Angela Buxton remembers the day, six years ago, that she opened the envelope in the old woman’s home in New Jersey. It contained two $100 bills and a note that read like this: ‘I focused on your game when I learnt how to play, and I wanted to thank you.â€
The ‘you†was Althea Gibson, the first black player to win a singles title at a major tournament, who died on Sunday, aged 76.
The daughter of North Carolina sharecroppers, Gibson had fought against rejection and humiliation in the days when schools, buses, restaurants and tennis clubs were still legally segregated in the United States. In the last years of her life, she found herself fighting poverty.
Remarkably, the ‘I†was a 25-year-old blonde woman from South Africa. Mariaan de Swardt was not born when Gibson won the French Open in 1956 and the Wimbledon and US Open titles in 1957 and 1958. But something had spoken across the decades to a Johannesburg businessman’s daughter who had just made it into the world top 30.
De Swardt’s letter turned out to be typical of the reaction when Gibson’s plight became news. Buxton, a Manchester cinema owner’s daughter who teamed up with Gibson to win the Wimbledon women’s doubles title in 1956, had brought it to the public’s attention. Now she was helping Gibson open the dozens of envelopes coming through the letterbox each day.
They had formed a bond soon after meeting while on tour in India in 1955. Gibson was black; Buxton was Jewish; neither was welcome in the privileged world of lawn tennis.
‘In fact, Althea was an outcast,†Buxton said. ‘That probably threw us together. And although our partnership was short and sweet, we remained great friends.â€
Gibson left the amateur game at the end of the 1958 season, aged 31. Even though she had returned from her first Wimbledon victory to a Manhattan ticker-tape parade, she needed money.
There was no women’s professional tour for her to join, so for a while she travelled with the Harlem Globetrotters, playing exhibition matches at half-time, followed by an unsuccessful spell as a pro golfer. She spent 10 years as New Jersey’s state commissioner for athletics. But in 1992 she suffered a stroke.
A few years later, Buxton picked up the phone. It was Gibson. Living on welfare, unable to pay for rent or medication, she was on the brink of suicide. She had written to various tennis bodies for help; none of them replied.
When Buxton arranged for a letter to appear in a tennis magazine, the response was phenomenal. Gibson, who had been told nothing, called Buxton. ‘Angie,†she said, ‘my mailbox is jammed. Anything to do with you?â€
‘After that she had more money than you and me put together,†Buxton said this week. ‘In the end there was nearly a million dollars. I had to help her open all those envelopes, and Mariaan de Swardt’s is one I remember.â€
From her home in Georgia, where she is studying criminal law, De Swardt spoke this week about Gibson.
‘I grew up watching Wimbledon and reading up on all the great players,†she said.
‘And when I started playing on the tour, Billie Jean King and all those guys would tell me stories about the struggle she had. So, although I never met her, I knew what an incredible person she was. You know, people sometimes assume that if you come from South Africa, you must be a racist. But it’s not necessarily like that. My mum and dad never raised me to think I was better than anyone else because my skin is white.â€
I asked Buxton what Gibson was really like, as a player and as a person. ‘Off the court we had great fun,†she said. ‘But on court she was very similar to Venus Williams.
‘She had the same look of disdain. You didn’t really know what was going on in her head. She was very tall and she was like a spider at the net — very difficult to pass or to lob. She was intimidating, just like Venus. And her expression never changed until the last ball had been hit.â€
As Buxton said, ‘It was Althea who broke down the barriers.â€
Eventually Zina Garrison and the Williams sisters would follow her. And so, arriving from quite another direction, would Mariaan de Swardt. —