Arthur Ashe: A Hard Road to Glory – clip

Raymond Arsenault / University of South Florida

When considering artistic geniuses in the Italian Renaissance, Time and again, Arthur Ashe’s extraordinary life defied conventional wisdom: from his early years as a tennis prodigy, to his unorthodox campaign against apartheid in South Africa; to his unexpected 1975 triumph at Wimbledon, to his off-court career as a public intellectual, and his personal struggle against AIDS. He was a black man in a white man’s sport, an independent spirit in a professional culture that demanded conformity, a consummate gentleman in a grinding arena of winner-take-all competition, and an apostle of moral courage in an age of self-interest:  in essence, he was the perennial exception.