Match Points

By R.Z. Sheppard

TITLE: DAYS OF GRACE: A MEMOIR

AUTHORS: ARTHUR ASHE AND ARNOLD RAMPERSAD

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 317 PAGES; $24

THE BOTTOM LINE: The late tennis star is unnecessarily defensive in this posthumously published memoir about court manners, reputation and facing overwhelming odds.

Arthur Ashe left the tantrum tennis to Ilie Nastase, Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe and let his silvery racket heap the abuse. The United States Tennis Association ranked him among its top 10 players seven times during the 1970s. He was No. 1 in 1975 when he beat Connors at Wimbledon, and fifth in 1979 when he had his first heart attack and underwent quadruple-bypass surgery.

Overnight, Ashe, the professional athlete, became, as he put it, "a professional patient." Physicians replaced coaches. He learned to handle 30 pills a day and gently swing a golf club. Even though the former tennis star was a top-10 patient, his coronary artery disease worsened. Feeling especially low after a second bypass operation in 1983, he asked his doctor about clinical options. " 'You can wait it out, Arthur, and you'll feel better after a while,' he said. 'Or we can give you a couple of units of blood. That would be no problem at all.'

The exchange is stoically recalled in Days of Grace, published four months after Ashe died of AIDS contracted from that tainted pick-me-up. If there were lamentations for his added hardship, they are not in the pages of this memoir, which Ashe started writing last June. He had endured greater pressures. "Race has always been my biggest burden," he writes. "Having to live as a minority in America. Even now it continues to feel like an extra weight tied around me."

There's a quiet irony at the center of this book. Although his ancestors landed in America hundreds of years ago, Ashe has had an immigrant's experience. Like a successful newcomer, he can be proud and defensive at the same time. Raised to play by the rules, Ashe tends to see people as good or bad sports. Discussing the journalists who pressured him to tell the world he had AIDS in the spring of 1992, Ashe calls a fault and invokes his right to privacy. As a retired athlete, he argues, he should no longer have been considered a public figure by the press. Somehow his appearances as a TV sports commentator, his seat on the boards of corporations, his widely recognized efforts as a black role model, and his newspaper column were strictly personal. Somehow an internationally known heterosexual with AIDS was not news in 1992. Would that it were so. Would that the world were a rectangle measuring 27 ft. by 78 ft. with white lines, a net and an umpire.

At the outset, Ashe states that his aim is to preserve his reputation. "No matter what I do, or where or when I do it, I feel the eyes of others on me, judging me," admits the man who may have taken his symbolic role as the only top-ranked black in a white sport too seriously. There are awkward moments in this book. Countering inevitable speculation about the source of HIV infection, he feels the need to testify that he has never been unfaithful to his wife and has never had a homosexual experience.

Although Arnold Rampersad, biographer of Langston Hughes and a Princeton professor of literature, is listed as a co-author of the memoir, its style and organization show understandable signs of haste. Ashe was anxious to set the record straight. He does. What he says about his conservative upbringing in Virginia and his days as coach of the U.S. Davis Cup Team add to his luster. His views on social values and race relations are unexceptionable, his Polonius-like financial advice is firmly based on bad experiences, and all things considered, his pick of Jimmy Connors as the best men's singles player of the past 25 years is sound. Too bad Ashe was not around long enough to question the title of his memoir. Days of Grace is rather self-regarding for an autobiographical work. Bad Bounce would have been more in keeping with the champion's professional approach to living and dying.