WIMBLEDON, England >> Arthur Ashe was never afraid of changing tack. He arrived at his only Wimbledon final 50 years ago having darted his way through a nettlesome draw as something approaching a nostalgia favorite, days away from his 32nd birthday and five years removed from his last Grand Slam title. He knew he no longer had the luxury of time. His desire to win burned hot.

The problem? His opponent in the championship match was known to smolder, too.

Jimmy Connors was nine years Ashe’s junior when they met July 5, 1975, a lefty slugger coming to defend his Wimbledon title on the heels of the best year of his career. Connors lost all of four matches in 1974, earning a reputation as a world beater that he reinforced at the All England Club. He hadn’t dropped a set on the way to the final. He lorded over Ashe a 3-0 head-to-head record and, for good measure, happened to be suing the man for libel after Ashe called Connors unpatriotic for ducking Davis Cup duties.

“Arthur was never the kind of person who would ever say anything negative, really, about anybody,” Ashe’s biographer, Ray Arsenault, said in a phone interview. “But Connors was an exception.”

Thinking through the match the night before with some of his closest friends, Ashe plotted the zag of his lifetime. Connors was an unbeatable counterpuncher when he could meet power with power, so Ashe ditched his big-serving, audacious game and fed Connors nothing but a soggy diet of low angles and limp, fluttering returns. He chipped balls that died on arrival, cut the speed of his serve and seemed to decide which shot he would use a second before he swung.

He remade himself overnight such that his weaker shots were suddenly infallible. It was a towering reminder that Ashe’s greatest strength was not his serve but his brain — and if anyone needed an extra hint as to how much thought he poured into the match, his wrists did the trick. He wore red, white and blue wristbands to accent his polo and sweater vest, lest anyone think his patriotism was lacking.

Connors was so thoroughly out of sorts that after winning the first game of the first set, he lost the next nine, and Ashe executed one of the most shocking upsets in tennis history, 6-1, 6-1, 5-7, 6-4, in 2 hours 5 minutes.

He was the first Black man to win the Wimbledon singles title and second Black person, following Althea Gibson’s trophies in 1957 and 1958. He remains the only Black male champion of tennis’s most prestigious tournament.

“I really felt as though I was going to win. It was predestined, somewhat,” Ashe said in an interview after the match before he was asked whether he felt he had triumphed on behalf of Black people. His response was typically measured.

“Oh, yes, it’s a tremendous boost,” he said. “… Things like this help because it further entrenches in the minds of kids, especially, that we have heroes. We have people who can do what anybody else can do just as well.”

The Wimbledon victory was Ashe’s second great act of reinvention.

Ashe, who died in 1993, has a legacy as an athletic pioneer and transcendent civil rights advocate. His work protesting apartheid and promoting AIDS education inspired millions after he found out he contracted the disease from a blood transfusion.

But his life of activism was not a given.

Ashe and his younger brother, Johnnie, were raised in Richmond by their disciplinarian father after their mother died when Ashe was 6 years old. It was the Jim Crow South, and stakes were high the moment Ashe picked up a racket — when he participated in youth tennis camps, it was ingrained in him that his behavior made the difference between Black players getting invited back and a riot breaking out.

“They would always be told, ‘Look, if you’re playing against a White boy and the ball is close, you call it in,’” Arsenault said.

His upbringing and his natural bookishness helped shape Ashe’s genteel, considered demeanor that defined him on and off the court.

He was a voracious reader and wanted to major in architecture at UCLA before he was convinced to switch to business instead. He took classes in sociology and African history and thought often about civil rights, but before 1968, he thought he could most effectively contribute to the cause as a silent role model who inspired change by winning.

He was also all alone in a White-dominated, individual sport, with no teammates to stand alongside.

“He really kind of did everything he could to avoid activism,” Arsenault said.

The change came in 1968 when Ashe was a lieutenant stationed at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. It was the deadliest year for U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War, and Johnnie, who served two tours as a Marine, shared his experience with his little brother and fed Ashe’s disillusionment.

When tennis journalist Neil Amdur went to check in on Ashe at West Point, he wanted to talk about a speech he agreed to make at a church in Washington — his first public speaking engagement — not his tennis game. Ashe spoke about the social responsibility of Black athletes. Stokely Carmichael was in attendance.

“His awakening was a process, and he was not going to be moved in that process until he felt comfortable in his level of what he wanted to say, how he wanted to say it and when,” said Amdur, who wrote the book “Off the Court” with Ashe.

The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy further inflamed Ashe, who turned out to be a natural public advocate. His dispassionate, thoughtful manner of speaking and bespectacled, professorial look both made him broadly appealing and helped him navigate life as a public figure.

“He was not somebody who tried to impress you with what he wore,” Amdur said.

“What you took from being with him was a profound measure of thought and intuition and the fact that you always got a sense that he didn’t stray from what he believed. You had to respect that.”

Ashe never looked back once he decided on a life of outspoken activism. He was encouraged by a career year on the court in 1968, when he became the first Black man to win the U.S. Open.

The title gave him a sense of legitimacy, Amdur said, as well as a newfound platform he eagerly took advantage of. Ashe became so outspoken he was arrested twice — once while protesting in front of the South African embassy in 1985 and once in 1992 outside of the White House.

Ashe had thought long and hard about speaking out, after all, his ability to pivot gracefully stemming from a deep knowledge of self and a desire to better the world.

His knack for reinvention helped him make history.