He strolled into Westwood as a student for the first time in 1961, a pioneer before his 18th birthday. He excelled as a Bruin and beyond, blossoming into one of the world's finest tennis players. He would grow into a civil rights icon and become one of the most famous people on earth.
But nearly six decades after Arthur Ashe first stepped foot on UCLA's campus, and more than 25 years after his incomprehensible death, his legacy lives on.
It lives throughout the UCLA campus that continues to spread his name.
It breathes inside the Bruins' tennis team facility that boasts of its greatest champion.
And, most importantly, Arthur Ashe's legacy remains in the hearts and minds of those who knew him best.
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Preserving and sharing the story of one of history's great Bruins is a task that Patricia Turner, UCLA's Dean and Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education, does not take lightly.
In 2017, with a major donation from Ashe's widow โ Jeanne Moutossamy-Ashe โ Turner helped steward the launch of the Arthur Ashe Legacy Fund at UCLA.
"His athletic legacy is just a part of (his life)," Turner said. "Had he just been a tennis star and nothing else, we might have handled it differently. His contributions in the arena of the anti-apartheid movement, his work with heart disease and AIDS, his research on African American athletes: There was an intellectual component to his life, and it's really important to share that."
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Arthur Ashe oral historian Chinyere Nwonye, a 2019 UCLA graduate,
speaks with one of Ashe's longtime friends Raymond Turner.
(Photo Courtesy Chinyere Nwonye)
Turner spreads the message to a new freshman class every year in a Fiat Lux seminar with 20 students who meet an hour a week and learn about Ashe's life, both from his own words, and from his friends and family. She also has spearheaded the Arthur Ashe Oral History Project, which is seeking to preserve the memories of Ashe's closest friends and confidants.
Chinyere Nwonye, a 2019 UCLA graduate, took Turner's seminar after regularly walking by the Arthur Ashe Student Health Center in the middle of the UCLA campus, and she became intrigued.
A year after taking Turner's course, Nwonye was asked to be a student ambassador for the Legacy Fund's Spark campaign. Now she serves as one of Ashe's oral historians, along with project director Yolanda Hester.
One of the program's goals: To chronicle and preserve the story of Ashe's younger life.
The New York Public Library hosts an archive of Ashe material, but it primarily focuses on the period of 1980 through 1993, when Ashe succumbed to the AIDS virus he contracted through a blood transfusion. Another archive at the United States Tennis Academy focuses on Ashe's life as a tennis player.
The AAOHP seeks to learn more about Ashe's childhood growing up in Richmond, Virginia, where he faced segregation and racial intolerance and struggled to become the first prominent young black men's tennis player in history, learning from none other than Althea Gibson's teacher, Robert "Whirlwind" Johnson. And the project seeks to explore Ashe's time at UCLA (1961-65), from his tennis exploits to his dedication to the ROTC to his emerging willingness to speak out against injustices.
"It was interesting to learn about how he went through this evolution," Nwonye said. "He came to UCLA in 1961 and there was a lot going on โ civil rights and, soon, the Vietnam War โ and not that he was necessarily involved in those things on campus, but for a lot of his life, he was trying to figure out his role in activism.
What Nwonye appreciates most is getting the chance to learn about who Arthur Ashe was before he became THE Arthur Ashe.
"I think the students like hearing that he didn't have everything figured out at UCLA," Turner said. "They like hearing evidence that he's like them."
Added Nwonye: "Sometimes when we look at figures, we only hear about them when they reached their peak. Here, you really get to see how he developed and learned. And you understand: Being another Arthur Ashe isn't about being the best tennis player, it is about being the best humanitarian you can be. That's been the thing for me. To tell his story so honestly and respectfully so people understand what he was teaching us."
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In the UCLA men's tennis team room, Ashe remains the teacher of all teachers.
"We have two main players highlighted in our team room: One is Arthur and one is Jimmy Connors," longtime Bruin head coach Billy Martin said. "We have almost all of our
UCLA tennis coach J.D. Morgan (left) with Ashe following his
NCAA singles championship (PHOTO: UCLA Athletics)
meetings in that team room, and everybody on our team knows what kind of humanitarian he was. I always try to mention how important he was to my tennis life and to me as a young man, someone who took a kindness to me and took me under his wing in my junior days. I want to highlight to our guys that one day, maybe they can be someone like that, to be special for another young man or woman in tennis or business or life. That's what Arthur was all about."
