IF ONE’S REPUTATION is a possession, then of all my possessions, my reputation means most to me. Nothing comes even close to it in importance. Now and then, I have wondered whether my reputation matters too much to me; but I can no more easily renounce my concern with what other people think of me than I can will myself to stop breathing. No matter what I do, or where or when I do it, I feel the eyes of others on me, judging me.
Needless to say, I know that a fine line exists between caring about one’s reputation and hypocrisy. When I speak of the importance to me of my reputation, I am referring to a reputation that is deserved, not an image cultivated for the public in spite of the facts. I know that I haven’t always lived without error or sin, but I also know that I have tried hard to be honest and good at all times. When I fail, my conscience comes alive. I have never sinned or erred without knowing I was being watched.
Who is watching me? The living and the dead. My mother, Mattie Cordell Cunningham Ashe, watches me. She died when I was not quite seven. I remember little about her, except for two images. My last sight of her alive: I was finishing breakfast and she was standing in the side doorway looking lovingly at me. She was dressed in her blue corduroy dressing gown. The day was cool and cloudy, and when I went outside I heard birds singing in the small oak tree outside our house. And then I remember the last time I saw her, in a coffin at home. She was wearing her best dress, made of pink satin. In her right hand was a single red rose. Roses were her favorite flower, and my daddy had planted them all around the house; big, deep-hued red roses.
Every day since then I have thought about her. I would give anything to stand once again before her, to feel her arms about me, to touch and taste her skin. She is with me every day, watching me in everything I do. Whenever I speak to young persons about the morality of the decisions they make in life, I usually tell them, “Don’t do anything you couldn’t tell your mother about.”
My father is watching me, too. My father, whose mouth dropped open when he first saw Jeanne, my wife. She looked so much like my mother, he said. He is still a force in my life. Some years ago, before he died of a stroke in 1989, I was being interviewed by the television journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault in her home.
“Tell me, Arthur,” she said, laughter in her voice, “how is it that I have never heard anyone say anything bad about you? How is it that you have never cursed an umpire, or punched an opponent, or gotten a little drunk and disorderly? Why are you such a goody-goody?”
I laughed in turn, and told the truth.
“I guess I have never misbehaved because I’m afraid that if I did anything like that, my father would come straight up from Virginia, find me wherever I happen to be, and kick my ass.”
When I told that story not long ago on Men’s Day at the Westwood Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, everyone smiled and some folks even laughed. They knew what I was talking about, even those few living in that little enclave of blacks surrounded by whites in Richmond who had never met my father. They knew fathers (and mothers) exactly like him, who in times past would come up and find you wherever you were and remind you exactly who you were and don’t you forget it. You were their child, that’s who.
My father was a strong, dutiful, providing man. He lived and died semi-literate, but he owned his own home and held jobs that were important to him and to people in the community where we lived. His love and his caring were real to me from that Sunday morning in 1950 when he sat on the bottom bunk bed between my brother Johnnie and me and told us between wrenching sobs that our mother had died during the night. From that time on he was father and mother to us. And the lesson he taught above all was about reputation.
“What people think of you, Arthur Junior, your reputation, is all that counts.” Or, as I heard from so many older people as I grew up, “A good name is worth more than diamonds and gold.”
What others think of me is important, and what I think of others is important. What else do I have to go by? Of course, I cannot make decisions based solely on what other people would think. There are moments when the individual must stand alone. Nevertheless, it is crucial to me that people think of me as honest and principled. In turn, to ensure that they do, I must always act in an honest and principled fashion, no matter the cost.
One day, in Dallas, Texas, in 1973, I was playing in the singles final of a World Championship Tennis (WCT) tournament. My opponent was Stan Smith, a brilliant tennis player but an even more impressive human being in his integrity. On one crucial point, I watched Smith storm forward, racing to intercept a ball about to bounce a second time on his side of the net. When the point was over, I was sure the ball had bounced twice before he hit it and that the point was mine. Smith said he had reached the ball in time. The umpire was baffled. The crowd was buzzing.
I called Smith up to the net.
“Stan, did you get to that ball?”
“I did. I got it.”
