But in the 1930s, race and class, often not distinguishable, played a major role in sports that was not limited to “residential and occupational arrangements.” According to Trevor W. Purcell, “Leisure activities also ensured separation, although on occasion there was racial mingling at the frequent baseball games.” The middle-level “colored” employees (of the U.S. company United Fruit) played tennis on a “separate tennis court,” suggesting that “mingling was confined primarily to one sport, baseball.”[/quote] Although the passage relates specifically to Central and South America, it applies generally to the development of tennis among black people anywhere on the globe.

Noah got lucky. Especially since the sport’s first black male champion did his bidding. Ashe told Philippe Chatrier, then President of the French Tennis Federation, that “one of his colonial subjects in Yaounde was doing exceptionally well, and he ought to do the neo-colonialist thing and bring him to France, get him assimilated immediately into the French junior program.” Chatrier heeded the advice. The rest is history. In 1983, Noah became the last Frenchman to win Roland Garros and the last black man to win a Grand Slam singles title.

Not all up-and-coming black players could get a beloved champion to vouch for them. Djata tells the story of little-known Ronald Agenor, who was born in Morocco but played for Haiti. I’d certainly never heard of him. He became the first Haitian athlete to win a gold medal at an international event when he won the boys’ title at the 1982 Central American and Caribbean Games. In 1989, the same year he lost the Roland Garros quarterfinal to eventual champion Michael Chang, Agenor reached a career high ranking of No. 22. He credits himself with ushering in the “power groundie era along with Jimmy Arias, Andreas Gomez, and Aaron Krickstein. When I started, only those guys had the big forehands. Now everybody has them.”

We’ve all heard of Evonne Goolagong, the multiple Slam champion from Australia. She was of Aboriginal descent, and while she sometimes passed for white, by admission, through no intent of her own, she was also the recipient of verbal racial insults in the latter part of her career. Insults much worse than “walkabout.”

“Walkabout” is one of the most common terms used in tennis today. A player is dominating and out of nowhere, she or he gets distracted and drops a handful of games to lose a set or fall behind after a big lead. Little did I know, it was a word used to disparage the native Australians back in the day. Goolagong’s coach used it often and while “I know he wasn’t being condescending,” she wrote in her memoir Evonne! On the Move, “it is an expression that irritates many Aborigines because it is the white man’s word for an Aborigine trait, and because it is a word that is frequently used derisively to mean shiftless or purposeless.” Food for thought, to be sure.

This is exactly why Blacks at the Net is such an important work. In addition to the three biographies of Noah, Agenor, and Goolagong and to the regional histories, there are chapters entitled “Image and Style,” “Advertising and the Black Professional,” “Racial Identity,” and “Obstacles in Black Tennis.” All of the biographies, especially that of Noah, who was encouraged to cut his dreadlocks before he became famous for them, encompass these broader subjects in one way or another. In these additional chapters, Althea Gibson, Serena and Venus Williams, Katrina Adams, James Blake and other black American players receive mention.

At times, the writing borders on redundant; the organization of the chapters could stand improvement. But without a book this thorough, I doubt I’d ever have known that a Surinamese player developed a program in several European countries that helped hone the talent of champions Richard Krajicek and Thomas Muster. And in his discussion of Africa above the Kalahari Desert, Djata outlines the history of Davis Cup, the major outlet for African players, on the continent.

Djata offers a vision of hope in the book’s closing paragraph, circling his discussion back to Volume One, which focused almost entirely on the United States.

An image of 1970 illustrates a point that many hope all levels of tennis can reach. Lloyd Scott, a black American who won the ATA National Championships in 1936, 1944, and 1945, played mix [sic] doubles with Esme Emanuel, a white South African in California, while Emanuel was studying at San Francisco State. At the time, apartheid was still practiced in South Africa, and when Scoot won his titles, it was practiced in the United States. Even so, their playing together represented how far tennis had come, but also how far it still had to go.[/quote]Indeed. And Djata’s fascinating and exhaustive book is a must-read for any tennis aficionado interested in the evolution of the sport as a multicultural global phenomenon.



Blacks at the Net: Black Achievement in the History of Tennis, Volume Two by Sundiata Djata is available directly from Syracuse University Press and from other outlets.