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Ashley Brown, "Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson" (Oxford UP, 2023)
00:45:42
An interview with Ashley Brown
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Ink Conversation podcast, a joint production of Oxford University Press and the New Books Network. I'm Mark Clobus and today I'm speaking with Ashley Brown, author of the book Serving the Life and Times of Althea Gibson. Ashley, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:22]
B
Thanks for having me, Mark.
- [00:24]
A
Well, thanks for agreeing to be on our podcast. I was wondering if you could start us off by telling our listeners something about yourself.
- [00:31]
B
Well, I am the Alan H. Selig Chair in the History of Sport and Society and an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I'm an expert on sport history, women's history and African American history.
- [00:45]
A
It's a wonderfully diverse range of subjects in which you specialize and it's fascinating how they all come together. Your biography of Althea Gibson, what led you to undertake a book about her life?
- [00:59]
B
Well, I actually came to Gibson through golf. I knew just the highlights of her tennis career, the highlights that most people perhaps know, which is that she was the first African American to play at what is now the US Open, the first African American to play at Wimbledon, and then in 1957 and she successfully defended in 1958. She won both of those titles and definitely earned the lifelong label and legacy of being a trailblazer. I learned those things as a child. What I didn't know until I was an adult was that Gibson was a two sport athlete. She played golf and she was the first African American woman to compete on, to join the LPGA Tour. And upon learning that, I found myself thinking, what kind of person sets out to do those things and what must she have gone through? And I spent more than 10 years finding the answer, or I should say the answers. And now your listeners will find those when they read Serving Herself.
- [02:04]
A
It really is an interesting tale as to how it was that she ended up becoming such a famous figure, such a great competitor, such a successful athlete. And that's something that you open the book with. You talk about what her early life was like and it involves not just talking about Althea Gibson, but also talking about what life was like for her as a young woman growing up in mid century America. What were her early years life. What were, what was her, what were her early years like? And what was it that led her to turn to sports and, and what led her to settle upon the sport of tennis?
- [02:47]
B
Well, Althea Gibson was born in 1927 in a little town called Silver, South Carolina. Her family moved to New York. They moved to Harlem during the early 1930s. Her parents had been sharecroppers, and they had four more children. Gibson was the oldest out of the group, and she loved sports and games from a very early age. She joked that her father actually had her shooting marbles when they lived in South Carolina, that he would shoot marbles with her on a dirt road. And she later said she shot marbles on the manhole covers in Harlem. So she always had quite a sense of humor, but she was also honest. She loved sports. She would do anything to play them, and she didn't matter or she didn't care who her competitors and teammates were. She simply wanted to win. So she said early on that she didn't care about the races of the different folks in Harlem that she encountered through sports. And she also pushed boundaries by playing sports with boys and men. In terms of tennis, she came to that through a game called paddle tennis. She played that in Harlem in her neighborhood through an organization called the Police Athletic League. A supervisor, his name was Buddy Walker, a supervisor for the Police Athletic League, saw her, learned about her reputation as a very fine paddle tennis player, and he thought that she might make a very good lawn tennis player. Buddy Walker didn't have a lot of money, but he bought her two used tennis rackets and some tennis balls and encouraged her to play. And that led to, effectively, a tryout for. For the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club, which was the elite African American tennis club in Harlem. And she's a member there. By 1941, she wins her first tournament a year later, and she rises through the ranks of the American Tennis association. So the ATA is still in existence. It was founded in 1916, and it was really very important or is very important in the history of sports. When we think about integration, because. Because the United States Law and Tennis association did not allow African Americans to compete, did not allow African Americans to become members of its clubs. The ATA had an open membership policy, and Gibson wound up being the number one junior among the girls in the ata. And pretty soon thereafter, when she was able to play in women's competitions for the ata, she became the number one ranked player among women. And in fact, she won a total of 10 ATA national women's singles titles between 1947 and 1956. So she absolutely dominated African American tennis.