Martin got his first lesson from Ashe before he was a teenager. Growing up in Chicago, Martin was the top junior tennis player in the country in 1968 when Ashe arrived at Northwestern University for a winter exhibition to be played on the team's basketball court. A mutual friend arranged a meeting, and Martin was able to pick his brain. That week, Martin served as Ashe's ball boy.
The tutelage worked: Martin went on to become a UCLA tennis legend and an NCAA singles champion himself, then joined the coaching staff in Westwood, where he's remained for nearly four decades. It is in that role that Martin serves as a purveyor of Ashe's wisdom.
"As a young kid on the pro tour, you saw Arthur and he's coming to the courts with a briefcase, and you saw him do business," remembers Martin. "The only thing I cared about was tennis. But that was Arthur. He'd come and speak to us, and we weren't real knowledgeable, very selfish, only interested in scoring points and getting rankings, but he had a much bigger picture. As a young kid, you didn't see it. Every time I look back, I can see how much more well-rounded and diverse Arthur was. There was so much more than tennis to him."
His UCLA teammates learned that from the very beginning.
"There was a lot of awe of Arthur," said Larry Nagler, a senior on the UCLA tennis team when Ashe was a freshman. "In the early days, it was because he was the Jackie Robinson of tennis. He was breaking down the color barrier for tennis. That in and of itself was a major undertaking, and he did it by at all times being a gentleman. He was an extremely thoughtful person, which is very unlike tennis players, including myself. He had a much broader outlook on life and what was important, but he hadn't yet found his place as a civil rights persona."
For a time, Ashe was known more for his tennis achievements than for changing the world. He was, after all, the first black men's tennis player to win Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.
One of his finest moments on court came in London in 1975 when he met fellow Bruin Connors in the Wimbledon final. Connors, the No. 1 player in the world and the defending Wimbledon champion, was the overwhelming favorite. Ashe would go on to pull off a 6-1, 6-1, 5-7, 6-4 upset.
Charlie Pasarell, Ashe's long-time best friend and UCLA teammate, remembers the eve of that encounter well.
"Three of us went out to dinner (Pasarell, Ashe and a friend), and we're asking Arthur, 'How are you gonna play this guy? Here's what we think.' Some of it he implemented, some he didn't. But it was the most strategic tennis match probably ever played. We all felt it might as well be us out there. It'll be remembered forever."
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In the 1975 all-Bruin Wimbledon final, Ashe upset world No. 1
Jimmy Connors (left), 6-1, 6-1, 5-7, 6-4. (PHOTO: Getty Images)
Added Nagler: "He actually was able to pull it off in part because of his intellect. The difference between the very best and the close to the very best is in the mind. They all have the physical ability. All of them.
But the ones who get there have that steely mind, and Arthur developed that better than many people."
A bigger achievement than that victory, Martin insists, was that he never saw Ashe raise his voice or say a cross word.
He was just very quiet and soft-spoken, and when he did say something, it was profound," said Martin. "So many different personalities on the pro tour and guys were shooting off their mouth a lot. Arthur never did, and when Arthur did say something, people listened. They might not have agreed, but when he said something, if and when he did, people respected it."
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Ashe does not just live on in the teachings of Turner or the musings of Martin.
To his closest friends, he remains an ever-present part of their lives.
"I remember my first encounter with Arthur," said Pasarell. "I was 12, he was 13. We met in a tennis match, the quarterfinals of the Orange Bowl in Miami. That was the first time I even knew there was an Arthur Ashe. I still remember the match, I still remember the score: 6-2, 2-6, 6-2. I happened to win that match."
Ashe did not bear a grudge, and the two became fast friends, regularly seeing each other on the junior tennis circuit, where both were among the top-rated players in the country.
Both faced prejudice in a country-club sport dominated by lily-white faces. One day at a tournament in the south, the two piled into Pasarell's mother's car with some other players, and they decided to stop for dinner.ย
"The people start looking at Arthur like he shouldn't be there," Pasarell said. "You had to know my mother โ 'Hi, how are you, I understand you have great food here and I want you to feed all of my kids."
