Angela Buxton, a top British player from the 1950s best known for her unique doubles partnership with Althea Gibson, passed away on August 14, 2020. She is regarded as one of the greatest tennis players of the Jewish faith of all time and featured in Sandy Harwitt’s book “The Greatest Jewish Tennis Players of All Time” (for sale and download here: https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Jewish-Tennis-Players-Time/dp/193755936X/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Greatest+jewish+tennis+players+of+all+time&qid=1597662241&sr=8-2
The following is a brief excerpt from the chapter on Buxton from Harwitt’s book.
Her first Wimbledon experience came in 1952 as a lucky loser. She fell in the first round, but in the Plate event — a separate tournament that used to be held for the Wimbledon first-round losers — she advanced to the quarterfinals. The experience offered Angela a clear picture of where she stood in the world of tennis and what she learned was that she had vast room for improvement.
Angela immediately knew the place to make the necessary repairs to her game would be California. She asked her father to finance an extended trip to the United States to which he readily agreed as long as her mother went along and that she made one promise to him: “He was in the cinema business so it appealed to him very much that I would go to California as long as I would visit the studios and say I was Harry Buxton’s daughter.” With the backing from her father secured, Angela went ahead and made all the arrangements by herself. Looking at that now in the context of today’s world of tennis she said, “I did all the arrangements myself. I went to the library and found out where all the tournaments were, like in Riverside and Bakersfield, and entered them all from England. I found out the place to play was the LA Tennis Club and a chap called Perry Jones was running it so I wrote to him. I mean, looking back, that’s what it takes. You can’t expect to be successful if your parents are pushing you. At the time this trip was organized, I was 17.”
The Buxtons rented an apartment for six months on the tree-lined block overlooking the LA Tennis Club and settled in. She started to play at the LA Tennis Club, but a few weeks later the arrangements she made fell apart. Jones approached her with the bad news: “He turned around and gave me my money back and said he’s sorry but I couldn’t play at the club any longer. I asked, ‘why not?’ I don’t think he actually said it but I found out later that it was because I was Jewish. So there I was overlooking the courts I couldn’t play on.”
Unwilling to allow the trip to California to become a disappointment, Angela went about resolving the problem by “turning a disadvantage into an advantage.” Research led to the La Cienega public courts, which was a treasure trove location for tennis. Pancho Gonzalez played there because he also was “excluded” from private clubs. And it was at La Cienega where she took lessons from the great legend, Bill Tilden. She also secured a temporary job working at Arzy’s, the racket shack at La Cienega.
In the spring of 1953, back in England, Angela felt she was ready to be a contender. But in April she suffered a humiliating 6-0, 6-0 loss to Doris Hart, the reigning Wimbledon champion, at the Bournemouth Hardcourt Championships. Disheartened, she believed she’d just been wasting her father’s money by pursuing tennis and was going to dedicate herself to becoming a dress designer. Nevertheless, she didn’t totally abandon tennis and in October 1953, Angela decided to conclude her tennis career in Israel, playing at the Maccabiah Games. As luck would have it, Angela blossomed at the Games, defeating the top 10-rated Anita Kanter from the United States 6-2, 6-3 to win the singles gold medal. She also secured gold in the doubles.
“It was a wonderful experience,” said Buxton, of participating in the Maccabiah Games. “I have such fond memories of it. All the footballers came along to cheer me on. I made some wonderful friends that are still friends. In my particular case, that’s when I virtually announced to everyone I was Jewish. I thought that would be fun to go with all these other people from different sports and go to Israel to play tennis. This was very big in the international press that I had won two gold medals. People wanted to know what the Maccabiah Games were and they were the Jewish Olympics, so I had announced that I was Jewish.”
Instead of the Maccabiah Games being her good-bye to tennis, it acted as her impetus to refocus herself on the sport. During that Bournemouth Hardcourt Championships where she lost to Hart, she had also met Jimmy Jones, a Daily Mirror sportswriter, the owner of a tennis magazine, and an accomplished teaching pro. He had offered to help her at the time, but she turned him down. On her voyage back to England from Israel, she formulated a plan: She’d now reach out to Jimmy Jones for help. Jones offered a new and different approach to tennis for Angela, stressing that tennis is not just about hitting tennis balls. There were tactical strategies to be learned and a whole psychology to the art of playing winning tennis.
Almost immediately, Angela went from being on the fringes of the sport in England to being invited onto the 1954 and 1955 Wightman Cup team for her country. In 1955, she would be a Wimbledon singles quarterfinalist. Just one year later, Angela Buxton would earn international headlines, and not just because she would have her most successful moment in singles by reaching the Wimbledon final, losing to American Shirley Fry 6-3, 6-1.
Angela’s fame would be forever tied to the doubles arena and a special and unique winning partnership. In England’s world of tennis, despite proving herself of doubles star quality, Angela was not paired with a player of equal talent. Nothing against Pat Hird, but continuing to play doubles with her would hold Angela back. That’s what Jones told her, and that’s what he suggested she tell the Wightman Cup captain when she called to set things up with Angela in 1956. She followed Jones’ advice, which left her without a doubles partner when she arrived at the Bournemouth tournament. In a last-minute, one-off pairing, Angela and Darlene Hard played together and won the title. But it would be at the French Championships and Wimbledon when two outsiders — Angela Buxton, an upper-class Jewish girl from England, and Althea Gibson, a poor African-American who grew up in New York City — would team together to make magical history, winning both titles.
A British national newspaper reported their Wimbledon victory with the headline “Minorities Win.” Gibson would also win the French singles title in 1956, and the Wimbledon and U.S. singles trophies in 1957 and 1958. It was Jones who urged Angela to pursue Gibson as a doubles partner: “No one would even speak to her, let alone play with her,” Buxton said. “She was always on her own. My coach said to me, you spend a lot of time with Althea, how about playing with her? I said to him, ‘Why don’t you ask her if she wants to play with me? Because if she doesn’t want to, she’ll say no to you but might not to me.’ She said yes, she’d like to play with me. We entered the French and we won and we kept it going through Wimbledon.”
That would be the beginning of a lifelong friendship between Angela and Althea, a bond that remained until Gibson’s death in late September 2003. Gibson not only briefly secured a doubles partner; she became an extended member of the Buxton family. “My mother was always brought up to help people if you’re in a position to help them,” Buxton said. “It was a foregone conclusion when someone like Althea came along and had no place to stay, and was with little money, that she would come live with us and she did.”
In fact, when Violet Buxton was approached by their London landlord that summer of 1956 with the message that another tenant had complained the family had a black person visiting, she was appalled. Violet suggested the landlord tell the person objecting to come see her themselves. That was the last mention of any issue with Gibson staying in the building. Later in life, when Gibson was ill and living in poverty in New Jersey, it was Buxton who went about raising money for her good friend, setting up a foundation that would raise $100,000, although much to the dismay of Buxton all the money never made it into Gibson’s hands. On one occasion when Buxton was in her South Florida apartment Gibson called to say she was thinking of ending her life. Buxton was cooking Friday night Sabbath dinner, but quickly turned off the stove and spoke to Gibson for hours, eventually talking her out of doing anything drastic.
