ANGELA BUXTON: 1934 – 2020
Angela Buxton, half of an outcast tennis duo! She was Jewish, Althea Gibson was black, and they forged a champion partnership. Buxton was inducted into the Black Tennis Hall of Fame in 2015.
They were both outsiders in the starched white world of elite 1950s tennis, superb players but excluded from tournaments and clubs and shunned on the circuit because of their heritage. Angela Buxton, a white, Jewish Englishwoman, was a granddaughter of Russian Jews who had fled the pogroms in the early 1900s; Althea Gibson, a black American, was born in a sharecropper’s shack in South Carolina and grew up in Harlem.
They eventually found each other and forged a powerful doubles partnership. In 1956, they won the French Championships and Wimbledon, the jewel in the crown of a sport that had hardly welcomed them.
But for all Buxton’s prowess on the court — she was ranked in the women’s top 10 in the mid-1950s — she is best remembered for the long-lasting support and encouragement she gave Gibson, the first great black player in women’s tennis, the first black to win Wimbledon and, for a time, the No. 1 ranked female player in the world.
Buxton died at 85 on August 14 at her home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the International Tennis Federation announced.
When Buxton and Gibson met at a tournament in New Delhi in 1955, Gibson was so discouraged by the barriers she faced as the only black player in the top echelons of tennis that she was ready to give up the game.
“When I came on the scene, the other players wouldn’t speak to Althea much less play with her quite simply because she was black,” Buxton told Sally Jacobs, author of a forthcoming biography of Gibson. “She was completely isolated,” she added. “I was, too, because of being Jewish. So it was a good thing we found one another.”
Buxton’s coach paired the two as doubles partners. In 1956, the same year they won in Paris and at Wimbledon, Buxton reached the singles finals at Wimbledon, losing to Shirley Fry. When Gibson won Wimbledon the following year, Buxton made the floral dress that Gibson wore to the winners’ ball.
“They were pictured dining together in a magazine snapshot, a white and a black sitting at a table in the clubhouse at De Coubertin Stadium in Paris, laughing as if they were in on a joke that the rest of the world didn’t understand,” Bruce Schoenfield wrote in The Match: Althea Gibson and a Portrait of a Friendship (2005).
Buxton suffered from a chronic wrist condition that forced her to cut short her career in 1957 at 22. But her successful pairing with Gibson left Gibson in demand as a doubles partner.
Buxton went on to mentor young players and write about tennis and she became a lifelong friend of Gibson’s. In 1995, when Gibson was living alone in New Jersey, sick and destitute, she telephoned her old friend, whom she called “Angie baby”.
“She said she was calling to say goodbye,” Buxton told Jacobs. “She said she was going to kill herself. I said, ‘Now, wait just a minute.’”
Buxton wrote a letter to Tennis Week magazine describing Gibson’s plight and asked for contributions. Money poured in from around the world. Jacobs said in an email that Buxton’s actions had helped pull Gibson out of her slump, enabled her to buy a silver Cadillac and encouraged her to go on living. She died in 2003 at 76.
In honour of her support, Buxton was inducted into the Black Tennis Hall of Fame in 2015.
Angela Buxton was born on August 16, 1934, in Liverpool. Her father, Harry Buxton, was a jewellery trader in Leeds; after amassing a windfall at gambling, he bought a string of movie theatres. Her mother, Violet (Greenberg) Buxton, was a homemaker.
The New York Times
