BY WAYNE COFFEY, NY DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
The Queen and her court
50 years ago, Althea Gibson beat odds to become first black to win U.S. Open
She was standing at center court, at the center of the sporting universe, a sepia-skinned speck in a sea of whiteness. There was nothing new about that, the new champion thought. But what about this sound? This sound was new, a convulsion of applause and appreciation that was rocking the blueblood corridors of the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, leaving little doubt about how the 12,000 fans felt about the angular artistry they'd just witnessed, about the whitest sport on the planet suddenly having a champion of a different color.
It was almost as if the crowd were saluting not just Althea Gibson's victory over Louise Brough, but the improbable arc of her life. Who, after all, had ever heard of such a story? Of an abused child, a chronic truant, a former PAL paddleball champion from West 143rd St., becoming the most acclaimed athlete in the land?
In the next day's New York Times, the moment was described as "the longest demonstration of hand-clapping heard in the stadium in years." The 30-year-old Gibson had already won the French Open and Wimbledon, and had a ticker-tape parade up Broadway. Now she was the champion of the U.S. Open, the first black person to achieve such a status, a full seven years after she became the first person of her race to play at the national championships.
"Nothing quite like it had ever happened to me before," Gibson would write later of the ovation. "And probably never will again."
Fifty years after her historic breakthrough and four years after her death, Althea Gibson will be honored at Arthur Ashe Stadium tomorrow night. The lineup of notables will include a wide array of African-American female groundbreakers, from Aretha Franklin, the first African-American woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to Dr. Mae Jemison, the first woman of color to go into space, to Harvard tennis coach Traci Green, the first black female coach in the university's 371-year history.
When the ceremony is over, the Stadium will feature Venus and Serena Williams, who aren't merely Gibson's tennis progeny, but the most successful women of color the sport has ever seen.
Nobody tomorrow night figures to touch on the late stages of Gibson's life, the depression and sickness and financial hardship she endured, and the reclusiveness that kept her locked up in her East Orange, N.J. duplex, and that only a select few could penetrate. The core message instead will be about courage and perseverance, pushing forward even when society, literally and figuratively, keeps telling you to get to the back of the bus.
When Gibson returned to defend her title in Forest Hills in 1958, she was greeted by a sign that said, "Go back to the cotten (sic) plantation, nigger." It wasn't the worst thing Althea Gibson ever heard. It just got the most attention.
"She basically ignored almost all of that stuff," says Fran Gray, a close friend and co-author of "Born to Win," a biography of Gibson. "The only white thing she concentrated on was the tennis ball."
Katrina Adams played for 12 years on the WTA Tour, reaching No. 8 in the doubles rankings, and is now the executive director of the Harlem Junior Tennis Program.
"I don't think (Gibson) really understood how significant what she did was for the sport, and for people like me," Adams says. "We were never around her enough to be able to say thank you, and make her feel appreciated."
Gibson is often called the "Jackie Robinson of tennis," but the truth is they had little in common beyond their race and barrier-breaking and a dazzlingly athletic and aggressive mind-set, Robinson with his steals of home, Gibson with her punishing overheads and lethal serves and volleys. Gibson acknowledged as much in her autobiography, "I Always Wanted to be Somebody."
"Someone once wrote that the difference between me and Jackie Robinson is that he thrived on his role as a Negro battling for equality whereas I shy away from it," she said. "That man read me quite correctly."
Says Billie Jean King, "She never thought of herself as a trailblazer. She basically said, 'I am not going to be that.' Maybe she felt the burden was going to be too great. Or maybe it was enough just to get through each day." King pauses.
"I don't think anyone can imagine what it would've been like to have been a black woman at that time unless they lived it," she says.
Born in the tiny town of Silver, S.C., Gibson grew up fast on the west side of Harlem, a self-described "traveling girl" with quick fists (her father taught her to box when he wasn't roughing her up himself) and little appetite for the confines of the classroom. She took to the streets, and to sports, becoming a city paddleball champion, drawing the attention of a man named Buddy Walker, a PAL recreation counselor and bandleader, who paid $5 for a pair of wooden tennis rackets for Gibson, rightly figuring that her paddle skills would transfer to the tennis court. At age 12, Gibson walked onto the Harlem River Tennis Courts at 153rd St. and Seventh Ave. "After about 10 minutes all the players on the other courts stopped their games to watch her," Walker told a reporter.
