Arthur Ashe

Their life

The only Black man to win the singles title at Wimbledon, the US Open and the Australian Open — barred as a boy from the whites-only courts of his own Richmond, Virginia. He beat Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon in 1975 by refusing to trade power, junking and slicing until Connors had nothing to hit against. Off the court he campaigned against apartheid, was arrested protesting US policy on Haitian refugees, and founded programmes for inner-city players. He contracted HIV from a transfusion during heart surgery in 1983, was forced to disclose it publicly by a newspaper in 1992, and spent his last year campaigning on AIDS. His memoir Days of Grace was finished weeks before his death.

Known for

• Winning Wimbledon in 1975
• First Black US Open champion
• Fighting apartheid in South Africa
• Founding inner-city tennis programs
• A Hard Road to Glory
• AIDS advocacy and Days of Grace

The road they walked

Arthur Ashe was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1943, in a city and a country where the best tennis courts were closed to him because of his skin. His father was a caretaker at Brook Field, a Black playground, and the family lived on the grounds. His mother died when he was six. He grew up thin, quiet and bookish, and he later wrote that he learned early to keep his feelings off his face. A local player named Ronald Charity first put a racket in his hands. Dr. Robert Walter Johnson, a physician in Lynchburg who ran a summer program for promising Black juniors on a backyard court, took over his training. Johnson taught the boy composure along with strokes: never argue a call, never show anger, never give an opponent a reason to say he was difficult.

Ashe left Richmond for his last year of high school in St. Louis so he could compete against white players, then went west to UCLA on a scholarship. In 1963 he became the first Black man on the US Davis Cup team. In 1968, still an amateur and serving as an Army lieutenant, he won the first US Open of the Open era. He took the Australian Open in 1970. In 1975 he beat the heavily favored Jimmy Connors in the Wimbledon final, with a game built on pace changes, slice and patience rather than power. By then he was already known for more than tennis. He had been denied a visa to South Africa in 1969, and he pressed the country's tennis authorities until he was allowed to play there in 1973, while speaking plainly against apartheid.

A heart attack in 1979 ended his career, and he spent the rest of his life widening it. He captained the US Davis Cup team and wrote a three-volume history of Black athletes in America, A Hard Road to Glory. He helped found programs to bring tennis and tutoring to inner-city children, including the National Junior Tennis League. He was arrested at the South African embassy in 1985 and outside the White House in 1992, in protest of US policy toward Haitian refugees. He did not look like a firebrand, which was part of why people listened.

How their story ended

Ashe died on February 6, 1993, in New York, at age 49, of pneumonia related to AIDS. He had been infected through a blood transfusion during his 1983 heart surgery. Diagnosed in 1988, he kept the illness private until April 1992, when he announced it publicly after learning that a newspaper was about to report it. He spent his final months raising money and awareness for AIDS research and working on his memoir, Days of Grace. His funeral was held in Richmond, the city that had once barred him from its courts.

In their words

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