Althea Gibson and Angela Buxton playing doubles at Wimbledon in 1956
Those also excluded
BUILT INTO THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY sporting ideal was an unquestioned assumption of the superiority of the white Anglo-Saxon race.
Until the Second World War tennis in the United States was almost entirely segregated.1 That African-Americans played tennis at all was due to the existence of a small black middle class. In an interview in 2000, black tennis coach, Branch Curington, recalled that ‘Tennis was always considered a rich man’s game. All the tennis was channelled through private country clubs. The black folks who started playing tennis were mostly teachers, maybe a few . . . doctors. Some wealthy black families had tennis courts constructed in their yards. The so-called elite blacks tried to play tennis because it was a social thing to do. Those who played tennis didn’t care anything about working people or helping anybody with tennis unless you were in that social environment.’
African-Americans were playing tennis by the 1890s and the American Tennis Association, the ATA, was set up in 1916 when the numerous black tennis clubs, mostly on the Eastern seaboard, got together to create a national organisation and circuit for their players. The first national championships were hosted by the Monumental Tennis Club in 1917 in Baltimore. In the 1920s and 1930s Ora Washington played on the circuit devised by the ATA and by 1939 there existed 150 black tennis clubs with 28,000 players; and thirty-five sectional and state tournaments. A tennis tradition was developing in black colleges. A minority of African-American men played tennis at white colleges and these players, who had the best exposure to serious, high-level tennis, benefited from good coaching, sharp competition and modern facilities. Some even captained college tennis teams, for example Richard Hudlin at the University of Chicago, who was the first black captain in the top ten colleges. Richard Weir was another talented black player between the wars; he was team captain at City College of New York for three years. He was one of two players who attempted to challenge the racist stance of the USLTA, when in 1929 he was refused entry to the Indoor Junior Championships. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed a formal grievance in the hope that this would force the USLTA publicly to defend its policy. This would have exposed its racism; however the grievance was disallowed. (Years later Weir did finally win a title at a USLTA championship – the Senior Indoor title in 1956.) 2
The promising African-American players of Weir’s generation had no chance of becoming star players in the white tennis world. Instead, a number contributed something more valuable in African-Americans’ long-term progress in tennis by becoming coaches. One prominent coach was Dr Robert Walter Johnson, who coached Althea Gibson. Johnson was the son of a successful African-American businessman and trained as a doctor. He started to play tennis in his thirties and had a clay court built in the garden of his home in Lynchburg [sic], Virginia. He became one of the most important figures in the development of tennis for African-Americans when he began to train promising youngsters who would not otherwise have been able to develop their game.3
In the 1950s Arthur Ashe was his protégé, attending his training summer camps from the age of nine until he was sixteen.
‘The black players and coaches of the 1940s and 1950s transformed professional tennis by opening doors for players of later generations. They challenged the racism in both the game and society in order to participate in an exclusive sport. Racism remained within the structure of the game, however, and class snobbery continued to permeate it even among blacks.’ 4
In 1940 Don Budge played an exhibition match against a talented black player, Jimmie McDaniel. The match was sponsored by Wilson Sports Goods and played at a black club, the New York Cosmopolitan Club in New York City. The windows of the surrounding apartment blocks were jammed with spectators and a local paper reported that ‘the colour line was erased, at least temporarily, for the first time in the history of major American tennis’.
After the Second World War things gradually changed. Players seem to have been less prejudiced than the amateur officials. The African-American player Oscar Johnson was accepted into the draw for the National Indoor Championships in 1948, after having initially been refused, and commented that while the officials had been hostile, ‘I had no trouble at all with any of the players. In fact a [white] guy from Texas asked me to be his doubles partner and we reached the semi-finals.’ And Althea Gibson attested that when she was the only black woman in all-white draws, the other players, who were genuinely friendly, made her feel ‘right at home’.5
By 1950 sports were beginning to breach the colour bar – in men’s basketball and baseball, for example. Althea Gibson reached the final of the National Indoor Tennis Championships, but no black player had ever been invited to play at Forest Hills. Alice Marble wrote to American Lawn Tennis Magazine to challenge the USLTA, pointing out that if Gibson was a challenge to the top white women players, then it was for them to face that challenge, and that to disbar her was to judge her by the colour of her skin, not her ability.
Althea Gibson did play at Forest Hills, but while integration in sports may have been inevitable, it did not follow that prejudice had been eradicated. In the mid-1950s, by which time Althea Gibson was the dominant women’s player in the world, at least one commentator insinuated that her place at the top was due only to the departure of the great post-war generation of players, Louise Brough, Margaret duPont, Doris Hart and Shirley Fry, and by Maureen Connolly’s departure through injury. Little Mo’s premature retirement was significant, but the others were past their prime and such speculative comparisons seem invidious. At Wimbledon Gibson lost to Shirley Fry in the 1956 quarter-finals, but she triumphed over the British player, Christine Truman, in 1957 in the semi-finals. Understandably the crowd was partisan during this match, but then, when she destroyed the American, Darlene Hard, in the final, ‘the centre court raised only an apathetic cheer as the Queen presented the trophy’.
