Review: Althea (2023)

By Sally H. Jacobs

There aren't many well-known people who go by the name Althea. Althea Gibson - the first Black person (male or female) to win a Grand Slam tournament title in tennis - probably tops the list. 

Althea is a Greek name, said to mean "healer" or "wholesome." If her parents had been able to forecast the future, they would have come up with something that translated to "trailblazer" or "champion." That was Gibson, who is certainly underrated on the list of racial pioneers in the United States - even among athletes. 

She certainly deserves a full biography, and Sally H. Jacobs comes through with an excellent effort with her 2023 book, "Althea." 

Let's start with three quick points about what makes her such an interesting subject even close to 70 years after her prime years as a tennis player:

1. It's difficult to imagine how tough Gibson's road to athletic success was. Tennis was one of the two main "country club" sports in her era, which meant most of the good players came out of relatively wealthy backgrounds. The club was where they learned and played the game. In the 1950s and before, that certainly meant that major championships in America were almost always reserved for white players. (There were some separate events for Blacks, and Gibson became a frequent winner on that circuit.) That was particularly true for tournaments in the South. And keep in mind that the top level of competition in that era was for amateurs only. In other words, you needed outside money to be able to practice your skills and go to tournaments ... because winning didn't carry any financial benefits. Gibson had to rely on help from relative strangers to receive lessons on the game and opportunities to even play in tournaments.

2. Tennis is a sport where the competitor is all alone. Care to travel around the country for events,  knowing that a designated hotel for competitors might not let you stay there because of skin color? Right - no thank you. As the only Black on the circuit in the mid-1950s, Althea didn't have many close friends who could listen to her experiences and fully understand her emotions. At least when Jackie Robinson broke into major league baseball in 1947, he had teammates who were rooting for him to succeed.

3. Gibson integrated not one, but two major women's sports. She was the first Black woman to join the LPGA Tour in 1964. Althea wasn't particularly good by professional standards, taking up the game in her 30s. Althea only came close to winning a few tournaments and usually ranked well down the leaderboard. But she was there with the other pros ... and the reception to her presence in the golf world was relatively close to her experiences in tennis. It's as if Robinson could skate and joined the National Hockey League for a while. 

That's all a heck of a start of a biography, and the story has plenty of surrounding drama. It starts in South Carolina, where Gibson was born in 1927 to sharecroppers. You might expect that there wouldn't be much time for tennis there. The family moved to Harlem in New York City after her birth. That figured to be a step up in terms of quality of life, and maybe it was. But around the time of their arrival, the Gibsons had to deal with the fact that a Depression was about to start - hitting the Black community hard. Mix an economic downtown with overcrowding, and you have a recipe for serious urban problems. Althea, at least, was quite a physical specimen - on her way to growing to a height of 5-foot-11. She was New York City's paddle tennis champion at age 12. She could compete with boys in almost everything athletic; you might have called her a "tomboy" back then. 

Eventually Althea found opportunities to play tennis in New York, and her skills demanded attention. Gibson's talent caught the eye of a North Carolina doctor who took her in as a teen and sponsored her play. She went on to qualify for the U.S. championships at Forest Hills in 1950 - knocking down that racial barrier. Gibson continued to improve in the next few years, climbing up the rankings. In hindsight, it's interesting to read about how women's tennis worked in those days at its highest level. Players would take the usual steps forward and reach the top (or at least fulfill their potential). But remember, there was no prize money and no endorsement money available. The champions sometimes peeled off to get married or make a living. The idea of playing for 20 years would have been preposterous.  

That movement left some space for Gibson to reach the top of her sport. She won the French Open in 1956, and took the U.S. Open and All-England titles in 1957 and 1958. And then she was gone, taking a needed long break and having an on-again, off-again relationship with tennis. Althea tried turning professional, which was in the barnstorming stage and didn't really work at all for women. The pro golf idea came up a few years later. It's easy to speculate how she might have done if she had taken up the game earlier. 

