Days of Grace (2 page)

“Arthur Junior, all I want to know is, were you mixed up in that mess?”

“No, Daddy, I wasn’t.”

He never asked about it again. He trusted me. With my father, my reputation was solid.

I have tried to live so that people would trust my character, as I had trusted Stan Smith’s. Sometimes I think it is almost a weakness in me, but I want to be seen as fair and honest, trustworthy, kind, calm, and polite. I want no stain on my character, no blemish on my reputation. And that was why what happened to me early in April 1992 hit me as hard as it did.

*   *   *

THE NIGHT BEFORE
I met Jimmy Connors in the men’s singles final at Wimbledon in the summer of 1975, I went to bed and slept soundly. That match was the biggest of my life. It was also one that just about everybody was sure I would lose, because Connors was then the finest tennis player in the world, virtually invincible. In fact, the match was supposed to be a slaughter, and I was to be the sacrificial lamb. Before going to bed I had talked and talked with various friends about strategy and tactics, but when it was time to go to sleep, I shrugged off all the nervousness and the worrying, as I usually do, and slept peacefully—as peacefully as that proverbial lamb.

The night of Tuesday, April 7, 1992, was another matter altogether. Try as I could, I was not able to deliver myself to sleep. Once again I had talked and talked, this time mainly with my wife at home but also with friends on the telephone. Once again we discussed strategy and tactics as I tried to make myself ready for another ordeal, but one far more threatening to me than four sets in the final at Wimbledon against Connors. This time I could not bring myself to sleep, except in fits and starts. From my windows on the fourteenth floor of my apartment building in Manhattan I saw the lights of the city and watched for the sun to come up through the murk and mist of Brooklyn and Queens to the east. Before six o’clock, with the sky still dark, I was dressed and ready to go, ready to hunt for a newspaper, to discover if my secret was out, exposed to the world. I knew that once that happened, my life and the lives of my family would be changed forever, and almost certainly for the worse.

In a shop across the avenue I found the newspaper I was waiting for,
USA Today
. I scanned the front page, then flipped back to the sports section. There was not a word about me. I felt a great relief. And then I knew that the relief was only temporary, that it was now up to me to take the matter into my own hands and break the news to whatever part of the world wanted to hear it. And I would have to do it that day, Wednesday, because the days—maybe the
hours—of my secret were definitely numbered. I had to announce to the world that I, Arthur Ashe, had AIDS.

The afternoon before was supposed to have been a normal time for me: a visit from a boyhood friend; a medical appointment at the Westchester Diagnostic Center in nearby White Plains, Westchester County; a tennis clinic; then back home in time to play with my daughter, Camera, and then to have dinner with her and Jeanne. The medical appointment was all too normal for me. Since December 1979, when I had undergone a quadruple-bypass heart operation in New York, I had become a professional patient, although only my wife and closest friends, as well as my physicians, knew the full story of my career as a patient. So the medical appointment was normal, with me undergoing an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) of my brain, which is like the better-known CAT scan (computerized axial tomography) but uses magnetism, not X rays, to capture its images.

Normal, too, was the visit from my boyhood friend Doug Smith. I make it a point to keep in touch with friends from my childhood in Richmond; I cannot help but think that childhood friends are the bedrock of all one’s future relationships, and that you move away from them at your risk. There is an African proverb in which I believe: Hold on to your friends with both hands. I try to stay in touch. Doug was a longtime friend, newly remarried, and I was glad he was coming to visit. We had played tennis as teenagers. He had gone to Phoenix High School in Hampton, Virginia, and I had gone to Maggie Walker in Richmond, but we had remained friends. He had gone on to Hampton Institute, as it was then called, and I had gone on to UCLA; but tennis had kept us together. Doug is a tennis writer for
USA Today
. When he called to ask if he could come to see me, I assumed that he wanted to discuss with me my three-volume work on African Americans in sports,
A Hard Road to Glory
. And we did talk about it for a while, sitting in my office at home. Then it became clear that something else was on his mind.

