‘Serena and Venus said I can be myself’: How U.S. tennis star power went from White to Black

An earlier version of a picture caption in this article misidentified Althea Gibson as a U.S. Open semifinalist in 1987. That was Lori McNeil.

James Blake has a story.

It’s around 1990, and he’s trying to play in a regional under-12 tennis tournament in central Connecticut. He doesn’t have a ranking and there are more players than available spots, so he has to enter a lottery to get in. His number doesn’t get picked.

Don’t worry, the organizers tell him. Everyone who missed out this time automatically gets into the next tournament.

So Blake shows up a few weeks later. The same tournament director won’t let him in.

Blake’s mother realizes what is happening to her son, who is Black.

“My mom pitched a fit,” Blake, who would eventually rise to No 4 in the world, said during a recent interview.

Blake won that tournament. He remembers the tournament director being there at the start of the finals, but someone else handed him the trophy when it was over.

A little more than three decades later, Coco Gauff has another story. It started when Chris Eubanks, her close friend and surrogate big brother, called her just a few days before the start of the 2024 Paris Olympics. Eubanks had nominated Gauff to serve as the female flag bearer for the United States during the opening ceremony. The athletes have voted, he tells her. She’s won.

The tears start to flow.

Gauff, 20, the defending U.S. Open champion and one of the biggest stars in American sport, is sitting in a quiet room in the middle of Paris, reflecting on all this. She is proud and amazed and humbled that a young Black woman from what she described as a “predominantly White sport” would end up holding the American flag for the biggest moment of the world’s largest sporting event.

She knows this isn’t about just about her. During her lifetime, Black Americans have become some of the biggest stars in tennis and in some cases have transcended the sport, especially in the U.S.

“Each one of them would tell you that Serena and Venus has played some part in their story,” she says, paying homage to the ground-shifting Williams sisters, who changed tennis as arguably no one else has before or since. She says there are so many more who bear mention too, including two mid-20th-century players that a lot of people her age may not know — Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson.

“They’ve all played some part of our story.”

Coco Gauff and LeBron James led Team USA down the Seine in Paris. (Ashley Landis / Pool via Getty Images)

There is nothing quite like the you-can-be-it-if-you-can-see-it effect when it comes to sport, or really any pursuit. Martin Blackman, the former pro who now leads the player development efforts for the U.S. Tennis Association (USTA), remembers listening on the radio as Ashe beat Jimmy Connors in the 1975 Wimbledon final. He was five years old. Tennis has been his sport ever since.

That doesn’t mean that different sports — with so much variance in accessibility, visibility, and emulation — don’t have different strata of impact. The Williams sisters and Tiger Woods broke out at basically the same time in the late 1990s. Some 25 years later, Woods remains essentially a one-off. The Williams sisters most certainly are not. Since their careers caught light, the star power of American tennis has been shifting from White to Black.

The roster of big names includes U.S. Open champion Gauff; semifinalists in 2022 and 2023, Frances Tiafoe and Ben Shelton; and the 2017 finalist and winner respectively, Madison Keys and Sloane Stephens. There’s Taylor Townsend, one of the world’s top doubles players and a Wimbledon champion in the discipline, and Eubanks, who has struggled since making the final eight at Wimbledon last year but remains a top attraction on U.S. soil.

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Their contemporaries, like world No 6 Jessica Pegula, Shelton’s top-10 compatriots Taylor Fritz and Tommy Paul, and Emma Navarro, who knocked Gauff out of Wimbledon, may sometimes go deeper in tournaments. But they don’t usually draw eyeballs or attention or fill stadiums, both in the U.S. and abroad, the way the others do.

Black players are also a major presence in the development pipeline, especially among the women, including Robin Montgomery, a 19-year-old from Washington, D.C., Clervie Ngounoue, 18, who won the Wimbledon girls title in 2023, and Tyra Grant, 16, the daughter of Tyrone Grant, a former pro basketball player who was prolific in Europe.

Blackman said roughly one-third of the top 1,500 to 2,000 youth players who cycle through the USTA’s regional camps each year are players of color. That is a significant jump from 20 years ago, and far different from so many other multicultural countries where tennis is popular.

Grant, who has largely grown up in Italy but spent last year at the USTA training center in Orlando, found the experience far different from Europe in one very significant way.

