The following is an excerpt from Sandy Harwitt’s book “The Greatest Jewish Tennis Players of All Time” ($19.95, New Chapter Press, available here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/193755936X/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_iEgYub1G0P727 via Amazon.com) on Renee Richards, who not only is considered one of the greatest Jewish tennis players of all time, but also, perhaps, the greatest trans-sexual athlete of all-time.
Unless someone was living under a rock in the late 1970s, they knew who Renee Richards was even if they weren’t a tennis fan. After all, it was kind of hard to miss — or ignore — the headlines about the man who became a woman and was suing for the right to play the 1977 U.S. Open as a woman. When Richards won the right to participate, as a woman, in that 1977 U.S. Open, and other women’s tournaments, she became the only player in history to play top-level tennis as a man and a woman — although possible, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will follow in Richards’ footsteps in that regard. Richards started life as Richard Raskind on August 19, 1934, the youngest child of two physicians — his father was an orthopedic surgeon, his mother a psychiatrist. Richards, who grew up in the leafy New York City quasi-suburban community of Forest Hills, described in her first memoir Second Serve how an older sister would push her penis into his body and say ‘Now you’re a little girl.’ If that was not disturbing enough, he also revealed that his mother would, at times, dress him in a little girl’s slip instead of traditional boys’ clothes.
Despite coming out of that childhood with a feminine image of himself, hardly surprising under the circumstances, Dick was outwardly the total package of the all-American man: tall, good-looking, intelligent and athletic. Publicly, he was living a life that would make other men jealous — attending Yale, where he was the captain of the tennis team, going to medical school at the University of Rochester, serving as a naval lieutenant, becoming a world-class ophthalmologist, marrying a model and having a son. Dick was so popular at Yale that he was asked to join a fraternity that extended few invites to fellow Jewish students.
Throughout that whole period, Dick was unable to totally suppress his urge to be a woman. At college, unbeknownst to others, he would shave his legs. At times, he would dress in women’s clothing in private. At one point, after taking female hormone injections off and on, Raskind moved to Paris and lived as a transgender individual. He traveled to Casablanca, Morocco, where there was a doctor who performed sex reassignment surgery that was still unavailable in the United States. In the end, Dick’s medical background overtook his urge to finally become Renee, a name which means reborn in French, and was how he had begun to refer to his female persona. He was worried that rumors he heard that the clinic lacked proper hygiene for surgeries were accurate, so he left and went home still a man.
Dick went on with life and was a well-known amateur tennis player in the East. He even played at the U.S. Nationals with his best result being two second-round finishes in 1955 and 1957.
Following the dissolution of his three-year marriage to Barbara and countless times in therapy to deal with his Renee side, in 1975, Richard Raskind underwent sex reassignment surgery to become Renee Richards. His son, Nick, was 3 at the time and until he was 8 was uninformed his father was now a woman — Renee would dress as a man, complete with a wig, when she spent time with her son. To this day, even as an adult in his early 40s, Nick Raskind calls Renee “Dad,” as that is who Renee is to him.
In talking to National Public Radio’s Neal Conan in 1977 to promote her second book No Way Renee: The Second Half of My Life, Richards spoke of surgery: “I sought out Dr. Harry Benjamin,” said Richards, noting that it was Benjamin, an endocrinologist and sexologist who coined the phrase transsexual, and who treated Christine Jorgensen, the first famous face of transsexualism in the United States. “Harry took care of me and counseled me through those turbulent years and got me started on my hormonal treatment with estrogen. And I was very lucky when he referred me to Dr. Roberto Granato in New York, who was the surgeon who performed the surgery on me. So I, actually, was very fortunate. I wasn’t so fortunate in the public’s acceptance…”
It was Renee’s initial impulse to keep her previous identity as Richard Raskind under wraps. She was so focused on remaining a private citizen that she chose to relocate herself — and her ophthalmologic practice — across the country to Southern California. She just wanted to live life as the woman she always felt she longed to be. Before she left, she received some important counsel from a longtime pal involved in the East Coast tennis scene: “My gynecologist in New York, who is a very close friend of mine, gave me some advice that would come to hit home years later,” Richards told Neal Conan during their interview. “He said, ‘You’re a perfectly normal woman now, except that you look like you’ve had a hysterectomy. But don’t try to play tennis out there when you move to California, because nobody is going to not notice that windup on the forehand that you have.’ I didn’t really believe Don — it’s Don Rubell — and I did play as an amateur in California, trying to remain quiet about it.”
