Morristown Resident Looks Back On Making History Through Tennis

MORRISTOWN, NJ — These days, Leslie Allen keeps herself isolated. The Morristown resident and real estate agent stays home and walks downstairs into her "command center" — or bunker, as she sometimes calls it — to conduct her work in a room without windows.

Allen's clients worry about the daunting processes of buying or selling a home. And she'll tell them to pause and attack things one step at a time. The mindset carries over from her historic accomplishment 40 years ago. In 1981, Allen became the first Black woman to win a significant pro-tennis tournament since Althea Gibson in 1958.

These days, the 63-year-old leaves home minimally because of the coronavirus. Along with her real-estate career, Allen also lead Win4Life, an organization that helps athletes develop life skills.

But Allen has been serious about COVID-19 protocols since the start of the pandemic. She won't even get together with her Morristown pickleball group, even though New Jersey has long since allowed people to play outdoor sports again.

"When the pandemic came, I was like ‘nope, not playing,’" Allen told Patch. "They asked, ‘When are you coming back?’ I’m like, ‘When there’s a vaccine.’"

But Allen doesn't need to leave home to see her reverberating impact on the outside world since winning the Avon Championships this month 40 year ago. She only needs to turn on her TV.

Black women now dominate the highest levels of women's tennis and often face each other in the Grand Slam tournaments. Naomi Osaka defeated Serena Williams on Feb. 17 in the Australian Open semifinal before winning her fourth Grand Slam title.

Before the Williams sisters dominated tennis, before Osaka developed a platform to promote Black Lives Matter, and before Coco Gauff, 16, was born into a world where nobody could ever doubt that Black athletes could lead her sport, Leslie Allen stood victorious on an indoor carpet court in Detroit.

Proving She Belonged

When Allen looks back at the press clips, she can't believe the close-mindedness of the questions she received in 1981. As an unseeded player, Allen entered the Avon Championships relatively unknown to the larger tennis world. This already made her journey remarkable, but the media cared little.

"I just couldn’t believe how so many of the questions were, are there any other Black players? Do you see more Black players coming?" she said. "Nobody asked about my game — where’d you get that big serve, where’d you get that volley, what was your strategy? It was all about, where did you come from and are there going to be more like you."

But Black people, including Allen's mother, played tennis long before that 1981 tournament.

The American Tennis Association — the nation's oldest Black sports organization — formed in 1916 as a majority-Black counterpart to the then-segregated United States Tennis Association. The organization held its national championship at Wilberforce University, a historically black school that Allen's mother, Sarallen, attended.

Sarallen watched the finals, and the sport's strategy fascinated her. She decided she would play in this tournament in a few years. While living in Cleveland, Sarallen played tennis religiously and won several amateur ATA titles.

Leslie Allen spent every summer of her childhood around the ATA circuit with her mother, who became an actress, but the sport didn't interest her.

"Tennis was seen as a white person’s sport," she said. "Nobody in my neighborhood played, so it was sort of not seen as a ‘real’ sport. It was more of an ‘effeminate’ sport. So there was a lot of baggage around the fact that a person of color might want to play tennis. It was seen as bougie, just for the rich and elite class. So I didn’t want to do it."

But Allen began competing after her mother put a racquet in her hand, and she found a knack for the sport. Allen played for the 1977 University of Southern California team that won the national title.

Black culture has become inseparable from the rest of American culture, but that wasn't the case in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Although the United States legally desegregated, Black culture from music to fashion to the myriad subcultures hadn't crossed over into mainstream white America. The stereotypes against Black people had much greater influence on white perceptions.

The few Black players at the higher levels of tennis bonded, but they had something to prove to the rest of the world.

"Some of the things said were that Black people don’t have the mental acumen to play tennis," Allen said. "There was all this coded language telling you why you can’t succeed. ‘You’re not smart enough to play tennis. You don’t have the brainpower. You should run. You should play basketball. Stick to those sports.’"

When Allen turned pro in 1977, she got a sense of the prejudices that remained. She would arrive at a venue where she'd play, and security would stop her and ask, "May I help you?" They'd wave her white counterparts through with no issue. In the French Open mixed doubles finals, her white male opponent walked up to Allen when she was sitting and called her several slurs, Allen wrote in The Undefeated.

Allen played an often lonely role in her pro career. People, of course, didn't have internet to connect with each other, and long-distance phone calls were expensive. So tennis pros often went on the road six to eight weeks at a time while barely contacting people close to them. And the world didn't look at women athletes the way they do now.

"You were isolated in and of itself by being a female athlete," she said, "which wasn’t necessarily accepted as a viable career or a positive role model. And then being a woman of color, that was unusual, as well."

