The champion tennis forgot: Before Ashe, before Serena, came Althea Gibson - How It All Played Out

0:02Paul Hayward:This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:07Mark Pougatch:Arthur Ashe is a name immediately recognisable to every tennis fan and most sports fans for that matter. He was the first black man to win the US Open, the Australian Open and Wimbledon. And the largest tennis stadium in the world, the US Open main court, is named after him. But he wasn't the first black player to win a Grand Slam. That honour went to the New Yorker, Althea Gibson, who won the French Open in 1956, a whole decade before Ash. She also won both the US Open and Wimbledon in 1957 and in 1958. So why isn't Althea Gibson as well known as Arthur Ashe? Why doesn't she have her name up in lights like his?

0:50Mark Pougatch:What's her story? This is how it all played out.

1:04Mark Pougatch:I think Arthur Ashwin in Wimbledon is one of my first tennis memories, mid-70s. But Althea Gibson's name I didn't know for a very, very long time. You actually pointed me and us towards this story. And I'm thinking, what's gone on here? The first black player to win a Grand Slam and then did the double, Wimbledon and the US Open in 57 and 58. How on earth is she not better known?

1:26Paul Hayward:Well, I would argue that Althea Gibson is the forgotten heroine of all sport, all women's sport, not just tennis. So, as you said, she was the first black player to win a major title, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in 1957 and 58 after the French Open. She got a ticker tape parade through New York City. A hundred thousand people turned up when she won the French Open, by the way, in 1956. She was booed and jeered by the crowd in Paris for the color of her skin. and her life story is a is a movie waiting to be made it is full of incredible talent and pain and childhood trauma and poverty later in life but above all it's it's it's a battle it's a fight against prejudice and discrimination reading her story in more detail mark i thought for some reason of the great american jazz singers you know nina simone or ella fitzgerald those people of that level who who were incredibly gifted at what they did but had to fight and fight and fight every minute of every day to be recognized and to be treated with respect and so the deeper you go into Althea Gibson's story the more you understand why it matters so much well she came from the

2:42Mark Pougatch:streets of Harlem and in the 90s and 20s and 30s Harlem was the was the black capital of the world a very tough place to grow up. Her father beat her, beat her with an ironing cord, so she'd go missing for days at a time, you know, running true. And it was a shambolic childhood on the tough streets of Harlem. She was the queen of the snitches, of the petty thieves. But even though her dad beat her, he also taught her to box. He was a tough mechanic. So you can immediately imagine there, very early on, she learned the streets are my friend and nobody's going to look after me in this world except for me.

3:17Mark Pougatch:I am in control of my own future, my own agency, if you like, because it's this tough out there.

3:23Paul Hayward:Yeah, she was born in 1927 in South Carolina to a sharecropper who, like a lot of black people in that period, moved north in search of freedom and a better life.

3:34Mark Pougatch:Like Jesse Owens' family had done, exactly the same.

3:36Paul Hayward:Exactly. Unfortunately, Arthur Gibson's father thought she could be a boxer and used to take her up to the roof of their tenement building and punch her to cajole her into punching back. It got so bad that she had to take refuge with various child protection agencies. She spilled onto the streets, fell into gangs and delinquency. But it all changed on 143rd Street where she was raised when a paddle tennis court was installed. And the supervisor there noticed her play and her attitude and introduced her to a coach and a club. A man, the tennis coach called Fred Johnson, who had one arm. I like that detail.

4:20Paul Hayward:A tennis coach with one arm. I hope it was a good arm. Sugar Ray Robinson noticed her talent and sort of tried to help her along the way. And eventually Fred Johnson got her into a very swanky club called the Cosmopolitan Club, where she learned the kind of airs and graces that she carried all the way through her career, really. She was a tremendously...

4:41Mark Pougatch:We should say this was a club for the black intelligentsia, wasn't it? Exactly, in Harlem.

4:45Paul Hayward:So it was quite hard to get into. And I think it was there that she saw the gateway to another world, a better life. And if you listen to her speak and you read what she wrote, she was a fantastically self-educated and articulate woman just looking for a chance in life.

5:02Mark Pougatch:Not surprisingly, given it's the 1950s, the American Tennis Association is just for black tennis players. And she absolutely dominated it. She lost the first final. But then after losing the first final, two black tennis coaches spotted her. They were like sort of unofficial scouts for the ATA in a way to find black players to unlock the doors of the all white USLTA. So this was the aim to get a black player to be able to play effectively at the US Open. And these two gentlemen called Dr. Robert W. Johnson from Virginia. So in the north. And there's a point about the geography. and Dr. Hubert A.

