Word: championships
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...TIME cover subject), is by all odds the leading contender. Shy by nature, wary of her turbulent success, the champ was a closemouthed subject for Reporter Serrell Hillman, dropped her guard only when Hillman spent a week at her side, trailed her to Chicago for the Clay Courts championship and scoured the suburbs for a supply of the pure honey she takes for prematch energy. Althea eventually gave Hillman the inside story of the life and hard times of a Negro tennis champion. See SPORT, That Gibson Girl...
Sent abroad by the State Department in 1955 as an athletic ambassador, Althea made friends and won tournaments from Naples to New Delhi. In Paris last year, she won the French championship, her first big-time title. At Wimbledon, where the heady traditions of genteel sport stretch back beyond any at Forest Hills, her new-found confidence carried her all the way to the quarter-finals before she faltered. This year even Wimbledon succumbed, and Althea came home a queen, owner of tennis' brightest crown...
...Could Be Something." Althea had been playing tennis for only a year when she entered, and won, her first tournament: the girls' championship of the Negro American Tennis Association's New York State Open. That same summer (1942) she got to the semifinals of the A.T.A.'s national championship for girls. She lost to a buxom teenager named Nana Davis (now Nana Davis Vaughan), and Mrs. Vaughan still remembers her appalling manners: "She was a very crude creature. She had the idea she was better than anyone. She said, 'Who's this Nana Davis...
Unmoved, New Jersey's Maplewood Country Club refused to let Althea on its courts during the New Jersey State championship. But the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in South Orange, NJ. unbent and invited Althea to the 1950 Eastern Grass Court championships. She went, and got whipped in the second round. But she had earned her bid to Forest Hills...
...Best Ever. It is doubtful that the new Althea will ever again be in the same kind of emotional pressure cabin. In Chicago last month, when she turned up for the national Clay Courts championship, hotels in stuffy Oak Park would not rent her a room; the swank Pump Room of the Ambassador East Hotel refused reservations for a luncheon in her honor. Officials and newsmen burned with rage, but Althea hardly noticed it. "I tried to feel responsibilities to Negroes, but that was a burden on my shoulders," says she. "If I did this or that, would they like...