Name: Arthur Ashe Talks About His Heart Attack | Letterman
Uploaded: 2022-08-29T11:05:40.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Arthur Ashe Talks About His Heart Attack | Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-29. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Arthur Ashe Talks About His Heart Attack | Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-29. Transcript available.

- Thank you.
My next guest has won every major tennis tournament
on the pro circuit.
Please welcome one of the great gentlemen
in the world of sports today, Mr. Arthur Aniston.
Pleasure to meet you.
Thank you for being here.
You know, when you were playing,
I always thought of you as the,
just about the best spokesperson
for the sport of tennis
and professional athletics generally.
You were an amazing gentleman
and it was always a pleasure to watch you compete.
- Thanks, nice to hear you.
Do we have to lock eyes?
- No, please don't start with that.
Do you mind if I ask you what happened medically to you?
- No, no, I don't mind talking about it.
In fact, I've just joined the American Heart Association
as their honorary national campaign chairman.
So I'm gonna be talking about it a lot.
No, I don't mind talking about it, no.
- Yeah, I remember reading that you had been playing
some just practice tennis, warmup tennis.
- Yes, I'd just gotten back from Europe
and just one night, you know,
I got these three bouts of pain
and I, in the center of my chest
and I was asleep in bed
and it was excruciating pain,
but it went away in about two minutes
and it happened three times.
And I went to sleep and forgot about it
when it didn't come back the fourth time.
And the next afternoon,
over in Queens, I was giving a tennis clinic
and it hit me again, same place, same sensation,
but maybe twice as severe.
And I mean, I was, it hurt so much,
I was in tears, it hurt so much.
And a doctor just happened to be there
and he said, he listened to my story
when I told him what had happened the night before then.
And he said, "Well, I want you to go to the hospital."
And I said, "Okay, I'll just get my racket
and my wallet and we'll go."
He says, "No, you're gonna go right now."
And I was in the hospital
and luckily I was just 10 minutes away
from New York hospital here in the city, so.
- See, now that happens to guys who are in their 60s
and who eat pizza all day.
But how old were you when it happened?
- This was last year, I was 36.
- And a superbly conditioned athlete.
- Yes, that's just, I guess, an example
of how it can hit anybody.
But there are 18-year-old boys and girls
that have heart attacks.
You just don't see them as being documented that much.
But, you know, my cardiologist over here, Dr. Scheidt,
says, you know, people just don't realize
that anybody can get a heart attack.
And on the diet that we have in the U.S.,
it's a wonder that more of us don't have heart attacks.
- Then I read that you were recovering
and thinking about returning to tennis.
- Yes, I had, I decided in November to have bypass surgery.
So, I had a quadruple bypass.
- What does a quadruple bypass mean?
- Well, they give you an angiogram,
which is a way that they go in and take pictures of,
to see to what extent and which arteries around the heart
are clogged.
And on the basis of that, and whether or not the rest of your
blood vessels leading away from the obstruction.
If they are clear, then you're a fairly good candidate for a bypass.
And mine were very clear.
So I had a quadruple bypass.
What they do, essentially, is the doctor will build some bypasses,
just like highways around the obstruction.
They don't remove your native vessel.
They just build another highway so that the blood can go around it.
And they reconnect it into the good part of the vessel.
But I, and I was terrific for two months.
And then all of a sudden, one day in Egypt, I think it just closed up.
One, or possibly two of them just closed.
We don't know yet, but I got angina again.
And I had to finally just say, well, that's that.
I'll retire from tennis, but, but I'm still here.
I mean, I lead a perfectly normal life.
- Yeah, do you, are you laboring under any kind
of, what the heck, why me, what?
- No, no, I did for about five minutes.
But too many, no, life's, I do too many things
that are interesting off the tennis court
to worry about whether or not I can't play tennis again.
- Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, life's too much fun anyway.
- We were talking about this yesterday,
and a lot of athletes never know when it's time to quit,
and they linger and deteriorate in public.
- That's true, that's true.
- You pretty well had a signal that you're not playing anymore.
- Well, that was a pretty strong signal.
I wanna talk about something else, if you don't mind.
Anyway, I'm glad that you're recovered and in sound health.
- Thanks.
- There was a thing on 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago
about the myth or the dream that young black athletes have
- Yeah. - Of playing professional sports.
- Right.
We all did.
I mean, I think white kids have it too,
but right now, the black community,
we're struggling with trying to get our kids
to not dream beyond the realms of possibility.
We're working at it.
It's coming along fairly well now,
because we're now coming up with a community approach to it.
It's not just, say, a Walt Frazier or somebody saying to a kid,
"Listen, don't think you can be me just because you're
all-state in high school."
So the message is getting through, finally.
- There was a time when it seemed to be an instant way out
of a poverty situation or a ghetto situation.
- Well, even now, professional athletes
are among the highest paid people in the world.
It's just that their economic life is so short.
You can't play baseball forever.
The average economic life of a running back in football
is 4.6 years.
That's all.
4.6 years.
- What are you going to do now?
- Oh, boy.
I do a ton of things.
I'm still involved with selling my tennis clothes,
shoes, and rackets still being sold worldwide.
So that never stops.
I have a very interesting consultancy job
with Aetna Life & Casualty Company,
which is in line basically with what you were talking
about earlier in trying to get more minorities interested
in the insurance industry, because the insurance industry
has a very bad image in most minority communities,
Hispanic communities as well.
I work for ABC television, a rival network in sports.
I'm in the midst of writing my autobiography right now,
at least about half of my life.
I hope to live another 35 years if I can.
I've just finished--actually, for RCA.
We just finished a--which is going to go on RCA's first catalog
for the new video disc machines, an instructional film,
but a very good one for the average tennis player out there.
Let me talk about that as--and I hope this doesn't sound strange, but--
Nothing sounds strange to me.
There are not a lot of professional black tennis players, hardly any.
No, we have about six girls now, and--I should say six women, and about four
men.
They're doing awfully--they're doing fairly well.
How did you get to be a world-class tennis player?
For me, it's--you can't use me as an example.
I happened to have lived 10 meters from four tennis courts.
I lived a very idyllic childhood because my father was a special police officer,
and he was in charge of the largest black playground in Richmond, Virginia when
I was a kid.
And we lived on this playground, and there were three baseball diamonds,
two football fields, an Olympic-sized pool, four tennis courts,
two basketball courts, horseshoe pits, and a monstrous utility field.
And that's where I lived for 17 years.
So I was in heaven all the time.
Again, I want to thank you very much for giving us some of your time.
It's a pleasure to meet and talk with you, ladies and gentlemen, Arthur Ashe.
Arthur Ashe, Rich Hall, will be here right after this conversation.