Hello friends! I’m back for another installment. This time, summer edition. I always associate August with Tennis. The National Bank Open (at our very own Sobeys Stadium on the grounds of York University) is August 1-13 every year. I’ve been going for the last three years or so, and I love it. I love that they alternate the men’s and women’s tournaments between Toronto and Montreal. I love walking the circuit of food stalls and outreach booths, sampling lobster rolls and yogurt tasters from Liberté. (Did you know they were a Quebec brand, by the way?) More than all those things, I love the late summer experience of watching virtuoso tennis — the setting sun turning the sky a thousand shades of orange, pink, and tempered blue during the night matches. I’ve seen Sinner play, Alexei Popyrin, Jessica Pegula, Bianca Andreescu, and Kayla Cross. It’s one of those things that’s always better with a big group, like a big-budget adventure movie played on a gigantic screen in a crowded theatre or a power ballad sung by every person at a concert. So much better than watching on TV. There’s also the US Open Tournament in late August. I went a couple years ago, and it was amazing and incredibly overcrowded. New York City (or rather, Queens) is a muggy wonderland in late August. It turns out VPL has a fair number of books about the elegant sport, including biographies, autobiographies, and non-fiction texts. In researching our catalogue, I was drawn to stories of women succeeding in a male-dominated sport and industry. In effect, this post has become an opportunity to get to know some faces that have no doubt been overlooked in the years since their heydays. It’s also a bit of a hopeful reminder because these women’s successes have directly influenced the successes of many women who came after. Hope can be a powerful rallying cry, after all. Have you heard of Lottie Dod? According to Sasha Abramsky, she was the ‘world’s first female sports superstar.” She can also claim the fame of being the youngest woman to win Wimbledon’s Singles Championship in 1887 at 15! She then won a further four times. And somehow I doubt she’s a household name here or in her native UK. Imagine the complexity and difficulty of such an achievement. Now imagine winning Wimbledon with a metal-and-whalebone corset on. You can see in the picture to the left the kind of attire expected for women playing a rigorous, high energy, high mobility sport. Dod’s corset drew blood as she moved during the game. (Interesting tangent for those interested in tangents: an article from The Science History Institute’s Distillations Magazine recounts the struggle of jogger Lisa Lindahl to jog without a proper sports bra in the 70s in Vermont. Dod’s violent corset encounter is put in the context of women’s centuries-spanning fight for comfortable athletic wear in the article.) A veritable renaissance woman of sport, after dominating the scene for a while, “she moved on to and excelled in myriad other sports: she became a leading ice skater and tobogganist, a mountaineer, an endurance bicyclist, a hockey player, a British ladies’ golf champion, and an Olympic silver medalist in archery.” An early leader for women in athletic pursuits for sure. You can read Sasha Abramsky’s biography of the little-known, early tennis star in our catalogue.

Speaking of accomplished women, certainly one of the most well known and highly regarded women tennis players is American Billie Jean King. Her famous quote, “pressure is a privilege” graces the wall as the players enter Arthur Ashe stadium at the US Open. The pressure of expectation can piggyback on athletes and common folk alike, but I always thought her words rang true. No expectation, and therefore no pressure, is so much worse. Of course, King will always be known for The Battle of the Sexes — an American televised tennis match between the accomplished, professional women’s tennis player King and the fifty-five-year-old, past-his-prime, notoriously misogynistic Bobby Riggs. Once ranked the best in the world for male players in the 40s, it had been a long time since Riggs’ glory days by the time the ‘Battle’ happened in 1973. The description of their match reads like a surreal movie or reality show. Playing it up for the cameras, the two players had ostentatious entrances: Riggs came in “on a shimmering red carriage with gold wheels, surrounded by buxom beauties; he was wearing a yellow jacket emblazoned with a red Sugar Daddy candy logo across the back.” King for her part matched Riggs’ pageantry, entering on a raised platform fringed by colourful feathers, carried by shirtless men, and bringing to mind the symbolism of emperors and kings of old. All of these surreal touches make complete sense to me. The goal was publicity. Media attention. Spectacle. Both sides understanding the power of the spotlight for their agenda. And it was a huge spotlight: millions of viewers around the world. Of course, we know the outcome. Especially if you’ve seen the 2017 fictionalized movie account starring Emma Stone and Steve Carrell. It’s hard to believe how important one tennis game can be, but this was a crucial time for King to not only beat Riggs, but knock him out in straight sets. For all the theatricality and talk Riggs spread throughout the press in the lead up to the event, these were important claims to rebuke. That women didn’t belong in sports, that they were naturally weaker and less mentally stable. King proved all his talk to be laughable, a con man’s game. I would be very interested to read about King’s life from her point of view. Her autobiography is available in our catalogue here and on Libby.

