Charging the Net: A History of Blacks in Tennis from Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe to the Williams Sisters »

Cecil Harris is a veteran sports reporter who has covered the NHL for The Hockey News and The Sporting News. He covered the New York Rangers and New York Islanders for New York Newsday, and the Carolina Hurricanes for the Raleigh News and Observer. Breaking the Ice is his first book. Harris lives in Yonkers, NY.

With every powerful serve and deft ground stroke, with every graceful volley and determined charge to the net, black tennis players, from Hall of Famers Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, Evonne Goolagong, and Yannick Noah to future legends James Blake and the sisters Venus and Serena Williams, have forced open the sport's shuttered gates and demanded to be acknowledged. In Charging the Net, Cecil Harris and Larryette Kyle-DeBose draw on personal interviews and extensive research to chronicle the triumphs-and humiliations-of blacks in professional tennis from the 1940s to the present. For many fans and writers, Ashe, Gibson, and the Williams sisters personify black achievement in tennis, but others have made their mark. Charging the Net spotlights a wide range of competitors as well as the American Tennis Association, an organization that thrived despite racial segregation, thanks to such benefactors as Dr. R. Walter Johnson. The book will also introduce readers to two black officials whose success was short-lived; both have sued the United States Tennis Association, alleging discrimination based on race, gender, and age. Harlem-trained, Harvard-educated James Blake, who overcame career-threatening injuries to achieve World Top Ten status, has written a foreword to Charging the Net. The afterword is written by Robert Ryland, the first black to compete in a major college tournament, who later found the doors to tennis's premier venues marked Whites Only. With a clear vision, Ryland, the eighty-six-year-old coach, now looks at how far blacks in tennis have come and how far they have yet to travel.

The New York Times Book Review

A wide-ranging history, built on more than 65 interviews, that tells in-depth stories about the lives of black tennis stars.

Foreword   James Blake     vii
Introduction     3
"There is no African-American culture in tennis"     9
"I'm not going to be who you want me to be"     25
"I'm not giving anything else away"     46
"He was exactly who we needed at the time"     76
"We were the only show in town"     106
"You tell me what the similarity is"     124
"It was as if God handed these two young girls to me"     140
"Tennis is a family sport"     155
"You niggers gotta get off the court"     169
"Nobody called me names on the court, but nobody rooted for me either"     182
"You could play the French Open and never really see Paris"     199
"It's nice not to have to be a fly in milk"     211
"We need you out here"     224
Afterword     237
ATA Singles Champions     239
World-Ranked Black Tennis Players     244
Bibliography     247
Index     257