Sport: That Gibson Girl

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Trapped on a swarming sector of Long Island where the backwash of Suburbia blurs into the edge of New York City, the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills is a green refuge from the crowded reality about it. Outside its high fences, the Long Island Rail Road rattles on its rounds and ordinary citizens endure the twice-daily war of commuting. Inside the club, the polite plunk of tennis balls, the whisper of sneakers on trim grass courts, the tinkle of ice in frost-beaded glasses still recall the long-gone white-flannel age of the courts. There, next week, a lanky jumping jack of a girl who grew up in the slums of Harlem will play tennis. She may not belong to any of the clubs that run the tournament, but this year the tournament belongs to her. Behind Althea Gibson, women’s tennis curves off into mediocrity: without her, the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association would not have much of a show.

It was a different story when Althea made her Forest Hills debut in 1950, the first Negro ever to be invited to the U.S.L.T.A.’s national championships. For a few days, Althea was too good to be true. The tricky turf courts of tradition seemed to hold no surprises for the girl who had started out playing paddle tennis on the streets. She was well on her way to a second-round victory over third-seeded Louise Brough when rain stopped the match. While the grass dried, Althea had time to think—and to worry. Next day, Louise Brough brushed her aside with ease.

After seven years of trying, Althea Gibson has yet to win the national singles title. As a Negro, she is still only a tolerated stranger in Forest Hills locker rooms, still has no official standing in the U.S.L.T.A. But now none of that matters. For that Gibson girl has finally whipped the one opponent that could keep her down: her own self-doubt and defensive truculence. At 30, an age when most athletes have eased over to the far slope of their careers, Althea has begun the last, steep climb.

Sent abroad by the State Department in 1955 as an athletic ambassador, Althea made friends and won tournaments from Naples to New Delhi. In Paris last year, she won the French championship, her first big-time title. At Wimbledon, where the heady traditions of genteel sport stretch back beyond any at Forest Hills, her new-found confidence carried her all the way to the quarter-finals before she faltered. This year even Wimbledon succumbed, and Althea came home a queen, owner of tennis’ brightest crown.

Lean, tall and well-muscled (5 ft. 10½, 144 Ibs.), Althea Gibson is not the most graceful figure on the courts, and her game is not the most stylish. She is apt to flail with more than the usual frenzy, and she often relies on “auxiliary shots” (e.g., the chop and slice). But her tennis has a champion’s unmistakable power and drive. Says Tony Trabert: “She hits the ball hard and plays like a man. She runs and covers the court better than any of the other women.” Says Promoter Jack Kramer, who eventually would like to get Althea into the pro ranks: “She has the best chance to be a champ in the manner of Alice Marble that I’ve seen.”

Uphill Career. When, Althea left for Wimbledon in May, only three close friends were at the airport to wish her luck. When she returned a winner, Idlewild was awash with people. Countless acquaintances suddenly remembered how they had helped her in the past, and crowded close to share her success. The big city, which had offered Althea’s parents a cramped railroad flat in which to raise their children, honored her with a ticker-tape parade. And people breathlessly wanted to know how it had felt to shake hands with Queen Elizabeth at Wimbledon and what they had said to each other (The Queen: “It was a very enjoyable match, but you must have been very hot on the court.” Althea: “I hope it wasn’t as hot in the royal box.”)

During a lunch given her by New York’s Mayor Wagner at the Waldorf, Althea managed to make a speech. “God grant that I wear this crown I have won with dignity,” she said. “I just can’t describe the joy in my heart.” But she was also learning the rough side of being on top. “No matter what accomplishments you make,” she says, “somebody helps you. People saw me going up there, and now they want to ride on the wagon. Whenever I hear anyone call me ‘Champ,’ I think there’s something behind it.”

Though she is near the top of a remarkable uphill career, suspicion still often lowers over the champ’s warm, infrequent smile. It is only half an hour by subway from Harlem to Forest Hills, and in many ways Althea is still close to home.

Fun, Fun, Fun. Althea Gibson was only one year old in 1928 when her parents decided that Manhattan’s swarming West 143rd Street offered more opportunity than their cotton-poor farm in Silver, S.C. (in New York, her father went to work in a garage). The Gibsons’ block between Lenox and Seventh Avenues was a play street, and in summer the white lines for paddle tennis and shuffleboard slid out over the baking asphalt to hold in the aimless kids. An instructor-supervisor sent up by the Police Athletic League divided his time as the situation demanded —part coach and part friendly cop.

