A Man of Fire and Grace ARTHUR ASHE 1943-1993

By Paul A. Witteman

There were so many long odds and so many graceful triumphs in the lifetime of Arthur Ashe. More than seem plausible for a black youngster from segregated Richmond, Virginia, whose ticket to worldwide renown and recognition was punched in a sport that was almost the definition of a game for whites. More than seem reasonable for a man who suffered the first of several heart attacks at age 36, while at the peak of his considerable game. More than seemed attainable to stunned observers who wept with him in April of last year when he announced (under the pressure of a pending newspaper story) that he had AIDS -- probably the result of a blood transfusion after a second bypass operation, in 1983.

The tears did not last. Ashe, the pragmatist, wiped them away and set out to teach the ignorant lessons about ourselves. He set up an AIDS foundation. He became active in AIDS research at Harvard and at his alma mater, the University of California, Los Angeles. He spoke to scores of gatherings on the nature of his disease, on race relations, on the lessons of life lived in the shadow of mortality. Along the way, he hugged his wife Jeanne and daughter Camera. The hugs and dignified discourse ended prematurely last week as Ashe, 49, succumbed to the disease in New York City.

Of the protean figures responsible for the integration of sports in America, Ashe stood in the first rank. Jesse Owens proved that white men do not run faster or jump farther than blacks. Jackie Robinson disproved with a fiery passion that whites have a stronger desire to win. Muhammad Ali demonstrated in the ring that speed and power were only the obvious ways in which a black athlete could be agile and courageous. There have been other pathfinders: decathlete Milt Campbell, golfer Charlie Sifford, and in Ashe's own sport the lithe and graceful Althea Gibson.

But none of them possessed the combination of attributes that made Ashe a paradigm of understated reason and elegance. In 1973 Ashe went off to play in the South African Open to see if he could chip away at the foundation of apartheid. Militants in the African National Congress did not welcome the visit, castigating him as an Uncle Tom and telling him he should go home. Ashe listened and replied evenly, "Small concessions incline toward larger ones."

He could demonstrate that was so. Postwar Richmond was a city where African Americans still knew their place and kept to it. In 1955 Ashe was turned away from the Richmond city tennis tournament because of his color. But that merely presented an opportunity to turn the other cheek: "Drummed into me above all, by my dad, by the whole family, was that without your good name, you would be nothing."

It helped if the good name was accompanied by a serve that sprayed aces and by ground strokes that delivered tennis balls with laser-like precision deep into his opponent's backhand. In fact, his game was the antithesis of his public persona. It was the fire that flowed out from behind an impassive mask and through his fingertips. In John McPhee's 1969 book Levels of the Game, Davis Cup teammate and occasional opponent Clark Graebner described Ashe's game: "He comes out on the court and he's tight for a while, then he hits a few good shots and he feels the power to surge ahead. He gets looser and more liberal with the shots he tries, and pretty soon he is hitting shots everywhere. He does not play percentage tennis." That unorthodox brilliance was never better displayed than on Centre Court at Wimbledon in 1975 when Ashe faced the enfant terrible of tennis, Jimmy Connors. Connors swaggered onto the court as the bookmakers' darling. Ashe turned him into an unexpected runner-up with a four-set lesson in pinpoint placement.

Tantrums took over tennis after that. Connors, John McEnroe and others transformed the courts into arenas where invective upstaged the delicacy of a drop shot, where insulting the umpire became more important than applauding an opponent's cross-court backhand. Ashe would have none of it. The game, like life, of course had to be conducted with passion, but dignity had to be maintained.

The restraint was less apparent in recent years, perhaps because Ashe knew that so much needed to be done in so little time. Referring to the violence that shattered Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict, he preferred to call it a "revolt," knowing full well that the word expressed a more powerful image of response to racial repression than the term most commonly used, "riot." On the other hand, he earned the outrage of many black coaches and educators by supporting a proposition that requires minimum standards of academic performance in exchange for athletic eligibility. Many African- American athletes fell below that threshold. But Ashe also realized the role in which numerous black college athletes are cast. "You really don't care about us as students," he told white administrators. "You care about us as athletes to fill your stadiums and arenas."

In recent months the great champion seemed driven to ensure that his many ventures and works would be tidy when he left them. "I'm getting my life in order, so if something should happen now or five years from now, it won't cause disruption." Unfairly to him and everyone else he touched, it had to be now. Five more years or five more months would have been a gift we all could have cherished.