- [05:37]
A
The fact that she chose tennis, I thought, was especially interesting in light of what you describe about the sport of tennis in the 1930s and 1940s. I mean, nowadays we know of tennis as this internationally dominant sport, one for which there are Olympic medals, competitions are Televised globally. And yet what you describe about tennis at that time is that it was a sport that was seeking to establish itself and kind of get away from what it was, its origins expand beyond its origins. I was wondering if you could perhaps elaborate upon that, because I felt that when I was reading your book, it really spoke to me how it was, how she felt she had to, or she was told she had to present herself in tennis in terms of it wasn't enough just to be the hardscrabble competitor that you had to comport yourself a certain way because of what the sport itself demanded.
- [06:36]
B
Well, tennis was definitely a global sport, but it was also a sport that had very specific connotations in terms of wealth and matters of class. So Gibson was an outsider from the start in that she came from this very poor, this at best, working class family, neither of her parents attended college, and she finds herself an honorary junior member of the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club. And she's surrounded by people who would have been considered to have belonged to the African American elite. And at the Cosmopolitan in particular. This wasn't just unique to the ct, the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club, but also to the American Tennis Association. These were folks who were doctors and lawyers and business owners, folks who were very, very successful. And her background didn't look like theirs, and she wound up being quite frustrated with the circumstances. But the thing is, this was tennis in America. There certainly were public tennis courts at this time, but they weren't as numerous as they would ultimately become. And many of the folks that she encountered within the elite tennis scene later on. It's interesting how a lot of those folks didn't necessarily come from wealthy backgrounds themselves, but the people who ran the United States Lawn Tennis association, they were very, well, well heeled people. And many of those folks had specific ideas about who should play the game and who should play at clubs and in the tournaments and who should not. And so for matters of race and class, Gibson was definitely on the, on the outside of people's perceptions of what elite tennis was.
- [08:24]
A
And yet. So she's starting out in New York City. And I was, you know, thinking in, you know, based on my limited knowledge, that seemed a perfectly natural place for her to start out. Yet you describe that her journey takes her into the very heart of segregated America in order to begin that process of becoming this globally famous personage. How exactly does she go from those socioeconomic origins? And why does that path take her through the south? And why does that path through the south succeed in making her a successful competitor?
- [09:02]
B
Well, the south is A very important place in terms of the history of African Americans in tennis. So, incidentally, it's believed that the first black tennis club in the south might actually have started at Tuskegee Institute sometime in the 1890s. And Tuskegee, of course, is in Alabama. Gibson was never a great fan of the south because she was well aware of the things that happened there in terms of Jim Crow and violence against African Americans. But you're right, she wound up having to leave New York and go to the south to get further tennis training. So in 1946, two African American doctors who were very close friends, Dr. Hubert A. Eaton Sr. And Dr. Robert Walter Johnson, they saw her playing in the ATA women's singles tennis finals match in Ohio. She finished second, but they weren't concerned about her defeat. They thought that she had all the elements to perhaps integrate tennis. When I say integrate tennis, that meant to play at their ultimate goal was the United States Lawn Tennis Championships at Forest Hills. So back to New York. But these two men lived in New York. Dr. Eaton was in North Carolina. Dr. Johnson lived in Virginia. And they had this idea that perhaps she could spend the academic year with Dr. Eaton and his family in Wilmington, North Carolina, and then she could spend her summers training with Dr. Johnson in Lynchburg and then traveling on the ATA circuit during the summer months. They approached her, and she agreed, and she began, really, her own great migration, we might say, by leaving New York and moving to the South. And she practiced with Dr. Johnson, pardon me, Dr. Eaton, practically every day after school. She dropped out of school at 14, so she had to go back and enroll in high school to get her degree. And she did spend those summers with Dr. Johnson. And that's really how she became the dominant force in the ATA was by working with those men and also getting further training in terms of just discipline. Discipline and structure, which were two things that she always, I think, appreciated throughout her life. But working with those two men and getting a sense of just how to organize things, right, this became important to her development as a tennis player.
- [11:31]
A
It was. That's one of the parts I thought it was really interesting to see how she learn to navigate a very different set of expectations. And yet, as you make clear, she always did so on her own terms, that she never. She didn't. She never seemed to fully become something that she didn't want to be or she didn't feel like that she couldn't, you know, that she had to surrender who she was in order to be, in order to attain this very ambitious goal.
