Free Days of Grace by Arthur Ashe Page A

thus far? How creative was winning Wimbledon?
    The third polarity—Masculine/Feminine—asserts the need for a man to come to terms with the mixture of genders that exists in every human being. This polarity is not about homosexuality, latent or otherwise, but about the biological fact of gender blending that exists in each individual, and the changing social response to this blending. During my tennis career, I knew many people who thought that the feminine had no place in the masculine world. Feminine meant weak, to be dominated and despised; masculine meant strong, to dominate and despise. Gentleness was feminine. Reading and reflection might be feminine, too. I knew that, according to these reckonings, some of me is feminine. I like being gentle and reflective. I want to hurt no one. I consciously looked forward to probing this aspect of my life even as, in the 1970s and early 1980s, the words
feminist
and
feminine
took on radically new meanings.
    And in the fourth polarity—Attachment/Separateness—a man must deal with the need and desire to attach himself to others and at the same time the need and desire to be apart and alone. All of my life I have been acutely aware of this polarity. I married at the age of thirty-three, and for the reason many people do so: I had found the perfect partner, and I no longer wanted to be alone. My marriage was working, but who knew what the next few years and pressures would bring?
    The Seasons of a Man’s Life
gave me much to think about. I had always been an avid reader, but the life of a professional athlete is not always conducive to much reflection.Athletes should be smart, but thinking too much can be a handicap on the court or on the field. So, too, with feeling too much. Emotionally, one had to rise to certain moments but also be able to act on instinct in a nanosecond and to be placid, detached, coldly analytical in moments of danger. I knew a lot of physically gifted athletes whose volatile minds and emotions prevented them from achieving lasting success in sports.
    Two close friends of mine, whose advice meant and still means a great deal to me, thought that my habit of reading and thinking, and the activities related to them, were bad for my career. Back in the 1970s, they were always urging me to be more single-minded. Now, however, with my playing days behind me, and the “real” world ahead, I had to try to tap into the depths of my intellectual and emotional powers, whatever they were.
    Why couldn’t I be satisfied with what I had done, with my tennis accolades and other rewards?
    “Often a man looks forward to a key event,” Levinson says about the mid-life transition, “that in his mind carries the ultimate message of his animation by society.” The big score. I suppose that one might think that winning Wimbledon in 1975 must have been such a culminating event for me. Well, it wasn’t. The victory was tremendously important, but not important enough to stop that nibbling in my soul. Perhaps that was so because I had been preparing almost all of my life to win Wimbledon, even though my career was almost finished when I finally won it, and could easily have ended without a victory there. More likely it was so because my “culminating event” could never be physical, never something athletic.
    My “culminating event” had to be less personal and materialistic, more humanitarian and inclusive. As I approached forty, I could think of nothing important that I had ever achieved of that sort. I had been a professional athlete, strictly defined and recognized as such. That’s what I put down on my income-tax form as my occupation: professional athlete. It was as simple as that. Perhaps I wouldnever have that truly satisfying “culminating event.” Nevertheless, I knew that, at the very least, I had to probe the roots of my dissatisfaction with what I had achieved as a tennis player. I had to examine the sources of my fixation on those “higher” goals that