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      Overlooked No More: Ora Washington, Star of Tennis and Basketball

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      She was dominant in both sports over two decades and was in all likelihood the first Black star in women’s sports in the United States.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.Ora Washington, a dominant two-sport champion over two decades, was so good at basketball and tennis that she was hailed in the Black press as “Queen Ora” and the “Queen of Two Courts” — and for good reason.In the 1920s through the 1940s, long before female athletes like Serena Williams, Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka became immensely influential sports figures, Washington was in all likelihood the first Black star in women’s sports the United States had ever seen.In one basketball game, she sank an improbable basket from beyond midcourt. In another, she scored 38 points when entire women’s teams normally didn’t score that many in a single outing. Washington “can do everything required of a basketball player,” the sports columnist Randy Dixon wrote in 1939 in the Black weekly newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier. “She passes and shoots with either hand. She is a ball hawk. She has stamina and speed that make many male players blush with envy.”Washington, the team’s center and captain, did it all without even warming up before competitions, coolly saying that she preferred to warm up as she went along. Her remarkable basketball skills were “flashy and aggressive,” as The Courier said in 1931, and brought spectators rushing to see her decades before the women’s game became popular in mainstream society.On the tennis court, Washington was perhaps even more spectacular. Beginning in 1929, she won seven straight national singles championships — and eight in all — as part of the American Tennis Association, a league that welcomed all comers at a time when the world’s top league, the United States Lawn Tennis Association, allowed only white players to compete. Washington also won 12 consecutive A.T.A. doubles titles from 1925 to 1936, including nine with her partner Lulu Ballard, and three mixed doubles titles.With a searing serve and an unconventional way of holding the racket halfway up its neck, Washington won her matches “with ridiculous ease” and “walloped opponents into the also-ran columns” with her “flying feet, keen sight, hairline timing and booming shots,” The New York Age, another Black newspaper, wrote in 1939. The Age likened Washington, who was square-jawed, muscular and about 5-foot-7, to the boxing champion Joe Louis because both won with “deadening monotony.”“If you’re looking at Black women’s sports in the pre-integration era, she was the star,” Pamela Grundy, a historian and a pre-eminent source of Washington’s life and career, said in an interview.“She did things her own way,” Grundy added. “I think that made a lot of people nervous.”Washington once made news when she boldly wore pants, not a skirt, on the tennis court. She rarely wore makeup, and she never married; her closest relationships were with other women, said Grundy, who has interviewed several of Washington’s relatives.After matches, Washington wouldn’t hobnob at social events that often surrounded big tennis matches. Instead, she quietly went home or back to her job as a housekeeper for wealthy white families, work she continued throughout her sports career, Grundy said.“Ora wasn’t girly girly,” she added. “And she didn’t pretend to be girly.”Washington was known for her physical, intimidating style of play, which opponents didn’t soon forget.“Competitors — 60 years after the fact — had quite vivid memories of her skills and style,” said the sports historian Rita Liberti, who has interviewed several of Washington’s opponents. Ruth Glover Mullen, who played against Washington in the 1930s, told Liberti that facing Washington “was just like playing a Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan.”Washington, right, in 1939 after winning the Pennsylvania Open. With her was the runner-up, Dorothy Morgan, whom Washington beat, 6-2, 6-1.John W. Mosley/Temple University Libraries, Charles L. Blockson Afro-American CollectionYears went by without Washington losing a single match. But white Americans did not notice because Washington had been relegated to a segregated corner of the sports world. And that was their loss, the tennis champion Arthur Ashe asserted decades later, “because Washington may have been the best female athlete ever,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1988.Some said her dominance had made tennis boring.“It does not pay to be national champion too long,” Washington told The Baltimore Afro-American in 1939. “It’s the struggle to be one that counts. Once arrived, everybody wants to take it away from you and you are the object of many criticisms.”She retired from her singles career in 1938 but came out of retirement briefly in 1939 to play Flora Lomax, the reigning A.T.A. national champion, whom the Black press had referred to as the sport’s glamour girl. There had been speculation that Washington had retired to avoid playing Lomax, prompting Washington to tell The Afro-American that she “just had to” prove somebody wrong after “they said Ora was not so good anymore.”Washington proceeded to beat Lomax with relative ease.Washington won her last A.T.A. mixed doubles title in 1947, when she was in her 40s. She and her partner, George Stewart, beat R. Walter Johnson and Althea Gibson, the Black athlete who was on the cusp of greatness.Washington then retired for good, just as the sport was beginning to be integrated. Had she stayed, “Ora would have beaten Althea,” Johnson was quoted as saying in Florida Today in 1969, and had she been a little younger, she could have become an international star.It was Gibson who became the first Black player to win a major tournament, the 1956 French Open singles; she went on to win five Grand Slam singles titles in all.Dixon, the columnist at The Pittsburgh Courier, said in 1939 that Washington might have become better known had she not shied away from the limelight. She had, he wrote, “committed the unpardonable sin of being a plain person with no flair whatever for what folks love to call society.”Ora Belle Washington is believed to have been born in the late 1890s in Caroline County, Va. (The state didn’t keep birth records at the time.) She was the fifth of nine children of James and Laura (Young) Washington, who owned a farm in the small town of File, about midway between Richmond and Washington.As a teenager, Ora left the increasingly violent segregated South for Philadelphia, where she picked up tennis at the Y.W.C.A. in the Germantown section of the city. She was a natural.At an A.T.A. regional tournament in 1925, just a few years after she had started playing tennis, Washington signaled that she had arrived when she upset Isadore Channels, the league’s reigning national champion. She also started her doubles winning streak with Ballard that year.After moving to Chicago, where she worked as a hotel maid, Washington won her first national singles title in 1929, and for seven straight years there was no stopping her. “Her superiority is so evident,” the Black paper The Chicago Defender wrote in 1931, “that her competitors are frequently beaten before the first ball crosses the net.”But with no avenue available to gauge her talents against white players, she turned to basketball. The timing was perfect; the sport was on the rise in the Black community, which embraced women ballplayers as celebrities.In 1930, Washington joined the Germantown Hornets, which played out of her local Y.W.C.A., and they lost only one game on the way to a Black women’s national championship.She later played for the Philadelphia Tribune Girls, a semiprofessional squad sponsored by a local Black newspaper, and the team became an all-star outfit that traveled throughout the South and Midwest for sold-out games. The team drew more than 1,000 fans when it played Bennett College, an all-Black women’s college in North Carolina, according to The Greensboro Daily News in 1934.The Newsgirls, as the Tribune Girls were also known, won 11 straight Colored Women’s Basketball world championship titles, in part because no opposing player could handle Washington and no coach could devise a defense to contain her.Even the mainstream press called Washington an “outstanding star” or the “famous colored girl athlete.” She remained with the team until 1943, when it disbanded.Washington then slipped nearly completely off the national stage. When she was inducted into the Black Athletes Hall of Fame in 1976, the organizers were surprised that she did not show up for the ceremony.They were even more surprised to learn that she had died five years earlier, on May 29, 1971, in Philadelphia, according to her death certificate. Grundy learned from an interview with Washington’s nephew Bernard Childs that Washington had been ill for some time.Washington was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, in Springfield, Mass., in 2018, partly through the efforts of Claude Johnson, the executive director of the Black Fives Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes awareness of African Americans who played basketball before the N.B.A. was integrated.“When Ora Washington played, there had never before been greatness at that level,” Johnson said in an interview. “We should honor that.” More

