Days of Grace (3 page)

I love to travel, and I have to do so for business—such as going to Wimbledon as a television commentator. But several countries will not admit someone who discloses having AIDS, or even to being merely HIV-positive but without full-blown AIDS. The United States is one of those countries. One can get a temporary dispensation, but usually only if one is attending a conference about AIDS or the like. The infected person would then be accorded the same status as Soviet diplomats used to have in the United States during the Cold War, with severe limits placed on his or her
travel. The major international conference on AIDS in 1992 was forced to move from Boston to Amsterdam in the Netherlands because of these restrictions. Because Great Britain also has restrictions connected to HIV and AIDS, I wondered if I would ever see Wimbledon again. I wondered about my commercial connections, my consultantships and other jobs in television, in the manufacture and sale of sports equipment and clothing, and in coaching. All of these connections went back a long way, and represented a tremendous human investment on my part as well as on the part of those companies. Would these connections survive the news?

For the news conference, Jeanne and I decided to appeal to Home Box Office (HBO), for whom I had worked regularly as a television commentator at Wimbledon. The president of Paramount Sports there is Seth Abraham, a close friend. He agreed at once to do it. We set the announcement for 3:30 the following afternoon. With HBO undertaking to notify the sports press, two major tasks remained. The first was to prepare a statement to be read at the conference, before I took questions from any reporters who showed up. The second, at least as difficult for me, was to call a number of people and break the news to them. To a few already in the know, I would be telling them only that I was going public; others would be hearing about my AIDS infection for the first time.

Between roughly 3:15 on Tuesday afternoon and 2:45 the following morning, I made between thirty and thirty-five telephone calls. I called several members of my family, including my brother in North Carolina, who is a retired Marine Corps captain, and my stepmother, stepsister, and stepbrother in Virginia; and I called many friends. Hearing the news that I had AIDS, two or three people burst into tears. I hastened to tell them, and others, that I was fine, that my spirits were up, that they should not worry about me. I called my lawyer Donald Dell, and he let me know at once that he would be present at the press conference. I called the chief of staff in the office of Dr. Louis Sullivan,
the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in Washington, D.C. I asked him to inform Dr. Sullivan, and I wanted Dr. Sullivan himself to pass the news to Barbara Bush at the White House. I had been favorably impressed by Mrs. Bush’s steadfast interest in AIDS and the generosity of her response to its victims when she visited children’s hospitals. From the president of the National Commission on AIDS, I secured its list of medical reporters who might be interested in what I had to say. They, too, would be invited to the press conference.

Several of the people I called had either answering services or answering machines, but I was extremely cautious in leaving messages. I was guarded even in talking to certain spouses. Some I knew I could trust; others were less reliable.

To help me draft the text of my statement, I called my old friend Frank Deford, a veteran sports journalist and television personality and now a senior writer at
Newsweek
magazine. Deford is the spitting image of the handsome riverboat gambler, rakish mustache and all, but there is nothing hit-or-miss about his literary style or his common sense. Co-author with me of
Arthur Ashe: Portrait in Motion
, which is an account of a year in my life on the professional tennis circuit, he had traveled with me to a number of places, including sub-Saharan Africa and South Africa. Together we had gone to Soweto, the most famous, or infamous, black township in South Africa. Although I would write a statement myself, I trusted Deford’s judgment on what I should say at this particular time.

As I worked at my computer, the telephone rang steadily as word began to spread. Instead of Barbara Bush, President Bush himself called to express his sympathy and to wish us well. Another caller was Douglas Wilder, an old friend who had become the governor of the state where I was born, Virginia. I also heard from Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta; Young, an ordained minister, had married Jeanne and me in 1977. I heard from my good friend David Dinkins, the mayor of New York and an avid
tennis fan. I took every call, even those that had nothing to do with my announcement. I needed to feel that the world was still turning normally on its axis. Someone called about changing the bylaws of an organization of which I am a member; I listened patiently and talked the matter through as intelligently as I could.

