Joe Guzzardi has an exquisite article on tennis nice Althea Gibson. Gibson dominated girls’s tennis within the Fifties changing into the primary Black participant to win the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open singles championships.
In August, West 143rd Avenue in Harlem was renamed Althea Gibson Means.
Althea Gibson represents to black skilled tennis gamers what Jackie Robinson is to American blacks in Main League Baseball. Gibson, a Fifties period participant, pioneered the way in which for Arthur Ashe, Zina Garrison and the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena. The distinction between Gibson and Robinson is that almost all Individuals immediately acknowledge Jackie’s identify, whereas solely a handful of septuagenarians who adopted tennis a long time in the past keep in mind Gibson. In 1950, Gibson broke the tennis coloration barrier when she grew to become the primary black to play in New York’s nationwide tennis championship, now referred to as the U.S. Open.
Gibson’s household migrated from South Carolina to Harlem in 1929. For Althea to turn out to be the world’s №1 ranked girls’s tennis participant 20 years later appeared unbelievable, however became actuality.
In her early years, Gibson, a lanky six-footer, handed her time combating with avenue gangs and shoplifting. Her father, a storage employee, wished Althea to turn out to be an expert boxer. However Althea took to basketball and ping-pong. After she gained the town’s paddle tennis championship at age 10, a Police Athletic League supervisor purchased her two used tennis racquets. From that second on, Gibson’s tennis profession, though nonetheless restricted to the black circuit, took off. Althea joined the Cosmopolitan Membership, an area black tennis membership the place probably the most affluent Harlem residents performed. Gibson quickly beat all comers. The impressed membership members despatched Althea on the nationwide, all-black American Tennis Affiliation tour.
By 1947, at age 20, Gibson gained her first ATA title and went on to win 10 nationwide championships, a still-standing file. By the tip of the Fifties, Althea had collected 11 Grand Slam titles, together with a number of championships at Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and the French Open, the place, in 1956, she gained titles in singles and doubles. After profitable the 1957 Wimbledon title, New York Metropolis honored Gibson with a Broadway ticker-tape parade, an occasion usually reserved for worldwide dignitaries and World Sequence winners.
After Gibson retired from tennis, she launched into golf, and in 1964 grew to become the primary black girl to hitch the Women Skilled Golf Affiliation. Gibson performed 171 occasions between 1963 and 1977, however by no means gained a title. Though she was one of many LPGA’s high 50 cash winners for 5 years, over the course of her golf profession, she earned a meager $19,250.25. However, as she did in tennis, Gibson opened doorways for black feminine golfers like Shasta Averyhardt, Sadena Parks, Mariah Stackhouse, Cheyenne Woods and Ginger Howard. When she discovered about Gibson’s groundbreaking LPGA involvement, Howard stated that “breaking these boundaries” (golf and tennis have been performed virtually solely by rich whites) was “an enormous step.”