Ironically, the next player on my list played doubles with Bobby Riggs in her day and coached a young Billie Jean King. Alice Marble lived an incredible and harrowing life that included professional tennis. Between 1936 and 1940, she won what was then called the U.S. National Championship women’s singles title (now known as the US Open) four times. A remarkable feat in and of itself, but when you add the circumstance that Marble had just recovered from Tuberculosis and Pleurisy (an infection in the lungs) in 1934, it becomes unimaginable. At a time when such things drew more attention than they do now, she opted to wear shorts instead of skirts during her matches. In 1939, she won Wimbledon’s Triple Crown: the mixed doubles event with Riggs, women’s doubles playing alongside Sarah Palfrey, and the singles title. Marble reinvented herself several times over the course of a life with many tragedies. Professional singer in New York at the iconic Waldorf Astoria. Fashion designer of tennis wear for women. Sportscaster on the radio. When World War Two began, she began to tour the US and visit military bases. That’s where she met her husband. Joe Crowley was a pilot in the war. Sadly, he was killed in action. News of his death reached Marble only days after her own tragic car accident wherein she lost the baby she was carrying. After an unfathomable low point, she writes in her autobiography Courting Danger that she was recruited to spy for the American government on a former lover — a banker from Switzerland — to retrieve Nazi financial information for the Allied cause. I should mention the details of this espionage haven’t been verified, as I believe Madeleine Blais’ biography Queen of the Court discusses. It’s available in our catalogue and looks to be a detailed portrait of the fascinating woman. What we do know is Alice Marble became a vocal proponent of de-segregating the US Open (known as U.S. Nationals at the time). An editorial penned in American Lawn Tennis Magazine in 1950 made an adamant case for the inclusion of the next figure on my list in that year’s tournament: Althea Gibson. The other thing we know is that she was an associate editor on DC Comics’ Wonder Woman! In her time at DC, she created “‘Wonder Women of History,’ an ongoing feature which highlighted brilliant and inspiring women throughout history who she felt embodied the same ideals as Wonder Woman—empowerment, justice, peace and compassion.” Needless to say, incredibly cool.

The first Black player to win a grand slam is the great Althea Gibson in 1956. Like all the other women in this blog post, her record is amazing: eleven grand slams! A childhood in Harlem meant hardship and adversity, but skill with a tennis racket propelled her into a different life. Before even Arthur Ashe was blazing trails for future Black athletes, Althea came first. Like Alice Marble and Lottie Dod, tennis wasn’t enough to satisfy her varied interests. Once she was permitted to compete in one sport, she moved on in 1964 to the LGPA. Not content with just athletics, she became a performer. Her record of standards, Althea Gibson Sings, was released in 1959. Gibson shared the silver screen with John Wayne in The Horse Soldiers (directed by John Ford) that year as well. Undoubtedly, Gibson now occupies her rightful place in the annals of tennis history. Her likeness stands outside the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens where the US Open is played. Former journalist for the Boston Globe Sally Jacobs penned Althea — the comprehensive biography of the legend in our catalogue.

That’s it for me this time. If you’re a tennis fan at all, or a history buff, please check out one of these books. If you at all subscribe to the idea that we can learn something from the accomplishments of others, there’s plenty of accomplishments within their pages to choose from. Enjoy the rest of summer please. It is on its way out, but there’s plenty of mild weather to come for a while. Take care.