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In the age of the pioneers of race relations, Nehemiah Atkinson was up to the task at hand.
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Photo by James Baker
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What is it about superior athletes, the champions,
that compels us? Surely not just beauty, the apex of youth -- though of course
that's a part of it. More is the sense we get of thought and action melded seamlessly,
so we can see into the champion's heart, can apprehend character in motion.
New Orleans' own Nehemiah Atkinson recently won the Vets World
Tennis Championship in the Men's Singles, 80-year-old and up division, on grass
courts in Perth, Australia. This is a very long way from the asphalt courts
of the Dryades Street YMCA where Atkinson got his start in the game.
It's not that he has outlived the best players of his generation:
his 6-4, 2-6, 6-3 victory was over Bob Sherman of Santa Barbara, Calif., the
No. 1 seed ("a tough man," says Atkinson), his nemesis for many years
on the Vets circuit, and, in Perth, his roommate.
Nehemiah Atkinson was born in 1918 in Biloxi,
the first of 10 children of Bishop C.C. and Josephine Atkinson. The family came
to New Orleans just before the Depression, when Bishop C.C. was promoted in
the Holiness Church to look after the multi-state diocese from here. "We were
blessed, a family where everything was working," recalls Nehemiah. He was educated
at the Thomy Lafon and J. W. Hoffman schools in New Orleans, and at the Louisiana
Industrial Training High School in Farmerville.
When war came, he shipped out of the First
Precinct at Tulane and Loyola avenues for infantry training, eventually finding
himself in the Army's Black Corps of Engineers, 97th Regiment, building airstrips
first at Puget Sound, Wash.; then to Valdez, Alaska., completing the Alcan Highway
with the Canadians; and then, after medic training, sailing to the South Pacific
to build airstrips in New Guinea, Buna Island and other locations in the Coral
Sea. The long journey home at war's end culminated with a last leg on a segregated
troop train out of Tyler, Texas, arriving in New Orleans on Dec. 25, 1945.
Out of the service with no jobs in sight,
he started doing things at the Dryades Y, and they grew. He got guys to bring
their checkers and chess games in out of the rain, to play a little ping pong.
He got youngsters to play street tennis, knocking a ball around with Y equipment,
and he got Coca Cola to sponsor it. This led to a night supervisor job at the
bottling plant.
With eight friends, Atkinson formed the New
Orleans Hard Court Tennis Club to organize and increase play at the Y's two
courts and also at Xavier University's two cement courts. And he started teaching:
$8 an hour, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
His first star pupil was Sharon Pettis, the
first local African American to break into the National Junior Sugar Bowl tennis
tournament, the important winter tennis event at Tulane University. "She got
beat bad, and cried and cried -- but went on from there," Atkinson remembers.
He helped her get a scholarship to play tennis on the Southern University men's
team; and she eventually became the first black female tennis teacher at NORD.
This was the age of the pioneers of race relations,
and Atkinson was up to the task at hand. Despite urine-filled tennis balls thrown
at him. Bricks. Foot-fault calls. Speeches by self-important superintendents
that began, "I've been watching you ... but there's too much riff-raff behind
you." (To which Atkinson replied, "Seems like your side's got more ... .")
And always -- always -- as his playing
career took off, and he won titles in Lafayette; Baton Rouge; Jackson, Miss.;
and beyond: the separate arrangements for sleeping and eating. Even on his first
trip to Australia not so very many years ago, where all the guys were doubled
up ... but there's your room, Mr. Atkinson, down the hall.
Atkinson carefully spells the name of Harry
Anisgard, a Jewish geologist with Esso, who in the 1960s sponsored his membership
to the City Park Tennis Club, for which they booted him out. After a few months,
they told Anisgard he could come back. So Atkinson sponsored him.
Atkinson long wrote a column called "Hard
Court Tennis Notes" for the Louisiana Weekly, the only local journal
covering important stories like the rocketing success of Althea Gibson, whom
Atkinson recalls as "a real tomboy with those long, beautiful strokes." He was
forever gathering photos and clippings, sending kids to tournaments ... all
on a volunteer basis, with the lessons paying the way.
From the time he was 12, Arthur Ashe would
come to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl season and be greeted at the station
by Atkinson. Ashe's junior era ended with "the greatest match ever at Tulane,"
Atkinson remembers. "Arthur was down 5-0 in the second set to [the great Yugoslav]
Nikki Pilic, and came all the way back. Then Arthur and Ron Homberg won the
doubles."
When NORD needed a tennis professional for
their City Park and Audubon locations, they sought advice from Philip Adam,
son of VA Hospital Chief Louis Adam, who stated flatly that "Nehemiah Atkinson
would be an excellent choice for the position." Later, in 1973, when NORD opened
the Stern Tennis Center on Saratoga Street, Atkinson was named director, a position
he held until his crowded retirement party at Gallier Hall in 1996.
From Stern, Atkinson was able to cast his
net ever wider. Like, in 1977, when one Stern guest was asked about his New
Orleans weekend the following night on the Johnny Carson show. "Where did you
eat?" Carson asked Bill Cosby. "Oh, a place called Eddie's," replied Coz, who
went on to describe his food. And what else did you do? "Oh, I played tennis
with an old man." (Atkinson was almost 60.) Why? "I felt sorry for him."
What happened? "I lost six-love, six-love."
Or the tournament in Lafayette where Atkinson
gave the 5-year-old Chanda Rubin a racquet, showed her how to grip it and told
her, "Now go get 'em!" Or when he was the keynote speaker at Van Der Meer's
of Hilton Head the year that Ashe -- the previous year's keynote speaker --
had died. Atkinson stood up, asked for a minute of silence for Arthur Ashe,
"and after the minute ... it was pandemonium," he recalls.
Everyone he's played tennis with has a favorite
Atkinsonism. "Service!" he'll exclaim, touching the three balls in his left
hand to his racquet strings, if he's felt anyone's attention drifting. "Thank
you!" with friendly enthusiasm if you have donated him a point with a double
fault. "That's a dandy!" you'll get, if you're lucky enough to have beaten
him with a particularly pleasing ball. How he'll start chuckling in the midst
of only the finest points. All gestures of a generous spirit as graceful as
his many varied strokes.
"Yes, the win in Perth was a great one," says
his friend Larry Kimbrough, who has been helping Atkinson while he's been sick
-- he's had to cancel a trip to a tournament near Mount Ararat in Turkey. "But
the real thing is the seeds he has left everywhere." So many fully grown now,
from this mighty oak.
