I Take The Good With The Bad,

There Were Times When I Asked Myself Whether I Was Being Principled Or Simply A Coward.... I Was Wrapped In The Cocoon Of Tennis Early In Life, Mainly By Blacks Like My Most Powerful Mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson Of Lynchburg, Virginia. They Insisted That I Be Unfailingly Polite On The Court, Unfalteringly Calm And Detached, So That Whites Could Never Accuse Me Of Meanness. I Learned Well. I Look At Photographs Of The Skinny, Frail, Little Black Boy That I Was In The Early 1950s, And I See That I Was My Tennis Racquet And My Tennis Racquet Was Me. It Was My Rod And My Staff.

My Humanity, In Common With All Of God's Children, Gives The Greatest Flight To My Full Range Of My Possibilities.

We Must Believe In The Power Of Education. We Must Respect Just Laws. We Must Love Ourselves, Our Old And Or Young, Our Women As Well As Our Men.

Drummed Into Me, Above All, By My Dad, By The Whole Family, Was That Without Your Good Name, You Would Be Nothing.

I Keep Sailing On In This Middle Passage. I Am Sailing Into The Wind And The Dark. But I Am Doing My Best To Keep My Boat Steady And My Sails Full.