Born in 1943, Ashe was six years old when he first picked up a racket outside his home in Richmond, Virginia. He sharpened his ground strokes on the area's black-only courts and showed so much talent by the age of 10 that Dr. Robert Johnson, a leading member of the all-black American Tennis Association (ATA), agreed to train him. Ashe went on to win the ATA's boy's, junior's, and men's national titles and poised himself to break through the sport's racial barrier in 1961, when he received a scholarship to the University of California, Los Angeles.