This is a review of “Citizen Ashe” was first published on Sept. 3, 2021 after the film’s premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.
There are those sports heroes who inspire both players and fans. Athletes who, beyond their stats, make a difference in their sport, help others, or inspire us to be better people. Tennis has a few of those throughout its history, and two of them won singles titles at Wimbledon in 1975: women’s pioneer Billie Jean King, and men’s champion Arthur Ashe.
His multifaceted documentary subjects, including his activism, influence, and sports achievements, have been long overdue. Now he is the center of attention. “Citizen Ashe,”Rex Miller directed this engaging and moving portrait.“Behind These Walls”Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”).
The ins and outs of Ashe’s groundbreaking win in England over rival Jimmy Connors are thrillingly depicted, as are his equally historic victory at the very first U.S. Open in 1968. But “Citizen Ashe,” dominated by rich archival footage and often driven by Ashe’s own words from myriad interviews over the course of his very public life, is less a tennis documentary than about the evolution of a tennis star, a Black American who figured out how to engage with the world beyond established rules and white lines both literal and figurative.
On a tennis court — he practically grew up one one, since family home in Richmond, Virginia, stood on park grounds his caretaker father oversaw — the lanky, regal and intelligent baseliner spoke with his racquet, breaking through with a smoothly overpowering game and an unruffled presence. This calm demeanor was not accidental. To be able to compete in the Jim Crow South as a Black player in tennis, ‘60s — as Ashe’s contemporaries from that era (Art Carrington, Lenny Simpson) and younger brother Lennie inform us onscreen in interviews — they couldn’t give white-run tournaments a reason to reject them beyond the color of their skin.
Ashe received a UCLA scholarship, and participated on the U.S. Davis Cup Team, further improving his game. This earned him popularity and success in tennis. (The fantastic archival clips of his clean-cut college days, when he very much looks like a fish IN water, would be unremarkable if he weren’t the only person of color in them.) But in an increasingly outspoken era for politically minded Black athletes represented by John Carlos, Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, Ashe’s non-confrontational path to being a role model got him labeled an Uncle Tom. Not that Ashe didn’t sense what was going on; that Black-specific legacy of internalizing stress and anger can also, the film underscores, be viewed as a factor in Ashe’s later heart problems.
But 1968 would change everything, for both Ashe’s fortunes as a tennis player and how he transcended his sport in the wake of a turbulent year for social progress. The surprise was that, as civil rights activist and initial Ashe critic Harry Edwards puts it in the film, when Ashe started speaking up off the court — in speeches, in interviews, at protests, in a tantalizing excerpt from a televised round table with prominent Black athletes featuring Ashe, Edwards and Jackie Robinson — he could sound more militant than anybody.
Central to conveying Ashe’s humanitarian works is the story of his campaign against Apartheid South Africa, which involved controversially playing there to show the country’s Black population what a free Black man looked like. It also shows the emotional power of Nelson Mandela, newly free, when he asked Ashe who he would like to meet in America. Ashe chose Ashe and became his friend. Only two years later, in 1992, Ashe — by then happily married, with a young daughter — would face the last of his battles: the forced public disclosure of his having contracted AIDS from an HIV-tainted blood transfusion, and turning it into a fight for more funding to battle the disease and against the diagnosis’ stigma. The year after his death, he was just 49. (His widow, Jeanne Moutoussamy Ashe, is a producer and an interviewee for the film.
At its best — when the flow of voices, archival clips (co-director Pollard being a master at the textural impact of found footage), and nicely blended-in recreations made to look archival, is thematically strongest — “Citizen Ashe”This documentary reveals how experience can be transformed into action. He excelled in matches because of his perseverance, his smarts and his poise. His fight, his talent, and his determination. It is why Ashe also moved mountains beyond the sport. He is the reason why the biggest tennis stadium is named after him. But his legacy is in how Colin Kaepernick (Serena and Venus Williams), LeBron James and Naomi Osaka refuses to separate their careers.
There’s a telling moment in the documentary when Ashe is interviewed about the antics of then-ascendant John McEnroe, and admits to being irritated, but also — to this middle-aged Black man who’d achieved so much — envious of the privilege they represented. “McEnroe had the emotional freedom to be a bad boy.”The Great Man said it.
Citizen Ashe will be on CNN during the July Fourth holiday weekend 2022.