Days of Grace Read Free Page B

and I have to do so for business—such as going to Wimbledon as a television commentator. But several countries will not admit someone who discloses having AIDS, or even to being merely HIV-positive but without full-blown AIDS. The United States is one of those countries. One can get a temporary dispensation, but usually only if one is attending a conference about AIDS or the like. The infected person would then be accorded the same status as Soviet diplomats used to have in the United States during the Cold War, with severe limits placed on his or hertravel. The major international conference on AIDS in 1992 was forced to move from Boston to Amsterdam in the Netherlands because of these restrictions. Because Great Britain also has restrictions connected to HIV and AIDS, I wondered if I would ever see Wimbledon again. I wondered about my commercial connections, my consultantships and other jobs in television, in the manufacture and sale of sports equipment and clothing, and in coaching. All of these connections went back a long way, and represented a tremendous human investment on my part as well as on the part of those companies. Would these connections survive the news?
    For the news conference, Jeanne and I decided to appeal to Home Box Office (HBO), for whom I had worked regularly as a television commentator at Wimbledon. The president of Paramount Sports there is Seth Abraham, a close friend. He agreed at once to do it. We set the announcement for 3:30 the following afternoon. With HBO undertaking to notify the sports press, two major tasks remained. The first was to prepare a statement to be read at the conference, before I took questions from any reporters who showed up. The second, at least as difficult for me, was to call a number of people and break the news to them. To a few already in the know, I would be telling them only that I was going public; others would be hearing about my AIDS infection for the first time.
    Between roughly 3:15 on Tuesday afternoon and 2:45 the following morning, I made between thirty and thirty-five telephone calls. I called several members of my family, including my brother in North Carolina, who is a retired Marine Corps captain, and my stepmother, stepsister, and stepbrother in Virginia; and I called many friends. Hearing the news that I had AIDS, two or three people burst into tears. I hastened to tell them, and others, that I was fine, that my spirits were up, that they should not worry about me. I called my lawyer Donald Dell, and he let me know at once that he would be present at the press conference. I called the chief of staff in the office of Dr. Louis Sullivan,the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in Washington, D.C. I asked him to inform Dr. Sullivan, and I wanted Dr. Sullivan himself to pass the news to Barbara Bush at the White House. I had been favorably impressed by Mrs. Bush’s steadfast interest in AIDS and the generosity of her response to its victims when she visited children’s hospitals. From the president of the National Commission on AIDS, I secured its list of medical reporters who might be interested in what I had to say. They, too, would be invited to the press conference.
    Several of the people I called had either answering services or answering machines, but I was extremely cautious in leaving messages. I was guarded even in talking to certain spouses. Some I knew I could trust; others were less reliable.
    To help me draft the text of my statement, I called my old friend Frank Deford, a veteran sports journalist and television personality and now a senior writer at
Newsweek
magazine. Deford is the spitting image of the handsome riverboat gambler, rakish mustache and all, but there is nothing hit-or-miss about his literary style or his common sense. Co-author with me of
Arthur Ashe: Portrait in Motion
, which is an account of a year in my life on the professional tennis circuit, he had traveled with me to a number of places, including sub-Saharan Africa