Alice Coachman: Running for Her Life
Boy, could Alice Coachman run and jump! Because of World War II, however, national competitions were as far as an athlete could aspire in the forties, and the young African American athlete held the national titles for the high jump for twelve consecutive years. Her chance to achieve international recognition finally came in the 1948 Olympics; Alice was thought to be past her prime, but she decided to go for it anyway. Her teammates lost every race; finally it was Alice’s turn for the high jump. She took the gold, defeating an opponent who towered above her in height, to become at age twenty-four, the first black woman to win Olympic gold and the first American woman to go for the gold in track and field.
Alice was warmly welcomed back to America with an invitation to the White House, a victory motorcade through her home state of Georgia, and a contract to endorse Coca Cola. Not surprisingly, the racist and sexist America of the forties didn’t fully embrace Alice as it should have. She was, however, lionized in the black community as a favorite daughter and truly was the trailblazer for every black woman athlete to come after her.
Althea Gibson: Never Give Up
From the ghetto to the tennis court, Althea Gibson’s story is pure sheroism. At a time when tennis was not only dominated by whites but by upper-class whites at that, she managed to serve and volley her way to the top.
Born in 1927 to a Southern sharecropper family, Althea struggled as a girl with a restless energy that took years for her to channel into positive accomplishments. The family’s move to Harlem didn’t help. She was bored by school and skipped a lot; teachers and truant officers predicted the worst for Althea, believing that she was a walking attitude problem whose future lay as far as the nearest reform school.
Although things looked dire for Althea, she had a thing or two to show the naysayers. Like many sheroes, Althea had to bottom out before she could get to the top. She dropped out of school and drifted from job to job until, at only fourteen, she found herself a ward of New York City’s Welfare Department. This turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to Althea—a wise welfare worker not only helped her find steady work, but also enrolled her into New York’s police sports program. Althea fell in love with paddle ball, and upon graduating to real tennis, amazed everyone with her natural ability. The New York Cosmopolitan Club, an interracial sports and social organization, sponsored the teen and arranged for her to have a tennis coach, Fred Johnson. Althea’s transformation from “bad girl” to tennis sensation was immediate; she won the New York State Open Championship one year later. She captured the attention of two wealthy patrons who agreed to sponsor her if she finished high school. She did in 1949—and went on to accept a tennis scholarship to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University.
Althea’s battles weren’t over yet, though. She aced nine straight Negro national championships and chafed at the exclusion from tournaments closed to nonwhite players. Fighting hard to compete with white players, Althea handled herself well, despite being exposed to racism at its most heinous. Her dignified struggle to overcome segregation in tennis won her many supporters of all colors. Finally, one of her biggest fans and admirers, the editor of American Lawn and Tennis magazine, wrote an article decrying the “color barrier” in tennis. The walls came down. By 1958, Althea Gibson won the singles and doubles at Wimbledon and twice took the U.S. national championships at the U.S. Open as well.
Then, citing money woes, she retired; she just couldn’t make a living at women’s tennis. Like Babe Zaharias, she took up golf, becoming the first black woman to qualify for the LPGA. But she never excelled in golf as she had in tennis, and in the seventies and eighties she returned to the game she truly loved, serving as a mentor and coach to an up and coming generation of African American women tennis players.
Through sheer excellence and a willingness to work on behalf of her race, Althea Gibson made a huge difference in the sports world for which we are all indebted.
Martina Navratilova: Always Herself
One of the all-time tennis greats, Martina Navratilova was a Czechoslovakian native who defected to the United States so she could manage her own career, rather than having the Czech government tell her what to do and where to go. During the eighties, she was the top-ranked women’s tennis player in the world with a career record of seventy-five straight wins. She approached her career and training as serious business, a pure athlete in the truest sense. One of the first openly gay celebrities, Martina has been linked amorously with Rita Mae Brown, who penned a novel about their affair and was sued in a “galimony” suit by another lover, Judy Nelson, who went on to share a bed with Rita. Opines Martina, “I never thought there was anything strange about being gay.”
The All-American Girls Baseball League: Backward and in High Heels
For the briefest time in the 1940s, women had a “league of their own.” And while it was not intended to be serious sports so much as a marketing package, the All-Girls Baseball League stormed the field and made it their own. The league was the brainchild of chewing gum magnate Phillip K. Wrigley, whose empire had afforded him the purchase of the Chicago Cubs. He came up with the concept of putting a bunch of sexy girls out on the field in short skirts and full makeup to entertain a baseball-starved population whose national pastime was put on hold as baseball players turned fighting men.
He was right—the gals did draw crowds, enough to field teams in several mid-sized Midwestern cities. (At the height of its popularity, the league was drawing a million paying customers per 120 game season.) A savvy businessman catering to what he believed were the tastes of baseball fans, Wrigley had strict guidelines for his “girls”—impeccable appearance and maintenance, no short hair, no pants on or off the playing field. Pulchritude and “charm” were absolute requirements for players. Arthur Meyerhoff, chairman of the league, aptly characterized it as: “Baseball, traditionally a men’s game, played by feminine type girls with masculine skill.” For Meyerhoff, “feminine type” was serious business and he kept a hawkeye on his teams for the slightest sign of lesbianism. He also sent his sandlot and cornfield trained players to charm school to keep them on their girlish toes.
Although the rules seemed stringent, the players were eager to join these new teams called the Daisies, the Lassies, the Peaches, and the Belles because it was their only chance to play baseball professionally. Pepper Pair put it best in the book she and the other AAGBL players are profiled in, “You have to understand that we’d rather play ball than eat, and where else could we go and get paid $100 a week to play ball?” After the war, men returned home and major league baseball was revived. However the All-Girls league hung on, even spawning the rival National Girl’s Baseball League. With more opportunity for everyone, teams suddenly had to pay more money to their best players in order to hang on to them, and both leagues attracted players from all around the U.S. and Canada.
Penny Marshall’s wonderful film, A League of Their Own, did a credible job portraying the hardship and hilarity of professional women athletes trying to abide by the rules and display feminine “charm” while playing topnotch baseball. Ironically, the television boom of the fifties eroded the audience for the AAGBL as well as many other semi-pro sports. The death blow to the women’s baseball leagues came, however, with the creation of the boys-only Little League. Girls no longer had a way to develop their skills in their youth and were back to sandlots and cornfields, and the AAGBL died in 1954.
“The fans thought we were the best thing that ever came