OG

You may have noticed that almost every single player I've covered so far has been a contemporary player, or at least, has played on the ATP or the WTA tours in relatively recent times. Of course, there have been some exceptions, but I have yet to cover anyone before Althea Gibson, who came to prominence in the 1950s. There are a lot of things that factor into this - it's obviously a lot easier for me to talk about players that I've personally seen, or about those that started their careers in the modern era, simply because it's easier to dig up information on them. However, starting with this and the next few posts, I want to take a look at some of the players that came before Althea - though she was the first great black champion in the sport on a national level, she was hardly the first black person to pick up a tennis racket, as there were several notable players before her. Granted, the consequence of profiling these players is that information and records were not kept as stridently in the past as they are now; as such, there isn't nearly as much information and pictures abound the way they are for the modern pros. So these posts will more than likely be shorter than what I've been doing so far, but I'm still plowing ahead with them. I'll try to fill in the gaps of info whenever I can.

Jimmie McDaniel is the first player we will take a look at. There's a book called Blacks at the Net: Black Achievements in the History of Tennis, which I've long seen referenced but have yet to read (I really need to pick it up on of these days); it is through this book that we find what little of Jimmie's background that we do have. (Thanks, Google books!) His father, Willis McDaniel, was a player in the Negro Leagues, so sports ran in his family. Once the elder McDaniel's playing career ended, he moved the family from Alabama to Los Angeles, where he began working as a railroad porter. Jimmie played many sports in his youth, but tennis became his greatest love; he taught himself how to play the sport by hitting the ball against a backboard while in elementary school. He tried out for his high school tennis team in his senior year and led the team to the league championship. Despite not having any formal lessons, he exhibited considerable skill; he played Bobby Riggs (a future amateur world #1 and best known in his later years for losing the "Battle of the Sexes" match against Billie Jean King) in a match in high school, where he put up a respectable effort, losing 7-5, 13-11 (tiebreakers have only existed since 1970, so a lot of these older matches have very long final scores). It was around this time that Jimmie was sent away from Los Angeles to serve a year in a reform school for a statutory rape charge; the high school he attended was primarily white and, having had a relationship with a younger white student (he was 18, she was 15), he got her pregnant. The issue was pressed, primarily because of their differences in race (of course it was), and off Jimmie went.

Jimmie stopped playing tennis during his time at the reform school, but upon his return to Los Angeles, he picked the sport up again. It was actually his exploits in track and field, however, that earned him a scholarship to Xavier University (New Orleans, not Ohio). But tennis began to take over the top slot in his sporting interests once more, and before long, Jimmie was playing in a summer tour, sponsored by Xavier, for the top black collegiate players. It was here that Jimmie began to play in tournaments by the American Tennis Association, which is, as I mentioned way back in Althea Gibson's post, the oldest black-run sports organization in America. (I'll be covering the formation of the ATA later on in this series.) He went on to win four national singles titles in the ATA's championships, and was generally considered by many observers to be the best black tennis player in the pre-war years, known for his powerful lefty serve and his volleying skills.

What Jimmie is best known for, however, is an exhibition match that he played with Don Budge on July 29th, 1940. In the grand scheme of sports and the constant celebration of players who broke the color line, a la Jackie Robinson, I'm really surprised that this event is not more widely known and celebrated - this is, as far as we know, the first time a black tennis player and a white tennis player played a match of any kind of important standing against one another. If you're a casual tennis fan and your knowledge doesn't stretch far back enough to know who Don Budge was, he was, at this particular moment in tennis history, the shit. (Okay, obviously there's more to it than that, but I just wanted to use that description for him. 'Cause it's true.) Budge was the leading amateur player in 1937 and 1938, and in the latter year, he was the first person to complete tennis' Grand Slam - winning all four majors in one year. In fact, if you believe what he says in his book, Don Budge: A Tennis Memoir (a great read if you can track it down), he unwittingly created the concept that we now know as the "Grand Slam"; after becoming the world's top amateur in '37, he entered the following year with the goal of winning all of the national championships of the four countries who had won the Davis Cup at that point - Australia, France, Great Britain, and the United States. He succeeded in doing so, and, having nothing left to accomplish as an amateur, turned professional, where he was the #1 ranked player at the time of his exhibition against Jimmie McDaniel.

As I said earlier, I'm really surprised that this match doesn't get mentioned in tennis' history the same way that similar events are portrayed in other sports. It was honestly both pretty brave and very receptive of Don to give Jimmie the chance to play this match at all; obviously, other great black athletes were never afforded the chance to compete against their white counterparts, including baseball, which was still to be segregated for another seven years at this point, and boxing, where Jack Dempsey, the great champion in the 20s, refused to fight Harry Wills, the top black contender of the time. But Budge agreed to this match, largely because, as Blacks at the Net notes, the event was sponsored by Wilson Sporting Goods, who furnished Budge's rackets and with whom he had signed a deal to do promotional work. The match was played on a clay court in the Harlem area of New York City at the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club, in front of a predominantly black audience. It would be nice to say that McDaniel held his own; however, the fact of the matter is that Budge won quite easily, 6-1, 6-2. It was said that McDaniel got lost on his way to the club and arrived just minutes before the event was to start, and he was a bundle of nerves, unable to summon his best. He was also a player who was weaned on hard courts; the clay surface was a foreign beast to him. Still, Jimmie played well enough that he earned praise from the great champion; Budge is reportedly quoted as saying that he thought McDaniel was a good player, possibly in the top 10 ranks of the white players he played on a regular basis, and thought that Jimmie could improve even more if he were allowed to play in their ranks.

According to Blacks at the Net, Jimmie eventually stopped playing tennis full-time and worked at an aircraft plant during the war years; segregation still barred him from competing in the major tournaments, so he played during weekend events in Los Angeles. He picked up the sport again later in life, though, after seeing how out of shape he was getting, and began teaching the game, though not to black youngsters, but mostly white, middle-class students. The youngsters saw him as emblematic of a bygone era, something which Jimmie resented; the book has him quoted as saying, "I don't care if they honor me. But maybe, maybe they could acknowledge me."

THAT'S WHY I'M DOING THIS SERIES, JIMMIE. I'm acknowledging you - for being one of the first truly great black pioneers in the sport of tennis, and for unofficially breaking the color line in tennis. These are absolutely accomplishments worth celebrating, and this man definitely deserves more recognition than time has permitted to him. I salute you, Jimmie McDaniel!

And honestly, I ended up digging up way more info about him than I expected. I don't know if the rest of these older players will have the same amount of info at my fingertips, but as my beloved Rafa would say, "I gonna try, no?"