I conceded the point. Later, after the match—which I lost—a reporter approached me. Was I so naïve? How could I have taken Smith’s word on such an important point?
“Believe me,” I assured him, “I am not a fool. I wouldn’t take just anybody’s word for it. But if Stan Smith says he got to the ball, he got to it. I trust his character.”
When I was not quite eighteen years old, I played a tournament in Wheeling, West Virginia, the Middle Atlantic Junior Championships. As happened much of the time when I was growing up, I was the only black kid in the tournament, at least in the under-eighteen age section. One night, some of the other kids trashed a cabin; they absolutely destroyed it. And then they decided to say that I was responsible, although I had nothing to do with it. The incident even got into the papers. As much as I denied and protested, those white boys would not change their story.
I rode to Washington from West Virginia with the parents of Dickie Dell, another one of the players. They tried to reassure me, but it was an uncomfortable ride because I was silently worrying about what my father would do and say to me. When I reached Washington, where I was to play in another tournament, I telephoned him in Richmond. As I was aware, he already knew about the incident. When he spoke, he was grim. But he had one question only.
“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.
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.
About five weeks later, Doug sent Jeanne and me a touching letter about what he called “the fiasco in New York,” in which he confessed to “the disturbance in my [Doug’s] soul caused by my role in the experience.” Nevertheless, he believed that “this traumatic event, and my role in it, were meant to be. The Lord, as my mother used to explain when logic was illusive, sometimes works in mysterious ways.”
I couldn’t bring myself to blame Doug himself for anything, and I certainly didn’t have him in mind when I told the news conference that someone had “ratted” on me. Still, something in his letter didn’t set well with me. Although he surely hadn’t intended it in his letter, he had identified the role of the press, specifically USA Today, with the Lord. I was pretty certain at the time that Jesus Christ or Jehovah was not on the staff of that newspaper. In his appeal to scripture I thought I saw a claim to the divine right of the press. I am a firm believer in the freedom of the press, and in the First Amendment, broadly construed. I knew more than a little about the history of press censorship in the United States from John Peter Zenger down to our time. But I was still angry every time I thought about what the press had done to me.
Was I justified in claiming that I had a right to privacy? Or was USA Today justified in asserting its privilege? For the record, the newspaper had acted with some deliberation. The editors had decided at about eleven o’clock on Tuesday evening, the day before my announcement, not to carry the story. The decision had involved not simply Policinski but also Peter Prichard, the editor of the paper. With some accuracy, USA Today could assert, and did assert, that it never broke the story. Once I had made my decision, the newspaper enjoyed only a minor scoop of sorts. At one o’clock, before my conference, it sent the story to the newspaper’s international edition, which mainly reaches Europe and Asia. The story was also sent to the Gannett News Service, which supplies a chain of eighty newspapers, including USA Today, as well as Cable News Network (CNN). “Tennis great Arthur Ashe has AIDS,” the item began, “he will announce Wednesday afternoon at a New York press conference.”
No one could doubt, however, who had forced my hand. To my surprise, and my satisfaction, this aspect of my announcement generated great controversy. More than seven hundred letters reached USA Today on the issue of my right to privacy, and about 95 percent vehemently opposed the newspaper’s position. In other newspapers, the story created less of a stir but still attracted a suprising number of letters and comments, often angrily expressed. “I didn’t want to turn on the television or read a newspaper ever again,” a woman in Indianapolis wrote. “I cried last night, and I’m crying today.… Shame on USA Today.” “I think USA Today is a villain this morning,” one man from Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote. From a man in Sioux City, Iowa: “It seems to me that this story would be something I’d read in the grocery store sleaze journalism department, not USA Today.” A man in Topeka, Kansas: “Linking AIDS with a public figure is titillating but rarely newsworthy. There is no compelling reason in this case to reveal Ashe has AIDS.”
Among famous tennis players, long accustomed to the ways of the press, at least two had comments. “It’s like the press has given up a touch of humanity,” Chris Evert told a reporter. And Billie Jean King, who certainly had been burned badly by publicity, remarked knowingly: “It’s almost like your life becomes a competition between members of the media.”
