Arthur Ashe forty years on

The highlight of television coverage of Wimbledon this year was for me not the many excellent matches. It was the BBC programme ArthurAshe, More Than A Champion. It was a fitting tribute to someone who was, as the programme said, a fine tennis player and a finer human being.

For those who don't remember or are too young, Arthur Ashe was the first black American tennis player to win a Grand Slam title. Born in the Deep South of America, he lived with prejudice most of his life but conducted himself on and off the tennis court in such a manner that he achieved the status of a national and international hero in his brief lifetime. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison, Arthur Ashe was one of the first people he expressed a wish to meet.

Arthur died in 1993 at the age of 49 from the AIDS virus he had received via a blood transfusion. Before his funeral, his body lay in state in the governor's mansion in Richmond, Virginia, as 5,000 people filed past to pay their respects. The previous person to lie in state in that building had been Confederate General “Stonewall” Jackson. This was Ashe's home town where, as a boy, he had been forbidden to enter the ByrdPark tennis courts or to play against white boys. In life, he broke down barriers and since his death he has continued to do so, as Serena Williams has recently acknowledged.

And so to my own memory of Arthur Ashe. Forty years ago, he reached the Wimbledon final and was due to play Jimmy Connors. It's difficult to imagine the extent to which, for a few years, Connors total dominated the men's tennis game. Certainly, fine player that Arthur Ashe was, few gave him a chance against Connors who was in the middle of a record run of 160 weeks at the top of the world rankings and was also the reigning Wimbledon champion.

Back in 1975, the Wimbledon women's final was played on the Friday and the men's final on the Saturday – no Sunday play! And so, on that Friday evening before the final, I was in a pub in Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, having a drink with a work colleague. The talk in the pub got round to the next day's final and everyone was unanimous that it was a foregone conclusion that Connors would win easily.

I have never, before or since, come close to experiencing anything that you might call a premonition. Logic tells me that such phenomena probably don't exist. But in that pub, I felt an overwhelming certainty that everyone was wrong and that Arthur Ashe would win. When I expressed this opinion, the pub regulars openly mocked me. Had I been a betting man, I could have gone round the pub making bets at odds of my choice, Instead, I finished my drink and went home nursing my certainty.

The next day, the feeling remained and I felt a strange detachment from the pre-final hype on radio and television. It was as if I was watching a film but had little interest because I knew the ending. In fact, I went to a cricket match in Worcester that afternoon and sat in the sunshine watching the cricket and picking up occasional snippets about the tennis as other watchers tuned in to their transistor radios. I didn't need to hear the detail, because the result was what I knew it would be – Arthur Ashe beat Jimmy Connors6-1, 6-1, 5-7, 6-4.

So that's my one and only premonition. Maybe it was just a matter of coincidence that the feeling of certainty was fulfilled. Or maybe not. Years later, I read Arthur Ashe's autobiography. In it, he wrote at length about that 1975 final and the tactics he adopted that confused and baffled Connors. And he also explained how, the evening before the final, he experienced a powerful premonition that he would win, a feeling of such certainty that it was a major factor in propelling him to his victory the next day. It was something unique that he couldn't explain rationally.

Forty years on, I am happy to remember a great man, his finest moment on the tennis court and the feeling of overwhelming certainty that we both experienced.