Keeping the Ashe Legacy Relevant
By Ronald Roach
Although tennis is regarded as an elite sport, the success that came to Arthur Ashe Jr. during and after his tennis career helped make him a figure whose impact reached far beyond the narrow confines of the tennis world. Among his exploits, Ashe is the first and only Black man to win the U.S. Open, Wimbledon and Australian Open tennis titles, besides his social activism and dedicated attention to academic achievement that made him the rare all-rounded individual in American sports.
This past February, the 10th anniversary of his death triggered an outpouring of tributes in the news media and by a few sports organizations. Ashe, who was 49 years old when he succumbed to an AIDS-related illness on Feb. 6, 1993, is now celebrated as much for his social activism and dedication to academic achievement as for his accomplishments on the tennis court. Scholars and sports experts say Ashe’s legacy makes him a unique figure in modern sports and one that will be a standard for others for a long time to come.
“I think Ashe is the model of the student-athlete that we need today. Ashe carved out his own place,” says Dr. Earl Smith, the chairman of the sociology department at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.
“He had a quiet diplomacy, and a quiet activism,” says Dr. Jeffrey Sammons, a history professor at New York University who has written extensively on sports in American society.
At the same time, there’s concern that keeping Ashe’s legacy relevant to younger people, especially among Blacks, may not appear to be the slam dunk that it should be, according to some. To the extent that student-athletes put athletics over academics in middle school, high school and college, Ashe might appear to be a remote and forbidding figure. And, unlike the period of the 1960s and 1970s, sports and social activism remain the uneasy mix they had been for much of 20th-century American history.
