Despite Althea Gibson’s US Open legacy, tennis still has its faults

The line from Gibson’s debut at the tournament to the success of black American tennis is obvious. Venus Williams spoke about Gibson this year before her own first-round match against Karolína Muchová, in which she wore a Gibson-inspired outfit.

“Althea accomplished so much and a lot of it has not been given the credit it deserves,” said Williams, who at 45 was competing in her 25th US Open. “That’s the most important part to me. Shining a light on it and acknowledging it.”

This year’s US Open semi-finalist Naomi Osaka began playing tennis after her father watched the Williams sisters win the 1999 French Open doubles final. The 2023 US Open champion Coco Gauff, who lost to Osaka in the fourth round this year, also had Serena Williams as her idol growing up. The successes of black women in tennis have undeniably inspired those who have come since.

Yet Gibson herself was a complex figure who did not always appreciate the role she was thrust into as the face of black integration in sport.

“I don’t consider myself to be a representative of my people,” Gibson reportedly once said when asked if what she had achieved in tennis helped the cause of black people more broadly.

“I tried to feel responsibilities to negroes,” she told TIME magazine in 1957, the month after she had become the first black player to win Wimbledon. “But that was a burden on my shoulders. If I did this or that, would they like it? Perhaps it contributed to my troubles in tennis. Now I’m playing tennis to please me, not them.”

Born in South Carolina but raised in Harlem, New York, Gibson was encouraged to be sporty from an early age by her father. She was later invited to play at the Cosmopolitan Club, a black tennis club in Harlem, after being spotted playing tennis near her apartment block.

That began a career that saw her become the French Open champion, the Wimbledon champion twice and the US Open champion twice.

Yet Gibson struggled throughout her career to conform to the standards of femininity expected of her as the sole representative of blackness and black womanhood within tennis.

A tomboy throughout her life, she disliked dressing or appearing in the feminine manner that people assumed she should, while she could also be a sore loser, refusing to shake hands with her opponent after a loss.

The constricted nature of being the “first”, and therefore being expected to uphold the ideals of that group as a whole, drained her.

Looking at the black tennis stars of today, there is much more freedom to express themselves in ways that they feel comfortable. Osaka’s custom outfits have been the talk of the tournament, even if Gibson herself would surely have cringed when Osaka revealed that her bedazzled Labubu toy for her fourth-round win over Gauff was called Althea Glitterson.

Even in tougher moments, like when Gauff broke down in tears after struggling with her serve in her second-round win over Donna Vekić, there is a freedom to show vulnerability.

Osaka, Gauff and Williams have also been the biggest stars of the tournament.

Williams’s run to the women’s doubles quarter-finals with Leylah Fernandez drew huge crowds, while Gauff and Osaka’s meeting in the fourth round was the most highly anticipated pre-semi-final match.

When it comes to the US Open in particular, black women are the biggest stars of the tournament.

But an incident between Jeļena Ostapenko and Taylor Townsend demonstrated how those expectations have not simply evaporated through the success of black tennis players over the past 75 years. Following Townsend’s 7-5, 6-1 win in the second round over Ostapenko, the 28-year-old Latvian reportedly accused Townsend of having “no class” and “no education”.

Ostapenko believed that Townsend had been unsporting by not apologising after winning a point that had hit the net cord.

“It’s one of the worst things you can say to a black tennis player in a white-majority sport,” said Osaka, when asked about it. “I don’t know if [Ostapenko] knows the history of it in America, but it was just terrible.”

While Ostapenko apologised on Instagram and Townsend said that she did not believe her opponent was being racist, the altercation showed how insidious racial stereotyping can be.

Throughout her career, Gibson experienced that same accusation – that she did not know how to play the sport in the proper manner, with that propriety a stand-in for the unspoken notion of whiteness.

It can be complicated trying to balance honouring Gibson’s legacy with the knowledge that it was not something she herself was necessarily comfortable with.

At times during the tournament, as fans pose in front of the graphic of Gibson that is this year’s poster, it can feel like it has been flattened.

At others, it can feel like a genuine celebration and recognition of someone who changed tennis for ever.

Truly to do justice to Gibson, the takeaway should be that for all the unprecedented success black women have had at Flushing Meadows, and in tennis more broadly, the realities she faced still exist in the sport.

That is something that still needs to change.

Photograph by Halton-Deutsch/Getty Images