score 6-1, 6-1, 5-7, 6-4.

It was, at thirty-one, the last Grand Slam singles title of his life, and the best argument anyone has ever made that tennis is a thinking sport. Nothing in that match was about being stronger or faster or younger, because Ashe was none of those things that day. He simply worked out what his opponent needed and declined to provide it for three hours. Players still talk about it as a template, and almost nobody has the nerve to try it, because dinking softly at a man who is hitting the ball through the wall requires you to believe your own analysis while the crowd is quietly wondering what on earth you are doing.

He remains the only Black man ever to win the Wimbledon men's singles title. He is also still the only Black man to have won singles titles at Wimbledon, the US Open and the Australian Open. Fifty-one years later, nobody has joined him on that list.

What he did when he was not playing

Most great players hand you a career and a highlights reel. Ashe hands you a second job that was arguably bigger than the first.

In 1969, with Charlie Pasarell and Sheridan Snyder, he set up what became the National Junior Tennis League. The idea was to put rackets in the hands of children who would never otherwise get near the sport, and Ashe insisted on a condition that tells you everything about him: every chapter had to run academic support alongside the tennis. He was not interested in strip-mining neighbourhoods for talent. He wanted the kids who would never be any good to get something out of it too. The network now runs to more than 250 organisations reaching over 150,000 young people a year, which is a strange and lovely afterlife for a man who has been dead since 1993.

Then there was South Africa. Ashe applied for a visa to play there in 1969 and was refused. He applied again. Refused. Three years running, the apartheid government would not let him in, and each refusal became an international news story, which was rather the point. He campaigned to have South Africa thrown out of the tennis tour and out of the Davis Cup.

When he finally got in, in 1973, he became the first Black man to play the country's national championship, and he did it without accepting the designation of honorary white, the bureaucratic fiction the regime used to let famous Black visitors move through white spaces. Plenty of people, then and since, argued he should have stayed away. He thought being visible inside the country did more than being absent from it. You can disagree with him. He had thought about it harder than most of his critics.

In 1985 he was arrested outside the South African embassy in Washington, protesting apartheid. He retired from playing in 1980 and captained the United States Davis Cup team from 1981 to 1985, winning it twice, in 1981 and 1982.

The illness he did not choose, and the privacy he lost

In 1979, at thirty-six, Ashe had a heart attack. He had quadruple bypass surgery. In 1983 he needed a second bypass, and during that operation he was given a blood transfusion.

That transfusion carried HIV. Nobody knew, because in 1983 nobody was testing blood for something that barely had a name yet. He found out in 1988, after an infection sent doctors looking for a reason his immune system was failing.

He told his family and a small circle, and then he did what most of us would do: he got on with his life quietly. For nearly four years he raised his daughter Camera, wrote, commentated, and did not tell the world, because it was 1988 and the world was not kind about this.

On 8 April 1992 he lost that choice. USA Today had the story and was going to run it. Rather than have it printed about him, Ashe called a press conference and sat down beside his wife, the photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, and said it himself. He was gracious, because he was always gracious, and he was also plainly angry that a decision this private had been taken out of his hands by people who felt the public was owed it. Camera was five.

The last thing he wanted was to become a poster. He became one anyway, and then he did the work: raising money, talking about AIDS in rooms that did not want to discuss it, founding the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health to deal with the fact that illness and poverty are the same conversation.

The last five months

On 9 September 1992, five months before he died and visibly unwell, Arthur Ashe stood outside the White House protesting the United States policy of turning back Haitians who were fleeing their country by boat. The demonstration was organised by TransAfrica and the NAACP. Police arrested ninety-five people. Ashe was among the first, wrists in a plastic tie.

Asked why he was there, he said: I think our policy of interdiction is ridiculous. That is why I am here.

He was dying. He went and got arrested for strangers.

Around the same period, an interviewer asked him whether AIDS was the heaviest thing he had ever had to carry. He said no. Being Black, he said, was the greatest burden he had had to bear. It stopped the room, and it has been quoted ever since, sometimes lazily. He was not ranking his suffering for effect. He meant something specific and exhausting: the permanent obligation to represent, to be the acceptable example, to have every opinion he expressed weighed as a statement on behalf of millions of people rather than as the thought of one man who had read a lot and considered it carefully.

He finished his memoir, Days of Grace, in the last weeks of his life. He died on 6 February 1993 of AIDS-related pneumonia. He was forty-nine.

They laid him in state at the Governor's Mansion in Virginia. The last person to be given that honour there had been the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. Consider the arc of that: a boy shut out of the white park in Richmond, lying in state in the mansion at the top of the same city. On 20 June 1993, Bill Clinton presented his Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Why his name is on the building

Four years after he died, the US Open outgrew Louis Armstrong Stadium and built something enormous. It opened on 25 August 1997 with a dedication ceremony, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe watching, and it seats 23,771 people, which still makes it the biggest tennis stadium in the world. A retractable roof went on in 2016, so the rain delays that used to swallow entire days are now mostly a memory.

Two days before the professionals arrived, children played on the new court first, at Arthur Ashe Kids' Day, which had been running since the year he died. Whoever made that scheduling decision understood the man completely.

When you watch this year

The Open runs from 30 August to 13 September, and the truth about that stadium is that it is a strange place to watch tennis. It is vast. From the upper rows the players are small bright figures a long way down and the ball is a rumour. What you get instead is New York noise, twenty thousand people who have opinions and will share them, a night session with a texture no other tournament manages. If you like that side of the sport, the loudest crowds in tennis is where the atmosphere lives, and if you are considering the trip properly one year, a fan guide to the four Grand Slams and the complete US Open guide will tell you what you are signing up for.

What is worth carrying in with you is this. Most sporting venues are named after donors, sponsors, or people who happened to be very good at the sport. Ashe qualifies on the third count, and if that were the whole of it his name would have gone quietly into the concrete years ago.

The name on that building belongs to someone who won the first Open Era US Open and was legally barred from the prize money, who beat the best player in the world by refusing to hit the ball hard, who was denied a visa three years running by a government that was frightened of him, who was outed by a newspaper while raising a five-year-old, and who spent one of his last free afternoons in plastic handcuffs on behalf of people he would never meet.

Fifteen days of tennis are about to be played in a room with that on the front of it. It is a good name to know before the first ball goes up.

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Related reading on super.tennis: how tennis prize money actually works, the loudest crowds in tennis, a fan guide to the four Grand Slams, and the complete US Open guide.