“Arthur, I’ve got to ask you something,” he said. I could
see that he was in pain, agonizing and wanting to be doing almost anything else than to ask me that question. “We have just gotten a lead at the newspaper, something about you, and my boss has asked me to follow up on the lead. I’m supposed to talk to you and ask you to confirm or deny it.”

“What sort of lead, Doug?”

He didn’t rush to answer, but he finally came out with it. “We have heard that you are HIV-positive, Arthur. That you have AIDS.”

“Can you prove it?”

“No. That’s the point. My editor wants to know, is it true? They sent me to find out. Is it true?”

Doug was a good friend and a good man, but right now he was the press, and I was not about to deliver myself to the press on this question without a struggle. In fact, I could feel my anger rising, slowly but steadily, although it was not aimed at Doug himself. I am not one to be plagued by fits or gusts of rage, and I try hard to keep calm and subdued at all times. I was taught to remain calm on the tennis court, no matter what the score or how questionable the call or discourteous my opponent. But the anger was building in me that this newspaper,
any
newspaper or any part of the media, could think that it had a right to tell the world that I had AIDS.

“I want to talk to your editor, Doug.”

I could see that Doug was relieved at that point, happy to turn the matter over to his boss. From my office, as we sat there at home, I telephoned Gene Policinski, managing editor of sports for
USA Today
. Policinski couldn’t talk right then, and Doug and I waited for him to return my call. He did so promptly enough, around four-thirty. We talked for between twenty and thirty minutes. He was fairly direct.

“Are you HIV-positive, or do you have AIDS?”

“Could be,” I replied.

I could not lie to him. Sometimes, indirectly, I had to lie about AIDS. Now and then, I had to lie about it directly. In November 1991, when I wanted to go to South Africa, I
lied on the application for my visa and said that I did not have an infectious disease. But I never lied without a sharp twinge of conscience, even in lying to the government of South Africa.

I also told Policinski flatly that I had no intention, at that time, of confirming or denying the story. I tried to argue with him, to make him see my position.

“Look,” I said with some force, “the public has no right to know in this case.”

As I saw this situation, the public’s right to know really meant the newspaper’s right to print. Of course, there would be people interested in, even titillated by, the news that I had AIDS; the question was, did they have a
right
to know? I absolutely did not think so. The law was on the side of the newspaper, but ethically its demand was wrong, as well as unnecessary.

“I am not a public figure anymore,” I argued. “I don’t play professional tennis anymore. I officially announced my retirement in 1980. I am not running for public office, so my health is no one’s legitimate concern except my own. I haven’t committed any crimes, so I am not fair game. And I haven’t been caught in any scandals. Why do you think differently?”

“You
are
a public figure,” Policinski insisted. “And anytime a public figure is ill, it’s news. If he has a heart attack, as you did in 1979, it’s news. We have no special zone of treatment for AIDS. It’s a disease, like heart disease. It is news.”

Match point had come, and I had lost it. All I could do now was try to control the announcement itself, to have it heard first directly from me and not as a blazing story in a national newspaper. I asked Policinski if I could have a little time, say, thirty-six hours, to call friends, talk to other journalists, and prepare a public statement. I reminded him that I had
not
confirmed his story, as far as I was concerned.

Policinski was polite but firm. No, it was not his role as the managing editor of a newspaper to help me plan a news
conference, and he could not in good conscience withhold a story if he considered it newsworthy and if he had proof of its accuracy. However,
USA Today
had certain standards and practices which it would stick by in this story as in any other. In general, it did not print stories with elaborately vague sources—information attributed to “informed sources” and the like. And the newspaper did not approve of backing crablike into a story, by reporting a rumor and then declaring that the person or persons involved had denied it. Policinski and I ended the conversation without coming to any agreement, except that I stood by my refusal to confirm the story, and he stood by his determination to continue to investigate it, as well as his right to publish it if he could find confirmation. I fully expected to see the story in the next morning’s edition.

