Days of Grace (7 page)

“Oh my,” she said, a chuckle in her voice. “Are we Jeremiah now?”

“Oh no, no,” I replied quickly. “I just like the way the picture is laid out. Very interesting use of light and shade.”

“Really, Arthur?”

“Really,” I insisted, a little feebly. I didn’t move. “Of course, Jeremiah does look a little depressed with this turn of events, doesn’t he? I would say he is not entirely resigned to the destruction of Jerusalem. He is taking it pretty hard. In fact, I see a hint of disgust on his face.”

“You know how he feels?”

“I know exactly how he feels.”

“Let’s go, Arthur. There are other paintings to see.”

We joked about the end of my tennis career because the joking helped to take something of the sting out of the moment, which was painful. It hurt more than a little again when, later that month, in New York, I confirmed to the press that I had retired from playing the game as a professional.

In fact, I merely confirmed then what I had already admitted in a letter to twenty-two friends and associates. “A long time ago in my Sunday school classes,” I had written, “I learned that ‘for every thing there is a season.’ From today on, I will end my nonstop Odyssey in search of the perfect serve and retire from competitive tennis. In case you
were wondering about my health, I plan to live to be 100 years old.”

When a reporter telephoned me about the letter, I was equally jaunty about how long I would live. “The doctors say I will live to be 100,” I assured him, “but they won’t put it in writing.”

ONE LIFE HAD
ended, and another had not yet quite begun. For some years I had known this moment would come, but now it was here in earnest. I had to negotiate the middle passage between the old and the new. Quite consciously, I gave myself a period of about three months simply to think about the past and about the future. At this crucial point in my life, I did not want to make any major mistakes.

Looking back on that period, I see only one thing clearly: that it seemed to me quite possibly a developing crisis. I felt a subtle but pervasive dissatisfaction with my life up to that point, and a deep confusion about what the rest of it would, and should, look like.

How could I be dissatisfied, even subtly, with my life to that point? I had lived, many people would say, a fantasy of a life. I had won a measure of international fame many people would die for. I had traveled all over the world, and often in grand style. Relatively speaking, I had made a great deal of money. I had won a large number of friends. How could I be dissatisfied?

But I
was
dissatisfied. Who knows what force gnaws at us, telling us that our accomplishments, no matter how sensational, are not enough, that we need to do more? Some psychologists, and some poets, talk about the rage for immortality that operates like a dynamo in the hearts and minds of men and women despite all we know about the transience of glory and the inevitability of death. I don’t think I wanted to be immortal, not in any literal sense. Although I enjoy receiving honors and awards, I am not obsessed by the question of whether or not people would know my name a hundred years from now. But I did want
to achieve something more than I had accomplished on the tennis court.

For one thing, I had been a professional athlete, and as far as I was concerned, few people took professional athletes seriously. At that time—perhaps it is somewhat different now—I thought that professional athletes were the modern counterpart to minstrels or
jongleurs
in the Middle Ages. All we needed, I sometimes believed, was the pointed hats and the curved shoes tipped by little balls to be complete fools. From start to finish we were entertainers, with essentially clownish roles assigned to us, for which we were handsomely paid. But the lavishness of the payment did not change the role.

I wanted to be taken seriously. In part, I had been instructed by the efforts of other athletes who had begun to tear themselves out of the clown’s costume in my own time. From the social and racial remove of the almost entirely white, upper-class stratum that is the tennis world, I had looked with fascination on athletes who had stood up defiantly and protested against social injustice. Cautious about getting involved in politics and protest myself, I couldn’t help but admire impetuous men such as Muhammad Ali, who struck me as menacing and purposeful even when he was amusing, a charming man but also unmistakably defiant; or the somber, black-gloved athlete-protesters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who turned the victory stand at the Olympics in Mexico City in 1968 into a sacrificial altar, as they surrendered their victory to the greater good of downtrodden black people; or more scholarly but in some ways equally militant protesters such as Dr. Harry Edwards of the University of California at Berkeley.

Although I did not always agree with everything these men had said and done, I respected the way they had stood tall against the sky and had insisted on being heard on matters other than boxing or track and field, on weighty matters of civil rights and social responsibility and the destiny of black Americans in the modern world. For many years,
even as I built my career in tennis, I had guiltily nursed the suspicion that I had not done as much as I should have in the arena of protest and politics, civil rights, and social reform. On the other hand, another part of me did not need a cue from other athletes, no matter how militant, about my duties as a citizen. I had been brought up to think that I myself was obliged to be a leader, and especially to help my fellow blacks. After years of caution, and with my tennis career over, I needed now to respond to those imperatives.

As I drew close to forty, I was aware of the special bind I was in, the dilemma that almost all professional athletes face when they come to retire. Most professional athletes leave their sport when they are in their twenties, brusquely cut by their teams or, in non-team sports, driven out by recurrent losses. The more successful, far fewer in number, leave professional sports in their thirties. A handful of stars remain into their forties. Then we all are gone, except for the “senior circuits” that have become more and more popular and viable. (I’m not sure that I could have brought myself to play any senior circuit in a serious, dedicated way.)

For most of the people in the world, retirement comes when old age or even death itself is on the horizon. Retirement then seems natural. At that point, the body and the mind are in relative harmony, both worn down from a lifetime of use. But athletes retiring at the age of thirty (or even at thirty-seven, as I was) are taking part in an unnatural rite. We may be tired of our individual sport or even injured, but our bodies are often, on the whole, still fundamentally fresh and vigorous. In no sense are we old. And with the amazing strides in scientific health care today, when men can look forward to living into their eighties, and women even longer, the retirement of a professional athlete is truly an anomaly as retirements go.

