Arthur Ashe was a prominent African American tennis player who was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. During his playing career, he won three Grand Slam titles. Ashe is also remembered for his efforts to further social causes. In his youth,  In 1963,  Ashe was the first African American ever selected to the US Davis Cup team. In 1965, Ashe won the individual NCAA championship. He was also a chief contributor in UCLA's winning the team NCAA championship in the same year.  Ashe quickly ascended to the upper echelon of tennis players worldwide after turning professional in 1969.By 1969, most people considered Ashe to be the best American male tennis player. He had won the inaugural US Open in 1968, and had aided the US Davis Cup team to victory that same year.  In 1970, he added a second Grand Slam title to his resume by winning the Australian Open. In 1975, after several years of lower levels of success, Ashe played his best season ever by winning Wimbledon, unexpectedly defeating Jimmy Connors in the final. He remains the only black player ever to win the men's singles at Wimbledon, the US Open, or Australian Open, and one of only two black men to win a Grand Slam singles event (the other being France's Yannick Noah, who won the French Open in 1983). He would play for several more years, but after being slowed by heart surgery in 1979,  Ashe retired in 1980. Ashe underwent a second heart surgery. To no one's surprise, he was elected to the Tennis Hall of Fame in 1985. The story of Ashe's life turned from success to tragedy in 1988, however, when Ashe discovered he had contracted HIV during the blood transfusions he had received during one of his two heart surgeries. He and his wife kept his illness private until April 8, 1992, when reports that the newspaper USA Today was about to publish a story about his condition forced him to make a public announcement that he had the disease. In the last year of his life, Arthur Ashe did much to call attention to AIDS sufferers worldwide. Two months before his death, he founded the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, to help address issues of inadequate health care delivery and was named Sports Illustrated magazine's Sportsman of the Year. He also spent much of the last years of his life writing his memoir Days of Grace, finishing the manuscript less than a week before his death. Ashe died of complications from AIDS