- [12:01]
B
You're right. So when it came to segregation, I think that there was a. A kind of quiet rage that burned within her. The fact, for example, that she loved to go to the movies and she liked to sit in the balcony, but she didn't like that she sat there not because she wanted to, but because the Jim Crow laws said that she had to. It irritated her that the only place where African Americans in Wilmington could play tennis was on the court that was in Dr. Eden's backyard. She was very much opposed also to the restrictions in terms of ideas about what women did and where they went. So one of the stories that I find really amusing is that, remember, she loved to play sports and games. She always loved pool. And she developed quite a reputation in Harlem and elsewhere for her skills as a pool player. She. She goes to Wilmington, and one day she goes into the pool hall, the local pool room, and she's having a great time while she's there. Someone spots her and they call Dr. Eaton, and Dr. Eaton calls the pool hall, and he asks her to come and see him. And she does. And he tells her that in the south, respectable young ladies don't play pool. And when he pointed this out, he said that she looked at her, and he said that she was. She was mystified that this was news to her. So, Gibson, she had a number of challenges in terms of adjusting and transitioning to. From living in Harlem to then living in the South. And this turned out to be a long period of adjustment because her. Her path through tennis, it also took her to Florida A and M, which was, of course, and is the historically black college, the university there in Tallahassee, Florida. So she went from being someone who felt that she had certain levels of freedom and mobility in New York to being someone who had to live with restrictions in terms of race and gender in various parts of the South.
- [14:19]
A
I thought her attendance at Florida A and M was a very notable point in her life for a variety of reasons, one of which you mentioned in the book that there was one of the things that she was proudest of having accomplished was graduating from A and M. But you also mentioned that. You also described how her path there was possible because she was already a very well established personage in tennis when she went there, and that it was in part the opportunities that existed. As you mentioned, she had a scholarship. And the. This was before Title ix. This was before women generally received scholarships for competition, regardless of their sport or their skin color. And yet she had that. She had that opportunity, and it really was key to her being able to get a college education, it's true, she.
- [15:12]
B
Did very well at Williston Industrial High School, which was her high school in Wilmington. And remember, of course, this is the time of segregated schools. So the white students went to one high school there, the African Americans went to another. Gibson finished 10th in her class. She had also been for a few years, the captain of the girls basketball team. And she was throughout her life. I like to think that throughout her life she was a Renaissance woman. So she liked to sing and she also played the saxophone. And in fact, Sugar Ray Robinson, the great boxer, gave her a saxophone, and she treasured it. And she played that in a jazz combo in high school. So we think about high school students today and all the things that they try to do to make themselves stand out in the application process. And Gibson definitely did that, especially when you add in her athleticism. So she had the scholarship at Florida A and M, and that indeed was a rarity. It certainly made her unique among most women in America's college and university system. And there were folks, I found this in the archives there at Florida A and M. There were people who wrote to the athletic department. And when I say people, I mean these were women from other parts of the country who wrote to the athletic department inquiring about scholarships for women. And they received letters saying that, in fact, no, Florida A and M did not provide such scholarships for women. But there was Althea Gibson, star athlete with a job in the PE Department. She had earned one.
- [16:48]
A
And she ended up more than justifying the expectations that all of these people had for her in terms of what she could accomplish. You described that after she graduates from A and M, she really begins to, you know, make tennis a full time occupation. And it was really in, you know, you said it in the context, what's happening in the 1950s. This is the era of Brown versus Ford. This is the tragedy of Emmett Till's murder. This is Little Rock. And during all this, she is not just competing, she's a representative of the country for the world, and one in which the United States takes considerable, albeit very selective prior.
- [17:39]
B
It's true, the idea of Gibson as a symbol of the country. I would say it even began in 1950 when she prepared to, and ultimately made her debut at the United States Nationals, which of course, now we. We call the U.S. open. Someone wrote a letter to the editors of a newspaper in which they pointed out that Jackie Robinson and Althea Gibson were better representatives of America and its possibilities than Paul Robeson, the actor and singer who was also an activist. And it speaks to, even at that moment in the middle 20th century, the idea that athletes could be these powerful symbols for their countries and for their governments about issues of opportunities and what the country did. Well, in 1951, a country abroad was looking for African or looking for tennis players, I should say, who could come and represent the United States and their tournaments. Gibson's name appeared on that list. This was, of course, long before she actually won Wimbledon in the US Open. But that interest, it speaks to her fame, her celebrity, very early at that particular moment. And we have to remember, she was quite, quite young. Right? She's 23 and 24 years old. And just a few years earlier, she had been living and playing games on the streets of Harlem. And now, within just a few years, her name is in newspapers and magazines all over the world, and she's making headlines.