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      Bill Fitch, Who Coached Celtics to the ’81 Title, Is Dead at 89

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      Hailed for reviving sagging teams, he was voted one of the top 10 coaches in the N.B.A.’s first half century and was twice named coach of the year.Bill Fitch, who gained a reputation for reviving the fortunes of dismal N.B.A. teams and took the Boston Celtics to the 1981 league championship in a pro coaching career spanning 25 seasons, died on Wednesday in Lake Conroe, Texas, north of Houston. He was 89.His death was announced by Rick Carlisle, the coach of the Indiana Pacers and president of the N.B.A. Coaches Association, who said he had been contacted by Fitch’s daughter Marcy Ann Coville. No other details were provided.A strong-willed figure who preached unselfish play, Fitch ran demanding workouts and did not spare the feelings of even his best players.“I believe in discipline and I think it’s the cornerstone of world championship teams,” Fitch once said.He was an innovator in taping games and practices to analyze his players and their opponents, shrugging off a nickname circulating around the league in its pre-high-tech years: Captain Video.Fitch was a two-time N.B.A. coach of the year and chosen as one of the top 10 coaches in league history in 1996-97 balloting that marked the N.B.A.’s 50th anniversary.He received in 2013 the National Basketball Coaches Association’s Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award, named for the coach who won two league championships with the Detroit Pistons.When Kevin McHale coached the Houston Rockets in 2012, he recalled the lessons he had absorbed as a Celtic rookie during Fitch’s sometimes intimidating reign.“Coming out of college, I had never been around a coach that talked the way Bill did to you,’’ McHale told The Houston Chronicle, “but he really pushed you hard, and I thought Bill did a great job.”Fitch on the Celtics bench during a game in Philadelphia in December 1982. From left were the forward Larry Bird and the center Rick Robey. Fitch resigned after four seasons with Boston. Peter Morgan/Associated PressLarry Bird, who joined with McHale and Robert Parish on Fitch’s championship Celtic team, told Sports Illustrated in 1997 that Fitch “was the best in terms of motivation, getting you to really lay it on the line for each other.”Bird thought, however, that Fitch, who resigned as the Celtic coach after four seasons, moved on to other teams so often because “he really got under the skin of some guys after a while.”Fitch made his N.B.A. coaching debut in Cleveland, watching his 1970 expansion-team Cavaliers lose their first 15 games.But in his sixth season, the Cavaliers won the Central Division title, going 49-33, and made it to the second round of the playoffs, bringing Fitch his first Coach of the Year Award.Fitch was hired as the Celtics’ coach in 1979 after they had missed the playoffs for two consecutive seasons. He received his second Coach of the Year Award in 1980, when the Celtics, in Bird’s rookie season, went 61-21 and reached the playoffs’ second round.Fitch’s Celtics won the N.B.A. title the following season, defeating the Houston Rockets in a six-game playoff final, the deciding victory coming in Houston. It was Boston’s 14th National Basketball Association championship and their first since 1976.Taking the Rockets’ coaching post in 1983 after they had fallen on hard times, Fitch developed the Twin Towers, Hakeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson, as the core of a team that he coached to the 1986 N.B.A. finals, where the Rockets lost to the Celtics in six games.Fitch got the New Jersey Nets’ coaching post in August 1989, succeeding Willis Reed, who became a team vice president after a 26-56 season.The Nets won only 43 games in Fitch’s first two seasons in New Jersey, but he coached them to the 1992 playoffs, their first postseason appearance in six years, though they were eliminated in the first round.Fitch had nearly failed to survive that season. A Nets minority owner wanted to hire Jim Valvano, the former North Carolina State coach, in December 1991. Though it didn’t happen, Fitch had other problems, having clashed with several of his players.He resigned after that season, then became coach of the floundering Los Angeles Clippers in 1994. He never produced a winning team with the Clippers but got them to the playoffs in his third season with them.Fitch was born on May 19, 1932, in Davenport, Iowa, and grew up in Cedar Rapids. His father, a former Marine drill sergeant, was a disciplinarian, shaping a trait his son would bring to the basketball court.“I was 14 years old before I found out I wasn’t in the Marine Corps because I lived like a Marine,” Fitch told The Los Angeles Times in 1994. “I had nobody to share that razor strap with. I was an only child.”Fitch played basketball at Coe College in Cedar Rapids and got his first head-coaching post there in 1958. He later coached at North Dakota, where Phil Jackson was one of his players, and then at Bowling Green and Minnesota before getting the Cavaliers’ head-coaching post.He retired from pro coaching after the 1997-98 season with 944 victories and 1,106 losses. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 2019.Fitch during his enshrinement in the Basketball Hall of Fame in September 2019. Annette Grant/NBAE via Getty ImagesIn addition to his daughter Marcy Ann, his survivors include two other daughters, Tammy Fitch and Lisa Fitch.Fitch retained his zest for basketball gamesmanship long after he retired from coaching.“I never really thought being known as Captain Video was a bad deal,” he told the N.B.A.’s website in 2013. “Other people could laugh and tease all they wanted. The truth is I was glad that nobody else was doing it because I thought it always gave our teams a big advantage.”“If you could see my closet today,” he said, “it’s crammed full from floor to ceiling with old tapes and now with DVDs, and I’m still doing film for different people. I still love the competition and the strategy.” More