Around the age of 40, Gibson - a woman who once received a ticker-tape parade down the middle of New York City - was at the point where she had no idea what she'd do with the rest of her life. A couple of marriages failed, some business ventures flopped, and some civic and government jobs more or less had little staying power. And it's not as if most country clubs of the era were willing to hire a Black to be their tennis pro. Old habits die hard. She comes across as rather lost and a little forgotten, although some of her isolation certainly was self-inflicted. 

Yes, quite a story - even without a happy ending. Jacobs certainly put a ton of effort into the book, and does a very good job of a balanced portrait of Gibson's good times and bad times. The author seems to have talked to almost everyone who ever met her, or so it seems. 

Gibson's death did spark a burst of appreciation for her life on the tennis court. There is a good-sized monument for her in Flushing Meadow, New York - the current home of the U.S. Open. But the question lingers in the background: What if she had been in her prime right now? Could she have become a player like Serena Williams? Since we'll never know, we'll have to appreciate what she did do. "Althea" helps us do exactly that.  

Five stars

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Review: The Year's Best Sports Writing 2026

Edited by Mirin Fader

It didn't take long for the latest issue of "The Year's Best Sports Writing" - an annual series that dates back a few decades in different forms and publishers - to be impressive. 

As in, the introduction. 

Guest editor Mirin Fader puts some early points by recounting her reaction to the news that the Washington Post was dropping its sports section: horror. You didn't have to live in Washington to be angry about that. A lot of experience and institutional knowledge about the Washington area, the country, and the sports world in general walked out the door when the Post gave up on sports. 

On the other hand, though, it's not as if we shouldn't have seen something like this coming. You only needed to reach each year's choices in this series of books to realize the landscape of sports journalism has been changing over the years. Go back 40 years to when the Sporting News was handling this assignment, and most of the stories were from newspapers and magazines. Now their appearances have become somewhat few and far between, replaced by outlets that are relatively unknown to mainstream readers.

Fader writes in her introduction, "I wanted this edition of The Year's Best Sports Writing to be a love letter. I want people to fall back in love. I wanted reading this to feel like we used to feel when our favorite sports writer put out a piece, and everyone would comment on Twitter, 'Appointment reading,' or 'Blind retweet.'" There is some good writing out there; it's just getting difficult to find it. 

There are 25 stories for the reader's consideration. The good news is that most of them are worthwhile. Last year's selections had a high percentage of efforts from out of the mainstream and was more hit-or-miss than most of the books in this series; that number dropped this time around. 

It's worth saying right at the start that there are a couple of patterns in the selections here that are interesting. The first is that Fader is a senior writer for the Athletic. Out of those 25 stories, seven are from the Athletic. That seems like a high percentage from a distance, although I have few complaints about the selections from that outlet. The second is that Fader is best known for her biographies of a couple of basketball players who grew up in the Eastern Hemisphere - Giannis and Hakeem. Therefore, some of the picks are not surprisingly international in tone. 

My usual standard for determining the possibility of interest in a particular story comes from the answer to a question: Would this be in the sports section of a newspaper? Admittedly, some of the ones here wouldn't be. There's a story about a skier who ended up as a crime boss, a tale of a woman who took her motorcycle and criss-crossed Africa with it, a report on women who essentially hiked across the top of the Canadian Rockies. A restaurant review by a noted critic caught me by surprise, but the review could have used a little whimsy when in this company. I struggled with these quite a bit. 

But there were plenty of other stories that carried me along. An old-fashioned profile of Cal Raleigh - "Big Dumper" - was nicely done. The dark side of sports betting as it affects the athletes themselves is eye-opening. Who knew that Robert Caro was the guiding unseen hand behind the rise of the Oklahoma City Thunder of the NBA?  It was fascinating to see what happened to former Dolphins' lineman Jonathan Martin. The story about the after-effects of the deaths of hockey's Gaudreau is sometimes haunting. 