- [19:20]
A
I also had the impression that there was an element of sacrifice involved, because, as you explained, she doesn't win Forest Hills and Wimbledon until after she stops touring for the State Department. That as important as what she did was in terms of representing the country is as important as the friendship she made in that process with the women with whom she played. It really put demands on her that really cost her perhaps a bit of focus. And it wasn't until after she stopped doing that that she was able to enjoy those professional triumphs of winning those major tournaments.
- [19:59]
B
Well, I like to think that Serving Herself is a book that is about a lot of different things, and it's a book that anyone and everyone can enjoy, because we all know what it means to have to persevere. And everyone, I think, no matter their industry or their profession, they're aware that you don't always succeed and get everything that you want all at once. And that was definitely the case for Gibson. She becomes this household name in 1950 with the debut at the US Nationals. Everyone's so excited about her. Then she plays as the first African American at Wimbledon in 1951. There had been at least one black player from Jamaica and one from South Africa before her, but she made it there in 1951, was invited. And then after that, some might say that basically there were crickets. Now, she won some international tournaments in the preceding years, but especially within the African American media, there had been all of this excitement. And then, of course, there had been a tremendous amount of anticipation that perhaps she would go ahead and win the US Nationals and win Wimbledon immediately after those debut matches there. But that's not what happened. Gibson and those around her also felt that the tour that she made for the State Department, and this is 1955, 1956, when, as you pointed out, there was global outrage over the heinous murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi. This is also the era of the Montgomery bus boycott. And then at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa authorine Lucy, who died not too long ago, she had attempted to enroll there. This only lasted for a few days because of the displeasure, to say the least, about school integration. This is all a part of the backdrop in which Gibson is playing tennis and representing the country. Country. And she would say, and those folks around her would say, that that tour was deeply important for getting her to grow and to develop her game as a tennis player. And so it's ironic to think about what her participation in the tour was masking for the country and the kind of propaganda work that it was doing for America's image. But on a personal level, it was doing a great deal for her. And she most likely would not have reached the heights of tennis, she would not have won the US Nationals in Wimbledon in those later years if she had not had that extended experience of touring for the State Department.
- [22:45]
A
And of course, she wins those tournaments in very, you know, in ways that make her a very prominent figure. I especially liked the scene you describe when she first went to Wimbledon, when she has the award presented to her by the Queen herself, and the symbolism of that moment in ways that you have the Queen of England and Althea Gibson, but you also have who Althea is and what the Queen represents in 1957, and just what that says about that moment, not just in terms of her life, but. Or in terms of Wimbledon, but in terms of really the history of the world.
- [23:31]
B
It's true. And a fun fact is that readers, when they pick up the book, they'll see we've got a picture of the Queen of England presenting Althea Gibson with the trophy there at the ceremony. And as it happens, Queen Elizabeth actually died on the day that I wrote the caption for that picture. So it's kind of an unusual occurrence there. But Gibson, the daughter of sharecroppers, the descendant of slaves, she reached the pinnacle of tennis and 1957 at Wimbledon. That was actually Queen Elizabeth's first visit to Wimbledon as monarch. And Gibson said later that she recalled what a hot day it was. And Queen Elizabeth, when she spoke to her, she said something very gracious and kind about the heat, something to the effect of that she hoped that it didn't bother her too much. And Gibson appreciated that remark, and she said something in kind to the queen, but she thought that the queen was just gracious and generous in their exchange. And just the irony that these two people from very different backgrounds could meet and they could meet in that moment, I think it's definitely one of the highlights of what is possible in terms of when we think about politics and sports coming together.
- [24:58]
A
She has this amazing moment, and then she replicates her achievement in 1958. She is effectively the dominant female chess player in the world. She only barely misses a Grand Slam in Australia. And yet, as you describe in the book, she's doing this at a time where, I mean, nowadays these people are making money practically hand over fist. But this is a very different time in the world of tennis. And it's one that has that really, you know, for all that she achieves, she doesn't profit from it the way that people nowadays would expect an athlete to profit level of achievement.
