The first

Today's post outlines some of the difficulties that I outlined when I mentioned the idea of covering some of these older players - despite many searches, I could find but a mere two pictures of this man online, and most of the info I was able to dig up is almost exclusively confined to two L.A. Times articles. So this is probably going to end up being a short, simple reiteration of the info that I found there, BUT, in the grand scheme of black tennis players, this man is very important - he was the first ever player to win a tournament on the United States Lawn Tennis Association tour (the modern-day USTA - they dropped the "lawn" part after grass courts largely began to be phased out), and for that, he's definitely earned a spot on this list.

Oscar Johnson is the man in question. As I said before, there isn't a ton of info about his background out there, but according to the articles I found, he started playing tennis in his Los Angeles sometime after World War II, after initially thinking it was, in his own words, a "sissy sport." He learned how to play very quickly, though, by watching other players play and imitating them in front of a mirror in his home. Eventually, he was good enough to become the champion of a local league tournament and, after graduating, applied to enter the biggest USLTA event in his area: the Long Beach Junior Open. Not only was he accepted, he wound up winning the whole thing, winning the final on July 4th, 1948. It's a pretty remarkable occurrence in tennis history, considering that there are very few tennis players who have won a tournament in their debut on tour. About a month later, Oscar entered another event, this time at the National Junior Public Parks Tournament. He won this event too, making him two for two in tournament appearances and wins - no mean feat at all.

These victories convinced tour promoters to allow Oscar to compete on the tour full-time, and he did, though with a much lower profile than Jackie Robinson, who was breaking baseball's color barrier around the same time as Oscar joined the tennis tour. He suffered a lot of the same indignities, though, often having to deal with nasty racial slurs being shouted at him during some of the tour stops. He soldiered on, though, and, as he said in the 1995 L.A. Times article that I found, he just tried to block it all out as best as he could and simply focus on playing tennis.

His career was halted by the Korean War, which he was drafted into in the early 50s and took him off tour for two years while he served in the Army. After he got out, he continued his playing career, and in 1954, the famous tennis player and promoter Jack Kramer, who ran many of the professional pro tours at the time, was prepared to offer Oscar a contract to turn professional and get paid for his efforts. Unfortunately for Oscar, he snapped a tendon him his elbow right as this was set to happen, and missed a year's worth of time. By the time his injury had healed, he'd attempted an unsuccessful comeback, had gotten married, had a day job at a tire company, and believed he'd missed his opportunity. So he put his racket down for almost 20 years, only beginning to play again when he realized just how much he truly missed the sport. He had success on some senior circuits in California, winning the Pacific Coast Championships in both 1976 and 1978, and started both a youth foundation and an annual tournament in his name to raise funding for inner-city youth tennis players.

In 1987, his contributions were recognized on the grandest scale of all, when he was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. I was unable to find any info on his birth or death dates; I would assume that Oscar has passed away by now, sad to say, but as the first black man to win a national tennis tournament, it should go without saying that he is more than worthy of being profiled. Even if this post isn't as chock full of info and pictures as the others have been so far, Oscar Johnson is still one of the great pioneers in black tennis history!