The Match
Althea Gibson and a Portrait of a Friendship
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
The incredible story of what happened when two outsiders—one an emerging champion who happens to be Jewish, the other, the first black player to win Wimbledon—pair up not only to form a winning team, but also an enduring friendship.
Althea Gibson first met Angela Buxton at an exhibition match in India. On the surface, the two women couldn’t be more different. The daughter of sharecroppers and fiercely competitive, Althea Gibson was born in the American South and turned to athletics in an effort to belong to a community that would welcome her. Angela Buxton, the granddaughter of Russian Jews, grew up in Liverpool. England, where her father ran a successful business. But they both faced their share of prejudice, particularly on the tennis circuit, where they were excluded from tournaments and clubs because of race and religion.
At the 1956 Wimbledon, despite their athletic prowess, both were shunned by the other female players and found themselves without doubles partners. Undaunted, they decided to play together. And though they had never so much as practiced together—they triumphed. In Nobody’s Darlings, Bruce Schoenfeld delivers an unexpected story of two underdogs who refused to let bigotry stop them both on the court and off. Here too is the story of a remarkable friendship.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Professional tennis players today can earn millions of dollars on the tour and off the court, but that was not the case 50 years ago when Gibson and Buxton were two of the top women's tennis players in the world. Coming from widely divergent backgrounds (Gibson from a poor black family in Harlem, Buxton from a well-to-do Jewish family in London), the two hooked up in the mid-1950s and became tennis partners and lifelong friends. While Gibson is certainly the better known of the two, Buxton led an interesting life in her own right, and Schoenfeld does a terrific job of capturing not only the individual personalities of Gibson and Buxton, but also the spirit of the time in which they played. Both were trailblazers, and although Gibson had the more difficult road to travel, fighting to overcome racism, sexism and financial concerns, Buxton was often snubbed in English tennis circles because of her religion. Still, it is Gibson, perhaps the best female athlete of her time, who is the star of Schoenfeld's often poignant work. Gibson worked hard to become a tennis champion, but her inability to earn a living from the sport plagued her throughout her life, forcing her to engage in some madcap business schemes. Schoenfeld's is an evenhanded portrait of Gibson (whose description is not always a flattering one), and his book is an important contribution in spreading the legacy of Gibson, a woman worth remembering.
