The good news was that the Long Beach Tennis Patrons pulled together to support the most promising young players. I’ll never forget the patrons’ names because, like the many people who helped me over the years, they were heroes to me: Al Bray, Gene Buwick, Charles Felker, Ted Matthews. Along with the Century Club, another all-volunteer civic group that pitched in, the Patrons helped young players with fees and travel expenses. I’m not sure how many of us would’ve managed without their aid.
Just as important was the individual attention we received, the doors that were opened for us as junior players, and the connections we made. An example: As juniors, Jerry and I weren’t allowed on the courts without an adult player at the grandly named Lakewood Country Club, which was actually a county-owned public park in Long Beach. Al Bray, who was the best adult male player in Long Beach, and Gene Buwick, who was number two, usually invited us to practice with them at Lakewood on Saturday mornings.
Jerry and I soaked up a lot of tennis lore while at Lakewood. I was always an avid student of tennis history. I had read about the nineteenth-century origins of the sport, and Wimbledon’s stature as the most important tournament in the world. I knew about the worldwide coverage of the 1926 “Match of the Century” in Cannes between the French icon Suzanne Lenglen, who once went seven years without a loss, and twenty-year-old Helen Wills, a three-time U.S. champion who crossed the Atlantic by ocean liner because she was so determined to play Lenglen. I memorized the score: Lenglen won, 6–3, 8–6. I devoured Doris Hart’s autobiography after she swept the Wimbledon singles, doubles, and mixed-doubles titles and rose to No. 1 in 1951. I read about the teenage sensation Maureen “Little Mo” Connolly, a five-foot-five powerhouse from San Diego whose career was ended prematurely in 1954 by a horrific leg injury that she suffered when a cement truck sideswiped a horse she was riding on the side of a road.
At Lakewood and the other venues we began to play, Jerry and I encountered people with firsthand stories about stars like Jack Kramer, Don Budge, Pancho Segura, Tony Trabert, Ken Rosewall, and L.A’s self-taught Richard “Pancho” Gonzalez, a son of Mexican immigrants. Gonzalez became one of the greatest players of any era.
Lakewood was also the first place where I heard about Bobby Riggs. Even then, everyone seemed to have a Riggs story. He was the son of a Los Angeles minister, and an early protégé of Perry T. Jones before he fell out of favor with the Czar for hustling players into betting on their matches. (I guess that was Bobby’s idea of passing around the collection plate.) He stood only five feet seven but he had a colorful personality, terrific racket skills, and a great strategic mind. He was just twenty-one when he won the triple crown at Wimbledon in 1939, sweeping the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles. But then, like so many great players, his career was interrupted by World War II. He served in the Navy and spent time in Guam before touring after the war as a barnstorming “contract” pro, which meant forgoing the traditional amateur tournaments for a series of paid events staged by a promoter.
By the 1950s, many of the great male stars had left the amateur ranks to do the same. Only a few women, most notably Lenglen, Pauline Betz, and Gussie Moran, were invited to tour as pros by then. I knew the decision disqualified them from playing Wimbledon and the other three majors, which still invited only amateurs. Even then, I questioned what was so special about winning those Grand Slam titles if most or all of the best men’s and women’s players weren’t in the tournament. In our house, pro sports meant being the best.
I found myself questioning a lot of other things as well. Later that summer, I attended the Pacific Southwest Championships for the first time. The event was held every September right after the U.S. National Championships (now the U.S. Open), so most of the top players made it their next stop. That particular year, the news was still full of stories about the Supreme Court’s issuing a clarification, in May 1955, that “separate but equal” schools and other public facilities were not only unconstitutional but must be desegregated “with all deliberate speed.” I remember asking my parents about some images of segregationists I’d seen in the newspaper, and they remarked that it wasn’t right for anyone to prevent children from getting an education or going to school together. So discrimination was on my mind as I sat watching the Pacific Southwest matches. It was my first time back to the Los Angeles Tennis Club since Perry T. Jones pulled me from the photograph for wearing shorts. My father’s former college opponent, Jackie Robinson, had been with the Brooklyn Dodgers for eight years by then, and I was used to the idea that athletes came in all colors. But as I looked down on the grandstand court from my seat high in the bleachers, I was struck by how white everything was. Everybody played in white shoes, white socks, white clothes. Even the balls were white. Everybody had white skin. Where was everybody else?
