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Forest Hills, September 9, 1968. A 25-year-old from Richmond, Virginia walks onto the grass and wins the first US Open o...
09/09/2026

Forest Hills, September 9, 1968. A 25-year-old from Richmond, Virginia walks onto the grass and wins the first US Open of the Open Era. He is still an amateur, and a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Almost nobody has him down as the man to beat. Arthur Ashe becomes the first man of African descent to win a Grand Slam singles title.

Fifty-eight years later, he is still the only one to have won the US Open.

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He served 26 aces, fifteen of them in a first set that ran to 14-12, and beat Tom Okker in five. No Black man had ever won a Grand Slam singles title. He was the first. Being an amateur, he couldn’t touch the $14,000 first prize. That went to Okker. Arthur Ashe went home with $20 a day in expenses, and something the money couldn’t buy.

Six days a champion, he sat down in front of the cameras to answer questions about race in America. Tennis was built around private clubs, he said, and people who looked like him weren’t members. To start at all you had to step outside the game and find someone willing to back you.

Then the real question. Does athletic success advance anything? Partly, he said. Only partly. You can be heavyweight champion of the world, but if you can’t turn that influence into practical progress, the victory costs more than it returns.

No man is an island. You cannot sit by and let the world go by.

He said it again where it counted. On 14 April 1970 he appeared as a petitioner before the United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid and asked the United States, Britain, France, Australia, Germany and Italy to expel South Africa from world tennis and the Davis Cup.

He had been asking for a visa for years. They kept refusing him.

Asked in 1968 about a proposed boycott, he said he’d have voted against it. Not because the grievance was wrong. His objection was to the method. A boycott tells the world you don’t like something. He wanted a tool that did more than tell.

Give up home advantage, go to Johannesburg, beat them in their own backyard. He arrived in 1973, refused to enter as an “honorary white”, and pressed organisers to open the segregated stands at Ellis Park. He won the doubles title with Tom Okker, the same man he’d

THE WILLIAMS DYNASTY — PART 1Richard and Oracene Price had five daughters between them: Yetunde, Isha, Lyndrea, Venus an...
08/09/2026

THE WILLIAMS DYNASTY — PART 1

Richard and Oracene Price had five daughters between them: Yetunde, Isha, Lyndrea, Venus and Serena. Before the trophies, the records and the attention, there was a household where the girls were expected to work hard, think for themselves and understand that tennis was only one part of who they were. There was no professional tennis family around them, no established route into the sport and no guarantee that two girls growing up in Compton would ever make it to the highest level. There was Richard, who decided he could learn the game himself, Oracene, who brought her own ideas about discipline and independence, and a family that would become the girls’ first support system.

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> MORE THAN GOALS
Written by Lotus Marpessa

Richard’s relationship with tennis began without the usual entry point. He saw the sport on television, became interested in the money available to professional players and decided to learn everything he could. In Compton, part of that education came from an older man known as Old Whiskey, a local tennis player who was regarded as a guru of the game. Richard learned from him, absorbing everything he could, then went further. He studied, practised and kept improving until he eventually became better than the man who had first taught him. He had no conventional coaching background, but he had an ability that would become central to the family’s story: he was willing to teach himself whatever he needed to know.

That curiosity soon became a plan for his daughters. Richard believed women were capable of far more than society often expected of them, a conviction he traced back to his own mother. She had taught him that women could think their way through difficult circumstances. When Richard began thinking about Venus and Serena, he did not see a reason to put a ceiling on what they could become. Rather than wait for a coach to take them under his wing, he decided to learn the game himself. “I knew what I would teach,” he said. He would become the person teaching his daughters.

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The decision becomes more significant when placed against the history of tennis in America. For much of the 20th century, access to th

08/09/2026

Sports & Culture: Allen Iverson sits on the bench while his aunt braids his hair mid game. Known for his iconic cornrows, Iverson was an influential figure in today’s NBA style. While players are now free and even encouraged to stand out with their appearance, it was different in his days. But he never wore his braids as a style or rebel statement, to him it was more functional if anything.

“People were making a big deal about it, like it was a thug thing, but I was tired of (barbers) messing my hair up on the road. If I could get a cornrow, I wouldn’t have to worry about that”

Same with the sleeve everybody copied. He wore it to press the fluid down after elbow surgery, and when his arm healed he was simply used to it.

“Everybody talk about my dress code and how I dress, all I was doing was dressing like the guys that I grew up around.”