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      Bob Goalby, Masters Champion Thanks to a Gaffe, Dies at 92

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      He won at Augusta in 1968 after Robert De Vincenzo signed an incorrect scorecard. But to many, the victory was tainted, leaving Goalby feeling like the victim.Bob Goalby, the 1968 Masters champion whose victory was shadowed by one of golf’s most memorable gaffes, Roberto De Vicenzo’s signing of an incorrect scorecard, died on Thursday in Belleville, Ill. He was 92.The PGA Tour confirmed his death.Goalby won 11 PGA Tour championships, he was a runner-up at the United States Open and the PGA Championship, and he once shot a tour-record eight consecutive birdies. He was among the founders of the Senior Tour, now called the Champions Tour. But he was remembered mostly for the bizarre events of an Easter Sunday at Augusta National in Georgia.When Goalby walked off the 18th green with a final-round 66 and a total of 277 at the 1968 Masters, he expected to face De Vicenzo, the winner of the 1967 British Open, in a playoff. De Vicenzo, who was considered Argentina’s finest international player, had finished moments earlier with a 65 that had evidently given him 277 as well.But De Vicenzo’s birdie 3 on the 17th hole had been marked as a par 4 by his playing partner, Tommy Aaron, who was tallying his scorecard, a common arrangement for paired golfers. De Vicenzo, disgusted by his bogey on the 18th hole, had quickly signed that card, giving him a 66 for 278, without making certain that Aaron’s markings matched his own unofficial scorecard.Goalby with a glum De Vincenzo after the Masters tournament had concluded. Goalby emerged the victor because of a scorecard mistake by his Argentine rival. “What a stupid I am,” De Vincenzo lamented.Associated PressWhen the error was discovered within minutes, Masters officials, after conferring with Bobby Jones, the patriarch of Augusta National, concluded that because De Vicenzo had signed the scorecard, the rules of golf prohibited him from correcting it.De Vicenzo famously lamented, “What a stupid I am.”Goalby put on the traditional Masters green jacket, but he received numerous letters from fans accusing him of being a phantom champion. Some evidently presumed that it was Goalby, rather than De Vicenzo’s playing partner, who had been keeping the Argentine’s scorecard.“I still have a thousand letters in a box at home saying I’m the worst guy that ever lived,” Goalby told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1998. “One fellow wrote, ‘They ought to put you and Sonny Liston in cement and drop you in the ocean.’”Goalby always considered himself a true Masters champion, and De Vicenzo, along with fellow golfers on the pro tour, did not begrudge him his victory.“The guy you have to feel sorriest for is Goalby,” the tour golfer Frank Beard was quoted as saying by Sports Illustrated in the weeks after the Masters. “A man gets few chances in his career to win a big one. But to win one and have it tainted like this is terrible. It wasn’t as if Roberto didn’t know the rules.”For Goalby, the taint never faded.“I’ve always felt like a victim, as much or more than Roberto,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “None of the problems with scorecards were my fault. But I have forever been singled out as the guy who won the Masters because of some damn clerical mistake. I don’t think I ever got credit for what I did that week.”Robert George Goalby was born on March 14, 1929, in Belleville, near St. Louis, the son of a coal miner. He was a star quarterback in high school and worked as a caddy. He won several Midwestern golf tournaments as an amateur, attended the University of Illinois, then served in the Army.“I learned to play golf by mimicking the swings of those I caddied for,” Goalby told The Missouri Golf Post in 2016. “Very few of my buddies played golf because it was so expensive, but we all played football, baseball and basketball. I only got serious about golf after I got out of the Army and was sort of at loose ends.”He joined the pro tour in 1952.Goalby struggled with his tendency to hook the ball, and he showed a temper that sometimes left him talking to himself on the fairways. But he was among the leading golfers of the 1960s. He tied Doug Sanders for second place at the 1961 United States Open, one stroke behind Gene Littler, and he was second at the 1962 PGA Championship, one shot behind Gary Player.He set a PGA Tour record for consecutive birdies in a tournament with eight at the 1961 St. Petersburg Open in Florida, a mark equaled by several others and eclipsed by Mark Calcavecchia’s nine at the 2009 Canadian Open. He played in the 1963 Ryder Cup.Goalby was a leader of the touring pros’ rebellion of 1966-68 against the Professional Golfers’ Association of America, the national organizing body at the time not only for the tournament players but also for the numerous “golf pros” who ran pro shops and gave lessons.The tournament players demanded full control over their scheduling and finances in a dispute that was finally resolved with the creation of the modern PGA Tour. Run by a commissioner, it has engineered a huge growth in TV revenue, purses and events along with a pension plan.“When you look at how successful it has been, and all the money these guys play for now, so much of it came from those days,” Goalby told Golf.com when it recounted the dispute in 2018.Goalby retired from the PGA Tour in 1971. He helped create the framework for the Senior Tour at a January 1980 meeting with Sam Snead, Gardner Dickinson, Don January, Julius Boros and Dan Sikes at PGA Tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. He was a two-time winner on the tour, its unofficial spokesman in its early years and later a member of its policy board.He was also a golf commentator for NBC and designed golf courses near his home.Goalby’s immediate survivors include his sons Kye, Kelly (known as Kel) and Kevin. He was an uncle of Jay Haas, a nine-time winner on the PGA Tour, and Jerry Haas, the golf coach at Wake Forest University, and a great-uncle of Bill Haas, who has won six PGA Tour events.Goalby was a playing partner with De Vicenzo several times over the years, and he said that they remained friends but never discussed that 1968 Masters. Di Vicenzo died in Argentina in 2017 at age 94.At the office in his Belleville home, Goalby kept a letter from Bobby Jones: “I ask you to always remember that you won the tournament under the rules of golf and by superlative play.”And, as Goalby told The Rocky Mountain News in 1995, “When I’m introduced, they still have to say, ‘Bob Goalby, Masters champion.’” More