They ate well that night, but the discrimination continued once Ashe got to UCLA, said Pasarell, who followed in the footsteps of Ashe and attended UCLA one year later.
"There was a time in the early UCLA days, and they invited our tennis team to play at a club โ and I'm not going to mention the club โ and they told our coach J.D. Morgan, 'We want you to bring the team minus Arthur,' and J.D. said, 'No Arthur, no team.'"
Those early memories helped mold Ashe into the ardent activist he would later become.
Ashe is credited with helping end apartheid in South Africa after years of protest, first by refusing to play in the segregated country in the late-60s; then by agreeing to play, but only if South Africa would desegregate the tennis stands, and only if he could travel to wherever he chose. Years later, on Jan. 11, 1985, he was arrested for protesting outside of the South African embassy in Washington D.C.
For Ashe, the fight against injustice was a life-long battle. And in that battle, he formed life-long allies.
"Arthur kept a secret nobody knew: He was secretly communicating with Nelson Mandela," Pasarell said. "They were passing secret messages. I was there, and I didn't have a clue. Fast forward, Mandela gets out of prison, becomes president, he comes to U.S. for the first time ever, and as soon as they pick him up, he turns to the mayor and says 'do you mind if we stop to see a friend I need to see? He was my friend when I needed friends.' They stop the motorcade, Mandela gets out of the car โ says, 'No, I want to go by myself,' and he goes up to Arthur's apartment on 86th, and they met. He wanted to see Arthur, first and foremost."
By then, Ashe's family and friends knew of his struggle with the HIV diagnosis that would eventually shorten his life.
Cautious to put his family's safety and privacy on the line, Ashe kept his diagnosis secret for many years. Upon learning that a USA Today reporter was about to report about his health status, Ashe held a press conference on April 8, 1992, to announce the news.
Pasarell happened to be in New York that day. Ashe asked if his friend would be by his side during the announcement, and the press tour that followed.
After first meeting as teenagers on the junior tennis circuit, Charlie Pasarell (right)
and Ashe would go on to be UCLA teammates. They remained close
friends until Ashe's passing of AIDS in 1993.ย
"Typical Arthur โ when he needed to speak up, he did," Pasarell said. "AIDS still very much had a stigma to it, a social stigma. I remember Arthur saying 'it's time for me to do it'. He wanted to do it before the article came out."
Adds Pasarell, "He was always more concerned about you than he was concerned about himself. "That used to bother me. Particularly it bothered me toward the end of his life, when he disclosed to his close friends that he was suffering from AIDS. We'd talk frequently โ he in New York, me in California โ and I always had to prod him. What's your blood count? Always a few answers. But quickly it would change to my wife and my kids.
"Even to my last conversation with him. He called me in the middle of the night, and we had this very lengthy conversation. All he wanted to know is how we were doing. He died less than 48 hours later. But he was that kind of a person, more concerned about you than he was about himself."
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When Patricia Turner and her team of historians look back on Ashe now, all they can do is sit back and smile.
Turner remembers once standing in a circle of three with Ashe's widow, Jeanne, and Congressman John Lewis, listening to stories of Ashe's life.
"This is as good as it gets," she said. "There is nothing more gratifying to me than the opportunities this project has afforded. Who gets these opportunities? It's just very, very humbling."
And speaking of humility: Of all Ashe's well-known traits, perhaps none was greater than that.
"He was never to any degree ostentatious," Nagler said. "He was always understated. He was always thinking. It took him a long time to get his feet under himself, to understand who he was and what he was. I didn't understand. I didn't think it was possible for a guy could be this nice and this talented and this even-tempered. Most tennis players are not that way, including myself. In order to be a really successful tennis player, you had to put tennis above everything. It was too difficult a game. It was too war-like. How could you do that on a court and then come off the court and be a thoughtful person? It's almost impossible.
"But Arthur actually was. I couldn't fully accept it. It wasn't until he went to South Africa and got arrested in the civil rights march that I said, 'yes, he is all these things! He could've been anything. There was no end to Arthur. He could've been Barack Obama."
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