The tennis player who broke the color barrier
Robert Ryland 1920–2020
Robert Ryland was a dominant force at tennis tournaments in the 1940s and ’50s—when he was allowed to compete. As a black player, he was banned from the major U.S. championships and prohibited from challenging white contemporaries on the segregated professional circuit. Armed with a powerful serve and low-flying slice shot, Ryland excelled in the blacks-only American Tennis Association, winning the men’s singles titles in 1955 and ’56. In 1959, promoter Jack March invited him to appear at the World Pro Championships in Cleveland. Ryland—in his late 30s and past his prime—lost his debut match 6-0 to Brazil’s Armando Vieira. But he earned $300 for competing, making him the sport’s first black pro player. Ryland would spend the next six decades as a tennis coach; one pupil was Arthur Ashe, who in 1968 became the first black man to win the U.S. Open. “Looking back,” Ryland said, “I’ll always wonder if I could have made it big.” Born in Chicago, Ryland was 2 years old when his mother died of tuberculosis, said The Washington Post. He went to live with his grandmother in Mobile, Ala., where he picked cotton with his great-grandfather, a former slave, “and watched the Ku Klux
Klan murder one of his cousins.” At age 10, Ryland returned to Chicago, and his father, a postal clerk of
Irish and Native American descent, began teaching him tennis. At Wayne University in Detroit, “Ryland became one of the first two black players to compete in the NCAA national championships,” said the Associated Press. He had to sneak into whites-only hotels where his college teammates were staying if he didn’t want to sleep on the bus.
After his breakthrough match in Cleveland, Ryland “didn’t last long on the pro circuit,” said The New York Times. “I had only exposed myself to black tennis,” he said in 2019, “and we didn’t have that type of competition.” He went on to become a sought-after coach, instructing future tennis stars including Leslie Allen, Harold Solomon, and Venus and Serena Williams. Ryland, who played in local competitions into his 80s, also taught celebrities such as Tony Bennett, Dustin Hoffman, and Barbra Streisand. His pupils vouched for Ryland’s unsung talent. “My only dream in tennis,” Ashe said, “was to become good enough to beat Bob Ryland.”