As I talked and wrote, I was aware above all of one person’s presence in the apartment: my five-year-old daughter, Camera. I could hardly look at her without thinking of how innocent she was of the import of this coming event, and how in one way or another she was bound to suffer for it. She is a beautiful child, if I say so myself. She was wearing yellow and pink barrettes in her hair and her smile went right to my heart. She had been tested and does not carry the virus. We had not told her about my AIDS, but now we had to do so, and soon—perhaps that night. We had to tell her before someone, most likely some other child, taunted her with the fact that her father has AIDS. In the apartment, where the phone was ringing more than ever and there were visitors in the middle of the morning, she knew that something was happening but didn’t know what.

“Daddy,” she said, and hugged me about my knees. She held out her right hand, which was closed. When she opened it, there was a chocolate kiss, in its bright silver wrapper. I kissed her on the cheek, and went back to my statement.

When I was finished I read the statement to Jeanne and Frank, and they approved of it. There was enough time for a quick lunch, and then I changed into a blue suit and red tie—just right for television, if anyone showed up from television. Jeanne, too, was dressed in a blue suit, with a white blouse and a blue velvet headband, as we went with Deford to the HBO office on the corner of Forty-seventh Street and the Avenue of the Americas.

We arrived just before the scheduled start of the conference at 3:30 p.m. Ross Levinsohn, who handles publicity for HBO, greeted us in the lobby.

“How’s the turnout?” I asked him nervously. “Anybody here yet?”

“Anybody here?” he echoed. “The place is packed. It’s been packed for an hour now.”

I asked about the room. “You’ve probably seen it on television,” Levinsohn assured me. “It’s where we hold some of our biggest fight announcements. Evander Holyfield, George Foreman, Mike Tyson, they’ve all been in there, talking about their coming fights.”

Oh great, I thought. Just great.

Almost exactly at 3:30 I entered the conference room on the fifteenth floor of the building. The room, warm and humid, was indeed jammed with reporters; the podium groaned with microphones. Like Holyfield, Foreman, and Tyson, I made my entrance with an entourage: my cardiologist, Dr. Stephen Scheidt, and my AIDS physician, Dr. Henry F. Murray, of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center; Edgar Mandeville, a close friend of mine who is also a physician; Donald Dell; Mayor Dinkins; and Jeanne. I half expected to hear the bell sound for Round One.

When I moved to the podium to explain why I had called the conference, I started with a joke. “George Steinbrenner has asked me to manage the Yankees,” I said. (In the tumultuous reign of Steinbrenner as principal owner of the Yankees baseball team, so many managers had been hired and fired that it was hard to keep count.) “But I graciously declined.”

Nobody laughed, which not infrequently happens with my jokes. Then I told my story. “Rumors and half-truths have been floating about, concerning my medical condition since my heart attack on July 31, 1979,” I began. “I had my first heart bypass operation six months later on December 13, 1979, and a second in June 1983. But beginning with my admittance to New York Hospital for brain surgery in September 1988, some of you heard that I had tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. That is indeed the case.”

The virus had been transmitted through a blood transfusion
during one of my open-heart surgeries, almost certainly the second in 1983. Testing for HIV in donated blood did not begin until two years later, in 1985. In 1988, after I underwent brain surgery, it was confirmed that I have AIDS. After my right hand had lost all motor function, a biopsy of brain tissue detected the presence of toxoplasmosis, which is one of the opportunistic infections that mark the presence of AIDS. Blood tests had proved positive for HIV.

Why hadn’t I gone public in 1988?

“The answer is simple: Any admission of HIV infection at that time would have seriously, permanently, and—my wife and I believed—unnecessarily infringed upon our family’s right to privacy. Just as I am sure that everybody in this room has some personal matter he or she would like to keep private, so did we. There was certainly no compelling medical or physical necessity to go public with my medical condition. I have had it on good authority that my status was common knowledge in the medical community, and I am truly grateful to all of you—medical and otherwise—who knew but either didn’t even ask me or never made it public. What I actually came to feel about a year ago was that there was a silent and generous conspiracy to assist me in maintaining my privacy. That has meant a great deal to me and Jeanne and Camera.”