Twenty-five years later, Naomi Osaka walked onto Arthur Ashe at the US Open in cornrows, a red and black headband, that same sleeve down one arm and a custom Who Decides War gown stitched from newspaper clippings of her own victories. Styled by Law Roach. She called him a trailblazer, someone who merged culture and sport. Right after the win she said it plainer:

“I love expressing myself through clothes. I don’t like talking that much.”

And when a reporter asked about the durag, a first at a Grand Slam:

“Nothing inspired it. Vanessa just told me that I had to hide my braids.”

Tennis has a long memory of deciding which cultures are welcome on its courts and which ones need explaining. Venus docked a point at the 1999 Australian Open when her beads came loose. Serena dancing after Olympic gold in 2012 and reading columns about it all week. The catsuit she wore for her health in 2018, banned by Roland Garros the following year. None of those were statements either. Someone else always supplied the meaning.

That is why Iverson matters beyond the crossover. He was told for a decade that his hair, his tattoos and his shorts were a problem, and he never translated himself into something easier to watch. What the league once treated as a threat, it now sells as a tunnel walk.

MTG Book Club: Tiger Woods. In this captivating biography written by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian, we delve deep int...
07/09/2026

MTG Book Club: Tiger Woods. In this captivating biography written by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian, we delve deep into the life and times of the golf legend Tiger Woods. 

The book beautifully unravels Tiger’s journey, focusing on his extraordinary family dynamic that played a pivotal role in shaping his legendary career. 

As a young golf maverick, Tiger faced immense challenges and societal barriers, but his unwavering determination and talent propelled him to greatness. 

One of the most compelling aspects explored is Tiger’s relationship with his father, who was his biggest supporter and guiding force throughout his rise to stardom. His father however, was a flawed man who proved to have been a hinderance to Tiger’s personal development despite the support he provided to Tiger for his career. In this book, we get a better understanding of the patterns, challenges victories that shaped Tiger Woods to become the man who changed the game.

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The decathlon is ten events across two days, and it does not allow anyone to be a specialist. For most of the twentieth ...
07/09/2026

The decathlon is ten events across two days, and it does not allow anyone to be a specialist. For most of the twentieth century it was also amateur, and competitors were forbidden from earning money from it. Daley Thompson arrived at the end of that era and became the most decorated decathlete Britain has produced.

Francis Morgan Ayodélé Thompson was born in Notting Hill in 1958, the second son of Frank, a British Nigerian with a minicab firm, and Lydia, a Scot from Dundee. Daley is a contraction of Ayodelé, a Yoruba name meaning joy comes home. He was twelve when his father was killed in Streatham, and at boarding school when the news came.

He met the coach Bob Mortimer at Crystal Palace in 1975 and followed him to Essex Beagles. Mortimer had four men entered for a team decathlon and one had chickenpox. He had never attempted seven of the events and had five weeks. He picked up a pole vault pole for the first time, slept in a tent beside the track, and won it.

He won Commonwealth gold in Edmonton in 1978, Olympic gold in Moscow in 1980, and a second Olympic title in Los Angeles in 1984, which made him only the second man to retain the decathlon crown. He set four world records. By 1983 he held the Olympic, World, European and Commonwealth titles at the same time, and he went nine years without losing a decathlon. He was named BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 1982 and appointed CBE in 2000.

Asked for his best day, he does not name an Olympics. He names the 1986 European Championships in Stuttgart, where eighty thousand Germans filled the stadium to support Jürgen Hingsen. The noise of that crowd, he says, was what made the day.

Thompson belonged to the first generation of British athletes permitted to earn from their name, and his Lucozade advertisements helped turn a drink for sick children into a sports drink. Athletes today are signed as brands long before they are champions. Thompson took far fewer of those deals than he was offered, on the grounds that anything costing him a single point was not worth it.

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On 14 March 1999, in a hall in Manhattan, Maurice Ashley beat Adrian Negulescu and became the first Black grandmaster in...
06/09/2026

On 14 March 1999, in a hall in Manhattan, Maurice Ashley beat Adrian Negulescu and became the first Black grandmaster in the fifteen-hundred-year history of the game.

He was born on 6 March 1966 in St. Andrew, Jamaica, and raised in Tower Hill, Kingston, by his grandmother, a schoolteacher. His mother had gone ahead to New York and spent ten years saving to bring her children over. She saw them five times in that decade.

