Last month, the fiftieth anniversary of Arthur Ashe’s historic victory at Wimbledon inspired First and Pen’s Yussuf Khan to ask why Ashe and France’s Yannick Noah are the only Black men to win Grand Slam tennis tournaments.
Limited financial resources, inconsistent access to learning the game, and hardly seeing Black men on the professional tour have likely reduced the number of Black male players, Khan concluded. Now, with the arrival of the U.S. Open, where Althea Gibson broke the color barrier seventy-five years ago in 1950 and where Ashe won his first major in 1968, I offer another possibility.
Perhaps tennis’s longstanding reputation as a less-than masculine sport further deterred many generations of young Black men from taking it up.
While conducting research for my book, Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson, the comprehensive biography of the first Black American—male or female—to enter and win Grand Slams, I was stunned to discover how emphatically tennis was ridiculed throughout the twentieth century as a game that “real men” did not play. Some people thought that the use of the word “love” instead of “zero” had something to do with it.[1]
Others believed tennis, in comparison to sports like baseball, football, boxing and basketball, lacked enough action to be considered “manly.”[2]
The fact that women played the same sport in the same tournaments and sometimes even with men (mixed doubles) contributed to the idea that tennis was not virile.
Sportswriters and players repeatedly used one word to describe the widespread perception of tennis: “sissy.”
It’s a loaded word that judges and ridicules boys and men as not meeting traditional standards of masculinity, which valorize “physical size, strength, power, mental toughness, [and] competitiveness.”[3]
Gibson and Ashe were aware of tennis’s reputation, and both hypothesized that it explained the lack of Black boys who followed in their footsteps.
In October 1963, Ebony published an interview with Ashe to celebrate his status as the “First Negro Davis Cupper.” Ashe responded thoughtfully when asked about the “dearth of Negro talent” in elite tennis, which, until 1968, barred professionals and was exclusively for amateurs. He pointed to the expensiveness of tennis and the time required to “become proficient.” Ashe also asserted that masculinity was a factor, or deterrent.
“I would suppose that most Negroes avoid the game because they prefer contact sports and consider tennis a ‘sissy’ game,” said Ashe in an attempt to dispel this notion. “I would like to get anyone who thinks like this in a tennis game for a couple of hours under an unshaded sun and see how long they would last in this ‘sissy’ sport.”[4]
Gibson agreed. After winning her first Wimbledon singles title in 1957, she returned to the street in Harlem where she had been introduced to paddle tennis, the pickleball of yesteryear. Surrounded by local Black children who welcomed her home, Gibson shared her thoughts about tennis and young people.
“A lot of kids think tennis is a ‘sissy’ game,” she said. “I wish they wouldn’t. It’s just the thing to curtail juvenile delinquency. Tennis is as rugged as football,” she insisted. “In fact, it is the most strenuous game in the sports field.”[5]
By the 1970s and 1980s, Black men remained largely invisible in professional tennis. Lendward Simpson, Arthur Carrington, and Horace Reid played but did not become household names. By this time, Gibson and Ashe had spent years working with Black youth in inner cities and fielding questions about race and tennis.
Gibson again referred to the perceived masculinity gap when journalist Stan Hart asked her why there were so few Black tennis players. She explained that boys were turned off by the “sissy sport” label, not just expenses or the lack of tennis scholarships for college, while many Black girls worried about developing muscular bodies.[6]
Ashe echoed that sentiment in a piece in the New York Times.
“As I travel around, watching and working with young athletes, my experience has shown me that tennis is not viewed as macho enough for most black boys.”[7]
Decades later, Gibson and Ashe are still worth listening to.
Gender is a powerful device, used to set boundaries that define socially appropriate actions, behaviors, and activities.
Race is, too, and throughout American history, limited ideas about masculinity have been applied against Black men and boys.
They have been portrayed as insufficiently masculine and thus ill-equipped for leadership positions. Society and culture also cast Black men and boys as hypermasculine and, therefore, prone to violence, making them vulnerable subjects of increased levels of surveillance, others’ fears, and assumptions of criminality. Constructions such as “the strong Black man” and “Black is not gay” are unhelpful, too, and can contribute to notions that Black men must prove their toughness, even in risky ways.
