At Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, he focused on track and field until his senior year, when he joined the previously all-white tennis team and led it to the league championship.

In 1935, McDaniel played a practice match against a fellow Los Angeles high school student Bobby Riggs, who was then the top-ranked junior player in the country, and who would go on to win Wimbledon in 1939 and the U.S. Nationals in 1939 and 1941.

[1] In 1938, at age 22, McDaniel, recruited by Olympian Ralph Metcalfe, was awarded a track scholarship to Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans — he was a powerful runner who had once leapt 6 feet 4 ½ inches to win the Southern California scholastic high-jump title — but he quickly found his way to the tennis courts instead.

During his tenure at Xavier University McDaniel would win numerous championships among the then-segregated ranks of black tennis players.

[5] In the spring of 1939, still as a college freshman, he became the National Open Men's Singles Champion, and shared the Doubles title with his schoolmate, Richard Cohen.

On July 29, 1940, McDaniel would unofficially break tennis' color barrier by participating in an exhibition match against Don Budge, winner of the Grand Slam in 1938, that received wide attention.

Two-thousand people crammed the club’s stands to capacity while others leaned out windows and crowded onto the fire escapes that overlooked the court.

[2] Although hailed as a step forward for Black tennis players, the event would all but be forgotten with the onset of World War II.

It would be another 10 years before Althea Gibson took the next step by integrating tennis at the United States National Championships (now the US Open) at Forest Hills, in 1950.

Sometimes he was denied entry into the draw; at other times he was given incorrect directions to the club so that he would arrive late and be forced to forfeit his match.

[6] After World War II broke out, McDaniel returned to Los Angeles and went to work at the Lockheed aircraft plant.