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      Lusia Harris, ‘Queen of Basketball,’ Dies at 66

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      She was the only woman officially drafted by the N.B.A. and the first Black woman inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.Lusia Harris, a powerful center who led the Delta State University’s women’s basketball team to three consecutive national championships in the mid-1970s, died on Tuesday in Mound Bayou, Miss. She was 66.Her daughter Crystal Stewart Washington confirmed the death at a therapy facility, but did not know the cause. She lived in Greenwood, Miss.Ms. Harris was one of women’s basketball’s most accomplished players. She averaged 25.9 points and 14.4 rebounds a game at Delta State in Cleveland, Miss.; scored the opening points when women’s basketball was first played at the Olympics, in Montreal in 1976; was the only woman officially drafted by an N.B.A. team; and was the first Black woman inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.Pat Summitt, her Olympic teammate who went on to a Hall of Fame career as the women’s basketball coach at the University of Tennessee, described Ms. Harris as “the first truly dominant player of modern women’s basketball, 6-foot-3 and 185 hard-muscled pounds of pivoting, to-the-rim force,” in her book, “Sum It Up” (2013, with Sally Jenkins).Ms. Harris, known as Lucy, played at Delta State before the N.C.A.A. held a women’s basketball tournament (its first one was in 1982) and before major universities began to dominate the sport.But there was a title for the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, and the Delta State Lady Statesmen won their first in 1975, defeating Immaculata University. During the next season, Ms. Harris scored 46 points against Queens College before 10,032 fans at Madison Square Garden.“She was just a giant,” said Donna Orender, who played for Queens College and later became president of the W.N.B.A. “There just weren’t that many women of that size and skill then. Down low, she was effective and efficient.”Ms. Harris scored the opening points when Olympic women’s basketball was first played, at the Montreal Summer Olympics, in 1976.ABC Photo Archives/Disney, via Getty ImagesDelta State soon after defeated Immaculata again to win the A.I.A.W. championship. Then, in 1977, the Lady Statesmen won the title over Louisiana State University.“The men’s team didn’t sell out as well as the women’s team,” Ms. Harris said in “The Queen of Basketball” (2021), a short documentary about her directed by Ben Proudfoot that premiered at the Tribeca Festival. “We began to travel on airplanes. As a matter of fact, the men didn’t fly. I guess the women were bringing in the money.”A few months after her final game at Delta State, Ms. Harris was chosen in the seventh round of the N.B.A. draft by the New Orleans (now Utah) Jazz. Only one woman before her, Denise Long, then a high school senior, had been drafted — by the San Francisco (now Golden State) Warriors, in 1969 — but Walter Kennedy, the N.B.A. commissioner, disallowed the pick.Ms. Harris declined to join a Jazz rookie camp; she was already married to her high school sweetheart, George Stewart, and pregnant. She also doubted that she could play successfully on a men’s team.“I knew that I couldn’t compete on that level,” she told The Undefeated last year.Born on Feb. 10, 1955, Lusia Mae Harris grew up in Minter City, Miss. Her parents, Willie and Ethel (Gilmore) Harris, were sharecroppers. Lusia picked cotton but also played basketball with her brothers in their backyard. She molded her game, especially her defensive skills, at Amanda Elzy High School, in Greenwood, before attending Delta State.By the time she was chosen for the 1976 United States Olympic team, Ms. Harris was a star. In addition to Ms. Summitt, the squad included Nancy Lieberman and Ann Meyers, two future Basketball Hall of Famers, and Gail Marquis. Ms. Harris scored the first points in women’s Olympic history in the opening game against Japan, which the United States lost.One of her biggest challenges was playing against Juliana Semenova, the Soviet’s 7-foot center.“She is so much taller, so much bigger and she didn’t jump,” Ms. Harris told the Kentucky Women’s Basketball Oral History last year. “All she had to do was extend her arms. And I mean, I’m only 6-3. The thing I figured out is that I would beat her down the court because she wasn’t that fast.”The Soviets routed the Americans, 112-77, with Ms. Semenova scoring 32 to Ms. Harris’s 18. The United States team nonetheless departed Montreal with a silver medal after defeating Czechoslovakia.In five games, Ms. Harris averaged 15.2 points and 7 rebounds.Ms. Harris graduated with a bachelor’s degree in health, physical education and recreation. But she had few opportunities to play professional basketball. The W.N.B.A. was two decades away. The men got the opportunities she craved. “Yeah, they’re millionaires, famous,” she said in “The Queen of Basketball.” “But I wanted to grow up and shoot that ball just like they would shoot it, and I did.”She worked as an admissions counselor and assistant women’s basketball coach at Delta State; played briefly for the Houston Angels of the short-lived Women’s Professional Basketball League during the 1979-80 season; and coached the Texas Southern University women’s basketball team from 1984 to 1986.Ms. Harris, pictured at the 2021 Tribeca Festival Premiere Shorts, made history when she was enshrined at the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992.Cindy Ord/Getty ImagesShe earned a master’s in special education from Delta State in 1984, taught special education and coached high school basketball in Mississippi. She retired nearly 20 years ago.In addition to Ms. Stewart Washington, she is survived by another daughter, Christina Jordan; two sons, George Jr. and Christopher; her brothers Clarence Harris, Kendrick Blossom and Ronnie Blossom; her sisters Ethel James, Ella Harris, Darlene Lindsey and Linda Washington; and 10 grandchildren. Her marriage ended in divorce.Ms. Harris’s enshrinement at the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992 — where her presenter was Oscar Robertson, whom she idolized — was a reminder of how much impact she had as a player.“Lucy was mean underneath the boards,” Margaret Wade, her coach at Delta State, told The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss. “When she wanted to score, she could score. But the thing I liked about Lucy was, she was a team player. She did what the team needed and that’s why we were successful.” More

