Arthur Ashe

1943–1993 · American tennis champion, diarist & civil-rights advocate

Arthur Ashe (born 10 July 1943 in Richmond, Virginia; died 6 February 1993) won three Grand Slam singles titles — the US Open in 1968, the Australian Open in 1970 and Wimbledon in 1975 — the first Black man to win any of them. Between Wimbledon 1973 and Wimbledon 1974 he kept a running audio diary of life on tour, published in 1975 as Portrait in Motion: The Arthur Ashe Diary, written with the sportswriter Frank Deford. That book is where the sporting sense of “the zone” first appears in print.

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