A few readers felt differently. If Ashe had disclosed his condition earlier, a man from Huntsville, Alabama, wrote, “he might have saved a lot of people, including Magic Johnson. Because he is such a notable individual, especially in the black community, he could have done a lot of good work for minorities, since we make up 12 percent of the population, but 29 percent of those with AIDS.” And another man, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, declared that Ashe “should have come out earlier and made his announcement when he discovered it or at least sooner than he did. Maybe he felt that his privacy would be invaded. I feel at the same time that AIDS needed a spokesman.” A woman in Salem, Oregon, wrote the newspaper to “completely support your story on Arthur Ashe. He was not secretive about his life-threatening heart problem and the whole thing about his particular situation is the stigma attached. That stigma is the thing that needs to be changed.… I thank you for running the story.”
A woman in St. Louis, Missouri, probably speaking for a lot of people, testified both to the solid reputation that USA Today had built in the few years of its existence and to the complexity of the issue. “You are really taking a public beating for breaking the Arthur Ashe story,” she observed. “Good luck, and maybe something good will come of this somehow.”
As the adverse criticism rolled in to USA Today (with 481 telephone calls, most of them negative, and 60 canceled subscriptions by 7:00 p.m. the following day), its editor took to its pages to defend the role of the newspaper in the affair. Not to have followed up the lead, argued Prichard, would have been to help me keep my secret. “Generally,” he insisted, “I think it’s a mistake for journalists to keep secrets—or to protect some friends who happen to be public figures, but not others.” Citing some famous instances of the American press keeping a secret, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s paralysis or Woodrow Wilson’s stroke, he insisted that such a “conspiracy of silence has not served the public. Ashe is not a public official, but for many people, young and old, he’s probably as influential as any president.” By sharing the story, “Ashe and his family are free of a great weight.”
I was flattered by his assessment of my influence, and by the comparisons to Roosevelt and Wilson, if only through our various infirmities. But my family and I did not now feel ourselves free of a burden. Camera, for one, had not been aware of any weight at all, but now had to assume one. Jeanne and I may have put down one heavy weight, but we had certainly picked up another, and one far more imposing.
One good result, at our expense but worthwhile on the whole, was the spirited discussion of the rights of the press and the right to privacy that echoed in the media itself. Inevitably certain cases were brought up. These were not references as arcane as Roosevelt and Wilson but of more recent vintage, about what the press had done to certain people in the name of its vaunted rights. Some had been presidential candidates such as Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and Jerry Brown. Hart seemed to dare the reporters to find out something untoward about him, but Clinton’s accuser was paid (reportedly $100,000) and prompted to tell her story of alleged marital infidelity on national television, to some 21 million viewers, according to The New York Times. Again on national television, Jerry Brown was accused by two men, unidentified and disguised, of allowing drugs to be used in his home while he was governor of California, even though the accusation seemed poorly founded. Then there was the case of William Kennedy Smith, of the Kennedy family, accused of rape and tried in a court of law; and of his alleged victim, whose name was revealed by one of the three major television networks in contravention of established journalistic practice concerning the victims of rape. And Senator Brock Adams of Washington, accused in the Seattle Times by eight women of sexual harassment—eight women who were not identified by the newspaper.
In the days that followed my announcement, several other newspapers, journalists, and organizations joined in the debate, quite apart from the many ordinary citizens who wrote to magazines and newspapers to express their opinion. The New York Times reported “a wave of public criticism of news organizations that was joined by some who have normally been among the press’s staunchest champions.” And indeed the executive director of the reporters’ Committee for the Freedom of the Press said of the position taken by USA Today, “My visceral reaction was that this is the kind of thing that’s going to get us regulated.”
Several writers who defended my position used a special term—“outed”—to describe what had been done to me. The term refers to the growing practice among militant gays of deliberately publicizing the names of well-known individuals who are homosexual but live “in the closet.” The aim, as I understand it, is both to discourage hypocrisy and to increase the power of gays by showing how pervasive gay culture really is. Ellen Goodman, the respected columnist and associate editor of the Boston Globe, called my case “the medical equivalent of an outing.” She also called Policinski’s explanation “pretentious.” Another syndicated columnist, DeWayne Wickham, wrote that I deserved “the same privacy considerations” routinely given to rape victims; like them, I “should not be twice victimized by being made to suffer the harsh glare of the public spotlight.” Michael Olesker in the Baltimore Sun declared that my privacy had been violated “because we in America live in a state of constant feeding frenzy now. Gossip is our snack food. The need for empty caloric titillation never goes away, it only arrives in a different wrapping each new morning.”
