THE MATCH

The story of an unlikely friendship between two tennis players: a black woman from the US and a Jewish woman from England.

Schoenfeld (The Last Serious Thing: A Season at the Bullfights, 1992) opens in the 1990s, when former Wimbledon champion Althea Gibson, famous for breaking the racial barrier in competitive tennis, was destitute, unable to pay her bills or buy the medication she desperately needed to maintain her health. Seriously considering suicide, Gibson called her friend Angela Buxton to say goodbye. Buxton, who partnered with Gibson to win the 1956 Ladies Doubles Wimbledon championship, was having none of that. She calmly turned off the stove she was tending and listened to Althea’s woes; then she helped her friend financially and solicited the help of others in the tennis world. This gesture was typical, Schoenfeld writes, of a friendship that stretched back more than 40 years. With this great serve of an opening, the author is off and running as he examines each woman’s early life, tracing their paths from girlhood to their first meeting in 1951, when an awed Buxton asked Gibson for her autograph. It was the beginning of an extraordinary relationship that would last a lifetime. Though the narrative is a bit dry at times, Schoenfeld succeeds in solidly depicting the two women as they blazed through the tennis scene of the ’50s, their friendship growing ever stronger. The author is particularly adept at recreating the tournaments Gibson and Buxton played, individually and together, although he lingers overly long on the details of the matches themselves.

Sound research—but missing the personal touch.