He went to Wolmer’s Boys School in Kingston. Then he landed in Brooklyn in 1978, aged twelve, and the family settled in Brownsville. Mike Tyson was coming up on those same blocks, born four months after him, and would walk into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2011.

Brownsville would send a second fighter to that Hall. She lived in Ashley’s house.

His mother had a plan for what her children would become. A degree, a profession, a floor under their feet. Not one of them took that road.

His older brother Devon became a three-time world champion kickboxer. His younger sister Alicia, pictured, followed Devon into the ring, switched to boxing, took world titles in three divisions and at forty-eight became the oldest woman ever to hold one. She went into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2023.

Maurice told his mother he was going to play chess.

At fourteen, he saw a friend playing chess at Brooklyn Tech and thought he knew the game. The friend, a kid everyone called Chico, wiped him off the board. It was not even close. He went to the library, read a book, came back, and lost again. Chico had been reading too.

During his three years at Brooklyn Tech, he never made the school team. He entered tournaments anyway. By twenty, he was a chess master. Nobody had coached him.

They called themselves the Black Bear School of Chess Ronald Simpson, William Morrison and Willie Johnson. They met at Mike Cox’s place at nine at night and played blitz until nine the next morning everyone else in Brooklyn out on a Friday night, while they were in a basement trying to take each other apart. Morrison reached 2500. They read magazines in languages they did not speak, word by word with a dictionary, to find out what the rest of the world knew.

Nobo

In the summer of 1964 a seventeen-year-old from Harlem sat in a journalism workshop that asked every kid in it the same ...
06/09/2026

In the summer of 1964 a seventeen-year-old from Harlem sat in a journalism workshop that asked every kid in it the same question: what are you going to do for this community? To answer it, he first had to go and learn the history of his own neighbourhood. Dr. King came to speak that summer. He went along with the reporters and got to ask him a question, and he says his heart was almost in his throat.

He was already the most recruited schoolboy player in New York, and everybody assumed they knew what he was for.

He spent the rest of his life showing them otherwise. He read Malcolm X as a freshman and recognised a man trapped inside somebody else’s idea of him. At twenty he sat in a room in Cleveland while Muhammad Ali explained why he would not go to Vietnam, and learned what a real position costs a man. At twenty-one he stayed home from the Olympics rather than help sell a picture of racial harmony that did not exist anywhere in the country. “I didn’t have any money at the time,” he said about it years later. “There was nothing they could take from me.”

The basketball speaks for itself. Three national titles under John Wooden, who crossed the country to recruit him and then talked to him about semicolons because the kid was an English major. Six championships, six MVPs, nineteen All-Star games, twenty seasons, and a shot nobody has ever managed to block or copy. He retired in 1989 as the league’s leading scorer and the record held for thirty-four years.

He was never only that, and he never wanted to be. He grew up on his father’s Ellington records, studied martial arts seriously enough to end up on screen opposite Bruce Lee, took the joke about his own reputation and delivered it in a pilot’s uniform, chose a new name and a new faith at the height of his fame, and has written twenty books since he stopped playing. In 2016 Barack Obama hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck.

“My years as a basketball player defined me, but my years as a writer refined me.”

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Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. learned the game on concrete in Upper Manhattan. The first time he tried he could not reach the rim and had to throw the ball underhand. By the eighth grad

Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s colour barrier in 1947, but it took another twenty years before a Black man was allowed...
05/09/2026

Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s colour barrier in 1947, but it took another twenty years before a Black man was allowed to stand on a major league field and call the game. His name was Emmett Ashford, and getting him there took a mother, a mentor, a league president and a city that refused to let him be overlooked.

He was born in Los Angeles in 1914 to a mother, Adele, who worked as a secretary at The California Eagle, the city’s Black newspaper, and by his teens he was writing for it himself. At Jefferson High he ran track, played ball, became the school’s first Black class president and co-edited the student paper. He was breaking things open long before anyone was watching.

He was never much of a player, and he spent most Sundays on the bench for a semi-pro team until the afternoon the assigned umpire never showed and they asked him to fill in. The ambition came later, in late 1945, on a Navy base in Corpus Christi, where he was lying on his cot when the radio announced that Jackie Robinson had signed with Brooklyn. “Right then, I said to myself, I’m going to be the first Black umpire.” Back home in Los Angeles a former American League umpire named Bill Stewart worked games alongside him and taught him the major league strike zone, because somebody had to.

