Fifty years too late, black and white Americans alike will, here at the Arthur Ashe Stadium on Monday night, celebrate the life of Althea Gibson, the first black player to win the US Open.

Ostracised by her fellow countrymen, Gibson died a bitter woman four years ago, but not a penniless one, thanks to the efforts of her life-long friend, the Briton Angela Buxton, with whom she won a Wimbledon doubles title in 1956.

One of the few people alive who knew Gibson intimately, the 73-year-old Buxton has been asked by the United States Tennis Association to fill in the gaps in their two-time US Open champion’s résumé. Much more surprisingly, she has also been asked, so that the organisers may round off their host of Afro-American pioneers, if she would bring the national security advisor Condoleezza Rice to the party.

The unlikely coming together of the British jew and the black American at Wimbledon has been the subject of a book and possibly shortly a film, entitled The Perfect Match, which a former protégé of Buxton’s, Rachel Violet, the daughter of the former Manchester United player Denis Violet, is hoping to make.

Though the victim of racial prejudice, Gibson didn’t like to talk about it, said Buxton. “It may sound strange because we were both stuck right in the middle of it, but we never discussed it.”

After an initial meeting in India in 1955 the two became firm friends, so much so that Buxton was one of the few people the American would confide in.

“Because she was so penniless until the last few years of her life, because she was so ill, she phoned me one day to say she was going to do herself in,” said Buxton. “I said ‘just hang on a minute I’m cooking some onions. Let me switch that off and we’ll talk about it’.”

In 1995, Buxton spent $1,500 of her own money to feed Gibson and pay her rent before making an appeal on her behalf in the magazine Tennis Week, highlighting her hardship. “I didn’t want my name on it in case she got cross with me and wouldn’t speak to me,” she said. “She could get on her high horse very easily.

“Eventually she received oodles of money. She was a millionaire by the time I'd finished.

“Money came in from all over the world in different currencies. We spent days just opening up the envelopes from people who remembered her.”

Buxton thought athletic Gibson was comparable to Alice Marble and Billie Jean King and better than even the Williams sisters, who owe her so much for breaking barriers.

“I’m just very, very sorry she’s not around to appreciate it,” said Buxton.