“There’s more people like me,” Grant, who trained regularly with other Black juniors and pros for the first time, said after a match during Wimbledon juniors in July.

Tyra Grant reached the semifinals of the girls’ singles at this year’s French Open. (Tim Clayton / Corbis via Getty Images)

This growth isn’t limited to the top of the sport. According to studies from the Physical Activity Council and the Tennis Industry Association, participation among Black players rose more than 60 percent from 2019-2023. Black people, who make up roughly 13 percent of the U.S. population, account for about 11 percent of the nearly 24million players in the U.S., a figure that is getting close to the USTA’s goal of aligning its participation rates with the country’s demographics — but means tennis remains, per Gauff, a predominantly White sport.

Marisa Grimes, the USTA’s chief of diversity and inclusion, said the organization has worked hard to be more intentional about making tennis a part of people’s lives in the Black community. Diversity in the sport is about far more than supporting tennis clinics in less advantaged urban areas, though that is important, too.

In recent years, the USTA has started running junior tennis programs with Jack and Jill of America, a leadership organization popular in the Black community, as well as organizing tennis clinics at SpringComing, the popular gatherings of alumni of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). It has held events for the past three years in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, a popular summer destination for the Black community for years. New initiatives, like Black Girls Tennis Club, co-founded by Kimberly Selden and Virginia Thornton in 2021, put on low-cost clinics to encourage young people, and their families, into the sport.

Arthur Ashe leads a clinic in Washington D.C. in 1968. (Bettmann / Getty Images)

Grimes said these efforts coalesce around meeting all facets of the Black community where people are. “Not expecting them to always find us and come to us, but finding ways to connect tennis from a culturally relevant standpoint,” she said.

Those efforts are in addition to the more than $10million that the USTA Foundation invests in some 250 National Junior Tennis and Learning centers throughout the country each year. Those centers use tennis as a vehicle to teach life skills and provide academic support to 150,000 children of all ages and tennis abilities. Nearly 80 percent are children of color, including 42 percent Black, 22 percent Hispanic/Latino, 8 percent Asian, 1 percent Native-American, and 4 percent mixed race. More than 70 percent of the children qualify for free or reduced-cost lunch at school.

“When they walk into a park and they see a tennis court, it’s going to have a fence and a door,” said Ginny Ehrlich, the chief executive of the foundation.

“We want them to see the door. That open opportunity to play.”

The public Pompey Park courts on which Coco Gauff grew up. (Scott McIntyre / The Athletic)

The USTA may be the door today, but for a long time, it played the part of the fence. The sport has been a part of the Black middle class and aristocracy since 1890, when the leaders of Tuskegee University in Alabama, an HBCU co-founded in 1881 by Dr. Booker T. Washington, built a tennis court on its grounds. The USTA did not allow Black participation in its events until 1950, so the Black community founded the American Tennis Association as a counterforce in 1916.

Black doctors, dentists, lawyers and business leaders who were unable to gain entry into country clubs built tennis courts in their backyards and came together to create their own, with tennis at the center of social life. Gibson, who won Wimbledon in 1957 and the U.S. Open in 1958 as one of the first Black athletes to cross the color line, honed her game at the home of Dr. Hubert Eaton, a surgeon in Wilmington, N.C.

Althea Gibson was a life member of the American Tennis Association, established as an alternative to the USTA in 1916. (Heritage Art / Heritage Images via Getty Images)

Ashe, who grew up in Richmond, Va., often trained on the backyard court of Dr. Robert Johnson in Lynchburg in the same state.

Art Carrington, who would become a practice partner of Ashe’s and a top coach in the U.S., grew up in northern New Jersey hanging around the Shady Rest Country Club, one of the first Black country clubs in the U.S. He got used to bumping into celebrities like Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Duke Ellington, Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis.

American tennis then experienced an influx of Black players during the 1980s, a group largely inspired by Ashe and Gibson, Blackman said.

These were players like Chip Hooper, Bryan Shelton — now known as Ben’s father and coach — Leslie Allen, Katrina Adams, Zina Garrison and Malivai Washington. Garrison and Washington both made the finals of Wimbledon in the early 1990s. Many of those players, especially the men, were products of college tennis, which increased its recruitment of Black players in the 1970s and 1980s and became the leading development pathway to the pro tours in the U.S.

