Friday, April 13, 2012

Last Night's Event

Eddie and I got all dude'd up last night for the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health Foundation event.  He also founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS (which does much of its work at UCLA where Mr. Ashe went to college and lead our team to an NCAA Tennis Championship).
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UCLA's Arthur Ashe Health Center
Arthur Ashe (for those of you that might not know) was famous African American Tennis Player - who won the US Open in 1968 and Wimbledon in 1975.  He was famously denied a visa into South Africa in 1968 to the South African Tennis Open - and used his platform to call for an end to apartheid.
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He was later invited back to South African as a member of the 31 person US African American delegation to help South African integrate their society. (thank you Wikipedia for that detail.)
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Arthur Ashe contracted AIDS during a heart operation in 1985 and passed away in 1992.  the Foundation - who's event we attended last night, raises money for the young men and women of the Institute to attend school and become doctors.  It was a great night.  Except for the tie.  Gosh I hate to wear a tie.
Jeff Williams, Katrina Adams - and my Eddie
The young woman with Eddie in the picture above is Katrina Adams.  She runs the Harlem Tennis outreach program.  And, get this, she was playing at Wimbledon (on court 5) the same middle Sunday I was watching Ivan Lendel (on court 2).  How cool is that!?
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Jeff is a USTA Volunteer District grand-poobah (I haven't gotten all the titles right yet :-), and all around nice guy.  I had a very nice time with these two - as well as the other people we hung out with.
Eddie and I in the mug shot
ack! Tie