Anna Quindlen, a syndicated columnist for The New York Times, eloquently went back and forth, caught in a dilemma that was evidently heartfelt. “I am disquieted by the Arthur Ashe story,” she wrote. “I can’t help but feel that in the medical sense we outed him, a practice that, in the sexual sense, I deplore. That’s the human being talking. The reporter understands: public figure, big news.” And: “Privacy, privacy. The white light of the press and the closed doors of our homes are two of the most deeply prized aspects of our lives as Americans. It just so happens that … they are often in direct opposition to each other.” Raymond R. Coffey, editor of the editorial page of the Chicago Sun-Times, conceding that his position would be counted “treason” in some quarters, supported me. “What the news media (most specifically USA Today) did to Arthur Ashe,” he argued, “was, in my view, something for all of us to be ashamed of.” To Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post, the editors of USA Today had gone after the story “with all the fury of a cur attacking a T-bone because the story had sensational potential. That Ashe had long ago ceased to be a ‘public figure’ as anyone in his right mind would interpret the term was entirely beside the point; the point was that red meat was there to be eaten.”
Despite all of these vigorous attacks on the approach taken by USA Today, however, support for its position among editors and other journalists was clearly strong. One poll of seven editors who were then visiting Washington for the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors revealed that six of the seven would have acted as USA Today had done. An editorial in The New York Times accused me of aiming my “barbs at the wrong target.” Instead of being annoyed with the person who had put out the word about my condition, or with USA Today, I should have aimed at “the cruel and benighted public attitudes that compelled Mr. Ashe to keep his disease secret for three years.” Needless to say, I considered the Times’s position self-serving.
The issue of privacy is far more important than one would think. The U.S. Constitution does not mention privacy, but the U.S. Supreme Court recognizes privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution. A long essay in the Times, prompted specifically by what had happened to me, pointed out that in a 1965 decision, Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court had validated the idea of a constitutional basis to the right to privacy. In that case, the state of Connecticut had tried to bar the sale of contraceptives; but the Supreme Court ruled that the law violated the privacy of married couples. Roe v. Wade, allowing abortion, has been one of the most controversial decisions of the Supreme Court in my lifetime, and few people know that the court based its decision on the concept of the right to privacy. Laws against abortion, according to the court, violate the right to privacy of women who happen to be pregnant.
Nevertheless, the court had definitely been on the permissive side in supporting the right of journalists to report on events in the lives of public figures. One of the most dubious decisions, I think, was that involving the young man who sued the San Francisco Chronicle after it published a news article referring to his having helped stop someone from trying to kill Gerald Ford, then president of the United States. Instead of enjoying his status as a hero, the man had to cope with his inadvertent “outing” by the Chronicle. The paper reported that he was gay, and that was how his family found out he was gay. The man sued the newspaper, and lost. He had become a public figure when he tried to save the life of the president; therefore, he was fair game for the press.
The press, in effect, has to decide what is fair and what is not. It has to discipline itself. Obviously I thought that one important newspaper had not done so in my case. I am, when I wear one of my hats, a member of the press as a television commentator on tennis and as an irregular columnist in the Washington Post. I see both sides of the issue, but I do not believe that the line between the two sides is nearly as fuzzy as some people suggest. In a column in the Post right after my “outing,” I tried to express myself on this point. “I know there are trade-offs in life,” I wrote. “I understand that the press has a watchdog role in the maintenance of our freedoms and to expose corruption. But the process whereby news organizations make distinctions seems more art than science. I wasn’t then, and am not now, comfortable with being sacrificed for the sake of the ‘public’s right to know.’ Doctors, lawyers and journalists have gone to jail rather than expose a client or source without his or her permission. Perhaps sportswriters’ organizations should take another look at the currently accepted rationale for making these decisions.”
