First Black tennis player to play professionally
Bob Ryland, an often overlooked link between Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe who broke a color barrier in American tennis, becoming the sport’s first Black player to go pro, died Aug. 2 at his stepson’s home in Provincetown, Mass. He was 100.
The cause was complications from aspiration pneumonia, said his wife, Nancy Ingersoll. They lived in New York City before leaving in March “to get away from COVID,” she said, adding that Mr. Ryland had been recovering from a fall before being hospitalized for pneumonia.
With an aggressive baseline style and dangerous, low-lying slice shot, Mr. Ryland was a dominant figure in 1940s and ‘50s tennis tournaments — at least those that let him play. His friend Bob Davis, president of the Black Tennis Hall of Fame, recalled that Black players were routinely barred from Southern tournaments once organizers “looked at you and saw who you were.”
“It must have been horrible for him,” Mr. Davis said. “Having to deal with ‘colored’ water fountains, and no access to restaurants or hotels — for him to be invited to play in this pro circuit was a breakthrough, in so many ways.”
Mr. Ryland was one of the first Black players to compete in the NCAA men’s tennis tournament, reaching the third round in 1946 while playing for what is now Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1958, he became the first Black player to turn pro when promoter Jack March recruited him for the World Pro Championships, where he competed alongside stars Pancho Gonzales and Lew Hoad.
Mr. Ryland was also the first Black player to compete at the Los Angeles Tennis Club and, according to a Washington Post report, he became the first Black assistant at a District of Columbia
tennis or golf club when he started coaching at St. Albans in the mid-1960s, alongside local tennis institution Allie Ritzenberg.
He taught the fundamentals of tennis to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and went on to a six-decade career as a coach, working with players including Bruce Foxworth, Harold Solomon and Leslie Allen, who became the world’s No. 17 ranked female player. He also briefly coached Serena and Venus Williams and gave lessons to Mr. Ashe, the first Black man to win the U.S. Open.
“My only dream in tennis was to become good enough to beat Bob Ryland,” Ashe once said, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In a phone interview, Ms. Allen called Mr. Ryland “the constant in my career,” recalling that she had known him since childhood.
“Anything he wanted you to do, he could execute beautifully, and that’s not always the case with a coach,” she said.
Robert Henry Ryland Jr. was born in Chicago on June 16, 1920. He had a twin brother who died the next year, and his mother died of tuberculosis soon after. His father, a postal clerk, sent him to Mobile, Ala., where he lived with his maternal grandmother for a decade.
While there, he picked cotton with his great-grandfather, who had once been enslaved, and watched the Ku Klux Klan murder one of his cousins. Neighbors were lynched and hung from trees. “Every day, I’d be scared to death,” he told the Journal last year.
Back in Chicago, he threw himself into tennis, receiving pointers from his father. In 1939, he won the state high school title and the ATA’s 18and-under singles championship. He also won a scholarship to Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically Black Catholic school in New Orleans where he played before joining the Army during World War II.
On leave in 1944, he played an interracial exhibition match in New York, teaming up with Alice Marble against Reginald Weir and Britain’s Mary Hardwick.
Mr. Ryland later resumed his collegiate tennis career at Wayne University and the Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State University (now Tennessee State University), a historically Black school in Nashville where he competed as a player-coach and received a bachelor’s degree in physical education.
He was working at the YMCA of Montclair, N.J., when he began playing professionally, and later coached from 1963-90 at the Midtown Tennis Club in New York, where he met Ms. Ingersoll when she brought her son in for lessons. “He was just the smoothest thing on the court,” his wife said.
Mr. Ryland was married at least three times, said Ms. Ingersoll, his partner since 1978. They married earlier this year after his health declined.
Besides her and his stepson, he has no immediate survivors.
Mr. Ryland was inducted into the Black Tennis Hall of Fame in 2009 and competed in tournaments into his mid-80s, according to his wife. But his focus was on coaching, in public parks as well as in clubs, where he taught celebrities such as Tony Bennett, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand and Bill Cosby.
“Stars can be hard to teach,” he told New York magazine in 1981. “They have problems coming down off their ego pedestals. ... The key is to keep your mind quiet on the courts.”