Saga of Unlikely Tennis Pair
by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 2/25/2002
The story of how two tennis "outsiders," black Althea Gibson and Jewish Briton Angela Buxton, teamed up to win one of the most dazzling women's doubles matches ever, in the 1956 French Open, was bought by Dawn Davis, editorial director of the Amistad imprint at HarperCollins. It's called Match of a Lifetime, and the author is Bruce Schoenfeld, an Emmy Award winning TV and magazine journalist who aims to examine the relationship between the two women, which lasted many years afterward, and the social and class barriers they had to overcome in the much more segregated tennis of the time. It will also, he says, bring more attention to Gibson, the first black woman ever to win at Wimbledon, as one of the more underrecognized sports heroines. Davis bought world rights to the story from agent Andrew Blauner.