Before long Gibson drew the attention of Fred Johnson, the renowned, one-armed coach at Harlem's Cosmopolitan Tennis Club. She began climbing the rankings of the American Tennis Association - the circuit for black tennis players, an ascension that might have stopped there were it not for Dr. R. Walter (Whirlwind) Johnson, who saw the 5-11 Gibson as the sort of transcendent talent to integrate the Open.
Johnson, a general practitioner out of Lynchburg, Va., who later became a benefactor to another rising talent, Arthur Ashe, teamed with another physician, Dr. Hubert Eaton, to map out Gibson's course, helping her get a high school diploma, enroll at Florida A&M University, honing her game even as they worked to soften some of the harder edges of her streetwise ways.
By 1950, three years after Robinson integrated baseball, the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association finally succumbed to pressure to follow suit, much of it coming from a pointed letter written by four-time national champion Alice Marble to American Lawn Tennis magazine.
"(Gibson) is not being judged by the yardstick of ability, but by the fact that her pigmentation is somewhat different," Marble said. "She is a fellow tennis player and, as such, deserving of the chance I had to prove myself." On Aug. 28, 1950, on Court 14 of the West Side Tennis Club, Althea Gibson defeated Barbara Knapp, 6-2, 6-2, in the first round of the Open, before losing a taut match to the same Louise Brough she would beat seven years later.
Gibson's path was never easy, as a child or an adult. She endured the usual indignities, getting turned away by restaurants and hotels, having to drink from colored water fountains, and dealing with much worse in the white, well-heeled world of tennis, which for so long had no idea of what to make of her, or her sometimes prickly persona.
"I wasn't really the tennis type," Gibson once said. "I kept wanting to fight the other player every time I started to lose a match." Gibson finished her career with 11 major titles and reached No. 1 in the world, but playing as an amateur, never scored a major financial payday from her skill. Even after she turned pro, playing exhibitions and touring with the Globetrotters, money mostly remained scarce, as it did when Gibson opted to pick up golf.
She integrated the LPGA, but was never able to sustain success, eventually moving into community-health work for the state of New Jersey before she was a victim of budget cuts and lost her job in 1990. She was 63, and according to Gray, was never the same. She suffered a stroke and was debilitated by other ailments, growing increasingly frail and depressed, bills mounting and days dwindling.
She rarely wanted to go out because she was too proud to have people see her in such a state. Once she went so far as to call her long-ago doubles partner, Angela Buxton, with whom she won a Wimbledon title. The great Althea Gibson, on the brink of suicide, was calling to say goodbye.
Buxton put out word to her network of tennis friends of Gibson's plight, and more than $100,000 poured in, easing Gibson's burdens but having less tangible impact on her despondence. "She put so much struggle into the front end of her life, that I don't think she had much left to fight with at the end," Gray says.
Ten years ago, before making her astonishing run to the U.S. Open final, Venus Williams spoke to Althea Gibson on the phone. Gibson had heard of Venus' game, of the similarities they shared, from the dominating serve to the long-limbed, intimidating athleticism. "Be who you are and let your racket do the talking. The crowd will love you," Gibson told her. It was wonderful advice. It was also true.
Tomorrow night, after all the ground-breakers leave the court and a long-overdue tribute is complete, Venus Williams, six times a Grand Slam champion, will begin her fortnight, and so will sister, Serena, eight times a Grand Slam champion. The showcase matches, in a stadium named for Ashe, will be perhaps the greatest tribute of all.
One in three newcomers to tennis is African-American or Hispanic, according to Karlyn Lothery, chief diversity officer for the USTA. Of the 65 Americans in the main and qualifying draws at the Open, 11 are African-Americans - or 17%. In the diversity orbit, tennis isn't to be confused with the NBA, but its face is evolving, a process that began with Althea Gibson, who won the U.S. Open championship a half-century ago. She never set out to change the world, but did anyway.
"I won't say that Althea was a Rosa Parks, or a Martin Luther King," Gray says. "But she participated in the civil rights movement. She just did it with her tennis racket. When she played in the 1940s and 1950s, she broke barriers and fought her way through the system, and when she won, the black community felt, 'One got through.' One of us made it.' She carried us with her. We hitched our wagon to her star, and she (lifted) us up."
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