Who was Arthur Ashe?

Arthur Robert Ashe Jr. was born on July 10, 1943, in Richmond, Virginia, the older of Arthur Ashe Sr. and Mattie Cunningham Ashe’s two sons. His mother, who taught him to read before he was four, died when he was six, leaving him and his younger brother Johnnie in the care of a father who worked as a caretaker at Brook Field, an eighteen-acre, blacks-only playground on the edge of the city — the Ashe home sat in the middle of it, so that Arthur could step out his front door and onto a tennis court. He picked up a racket at four, and by seven he had been spotted by Ronald Charity, one of the finest Black players in the country, who taught him the game’s fundamentals before handing him, at ten, to the man who would shape his life: Dr. Walter Johnson, a Black physician and coach in Lynchburg who had discovered Althea Gibson. Johnson drilled into Ashe a discipline that had nothing to do with forehands. He taught him to play every shot, in or out of bounds, so no umpire’s call could ever be blamed for a defeat; to accept mistakes without flinching; and to lose with grace and a smile, because a Black player in a white sport could not afford to give anyone a reason. “Drummed into me above all, by my dad, by the whole family, was that without your good name, you would be nothing,” Ashe later said. In 1955 he was turned away from Richmond’s city tennis tournament because of his color — a rejection that might have embittered a lesser boy and instead became, in his own telling, one more reason to be so good that no one could look away.

The answer to that rejection was excellence, and it came fast. In 1960, Ashe won the U.S. junior national singles title — the first African American to do so — and the next year he moved to St. Louis to live with the tennis official Richard Hudlin, facing stiffer competition and graduating first in his class from Sumner High School. A scholarship took him to UCLA, and in 1963 he became the first Black player ever selected to the U.S. Davis Cup team. After graduating with a degree in business administration, he served two years in the Army, rising to second lieutenant, still playing tournament tennis the whole time. Then came the breakthrough. On September 9, 1968, in the first US Open of the professional era, Ashe beat the Dutchman Tom Okker to become the first Black man — still the only one — to win the men’s singles title at the US Open. Because he was technically still an amateur, he accepted only expenses and waved away the prize money, a detail that said as much about his sense of duty as his groundstrokes. Two years later he added the Australian Open. He was no longer a promising player; he was the face of the game.

The nineteen-seventies made him a legend, on court and off. In 1969 Ashe applied for a visa to play in the South African Open and was denied because of apartheid; the refusal transformed him into the most persistent sporting critic of white rule, and he spent the next two decades campaigning for South Africa’s expulsion from international tennis. In 1972 he helped found the Association of Tennis Professionals, the players’ union that governs men’s tennis to this day, and served as its president in 1974. In 1973 he finally got his visa and played in South Africa, winning the doubles title — “small concessions incline toward larger ones,” he explained, absorbing the criticism of militants who called him an Uncle Tom. Then came 1975, the greatest year of his career. He won the WCT Finals against Björn Borg in May, and on July 5, at Wimbledon, he dismantled the heavily favoured, swaggering defending champion Jimmy Connors in four sets with a performance of surgical placement and nerve — the first and still the only Black man to win the men’s singles title at the most prestigious tournament in the world. That year he was ranked the No. 1 player on the planet. In 1977 he married the photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy at the United Nations chapel, with Andrew Young officiating; they would have a daughter, Camera.

His health began to betray him at the height of his powers. In July 1979, while teaching tennis to inner-city children, Ashe suffered a heart attack, and after quadruple bypass surgery he retired in 1980 with 818 career victories and 51 titles. Retirement, for him, meant expansion rather than rest: he wrote the three-volume history A Hard Road to Glory, a chronicle of Black athletes in America; he became a commentator for ABC Sports and captain of a Davis Cup team that won back-to-back titles; and he was arrested, in January 1985, at a protest outside the South African embassy in Washington. A second bypass operation in 1983 had required a blood transfusion — and that transfusion, he would later learn, carried HIV. He discovered the infection in 1988 but kept it private until April 8, 1992, when he announced it to the world to preempt a newspaper that was about to break the story. What followed was the most remarkable year of his life. He founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, addressed the United Nations on World AIDS Day, and wrote his memoir, Days of Grace, finishing the manuscript days before his death. On February 6, 1993, he died of AIDS-related pneumonia at forty-nine. His body lay in state in the governor’s mansion in Richmond — the first person so honoured since Stonewall Jackson in 1863 — and some six thousand mourners came to say goodbye.