Once I started to talk about my family, I could feel my emotions bubbling and surging to the surface, and especially so when I thought of Camera. I tried to continue reading, but her beautiful brown face swam before me and I felt the tears flooding my eyes, and my throat simply would not open to let out the words. I waited and waited but I am not sure I would ever have been able to continue. I then asked Jeanne to step to the microphones and read the words for me. “This has meant a great deal to me and Jeanne and Camera,” she read. “She does already know that perfect strangers come up to Daddy on the street and say ‘Hi.’ Even though we’ve begun preparing Camera for this news, beginning tonight, Jeanne and I must teach her
how to react to new, different, and sometimes cruel comments that have little to do with her reality.”

I did not want to be hard on
USA Today
, but I had to talk about what had caused me to break my silence. The newspaper had “put me in the unenviable position of having to lie if I wanted to protect our privacy.
No one should have to make that choice
. I am sorry that I have been forced to make this revelation now.” I then revealed that Jeanne and Camera were in excellent health. Both had been tested and both were HIV-negative.

What of the future for me? “I have been an activist on many issues in the past—against apartheid, for education and the athlete, the need for faster change in tennis. I will continue with those projects in progress, and will certainly get involved with the AIDS crisis.” I mentioned Earvin “Magic” Johnson and said that I thought we might work together. I ended with a reflection about what was to come: “The quality of one’s life changes irrevocably when something like this becomes public. Reason and rational thought are too often waived out of fear, caution, or just plain ignorance. My family and I must now learn a new set of behavioral standards to function in the everyday world, and sadly, there really was no good reason for this to have to happen now. But it has happened, and we will adjust and go forward.”

For about forty-five minutes more I took questions from the reporters and others present. “How do you feel?” someone asked. “I am not sick,” I assured him. “I have good days and I have bad days. The good-day, bad-day ratio is about six-to-one.” I mentioned some of the drugs I am taking for AIDS. Did I plan to sue the hospital where I received the tainted blood? No, I had no intention of suing anyone. I am not litigious by nature, and a lawsuit would serve no purpose, because I blamed no one. “Do you feel forced out?” some asked. “Absolutely. If the person hadn’t called the newspaper, I’d still be leading a normal life.” Did I have advice for AIDS sufferers? Yes, I
did. “Take care, because you never know what breakthrough lies around the corner.”

THEN IT WAS
over. Flanked by Jeanne and David Dinkins, I left the room. A remark I had made to Doug Smith earlier in the day came back to me as I walked away. “In a way,” I had said to him about the announcement, “it’s sort of akin to walking out of the confessional booth in the Catholic Church. You’re supposed to come out feeling better. Certainly there’s a self-imposed burden when you keep something like this to yourself. It’s one of those things that cries out for revelation, just to tell someone.”

I indeed felt a certain sense of relief at having made the announcement, but in no way had I been “cleansed.” The analogy between my statement and the Roman Catholic confessional was not a good one. I had not committed a sin, one that could be absolved either by a news conference or a priest. The truth is that I had been made to feel guilty without having committed a sin. First there was the sense of guilt that surrounds the acquisition of a disease, and especially a disease like AIDS that is linked sensationally in the public mind to “deviant” sex and drug abuse. Then there was the guilt implied in the newspaper’s determination to break the story: my guilt in having deliberately kept a secret from the people. However, I had been guilty of nothing.

Doug, who is a Roman Catholic himself, understood what I meant in making the connection but still felt badly about his role in the affair. I thought I knew why my boyhood friend felt so bad. He could not be sure that I believed that his newspaper had received the tip that I had AIDS from someone else. Perhaps
he
had taken the rumor to his editor. But I believed him. In any event, he could console himself that he had acted completely aboveboard, from the viewpoint of journalistic ethics. He had not wormed the story out of me, then published it. I went out of my way to make sure that Doug understood that I bore him no ill will, none whatsoever.