Althea’s sister Millie (she has three sisters and a brother) recalls: “Althea was out in the street all the time. We used to have to drag her back into the house. When other girls were putting on lipstick, she was playing stickball. When she got a whipping, she never cried. She just stood there and took it.” At P.S. 136, Althea was a chronic truant; she played hooky and played Softball with the boys in Central Park. She also played forward on a basketball team called “The Mysterious Five,” which practiced at the 134th Street Boys Club and scheduled as many as four games a week with local industrial clubs. “I just wanted to play, play, play,” says Althea. “My mother would send me out with money for bread, and I’d be out from morning to dark—and not bring home the bread. I had fun, fun, fun!”

Now that the world has brightened for her, Harlem’s harsh outlines occasionally soften for the reminiscent tournament traveler. “I remember you could get fish and chips for 15¢ and soda at 5¢ a quart. And there were sweet potatoes—we called ’em ‘mickeys’—that we cooked at a fire over milk crates. We’d climb over the fence to a playground and we’d swing way up, two on a swing. And we’d sneak in the movies. If there was any poverty, I wasn’t aware of it. How could you think of it when you could get soda for five cents?”

Chock Full o’ Guts. By 1941, when she was 13, Althea was ready to graduate from paddle tennis. The PAL instructor that year was an unemployed musician named Buddy Walker, and Buddy was impressed with the gangly youngster’s ferocious skill. He went to a friend named Van Houton (a tennis buff who liked to boast that he was the only self-employed racket stringer in Harlem), bought Althea a pair of secondhand rackets, and put her to work practicing against the wall of a handball court. A few weeks later he took her uptown to some public courts, and her performance was phenomenal. The other players quit their games to watch. In her first time on a tennis court, Althea learned the pleasure of playing to a gallery.

By midsummer, Althea was taking lessons from Fred Johnson, a one-armed pro at the now defunct biracial Cosmopolitan tennis club. Her game, which had been an exercise in sheer power, began to show signs of sophistication. Now all her life was focused on tennis. She quit school and went to work. She was a counter girl in a Chock Full o’ Nuts shop in lower Manhattan, a chicken cleaner on Long Island (“I used to have to take out the guts and everything, but I still like chicken”), an elevator operator in the midtown Dixie Hotel, a packer in a button factory, a mechanic in a machine shop (“It was puttin’ screws in somethin’, I don’t remember what”). Any time work interfered with tennis, she quit her job.

Says Althea’s father: “I didn’t know nothin’ about tennis, and that’s all she was interested in. I got her some boxing gloves once,” he adds wistfully. “I wanted her to be a lady boxer.” Althea almost flattened her father in a practice bout, then hung up her gloves. But ever since, she has been driving ahead with a boxer’s toughness and will to win.

“She Could Be Something.” Althea had been playing tennis for only a year when she entered, and won, her first tournament: the girls’ championship of the Negro American Tennis Association’s New York State Open. That same summer (1942) she got to the semifinals of the A.T.A.’s national championship for girls. She lost to a buxom teenager named Nana Davis (now Nana Davis Vaughan), and Mrs. Vaughan still remembers her appalling manners: “She was a very crude creature. She had the idea she was better than anyone. She said, ‘Who’s this Nana Davis? Let me at her.’ When I beat her, she headed right for the grandstand. Some kid had been laughing at her and she was going to throw him out.”

Althea saw no need to be sociable. She had come to play tennis, and she had come to win. Anything less rasped her raw nerves. She avoided parties and other players; she spent all her time practicing and playing poker with the ballboys.

One day, when she recognized Boxer Sugar Ray Robinson in a Harlem bowling alley, Althea went up to him and said brashly: “You’re Sugar Ray, aren’t you? Well, I can beat you.” The blunt greeting started a fast friendship. “Althea used to come over to our apartment and sit on the floor,” says Sugar Ray’s wife, Edna Mae. “She was unhappy; she had a gaunt build and she felt that she was the least good-looking girl she knew. She had insecurity and went into herself. She used to talk wild. I tried to make her feel she could be something.”