Arthur Ashe’s most memorable quotes

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

The meaning behind these words

This is the most quoted sentence Ashe ever produced, and it has survived because it is not a slogan but a strategy. It is a three-part instruction, each clause shorter than the last, each one removing another excuse. “Start where you are” dissolves the alibi of circumstance — the belief that you must first be somewhere else, with better resources or a different history, before you can begin. “Use what you have” answers the complaint of inadequacy, insisting that whatever is already in your hands is enough to get moving. And “do what you can” strips away the paralysis of perfectionism, the fantasy that a problem must be solved completely or not at all. Ashe lived exactly this way: he could not play on his hometown’s white courts, so he played on the Black playground his father tended; he could not make apartheid disappear, so he lobbied, campaigned, and got himself a visa to go play there anyway.

The sentence is also, quietly, a definition of heroism for ordinary people. Ashe was a man who had been told no his entire life — no entry to this tournament, no visa to that country, no place on those courts — and the entire architecture of his response is contained in these nine words. It is a philosophy of scale: you do not wait to be given the ideal conditions, you begin with the conditions you have and improve them as you go. That is why the line has travelled so far beyond tennis, onto classroom walls and office posters and self-help books, and why it never sounds like a cliché: it was not written by a motivational speaker but by a man who had tested it against the hardest circumstances a country could offer and found that it held. Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. It is the entire biography of Arthur Ashe compressed into three commands.

“From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life.”

The meaning behind these words

This is Ashe’s economics of meaning, and it draws a line between two things most people spend their lives confusing. “What we get” — the salary, the trophies, the titles, the applause — is real and necessary; Ashe, who had all of them, never pretended otherwise. But he called all of it a living, a word that points at survival rather than significance. It pays the bills and keeps the lights on, and that is all it can ever do. The life — the thing that actually matters, the thing that turns years into a story worth telling — is built on the other side of the ledger, on what we give. The contrast is deliberate and brutal in its clarity: a living can be earned and spent and forgotten, but a life is only ever made by what flows outward.

What makes the line credible is the man who said it. Ashe was not a wealthy philosopher reflecting from a distance; he was a champion who could have rested on what he had won and instead spent his final, sickest, shortest years giving everything he had left. He gave his name to a foundation fighting AIDS, his time to a history of athletes the world had forgotten, his composure to a public that needed to be taught not to fear him. And he kept giving even as he was dying, writing Days of Grace to the very last days, because he understood the arithmetic he was handing down: a living is what you accumulate, but a life is what you leave. That is why the sentence has become one of his most quoted — it is not an abstraction but a receipt, the balance sheet of a man who made sure his giving outweighed his getting until the very end.

“True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.”

The meaning behind these words

Here Ashe takes the word “hero” — a word sports routinely applies to the man who scores the winning point — and quietly hands it back, insisting it belongs somewhere else. His definition strips heroism of spectacle. “Sober” and “undramatic” are the opposite of everything a stadium celebrates: no crowd, no highlight reel, no triumph over a rival. What he describes instead is a disposition, a direction of the will. The world’s idea of a hero, he says, is someone who rises by surpassing others; the real thing is someone who rises by serving them. It is a sentence that turns heroism from a competition into a vocation, and it explains why Ashe, for all his trophies, never spoke of winning as the point of anything.

The line also reads, now, as something close to an epitaph, because Ashe lived both halves of it. He surpassed others at the highest level of his sport — beat Connors, beat Borg, won three Grand Slams — and never once mistook that for heroism. The heroism, in his own accounting, was elsewhere: in the campaign against apartheid, in the quiet work of building the players’ union, in the decision to announce his AIDS diagnosis and turn his own dying into a public lesson. He was not being humble when he defined heroism as service; he was being precise. This is the man who was arrested outside an embassy for a cause that had nothing to do with him winning anything, and who called that the most important work of his life. True heroism is sober and undramatic — and so, in the end, was he, a man whose greatest acts were the ones that never made a highlight reel.

