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 down the pike.”
— player Mary Pratt
Joan Joyce: Perfect Pitch
Joan Joyce should be a household name. In the words of a tournament umpire who watched her pitch a game, she was “one of the three best softball pitchers in the country, and two of them are men.” Joan ended up in softball when she was blocked from playing baseball in the fifties. She recalled in an interview in Sports Illustrated, “I started playing softball at eight because my father played it and because it was the only sport open to me at the time.” By her teens, she was astounding players, coaches, and parents alike with a fast ball clocked at 116 miles per hour. At eighteen, she joined the Stamford, Connecticut, all-girl team, the Raybestos Brakettes, and pitched the team to three consecutive national championships. Soon, the Brakettes were the force to be reckoned with in amateur softball, winning a dozen championships in eighteen seasons. Joyce’s record was an unbelievable 105 no-hitters and thirty-three perfect games.
Joyce’s reputation as an “unhittable” pitcher led to a challenge in 1962 between Joyce and Ted Williams, then a batting champion with a .400 average per season. A roaringly appreciative crowd watched her fan thirty pitches past the bemused Williams. He managed only a few late fouls and one limp hit to the infield. On that day, Joan Joyce showed she was not only just as good, but better than any man!
Wilma Rudolph: La Gazelle
Runner Wilma Rudolph’s life is the story of a great spirit and heart overcoming obstacles that would have stopped anyone else in their tracks, literally! Born in Bethlehem, Tennessee, in 1955, Wilma contracted polio at the age of four and was left with a useless leg.
Wilma’s family was in dire straits with a total of eighteen children from her father’s two marriages. Both parents worked constantly to feed the burgeoning brood, her father as a porter and her mother as a house cleaner, and it was more important to feed Wilma and her siblings than it was to get the medical attention Wilma needed to recover the use of her leg. Two years later circumstances eased a bit, and at the age of six, Wilma started riding the back of the bus with her mother to Nashville twice a week for physical therapy. Although doctors predicted she would never walk without braces, Wilma kept up her rehabilitation program for five years and not only did the braces come off, but “by the time I was twelve,” she told the Chicago Tribune, “I was challenging every boy in the neighborhood at running, jumping, everything.”
Her exceptional ability didn’t go unnoticed. A coach with Tennessee State University saw how she was winning every race she entered in high school and offered to train her for the Olympics, which Wilma hadn’t even heard of. Nevertheless, she qualified for the Olympics at sixteen and took home a bronze medal in the 1956 Summer Games for the 100-meter relay. Still in high school, she decided to work toward a gold medal