- [25:40]
B
She didn't. She won Wimbledon and she won the U.S. nationals. And immediately the discourse in the press became, okay, when is Althea Gibson going to turn pro? Well, no one made her an offer. And she also had to be very careful about even talking about her interest in turning professional, because there had been precedents in the past when tennis players, specifically women, had done that and they had been suspended or even banned by the US lta. And this, of course, was the period of amateur tennis. So amateurs played for honor and trophies. They did not play for money. You could become a professional tennis player, but when you did that, you gave up your ability to compete in the four Grand Slam tournaments and basically any other tournament that was an amateur event. Women in the past had not had the same opportunities in professional tennis that men had. And in fact, if we think back to Wimbledon and the Wimbledon ball that night, Gibson turned a few heads when she did what the other they would call them ladies champions had done in the past, which was that she danced with the winner of the men's singles title. So in her case, it was Lou Hode from Australia. Lou Hode was white. Well, Lou Hode had signed a contract with Jack Kramer to play play professional tennis for $125,000. I'll let your listeners go to some inflation calculator and figure out exactly how much money that would translate into in today's money. So there's Althea Gibson playing for honor and trophies, and Lou Hode has won the Wimbledon title, but he's going to go on and is guaranteed to make a great deal more money afterward. That was not the case for her. So she stayed in amateur tennis for another year. She wanted to make sure that she proved the naysayers wrong. So another difficulty for Gibson was that many people in the media in America and abroad, especially in England, they were reluctant to say that she was the best player in women's tennis. They did this after she won Wimbledon and then after she won the US Nationals. This irritated her. She stuck around and she successfully defended her titles. And then she still had to wait yet another year before the opportunity to turn professional ever came her way.
- [28:20]
A
And that experience, as you described, was nowhere near as beneficial as it should have been. The conditions you describe, I'm thinking as I'm reading this, this is professional tennis. The amateurs seem to have been, have been done a far better job of providing her with the forum to, to play at her best. And you describe, you know, bad that she's playing on like basketball courts and that are poorly kept up and that it's, it's just, it's nothing like what we would expect the word professional to kind of denote. And she ends up not making a fraction of what she is more in debt from the experience than she did.
- [29:04]
B
When she went into was very difficult. Professional tennis today doesn't look anything like it did when she played 60 years ago. This was barnstorming, in effect. So she put together a team. She's got a friend of hers, Carol Fagaros, who was a part of the State Department tour in 1955, 1956. They are the leads. So they compete against each other. And as much as Vagaros and Gibson liked each other, the fact of the matter was Gibson was a superior player. So she beat her night after night. Carol Fagaros winds up getting bursitis in her arm. They have two assistants, one of whom is Gibson's coach, who travels along with them. And they're riding around the country, driving around in a station wagon and they have all of the gear in the back. And this is not glamorous, this is not the jet setting world that people might have thought about in terms of the game of tennis, but there they were. And she also had to deal with segregation and discrimination. So, so Gibson was loathe to talk about it, but Vagaros said in the 1980s that Gibson was treated horribly, that the group, and Fagaros, I should mention, was the only white person who was a part of their group. They would go to hotels and restaurants and Gibson would not be served. She had experienced this, of course, in amateur tennis, but here she is associated with the State Department winner of across singles, doubles and mixed doubles, 11 Grand Slam titles, and she's being treated this way. It didn't matter to those people who she was and what she had accomplished. The color of her skin was the barrier for them.
- [31:10]
A
So what led her to turn to golf as her. As a second career, and what was similar to her reception relative to tennis and what was different?