THE DAY AFTER my press conference, I made sure to keep the two appointments on my calendar because I was anxious to see how people would respond to me after the announcement. I was thinking not only about the people I knew personally, even intimately, but also about waiters and bartenders, doormen and taxi drivers. I knew all the myths and fears about AIDS. I also understood that if I hadn’t been educated in the harshest possible way—by contracting the disease and living with it—I would probably share some of those myths and fears. I knew that I couldn’t spread the disease by coughing or breathing or using plates and cups in a restaurant, but I knew that in some places my plates and cups would receive special attention, perhaps some extra soap and hot water. Perhaps they would be smashed and thrown away.
That morning, I accompanied Donald M. Stewart, head of the College Board testing service, on a visit to the offices of the New York Community Trust. We were seeking a grant of $5,000 to support the publication of a handbook aimed at student-athletes. The appointment went well; we got the money. And in the evening, I went in black tie to a gala dinner to celebrate the eightieth birthday of a man I had known for thirty years and regarded as one of my key mentors in New York City, Joseph Cullman III, a former chairman of Philip Morris. At the event, which took place at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, I felt anxiety rising as our taxi drew up to the curb. How would the other guests respond to me? The first person I saw was an old friend, John Reese. An investment banker now, in his youth John had been an up-and-coming star with me in junior tennis. He saw me, and hurried over. There was no mistaking the warmth of his greeting, his genuine concern but also his understanding of my predicament. We walked inside together and I had a fine time at the celebration.
Did I feel a sense of shame, however subdued, about having AIDS, although I was guilty of nothing in contracting it? Very little. I could not shake off completely that irrational sense of guilt, but I did my best to keep it in check, to recognize that it was based on nothing substantial.
I was glad, in this context, that I had not concealed my condition from certain people. I had reminded myself from the outset that I had an obligation to tell anyone who might be materially hurt by the news when it came out. I have been both proud of my commercial connections and grateful to the people who had asked me to represent them or work for them in some other way. Several of them had taken a chance on me when they knew full well, from the most basic market research in the early 1970s, that having an African American as a spokesman or an officer might cost them business.
Among these organizations, the most important were the Aetna Life and Casualty Company, where I was a member of the board of directors; Head USA, the sports-equipment manufacturer that had given me my first important commercial endorsement, a tennis racquet with my very own autograph on it; the Doral Resort and Country Club in Florida, where I had directed the tennis program; Le Coq Sportif, the sports-clothing manufacturer; Home Box Office (HBO), the cable-television network for which I worked as an analyst at Wimbledon; and ABC Sports, for which I also served as a commentator.
Not one of these companies had dropped me after I quietly revealed to their most important executives that I had AIDS. Now those executives had to deal with the response of the public. I would have to give them a chance to put some distance between their companies and me because I now carried the most abominable and intimidating medical virus of our age. In business, image is everything. And one would have to go back to leprosy, or the plague, to find a disease so full of terrifying implications as AIDS carries. AIDS was a scientific mystery that defied our vaunted claims for science, and also a religious or spiritual riddle—at least to those who insisted on thinking of it as possibly a punishment from God for our evil on earth, as more than one person had publicly suggested.
As far as I am concerned, these companies did not owe me anything. They had products and services to sell, and employees and stockholders and their families who were dependent on them. If I hurt their business, I believe, they would be obliged to revise our arrangements. I would not have waved my contract in anyone’s face, or hidden behind an ingenious lawyer. I understand business and free enterprise. My university degree is in the field of business administration, and I have profited from business and the free-enterprise system.
I waited for the phone calls and the signs that my services were no longer needed. None came.
I READ SOMEWHERE that in the two weeks following his announcement that he was HIV-positive, Earvin “Magic” Johnson received thousands of pieces of mail, and that months later he was still receiving hundreds of letters a week. Well, I received nothing approaching that volume of correspondence following my press conference, but I certainly had a mountain of reading and writing to do in its aftermath. And every time I appeared on one of the few television interview shows I agreed to do, such as with Barbara Walters or Larry King, there was another surge of correspondence. I heard from the famous and the completely unknown, people I knew and people I had never met.