They weren’t taking him at umpiring school, “so I evolved my own style.” Everything people would later hold against him came out of that the booming calls, the sprint down the line, the cuff links and the pressed suits. They said it cheapened the profession. It was a man building a craft that nobody would agree to teach him.

In 1951 he took leave from his post office job and became the first Black umpire in organized baseball, and when they offered him a full season he walked away from fifteen years of pension to take it. A fan in the Arizona-Texas League leaned over the rail and told him to go home, and in some towns he couldn’t eat in the same restaurants as the white umpires on his own crew. By the end of that season, in El Paso, the same crowds stood and applauded him off the field.

Twelve seasons in the Pacific Coast League made him the most famous umpire in the minor leagues, and in 1963 the lea

Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s colour barrier in 1947, but it took another twenty years before a Black man was allowed...
05/09/2026

Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s colour barrier in 1947, but it took another twenty years before a Black man was allowed to stand on a major league field and call the game. His name was Emmett Ashford, and getting him there took a mother, a mentor, a league president and a city that refused to let him be overlooked.

He was born in Los Angeles in 1914 to a mother, Adele, who worked as a secretary at The California Eagle, the city’s Black newspaper, and by his teens he was writing for it himself. At Jefferson High he ran track, played ball, became the school’s first Black class president and co-edited the student paper. He was breaking things open long before anyone was watching.

He was never much of a player, and he spent most Sundays on the bench for a semi-pro team until the afternoon the assigned umpire never showed and they asked him to fill in. The ambition came later, in November 1945, on a Navy base in Corpus Christi, where he was lying on his cot when the radio announced that Jackie Robinson had signed with Brooklyn. “Right then, I said to myself, I’m going to be the first Black umpire.” Back home in Los Angeles a former American League umpire named Bill Stewart worked games alongside him and taught him the major league strike zone, because somebody had to.

“I didn’t go to umpiring school because they weren’t taking blacks back in those days, so I evolved my own style.” Everything people would later hold against him came out of that one sentence the booming calls, the sprint down the line, the cuff links and the pressed suits. They said it cheapened the profession. It was a man building a craft that nobody would agree to teach him.

In 1951 he took leave from his post office job and became the first Black umpire in organized baseball, and when they offered him a full season he walked away from fifteen years of pension to take it. A fan in the Arizona-Texas League leaned over the rail and told him to go home, and in some towns he couldn’t eat in the same restaurants as the white umpires on his own crew. By the end of that season, in El Paso, the same crowds stood and applauded him off the field.

Twelve seasons in the Pacific Coast League made him the m

When it comes to African American track and field athletes, some names must always be in the conversation. Rafer Johnson...
05/09/2026

When it comes to African American track and field athletes, some names must always be in the conversation. Rafer Johnson is one of them. What he did after the medals matters as much as what he did to win them.

Born in Hillsboro, Texas in 1934. When he was nine the family moved west to Kingsburg, California, a small Swedish farming town of 2,500 where they were the only Black family. They spent their first stretch there in a railroad boxcar. He picked cotton to help the household and tore his foot open on a cannery conveyor belt as a kid he could still feel it years later coming down a long jump runway.

What he remembered about Kingsburg wasn’t the hardship. It was that the parents and coaches built the fields themselves, and that there was a place for every kid who wanted to play. Hold onto that. It explains everything he did later.

In 1952 his high school coach Merle Dodson drove him 25 miles south to Tulare to watch the Olympic decathlon trials. Bob Mathias broke his own world record that day. Johnson went home and started dreaming.

He was the first in his family to go to college. Offers came from across the country. He chose UCLA close to home, a campus with a history of taking athletes of every race, and a track coach named Elvin “Ducky” Drake who told him plainly: you can make the next Olympic team.

He became the first African American to pledge a national fraternity at UCLA. His classmates elected him student body president, the same thing they’d done in eighth grade and at Kingsburg High. In 1955, in only his fourth ever decathlon, he won Pan American gold in Mexico City. Back home in Kingsburg they threw him a welcome meet and he broke Mathias’ world record on that track, in front of the town that raised him.

Silver came in Melbourne in 1956, competing injured, and it stung. He held the world record going in and knew he hadn’t performed. He told his coach he wanted Rome.

By 1957 his knee was strong enough for basketball, which started a lifelong friendship with John Wooden. In 1958, at the first ever USA–USSR dual meet in Moscow, he took the world record back from Soviet rival Vasily Kuznetsov on Kuznetsov’s own soil. Sports Illustrated named him

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