“Don’t Kid Me.” The trouble was that by then Althea dominated Negro girls’ tennis, and she was getting nowhere fast. She shot pool and billiards, soaked up jazz and thought of a career as a nightclub singer or musician (Sugar Ray bought her a saxophone). Then, in the summer of 1946, Althea moved up to the women’s division of the Negro A.T.A. national championships. She was beaten in the finals by Roumania Peters, a Tuskegee Institute instructor, but her tremendous potential as a tennis player caught the attention of two A.T.A. officials: Dr. Robert Johnson, a general practitioner from Lynchburg, Va., and Dr. Hubert Eaton, a surgeon from Wilmington, N.C. Dr. Johnson took Althea aside and asked bluntly: “How’d you like to play at Forest Hills some day?”

Said Althea: “Don’t kid me.”

Johnson was not kidding; he had a plan. Dr. Eaton would take Althea to Wilmington for the winter and put her through high school; in the summer she would travel the Negro tournament circuit with the Johnsons. Her family agreed, and Eaton still recalls Althea’s arrival at the railroad station in Wilmington: “There she was with Sugar Ray’s sax in one hand and in the other an old pasteboard suitcase with two belts tied around it. She was wearing an old skirt; she’d never owned a dress in her life. My wife bought her a few dresses and tried to make her more feminine by getting her straight hair curled and showing her how to use lipstick.”

First Touch of Fame. The Kid from Harlem gave the Eatons a rough time. She hung out in a poolroom. Her table manners were so bad that the Eatons made her eat in the kitchen (“She was underfed, and it took almost a year to fill her up properly”). At first, 19-year-old Althea could not even qualify for the freshman class in high school. But she worked sternly, and she finished among the top ten in the graduating class. Four or five times a week, Dr. Eaton practiced tennis with her. “I tried to show Althea how to be a lady on the court,” he says, “but she was still unable to accept defeat with grace. If I ran up a 4-1 lead, she’d just quit. Anyone who could get’ a lead on her could beat her.”

While she got a polishing from her Southern foster parents, Althea continued to give a pasting to all her tournament opponents. After her first defeat in the A.T.A. women’s singles, she came back and won the title, has won it every year since. On the strength of her formidable tennis, Althea won a scholarship to Florida A. & M. (for Negroes) in Tallahassee.

College was a great experience. She played on the tennis team, starred on the girls’ basketball team and joined the oldest Negro college sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. She also made $40 a month cleaning up the equipment rooms in the gym. Most important of all, she found more time to study tennis. And in the winter of 1949 she felt ready to take her first tentative step across big-time tennis’ color line. She entered the U.S.L.T.A.’s Eastern Indoor championships* and got to the semifinals. (Next year she won the title.) In the National Indoor championships that same winter, she went out in the quarterfinals. When she got back to college, the band, the faculty and the student body turned out to greet her. “It was my first touch of fame,” says she, “and it was wonderful.”

On to Grass. There were few Negroes who were good enough to get into white tournaments, fewer still who had the inclination to enter. But Althea was good enough—and she had the inclination. Without consulting Althea, friends suggested her for Forest Hills. The answer from U.S.L.T.A.: “We can’t very well invite the girl until she makes a name for herself on grass—at Orange and East Hampton and Essex. And those tournaments are all invitational. We can’t tell them who should be invited.”

“Miss Gibson.” wrote Tennis Great Alice Marble angrily in American Lawn Tennis, “is over a cunningly wrought barrel, and I can only hope to loosen a few of its staves with one lone opinion. I think it’s time we faced a few facts. If tennis is a game for ladies and gentlemen, it’s also time we acted a little more like gentlepeople and less like sanctimonious hypocrites.”

Unmoved, New Jersey’s Maplewood Country Club refused to let Althea on its courts during the New Jersey State championship. But the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in South Orange, NJ. unbent and invited Althea to the 1950 Eastern Grass Court championships. She went, and got whipped in the second round. But she had earned her bid to Forest Hills.

Off to Asia. So Althea went out to the West Side Tennis Club in the summer of 1950 and made history by almost upsetting Louise Brough. She went home a loser, and spent the next few summers as an unspectacular but familiar figure at assorted tournaments around the U.S. and Europe. In 1953 she graduated from Florida A. & M. and got a job teaching health and physical education at Lincoln University (then restricted to Negroes) in Jefferson City, Mo. She coached the men’s tennis team but had little chance to play. She was bored and restless, and in one year her ranking fell so far that she was no longer listed among the country’s top ten players. Althea was ready to quit. She all but decided to join the WAC and use a lieutenant’s salary to help her family.

