Days of Grace (6 page)

The sportswriter S. L. Price, in the Knight-Ridder newspapers, showed me that I was not imagining the funereal undertone. Price wrote:

One Sunday evening that fall, I was reading to Camera when she was in bed, as I do every night when I can, and now she was drifting off peacefully to sleep. Then she opened her eyes, looked directly at me, and asked: “Daddy, how did you get AIDS?”

I shuddered. I hadn’t expected the question at all, certainly not now, not dredged up, as it were, from her subconscious, where it obviously had been stirring awhile. In the wake of my public announcement—in fact, that very evening in April—Jeanne and I had tried to talk to Camera about my illness. As I said, we did not want her to find out about it through the taunts of a classmate or through the blunderings of some well-meaning adult.

Now and then she had asked Jeanne some casual questions about my medicine and my illness. But this was her first expression of arguably the most intimate question anyone could ask me about the illness.

“Well,” I told her. “It was like this. I was in the hospital. I had to have an operation. During an operation, you can lose a lot of blood. And after the operation, to feel better, I got a blood transfusion to replace some of the blood I had lost. I was given blood that somebody had given to the hospital for people like me. The blood turned out to be bad.”

“And the person had AIDS?”

“Yes.”

Camera said nothing for a moment. Then she spoke again.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Camera. I’m sure. That’s how I got it.”

Her eyes remained open for a moment or two, and then she faded to sleep.

ON
JULY
25, 1979, in the picturesque Austrian hilltown of Kitzbühel, I played the last tennis match of my professional career, and also one of the last tennis matches of my life. At the time, I had no idea that it would be so important. I lost, in only the second round of the tournament, to a virtually unknown French player named Christophe Freyss. Certainly I had recognized for some time that my career was winding down. The previous month, I had been ignominiously defeated in the first round at Wimbledon by Chris Kachel, another player of whom nobody but his family, his friends, and a few local fans had ever heard. And this early Wimbledon exit repeated what had happened to me there the previous year. The end was clearly in sight. Nevertheless, I saw no reason why I couldn’t continue to play professionally, with mixed success to be sure, for at least two or three more years.

Less than a week after losing to Freyss, I was in bed in New York, asleep before midnight, when I was jolted awake by the most intense chest pain I had ever suffered. After about two minutes, the pain subsided. Telling myself that I was suffering from nothing more than a severe case of indigestion, I tried to go back to sleep. I was almost there when the pain returned even more intensely than before. Breathing hard, I sat up in bed. I could not remember an attack of indigestion so acute. Again, the pain subsided;
again I relaxed; and again, after about fifteen minutes, I was jolted by an excruciating pressure in my chest. Finally the pain ebbed and I returned to sleep.

The next day, July 31, I was conducting a tennis clinic just across the East River from Manhattan when the pain struck again. This time, it was far more intense and gave no sign of abating. A physician, Dr. Lee Wallace, who happened to be playing on a court nearby, asked me a few urgent questions. Then he insisted on escorting me personally to New York Hospital. Since then, I have come to know that institution well.

“I want Mr. Ashe admitted as a possible heart attack patient,” he informed a resident physician.

This was my first indication that the pain I was suffering was the result of a heart attack. At New York Hospital, I spent two days in the intensive-care unit and most of the following eight days in the coronary-care section.

When I was released, I still hoped to resume my professional career. I missed the travel to foreign lands, the camaraderie of the players, the excitement of the matches themselves, and the prize money. In 1968, as an amateur, I had received exactly $280 in expense money after winning my country’s most prestigious tournament, the first United States Open. Eleven years later, the stakes were much higher, and we were all professionals now. Most of all, though, I missed the camaraderie and the competition. In spite of my heart problem, and although my game was not what it once was, I still hoped to serve and volley a few more times against the mightiest names in professional tennis—Borg and Nastase, Vilas and Newcombe, McEnroe and Connors.

“Sorry, Arthur. Unless you have an operation, you can forget about playing tennis again. Certainly not professional tennis.”

Two physicians, Dr. Mike Collins and Dr. Virginia Bouchard Smith, had scrutinized the results of a catheter examination of my arteries and heart and had laid down the law. Unless I underwent surgery, I could probably no longer
think about playing tennis at the professional level; perhaps I would not be able to play any tennis at all.

I had enjoyed a wonderful career and didn’t want it to end. I had never been the most dominant player the game had ever seen, or the most skilled. For example, my record against Rod Laver, who some experts call the greatest tennis player ever, is, as I have already said, just about all in Laver’s favor. But I had certainly had my moments of triumph. I had been top ranked in the world once in my career and co-holder of the number-one position at another time. I had won three of the four Grand Slam tournaments that constitute the pillars of international professional tennis: the United States Open, the Australian Open, and Wimbledon. I had shared the doubles crown in the fourth Grand Slam event, the French Open, and also won, with Tony Roche of Australia, the Australian Open doubles crown. In the decade since 1968—the start of the open era of professional tennis—I had played steadily and won thirty-three events. That is quite a good record.

Perhaps I was even more pleased by the way I had played than by my results in terms of wins and losses, or even in terms of prize money. I had done nothing, through scandal or bad behavior, to bring the game into disrepute. And I was also proud that fans and other players had found my game adventurous. As a junior player I had been a “pusher,” mainly keeping the ball in play from the back of the court. Then, in my senior year in high school, in St. Louis, Missouri, I had turned myself into a serve-and-volley player. I became adventurous, sometimes even reckless.

