Free Days of Grace by Arthur Ashe

life. Levinson introduced me to ideas I had hardly encountered in my readings in elementary psychology as an undergraduate at UCLA early in the 1960s.
    Dr. Levinson takes issue with Freud’s basic contention that the truly formative part of our lives is our early childhood and that our later life is mainly a reenactment of childhood conflicts, of which we are largely unconscious. For Levinson, a man’s life is a succession of stages, and each stage involves its own conflicts and dramas. (The major underlying problem facing many athletes is that they wish to remain “forever young,” which is impossible.) “Each phase in the life cycle,” he writes, “has its own virtues and limitations. To realize its potential value, we must know and accept its terms and create our lives within it accordingly.” Childhood is important, but so are the other stages. “No season,” Dr. Levinson writes, “is better or more important than any other.”
    For most men, the basic long-term enterprise of life is the task of “Becoming One’s Own Man.” And at mid-life, we assess our success or failure in achieving this goal.
    In the “Mid-life Transition,” which is certainly where I was, three major tasks face a man as he prepares for the future. One task is to close out the period of early adulthood, and to assess what has been achieved in it. For an athlete, retirement dramatizes this moment. The second task is tobegin to take steps toward the coming change of life, which I was doing, especially in terms of altering existing negative patterns. And the third task facing a man, according to Levinson, is “to deal with the polarities that are sources of deep divisions in his life.” There are four of these polarities.
    In the first polarity—Young/Old—a man must deal with the fact that he feels himself to be both young and old, and must resolve the conflicts involved. This was the most important polarity; Dr. Levinson calls it the one “most central to all developmental change.” The terms
young
and
old
have little to do with actual age levels. After all, old people can and do feel young, and becoming old begins at birth itself. “Young” has to do with “growth, openness, energy, potential,” and the like. “Old” has to do with “termination, fruition, stability, structure, completion, death.” In this context, to have AIDS is to be instantly “old.”
    Complicating the Young/Old polarity for me was the fact that I had just retired from my career, which made me feel old; and the fact that I had undergone open-heart surgery, which made me feel older still. But I wanted to feel young; and in some ways I did feel myself young. “In all beginnings dwells a magic force,” wrote Hermann Hesse in his poem “Stages.”
    In the second polarity—Destruction/Creation—a man is aware as never before of the pain and affliction that other people have wrought on him and also the pain and affliction that he has wrought on others, including his family. At this point, aware of his own mortality as never before, he also has a strong and assertive desire to become more creative. Dr. Levinson puts it this way: “In middle adulthood, a man can come to know, more than ever before, that powerful forces of destructiveness and of creativity coexist in the human soul—in my soul!—and can integrate them in new ways.”
    “Arthur,” a friend asked me once, “do you regret having been mean to certain women in your life?”
    “Mean to certain women? What are you thinking about?”
    “Well, you must have been mean to some women. That’s part of being a man.”
    “Look,” I said to him, “I can’t recall being mean to anybody, much less to women. Unless you and I have completely different ideas about what being mean is.”
    “Arthur, I don’t believe you.”
    Still, I understand that one doesn’t have to be overtly mean to other people to be destructive to them. As for creativity: Yes, I wanted to create. But what had I created