Althea Gibson, R.I.P.

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Althea Gibson, First Black Player to Win Wimbledon and U.S. Titles, Dies at 76

By Robert McG. Thomas Jr. -- New York Times, 9/29/03

Althea Gibson, the first black player to win Wimbledon and the United States national tennis championship and a pre-eminent figure in women's tennis, died yesterday in East Orange, N.J. She was 76. Gibson, who had been in poor health for many years, died at East Orange General Hospital, where she was treated for an infection and respiratory illness, said Dr. Duane J. Dyson, its senior vice president for medical affairs.

Althea Gibson emerged in the tennis world of the 1950's as a most unlikely queen of the lawns of Wimbledon and Forest Hills.

In 1950 she became the first black to compete in the United States nationals. She won 56 tournaments, including five Grand Slam singles titles — the United States nationals and Wimbledon twice, in 1957 and 1958, and the French championship in 1956.

What made that especially remarkable was her background as a rough-hewn product of Harlem, a chronic truant and an eighth-grade dropout. She had grown up far removed from the two genteel worlds of tennis: the white country club set and the network of black doctors, lawyers and other professionals who pursued tennis on private courts of their own. Gibson owed much of her success to that very network of black tennis enthusiasts and to a geographic coincidence. Althea Gibson, born in a sharecropper's shack in Silver, S.C., on Aug. 25, 1927, was brought to New York by her parents when she was a few months old. By chance, the family moved into an apartment on a West 143rd Street block between Lenox and Seventh Avenues that was a designated play street. When the volunteers from the Police Athletic League closed the block to traffic and set up their recreation equipment, the spot they chose to mark off as a paddle tennis court was right in front of the Gibsons' front stoop. A natural athlete who excelled in virtually every sport she tried, Gibson took up paddle tennis at 9 and won a citywide championship when she was 12.

In 1941 Buddy Walker, a Harlem bandleader and part-time P.A.L. supervisor, bought her two rackets and introduced her to friends at the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club, a predominantly black club that played on courts on 149th Street just a few blocks away but a world removed from the neighborhood she had known. Gibson was coached there by Fred Johnson, the one-armed club pro, and taken up by the club's members, who taught her some more important lessons. As she put it in her 1958 autobiography, "I Always Wanted to Be Somebody," the club attracted "the highest class" of Harlem residents, people, she noted, who "had rigid ideas about what was socially acceptable."

Those ideas were alien to her own experience. "I'm ashamed to say," she wrote, "that I was still living pretty wild." Gibson would come home late (sometimes the next day) and her father, a garage attendant, would beat her. But Gibson saw her father as merely a stern disciplinarian, not abusive.

Gibson made a lifelong friendship when she approached her idol, the boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson, in a bowling alley. Sympathetic to her dream of a career in music, he bought her a saxophone. Finally, to escape her father's wrath, she sought refuge in a Catholic home for girls and eventually received a welfare grant to get her own apartment while she worked at menial jobs. But it was tennis that gripped her interest. In 1942 she won her first tournament, the New York State girls' championship, sponsored by the American Tennis Association, which had been organized in 1916 by black players as an alternative to the United States Lawn Tennis Association.

In 1946, when she lost in the final of her first A.T.A. women's championship, she caught the eye of two men who changed her life and altered the course of tennis, Hubert A. Eaton of Wilmington, N.C., and R. Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Va. These men, both physicians and leaders of a cadre of black enthusiasts determined to crack the racial barriers of mainstream tennis, saw Gibson's potential and became her sponsors. They arranged for Gibson to live with Eaton and his wife during the school year, practicing on his court and attending high school, and to spend the summer traveling on the A.T.A. circuit with Johnson, who later performed a similar service for Arthur Ashe.

She was 19 when she started at Wilmington Industrial High School, but finished in three years, graduating 10th in her class, and enrolled as a scholarship student at Florida A&M, receiving a degree at 25. She also flourished on the court, winning the first of her 10 straight A.T.A. national championships in 1947. In 1949, a year after Dr. Benjamin Weir had become the first black to play in a United States Lawn Tennis Association title event — the 1948 National Indoor Championships — Gibson took her first steps beyond the world of the black tennis circuit, making it to the semifinals of the Eastern Indoor Championships and then to the semifinals of the national championships.

