Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Ashe

Ashe borrows the cleanest language he knows - tennis - to sketch an entire political psychology. "Keep the ball in play" is the ethic of the long rally: minimize unforced errors, control the center, wait for your opponent to blink. Translated into party temperament, it flatters Republicans as disciplined managers of risk, people who trust institutions, markets, and habits to grind out points. It's not praise so much as an explanation of style: incrementalism as strategy, not just ideology.

Then he snaps to "go for broke", the higher-toss, higher-stakes shot. Democrats, in Ashe's framing, aim for winners: ambitious legislation, moral crusades, big structural fixes. The subtext is that progress depends on risk tolerance - and that risk can look like recklessness when it misses. Ashe isn't calling one side good and the other bad; he's describing different relationships to failure. Conservatives prefer the safe return; liberals accept the double fault as the cost of changing the scoreboard.

Context matters: Ashe came of age as a Black athlete in a country where "keeping the ball in play" could mean patiently enduring a rigged match. His own life threaded tactical restraint with principled boldness, from breaking tennis color lines to speaking on apartheid and AIDS. That gives the line its quiet bite: politics, like tennis, rewards consistency, but history sometimes only moves when someone tries the low-percentage shot - and lives with the consequences.