‘Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson’
By Ashley Brown
Oxford University Press, 616 pages

‘Althea: The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson’
By Sally H. Jacobs
St. Martin’s Press, 464 pages

Some biographical subjects, like Althea Gibson, a world-class athlete and breaker of racial barriers, are just bigger than a single biography can encompass. So the question becomes, for each biography, how to tell her story anew, showing that its implications are innumerable. 

In the first paragraph of “Serving Herself,” Gibson, after being presented with the victor’s plate by Queen Elizabeth for taking the 1957 women’s singles title at Wimbledon, the first Black American to mark that triumph, dances with the white, blond men’s singles champion, Lew Hoad, as Wimbledon Ball attendees watch — some with admiration, some with displeasure. 

That’s how fast Gibson’s world revolved from its summit to its nadir. Similarly, in the second and third paragraphs of Ashley Brown’s biography, Gibson is celebrated at New York City, her hometown, by thousands in a ticker-tape parade, lavished with praise at a Waldorf-Astoria Hotel banquet, and then during the U.S. Clay Court Championships the following week, none of the hotels in River Forest, site of the tournament, will accommodate her.

At the beginning of “Althea,” we are watching “King Richard,” the recent film about the tennis champion Williams sisters and their irrepressible impresario of a father, and a photograph of Gibson is seen stuck on a refrigerator, an acknowledgment of how much her example has contributed to the lives of these winning Black sisters.

Ms. Jacobs in her second paragraph backs up 65 years to show a “skinny high school dropout bearing the scars of her father’s beating on her back” who “served and lobbed her way from Harlem’s mean streets to the lush green courts of Wimbledon to become the first Black woman to be number-one tennis player in the world. Seven years later she rewrote history again when she broke the color barrier in women’s golf and became the first Black member of the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour in 1964.”

Which is the better biography? It depends, doesn’t it, on your taste in metaphors and your appetite for facts, and how they are presented. Ms. Brown tends to be more reportorial, Ms. Jacobs more novelistic (“served and lobbed,” “lush green courts”). Blood has been spilled before the end of the first page of Ms. Jacobs’s preface, whereas with Ms. Brown there is just the mention by a banquet speaker that Ms. Gibson has “come up the hard way.”

Jack Johnson and Jackie Robinson are Gibson’s barrier-breaking predecessors on the first page of “Althea,” even as Ms. Jacobs observes that as a woman, Althea “had no models before her to lead the way, no teammates to support her.”

The very last words of Ms. Brown’s first page invoke the “civil rights movement under way,” and when questioned (we are now heading into page 2), Althea wants no part of movement politics: “No, I don’t consider myself to be a representative of my people. I am thinking of me and nobody else.” This made her sound selfish to some, when in fact she was simply uttering the conviction of every artist, every athlete, who has invested in herself and does not want to be heralded as an example or cause.

At the beginning of Ms. Jacobs’s second page, Gibson’s fluid sexual identity is determinative, earning her the “enmity of not only men in the white world who were inclined to reject her for her skin color alone but also some people in the Black community.” Ms. Jacobs is keenly attuned to the psychology of a woman who endured a “childhood of neglect and physical abuse.”

Too often biographies are read as though they are all content, which means the biographer is a supplier, not a creator. While that is, to some extent, true insofar as the data of a subject’s life remain the same, the truth of that life, its resonance, is going to reverberate differently from one biography to another.

Althea Gibson is remarkably well served by these two biographies that in their differences of approach and style make the reading of biography itself so endlessly fascinating and fruitful.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Reading Biography.”