anthonyhaley

He won the US Open as an amateur and got no prize money. He was refused a visa by South Africa for years for being Black. And in 1992 a newspaper told him it was going to print his medical records, so he had to stand up in front of the world and announce he was dying. He said: "I didn't commit any crime. I'm not running for public office. I should be able to reserve the right to my medical history." He won the US Open in 1968, Wimbledon in 1975, and was the only Black man ever to win either. He had heart surgery twice in the early 1980s and received a blood transfusion. The blood supply was not screened then. That is how he contracted HIV. He told his family and kept it private for three and a half years, which was his right and which in 1988 was also basic self-protection — people with the virus were losing homes, jobs and children. In April 1992 a reporter rang him, said the paper had it, and asked him to confirm. He was given twenty-four hours. So he called a press conference, with his wife beside him, and announced it himself rather than let it be done to him. He then spent the last ten months of his life founding an AIDS foundation, campaigning, and being arrested outside the White House protesting the treatment of Haitian refugees. He died in February 1993 at forty-nine. He had been arrested for protesting apartheid, arrested for protesting Haitian deportations, and outed by a newspaper for having had heart surgery.