Althea Gibson was named Woman Athlete of the Year in 1957 and 1958. A born athlete, Gibson began playing tennis as a child by hitting rubber balls off a brick wall and taking lessons at the Harlem Cosmopolitan Club.She attended Florida A&M University on a tennis and basketball … On Aug. 28, 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in baseball, that Althea Gibson became the first black player to compete in the national tennis championship. Gibson did team with Angela Buxton to win the Wimbledon doubles championship in 1956. The two physicians, leaders of a cadre of black enthusiasts determined to crack the racial barriers of mainstream tennis, saw Gibson's potential and became her sponsors in both life and tennis. finals later that year, Gibson continued to improve, so much so that in 1946, when she lost in the final of her first A.T.A. She also flourished on the court, winning the first of her 10 consecutive A.T.A. Then in the fall of 1955 the State Department selected her for a good-will tennis tour of Asia and the Far East, and the experience seemed to renew her spirit and inspire her game. Contribute. Bandleader Buddy Walker, a youth-work volunteer, introduced her to Fred Johnson, the famed one-armed pro at the nearby Cosmopolitan Tennis Club. Gibson blossomed, finishing high school in Wilmington, and winning a scholarship to Florida A&M University, where she also played basketball. The Horse Soldiers (1959) [Lukey]: Shot to death by Confederate soldiers while Althea and Constance Towers are riding alongside John Wayne's Union troops. Althea Gibson was born in 1927 in Carolina, her parents were poor and their livelihood was under threat. He bought her two rackets and introduced her to friends at the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club, a predominantly black club that played on courts on 149th Street just a few blocks away but a world removed from the neighborhood she had known. She later toured as a celebrity with the Harlem Globetrotters and then, like Babe Zaharias, chose golf as a second career, playing on the LPGA tour from 1964-71. Taking her place on a remote court at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, she dispatched Barbara Knapp of England, 6-2, 6-2. From 1963 to 1977, she played on the Ladies PGA golf circuit. Quick Facts Name Althea Gibson Birth Date August 25, 1927 Death Date September 28, 2003 Did You Know? She got married to Sydney Llewellyn in 1983, after ending an 11-year marriage with William Darben […] The next step proved harder. "If tennis is a game for ladies and gentlemen," she wrote in a letter to American Lawn Tennis magazine, "it's time we acted a little more like gentlepeople and less like sanctimonious hypocrites.". Gibson, whose table manners were so atrocious when she first arrived in Wilmington that the Eatons made her eat in the kitchen, blossomed in the refined environment.. As for her education, Gibson was even more tenacious. In 1983, she married Sydney Llewellyn, but they divorced five years later.Gibson had no children of her own. Considered a hopeless case when she started Wilmington Industrial High School at the age of 19, she finished school in three years, graduating 10th in her class, and promptly enrolled as a scholarship student at Florida A&M, where she received a degree when she was 25. To qualify for an invitation to the 1950 nationals, the tennis association said, Gibson would first have to make a name for herself at one of the major preliminary grass-court events — all invitational tournaments over which the organization had no control. Her father, a strict disciplinarian, often beat her, and tried to turn her from tennis to boxing. Althea Gibson, Actress: The Horse Soldiers. Buxton became Gibson's doubles partner in an "odd way," as she remembered it in 1996. In later years, she served in various sporting positions in the New Jersey state government, but after losing her job on the governor's physical fitness council in 1992, she went into decline, subsisting on social security. For all her natural ability and gritty determination, Gibson owed much of her later success to that very network of black tennis enthusiasts — and to a geographic coincidence.