She played doubles with Angela Buxton. Buxton was her friend and – significantly – was one of the few Jewish women on the circuit. At Wimbledon, suggested one journalist many years later, they were ‘an oddity’. Scottie Hall of the Sunday Graphic went further, describing the crowd’s bias against Gibson in the quarter-final she lost to Fry as shameful. It had, he felt, robbed her of a match she deserved to win. It wasn’t that anything was whispered, and certainly not shouted: ‘It was just an atmosphere, tight-lipped, cold . . . an unspoken, unexpressed but felt anti-Gibson atmosphere.’ Another reporter made a similar point: ‘To pretend that Miss Gibson is just another player is to bilk the truth. She is the first coloured player ever to invade a game that is riddled with snobbery . . . it was very noticeable that the crowd . . . did not applaud the Gibson girl.’ 6
Nor was it just the British crowd. Scottie Hall heard an American at the Wimbledon Press bar sneer: ‘So Joe Louis became a champ. And what happened? Nigger boxers came out from under every stone. Same thing if Gibson walks away from here with a tennis pot.’
He was wrong. During the tennis boom of the 1970s more black American players did come forward, but lack of money and failure to find sponsors continued to prevent many talented youngsters from getting to the top. There were no more black Wimbledon champions until the end of the twentieth century when the Williams sisters triumphed, although Zina Garrison reached the women’s final in 1990 and MaliVai Washington the men’s in 1995. Yannick Noah, discovered by Ashe in the Cameroons, won the French Open in 1983, and the first decade of the twenty-first century saw James Blake from the United States and the French players Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Gael Monfils reach the top echelons of the game, but Wimbledon and Flushing Meadow still awaited another black men’s champion.
Althea Gibson was fated to belong to a transitional decade, the decade before open tennis ended the old amateur system. Tennis did not reward her with the wealth enjoyed by later top players and her old age was dogged by ill-health and poverty.
The next African-American player to make it to the top, nearly ten years later, faced a changing culture and a changing situation. Arthur Ashe was fortunate in arriving on the scene just as opportunities were opening up. Born in Richmond, Virginia, he experienced the racism of the American South as a boy, but by 1963 when he was chosen to play for his country in the Davis Cup, there was also a new consciousness of racism. There was a growing civil rights movement and traditional attitudes were being challenged. So although he was the first black American Davis Cup player, his right to be there was not in question; in 1968 he was part of the winning American team. That was also the year in which he won the first US Open championship. In 1970 he won the Australian Open, but his most famous victory was his defeat of Jimmy Connors in the Wimbledon final in 1975 at the age of thirty-two.
The players were on bad terms. Ashe had fully supported the founding of the ATP; Connors refused to join, although he benefited from its existence: ‘he never helped in our ongoing struggles with the national and international governing bodies’, said Ashe. Furthermore, Connors refused to play in the Davis Cup, which Ashe felt was unpatriotic. In response to Ashe’s open criticisms, Connors filed a lawsuit, which was pending at the time of the championships. Jimmy Connors was by far the favourite for the title that year at Wimbledon. When Ashe won in four sets, the legal proceedings were dropped.
Ashe bestrode the transition from amateur to professional tennis. He was known as a consummate ‘gentleman’ of the game. That could be interpreted as stereotyping Ashe as the kind of soft-spoken, polite African-American whom the white folk could accept because he did not openly challenge them. But Ashe was no Uncle Tom. Refused entry to South Africa on account of his colour, he attended demonstrations against the apartheid regime and in 1985 was arrested outside the South African embassy in Washington. In the 1970s he wore his hair in the popular afro style; after his win over Connors at Wimbledon he punched the air with his fist – though this was probably not to emulate the black power gesture made by black players at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Yet at the same time he remained a product of the 1950s, courteous and sportsmanlike in the traditional mould.
This was due to all he had learned from Dr Johnson, who emphasised good manners. Ashe was later to say that his mentor had realised that in the segregated South of those days, tournament directors were liable to seize on any excuse they could to eject a young player from a tournament. Therefore any sign of bad manners, let alone a temper tantrum on court, was to be avoided at all costs. Ashe and his peers were taught ‘first of all, when you walk onto the court you have to be impeccable in your appearance . . . you were to be the most courteous guy – you know, faultless person – one could find.’ 7 This training led Ashe to the conclusion that ‘how you played the game was more important than whether you won or lost’.
Commentator Peter Bodo felt that he suffered from the ‘black man’s burden’: that then, and to some extent even today, any outstanding black personality will still be seen as representative of and speaking for his whole race. He also suffered from not seeming radical enough because of his old-fashioned manners. He was therefore paradoxically in the position of being a principled activist who was for a large part of his career viewed as lukewarm in support of the advancement of his race because he worked diplomatically behind closed doors, and as a member of the old elite tennis establishment because, bookish, aloof and private, he was so different from the raucous new stars of the seventies, Connors and Ilie Nastase.8
Ashe suffered poor health. A heart attack in 1979 and two operations were followed in 1988 by brain surgery, during which doctors discovered that he had contracted AIDS from contaminated blood during an earlier operation. It seems to have been only then when he went public about his illness and became a campaigner around the disease until his death four years later at the age of forty-nine that the American people fully took him to its collective heart as a true hero.
