Word: tennised
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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By midsummer, Althea was taking lessons from Fred Johnson, a one-armed pro at the now defunct biracial Cosmopolitan tennis club. Her game, which had been an exercise in sheer power, began to show signs of sophistication. Now all her life was focused on tennis. She quit school and went...
Says Althea's father: "I didn't know nothin' about tennis, and that's all she was interested in. I got her some boxing gloves once," he adds wistfully. "I wanted her to be a lady boxer." Althea almost flattened her father in a practice bout...
"She 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.'...
Althea saw no need to be sociable. She had come to play tennis, and she had come to win. Anything less rasped her raw nerves. She avoided parties and other players; she spent all her time practicing and playing poker with the ballboys.
"Don't Kid Me." The trouble was that by then Althea dominated Negro girls' tennis, and she was getting nowhere fast. She shot pool and billiards, soaked up jazz and thought of a career as a nightclub singer or musician (Sugar Ray bought her a saxophone). Then, in...