Stirring Up a Breeze

The President’s Box, which sits at the south end of Arthur Ashe Stadium, is where America’s version of tennis royalty gather to watch their country’s national championship. While it’s not as picturesque as its counterpart at Wimbledon, the Royal Box, it does come with a dining room and a lounge and the best seats in a house full of so-so ones.

As of a few years ago, at least, it also came with a little bit of American history. The last time I was in the lounge there, its walls were adorned with vintage black-and-white photos of past U.S. tennis greats—Sidney Wood, Tony Trabert, Bill Tilden, and others float through the air, each dressed in immaculate whites.

But none of these legends looked quite as immaculate as the four players, none of them famous, who appeared in another shot, from 1930. It was taken at an American Tennis Association doubles tournament, and the four players, like most members of the ATA, were African-American.

In the picture, they pose, smiling, at the side of a court. They sport collared white shirts, khaki pants, and canvas shoes, and each carries a stack of wooden racquets. Like their better-known white contemporaries, each exudes the easy grace of the amateur sportsman. A small sign nearby said that their names were Eyre Saitch, Sylvester Smith, John McGriff, and Elwood Downing.

On the night I saw the photo, eight decades after it was taken, their images were hanging inside a tennis stadium—the world’s largest—named after an African-American player, Arthur Ashe. Playing on the court a few feet away was the United States’ most famous player, an African-American named Serena Williams. All of this may have been a little hard for the four men in the photo to believe, considering that at the time it was taken, they weren’t allowed on the courts at the nation’s most prominent tennis clubs, or to enter its national championships at Forest Hills.

How did American tennis, specifically African-American, get from the ghostly gentleman in that photo, each lost the game’s official history, to a world-famous figure like Serena Williams? The answer is simple: By way of a one-person bridge who spanned two thoroughly separated worlds. Sixty-five years ago, Althea Gibson cracked the sport’s color barrier. In 1950, the child of sharecroppers and roamer of the New York City streets became the first African-American 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 could claim the right to the those initials in full.

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As her own history indicated, the women who made the Open a fully American event was an unlikely candidate for the job. Gibson was born in South Carolina in 1927 and raised in Harlem. 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 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.”

This likely wasn’t a typical childhood experience for most champions at Forest Hills up to that point. But while Gibson didn’t know it at the time, she had a spiritual 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 U.S. 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 sports, like much of American life, had long been split by race. Tennis took root in the private clubs of WASP 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 in Washington, D.C., that year to organize one. But while its membership was primarily black, the association was open to all. Perhaps early members believed there was a better chance of whites playing in their tournaments someday—and thus creating a fully “American” tennis organization—than there ever was of blacks being allowed onto the lawns of the sport’s all-white clubs.

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A tomboy, Gibson was a table tennis champ by age 12. She impressed local teaching pro Fred Johnson, who guided her away from the ping-pong table and onto the tennis courts of Harlem. There she could show off both her hand skills and her pugilistic skills. Gibson’s style, it seemed, was too rough-edged for some.

As a teenager, she was allowed to play at New York’s all-black Cosmopolitan Club, but she said she never comfortable there. “They had set ideas about what was socially acceptable behavior,” Gibson said of its 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.”

Whatever problems that tennis authorities may have had with 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 African-American doctors and tennis lovers from the South, Hubert Eaton and Robert Walter Johnson. They thought her talent might go to waste in New York, so they offered to take her into their homes and travel with her to tournaments.

“Are you interested?” they asked.

“Who wouldn’t be interested in a deal like that?” Gibson asked back.

For three years, she lived with the Eatons in North Carolina during the school year and played tennis in Virginia with Johnson, who would go on to coach Ashe, in the summers. Along the way, she honed her net-rushing style, which was a rarity in women’s tennis at the time.

It was obvious, though, that Gibson’s game would stagnate without better competition. She dominated the ATA, winning its national championship 10 straight times. But the sport’s color line remained intact. In reality, it was less a straight line than a circular piece of logic. To be invited to play the U.S. Championships, it was necessary to have a record in other USLTA grass-court events. The problem was, Gibson couldn’t play those events because they were held at private, whites-only clubs.

It took a fellow player to break the impasse. Alice Marble, a Grand Slam champion, wrote a stinging editorial in the July 1950 issue of American Lawn Tennis Magazine. “If tennis is a game for ladies and gentleman,” she wrote, “it’s also time we acted a little more like gentlepeople and a little less like sanctimonious hypocrites.” That summer, the gates opened for Gibson at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in New Jersey, where she was allowed into the Eastern Grass Court Championships.

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A few weeks later, a USLTA (now USTA) committee accepted Gibson’s application to play at Forest Hills. According to author Bruce Schoenfeld, in his book on the period, The Match: Althea Gibson and Angela Buxton, this was a step short of full integration. In the new set-up, the winners of the ATA’s national championships would automatically enter Forest Hills. “Blacks would be qualifying on a parallel course,” Schoenfeld wrote, “which meant that integrating the grass-court tournaments held at exclusive clubs would not be necessary.”

Nevertheless, history was made on August 28, 1950, when, in front of a few hundred mostly black spectators on Court 14, Gibson beat Barbara Knapp 6-2, 6-2 in the first round at Forest Hills. Whatever its historic significance, though, that result was forgotten as soon as Gibson began her next match, on a packed show court, against the 1947 U.S. National champion, Louise Brough.

Gibson started nervously, and Brough, a two-time Wimbledon winner, controlled play thoroughly enough to win the first set 6-1. In the second Gibson loosened up and got hot, winning it 6-3. The two dueled through the third set as storm clouds approached. When Gibson went up 7-6, the skies opened and rain swept over the court. A bolt of lightning knocked off one of the concrete eagles that stood at the top of the arena.

The symbolism wasn’t lost on Gibson. “It may have been an omen that times were changing,” she would later say. At the time, though, the storm only brought her bad luck. She came back the next day and lost three straight games.

It appeared for a time that Gibson’s career had peaked on that dramatic day. She went to college at Florida A&M and came close to quitting the game. But a State Department tour of Asia rekindled her love for it, and in 1956 she won 16 of 18 tournaments, including the French Championships. Besides her race and her aggressive game, Gibson was ahead of her time as a competitor. In an era when the amateur women’s circuit could have the air of a traveling sorority, she played to win and didn’t go out her way to make friends along the way.

“She was imposing to begin with,” Billie Jean King said, “and she had a swagger that added to that aura.” Fellow player Doris Hart took pride in never losing a set to her. Like that other roamer, Pancho Gonzalez, Gibson injected a tough, individualistic streak into a game known at the time for its sporting camaraderie.

Gibson had one more breakthrough in her. In 1957, age 30, she became the first black player to win Wimbledon. When Queen Elizabeth II presented the winner’s plate to her, the Queen said, “It must have been terribly hot out there.” Gibson answered, “Yes, Your Majesty, but I hope it wasn’t as hot in your box. At least I was able to stir up a little breeze.”

This year, a visitor to Flushing Meadows could still feel that breeze. It will be swirling through a stadium named after an African-American, and you might feel it coming off the racquet of Serena Williams as she powers through a winning serve. It’s the breeze that has, for the last 65 years, put the U.S. in the U.S. Open.

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