US Edition
First black Wimbledon champion who paved way for Arthur Ashe and Williams sisters
Althea Gibson may not be as well known as Venus and Serena but she broke barriers in tennis and golf, as this book extract illustrates
In the film King Richard, a drama about the tennis-playing Williams sisters and their father released in 2021, there is a fleeting moment in which the face of Althea Gibson appears. She gazes out from a black-and-white photograph stuck to the refrigerator as the Williams parents argue about which of them has contributed more to their daughters’ success. Althea is smiling, a tennis racket gently clasped against her chest, as though amused at the couple’s wrangling. After all, she knows better than anyone that it’s she who deserves primary credit. If it weren’t for her, the Williams sisters likely wouldn’t have become who they did.
Sixty-six years ago, Althea Gibson did the seemingly impossible. A skinny high school dropout bearing the scars of her father’s beatings on her back, she served and lobbed her way from Harlem’s mean streets to the lush green courts of Wimbledon to become the first black woman to be the No 1 tennis player in the world. Seven years later she rewrote history again when she broke the colour barrier in women’s golf and became the first black member of the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour in 1964.
Like many black women of achievement in America’s past, Althea’s story has been largely ignored. To the bulk of those at the upper levels of the white-dominated world of tennis in her day, she was both an astonishing athlete who had to be recognised and a conundrum to be avoided. Nor did they come to feel much more warmly toward her with the passing of years.
When the USTA named its new tennis stadium at Flushing Meadows in 1997 it chose the name of Arthur Ashe, a black player who earned his No 1 ranking nearly two decades after Althea. When the organisation christened its national tennis complex nearly a decade later it chose the name of white tennis champion Billie Jean King. It was not until 2019 that Althea was honoured with a granite bust at the complex, nestled in the shadow of the other two structures.
It is likely that few on the set of King Richard, other than the Williams family members, were aware of the identity of the woman in the photograph on the refrigerator.
Winning Wimbledon and meeting the Queen
Gibson won her first Wimbledon singles title in 1957, beating fellow American Darlene Hard in the final to become the tournament’s first black champion, and she was presented with the trophy by Queen Elizabeth II.
Althea took the first set 6-3 in under 25 minutes. In the second set, she picked up the pace. Althea continued to rush the net while maintaining her laser-like focus, pausing only to glare with harnessed irritation at the perspiring linesman making repeated calls of foot faults. Nor did she allow the crowd’s annoying habit of clapping at her mistakes, just as they had done in some of her earlier matches, to distract her. Hard struggled fitfully onward, at times dropping her head in her hands in despair. In a few memorable instances, she even paused to applaud Althea’s shots ripping by her. Armed with a new set of balls in the final game, Althea delivered a series of searing serves and triumphantly took the set without surrendering a single point. The match was over at 6-3, 6-2 in 50 minutes. With that final shot, not only was one woman’s epic undertaking of more than 15 years accomplished, but a page in the history of the African American struggle for parity had irrevocably been turned.
A beaming Althea rushed up to the net and threw her arm around Hard as the crowd erupted in exuberant applause that rang through the tennis complex. The two drenched players were escorted to the trophy table near the umpire’s chair, while a thick green carpet was unfurled for Queen Elizabeth. One by one, the players curtsied for the monarch, who was clad demurely in a rose and white silk dress, a beribboned pink hat, and white gloves, before Althea approached her. As the crowd looked on, seemingly more riveted by the ceremony than it had been by the sluggish match, the Queen presented Althea with the Venus Rosewater Dish.
“At last, at last,” Althea exclaimed.
“My congratulations,” the Queen said to her. “It must have been terribly hot out there.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” said Althea, “but I hope it wasn’t as hot in your box. At least, I was able to stir up a breeze.”
Althea, the first Wimbledon winner to be presented with a trophy by the Queen, teared up as she curtsied, and then stepped back so that Hard could come forward to accept her trophy as the camera flashes erupted. The press followed up with an explosion of superlatives and a succession of more photographs back in the club pressroom.
“Althea Gibson fulfilled her destiny at Wimbledon today and became the first member of her race to rule the world of tennis,” declared The New York Times.
Some among the black press put it in even more cosmic terms. Her win, thundered Sam Lacy, “is the greatest triumph a coloured athlete has accomplished in my time... Althea, on Saturday, beat the world at tennis.”
Back in the dressing room, Althea found a pile of telegrams from around the world, with many from those who had known her since childhood. “Congratulations. Edna cried with joy. I knew you’d do it,” wrote boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.
The day was far from over. Less than two hours later, Althea and Hard were back on Centre Court, this time as partners, playing the women’s doubles against the Australian team of Mary Hawton and Thelma Long. In a match as sluggish as the women’s singles, the Americans easily won the title 6-2, 6-1. By then, Althea was near her energy’s end, and the mixed doubles sapped the last bit she had. With Hard now on the opposite side of the court, paired with Mervyn Rose of Australia, Althea and Neale Fraser struggled, but the triple crown was not to be Althea’s that day; they lost the mixed doubles 4-6, 5-7.
The Wimbledon Ball took place that night at the iconic Grosvenor House hotel, in the heart of the Victoria district and just a short walk from Buckingham Palace. She was seated at the head table in between Lew Hoad, the men’s champion, and the Duke of Devonshire, the master of ceremonies. It was Althea’s night from the start. She began her three-and-a-half-page handwritten speech with an approximation of the words uttered by Winston Churchill in 1940 shortly after the French sought an armistice, saying, “This is my finest hour. This is the hour I will remember always as the crowning conclusion to a long and wonderful journey.”
Giddy with her triumph, Althea allowed herself to be talked into taking the microphone, and in her deep contralto, she crooned two of her favourite tunes, “If I Loved You” and “Around the World”. In doing so, she attained yet another “first” in apparently becoming the first Wimbledon champion to perform before the crowd attending the ball.
Remembering the momentous day later, she said, “Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the coloured section of the bus going into downtown Wilmington, North Carolina.”
From ALTHEA: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson by Sally H Jacobs. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.