Sixty years ago, Althea Gibson made the U.S. Championships live up to its name.
The President’s Box, which sits at the south end of Arthur Ashe Stadium, is where America’s version of tennis royalty—think David Dinkins, Alec Baldwin, USTA bigwigs in blazers and straw boaters—gather to watch their country’s national championship. While it’s not as picturesque as its counterpart, Wimbledon’s Royal Box, it does come with a dining room and a lounge, as well as the best seats in a house full of very bad ones. It also comes with a little bit of American history.
If you had been standing in the lounge on the tournament’s first Wednesday of 2009, you could have witnessed, with a slight turn of your head, a seemingly inexplicable juxtaposition of this country’s past and present. Outside, on the court, was Serena Williams, the most successful African-American in tennis history. Back inside, the walls of the lounge were filled with vintage black-and-white photos of past U.S. tennis greats—Sidney Wood, Tony Trabert, Bill Tilden and others floated through the air, each of them dressed in immaculate whites.
But none of those legends looked quite as immaculate as the four anonymous players who appeared in another shot, from 1930. It was a photo not from a USTA event, but from an American Tennis Association (ATA) doubles tournament. The four players, like most members of the ATA, were African-American. In the picture, they pose at the side of a court; it’s not clear whether they’ve already played or not. They sport collared white shirts, khaki pants and canvas shoes, and they carry multiple wood frames. Like their betterknown white contemporaries, each exudes the easy grace of the amateur sportsman. A small sign nearby says that their names were Eyre Saitch, Sylvester Smith, John McGriff and Elwood Downing.
On this night at the Open 79 years later, their images were hanging inside a tennis stadium—the largest in the world—named after a black player. On the court in front of their photo was the game’s premier black superstar. All of which might have been a little hard for these four men to believe, because at the time that their picture was being taken, it was impossible for Saitch, Smith, McGriff or Downing to play in a USTA (then USLTA) tournament.
How did American tennis, specifically African-American tennis, get from the ghostly gentlemen in that photo, each lost to the game’s official history, to a world-famous figure like Serena Williams? The answer is simple: It got here by way of a one-person bridge who spanned two distinctly separate worlds. While it may get lost in the bright lights above Ashe Stadium, or drowned out by the luxury-suite chatter inside, 2010 marks the 60th anniversary of Althea Gibson cracking the sport’s color barrier. In 1950, this child of sharecroppers became the fi rst black player to enter the U.S. Championships. That once-amateur event is now called the U.S. Open, in a nod to its open-door policy toward professionals. But while its name always began with “U.S.,” it wasn’t until Gibson made her debut, 69 years after it had first been held, that the tournament earned the right to those initials.
As her own history indicated, the woman who would make the Open a fully American event was an unlikely candidate for the job. Gibson was born in South Carolina in 1927 and raised on the Harlem streets—literally raised on those streets. Always on the move, she spent her youth roaming the neighborhood’s avenues and riding New York’s subways from one end of the city to the other.
“I hated to go to school,” Gibson wrote in her 1958 autobiography, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody. “What’s more, I didn’t like people telling me what to do.”
The person telling her what to do most often was her father, Daniel. Disappointed that Althea hadn’t been a boy, he treated her like one, even training her to become a boxer. It was a skill she put to use against him on at least one occasion.
“One day he got mad at me for not coming home for a couple of nights,” Gibson wrote. “When I finally showed up, he just walked up to me and punched me right in the face and knocked me sprawling down the hall. I got right up and punched him as hard as I could, right in the jaw, and we had a pretty good little fight going. We weren’t fooling around, either.”
It’s safe to say that this was not the typical childhood experience of many Wimbledon champions up to that point. But Gibson, while she didn’t know it at the time, wasn’t alone. She had a spiritual tennis sibling growing up across the country. Pancho Gonzalez, born to Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles one year after Gibson, was also a street-running truant who found freedom, and a home, on the tennis court. In 1948, Gonzalez became the first Mexican-American to win the nationals at Forest Hills. Two years later Gibson would follow him onto those grass courts.
To get there, though, she would have to cross an extra, entrenched barrier: tennis’ color line. The sport, like much of American life, had long been split by race. Tennis took root in the private clubs of white society near the end of the 19th century, and the public courts that were built at the start of the 20th were largely segregated as well.
Still, tennis had a following among the black elite, its doctors, lawyers and businessmen. By 1916, there was enough interest in holding a national African-American championship that the ATA was formed to organize one. Tally Holmes, a Dartmouth graduate and Washington, D.C., hotel owner, was the group’s founder. In a poignant touch, Holmes chose the name in part because he dreamed of someday seeing a real American championship that involved both races. He thought there was a better chance for whites to eventually join the ATA than for blacks to ever be allowed into the USLTA.
The streets where Gibson grew up were not ATA country. A tomboy, she was a table tennis champ at age 12. As a teenager, she was allowed to play at New York’s exclusive, black Cosmopolitan Club, though she was never comfortable in that bastion of Caribbean-American society. “They had set ideas about what was socially acceptable behavior,” Gibson said of the members. “They were probably stricter than white people of a similar position. They felt they had to be doubly careful to overcome the prejudiced attitude that all Negroes slept eight to a room.” Even when Gibson beat a white girl at the club, she believed that most of its members had been rooting against her, because she was “too cocky.”
Despite her attitude, Gibson’s ability was recognized within the ATA. In 1946, as an 18-year-old, she reached the final of an association event in Ohio, where she caught the attention of two doctors and tennis fanatics from the South, Hubert Eaton and Robert Walter Johnson. They thought her talent would be wasted in New York, so they offered to take her into their homes and travel with her to tournaments.