(1943 - 1993) Ashe once claimed that he would consider himself a failure if he were remembered only for tennis. The first black man to win either the U.S. Championship (1968) or Wimbledon (1975), he was also the first American tennis player to earn over $100,000 in one year (1970). The author of Hard Road to Glory, a history of black athletes, Ashe announced in 1992 that tainted blood from a 1983 heart surgery had given him the AIDS virus. Arthur Ashe Stadium, the current home of the U.S. Open, was named for him in 1997.