The next step proved harder. Even after she had won the 1950 Eastern Indoor Championship and a clamor had begun to let her play in the National Grass Court Championships at Forest Hills, the precursor of the United States Open, the powers of tennis seemed to close ranks to keep her out. To qualify for an invitation to the 1950 nationals, she was required to first make a name for herself at one of the major preliminary grass-court events. But no invitations were forthcoming. Alice Marble, a former champion, rallied support for Gibson. "If tennis is a game for ladies and gentlemen," she wrote in a letter to American Lawn Tennis magazine, "it's time we acted a little more like gentlepeople and less like sanctimonious hypocrites."

Finally, Gibson received an invitation to the Eastern Grass Court Championships at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in South Orange, N.J. She made it only as far as the second round, but that was enough to win a bid to Forest Hills. On Aug. 28, 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in major league baseball, Gibson became the first black player to compete in the national tennis championship. Taking her place on a remote court at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, she dispatched Barbara Knapp of England, 6-2, 6-2. The next day, she faced the Wimbledon champion, Louise Brough. After losing the first set, 6-1, Gibson took the second, 6-3, then fell behind by 3-0 in the third before beginning a surge that brought repeated roars from 2,000 hardy spectators who ignored the first peals of thunder and flashes of lightning of a gathering storm.

Gibson took a lead of 7-6 and was on the verge of victory over her visibly spent opponent. But the rains came, the match was suspended, and when it resumed the next day, Brough won three straight games to win the match.

The 5-foot-10 1/2 Gibson gained the attention of the tennis public. A powerful if inconsistent player, the lean and muscular young woman had a dominating serve, and her long, graceful reach often stunned opponents. Over the next half-dozen years, Gibson became a fixture on the tennis circuit, playing Wimbledon for the first time in 1951 and earning a ranking as high as No. 7 in the United States. But Gibson became so disenchanted with her failure to break through to the top that she considered abandoning tennis and entering the Army. In the fall of 1955, the State Department selected her for a goodwill tennis tour of Asia and the Far East, and the experience inspired her game. In 1956 she won 16 of her first 18 tournaments, including the French championship at Roland Garros, her first title at a Grand Slam event. But once again victory in the singles championships eluded her at Wimbledon and Forest Hills, although she had been favored to win both. Gibson did team with Angela Buxton to win the Wimbledon doubles in 1956. She won in doubles again in 1957, with Darlene Hard, and in 1958, with Maria Bueno.

After losing to Shirley Fry of the United States in the singles final of the Australian Open in 1957, she did not lose another match all year. Passing up the clay court distraction of the French championship to concentrate on tuning up on grass courts in England, she again entered Wimbledon as the favorite and defeated Hard in the final. "At last," she said, "at last," as she accepted the trophy from Queen Elizabeth II.

She later wrote in her autobiography: "Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the colored section of the bus going into downtown Wilmington, N.C." Upon returning home, Gibson was given a ticker-tape parade up Broadway, a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria and a celebration on West 143rd Street. She told friends and supporters, "This victory belongs to you," but she chaffed at efforts to make her a symbol of black achievement. When a reporter asked if she was proud to be compared to Jackie Robinson as an outstanding representative of her race, Gibson replied: "No. I don't consider myself to be a representative of my people. I am thinking of me and nobody else."

Having won Wimbledon, Gibson rolled through the national championship at Forest Hills. In the final, she defeated Brough, who had eliminated her in her first national seven years before. After being named the outstanding female athlete of the year in a poll of Associated Press sports editors, Gibson repeated her Wimbledon and Forest Hills singles victories in 1958, and was named the outstanding female athlete again. Then, under pressure from her family to make some money from her talent, she announced her retirement from amateur tennis. At a time when the professional game was little more than a sideshow, she had little trouble winning the pro title and went on an exhibition tour with the Harlem Globetrotters, playing tennis at halftime.

In the early 1960's she became the first black player to compete on the women's golf tour, but she never won a tournament. Gibson, who was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame at Newport, R.I., later held various athletic posts in New Jersey state government. A resident of East Orange, she had served as its recreation director. Gibson was married twice, to William Darben and Sidney Llewellyn. She had no children.

When another black woman, Zina Garrison, made it to the Wimbledon final in 1990 before losing to Martina Navratilova, Gibson was there to cheer her on, but she soon receded from the limelight once again with health and financial problems.

"It was truly an inspiration for me to watch her overcome adversity," Billie Jean King, who was 13 when she first say Gibson play, told The Associated Press yesterday. "Her road to success was a challenging one, but I never saw her back down."