Championship point at 40-love. He was deep in the fifth set of a match that never seemed to end. The clock flashed two hours and 40 minutes. He was running on fumes.

‘Nobody can imagine, unless they’ve been through it, what agony you face in a close five-set match,’ he later said. ‘Your feet hurt, your racket hand hurts, your one-pound racket is as heavy as a shovel, maybe your head pounds and your eyes hurt from the sun.’

Now all he had to do was play one point. Play the best point that he could. He bounced the ball on the court, threw it up in the air, and smashed. A furious serve. His opponent was overwhelmed and hit a mediocre return. He was already at the net and hit back a whipping volley. Game, set, match. 14-12, 5-7, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3.

The date was 9 September 1968. Arthur Ashe, a 25-year-old player from Richmond, Virginia, had just won the first US Open. His victory represented a first in more ways than one. For the first time in its history, the US Tennis Championships had let both amateur and professional players enter the tournament. It marked the dawn of the Open Era of tennis, which continues to this day. Ashe also made history in another, more important, way. He became the first Black man to win a grand slam tournament.

Ashe’s triumph came amid an annus horribilis for America. In April, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in Memphis. Two months later, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was killed in a burst of gunfire in Los Angeles. African-Americans hailed both men as their champions.

Ashe was no different: The murders hit him hard. He felt compelled to use his platform to speak out on racial injustice. But, for his words to have an impact, he had to win the US Open first. ‘I’m a champion now,’ he told his brother after his victory. ‘People will listen to what I have to say.’

More than 50 years later, amid renewed political turmoil, people are still listening. Ashe’s presence looms large over the tennis court. The US Open’s main stadium is none other than Arthur Ashe Stadium. And young African-American players such as Frances Tiafoe and Ben Shelton extol Ashe as a role model.

Ashe, who was the subject of a 2018 biography by Raymond Arsenault and a 2021 CNN documentary, beat the odds in order to reach the heights of tennis. The sport was long synonymous with white privileged elites. To quote one commentator back in the 1960s, it was ‘a symphony in white – players in white suits, hitting a white ball back-and-forth between white base lines in all-white country clubs’. Ashe, a Black kid from the South, should never have found his place between those white lines.

But his father was the caretaker of a playground for African-Americans in Richmond, which had four tennis courts. At age seven, Ashe picked up a racket for the first time. He would never let it go, telling his brother that ‘I want to be the Jackie Robinson of tennis.’

In 1963, by age 20, he was well on his way. He had won the prestigious National Junior Indoor Tennis Championship. UCLA, which had one of the best tennis programmes in the country, offered him a scholarship.

As Ashe moved west, the civil rights movement reached its zenith. That same summer, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech at the March on Washington. Ashe didn’t join the movement; although he supported its goals, he was reticent about making his support public.

His whole childhood, Ashe had been taught by tennis coaches to keep his emotions in check and not make waves. His unwillingness to take a stance was also the result of growing up in the South, where Black people perpetually ran the risk of lynching by white supremacists. ‘In the South,’ he said, ‘if you got angry too quickly, your life would be in danger.’

Ashe soon became the first Black man to make it onto the US Davis Cup team. It raised his profile to a whole new level. With great fame came great responsibility. Ashe was pressured to take up the cause of civil rights. ‘All around me [during the mid-1960s],’ he said, ‘I saw these athletes stepping out in front trying to demand civil rights. But I was still with mixed emotions.’ Ashe’s focus was tennis, and tennis only. This earned him the ire of Black Power activists, who labelled him an ‘Uncle Tom’. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the outspoken basketball player, nicknamed him ‘Arthur Ass’.

Then came 1968. Ashe had evolved into one of the best American tennis men in the world. On paper, he was still an amateur. His day job was in the data-processing department of West Point. But Ashe was playing at the highest level of the game. In 1967 he had reached the final of the Australian Championship, soon to become the Australian Open, and lost.

By then, Ashe had started to speak his mind on social issues. ‘I felt that I was coming into my own as far as being able to say what I wanted to say and have it be taken seriously,’ he recollected later. In March 1968, he gave a talk at a Black church in Washington, D.C. ‘The Black athlete, whether of average ability or a superstar, must make a commitment to his or her community and attempt to transform it,’ he said.

It was nothing radical, but for Ashe it was a start. On 4 April 1968, Ashe was driving to practice when he heard on the radio that King had been murdered. ‘I pulled my car to the side just to think about it,’ he said later. ‘I was very angry. I also felt slightly helpless. Things would be different now because he was seen as our knight in shining armour.’

With King dead, Senator Robert F. Kennedy became America’s new knight. Kennedy was running for the Democratic presidential nomination at the time. ‘I want to work for all the unrepresented people,’ he said. ‘I want to be their president.’ Among the unrepresented, no community felt closer to him than African-Americans. In Kennedy, for whom the term white privilege could have been invented, they saw an ally who would give them a helping hand.

Ashe agreed: ‘Bobby was white. He was Ivy League. He was rich. But nonetheless you believed in Bobby Kennedy. If you’re Black, growing up in the South, you have an extra set of antenna… You can spot a phony most of the time. And Bobby Kennedy was not phony.’

Ashe knew that first-hand. He had spent some time with Kennedy on the campaign trail. They had even played tennis together. On 5 June 1968, Kennedy was shot. He died a day later. Ashe was wrecked, and so was the Black community. They had just lost two prophets in two months. ‘There was so much happening,’ Ashe remembered later. ‘Dr King’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination… You didn’t get five minutes to breathe.’

Ashe felt he had a special role to play. ‘Being a Black American, I felt a sense of urgency that I want to do something. But I didn’t know what it was.’ It turned out to be winning the US Open. Ashe entered the tournament as the Number five seed and the highest ranked-amateur. The tournament, unlike today, was played on grass. Ashe’s offensive game, full of aces and serve-and-volley, was perfectly suited to the fast surface. He tore through the matches, dropping only two sets on the way to the final.

A week after his victory, Ashe was interviewed on CBS’ ‘Face the Nation.’ No athlete had ever appeared. For 25 minutes, he expounded on his experiences as a Black athlete – and Black man – in the US.

Ashe had completed his political awakening. Over the ensuing decades, he would support civil rights and human rights, protest against apartheid, and fight for the rights of Haitian asylum seekers in the US. He would also earn two more Grand Slam titles at the Australian Open and Wimbledon, securing his place as one of tennis’ greatest players.

In 1983 Ashe contracted HIV as a result of a blood transfusion. He went on to lead the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, and died from the disease in 1993 at 49. ‘Champions are people who want to leave their sport better than they found it,’ he once said. Arthur Ashe left the United States, and the world, better than he found them.