That "Other" Ashe...

Greatly enjoyed the discussion last Saturday night, mes amis---

I’ve got some additional thoughts to share, but first I have to make one thing clear: the idea to delay the start of the meeting three-and-a-half hours was my idea, and my idea alone (and it would have worked perfectly if everyone had checked his e-mail in a timely fashion, ahem, but I won’t go there). Anyway, just wanted to make sure everyone knew that.

I’ve been thinking about Rhoden’s book, and our discussion of it, and the one name that never came up, in the book (as far as I recall) or last Saturday, was Arthur Ashe! Remember when Nate suggested that Rhoden, when he critiqued today’s athletes, wasn’t accounting for the times (particularly, as I chimed in, when he longs for movement-style activism in a post-movement era)? And I said something like, “You couldn’t just float back then, you were forced to take a stance, and if you didn’t, you’d get slammed”? Well, Arthur Ashe got slammed. In the same way Hobbs’s suggestion that Michael Jordan, if he was so inclined, would have been positioned to be a Jim Brown-style activist/catalyst, the way Jordan actually is seems, now that I've considered it, very Ashe-like.

He was a very high-profile athlete in a sport with very few blacks, and he tried to float, and got smacked for it. (You might find Days of Grace, Ashe’s autobiography, a very interesting read; I sure did.) True, he became quite the activist when he retired, but as a practicing athlete, he was mum. If it’s true, as his agent David Falk insists, that it’s just Jordan’s personality to be apolitical, then I wonder if Jordan, had he played in the movement era, might have looked and sounded something like Ashe---not necessarily in terms of voice and manner (they were/are two very different men), but in terms of their approach to politics, and sports, and fame.

Don’t you think if Ashe was a top tennis star today, say, like James Blake, only better, and was consistently challenging (and occasionally beating) Federer for Grand Slam titles, nobody would slam him for not taking a political stance on, say, the Darfor crisis, or the Iraq war, or anything else, for that matter. Keep in mind, just a few months ago, if not more recently than that, LeBron James refused to sign a petition condemning the Darfor situation; I think he said he didn’t know enough about it or something. Obviously his refusal got some pub, or else I wouldn’t know about it. But it wasn’t very big news, after all….