“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.”

The meaning behind these words

This is Ashe the analyst, the student of the game, and it is the most practical thing he ever said. It is a two-link chain, and its logic is what gives it force. Success, he argues, is downstream of self-confidence — a claim that would be empty if he stopped there, the kind of thing any coach says before a big match. But the second sentence supplies the foundation the first one lacks: confidence, far from being a gift or an act, is simply preparation made visible. You become confident the only way anyone ever genuinely does — by doing the work in advance, until the moment arrives and your body already knows what to do. It is a definition of confidence that has no room for bluster, because it locates the feeling not in the ego but in the hours nobody saw.

Ashe was living proof of the chain, and his entire game was built on it. His 1975 Wimbledon triumph over Jimmy Connors is the textbook example: Connors was younger, faster, and the overwhelming favourite, but Ashe had prepared a strategy — slicing the ball low and soft, refusing to give Connors the pace he loved — and he executed it with a calm that looked, to everyone watching, like arrogance, but was in fact the opposite. It was preparation so thorough that it had already won the match before it was played; the confidence was only the echo. The line is why Ashe’s calm has become legendary rather than merely famous. He never needed to shout, because he had already done the thing that shouting is usually a substitute for — the work. And that, he is telling us, is the whole secret: there is no shortcut to confidence except the long way.

Arthur Ashe’s legacy

The most visible measure of his legacy is architectural, and it grows more literal every September. The biggest tennis stadium in the world, the arena that hosts the US Open’s final rounds, is named Arthur Ashe Stadium — a building so central to the sport that his name is spoken by millions of people every year who were not alive when he played. In Richmond, a twelve-foot statue of him stands on Monument Avenue, where it was erected in 1996 after a fierce civic argument — the “Battle of Monument Avenue” — over whether a Black tennis player belonged among the Confederate generals whose statues lined the street. It depicts him surrounded by children, a racket in one hand and books in the other, which is as precise a portrait as any sculptor ever produced: the athlete and the scholar, the champion and the teacher, standing in the middle of the city that once refused to let him play.

The second measure is institutional, and it is startling for how much of it refused to die with him. The Association of Tennis Professionals, which he co-founded in 1972, still governs men’s professional tennis. The National Junior Tennis League, which he helped create to bring the game to inner-city children, still operates. The Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health still works to close the gaps in health care he exposed with his own diagnosis. And the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS — the cause he took up in the final year of his life — carried his fight forward after he was gone, as did the truth he insisted on telling: that HIV was not a moral judgment but a virus, that it could touch anyone, and that silence about it was deadlier than the disease itself. A man who spent his life being told where he could not go ended his life building institutions that opened doors for the people who came after.

The deepest measure is moral, and it lives in the way an entire culture still reaches for his words. “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” “From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life.” These are not tennis sayings; they are the axioms of a life lived against the grain of history, and they have outlasted the man by decades. Ashe’s singular achievement was to fuse two things the twentieth century kept trying to separate: excellence and conscience. He proved you could be the best in the world at something and still believe the best thing was not the winning but the serving — that a champion could be quiet, could be patient, could be kind, and lose none of his power. That is why, thirty-three years after his death, a new generation born long after he died still finds its way to him every time the US Open lights up the stadium that carries his name. He taught the world that true heroism is sober and undramatic, and then he spent a life — and a death — proving it.

Create graphics with Arthur Ashe’s quotes

Ashe’s words have the rare quality of being both gentle and unyielding — short enough to commit to memory, deep enough to carry you for years. Whether you need the practicality of “start where you are,” the purpose of “what we give makes a life,” or the quiet definition of true heroism, Quotes Creator helps you turn these quotes into beautiful, shareable designs with custom fonts, gradients, and layouts.