Midlife Champions

 Athletes are referred to as “the Jackie Robinson” of their sport if they are the first African American to play in its top leagues or tournaments.

Althea Gibson has been awarded that title by more than one historian of sports. She broke the “color barrier” three years after Robinson played his first game for the Dodgers. Aside from the barriers they faced on account of their race, their stories have other parallels—and differences. 

Althea was born and raised in Harlem, New York City. While that presented its own challenges—for example, cops often conducted spurious raids in her neighborhood and chased African Americans, especially boys and young men out of other neighborhoods, she at least had a network to help her develop her talents. At age 14, she won on the New York State Girls’ Championship sponsored by the American Tennis Association, organized as an alternative to the all-White United Sates Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA).

Jackie, on the other hand, was born to sharecroppers in Georgia eight years before Gibson. What was life like in the Peachtree State? Because of the Jim Crow laws that were in effect at that time, African Americans were restricted to living in certain areas, deterred from voting through poll taxes, literacy tests and “grandfather rules” and barred from some schools, occupations and professions. And while sandlot baseball helped him develop his talents (like Gibson, he also excelled in other sports) it probably didn’t help him develop some of the habits and skills baseball players need to succeed at the highest levels.

I do not mean to minimize the obstacles Althea faced in comparison to those of Jackie. In 1949, she tried to gain entry into the USLTA’s National Grass Court Championship (the predecessor of today’s US Open) but was refused.This infuriated Alice Marble, a four-time winner of the NGCC, who wrote a letter to American Lawn Tennis magazine in which she created the USLTA’s “bigotry “ and demanding that Althea be allowed to compete in a qualifying event.

Finally, on this date in 1950, the USLTA admitted Gibson. She won her early matches but struggled for several years until winning the French Open in 1956 and the US Open and Wimbledon the following year, when she was 30.

While Jackie had an equally circuitous path to Major League Baseball, his differed in that he was already an established star in the Negro American League and, before serving in World War II, was a star football player and track-and-field athlete at UCLA.  Still, even though he was a first-ballot Hall of Famer, one can wonder what his career could have been: He was already 28 years old, an age when most ball players are at, or on the verge of, their prime.  

So being the first African American to achieve what she did is not the only reason Althea Gibson is “the Jackie Robinson of tennis”: both of them accomplished what they did as they were in, or entering midlife, depending on how one defines it.

(Althea also faced accusations that she was a man. Some things never change!)

Not The Way To “Graduate “

Many people ride bicycles until they “graduate” to cars. 

Here in the United States, kids may pedal to school, an after-school job or to someplace “fun” until they get their driver’s licenses.  Like many of my high school classmates, they may not mount a saddle again once they get behind the wheel of a car.

In other countries—and in some communities, including ones near me, the bicycle might be a means to acquiring an automobile. You often see immigrants taking this path, if you will:  They might ride a pedaled or e-bicycle to work, or to make deliveries, so they can save enough money to buy, or make a down payment on, an automobile. 

A gentleman in Indiana decided to follow the time-honored tradition I described in the previous paragraph, except for one thing:  He didn’t want to save up. Instead, he had the brilliant idea of using his bike to make one quick payday that would allow him to parlay two wheels into four—or, to be more precise, eight, as he bought two cars.

So what did he do that will be taught to future generations of students at the Wharton Business School (a certain billionaire’s alma mater)? And what lessons might those future Masters of the Universe draw from it?

Well, Derek Dwayne Core rode his mountain bike to a bank. I’ve done that many times myself. However, I have never entered such an establishment (or any other) dressed in white—and a ski mask. And the many items I’ve carried on my bicycles have never included a handheld device designed to propel projectiles for the purpose of making holes in human bodies.

OK, I don’t think I need to tell you what he did.  And it might’ve been a brilliant business plan except for a couple of things. 

 One, the bag into which he stuffed those green pieces of paper he took from the bank ripped, spilling those likenesses of American historic icons. Naturally, he gathered up as many as he could, which probably narrowed the time and distance between him and the folks pursuing him in blue suits.

Two: A piece of his sneaker lace got caught in his chain.

Those green pieces of paper and sneaker lace became evidence that the fellows in blue suits would use at the end of their pursuit. Those things, and two others: the 2005 Cadillac Escalade he bought and the 2013 GMC Yukon his friend bought—with the green pieces of paper he managed to retrieve.  

Do They Ride Bikes?

During the mid- and late ‘80’s, I could ride all day and not see another adult cyclist, especially in “transportation deserts “ and other areas where, by necessity or choice, people were car-dependent.  By “choice,” I mean that people drove even when they could have walked or cycled for local trips or commuted on a bus or train.

Those communities tended to be working- and lower middle class. I often thought they, like many of us, were inculcated with the notion that motor=maturity and that only kids rode bikes. Whatever receational or other “by choice” cycling took place in middle-class neighborhoods. 

When I started this blog in 2010, I noticed that if I was the only adult cyclist within sight, I was probably in a low-income immigrant community. Sometimes it had to do with the fact said immigrants came from places where there was little or no cycling, possibly because they were too poor to buy a bike. Or they aspired to having a car, and they saw riding a bicycle as a sign that they were not progressing toward the goals they had when they emigrated.

If I saw other cyclists, they were almost always male. I was often admonished to be careful or that I shouldn’t be riding at all because the dangers were too great—or because they came from cultures in which girls and women simply didn’t ride bicycles. 

These days, even in the neighborhoods or areas I’ve mentioned, I am rarely the only adult cyclist.  Some might be on beat-up wrecks they cobbled together from abandoned or discarded bikes; others might be spinning the pedals of a Trek or Cannondale.  

There is, however, one city that reminds me of the old days. Before I moved to my current home, two years ago, I had ridden through it maybe a couple of times. But now that I am living across from the New York Botanical Garden and just above Fordham University, that city is only 8 kilometers (5 miles) away, directly across the city/county line. It hasn’t been a destination—yet—but it is along some routes I now ride.

I am talking about Mount Vernon. It’s not what comes to mind when most people think about Westchester County. If anything, it’s a lot like the working-class neighborhoods I described: apartment buildings are interspersed with brick and stucco houses surrounded by small parches of lawn. I suspect that many residents, if they don’t work in the city’s shops or factories, take the Metro North commuter railroad to Manhattan. For them, commuting by bike isn’t feasible and I imagine they don’t have the time or energy at the end of the day for a ride.

Perhaps their busy schedules, or some of the attitudes I described earlier, are reasons why I have yet to see another adult on a bicycle in Mount Vernon. Or could it be that they see someone like me and don’t see themselves?