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CHARGING
THE NET
A
History of Blacks in Tennis from Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe to the
Williams Sisters
The
untold story of prejudice and triumph on the courts
With
every powerful serve and deft ground stroke, with every graceful volley
and determined charge to the net, black tennis players, from Hall of Famers Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, EvonneGoolagong,
and Yannick Noah to future legends James Blace and the siters
Venus and Serena Williams, have forced open the sport's shuttered gates
and demanded to be acknowledged. In Charging The Net, Cecil
Harris and Larryette Kyle-DeBose draw on
personal interviews and extensive research to chronicle the
triumphs-and humiliations- of blacks in professional tennis from the
1940s to the present.
For
many fans and writers, Ashe, Gibson, and the Williams sisters personify
black achievement in tennis, but others too have made their mark.
Charging The Net spotlights
a wide range of competitors as well as the American Tennis Association,
an organization that thrived despite racial segregation, thanks to such
benefactors as Dr. R. Walter Johnson.
The
book will also introduce readers to two black officials whose success
was short lived; both have sued the United States Tennis Association,
alleging discrimination based on race, gender, and age.
Harlem-trained,
Harvard-educated James Blake, who overcame career-threatening injuries
to achieve World Top Ten status, has written a foreward
to Charging The Net.
The afterward is written by Robert Ryland,
the first black to compete in a major college tournament, who later
found the doors to the tennis' premier venues marked "Whites
only." With a clear vision, this eighty-six year old coach now
looks at how far blacks in tennis have come and how far they have yet
to travel.
Cecil
Harris has written for Newsday, the New York Post, the Sporting News,
and USA Today, and has covered tennis for the Indianapolis
Star and for Gannett suburban newspapers in New York. His other books
include Breaking the Ice: The Black Experience in Professional Hockey
and Call the Yankees My Daddy: Reflections on Baseball, Race, and
Family. He lives in Yonkers,
New York.
Larryette
Kyle-DeBose is a player-captain in the Atlanta Lawn
Tennis Association. She has worked as a photojournalist for the Swazi Times in Africa
and is the author of The African-American Guide to Real Estate
Investing. She lives in Stone
Mountain, Georgia.