At that moment, I had an epiphany that I’m sure had something to do with the incidents in the news, the hurdles I was already experiencing, and the messages I was hearing from Rev. Richards on Sundays: I told myself that day that I would spend my life fighting for equal rights and opportunities for everyone, so no one felt scorned or left out. I believed our church’s teaching that I was put on this earth to do good with my life. Now I had a better idea what my calling could be: I could bring people together through tennis. If I was good enough and fortunate enough to be No. 1 in the world, tennis would be my platform.
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When I look back now, I’m amazed at the personal contact I had with so many accomplished players and people who helped me. Those experiences helped make me the human being and player I became. Remember, there was no tennis to watch regularly on TV when I was developing my game, no hopping on the internet to call up YouTube videos of how a top player hit her forehand or serve. Southern California was a mecca for champions, and I was lucky enough to meet some of them and watch others from the stands. On that same first trip of mine to the Pacific Southwest tournament, I asked everyone, “Who should I see?” They directed me to a faraway side court. That’s the first time I saw Rod Laver, then only seventeen and a rising Australian star. Many people now think he was the greatest male player ever. Serendipitous things like that happened often.
Another high point of my summer was being a ball girl with Susan Williams for a Recreation Park exhibition match between the three-time U.S. Nationals champion Doris Hart and the top-ten player Beverly Baker Fleitz. When they invited us to play doubles with them afterward, all I could think—besides Oh my God, I’m playing doubles with Doris Hart!—was what superbly skilled athletes they were. Trading shots with them gave me a greater sense of how precise their strokes and ball placement were, how efficiently they moved around the court.
Later, getting to practice with Darlene Hard, a budding star on the women’s circuit, drove home even more how talented the top players were. Darlene was twenty-one years old when we met but already a veteran of Wimbledon as well as a doubles titlist at the French Championships (Roland-Garros). She was a lively California girl who was studying pre-med at Pomona College. She and her mother, Ruth, knew Clyde Walker from competing on the local scene, and Darlene sometimes helped him with his clinics. One day, Clyde asked her to hit with me. Playing one-on-one with Darlene, who wound up in the International Tennis Hall of Fame, changed my outlook because I got my first extended taste of what it meant to play at a high level. The pace and depth of her shots were a revelation.
Amazingly, Darlene not only agreed to play with me a couple more times, she also offered to drive the forty miles from Pomona and pick me up at my house to do it, even though it could take her as long as an hour and a half one way in bad traffic. I would be jumping out of my skin as I waited to hear her coming down 36th Street in her red Chevy convertible. It had a twin-pipe hot rod muffler that announced when she was near.
Sometimes Darlene would join me for a meal with my family after we practiced. It was my chance to barrage her with questions about all the thin
gs I longed to know: What’s it like to play a major? Is Wimbledon as great as they say? Tell me about some of the places you’ve been! Darlene filled me in on Althea Gibson, whom she anticipated she might compete against at Wimbledon. (Sure enough, Althea defeated her in the 1957 final.) When I saw Darlene again over the next few years, her predictive powers remained sharp. She was always raving about a smooth young Brazilian player named Maria Bueno, who later became No. 1. She also mentioned a tall, rawboned Australian teenager named Margaret Smith, who was later better known by her married name, Court, and would become one of my fiercest rivals. When Darlene announced, “Margaret is really the one to watch,” it broke my heart a little. I wondered if she would ever tell me I was good enough to make it on the tour. She never did. Inside, I felt that familiar restlessness churning in me again.