I liked being reckless, as long as I was reckless only on the tennis court, and as long as I won. Fans deserve to see a player with flair, someone for whom tennis is an art as well as a craft. Because I became bored fairly easily I would try the difficult shot, or sometimes even the impossible shot, just for the hell of it. I was known for being a winning but frequently erratic player—or “liberal,” as the proudly conservative Clark Graebner once termed it in a
genteel disparagement of my approach. I admit that I was capable of following flights of exhilarating tennis with bonehead misses. From time to time, my mind certainly wandered on the court. On the whole, however, I was entertaining, and I liked that.

Because I did not want my career to end in 1979, on December 13 of that year I underwent a quadruple coronary bypass operation. With long, skillful incisions, my surgeon, Dr. John Hutchinson, removed veins from my legs and implanted them in my chest to take over the functions of my clogged arteries. He pronounced the operation a success. If he could not assure me that I would be playing tennis professionally again, he nevertheless gave me hope that my life might be pretty close to normal.

Then, on March 9, 1980, I discovered that my life would never again be perfectly normal. That afternoon, in Cairo, during a long anticipated visit, I left my hotel near the pyramids for what I hoped would be a pleasant run. Three months had passed since I had undergone open-heart surgery. As far as I was concerned, I was completely recovered and only weeks away from a return to professional tennis. I was loping along gently, easing into the main phase of my run, when the angina struck. It hit me relatively softly, but hard enough to stop me dead in my tracks. I felt the world come to a halt. I walked slowly back to the hotel.

“Back already, Arthur?” Jeanne asked, half awake from a nap. “What happened?” She was cool as could be, but I could tell she knew something was wrong.

“Just a touch of angina. I thought I shouldn’t go on with the run.”

“Let’s call Doug.” Douglas Stein, a physician and one of our closest friends, had accompanied us on the trip.

When Doug came, he took my pulse and listened to my heart. Then he asked me to try some exercises, jumping jacks. As soon as I started, the angina returned. He checked my pulse again, and listened to my heart.

“You were right to stop running,” Doug said. “Your heart wants no part of it.”

“Should I be getting back to New York?”

“I think that’s a good idea, Arthur.”

“I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Doug responded. “If your heart is acting up, you should definitely be close to your cardiologist and your surgeon. At the very least, you should be close to top-class medical facilities, where you would be recognized and taken care of at once. There are fine doctors here in Cairo, but we really don’t know anyone. I don’t think this is an emergency, but there is no point in taking chances.”

As we flew out of Cairo, I knew one thing for sure: My career as a competitive tennis player was over.

We decided that instead of rushing back to New York, we would linger awhile in Europe, which I knew fairly well from years of playing tennis there. We stopped in Holland, a country I love. In Amsterdam, at my urging, we headed for the Rijksmuseum and its outstanding collection of Rembrandts.

Of the old masters, the work of Rembrandt moves me more than any other. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on Fifth Avenue in New York City, I have several times studied his celebrated
Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer
. It evokes in me a wicked sense of the close kinship that exists between admiration and envy. In other museums in other cities around the world, taking time off from the tennis tournaments that usually had brought me there, I used to seek out his quiet, brooding self-portraits, or his wonderful group paintings, or his more modest but accomplished etchings. Having read a little about his life, I thought I saw a great deal of pain and suffering inscribed in those self-portraits. His paintings and etchings move me deeply, and yet I find them sublimely peaceful even in their dynamism. I own one of his etchings, called
The White Negress
.

Born in Leiden, Holland, the son of a prosperous miller,
Rembrandt had married into a rich family and risen in the world to wealth and fame. Then, following the death of his first wife, Saskia, he had fallen slowly but irrevocably from that height. His last years found him poor and lonely. He saw his beloved mistress Hendrickje Stoffels, who was much younger, die, as well as his son Titus. But although his last years were unhappy, most critics agree that Rembrandt’s art in this period was not only technically superior to that of his happier years but also much richer in spiritual and psychological insight. I wasn’t surprised to read this judgment, because I have always been a firm believer in the therapeutic value of adversity. Of all people, athletes must reach an accommodation with losing, and learn to make the best of it.

Above all, I wanted to see one of his most famous works,
The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq
, usually called
The Night Watch
. One of Rembrandt’s earlier works,
The Night Watch
was also one of his most controversial. The picture fascinated me as much for the basic confusion surrounding it as for its intrinsic quality. I was always bemused by the fact that because soot and other grime had darkened Rembrandt’s original work, it had been taken for something completely different. Rembrandt had painted the company of soldiers in brilliant noon sunshine, but the world had come to call the picture
The Night Watch
. I was sure there was a lesson of some kind to be learned in that.

I spent some time in front of
The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq
, then moved on to other paintings. Unlike many of my friends who love art, such as the former tennis stars Tom Okker of the Netherlands and Wojtek Fibak of Poland, I have always been interested in biblical paintings. Here, too, Rembrandt was impressive. Of his 700 or so oil paintings, about 150 are on biblical subjects. In the Rijksmuseum, I found myself admiring several of his biblical pieces, including
The Apostle Peter Denying Christ
. Then I noticed one painting,
The Prophet Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem
, that riveted my attention.
Its power over me at that particular moment had much to do with what had happened to me in Egypt. Rembrandt was speaking to my ill-fated attempt to jog near the Nile and the collapse of my dreams of returning in glory to the tennis court.

Jeanne, who is a professional photographer and—after years of classes at the Art Institute of Chicago and Cooper Union in New York—has a much keener eye for art than I do, also knows something about helping me keep my thoughts in perspective. Noticing me linger in front of the painting, she circled the room and came back to join me. She glanced at the painting, then at me.