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      Bob Falkenburg, Tennis Hall of Famer Turned Entrepreneur, Dies at 95

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      He won at Wimbledon in 1948 and took some doubles titles before decamping to Brazil and founding a fast-food chain.Bob Falkenburg, the Tennis Hall of Famer who captured the 1948 Wimbledon singles championship in a thrilling fifth-set comeback and also won a pair of Grand Slam men’s doubles titles, then forged a second career as a businessman who introduced fast food outlets to South America, died on Thursday at his home in Santa Ynez, Calif. He was 95.His death was confirmed to The Associated Press by his daughter Claudia.Falkenburg was ranked among the nation’s top 10 tennis players at age 17 and remained in that elite category for the next five years.His signature achievement came at Wimbledon in 1948, when he was down three match points facing John Bromwich of Australia. Relying on powerful backhands and a strong serve, he came back to win his only major singles championship. A year later, Falkenburg won the first two sets facing Bromwich in the Wimbledon quarterfinals, but Bromwich won the last three.Falkenburg teamed with Don McNeill as men’s doubles champions at the U.S. Nationals at Forest Hills in 1944 and with Jack Kramer in the Wimbledon doubles in 1947.The International Tennis Hall of Fame, which inducted Falkenburg in 1974, called him “a thinking man’s player, one who took calculated risks when others might play it safe.”“He was confident that his big booming serve wouldn’t fail him and that his forays to net would lead to winners,” it said.Falkenburg’s brother, Tom, and his sister, Jinx Falkenburg, competed in the U.S. Nationals. But Jinx was best known for her career in show business. She was a model and movie actress, then joined with her husband and manager, Tex McCrary, on the popular radio and early TV breakfast chat program “Tex and Jinx.”Falkenburg entered his last Grand Slam tournament in 1955 after moving to Brazil with his wife, Lourdes Mayrink Veiga Machado, a Brazilian native, whom he married in 1947. He played for Brazil in the 1954 and 1955 Davis Cups.According to the Tennis Hall of Fame, Falkenburg once remembered how on one of his trips from the United States to Brazil he was “distressed that I couldn’t get a decent hamburger or milkshake.”He founded South America’s first fast food and ice cream outlets in 1952 in the Copacabana neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, calling them Bob’s. His mini-chain consisted of about a dozen outlets when the Falkenburgs, having moved back to Southern California in 1970, sold Bob’s to Nestlé’s Libby operation in 1974. Bob’s has had several ownerships since then and has expanded to more than 1,000 outlets in Brazil and beyond South America as well.Robert Falkenburg was born on Jan. 29, 1926, in Manhattan and grew up in Los Angeles. His father, Eugene, an engineer, and his mother, Marguerite (Crooks) Falkenburg, played in amateur tennis events, and Bob began wielding a racket at private clubs when he was 10 years old.He won a junior tennis tournament to the Bel-Air Country Club in 1937 and, while at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, won the U.S. Interscholastic singles title in 1942; he also teamed with his brother to win the doubles title that year. He was later a fine amateur golfer and won the Brazilian amateur championship three times.After serving in the Army Air Forces during World War II, Falkenburg won the 1946 intercollegiate singles and double championships while at the University of Southern California.In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by his son, Robert, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, according to The A.P. Both Tex and Jinx (her birth name was Eugenia; her mother provided her nickname) died in 2003.Describing Falkenburg’s stunning final-set comeback at Wimbledon in 1948, The New York Times reported that “Wimbledon championship fans have seen far better tennis than today’s match, but they’ve rarely witnessed a more exciting one.”As for Falkenburg’s serve that ended the match, 7-5, The Times related how “there was one clear loud pop.”“Bromwich stood flatfooted as the service ace whizzed by him,” The Times wrote. “When a few minutes later, the Duchess of Kent up in the Royal Box presented the coveted trophy to Falkenburg, he looked as surprised as he was pleased.” More