Three of the stories stood out, and one was a natural for me. A 50-year anniversary story of Ali-Frazier III is as good as could be hoped - a moment that probably stands close to the peak of history of boxing interest. (Things haven't been the same since then.) It was a hanging curve ball that was slugged out of the park. A profile of Dale Earnhardt Jr., still trying to cope with the loss of his famous father, has tons of new information - at least to a non-NASCAR follower. But Tom Junod gets the "Best in Show" Award with a story about two high school quarterbacks who have much in common even though their tragic stories are 50 years apart. Junod asks all the right questions in this one, even if we'll never be really comfortable with the answers.  

You'll speed through the good stories and skim through the less interesting ones, which makes the 350-page length a little less intimidating. "The Year's Best Sports Writing 2026" has a very good batting average this time, and it's worth your time. 

Four stars

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Review: The Cruelest Game (2026)

By Matthew Futterman

This has been something of an unstable decade in the world of professional tennis - particularly compared to what happened before it.

For about 20 years starting in 2003 or so, it was easy to figure out what would happen in the major tournaments. Roger Federer was just about to start his run of greatness, taking Grand Slam #1 in 2003 at Wimbledon. Rafael Nadal became his biggest rival when he joined the Majors Club with a victory at the French Open in 2005. For a while there it seemed as if it wasn't a big tournament if Federer and Nadal didn't play each other - ideally for a championship. 

Then came Novak Djokovic in 2008, who captured the Australian Open then. He became a regular threat in the majors starting around 2011. Suddenly the Dynamic Duo became the Terrific Trio. All three have an argument as the greatest men's player of all time, and Djokovic is still trying to add to his reputation right now.  

The women's players also had a couple of all-time greats on the scene, and they were even sisters. Venus Williams won the first of seven Slams in 2000 - a year behind sister Serena's first big trophy. We didn't know that the win by Venus at Wimbledon in 2008 would be her seventh and last major title. But Serena was just getting warmed up then. She picked up her 21st and last Slam win in 2017. 

Once those eras ended, we've had some scrambling at the top. Matthew Futterman, a reporter for the Athletic who clearly knows the game and its people, takes a good-sized look at the participants who have been top players in recent years, and - in some cases, their struggles for consistency - in "The Cruelest Game."  The resulting book is one part tennis and one part psychology. Matches, it seems, are often won above the neck instead of below it. 

At least on the men's side, a big rivalry has developed. Carlos Alcaraz has seven Slams to his credit, and Jannik Sinner has six. They have won 10 of the last 12 titles, taking over the spotlight once Djokovic won three of four championships in 2023. It's a lot to ask for them to have the staying power of Federer and Nadal. On the women's side, no one has won more than six Grand Slam titles in a career since Serena Williams retired. The leader is Iga Świątek, who has four French Open crowns to go with a win at Wimbledon and Flushing Meadows.  

As Futterman discovers as he checks out the top players, their problems are unique in sports. Start with childhood, when the best players are usually identified and fast-tracked toward professional status. Care to move to a warm-weather academy and have your entire life ruled by a ball and racquet while leaving friends behind? Throw in the fact that families sometimes dedicate huge portions of their financial resources toward the goal of making tennis a nice livelihood for everyone involved. That's a lot of pressure on a kid. It's tough to make friends along the way, particularly if you aren't in the same country for more than a couple of weeks at a time. This is a sport where the various mental demands can become too much, forcing sabbaticals if not early retirements. This last part goes back at least as far as Bjorn Borg, who left the stage shortly after it seemed he was just starting to fall off the peak of the mountain. 

And speaking of pressure, Futterman makes a terrific point when he talks about personal finances. Yes, there's big money to be made in the sport, but only at the top. Players can get by if they crack the top 100 consistently, but the drain caused by travel, coaching, etc. doesn't let up through injuries and slumps. If you don't play, you don't cash checks. Do it enough and outside income drops off. The odds aren't too good. At least the men playing in pro basketball, football, baseball or hockey all can do fine simply by reaching the major leagues. Women don't have the same options available, and that merely adds to the pressure involved. 

Maybe that's why the last American male to win a Grand Slam title was Andy Roddick in 2003. The replacements for Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, who were fading away at that point, never quite arrived. The women have done a little better, but only Coco Gauff has two majors to her credit since the Williams sisters faded out of the title picture. From an American standpoint, the tennis scene is at least a little more interesting if some U.S. players are at least contenders. 