As it turned out, Rubell’s forewarning was accurate and he came to the opinion with good knowledge. Rubell was well entrenched in the New York tennis community. His father, Phil, was a teaching pro and even reached the finals at the over-90 world tennis championships. His younger brother, the late Steve Rubell, a co-owner of the Studio 54 discotheque, played No. 1 singles for Syracuse University. His wife, Mera, was the U.S. President of Ellesse, the Italian company that dressed many top players in the ‘70s and ‘80s. His son, Jason, would be all-American and an ACC singles champion while playing at Duke. And Don himself, was the captain of the Cornell University team when he was there, played at the U.S. Nationals, and ranked third in the East behind Gene Scott and Herb Fitzgibbon and ahead of one, Richard Raskind.
If she had listened to Rubell and stayed away from tennis in California, it’s likely life would have gone on under the radar for Renee. But in the end, Renee just couldn’t not play — tennis was essential in her life: “Tennis was a refuge because it’s something that I love to do, and it was something that I was good at and I could have success at doing. And it was so clear-cut — the geometry of a tennis court and you against your opponent,” Renee said on that NPR “Talk of the Nation” radio show. She started to enter local women’s tournaments and found herself playing — and winning — the La Jolla championship in 1976. As Rubell predicted, someone, as in a reporter, noticed that windup forehand and the power serve the other women didn’t possess. The story broke quickly that a former man was playing
at tennis events in California as a woman. Later, in the summer of 1976, Renee’s old friend and fellow Yale alum Gene Scott asked whether she wanted to play in the Tennis Week Open at South Orange, New Jersey, a professional women’s event where he was the tournament director. She did play, which started a “Keep Renee Richards out of women’s tennis” campaign.
Desperate to prevent any possibility of Richards attempting to play the U.S. Open, the United States Tennis Association reacted quickly, saying that Richards would not be welcomed in the U.S. Open women’s draw. Now the ball was, so to speak, on Renee’s racket — go back to her practice as a prominent eye surgeon, or fight for the right to play tennis as a woman. Never one to let a challenge go by, Renee filed suit against the USTA: “After 30 years of apologizing to myself and to the world in general, I was through apologizing,” she wrote in Second Serve. “It was time for a savvy lawyer.” Renee obviously found the right attorney because in 1977 the New York Supreme Court, after hearing persuasive medical testimony that the surgery and hormonal treatment has indeed turned Renee Richards into a woman, ruled in her favor. She hadn’t set out to play at the U.S. Open but now that she was in, she joined the women’s circuit. She predicted that because of her age — she already had turned 40 — she could never become a real factor in the women’s game. Her best singles ranking was No. 19 and best result was reaching the 1977 U.S. Open doubles final with Betty Ann Stuart (mother of former men’s player Taylor Dent), losing to Martina Navratilova and Betty Stove.
Renee traveled the world and despite everyone believing everything regarding her was about her sex switch, it wasn’t always the focus. In the Cross-Court Winner chapter on Richards, written by Emily Bazelon in the book Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, there was a story that Renee, who had taken to wearing a mezuzah after noticing many players wore crosses on necklaces, told of playing a 1977 tournament in Santiago, Chile: “My opponent said, ‘I never saw so many people cheering for you. I said, ‘You don’t understand — this is a Jewish country club.’”
Not surprisingly, the locker room was somewhat divided on whether Renee belonged on the tour. Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova believed she should be able to play. Chris Evert and Virginia Wade admitted to not being sure. And there were some players, who would sometimes sing in a whisper the 1966 Left Banke hit, Walk Away Renee when they saw Richards around.
In the end, Renee stayed involved in tennis for five years, first playing, and then coaching, most notably working with Navratilova when she won back-to-back Wimbledon titles (1978=79). She then returned to her life as a physician, choosing to return to New York to do so.
As the years have marched on, Richards has had time to look back and think about everything that’s happened in her life. While she strongly believes having the sex change operation was unavoidable, she is now not convinced that choosing to be a public curiosity by playing tennis was the right choice: “I made the fateful decision to go and fight the legal battle to be able to play as a woman and stay in the public eye and become this symbol,” Renee told Reuters in February of 2007. “I could have gone back to my office and just carried on with my life and the notoriety would have died down. I would have been able to resume the semblance of a normal
life. I could have lived a more private life but I chose not to. I have misgivings about that. I am nostalgic about what would have happened if I had done it the other way.”
Richards, who was inducted into the Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame in 2000, spent her last day in the operating room of New York Eye and Ear, which she refers to as “the infirmary,” on December 18, 2013. In a posting on her Facebook page, Richards told of her final day as a surgeon, saying, ”I was born for two things; to play tennis and operate on eyes. It’s what I do, it’s who I am and now I don’t do either anymore. But that’s okay. I did what I was meant to do.”