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      Sam Jones, Sharpshooting Celtics Star of the 1960s, Dies at 88

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      A member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, he was named one of the 50 greatest players in N.B.A. history and played on 10 N.B.A. championship teams.Sam Jones, the Boston Celtics’ sharpshooting Hall of Fame guard who played on 10 N.B.A. championship teams, a milestone exceeded only by his teammate Bill Russell, died on Thursday in Florida. He was 88. His death was announced by a Celtics spokesman, who did not specify a cause but said that Jones had been in failing health. He also did not say where in Florida he died, but Jones had been living in the Orlando area.When Jones was selected by the Celtics out of the historically Black North Carolina College at Durham (now North Carolina Central University) in the first round of the 1957 draft — he was the eighth player chosen overall — he was more astonished and apprehensive than thrilled. Since players at Black colleges had gained little national notice at the time, he viewed himself as a potential pioneer, though he questioned his chances of making a Celtics lineup brimming with stars.“I had a lot of pressure put on me,” Jones told The Boston Globe in 2009. “We didn’t have scouts coming in to see what the Black colleges were doing. If I make good, they’re going to start looking into the Black colleges.”Despite his doubts, Jones quickly impressed Coach Red Auerbach. He went on to team with K.C. Jones (no relation), a tenacious defender, in a backcourt pairing that eventually replaced that of Bob Cousy and Bill Sharman, two of the N.B.A.’s greatest players of the 1950s. The Joneses became part of a record-setting run alongside Russell, who transformed the center position with his rebounding and defense, the forwards Tom Heinsohn, John Havlicek and Satch Sanders, and Cousy and Sharman in their final seasons.Jones went to the basket against the Philadelphia Warriors in a 1965 game as the Warriors’ Wilt Chamberlain (No. 13) looked on. Jones, who was 6-foot-4, relished getting the best of Chamberlain, who was 7-foot-1.Dick Raphael/NBAE/Getty ImagesSam Jones played on Celtics teams that won eight consecutive N.B.A. championships (1959 to 1966) and another two in 1968 and 1969. A five-time All-Star, he was called Mr. Clutch for the many baskets he scored in the final seconds of playoff games. His total of 10 championship rings has been exceeded only by Russell’s 11.Jones was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 1984 and was named one of the 50 greatest players in N.B.A. history when the league celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1996. He once held the Celtics’ single-game scoring record, with 51 points against the Detroit Pistons in October 1965. When he retired after 12 seasons, he was the team’s career scoring leader, with 15,411 points. Larry Bird and Jayson Tatum are the current single-game record-holders, with 60 points, and Havlicek holds the career scoring record, with 26,395.Jones was renowned for using the backboard when most players were shooting directly at the hoop.“Sam showed them how to use the bank shot,” Auerbach once told United Press International. “He made it popular, and he made it an art.”Jones had supreme confidence in that shot. As he put it, “I felt it was like making a layup.”Samuel Jones was born on June 24, 1933, in Wilmington, N.C. At North Carolina College, playing for the Hall of Fame coach John B. McLendon in a Division II program, he was a fine shooter, scoring a total of 1,170 points, and an outstanding rebounder.Auerbach had never seen Jones play in college. But he drafted him when Bones McKinney, a North Carolinian and one of Auerbach’s former players, raved about him. Jones had planned to become a teacher but tried his luck at the Celtics’ training camp.He was a reserve for several seasons before taking over for Sharman. Though he was 6-foot-4, tall for a guard at the time, he was quicker than many smaller guards.When he saw Russell about to snare an offensive rebound, Jones would move away from the man defending him, who was watching the ball, and get ready to snare a pass from Russell and convert it into a bank shot. As he told NBA.com, “You only need a second to get a shot off.”Jones retired from the Celtics in 1969 and was later head coach at Federal City College in Washington (now the University of the District of Columbia) and at North Carolina Central. He was an assistant coach for the N.B.A.’s New Orleans Jazz.Jones in 2009 at the Sports Museum in Boston, where he received a lifetime achievement award. After retiring from the Celtics, he coached college ball. Steven Senne/AP Jones and his wife, Gladys Chavis Jones, who died in 2018, had five children. Information on survivors was not immediately available.Jones averaged 17.7 points a game in the regular season for the Celtics, but he was particularly dangerous in the playoffs. He hit a jump shot over the Philadelphia Warriors’ Wilt Chamberlain in the final seconds of Game 7 in the 1962 Eastern Division playoff final, giving Boston a 109-107 victory. He had five of the Celtics’ 10 overtime points against the Los Angeles Lakers in Game 7 of the league finals, helping to propel Boston to a fourth consecutive championship.Jones relished getting the best of the 7-foot-1 Chamberlain.“I never challenged him by trying to drive right on him — he’d just block your shot,” he told Terry Pluto for the N.B.A. oral history “Tall Tales” (1992). “I’d stop in front of him and shoot over him. Then I talked to him. I talked to everybody on the court, but it was a lot of fun to say things to Wilt because he’d react to them.”In a fight-filled fourth quarter of Game 5 in that Celtics-Warriors series, Jones collided with Chamberlain, who outweighed him by nearly 50 pounds, and they exchanged unpleasantries. When Chamberlain grabbed at Jones’s wrist — perhaps in a peace gesture — Jones ran off the court.“He saw Wilt still coming after him, so Sam picked up one of the photographers’ chairs and held it out at Wilt as if Sam were a lion tamer,” the referee Norm Drucker recalled to Mr. Pluto.“He was about ready to go up into the stands — he didn’t want to fight,” said Chamberlain, the strongest man in pro basketball. “So I said, ‘Ah, forget it.’” More

