Althea Gibson: THE WOMAN WHO WAS SOMEBODY

The well-kept garden apartment in East Orange, N.J., is home to a woman who shook hands with the Queen of England at Centre Court in Wimbledon, a woman who was a queen herself, the reigning tennis champion twice in a row at Wimbledon and at the U.S. Open. But Althea Gibson has vanished from sight.

On the streets of East Orange, no one knows where Gibson lives. “Althea who?” is a common response. “You mean the great track star?” says one man. In city hall, behind the counter at the Department of Property and Taxation, the clerk recognizes her name (“Oh, we know exactly who she is”) but says, “Are you sure she hasn’t passed? I could have sworn I heard she passed.”

It is more like passed over. Last week, at the ceremonies starting the U.S. Open and inaugurating the Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York, Gibson’s name echoed in the list of past tournament winners. But few commentators noted that she was missing among the living champions gathered for the extravaganza. Andre Agassi’s supposed snub of the opening ceremony was much easier to headline. But Gibson’s absence was heart-wrenching. The new stadium was named for a man who broke race barriers in the ’60s and ’70s. Althea Gibson broke race barriers in the ’50s: she was the first black person to win the French Open, the U.S. Open and Wimbledon. And on the day the new stadium opened, she turned 70.

That is just one of the many ironies of her life. Here’s one more: while Ashe’s heroism extended to the way he died, a dauntless crusader in the war against aids, Gibson is suffering in silence from a series of strokes and ailments brought on by a disease she is simply said to have described as “terminal.” When pressed, her friends will admit she can no longer pay her medical bills on her own.

The few East Orangers who know her have walled her away from the press with a touching ferocity. “Why has she been forgotten for so long?” says Helmut Schroeder, the former manager of an apartment building where she once lived. He speaks in a thick German accent and refuses to take anyone to see her. “She is very frail,” he says. “She is not the kind of person who complains. But I worry for her.” She has given his sons an old tennis racket and an old golf club (yes, Tiger Woods, she was a pioneering black pro golfer too).

Cynthia Cooper has written a play that includes Gibson and has attempted to correspond with her. But, says Cooper, “Billie Jean King told me [Gibson] was very private and really didn’t like to be bothered.” King herself remembers a different Gibson, before she turned recluse. “She would always come into the locker room to say hi and just make an effort to be really friendly to all of us.” But then the silence settled in, and it has taken King years to arrange to see her; finally this week she has an appointment to visit, together with Zina Garrison, whose own tennis career was made possible by Gibson. Says King: “If it hadn’t been for her, it wouldn’t have been so easy for Arthur or the ones who followed.”

Gibson grew up in Harlem, sharp enough to shoot pool with the local sharks and tall enough to play basketball with the boys. She was impossible to beat at paddle ball, a skill that evolved into her powerful game of tennis. She admitted no equals in the segregated leagues. And soon her talents were grudgingly admitted by the whites-only tournaments. But even while winning, she was denied rooms at hotels. One refused to book reservations for a luncheon in her honor. She claimed not to care, telling TIME in 1957, “I tried to feel responsibilities to Negroes, but that was a burden on my shoulders … Now I’m playing tennis to please me, not them.”

But she probably sensed she was born both too early and too late. She was already 30 at the time of her great victories. Prize money was unheard of in those amateur days. And the civil rights movement had not gained enough momentum to turn her into an instrument of integration. Still, says King, “She won. She won.”

Gibson may not have thought herself a winner. Her life meandered after she gave up amateur tennis in 1958. Her marriage failed. Her illness has all but robbed her of speech. All the blinds are lowered at her home. But through a gap, the doorbell brings a momentary glimpse of a tall figure in khakis, refusing reply and vanishing into darkness. A certain unintended wistfulness haunts the title of her autobiography, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody. She was. But in East Orange, there is a woman who lives in an apartment whom nobody sees. She used to be somebody.

–Reported by Charlotte Faltermayer/East Orange