Being around Darlene and other champions enriched my life. It also made me want to be better than any of them.
Chapter 3
Just a few months after I met Darlene, I finally saw what it looked like to be the absolute best in the world. I was sitting in the bleachers at the Los Angeles Tennis Club when Althea Gibson strode out in the sunlight for a match at the Pacific Southwest Championships. She was transfixing even before she swung her racket. Althea stood five feet eleven and was a lithe 140 pounds. Her coffee-colored skin looked beautiful cast against her brilliant white tennis outfit. Her arms and legs were impossibly long and lean, and she moved like a gazelle. She wore a faint frown of utter concentration as she bounced the ball at the baseline, preparing to serve. When she rocked back, floated her toss high in the air, and brought her racket through in one smooth, explosive motion, the ball shot off her racket with a crack.
I had just seen what I wanted to be. And if you can see it, you can be it.
I watched Althea closely that day, tracking every move. For a while I would zero in on just her hands, then her footwork. I noticed how incredibly efficient her movements were, and how still her head remained as she connected with the ball. Althea played an aggressive serve-and-volley game, my preferred style. I studied when she approached the net, how intimidating her long wingspan was when she chose to attack, how she executed shots and plucked volleys out of the air as if guided to where the ball would be by some awesome sense of premonition.
Could I ever be that good? I knew I was going to have to work awfully hard to try to get there. It helped me that Althea’s backstory was proof that anything could be done—a fact that stayed with me as much as her game.
Althea was born in Silver, South Carolina, to Daniel and Annie Bell Gibson, who were sharecroppers on a cotton farm before they moved to Harlem when Althea was a child. I can only imagine what a culture shock it must’ve been for them to relocate from an area of open spaces to a small apartment on a crowded, noisy stretch of 143rd Street near Lenox Avenue. By chance, the area was a designated Police Athletic League zone and sealed off from traffic during the day so people in the neighborhood could play organized sports. That’s where Althea learned paddle tennis, and by twelve she had become the New York City women’s champion.
Some neighbors saw Althea’s obvious talent and chipped in for her to learn tennis at the Black-owned Cosmopolitan Tennis Club in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. Soon she was winning junior events organized by the all-Black American Tennis Association, the amateur tennis equivalent of the Negro leagues in baseball. She quickly found an important patron and mentor in Dr. Walter Johnson, the same Virginia physician who was active in the ATA and would later help Arthur Ashe. Johnson sponsored Althea’s advanced training.
In 1950, Althea became the first African American to compete in the previously all-white U.S. National Championships at Forest Hills. She was our sport’s Jackie Robinson. She broke the color barrier in tennis three years after Robinson integrated Major League Baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers. At the 1956 French Championships, she was the first African American to win a Grand Slam title. In the summer of 1957, when she beat Darlene Hard for her first Wimbledon singles title—“At last, at last!” Althea said as Queen Elizabeth II handed her the Venus Rosewater Dish that goes to the winner—she swept the doubles and mixed doubles too.
When I saw Althea walk out at the Los Angeles Tennis Club just a few months after that, she was thirty years old and at the peak of her tennis career. But I had a strange sensation as I watched the all-white crowd cheering for her. Three years had passed since the Supreme Court had decided its landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling that declared separate but equal public facilities were unconstitutional. Now a group of African American students who became known as the Little Rock Nine were trying to attend class at Little Rock Central High School, and the state of Arkansas refused to enforce the law. So President Dwight Eisenhower sent in troops to desegregate the school.
I couldn’t stop thinking about a picture I had seen of one Black girl in particular, a fifteen-year-old named Elizabeth Eckford, who was impeccably dressed for her first day of school in a starched white blouse, crisp gingham skirt, and eyeglasses. Eckford was walking all by herself, with her schoolbooks clutched in her arms, and she was being followed and menaced by a clutch of angry white people who hissed and spat at her. Eckford kept her head up and showed no expression, but she must have been terrified. Could I have managed that?