The most moving letters, without a doubt, came from people who had lived through an AIDS illness, either their own or that of a loved one. Often the loved one was now dead. These writers, above all, understood why I had made such a fuss about the issue of privacy. Many probably understood better than I did, because they were more vulnerable than I am, and had suffered more. One Manhattan woman wrote to tell me about her father, who had received HIV-tainted blood, as I had, through a blood transfusion following heart surgery. Without knowing it, he had passed the infection on to her mother. For some years, they had kept their illness a secret from their daughter. After they could keep the secret from her no longer, she in turn had worked to keep their secret from other family members and friends, and from the world. Although both parents were now dead, she wrote, “I share your anger at that anonymous person who violated either your trust or their professional ethics.”
Another woman, writing from Toronto, told of her husband’s similar infection. He, like me, had received a transfusion during his second bypass operation. One summer five years later, he was plagued by unaccountable bouts of fatigue and flulike symptoms. In the winter came a cough that would not go away. The spring brought pneumonia, and death. Virtually to the end, his illness seemed inexplicable. Only three days before his death was he finally tested for AIDS. The test was positive.
A grandmother in New England, HIV-positive after a transfusion, shared with me her terror that the company she worked for would dismiss her if they found out; she was awaiting the passage of a law that might protect her. From Idaho, a mother told me about her middle-aged son, who had tried to keep his AIDS condition a secret even from her: “My son kept it to himself for six months before he told me and I’ll never forget that day as we cried together.” His ordeal included dementia, forced incarceration in a state asylum, and ostracism by relatives and friends. But mother and son had spent his last “four difficult months” together. “I’m so thankful to have had those days with him.”
I heard from people whom I had not thought of in years, and some of them had been touched by their own tragedy. A woman I remembered as a stunningly beautiful UCLA coed, as we called them in those days, told me about her younger brother, who had been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS about five years before. “He is gay,” she reported, “and I saw how he lost so much self-esteem and hope” because of intolerance. “No one can speak as eloquently as you and Magic to allow the stigma to disperse regarding this situation.” Another letter illustrated the power of the stigma. Signed simply, “Sorry I can’t identify myself, but you understand,” it came from a man who had been diagnosed with HIV three years ago. “I’m the father of six children and many grandchildren. I’m not into needles or the gay life. Don’t know where it came from (really).”
As for my daughter, Camera, more than one writer underscored my fears about what she might have to undergo from insensitive people in the future. A woman whose son had died of AIDS about a year before, following the death of his wife, was now bringing up their young son: “I struggle with how this little child is going to deal with the insults and rejections that people will inflict on him when they find out that his father died from AIDS.”
Perhaps the most unusual letter I received from someone with an ailing relative came from a woman in Florida who offered an anguished apology to me and others who had been infected from blood transfusions. As she told it, her mother had become HIV-positive two years before, following a personal history of drug addiction. “I realize that your situation, and [that of] many others who have contracted the virus, has been caused by people like my mother who have lived their lives with such disregard for the sanctity of human life.”
Needless to say, I am grateful to all those who have taken the trouble to write. Most of the letters left me humbled. Among those famous people who wrote immediately after my announcement was Nelson Mandela, who is one of my genuine heroes, and whom I had met both in South Africa and here at home. He sent a long letter on the stationery of the African National Congress of South Africa. “I can never forget my own joy at meeting you,” he wrote. “I hope you feel my embrace across the continents and that it serves to let you know that we love you and wish you well.” Elizabeth Taylor, whose work on behalf of AIDS sufferers is to her eternal credit, sent a bouquet of tulips, and a lovely note: “My thoughts, prayers and admiration are with you and your family.”
(I had never met her. Some months later, I read a story about her AIDS work in Vanity Fair and was startled to see my name. She had been annoyed when a colleague in their AIDS foundation, American Foundation for AIDS Research [AmFAR], contacted Magic Johnson after his announcement, to try to get him to join their effort. “I don’t want to use him,” she said about Magic. “It’s the same with Arthur Ashe.” She called my press treatment “appalling. The way [somebody] chooses to die is their own goddamn business.”)
