Citizen Ashe review – tribute to Wimbledon champ and Obama’s quiet inspiration

This documentary tracks the life of African American tennis star Arthur Ashe who was a pioneering radical despite his restrained style

A clip towards the end of this respectful documentary shows Barack Obama revealing that his role-model heroes were Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe. Surely, Ashe had to be the bigger influence: the only black man ever to have won Wimbledon was a famously someone with a thoughtful, non-strident personality whom the white tennis establishment found to be highly acceptable. Ashe himself, though sympathetic to the new black radicalism of the 1960s was, in terms of style, entirely apart from it, and this film recounts his stoicism at enduring the occasional “Uncle Tom” jibe.

Perhaps this was crystallised by his decision to ignore the boycotts against apartheid South Africa and play there as a way of accelerating integration, despite the fact that he was for a long time refused a visa precisely because of his fulminations against apartheid. This strategy had a non-Hollywood ending: he lost in the singles final there in 1973 to his old rival Jimmy Connors. Later, Nelson Mandela embraced Ashe in public and called him “my brother”.

A whole documentary (or maybe a feature film) could be made about the culture-clash duel between Ashe and Connors, the bad boy of tennis who refused to play for his country in the Davis Cup, and then sued Ashe for calling him unpatriotic. But Connors’ rock’n’roll antics were something that only a white man could afford; Ashe grew up knowing that he had to stick to the rules more than others, in a world where the white authorities would be looking for any excuse to exclude him.

Later, Ashe faced a tragic catastrophe: he contracted HIV through infected blood in the course of a heart operation, and so became a respected campaigner for Aids education and awareness, a new purpose he took up with characteristic dignity and humility – though, typically, his style was far from that of radical movements such as Act Up.

The issues involved here might have been discussed a little more extensively and the provenance and context of the TV interview archive material could have been labelled more clearly. But this is a decent film.

• Citizen Ashe is in cinemas from 10 December.