Arthur Robert Ashe, Jr., was a black man, of the 1960’s and 1970’s, who excelled in athletics and had a mind for other important pursuits. Like Curt Flood, who challenged Major League Baseball’s Reserve Clause as unfair to players; like Jim Brown, who retired from the NFL – at his peak – rather than allow the Cleveland Browns to dictate to him. Others included Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Bill Russell. These were passionate sportsmen, but each knew where sports ended and dignity began.
A little more about Arthur Ashe…
Born July 10, 1943 in Richmond, Virginia, to married parents. His mother died in 1950. His father raised his children with strict discipline. Ashe and his younger brother attended church every Sunday. Their father timed the walk from school, and Ashe had 12 minutes to get home after the last bell. Mindful of his son’s slight build, the elder Ashe forbade his son to play football.
Ashe began playing tennis at age 7, first mentored by Richmond’s best black tennis player, then by another black man who coached Althea Gibson. When segregation in Richmond limited his competitive options, he spent his senior year of high school living with the family of another black man in St. Louis, who coached him as well. In response, Ashe became the first black to win the National Junior Indoor Championship in 1962.
Arthur Ashe received a tennis scholarship to UCLA, and was the first black ever selected for the U.S. Davis Cup Team, in 1963. He won the U.S. Amateur and U.S. Open Championships in 1968 (ranked Number 1 in the world during that year), the Australian Open in 1970, and Wimbledon in 1975 – also black American firsts.
Ashe, with Charlie Pasarell and Sheridan Snyder, founded the National Junior Tennis League in 1969, a program offering tennis opportunities to economically disadvantaged youngsters. It was the first organized tennis program in which Venus and Serena Williams participated.
A heart attack, and quadruple heart bypass surgery, in 1979 forced his retirement the next year; he had another bypass procedure in 1983. In 1988, Ashe had an emergency brain surgical procedure and published a three-volume history of black American athletes, A Hard Road to Glory. A blood transfusion, during the second heart procedure, infected Ashe with HIV; he died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1993, spending the last year of his life raising awareness, and funding, to combat the disease.
Arthur Robert Ashe, Jr., the product of a black nuclear family, was building his own when he died. He was a great athlete who never caught a break. Rather, helped by other black men in his early years (including his father), he created them. He was an honorable man, made great by doing good, including excellence in his chosen field. And he responded to the misfortune of a fatal infection by fighting for others. He was, and remains, a legacy in which blacks can take pride…and one which they should defend.
Watching Abby Wambach and Bruce Jenner make that legacy a blank canvas onto which they painted the homosexual agenda – describing their “community” in sympathetic terms, and grabbing attention to help “mainstream” their “choices” – as “courageous” was distressing, and not just to Brett Favre (see video below, at @ 2:15 in)…
The ESPN/Wambach/Jenner performance was not racist; it was worse than that. In just over 13 minutes, and on an international stage:
- • It made dislike for the homosexual lifestyle equivalent to dislike for skin color – an equivalence blacks still reject,
• It gave U.S. combat troops the side-eye, overlooking a veteran who had lost limbs but not his passion for sport, and
• It dismissed the fearlessness of a female college athlete, whose terminal cancer claimed her life, but not her competitive spirit.
Instead of acknowledging sports relevant example of courage, ESPN gave the award to someone whose last sports involvement precedes the birthdates of their target audience. All while standing on the grave of a black man whose courage, character content – and myriad accomplishments – made his skin color an asset, at a time when it was a liability for many others. The black response to this blatant legacy hijacking…
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHQxE-CNKkA[/youtube]
Despite Wambach’s assertions to the contrary, the award was all about Jenner. He actively campaigned for this award. His team approached ESPN about it to promote his upcoming TV show and, when negotiations faltered, threatened canceling an interview with Diane Sawyer (see video, at @ 2:10). The result was a “win-win-win”: Jenner “won” publicity for his media efforts, ABC “won” a major news story, and ESPN “won” another political correctness opportunity.
(By the way, the Walt Disney Company, itself increasingly sympathetic to the homosexual agenda, owns ESPN and ABC.)
The only losers were America’s blacks, who ESPN publicly pimped and, apparently, are too focused on irrelevant flags and monuments, churches burned by phantom racists (like lightning and poor electrical wiring), and seeking “justice” FOR every questionable (or worse) character the police encounter – while requiring no justice FROM them – to care what the presentation sought to take from them.
Blacks resisted efforts to use Rosa Parks’ legacy to promote the homosexual agenda, and Martin Luther King’s daughter is on record declaring that her father “did not take a bullet for same-sex marriage”. At least for now, those legacies remain valuable to blacks.
But Arthur Ashe, a black man who rose to the pinnacle into an internationally white-dominated sport, winning the hearts and minds of people the world over, by dint of effort and class, his legacy – as black as black excellence CAN be – is abandoned to a re-definition of courage shown in, or through, sports to mean standing up for one’s bedfellow choice or being openly confused about one’s gender?
That every black athlete did not stand up and walk out of the ESPY’s speaks volumes about today’s black American athletes. That not one of them did speaks even more loudly. To be fair, had Jenner worn a Confederate flag, and received the award atop Georgia’s Stone Mountain, then black NBA players might have reacted like this:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxziyB_VJGM[/youtube]
or black NFL Players might have exited the auditorium the way these entered a stadium:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjatISKs5BA[/youtube]
As it was, they clapped politely at the public denigration of a legacy that helped make them both prosperous and popular.
This lack of black pride and principle is astonishing. Peter Berg, no one’s black man, at least attempted outrage, before the PC police got to the Friday Night Lights producer. But black athletes today seem more willing to make acceptable “protests” than principled statements, more concerned with being PC than with legacy. That attitude seems shared by many, if not most, blacks.
So, what are blacks about?
Is it taboo to disrespect black criminals, but acceptable to piss on the legacy of a black sports legend? Are we more committed to attacking symbols that we say we hate, be they flags, rocks, or 150-year-old military corpses, than to protecting the legacy of those who deserve love for what they showed of “blackness”?
Disney challenged American black self-respect and, so far, that challenge goes unanswered; perhaps all accept that homosexuals are more politically relevant than blacks today. After all:
- • So say the courts, who remove liberties to favor homosexuals,
• So say the schools, which promote homosexuality with a fervor not shown for black concerns,
• So says the president, who violated his oath of office by not defending traditional marriage, as law requires (though blacks support traditional marriage), and further disregarded the views of blacks by “re-lighting” the White House after the recent Supreme Court Decision on homosexual marriage:
So, the “black” president disregards blacks; now a major corporation follows suit. Both have done so on an international stage. A relevant people does not take such treatment lightly. So, the question is, “Are blacks yet relevant, or has Political Correctness finally claimed its first ethnic group victim in the U.S.?
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