It doesn't take much for a tennis player's state of mind to change, as Futterman discovers. It can happen in a snap - an injury, a fight with a relative, a search for a new coach. Sometimes when a player thinks he or she has an answer, the question changes. 

The author has some opinions about what's going on here, and sometimes this reads a bit like a psychology book with tennis serving as a case study. It's a side of the game that might not be as popular with audiences who simply want to see good athletic competition. But "The Cruelest Game" should work nicely for those who want to take the next step into understanding it all, but need a smart guide to get there. 

Four stars

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Review: Certified Beauties (2025)

By James Duthie

It's story time again in Hockeyland. 

Canadian sports reporter James Duthie had some success in 2020 with a book about some of the backstage moments for hockey players. He called it "Beauties." It should be mentioned that calling something or someone a "beauty" in the world of hockey is high praise, especially north of the border. 

The book seems to have done quite well - well enough to earn a sequel. Therefore, "Certified Beauties" arrived in the bookstores in 2025. As you'd expect, this is no time to break up a winning formula. The approach is about the same: talk to a wide range of hockey personalities, and collect some of the best stories that come up. 

Duthie throws out a rather big net to catch the tales, which is a good idea. There's the time that a summer beer-league hockey game had a couple of ringers turn up one day in an attempt to get in a good workout - Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl. The time that Mike Johnson received some bad directions to the airport shortly after he was called to the NHL for his first game. How about Sam Gagner scoring eight points in a game out of absolutely nowhere? Then there's the moment when Nick Foligno was convinced to pay tribute to his father Mike by jumping after a goal. And there's a story about the rise of Kenyan hockey - as in Kenya in Africa, and its one rink. 

Since this is a book about hockey and its players, a few other elements pop up too. Hockey players are rather legendary for their consumption of alcoholic beverages, and that can cause some problems. Jeff O'Neill had just been recalled from the minors when he decided to try out the legendary nightlife of Los Angeles ... which caused him to sleep in the next morning, prompting a mad drive through the crowded city streets in order to catch the bus to practice. Then there is the matter of practical jokes. Hockey players have left behind a trail of sawed-off sticks and scissored ties and stolen suits and moved cars over the years. That's not my favorite subject, but others will enjoy those accounts.   

Two members of the Buffalo Sabres turn up here. Marty Biron had just missed out on making Canada's World Junior Team in December 1995 when he was called up by the Sabres for his first look at the NHL. It's around Christmas, and Marty had trouble finding out what exactly was going on. But he flies to Pittsburgh, expecting to have a good seat on the bench ... only to discover he was starting. Against Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr, and Company. The other Sabre is Zenon Konopka, who turned up for a half-season during the playoff drought to take faceoffs and get into fights. It was Team No. 19 in his personal hockey odyssey, starting in junior hockey in Ottawa. He broke his nose 14 times along the way. Ouch. 

Two of the stories here are a bit out of the norm from the rest of the book for all the right reasons. Duthie pays tribute to brothers John and Matty Gaudreau, who were killed in 2024 who were hit by a car when riding bikes. An excellent recollection is offered here. Later, the book recounts the last meeting between two old teammates, Darryl Sittler and Borje Salming. Grab a tissue.  

One little warning, courtesy of the author: Hockey players tend to speak in two languages: their native tongue and profanity. This comes uncensored - especially a speech by Bruce Boudreau. You can decide if that quality is a potential turn-off or a selling point.

"Certified Beauties" probably won't stay in the bookcase forever. It's an easy, fun read that will put some smiles on your face, even if you won't remember too much about it later on. If that, Mr. or Ms. Hockey Fan, sounds like it's in your sweet spot, by all means take a look at it.

Three stars

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Review: Mucking in the Corners (2026)

By Steve Currier

Many adjectives could be used to describe hockey in the 1970s. Stable is not one of them. 

No wonder Steve Currier found some areas for discussion in his book on the era, "Mucking in the Corners."