I like
USA Today
. In fact, I have the paper delivered to my home every day. In its beginning and even now, some people deride it as
McPaper
, a kind of fast-food approach to journalism. The truth is that it is an extremely informative newspaper, attractive and dependable, and well written. And if you travel as much as I do, it keeps you abreast of events around the country and the world. At that moment, however, I hated the paper for what it was doing, although I was also glad that it was making a conscientious effort to determine if the story were true. It had given me time, much needed time.

I had to decide what to do next. First, I canceled my MRI. I canceled the tennis clinic, which was for my own Safe Passage Foundation, working with young people, in Newark, New Jersey. The next day, I was supposed to go to Washington, D.C., to be with my old tennis partner Stan Smith and Donald Dell, who is my lawyer and one of my closest friends, and speak to the Washington Tennis Patrons at the William G. Fitzgerald Tennis Center, where the center court is named after me. I canceled that appointment, too. Then Jeanne and I began to talk. We talked for hours that day, looking at the problem from every possible angle, trying to come up with the best plan.

In one way or another, Jeanne and I had already had this conversation many times. From the start, we had understood that the truth would eventually come out, and that basically we had three choices about the revelation: The first was to make the announcement ourselves, when and where we wanted. The second was to wait until the rumors began to build, until the story seemed about to break, then try to preempt the announcement ourselves. The third choice, easily the worst, was to wait until the announcement was a
fait accompli
, until one of us turned on the television or picked up a newspaper and saw a picture of my face and the report of a rumor, or until some reporter called on the telephone to say, “Mr. Ashe, sir, Associated Press is running a wire story about you. It says you have AIDS. Any comment, sir?” Then we would have totally lost control of our lives. We had decided long before that if we could not implement pian A, then we absolutely had to execute plan B. And now it had to be done the next day.

Although she later told me that I was wrong, quite wrong, I was sure Jeanne was relieved that the truth was finally going to come out. I suppose that I have a deeper commitment to keeping things to myself, bottling them up, suppressing them. I tend to be more on guard. But we both knew that our lives would be changed forever by the announcement, even if we didn’t know exactly how and to what extent. I could see, too, that we were part of a larger pattern concerning AIDS and publicity, that our announcement could not be cleanly divorced from similar announcements by other persons of some celebrity. Although light needed to be shed on AIDS, very few people were willing to admit to being infected with the HIV virus, much less the disease itself.

Before Magic Johnson went public the previous November about his HIV infection, no prominent heterosexual had admitted publicly to being HIV-positive, or to having AIDS, unless he or she were on his or her deathbed. One could argue that Magic did not have much of a choice in making his announcement, in that he would have had to explain
why he was retiring as a basketball player at the height of his game, apparently without an injury. He could not have feigned a career-threatening injury even if he had wanted to, because the integrity of his physicians would have been on the line. Rock Hudson admitted his infection only near the very end. Only after the death of Brad Davis, who starred in the movie
Midnight Express
, did anyone admit that he had died of AIDS. Willi Smith, the gifted black clothing designer, died without admitting he had AIDS. The entertainer Peter Allen died after my announcement but never came forward before his death to tell the world that he was infected. Rudolf Nureyev forced his doctor into the position of initially denying, after the dancer’s death, that he had died of AIDS.

Public attitudes have changed and become more enlightened, and still AIDS patients who are public figures tremble at announcing their infection. Cancer, once almost as unspeakable, is one thing, but AIDS is quite another. One can be sure that there are many famous people who are HIV-positive, or who have full-blown AIDS, and are keeping it a secret. As for myself, I never worried as much about being a social outcast as I did about not being able to maintain my life’s schedule. On visa applications, on job applications, in seeking medical treatment or insurance, and in myriad other ways, AIDS is enough in many cases to result in a blunt rejection. Brad Davis’s wife confessed that Davis had kept his illness a secret so that he could continue to take whatever acting jobs came his way.