5:39Mark Pougatch:Eaton from the South, from North Carolina. So she'd sort of spend time in the North and time in the South. And of course, the time in the South is the height of segregation, the Jim Crow laws, as they said. But all the time, Dr. Johnson is training her and others in etiquette because they're saying to her, white people are looking for a reason to think you can't behave yourself. So I'm going to train you about how to hold a knife and fork and how to hold yourself because we can't give them an excuse to say, you don't know how to behave.

6:10Paul Hayward:Oh, absolutely. And it's worth saying that the National Tennis Association in 1950 was closed to black people. She could not play in the national championships. There's another hero to this story. She's called Alice Marble. She was a former tennis champion. She'd been world number one Wimbledon champion in 1939 and a four-time winner of what is now the US Open. Now, she stood up for Althea Gibson. She wrote this immortal letter to the association. and I'll read an extract for you. Alice Marble wrote, If tennis is a game for ladies and gentlemen, it's also time we acted a little more like gentle people and less like sanctimonious hypocrites.

6:49Paul Hayward:If there is anything left in the name of sportsmanship, it's more than time to display what it means to us. If Althea Gibson represents a challenge to the present crop of women players, it's only fair that they should meet that challenge on the courts. and that was a stunning riposte to the racism of the um of the u.s tennis association and lo and behold that letter tips the balance in favor of althea gibson being able to play in national

7:17Mark Pougatch:championships the interesting thing about althea gibson and all this is that she didn't particularly want to be at the forefront did she of the civil rights crusade because immediately like sugar ray robinson jackie robinson the baseball player the black press which was very strong in america at time thought oh great we've got a female black tennis player she can lead the crusade from her point of view she didn't want to do it and she was criticized by some of the black press for not doing that and she said it's just too much of a burden to take on i grew up in foster homes i grew up on the street i grew up playing truant i grew up with a shambolic family with a father who beat me i learned early on to look after myself i don't know how you interpret this but i almost interpret it as I don't have the energy to do this as well I want to play really good tennis and people see I'm a very good tennis player and then I'm a black very good tennis player and hopefully that will reflect well on black people not me at the forefront you know with the cudgels as it were

8:12Paul Hayward:how would you interpret it yeah I mean well in her first memoir the Jackie Robinson comparison kind of dogged her quite a lot and in this memoir she said that Jackie Robinson thrived on his role as a Negro, her word, not mine, battling for equality, whereas I shy away from it because it would be dishonest of me to pretend to have a feeling I don't possess. She simply didn't want to take up that fight. She wanted to get on in life on her own steam and become a tennis player, a great tennis player. And this does come up from time to time. I remember, you know, when Tiger Woods emerged on the scene and political issues came up in American society.

8:52Paul Hayward:we as sports writers would sometimes say to Tiger Woods, well, what's your opinion on this? And he never went there. And he got criticised for that, as if it was his job and his obligation to take up the fight. And then the counter-argument is, well, nobody is obliged to do that if they choose not to. You don't have to be a spokesman or a spokeswoman for anything if you choose not to be.

9:14Mark Pougatch:And Arthur Ashe was. He did choose to be. He wasn't at first, actually, and then he came round to it. Yeah, he didn't want to do it at the start, but then he came round to it. he did speak about education for black kids and he did speak on about apartheid. But interesting that there's always two sides to this, because after Alice Marble's letter, when seven days before the start of what is effective, the US Open in 1950, she is Althea Gibson allowed in. The press say that here's a quote. Let's put the cold stiletto of reasoning into this trick played by the US LTA, the United States Lawn Tennis Association.

9:47Mark Pougatch:Is Althea Gibson a pawn or a trailblazer? the lily white rules of the organization are still in fact next year or the year after the barriers will be back jim crow the jim crow segregation laws in the south which were horrendously implemented jim crow tennis will go on its way so even when she is allowed into the u.s open people are saying oh they're just you know the white people are just putting a trick on you allow you in but they won't allow black players in in general and meanwhile she's living an amazing

10:19Paul Hayward:life in harlem she's a woman of fluid sexual identity she's hanging out with jazz musicians and writers and intellectuals and this is why i cannot believe that a movie hasn't been made of

10:30Mark Pougatch:her life yet she had a very good singing voice didn't she she did she played the sax she recorded

10:34Paul Hayward:an album of songs you know when she stopped playing tennis nowadays she'd be she'd be a

10:40Mark Pougatch:household name yes you know everywhere her biographer said she can never play only for herself she carries the hopes of millions of others on her shoulders every time she goes in to action but as you say she didn't ask to do that this is the problem she didn't ask for that this is just pressure that is on her shoulders she gets a Wimbledon invite in 1951 she's the first African-American to play in SW19 as they say either we are with Althea Gibson and her A gallant fight to win democracy, says the papers in tennis, or we don't give a damn. If you read the British reports of her coming to Wimbledon, I read one newspaper article where the same sentence it mentions she's black three times.