Sports have traditionally served as platforms for toughness.[8]
Yet, in its first 100 years, the tennis court functioned just as often, if not more so, as a stage for manners, grace, and elegance. Those traits fit the origins and popularity of the game among the European elite. Male tennis players were even called “gentlemen,” a term not applied to men in the major team sports and seldom used to describe Black men in general.
Ashe was an exception.
His final book was even called Days of Grace. Sports Illustrated captured his gentlemanly aura on its cover for August 29, 1966. Gazing out serenely while wearing a navy blazer, crisp white shirt, rep tie, and soft crewcut, he looked like an all-American boy with brown skin.
He was beloved by tennis traditionalists for remaining composed and calm in competition. In the 1960s and 1970s, the tall and slender Ashe presented the world with a way of being a man and a Black American man that countered the outbursts and shenanigans of the “bad boys” of tennis—Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, and Ilie Nastase.[9]
He also contrasted with the militant poses associated with Black Power and the flashiness of Blaxploitation and stood apart from gangster rappers in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Ashe was a poised individual, and he learned early on from his father and his upper-class mentors that he had to carry himself in a controlled way to counter stereotypes of African Americans—a responsibility that Connors, McEnroe, and Nastase did not bear.[10]
Yet Ashe’s composure, gentlemanliness, and conservative appearance may have contributed to false rumors in Black communities that he was gay, which were perpetuated after Ashe died in 1993 from AIDS.
“The assumption that AIDS was primarily a homosexual disease was a mainstay of public thought,” writes biographer Raymond Arsenault.[11] Taken together, Ashe’s life in tennis and his death may have added to sentiments among African Americans that tennis was not a sport for Black men.[12]
“So how do we solve the issue of the missing Black male tennis star?” Khan asked in his story.
Money is one solution. A reconceptualization of race and masculinity may be in order, too.
Both Ashe and Gibson defied norms of race and gender to achieve success in tennis. Today, Ben Shelton and Frances Tiafoe are doing the same. Every time these two young men dash about the tennis courts of the world in their bright and boldly colored apparel, they challenge perceptions and history. With every stroke of their racquets, Shelton and Tiafoe are painting new pictures for everyone of who tennis players are and what they can be.
Above all, though, every athlete, no matter how they self-identify, must compete because they want to compete, not because they are instruments to prove or disprove stereotypes about the groups to which they belong. Gibson and Ashe did that, too. “If I see something and it appeals to me, I do it,” Gibson once said.[13]
That approach can lead to happiness, success, and career longevity for anyone.
[1] “Objecting to ‘Love,’” American Lawn Tennis, September 5, 1937, 42.
[2] Jack Kramer with Frank Deford, The Game: My 40 Years in Tennis (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979), 65.
[3] Pat Griffin, “The Lesbian Athlete: Unlearning the Culture of the Closet,” in A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 564.
[4] “First Negro Davis Cupper,” Ebony Magazine, October 1963, 154.
[5] Marion E. Jackson, “Sports of the World,” Atlanta Daily World, July 14, 1957.
[6] Stan Hart, Once a Champion: Legendary Tennis Stars Revisited (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1985), 31.
[7] Arthur Ashe, “Why There Aren’t More Blacks Playing Tennis,” New York Times, June 22, 1986.
[8] Griffin, “The Lesbian Athlete,” 564.
[9] Robert J. Lake, “The ‘Bad Boys’ of Tennis: Shifting Gender and Social Class Relations in the Era of Nastase, Connors, and McEnroe,” Journal of Sport History 42, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 179-199.
[10] Raymond Arsenault, Arthur Ashe: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018); Eric Allen Hall, Arthur Ashe: Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
[11] Arsenault, Arthur Ashe, 548.
[12] Don Harrison, “Arthur’s Journey,” Richmond Magazine, August 17, 2018, Arthur’s Journey – richmondmagazine.com.
[13] Lynda Whitley, “Althea Gibson Rose to the Top in Grand Style,” Daily Press (Newport News, VA), April 4, 1987, B8.
