Arthur Ashe - Personal Life

Personal Life

Ashe served in the US Army in 1966–68, reaching the rank of first lieutenant. On February 20, 1977, Ashe married Jeanne Moutoussamy, a photographer he had met four months earlier. Andrew Young, the US ambassador to the UN, performed the wedding ceremony at the UN chapel in New York City. Arthur and Jeanne had an adopted daughter, who was born on December 21, 1986. She was named Camera after her mother's profession.

In 1979, Ashe suffered a heart attack, which surprised the public in view of his high level of fitness as an athlete. His condition drew attention to the hereditary aspect of heart disease. Ashe underwent a quadruple bypass operation, performed by Dr. John Hutchinson on December 13, 1979. A few months after the operation, Ashe was on the verge of making his return to professional tennis. However, during a family trip in Cairo, Egypt, he developed chest pain while running. Ashe stopped running and returned to see physician and close friend Douglas Stein, who had accompanied the family on the trip. Stein urged Ashe to return to New York City so he could be close to his cardiologist and surgeon.

In 1983, Ashe underwent a second round of heart surgery to correct the previous bypass surgery. In 1988, Ashe fell ill and discovered he had contracted HIV during blood transfusions during his second heart surgery. This ultimately led to his death; he and his wife kept his illness private until April 8, 1992, when reports that the newspaper USA Today was about to publish a story about his health condition because of his increasingly gaunt physical appearance forced him to make a public announcement that he had the disease. In the last year of his life, Ashe did much to call attention to AIDS sufferers worldwide. Two months before his death, he founded the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health to help address issues of inadequate health care delivery and was named Sports Illustrated magazine's Sportsman of the Year. He also spent much of the last years of his life writing his memoir Days of Grace, finishing the manuscript less than a week before his death. Ashe died from an advanced HIV infection related pneumonia on February 6, 1993. He is buried in Woodland Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia. His wife continues with civil rights activism, most recently contributing a video to New Yorkers for marriage equality.