Bob Ryland, first Black tennis player to go pro, dies at 100

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 Ryland had been recovering from a fall before being hospitalized for pneumonia.

With an aggressive baseline style and dangerous, low-lying slice shot, 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 African American players were routinely barred from Southern tournaments once organizers “looked at you and saw who you were.”

“It must have been horrible for him,” Davis said in a phone interview. “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.”

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.

Making his professional debut in Cleveland at age 37, he lost to Armando Vieira of Brazil, 6-0. A Detroit Tribune story at the time called the match “another milestone in sports for tan athletes.”

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 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. The tennis star was on the eve of winning his first junior national championship when Ryland landed an invitation to the U.S. National Championships, later known as the U.S. Open, in 1955, five years after Gibson became the first Black player to compete there.

At 35, Ryland had lost some of the speed and power of his youth but had just won his first of two straight titles in the American Tennis Association, one of the country’s oldest Black sports organizations. He lost to Robert Perry in straight sets in the first round, at Forest Hills in Queens.

“In my prime I think I might have been up there with the top 10,” he told the New York Times in 1964. “Looking back over the years,” he added, “I’ll always wonder if I could have made it big, with the right backing, like Althea Gibson or Arthur Ashe. But I think I’m still hitting the ball pretty good.”

In a phone interview, Allen called Ryland “the constant in my career,” recalling that she had known him since childhood, when he was a friend of her mother’s and offered encouragement even when Allen had little interest in tennis.

“Anything he wanted you to do, he could execute beautifully, and that’s not always the case with a coach,” she said. Only later did she learn about his trailblazing past — sneaking into Whites-only hotels where his college teammates were staying, coaching at clubs that didn’t allow Black players, “teaching in a sport that didn’t always embrace you.”

“He laid the groundwork for so many,” she said. “I’ve said this before, but people stand on his shoulders, and they don’t even know who he is.”

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 the next 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 18-and-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. He later recalled that Marble asked him about Gibson, then an up-and-coming teenager competing in the ATA. At the time, the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association — later known as the USTA — effectively presided over a Whites-only league.

“I told her that she was very good, that she could be number one in the world,” Ryland told the Palm Springs (Calif.) Desert Sun in 2000. “She went back and talked to the USTA, and the next thing I know, they called the ATA and they said they’d get her in and let her play.”

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 to 1990 at the Midtown Tennis Club in New York, where he met Ingersoll when she brought her son in for lessons. “He was just the smoothest thing on the court,” his wife said in a phone interview. “He was like a fish in water.”