But tennis changed through the 1990s. Player development and coaching became more professionalized and more expensive at every level. Rising to the top began to require intense training from an early age; players needed to build a team of supporting staff in early adulthood, rather than banking on a few formative years in the NCAA.  The USTA wasn’t yet providing much support to create the next generation of stars, and the ascendancy of Michael Jordan and the NBA claimed first the attention and then the representation of so many of the best athletes in America.

Zina Garrison beat Monica Seles en route to the 1990 Wimbledon final, where she lost to Martina Navratilova. (Focus on Sport / Getty Images)

According to Roxanne Aaron, the president of the ATA, there was another big problem. It wasn’t clear back then, she said, that Black kids could express themselves in tennis, that they could play the sport and also be the people they wanted to be.

Then, two sisters from Compton arrived.

“They came out there with the braids, wearing bright colors and all kinds of stuff,” Aaron said of Serena and Venus Williams. “They acted like they were revolutionizing tennis, like they were revolutionaries. Kids saw that and they said, ‘Oh, OK, right, I can do both.’”

Aaron said that this was so much different from how Ashe had behaved, for reasons at the time beyond his control. She said the only way for him to open the door and keep it open had been to conform to the expectations of the tennis establishment. And because Ashe did that, 30 years later, the Williams sisters were able to write their own rules.

“They always came out on the court like they’re the baddest thing around,” Aaron said.

Blake, who is the same age as Venus Williams and played in braids and cornrows and dreadlocks in college at Harvard, said the Williams sisters changed everything. They freed tennis from its reputation as an uncool pursuit among Black youth.

“Serena and Venus said, ‘I can be myself,’” Blake said.

“If you feel you can be yourself, it can make a huge difference.”

Venus and Serena Williams’ tennis legacy is peerless in the U.S. (Jamie Squire / Allsport via Getty Images)

Still, regardless of race and background, nearly every American player who makes it these days in tennis has some combination of two things. At least one supportive parent and, if money is an issue, and it almost always is, an opportunity that can eventually lead to some level of support from the USTA, especially during the late teenage years when players try to cut their teeth on the pro tours.

“You had a parent who was an athlete who introduced the game to their child,” Carrington said of Ashe and Gibson’s era. “That’s mostly what you still see going on now.”

For Blake, that opportunity was weekly participation in the National Junior Tennis and Learning program in Harlem, even after he moved to Connecticut. Through his teenage years, he volunteered there as a tutor. Asia Muhammad, who grew up in Las Vegas, got to play in a program Andre Agassi started for less advantaged young people in his hometown. Keys and Stephens gained entry and received support to train at the Evert Academy in Florida. Shelton had the right father, the head tennis coach at the University of Florida.

Taylor Townsend’s mother became friends with the mother of Donald Young, who became the world’s top-ranked junior. Young’s parents ran a tennis program in Atlanta where Townsend trained. Eubanks’ father introduced him to the game and eventually trained with the  Youngs as well.

Montgomery, Ngounoue and Hailey Baptiste began at NJTL centers. Montgomery and Baptiste won spots at the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, Md., the same tennis facility where Tiafoe’s father worked as a maintenance man. That allowed his son to be discovered, banging balls against the wall with his brother when he was six years old.

Gauff’s father drilled her on a local court at Pompey Park in Delray Beach, Fla., seeing early on that she was a prodigy. She played in ATA junior tournaments, and then when she was 10, Patrick Mouratoglou, Serena Williams’ coach, offered her a scholarship to train at his academy in France.

Coco Gauff’s U.S. Open triumph in 2023 cemented her place at the top of the sport. (Al Bello / Getty Images)

Then one day, after years of work, she was the U.S. Open champion. On another day last month, she was the literal standard bearer for her sport and for all the American Olympians, the first tennis player to have that honor.

She knows it’s a long story, that it took a village, and that being a Black American tennis star has a larger meaning than simply compiling tennis titles and a growing fortune.

“It means a lot to me,” Gauff said that day in Paris. “Especially in a sport like tennis where it is a predominantly White sport.”

And then the conversation goes back to where all these conversations always go.

“Having Serena and Venus, kind of, lead that path for me and pave that path for me,” she said. “It means a lot.”

(Top photos: Getty Images; Design: Dan Goldfarb for The Athletic)