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      Manuel Santana, Influential Spanish Tennis Champion, Dies at 83

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      He won the French Open twice and captured the U.S. National Championships and Wimbledon, as well as winning at the 1968 Olympics.MADRID — Manuel Santana, who as one of Spain’s first great tennis champions won four Grand Slam titles in the 1960s and heralded his country’s arrival as a tennis powerhouse, died on Saturday in Marbella, the beach town in southern Spain where he had long lived and managed a tennis club. He was 83.His death was announced by the Mutua Madrid Open tennis tournament, where Santana was honorary president. No cause was given, but Marcos García Montes, a lawyer and close friend of his, told a Spanish television show that Santana had died of a heart attack. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.Santana, the first Spaniard to win a Grand Slam event, rose to the top echelon of world tennis during the amateur era by winning the U.S. National Championships at Forest Hills, Queens, Wimbledon and the French Open, twice. He also represented Spain in winning a gold medal in singles and a silver in doubles at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City (when tennis was a demonstration sport at the Games).His victories inspired a host of Spanish players, who have kept Spain among the most successful countries in tennis to this day.That progeny includes Manuel Orantes, Carlos Moyá, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario and Conchita Martínez. The greatest of them all, Rafael Nadal, a 20-time Grand Slam champion, called Santana his role model on Twitter. “A thousand thanks for what you did for our country and for opening the way for others,” he said.Santana, who never played in the Australian Open, and Sánchez Vicario are second to Nadal in Slam victories, with four each.Santana won 72 tournaments in his career. His first success in a Grand Slam came in 1961 in Paris on his favorite surface, clay. He defeated two Australian stars, Roy Emerson and Rod Laver, before capturing the final against Italy’s Nicola Pietrangeli, a two-time winner in Paris. Three years later, Santana defeated Pietrangeli again in the French Open.In 1965, Santana established his credentials on grass, the surface he had once derided as made for cows and the one used at the time by three of the Grand Slam tournaments: Wimbledon, Forest Hills and the Australian Open. He became the first European in almost four decades to win at Forest Hills that year, beating Cliff Drysdale in the final of the tournament, which was later renamed the U.S. Open.The next year, Santana skipped the French Open to better prepare for Wimbledon. The strategy worked: He defeated Dennis Ralston in the final. Upon receiving the trophy, Santana sought to kiss the hand of the Duchess of Kent, a breach of royal protocol. But the breach endeared him further to Spanish fans, who viewed him as a charismatic and warmhearted product of society’s margins in a sport once considered a realm of the elite.Manuel Santana Martínez was born on May 10, 1938, in Madrid. His father, Braulio Santana, was an electrician who was imprisoned after the Spanish Civil War and died when his son, known as Manolo, was a teenager. His mother, Mercedes Martínez, was a homemaker who struggled to raise her four children in an apartment building in which all the residents shared a single bathroom.Santana started at the Velázquez tennis club in Madrid as a ball boy, skipping school to collect tips from tennis players and earn money to support his mother. Tennis drew him, he said, because of the distance between competitors. “For somebody who always hated violence, a sport in which a net prevented physical contact felt like it was made for me,” he told the newspaper La Rioja of Logroño.At the club, he regularly prepared the clay court for two siblings from a wealthy family, Álvaro and Aurora Romero Girón. The two took an interest in Manuel and encouraged him to combine tennis with a commitment to school, while also providing financial support for Santana’s mother.When he was 13, he won the ball boys tournament at the Velázquez club and was officially admitted as a member. His game developed, and Santana, relying on an effective topspin, powerful forehand and craftily disguised drop shots, won the Spanish junior championships in 1955.“His game was pretty unique, and even though he was one of the best clay courters ever, he could play on anything,” said Stan Smith, the American former top player and president of the International Tennis Hall of Fame, which inducted Santana in 1984. “He was an ultimate big occasion competitor, but I don’t know anyone who didn’t like and respect him,” Smith added, in a statement on the hall’s website.After retiring as a tennis player, Santana went on to be captain of Spain’s Davis Cup team from 1980 to 1985 and 1995 to 1999. He managed two tennis clubs — in Madrid as well as Marbella — and until 2019 was the tournament director of the Mutua Madrid Open, whose center court was named after him.A fixture on the Spanish social scene, Santana was married four times and had five children. He is survived by his wife, Claudia Rodríguez; three children, Beatriz, Manolo and Borja, by his first wife, María Fernanda González-Dopeso; a daughter, Bárbara, with Bárbara Oltra; and another daughter, Alba, whose mother, Mila Ximénez, was a well-known Spanish journalist who died this year. Santana’s 1990 marriage to Otti Glanzelius, a former Swedish model, ended in divorce in 2009. More