The open era and the radicalism of the 1970s did not result in African-Americans, or for that matter non-white players from other countries, appearing on the professional tennis circuit in large numbers. In a more race-conscious time there was still covert prejudice. Black Americans, Afro-Caribbeans in Britain and the indigenous people of Australia, for example, suffered disproportionately from poverty and lacked the opportunity to even acquaint themselves with an expensive and complicated game requiring equipment, specialised venues and regular coaching.
Evonne Goolagong was an extraordinary exception. The daughter of an aboriginal sheep-shearer, she was noticed by a local (white) resident when she peered through the netting at the local courts. He invited her in to play. News of her talent reached Vic Edwards, a tennis coach in Sydney, who took her on and had her live with his family as she completed her education. She won seven grand-slam singles titles, the last in 1980 at Wimbledon, the only mother to have done so in the open era.9 She remained an exception and with the gradual decline of tennis in Australia her triumphs did not empower other potential indigenous players.
When John Wilkerson started a free tennis clinic in Houston at MacGregor Park in 1974, this was a fairly unusual initiative. His two most successful students were Zina Garrison and Lori McNeil. Yet the general trend during the last decades of the century was for the development of tennis academies, which, while they did not exclude blacks, were likely to have been too expensive for the majority of aspiring black kids. In any case, boys in particular saw a more promising pathway in basketball, boxing and other sports in which non-whites were already more visible.
It was in the United States that racial issues in tennis were most noted, because of the particular African-American history in that country. If there were no black players in Europe between the wars, this was because Europeans to some extent exported racism to the colonies over which they ruled. There had always been non-white citizens in Europe, but no significant ethnic middle class had developed in any country, apart from well-established Jewish minorities. But Jews, too, were unwelcome in many tennis clubs.
In the imperial Raj Indians were likely to appear on court as ball boys, apart, that is, from wealthy rajahs, for whom the game was an ingredient in their international lifestyle and who were as likely to be spotted on the Riviera as Russian princes or English dukes. Cricket, as a team game requiring less equipment and which could be played on waste ground, was able to take root among the general population and achieve winning popularity, but tennis was too complicated and exclusive to achieve a mass following.
However, when the British departed they left behind a number of tennis clubs and an Indian middle class who could and did play. The Brahmin Ramanathan Krishnan reached the semi-finals at Wimbledon in 1966 and led the Indian Davis Cup team that reached the challenge round, losing to Australia. Krishnan was an inspiration to Vijay Amritraj, growing up in Madras (Chennai).
Many ex-pats had stayed on in India after the end of British rule and in Madras they kept the Madras Gymkhana Club flourishing. Vijay’s parents played mixed doubles at the club and as soon as they were old enough Vijay and his brothers learned tennis there too. It was, remembered Vijay, all very British. There would be tea and scones on the lawn and dancing in the evening. The walls of the main salon were hung with honours boards engraved with the names of past presidents of the club. ‘Not until the 1950s,’ he recalled, ‘could one find a name that was not obviously British.’ But in his parents’ day the number of ex-pat members was on the decline.10
Amritraj became a top-twenty player in the early open era days and led the Indian team on a successful run to the Davis Cup final. Unlike some of his more introverted fellow players, he enjoyed the lifestyle and ‘was always ready to put myself out for sponsors by attending parties . . . a little effort goes a long way in this corporate-minded world’.11 His success led, like others before him, to the movie industry. He was ‘movie mad’ and started his own cinema company, and he reckoned that many sports stars were tempted by film and received offers, only to find that they couldn’t actually act. Amritraj was more successful than most, landing a big supporting part in the Bond film Octopussy. This was thanks to the fact that he knew the wife of the producer of the Bond movies, the late Cubby Broccoli (whose father invented the vegetable, according to Amritraj). Even this, however, did not lead to an acting career. He did land some parts on Indian television, but they were not as rewarding and the final straw was when he had to play an undercover cop in drag (to infiltrate a prostitution ring).12
Non-white players often suffered not only from generally negative stereotypes, but also from what might seem the more positive stereotype: that they are ‘naturally’ athletic. Whatever the evidence, or lack of it, for any inherent ability, the result has often been that in childhood and adolescence black children or children of mixed race may be pushed in the direction of athletics rather than academic excellence at school.
Racism in sport was certainly not confined to tennis and continued to be a problem into the twenty-first century. In tennis it was complicated by issues of class, but it would be fair to say that in this, as in so many other ways, sport in general and tennis in particular did no more than reproduce attitudes in the wider society. Yet because it was such a middle-class game, it was even harder for individuals from immigrant or ethnic minority groups to participate; a classic case of the way in which class also shaped the destinies of ‘minority’ groups.