But the unseeded Allen left her mark at the 1981 Avon Championships, defeating Hana Mandlíková — a four-time Grand Slam winner — in the finals.

Allen still vividly remembers her landmark victory on Feb. 8, 1981. It was her mother's birthday. Sarallen couldn't attend the match, since she was starring in the opening-night performance of Don't Weep for Me on Broadway with Phylicia Rashad.

Her victory, however, gave Allen's mother a perfect birthday gift. And her championship held even wider significance as tennis's most talked-about story at the time. Allen's success propelled her to the No. 17 ranking in the world, and her fellow Black athletes also felt victorious.

"When I won the tournament, it was like they all won the tournament," she said. "It was confirmation that we can do this. Part of it was, I was the one out of all of them who played the least amount of tennis as a kid. So they thought, ‘If Leslie can get there, we know we can get there.’"

Speaking Out

Allen wanted to speak up back then, but she couldn't. Professional women's tennis remained in its early stages. The prize money wasn't great, and women's athletes were still trying to find sponsors and play in bigger arenas. She didn't want to jeopardize the future of women's tennis, and speaking out as a Black woman put her at even greater risk.

"Knowing that there was a generation of athletes coming behind me," she said, "I didn’t want to mess it up for the next ones coming."

But now Allen speaks out, as she did after George Floyd died at the hands of Minneapolis police last May. Something changed. Business entities rushed to release statements supporting the Black Lives Matter movement — a few years before, most wouldn't have touched the subjects of police brutality and system racism.

The USTA's statement began as follows:

"Tennis is a sport that embraces all players, regardless of age, race or religion, gender and sexual orientation or nationality. It is a sport that is built on respect — respect for one another, and for the game itself. It is a sport with a long history of striving for equality and a proven record of trying to level the playing field of opportunity."

The statement bothered Allen, because the USTA ignored its history of racism, she said. Allen remembered all too well the prejudice she experienced and the pressure Black tennis players faced not to "act out."

Allen wrote June 18 in The Undefeated about the USTA's "tone-deaf" statement. And she felt the association missed an opportunity to bring attention to lessons of its past.

In 1950, four-time U.S. Open champion Alice Marble wrote an open letter chastising the sport for its practice of segregation. Marble wrote that Gibson, who became Allen's mentor, “is a fellow tennis player and, as such, deserving of the same chance I had to prove myself.”

In response to the public shaming, the USTA — then the USLTA — invited Gibson to play in 1950 at Forest Hills, which is now the U.S. Open. Marble was a white woman, and her actions showed the quickest way to make change for Black people was for white people to step up, Allen says.

"What a great story tennis could’ve told in that moment," she said. "We saw with George Floyd how people of different colors around the world stepped up to protest that changes needed to happen. Tennis could’ve been a leader."

But the fight toward racial equality continues, and some prominent tennis players have joined to speak up. In 1981, Allen couldn't have imagined that, 40 years later, Black women would not only dominate tennis but also have the freedom to use their voices against racial injustice.

Sports Illustrated named Osaka a 2020 Sportsperson of the Year for her activism, and she became one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world. Last year, she withdrew from the Cincinnati Open to raise awareness for the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

At the U.S. Open last summer, her face masks prominently displayed the names of Black people killed in recent years: Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile and Tamir Rice.

"Prize money (in women's pro tennis) is tremendous, sponsorship deals are solid and millions more are watching," Allen said. "So they have that platform to be able to speak out. You have to have the consciousness to want to do it, and I think Osaka understands the art and the history and the benefit that can be had."

But athletes still risk ostracization for speaking out against racism, Allen says. She brings up the modern example of Colin Kaepernick. During the 2016 NFL season, the former 49ers quarterback and teammate Eric Reid knelt during the National Anthem to protest police brutality.

The action of kneeling during the anthem became a culture war for years to come, and no team signed Kaepernick after 2016. The quarterback filed a grievance in October 2017, accusing league owners of colluding the keep him out of the NFL. Kaepernick reached a confidential settlement with the league in February 2019.

"Seeing what happened to Colin Kaepernick was almost like it was a cautionary tale: ‘Don’t get too outspoken, because we can shut you down,’" Allen said.

Allen understands alienation. Singles tennis matches put all eyes on the individual, especially when she's also fighting racial barriers. The pandemic creates a different type of isolation, which keeps the Morristown resident away from her office, her pickleball group and unable to visit her daughter in Virginia.

But the world has changed since she stood alone at the Avon Championships. She sees it in tennis, the NBA, the WNBA and throughout sports: athletes coming together to propel change in ways she couldn't but that she helped make possible.

"It’s also going to take action by those in power," Allen said. "But it’s harder to ignore things going wrong when everybody is talking about it."

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