Tennis Champ Arthur Ashe's interracial romances were taboo...

...biography reveals

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...rracial-romances-taboo-biography-reveals.html



"He hooked up with two swinging Swedish girls, had an illicit affair with a married woman from Dallas, lusty romps with airline stewardesses from Trinidad to Australia, an Asian girlfriend, and dated a gorgeous Jewish girl from Toronto."

Whoa. I always heard about his love of beautiful women, but not to this degree. A must read article.

 

This is the kind of historical figure we need to be looking up to.

 

You know there's a cadre of Black social media posters who swear this dude was gay.
I'm like WTF??? People don't understand in the 1980s people were getting AIDS from dirty blood transfusions.

I'm glad Arthur got it in at the height of his fame. Two claps.

 

^^ No wonder they don't know what to say now that his biography came out. lol.

 

Bought the book this morning.. I copied and paste the chapter/section about Ashe's IR romances...


The first was Meryl (pronounced Merle) Carr, a strikingly beautiful Jewish woman from Toronto whom he had been dating for more than a year. For several years, he had been playing the field, dating a wide variety of women and studiously avoiding any long-term relationships. His first and only serious romantic entanglement, his year-long engagement to Pat Battles, had ended awkwardly in March 1967, and he had been wary of commitment ever since. His deepening infatuation with Meryl, however, led him to reconsider his aversion to lengthy relationships.

Ashe’s romantic involvement with Meryl marked his first extended experience with interracial dating, although he had dated white women before on a number of occasions, beginning as early as 1962. He had gone out several times with the Swedish tennis star Ingrid Löfdahl, had enjoyed a fling with an Iranian woman in 1972, and had even engaged in an illicit affair with a married white woman from Dallas. Indeed, in 1967, the year the U.S. Supreme Court finally struck down bans on interracial marriage in the landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling, he had talked openly about his liberal views on interracial dating and intermarriage. “If I see a white girl who fascinates me I’ll make a play for her,” he declared in his surprisingly candid memoir Advantage Ashe. “I’ve taken white girls to parties just to watch the reactions. Some of my acquaintances look shocked or embarrassed, and I feel slightly sorry for them.” Later in the book, he discussed his experiences with Swedish girls in the “swinging” resort town of Bastad: “Girls from all over Sweden save up for a year to go to Bastad and meet the tennis players. The ratio is about two girls to every fellow, and I didn’t see a bad looking girl the week I was there.” “I had two girl friends,” he bragged.

Ashe was well aware this kind of boastful talk would not play very well back in the States—and that it was potentially explosive in places like Richmond. But he didn’t seem to care, refusing to trim his sails to fit the racial conventions of narrow-minded traditionalists, black or white. “It doesn’t bother me when I see a Negro woman with a white man,” he insisted. “That riles a lot of Negroes. But I feel sorry for Negroes who feel that way. They’re even more narrow-minded than some whites. I’ll go out with a white girl if we happen to like each other. Some Negroes think I don’t like Negroes. I just laugh when they tell me this. Or I give them a silent stare. I’ve had some of them ask me, ‘Ashe, do you think you’ll ever marry a Negro girl?’?”

While he conceded he was “more likely to fall for a girl of my own race,” he refused to rule out the possibility of intermarriage, even though he recognized the obvious difficulties an interracial union would entail. “If I did have a white wife I know I wouldn’t be too popular in American tournaments,” he acknowledged. “I couldn’t live in Richmond, or even in most other places.” Nevertheless, he took some solace in the fact that Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the first black United States senator elected since Reconstruction, had “married a white wife, and it didn’t stop him from getting elected Senator in a state where only 3% of the voters are Negro.”

At the same time, Ashe was well aware of the furor over the popular entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.’s eight-year marriage to the Swedish film star May Britt. A decade earlier, the singer and actress Pearl Bailey’s 1952 marriage to the celebrated white jazz drummer Louis Bellson endangered both of their careers. Earlier still, during the so-called Progressive Era and the Roaring Twenties, the heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson’s successive marriages to three white women led to pariah status and several near riots. Indeed, throughout the post–Civil War era, in custom and often in codified law, the intermarriage taboo applied to celebrities as well as ordinary citizens, and even a figure as distinguished as Frederick Douglass could not escape mass ridicule and scorn following his marriage to the white abolitionist Helen Pitts.

To date, most of Ashe’s interracial dating had taken place outside the borders of the United States, either in Australia or Europe, where attitudes toward miscegenation tended to be somewhat more tolerant and forgiving than in America’s hypersensitive racial climate. Thus, his extended involvement with Meryl presented him with new and potentially uncomfortable situations. Cold stares and ugly incidents were inevitable challenges for any interracial couple living in the United States, where according to an October 1972 Gallup poll only 29 percent of Americans “approved” of interracial marriage between blacks and whites.

Although Meryl’s parents were Canadian, they initially expressed strong disapproval of their daughter’s interracial relationship. Fortunately, after she stood firm and refused to break off the relationship, her family came around and more or less accepted Arthur as a worthy suitor. Even so, he never felt completely comfortable in their presence.

For the Carrs, as for most white families in the 1970s, traditional stereotypes and fears related to race and sex were a fact of life, and Arthur’s celebrity status did not shield him from this reality. On the contrary, his visibility probably heightened his vulnerability. Whenever he and Meryl went out in public, they could be sure that somewhere in the room someone was commenting on their relationship, perhaps only in a whisper, but usually with an air of disapproval.

One solution, though temporary and imperfect, was to escape to a more tolerant cultural setting, a place where they could be together without shouldering the heavy burden of America’s racial baggage. This is the path Arthur chose in the spring of 1973. Risking censure from his family and throwing caution to the wind, he invited Meryl to accompany him on the European tour. A freelance commercial artist with an open schedule, she gleefully accepted. For nearly six weeks, from mid-May until the end of June, she would be his companion. Running from the French Open to Wimbledon, it was, as Arthur wrote in mid-June, “the longest time I’ve ever spent with one woman.”

 

Maybe they need to do a little less SM and start educating themselves.

 

LOL. Are these same people who swear that Malcolm X was gay?

 

LOL. Probably.

 

Exactly. He got it from a transfusion during open heart surgery after a couple of debilitating heart attacks.

 

I'm sure they'll take your advice and start improving themselves immediately lol

 

LOL IKR!

 

Everybody's gay nowadays SMH

 

Never happen. Some people are comfortable in their delusions

 

He was one gorgeous man.