In addition to the telephone call from President Bush, I also received kind letters from former presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. An avid sportsman, Nixon had credited a meeting with me years before with stirring his interest in tennis. Given his wars with the press, I was not surprised that he backed my position against USA Today: “Your privacy should have been respected.” Ford evidently concurred: “Betty and I congratulate you on your superb handling of a very difficult and personal matter. You and Mrs. Ashe have our highest admiration and affection.”
Much more surprising to me was a letter from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whose own television ordeal I had watched with dread fascination, and without being convinced of his guilt or, indeed, his innocence. “You have been an inspiration to me for most of my life,” he wrote. “I admire & respect you; I will continue to remember you & your family in my prayers.”
A woman who had cleaned my hotel room during a tournament in Tucson, Arizona, fifteen years before in 1975, wrote to Frank Deford after reading a story of his about me in Newsweek. She praised my “kindness, gentleness, and serenity.” I was glad to get her letter.
Many tennis players called or sent me cards, notes, and letters, including Charlie Pasarell, one of my best friends from tennis and someone I’ve known since I was fourteen, and Pam Shriver, who generously sent a contribution in my name to the United Negro College Fund. I also heard from Tracy Austin, Brian Gottfried, Jeff Borowiak, Tom Okker (who had watched my news conference on CNN in Holland), and Rod Laver. I was a little surprised at the intensity of Laver’s reaction. Rod and his wife, Mary, wrote about their “concern, emptiness, and yes, also anger” at the news. Since my tennis victories over him had been rare—two wins in twenty-one matches—I was pleased to be saluted by “the Rocket” now as a “great champion, both on & off the court.”
A telegram came from the soccer star Pelé—Edson Arantes do Nascimento; two messages from the boxer Sugar Ray Leonard; a touching note from Lynn Swann, who had been a star wide receiver with the Pittsburgh Steelers football team and who always impressed me as being so much more than a professional athlete. John Thompson, the renowned basketball coach at Georgetown University, with whom I had sparred at one point on the telephone over the question of academic requirements for black student athletes, expressed the “good feeling that you’ll be around to irritate me for a long time; this is my very sincere prayer.” I received a card from the tennis team at the University of Chicago, and from Terry Donahue, the football coach, and various athletes at UCLA, my alma mater. I was pleased to hear from students at various elementary schools, including some I had visited, as I often do.
Many of these letters brought back powerful memories or associations, as did one from the outstanding golfer Gary Player. We had had our differences about his country, South Africa, where I had been banned twice, and about apartheid, which he could never bring himself to attack and which I found impossible for anyone to defend. Telling me about an educational foundation he had started in South Africa, he sent his sympathy and kind wishes: “Whilst we have perhaps at times had different views on South Africa in the past, I think we have both shared a common interest in people and mankind and have tried to contribute to society as a whole.”
Race and politics crossing medicine and disease. One card I received called me “an inspiration to many people during your career. Our thoughts and prayers are with you and your family as you face this new challenge.” It was signed: “A white family in Mississippi.”
Believe me, these letters helped. I think I know better than to accept that all or even most of the praise heaped on me is deserved; but I felt good to know that so many people thought so highly of me. On the other hand, I know that sympathy clouds the judgment, especially when the object of sympathy has an illness we think of as terminal. Or an illness that is terminal. I began to have a sense in reading many of the letters and the essays on me in newspapers and magazines that I was reading my obituary, but I could not say, as Mark Twain did, that the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. Exaggerated, but not greatly.
The sportswriter S. L. Price, in the Knight-Ridder newspapers, showed me that I was not imagining the funereal undertone. Price wrote:
… People talk about beating cancer. No one talks about beating AIDS. These victims talk about living a full life, about the new treatments. They hope for a cure. But everyone else—even the wives and the parents and the good, close friends who want to believe—they cannot help but to begin placing them gently into the past.
It began for Arthur Ashe on Wednesday. Testimonials. Tributes. Words on a tombstone. He was a great champion. He battled apartheid, he spoke eloquently on black issues, he was a fine man. All in the past tense. He was.
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.