On This Date: Arthur Ashe Wins the First US Open — and Can't Accept the Check (Sept. 9, 1968)

On this date in 1968, at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, a 25-year-old Army lieutenant on leave from West Point won the very first US Open — the first American Grand Slam of the "Open era," when professionals were finally allowed in. Arthur Ashe beat Tom Okker of the Netherlands 14-12, 5-7, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, serving 26 aces across five sets on the grass.

He was the first Black man ever to win a Grand Slam singles title. He was also, thanks to one of the strangest technicalities in sports history, the only man in the building who couldn't get paid for it.

The Champion Who Made $280

The 1968 Open was "open" — pros welcome, prize money on the table: $14,000 to the winner, the richest purse in tennis. But Ashe was still an amateur, in part to protect his Davis Cup eligibility, and amateurs couldn't touch prize money. So the winner's check went to the runner-up. Tom Okker — the "Flying Dutchman," a so-called registered player permitted to collect — took home $14,000 for losing the final. Arthur Ashe, the champion, collected his amateur's allowance: $20 a day in expenses. Two hundred eighty dollars for the fortnight. The first US Open champion was, on paper, the worst-paid man in the draw.

He didn't much care. His father, Arthur Ashe Sr., came out of the stands, and the embrace between them became the tournament's first iconic image.

Lieutenant Ashe

The winner's day job makes the story better: Ashe was an active-duty first lieutenant in the U.S. Army, stationed at West Point as a data processor, playing the tournament while on leave. Two weeks earlier, he'd won the U.S. Amateur title in Boston. Nobody had ever held the U.S. Amateur and the U.S. Open in the same year — and since the amateur championship soon ceased to exist as a parallel major, no one ever will again. He was also the first American man to win his home championship since 1955.

The wall he broke ran further than the record book. In a sport played behind club gates that had excluded people who looked like him — in his hometown of Richmond, Ashe as a boy had been barred from the city's segregated courts — the first open championship of American tennis went to a Black man in Army-crisp discipline, serving rockets. As of today, he remains the only Black man ever to win the singles titles at Wimbledon, the US Open and the Australian Open.

What He Did With It

Ashe never treated the title as the destination. He won Australia in 1970, then delivered one of the great tactical masterpieces in tennis history at Wimbledon 1975, dismantling a heavily favored Jimmy Connors with junk and guile. Off the court he became the sport's conscience — arrested protesting apartheid and, after heart disease ended his career at 36 and a transfusion during 1983 surgery infected him with HIV, a dignified, relentless educator about AIDS until his death in February 1993 at 49.

When the US Open built the largest tennis stadium on Earth in 1997, there was only one name to put on it. Every champion crowned in Arthur Ashe Stadium is crowned, in effect, inside the answer to what happened on this date in 1968 — when the $280 champion turned out to be the richest figure in the sport's history.

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