Word: althea
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Chock Full o' Guts. By 1941, when she was 13, Althea was ready to graduate from paddle tennis. The PAL instructor that year was an unemployed musician named Buddy Walker, and Buddy was impressed with the gangly youngster's ferocious skill. He went to a friend named Van Houton (a tennis buff who liked to boast that he was the only self-employed racket stringer in Harlem), bought Althea a pair of secondhand rackets, and put her to work practicing against the wall of a handball court. A few weeks later he took her uptown to some public...
...midsummer, Althea was taking lessons from Fred Johnson, a one-armed pro at the now defunct biracial Cosmopolitan tennis club. Her game, which had been an exercise in sheer power, began to show signs of sophistication. Now all her life was focused on tennis. She quit school and went to work. She was a counter girl in a Chock Full o' Nuts shop in lower Manhattan, a chicken cleaner on Long Island ("I used to have to take out the guts and everything, but I still like chicken"), an elevator operator in the midtown Dixie Hotel, a packer...
...Says Althea's father: "I didn't know nothin' about tennis, and that's all she was interested in. I got her some boxing gloves once," he adds wistfully. "I wanted her to be a lady boxer." Althea almost flattened her father in a practice bout, then hung up her gloves. But ever since, she has been driving ahead with a boxer's toughness and will...
...Could Be Something." Althea had been playing tennis for only a year when she entered, and won, her first tournament: the girls' championship of the Negro American Tennis Association's New York State Open. That same summer (1942) she got to the semifinals of the A.T.A.'s national championship for girls. She lost to a buxom teenager named Nana Davis (now Nana Davis Vaughan), and Mrs. Vaughan still remembers her appalling manners: "She was a very crude creature. She had the idea she was better than anyone. She said, 'Who's this Nana Davis...
...Althea saw no need to be sociable. She had come to play tennis, and she had come to win. Anything less rasped her raw nerves. She avoided parties and other players; she spent all her time practicing and playing poker with the ballboys...