The groundbreaking tennis champion who told the world he had AIDS

In 1988, World AIDS Day began with the aim of raising awareness and understanding of a disease that had caused fear in communities around the world. That same year, American tennis legend Arthur Ashe learned of his own diagnosis. History looks at the dilemma Ashe faced when, after years of secrecy, he became a pioneering campaigner again.

In April 1992, Arthur Ashe walked into a packed conference room, where the media stood ready with cameras rolling. This time he wasn’t asked about his role as the first black tennis player selected for the United States Davis Cup team, or about his groundbreaking wins over Wimbledonthe US Open or the Australian Open. He had cemented his name in history as the first black winner of a major men’s singles championship, but after a heart attack that led to multiple surgeries, he had retired from the sport twelve years earlier, at the age of 36.

His intelligence, calmness and sportsmanship had made him a popular figure both on and off the field. But the press had heard rumors about his health, at a time when the world was still full of fear of an incurable epidemic. USA Today sportswriter Doug Smith, a childhood friend, confronted Ashe about a tip he had received. The next day, Ashe, eager to control his own narrative and defeat the press, reluctantly told the world the secret he and those around him had kept since 1988: he had AIDS.

He believed he contracted the disease from a contaminated blood transfusion during surgery in 1983, two years before blood donations were screened for the HIV virus in the US. The devastating news shocked the nation, but quickly sparked a debate about personal privacy and the ethics of an invasive press. At the conference, Ashe read a statement: “I am angry that I… was put in the unenviable position of having to lie if I wanted to protect my privacy.” He added that “there was certainly no compelling medical or physical need to disclose my medical condition.” In his memoir, Days of Grace, Ashe wrote, “More than 700 letters reached USA Today on the issue of my right to privacy, and approximately 95% strongly opposed the newspaper’s position.”

Some AIDS activists criticized Ashe’s desire for secrecy around his health, saying they wanted public figures to broaden the discussion beyond the focus of the LGBT+ community. Some felt that he would have been the perfect spokesperson to raise awareness, especially among heterosexuals and minority groups: one letter even went so far as to say that Magic Johnson, the NBA player who received his HIV diagnosis just five months earlier revealed, could have been saved if Ashe had spoken up sooner.

When asked at the press conference why he didn’t go public in 1988, Ashe said, “The answer is simple.” Any admission of HIV infection at that time would have been a serious, lasting and – my wife and I believed – unnecessary infringement of our family’s right to privacy.” When the topic turned to telling his five-year-old daughter Camera about having the disease, Ashe was overcome with emotion and his wife Jeanne read on his behalf.

USA Today sports editor Gene Policinski had no qualms about his decision to continue the story. He told the BBC’s Tom Brook: “This is one of the great athletes of the 20th century. His name is instantly recognizable around the world. He has an illness that will prove fatal and which, by any definition, I in the newspaper industry over the past 25 years, that is news.” When asked if he felt guilty, he said, “No, I didn’t. That would somehow imply that I felt like my decision was wrong. And I don’t.”

Three months after revealing to the world that he had AIDS, Ashe was in London commentating on Wimbledon for HBO. During his trip he was interviewed by actor Lynn Redgrave in the BBC program Fighting Back. He said: ‘I definitely wanted to come out at some point when I was quite healthy, to give myself time to help the cause globally. But my health was so good, I wanted to continue what I was doing without it bothering me. because of this… Just the prospect of going public, you have some fears and some discomforts that you know you’re going to have to go through.”

Ultimately, the issue of privacy arose, and as he had done many times before, Ashe questioned the status quo. At the National Press Clubhe challenged journalists to examine their sensitivities, to ask“What are the parameters of personal privacy? What are they? Who sets them? And by whose authority are they issued? What is sacred and inviolable to me, or to any other American?”

This was far from the first public stand Ashe took on a broader social issue. While his sporting prowess helped him break barriers on the field for black athletes, he spent much of his time off the field campaigning for change. Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1943, he had retreated into the world of sports and books after his mother died when he was just six years old. “Control is very important to me,” he told Redgrave. ‘You grow up in the southern United States in the late 1940s and 1950s, you have no control over it. White segregationist laws tell you where to go to school, which bus to ride, where to ride the bus, which taxis to take. to take what you can say. Your life is forbidden.”

But Ashe was initially a reluctant activist, preferring to focus on tennis, despite calls for him to use his public position to advance the civil rights movement. It led some to accuse him of being an “Uncle Tom,” or someone complicit in racial oppression. But after years of being controlled by a racist system, Ashe did not feel liberated by the civil rights of the 1960s. He told the BBC that he had “black ideologues trying to tell me what to do”, adding: “All the time I say to myself, ‘Hey, when do I get to decide what I want to do?’ So I’ve always been kind of fiercely protective, against anyone, against my will to do and control my life as I saw fit.”

When asked by fellow tennis star John McEnroe about the public outburst, Ashe said: “McEnroe had the emotional freedom to be a bad boy. I never had that emotional freedom. If I had been like that, I’m convinced that the tennis world the world would have dug me out… because of my race.”

Ultimately, Ashe had to do things his way, and he would go on to use his position as a world-class athlete to campaign for various charities. At the height of his career, he was confronted with the apartheid regime in South Africa for years, and in 1973 he traveled to the South African Championships with the agreement that the tournament would be integrated. Away from the attention of the world media, he also financed a tennis center for black South Africans in Soweto.

Ashe felt equally passionate about inclusive tennis involvement closer to home. As co-founder in 1969 of the National Junior Tennis League, his goal was to ensure that children of all backgrounds had access to tennis, not just those with a country club membership. And while initially hesitant in his involvement, over time Ashe would become one of the most powerful voices in the fight for justice and equality in the US. In the documentary Citizen Ashecivil rights leader and key figure in the Black power protests at the 1968 Olympic Games in MexicoDr. Harry Edwards said of the tennis star: “If you wipe away the kindness, the gentleness, the intelligence and the calmness, his statement would be more militant than mine.”

After suffering multiple heart attacks, Ashe joined the board of the American Heart Association. And after he revealed his AIDS diagnosis, it was no surprise that a new campaign began. In addition to making media appearances to debunk myths about the disease, he founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS. On World AIDS Day in December 1992 he addressed the World Health Organization.

Ashe died of AIDS-related pneumonia in February 1993, two years before a new class of antiretroviral drugs came onto the market that allowed people with the virus to live long and healthy lives. He told Redgrave in 1992: “I’m not afraid of dying. There is always hope and you have to live your life as if there is, or will be, some hope. Hope should not be a selfish hope. For me, hope is Maybe there will not be a cure for AIDS in time for me, but certainly for everyone else.”

For more stories and never-before-published radio scripts in your inbox, sign up for the In the History Newsletterwhile The essential list delivers a hand-picked selection of features and insights twice a week.