Most athletes, no matter how intelligent they may be, are almost totally unprepared to retire, as they are forced to do, while they are in their physical prime. I was at least as cautious
and reflective as the next professional, but I know that I was not adequately prepared to take the step. Remove the glitter and glamour of the tennis world, I wondered, the endless stroking of the ego, the copious episodes of pampering and privilege, and where would I be? Would I end up like so many other ex-athletes I knew or have read about? Would I be haunting bars and picking up women, or loafing in my “den,” swilling beer and playing videocassettes of the highlights of my career over and over to my “buddies,” or to myself? That was not what I wanted.

Doubtless I wasn’t the most intelligent person on the tennis tour, or the most sensitive; but my ideas and my feelings, as well as my principles, were at all times important to me. I guess I was different from most other athletes, especially in tennis, because I knew that a lot of people expected much from me, and that if I disappointed them, it would be extremely painful to them and to me. Some had sacrificed so that I might go forward with my tennis career. Most, however, I had never met. They were simply the masses—I suppose I was thinking mainly of the masses of poor black people—who idealistically expected a great deal from those, like myself, who had been given so much.

“Lord,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, perhaps quoting someone, “make us not great but busy.” I have long savored that little prayer. My father also believed in being busy, and he left his stamp on me. Not simply because he needed or wanted money, but because he believed in the therapy or balm of labor. When he was not on duty in his salaried job as a special policeman, he was working either as a caterer, cooking and waiting on tables in the homes of wealthy white families, or he was involved in the landscaping business, which meant taking care of the gardens of some of those people. No job was beneath Daddy, as long as it was honest. He took pride in being self-sufficient. And I know that my father did each job not merely to the best of his ability but very well.

He even erected a temple to his busyness: his home in Gum Spring, Virginia, some thirty miles from Richmond,
where his widow, my stepmother, Lorene Kimbrough Ashe, still lives today. With my help, such as it was, Daddy built that house almost entirely out of scrap material, mainly cinder blocks and bricks, discarded when Interstate 95, which runs from Maine to Florida, cut its way in the 1960s through Richmond. Following in the wake of the destruction, Daddy picked up what he needed. To complete his house, he bought only certain material, such as tubing and wiring, when he absolutely had to. If he worshiped any deity in his temple besides his Presbyterian God, it was the god of hard work. And if Daddy took pride in what he had achieved, it was a quiet pride, the kind that is always wary of a fall, and that only more work appeases.

No matter how lofty or convoluted my ideas about hard work and fame were, I knew that my first responsibility was to support myself and my family. I did not need money desperately. Far from it. I was in no danger of becoming one of those tragic, or sometimes only pathetic, former professional athletes whose money vanishes even faster than their fame once they retire. Since the start of my professional career in 1969, I had had a financial manager, and I had made it my business to know my finances. After all, my finances were exactly that:
my business
. Unlike some of my friends in sport, I do not freeze with fright before a column of figures. In college, my major was business administration. I had intended to study architecture, but my coach and mentor, the late J. D. Morgan of UCLA, had wisely advised me that architecture courses probably left far less time for tennis than those in business administration. Later, while I was playing, I learned more, and in a practical way, about business. Now I would have to apply all that I was taught so that I could maintain the level of financial security I wanted for my family and myself. The idea of not working made no sense at all.

However, I was adamant about not giving myself over exclusively to making money. If God hadn’t put me on earth mainly to stroke tennis balls, he certainly hadn’t put me here to be greedy. I wanted to make a difference, however
small, in the world, and I wanted to do so in a useful and honorable way. Having thought a great deal about the matter, I recognized that there were only a few ways, practically speaking, for me to begin to make a difference.

Although protesting black athletes like Muhammad Ali and John Carlos had challenged me with their example of defiance and militancy, I also had other models in mind for the kind of life I wanted to live after tennis. Frequently in the 1970s, after New York Knickerbocker basketball games at Madison Square Garden in New York, I would meet the Knicks star Bill Bradley to drink a glass of beer and talk about the game just ended and the important issues of the day; sometimes the Giants’ quarterback Fran Tarkenton joined us. Born only a few days after me in 1943, Bradley had gone to Princeton, become an All-American player there, passed up professional basketball to take a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, dutifully finished his Air Force military requirement, then returned to the United States to play for the Knicks, starting in the 1967–68 season. No longer a dominating force as he had been in college, he nevertheless played a crucial supporting role in two glorious Knicks championship seasons. But despite his fame and success, Bradley lived almost austerely. He also lived purposefully. In 1978, the year after he retired, he was elected to the U.S. Senate from New Jersey, where he has served with distinction ever since.

I hoped I could go on, as he had done, to a life of service and achievement after retirement. I also admired what Paul Robeson had done earlier in the century, after an All-American football career at Rutgers and graduation from the Columbia University Law School; Robeson had become first an acclaimed singer and actor, then grown into a charismatic political leader who in the end sacrificed his career for his beliefs. Yet another model for me was Byron “Whizzer” White, a football star who had become a respected U.S. Supreme Court justice; and Jackie Robinson, who moved on from baseball to a position of leadership both in the corporate world and in the African American
community. I wanted to be like these men in what they had achieved beyond sport.

What could I myself do? First, I hoped I could continue to play a prominent role in tennis, although not as a player. Having compiled an outstanding record as a Davis Cup team member, playing for the United States, I wanted sooner or later to become involved in Davis Cup administration, preferably as captain of the squad, which was a great honor and responsibility. Second, I expected to do much more public speaking than in the past; I would try to share with diverse audiences, especially of younger people and people of color, some of my experiences and also my sense of the world. I knew that I also wanted to write, certainly about sport but also about broader social and political issues. Perhaps I could pen a newspaper column. I didn’t think I could write a book—that is, that I would have the time to write one. Having collaborated with three writers on books about me, I suspected that a book would take more time than I could spare.