Opinion: Remembering Arthur Ashe
Arthur Ashe of Richmond, Va., was called the greatest tennis player in the world in 1975. He was the first Black player selected to the United States Davis Cup team, and the only Black man ever to win the singles titles at Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Australian Open. (Harry Harris/AP file)
Micah Greenstein
Rabbi Micah Greenstein is senior rabbi of Temple Israel of Memphis.
Tennis was the competitive sport of my childhood, and Arthur Ashe, the trailblazing American professional tennis player, was my hero.
With Wimbledon just behind us and the U.S. Open a few weeks off, I have been thinking about Ashe and his historic victories, including Wimbledon in 1975 before my bar-mitzvah and the 1968 U.S Open, just months after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.
For Ashe, athletics were more than a means to earn a living. “Sports can teach you how to be resolute in moments of crisis,” Ashe wrote in his memoir “Days of Grace,” completed days before his death in 1993 and published a few months later.
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