As I watched Althea in her own perfectly pressed shirt and skirt, playing here in front of a different white crowd, I wondered, What lonely road did she have to walk to get to this place?
As a white person I obviously have not had to deal with the challenges that my sisters and brothers of color have faced. But when I was a thirteen-year-old girl, Althea inspired me. I knew if she had gone through what she had gone through and changed the world by her example, then maybe I had a chance too.
A year later when Althea published her memoir, I bought a copy and read it at least ten times. I slept with her book in my bed, next to my tennis sweater and racket. Even the title spoke to me: I Always Wanted to Be Somebody.
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The same week I watched Althea, Jerry Cromwell and I won the junior singles titles in our respective fifteen-and-under age categories at the tournament. As a result, we were both given honorary memberships to the Los Angeles Tennis Club where I had just seen Althea play.
Having regular access to the place known as “the cradle of tennis” in Southern California did more than open a new level of competition for me. My family and I were exposed for the first time to a world of money and privilege we couldn’t have imagined or accessed without tennis. When I was a child attending Los Cerritos Elementary, I didn’t know that the more affluent parents were trying to get my neighborhood redlined out of the school. But my parents sure knew. They didn’t tell Randy and me until years later that they were among those who attended meetings to defeat the effort.
The Los Angeles Tennis Club was located on a few acres of prime real estate in the swanky Hancock Park section of L.A., which is south of Hollywood and just around the corner from Paramount Studios. Before World War II, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard had a courtside box there. On any given day, Errol Flynn and Bette Davis might be around too, playing a friendly match. The club looked like a colonial Spanish palace with its white stucco walls, pillared entryway, and red tile roof. You walked through an arched front door and the first room you entered was a lounge filled with upholstered chairs and game tables for the members.
When my mother and I arrived it was still common to find Lucille Ball there playing backgammon. She was always nice and said hello to us, which thrilled my mom. Ozzie Nelson, then the dad on the hit television show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, was often at the club with his handsome son, Ricky, an excellent junior player who all the girls had a crush on. Ricky eventually gave up tennis to be a pop star.
Another regular was Jack Webb, the star of the Dragnet TV show. One day he asked Mom, “What project are you working on?�
�—he genuinely thought she was an actress—and my mother was floored. “Oh. No…I mean…Oh dear, no—my daughter is a junior tennis player,” my mother stammered. I always thought she was as gorgeous as any movie star, with her high cheekbones, perfectly coiffed hair, and dazzling blue eyes. I wasn’t surprised Jack Webb did too.
As fun as those moments were, the bigger attraction of the club for me was the amateur and pro tennis stars we bumped into. On any given day I might see Louise Brough or Pancho Gonzalez practicing on the stadium court. You learn from the players who come before you, and I was lucky to be able to study some of the best. Unfortunately, the men weren’t much interested in helping girls. Jack Kramer and Pancho would fall over themselves to volunteer pointers to my contemporary, Dennis Ralston, the latest local boy star. But neither legend cast even a sideways glance my way. I used to crouch behind the seats to eavesdrop on what they were telling Dennis.
The boys got everything, and the girls got crumbs. After I had been at the club awhile, I had a few dates with a young amateur player named Dave Reed, and the subject of expenses matter-of-factly came up. He said, “Oh, we get financial help from the [Southern California Tennis] association”—Perry T. Jones’s group. That was news to me. It burned me to hear that, and to know Dennis was signing for his free meals at the club lunch counter and Perry T. Jones was taking care of his expenses but not mine. I was a top junior too. I used to pass by that lunch counter and tell myself, Billie, it’s not always going to be this way.
When I pulled back and assessed my game at this point, it took faith at times for me to stick with the serve-and-volleying style I preferred. Baseline players become proficient earlier because there are fewer shots and decisions to master and less risk baked into their games. At that age, the pattern is basically serve, return (or return/return/return), repeat. We used to call the baseline players “pushers.” At this point, they still usually beat me.
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