The sport grew up quite a bit in that decade. The National Hockey League was something of a small blip on the radar for about a quarter of a century. It had only six teams from 1942 to 1967, and two of those were in Canada. If it ever was going to become any sort of competitor with baseball and football in the United States, it needed a bigger footprint. That explains the expansion of 1967, when the NHL magically grew from six to 12 teams in one fell swoop. It wasn't a good move for the quality of play or competition for championships (the expansion teams figured to be poor for a while), but the move did come with a national television contract. 

Somewhat unexpectedly, though, the teams kept coming throughout the 1970s. Some were placed by the NHL in cities via expansion, while others became part of the action through an entirely new league - the World Hockey Association. Sports history teaches us that if an established league doesn't expand enough to fill a vacuum, a new league will come along to fill the void. That's more or less what happened here. The NHL also expanded in the 1970s, partly to bring in fresh money and partly to prevent the WHA from grabbing attractive cities first. Eventually we reached the natural conclusion that the two leagues need to merge in some form because the new league usually can't keep losing money indefinitely. The NHL grabbed four WHA teams in 1979 (Edmonton is the only one still in its original city, which says something), and the dynamic was changed forever. 

Still, it was fun in an odd way while it lasted. Anyone who could skate was a candidate to play pro hockey in that era, and the leagues and teams tried almost anything to attract attention and fans. The most obvious technique was to bring more fighting into the game in the hopes of bringing fans who like the rough stuff into buildings. It probably wasn't the best long-term strategy, since fighting probably turns off more fans than it turns on. But who cares about the long term when there are bills in that area that are past due?

That's the "macro" picture of the era in a nutshell. Currier is more of a "micro" sort of writer here. He's found 41 subjects for essays about hockey in the Seventies - loosely grouped into seven different departments. They are snapshots of a particular subject - some of which go on for some time, others that are covered in a few pages. Practically any hockey fan will read about some events that are completely new to them here. For example, the NHL experimented one preseason with a way to prevent forced stoppages by freezing the puck by giving the opposing team a free shot on goal as a start to play. It turned out to be a great way to drive goalies to learn how to go into some safer line of work, like bomb defusing. 

Currier runs into some good-sized problems in his effort along the way. Some of the subjects are mere curiosities - such as a run of ties, or a hat trick in which a player never did put the puck directly into the net (bounces, etc.) Some of the stories have a great deal of play-by-play involved, and it's a very tough assignment to make a game from 50 years ago come to life that way. (Currier's book on the California Golden Seals had that problem as well, as I recall.) Do people want to read a full description of a game by the London Lions in international play? Seems like a tough sell from here. That approach is going to lead to some skipped sections. 

Along those lines, the book checks in at more than 300 pages. That's probably too long for a project like this. It would have been an easy task to make the writing more compact and send a few of the less-interesting chapters to the cutting room floor.  

The research also comes across as a little superficial in spots. The Buffalo Sabres have a few chapters devoted to them here, and I'm familiar with stories about them. Our conclusions don't exactly agree. The tale of the Intra-League Draft of 1971 is portrayed as a somewhat maddening quirk instead of as a smart move by Sabres' general manager Punch Imlach that built up his roster as it entered Year Two. I was also surprised to see the team described as underfunded; the Sabres sold out the building for almost the entire 1970s, which was the way success was defined in that era for the most part. At least Currier does tell the stories of Al Smith's departure from the team and the drafting of Taro Tsujimoto - a player who never existed. 

Then there's the obvious issue of age. The two leagues merged in 1979 - 47 years ago, at least from the time of this writing. That's ancient history by now. It's tough to say how many people care about that era now, especially the ones under, say, 55 or 60 years old. That's a rather small slice of the market. 

No, "Mucking in the Corners" won't be on the best-seller list. Even so, there's something nice about the idea that Currier was a big fan of the oddities from this particular era of hockey history, and wrote a book that was published about it. Good for him; it's an accomplishment. I'm sure he has some company in his interest, and those readers will rekindle some memories here. 

Two stars

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