11:26Mark Pougatch:Just in case the reader is unaware of who is coming over from the States.

11:30Paul Hayward:Yeah.

11:30Mark Pougatch:I mean, there's an obsession there, isn't there?

11:32Paul Hayward:Oh, yeah. Just in case we think America was the only place she encountered racism. And as I said, when she won the French Open, which was her big breakthrough, she was booed and jeered.

11:41Mark Pougatch:When she first arrives for Wimbledon, Sugar Ray Robinson, the great boxer, is over here as well and actually part funds the trip. Because remember, they're all amateur. They're all amateur. So there's no money to be made, which is part of her problem. There's a little bit of shamitarism money under the table, but not for women players. But Sugar Ray Robinson, we're literally just down the road from Piccadilly where we're recording this. Sugar Ray pulled into Piccadilly in an 18-foot flamingo pink Cadillac, two Rolls Royces, two more Cadillacs and a coach. Just in case we weren't sure who was rolling into town.

12:15Paul Hayward:I only wish I'd been there to see a report on it.

12:18Mark Pougatch:So Althea Gibson is over at Wimbledon on her own. She's got no support team. Everything about her is scrutinised. This is not straightforward. But when we come back after the break, something happens to her which certainly changes her fortunes on the tennis court.

12:48Mark Pougatch:So she gets a new coach in all this, having played at Wimbledon for the first time, called Sidney Llewellyn, who has something... I really want to ask Novak Djokovic if he's heard this. something called the theory of correct returns did you read this that every shot has exactly that a correct return a point at which in the opponent's half you should put the ball exactly anyway sydney llewellyn's around but then something happens we're talking about the mid-1950s we're talking about what's happening in the southern states and some pretty awful racist lynchings including the infamous murder of a 14 year old boy called emmett till who was murdered in the summer of 1955 after he's accused of whistling at a white woman in a grocery store in Mississippi the woman later confesses she makes most of it up anyway the American State Department go hang on a second the rest of the world think we're a bunch of racists here why don't we have a goodwill tour a bit of soft power with some high-class tennis players and let's have a black one while we're about to Althea Gibson and actually this tour changes her doesn't it yeah the State Department

13:50Paul Hayward:approaches Althea Gibson at a tennis club on the west side of New York and asks her whether she'd go on a tour on their behalf to show that America really isn't a racist country after all. Althea Gibson quite likes the sound of it because her career at that point isn't really going anywhere. She lacks confidence. She lacks conviction on the court.

14:08Mark Pougatch:Today they'd call her a bottler, wouldn't they? She loses finals. She's not really living up to the potential they've all invested in her.

14:16Paul Hayward:Yeah, yeah. there's something lacking in her and it turns out to be confidence. So she goes off and sort of finds herself really on this diplomatic tour. She wins matches over there. She meets people. She broadens her horizons. She comes back and she's an imperious tennis player by the time she's added confidence and conviction to what is already a very solid game she has. So that's when her career really takes off in the mid-1950s.

14:41Mark Pougatch:So she stays in Europe after the end of this tour to the Far East because obviously Paris and Wimbledon are there. She's in really good form. She's got a level of self-confidence. She's got a level of international significance as well. And in 1956, she goes to the French Open and she beats her friend Angela Buxton. She really buddied up with Angela Buxton, who was Jewish. So she knew what it was like sometimes to be ostracised and for people not to want to hang out with you and not play doubles with you. Not to the extent of a black woman, of course, but she had a reasonable amount of it as well.

15:11Mark Pougatch:And she beat her friend Angela Buxton in the semifinal, whose bra strap snaps at just the wrong moment. I did not know that. You have time to fix it all up and she wins. And then she wins the final.

15:21Paul Hayward:For a short time, nobody could live with her. And, you know, when she gets to Wimbledon in 1957, this is, and we're bound to say this because we're biased in favour of Wimbledon. We think it's the epicentre of the world in tennis. But it really is, I think, her defining moment. She's in the final on centre court. This is the first time the Queen has been on centre court, Queen Elizabeth. It's a sweltering day, one of the hottest Wimbledon's ever seen. She needs cold packs on her neck and hands. She says, I was sweating like a steam engine. So she's 5 '11". She's a big server, a servant volleyer, who's modelled herself actually on Alice Marble, the woman who came to her support in 1950.