- [31:25]
B
Gibson was highly competitive, and I think it was very difficult for her to give up tennis. And the way she left tennis left something of a bad taste in her mouth. So she had gone on this sabbatical from tennis between 1950, in 1959, from amateur tennis, I should say. And then she had her brief period as a professional tennis player. But she didn't like how when she did play in a pro tournament, she felt that she wasn't paid what she was worth. And she also didn't like that the men's champion of that. Of that tournament, he was paid more than she had been. She was bothered because she didn't get the same endorsement opportunities after turning professional that others did. And she felt that she was just as good and in a lot of cases, even better than they were. And she wanted to be challenged, and she just wasn't finding that away from sports. So she turned to tennis, or, pardon me, turned to golf, because she said, like tennis, it was a game that was basically about using one object to hit another object. So in this case, using the club to hit, hit the ball. And she also realized that there were just so few opportunities for women to play professional sports at that time. And the LPGA Tour had been founded between 1949 and 1950. So it was established, it was there, and she gave it a try. And Gibson was deeply passionate about the things that she did. She was definitely someone who was all in when she set her sights on a goal. And she gave so much of herself, devoted so much of her time and her energy into succeeding in golf. In 1963, she plays in an LPGA Tour event, and halfway through the year, she moves from being an amateur golfer to turning professional and ultimately becomes the first African American to compete on and to join the LPGA Tour. But again, here we have. Here we have a dark spot. Because she gets there, she makes it to the best golf circuit in the world for women. But she begins to have some of the same challenges in golf that she had in tennis, and that was that clubs would not allow her to play in their tournaments. Places might let her play, but they wouldn't let her use the locker room. Facilities. Again, they didn't care who she was. They didn't care about her success or her notoriety. They cared that she was an African American. And these, these clubs just didn't allow African Americans on their properties. At least they didn't allow them there to enjoy the facilities. Right. If you were a worker, that was fine. So Gibson stayed quiet about this. And then by 1964, 1965, she begins to speak up and she begins to talk about the fact that these groups would not let her play in their events. And she explains that it begins to. It's having an impact on what she's able to do in golf. And she also emphasizes that this is adding to financial difficulties for her because whereas many of the other women on the LPGA Tour had corporate sponsors, she was having difficulty coming to the attention of corporations because, again, of ideas about, or maybe I should say some ambivalence in opposition to having an African American person as the spokesperson for the business, whatever it happened to be. So she was definitely in a difficult situation. But the difference between Gibson in the middle 1960s and Gibson really of most of the 1950s was that in the 1960s, she. She spoke out about the challenges that she had because of race. And also she spoke out about how she felt that the challenges with race were intertwined with also the fact that she was a woman.
- [35:43]
A
What was she like as a golf player? And to what degree did the, you know, golf posed different challenges for her than tennis did?
- [35:54]
B
She was at a disadvantage in golf because she came to the game so late. She had played a bit at Florida A and M, but she had not played the game with the same kind of regularity as so many of the other women on the LPGA Tour. So that was definitely a barrier. And she came to the game when she was in her early 30s. She was playing against folks who had played since they were girls or teenagers. We're going to have to go back. Give me that question again, Mark. I'm sorry.
- [36:32]
A
What was she like as a player? In what ways were the challenges similar or different to the ones she faced in tennis?
- [36:39]
B
Tennis had also impacted her abilities in golf. So she could drive the ball a long way. And it's useful to think about the kind of equipment. So we're not talking about titanium heads or any of the carbon and all the things that we've got in our tailormades and callaways and so forth today. These were heavy wooden clubs, and she could drive the ball as far as. As many as 250, 270 yards, which was quite significant during that period of time. But she sometimes had difficulty driving the ball straight. She had challenges in terms of the putter. She said also that she was right handed. And she said that she felt that the strong right arm that she had developed in tennis, think about the forehand. And she was known for having just a blazing forehand drive that this put her at a disadvantage in golf. So as a golfer, she. She had good days and she had bad days. I think the fact that she wanted to do so well, and it wasn't just that she wanted to do well, she really had to do well. And she had so many fewer opportunities, at least in the beginning of her golf career to compete than her, her counterparts, that she wound up putting a lot of pressure on herself to play well when she had the opportunity later in the season to play in various tournaments. And the pressure, I think it got to her. And one of the ways in which you see that is the fact that she could be very slow on, on the course. And sometimes she incurred slow play penalties and upset the people who played in her group or behind her because of the pace at which she played and also upset the tournament director. But it was all because. Not because she just happened to be applauding person, but it's again, it was just the mental toll that all of this pressure wound up putting on her game. The mental toll had a physical expression.