One afternoon in the summer of 1955, officials of the U.S.L.T.A. told Althea that the State Department had asked them to nominate some players to tour Southeast Asia; they wanted her to go. Althea hesitated (“I had to get on my knees to persuade her,” says a friend), finally accepted. The troupe included Karol Fageros, a bouncing blonde as famous for her frilly panties as her fancy tennis, Rhodes Scholar Ham Richardson and California’s Bob Perry. India, Pakistan, Thailand, Burma —everywhere the tennists made friends for the U.S., and everywhere Althea was the acknowledged champion. Once or twice when reporters raised a question about race problems, she handled herself deftly. “Sure we have a problem in the States,” she would say, “as every country has its problems. But it’s a problem that’s solving itself, I believe.”

Ruthless Geometry. Back home after her victory in Paris and her quarter-final defeat at Wimbledon, Althea made a disappointing showing at Forest Hills, but she was sure by then that she would stick with tennis. She continued to work steadily with a new coach, Sydney Llewellyn, a Negro pro from New York with an unusual knack for teaching his rigidly defined theory of tennis. The game to Llewellyn is a ruthless exercise in geometry. For every shot, he argues, there is one proper return, one proper angle to aim for. “You don’t play the person, you just play the board as if you were a machine. Tennis looks genteel,” he adds, “but it’s the meanest, most vicious game I know.”

“When Sydney first came to me,” says Althea, “I thought, this guy can’t teach me anything.” But, for one thing, he changed her grip from the Continental, which allows a player to make forehand and backhand shots without rotating the racket, to the Eastern grip, which requires a slight rotation of the racket but allows a smoother, more powerful swing. Above all, he gave her confidence. “I’m a Virgo,” says Althea, who takes her astrology seriously. “Sydney’s an Aquarius, a guy of profound perception.”

At Forest Hills last year, not even Sydney’s perception could help Althea over a bad case of the West Side shakes. Says he: “She got outgeneraled and outfought by Shirley Fry. Forest Hills meant everything to her. She wanted it so much it awed her till it was like living in a pressure cabin. When the day came, she was a nervous wreck, and Fry beat her like a mother beats a child.”

The Best Ever. It is doubtful that the new Althea will ever again be in the same kind of emotional pressure cabin. In Chicago last month, when she turned up for the national Clay Courts championship, hotels in stuffy Oak Park would not rent her a room; the swank Pump Room of the Ambassador East Hotel refused reservations for a luncheon in her honor. Officials and newsmen burned with rage, but Althea hardly noticed it. “I tried to feel responsibilities to Negroes, but that was a burden on my shoulders,” says she. “If I did this or that, would they like it? Perhaps it contributed to my troubles in tennis. Now I’m playing tennis to please me, not them.”

Playing to please herself, just how good is Althea? Fortnight ago she led the U.S. team to an easy Wightman Cup victory (TIME, Aug. 19); last week she did beat both Louise Brough and Darlene Hard to win the Essex County Invitational tournament in Manchester, Mass. She may not yet be close to the steady, spectacular game that was the hallmark of women’s tennis in the days of Suzanne Lenglen and Molla Mallory, of Helen Wills Moody and Helen Jacobs. The champions of a few years ago—Pauline Betz, Doris Hart, Maureen Connolly—could probably have beaten her. But at an age when all the other topflighters are slipping downhill or have retired (e.g., Maureen Connolly, Shirley Fry), Althea is improving steadily.

These days she seldom succumbs to her old habit of charging the net behind weak, mediocre shots; no longer does she take the offensive and then temporize, pat back her volleys instead of smashing for the kill. Her booming serve gives her the basis of a sound, big game, and no woman playing today has the ground strokes to pass her. “She plays smarter all the time,” says her close friend, former Champion Sarah Palfrey Fabyan Cooke Danzig. “She makes fewer mistakes, and she has the natural ability to be still greater than she is.” Darlene Hard, who went to the Wimbledon finals with Althea last month and will probably give her her toughest competition at Forest Hills, is even more emphatic: “Althea improved 400% in the last four years. She’s the world’s champ—and doggone it, she’s earned it.”

Says Althea: “After Forest Hills I’m gonna rest. But, barring illness, I don’t see why I can’t play till I’m 35. If I have any ambition, it’s to be the best woman tennis player who ever lived.”

*The year before, a Manhattan dentist. Dr. Reginald Weir, was allowed to enter the Men’s Indoor championship, became the first Negro player in a U.S.L.T.A. championship.