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      Darlene Hard, Strong-Willed Tennis Star Before Pro Era, Dies at 85

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      Hard, who was outspoken and independent minded, was the top-ranked American woman from 1960 to 1963.Darlene Hard, a sturdy and strong-willed Californian with a power game who won 21 Grand Slam tennis championships as one of the last stars of the amateur era, died on Dec. 2 in Los Angeles. She was 85.Anne Marie McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I., which inducted Hard in 1973, confirmed the death but did not give a cause.Hard flourished in the late 1950s and early ’60s, when tournament tennis was the domain of amateurs. Along with her, the women’s game featured stars such as Althea Gibson and a young Billie Jean King, Maria Bueno of Brazil and Margaret Court of Australia, all future Hall of Famers.Of the Grand Slam tournaments, Hard won the United States amateur titles in 1960 and ’61 and the French title in 1960. She reached the United States finals in 1958 and 1962 and the Wimbledon finals in 1957 and 1959. She also won 13 Grand Slam championships in women’s doubles with eight different partners, and five in mixed doubles, often paired with Rod Laver.She was ranked No. 1 in the United States from 1960 through 1963, and No. 2 in the world in 1960 and ’61.Gibson played with more power than many women before or since, and Bueno was noted for her grace, but Hard’s aggressive game — big serve, strong overhead and punishing volley — made her a winner. At 5 feet 5½ inches tall and 140 pounds, her main success came on grass courts, where three of the four Grand Slam tournaments were played. (The French Open was, and still is, played on a clay surface).Hard was unusually outspoken at a time when most top players lacked the assertiveness that some display today. She once said of dominating Australian tennis officials: “They treat you not as a player but a puppet. Between tournaments, I was not asked to play in exhibitions — I was ordered to play in them. It was not ‘Miss Hard, would you mind playing?’ It was ‘Miss Hard, you will play.’”Hard belonged to four victorious teams in the Wightman Cup, the annual competition between British and American tennis players. She showed her independent mindedness then, too, earning the irritation of the American team’s captain, Margaret Osborne duPont.DuPont called Hard a “disrupting element” in an official 1962 report. “She insisted on practicing her way instead of complying with the captain’s wishes and those of the other team members,” duPont said.Hard took part in a match that made tennis history on July 6, 1957, losing in the final that made Gibson the first African American woman to win Wimbledon (by a 6-3, 6-2 score). Before the match, as customary, both players curtsied to a young Queen Elizabeth II. Afterward, the queen spoke to them for a few minutes. Then Gibson, following protocol, backed away. An overly enthused Hard, however, in an eyebrow-raising breach of etiquette, turned her back to the queen and skipped toward the locker room.Hard and Althea Gibson after the 1957 Wimbledon final, in which Gibson became the first African-American woman to win the event, defeating Hard. Keystone/Getty ImagesDarlene Ruth Hard was born on Jan. 6, 1936, in Los Angeles and grew up in nearby Montebello, Calif. Her father introduced her to football, basketball, baseball and softball. Her mother, a good amateur player, taught her tennis on public courts.After high school, Hard spent four years on the tennis circuit. Then, she later said, “I decided I didn’t want tennis for a life, so I went to college. I wanted to be in pediatrics. I guess I always wanted to be a doctor.”She went to Pomona College in California and in 1958 won the first intercollegiate tennis championship for women. She graduated in 1961.While at Pomona, Hard had a hitting session with a 13-year-old player who had demonstrated some promise: Billie Jean King.“Darlene Hard had a major influence on my career, as an athlete, teammate and friend,” King was quoted as saying on the Hall of Fame website. The two went on to play doubles together in the first Federation Cup, in 1963, the premier international women’s team tennis competition. King — for whom the cup is now named — recalled how they had overcome two match points to win the final, a highlight of both of their careers, she said.Hard returned to tennis after graduating and worked as a waitress between tournaments. In 1964, with only $400 in the bank, she turned professional and played on a South African tour with Bueno. She soon started giving tennis lessons in the Los Angeles area, leaving behind tournament play.But in 1969, the year after pros were accepted into major tournaments, she returned briefly to international competition, teaming up with Françoise Dürr to play doubles at the U.S. Open. Down 0-6, 0-2 in the final, they rallied to capture the title, 0–6, 6–3, 6–4.Hard went back to teaching tennis and owned two tennis shops. One of her tennis students, the director of student publications at the University of Southern California, offered her a job in the office in 1981. Hard remained there for nearly 40 years.Information on her survivors was not immediately available.In “We Have Come a Long Way: The Story of Women’s Tennis” (1988), which King wrote with Cynthia Starr, Hard described her dedication to the sport.“I didn’t do it for money,” she said. “I was the last of the amateurs. I won Forest Hills and I got my airfare from New York to Los Angeles. Whoopee.” She continued: “But we still went for our titles. We went for the glory. I was happy. I loved it. I loved tennis.”Frank Litsky, a longtime sportswriter for The Times, died in 2018. Daniel J. Wakin and Jordan Allen contributed reporting. More