- [38:48]
A
An interesting aspect of her time as a golfer is that she is still very active in professional sports. She is, she's very visible participant. And she is at a time, it's at a time when you describe that tennis, women's tennis in particular, is really beginning to take off. We're talking about people like Billie Jean King are becoming very prominent. Tennis really, you know, kind of lace tense with seems to explode in the early 1970s. And she in some ways has been indispensable to that. And at the same time, she's not. She just receives absolutely no benefits from this. And how did she respond to this?
- [39:35]
B
Gibson decided to make a comeback in tennis. So at first, when people asked whether she would do so in the late 1960s, when of course, open tennis happened, she said no, but the money was just too good. The possibility of making all that money that she hadn't been making in golf appealed to her. So she made a comeback, but it really didn't last. But maybe readers will find this amusing and maybe even endearing about Gibson. She refused to say that basically the sun had stopped shining on her tennis abilities. So she bragged that she could beat Bobby Riggs. You know, remember in 1973 that it was Billie Jean King who had beaten Bobby Riggs in the famous battle of the sexes. And she did this after Margaret Court, it was have been such a fine player in her time after Cord had lost to Bobby Riggs. Well, Althea Gibson decided that, yes, she thought that Billie Jean could beat Bobby in the battle of the sexes, but she also thought that she could beat Bobby Riggs, too. She also seemed to believe that she could beat Billie Jean King. She thought that she could also beat Martina Navratilova in the 1980s. She said that Steffi Groff's game reminded her of her own. So it's interesting how she found ways to remain relevant and in the public eye by continuing to talk about the tennis scene of that particular moment and then to link herself, to compare herself with the people who were the big names, the stars of that particular point in time. And she. She also used the 1970s as an opportunity to talk about issues related to Title IX and women's rights.
- [41:30]
A
It's interesting. One of the things that fascinated me most about that part of her life was your description of how that the one thing that she really didn't embrace was that in terms of what she could do, as in tennis, was coaching. As you explained, she was quite a good coach going back to when she had graduated from A and M. She had briefly taught at Lincoln University, and she had done, you know, wonders with their. With their men's tennis team. And while she was in coaching, she didn't seem to have the heart for it or the determination to do as much with it as she had as a player. And I thought that was really fascinating about what that might say about her, that she always wanted to be the player and not the mentor, even though she had great skills as a mentor.
- [42:23]
B
Well, her own coach, Sidney Llewellyn, was fond of saying, let's see if I can get this right. It was basically that it took a chump to teach a champ, but a champ could never be a coach. It was something along those lines. And he just felt that Althea Gibson and any number of other star athletes just had too much pride and maybe too much of a desire to be in the limelight, to effectively sublimate themselves, to put themselves in the background to support others. And you sometimes you hear what Llewellyn's talking about when you listen to Gibson in interviews in the 1980s, when she makes certain remarks about than contemporary players. And it reminds me that very Often athletes who achieved their moments, their achieved the best in sports in the past. Yes, often they can be gracious about those who have come afterward. But there's still always that sense of competition that I could do better. And you definitely hear that coming from Gibson. But she could be a really good teacher, and she was. And this happened in the early 1960s when she was playing pro tennis and I believe she was in California. And Llewellyn watched just how devoted she was to the lessons that she gave to a group of youngsters. And an interviewer was there, and he turned to the writer and he said, you know, I really have to stop her. She's gone over time, but she just got so into it with working with the kids that she didn't want to stop. And in later years in the 1970s, she did turn to coaching and people talked about how intense she was and how effective. And she taught briefly Leslie Allen, and she also was a mentor, too, and briefly taught Xena Garrison. And I think she got quite a bit of joy out of those experiences.
- [44:47]
A
We appreciate the time you've taken to speak with us, but before we go, could you tell us what you're working on now?
- [44:53]
B
Oh, well, the main thing I'm focused on is just making sure that as many people as possible know about Althea Gibson through my book, Serving the Life and Times of Althea Gibson. And I'm also really engaged with teaching my own courses at the moment. So I'm teaching my lecture course, African Americans in Sports, and also a seminar called Biography and US Sports History.
- [45:19]
A
Those sound like fascinating classes. I only wish I could take them. Dr. Brown, thank you very much for taking some time out of your schedule to speak with us. I hope you have a wonderful day.
- [45:30]
B
You too. Thanks, Mark.