MARBLE, Alice

(b. 28 September 1913 in Beckwith, California; d. 13 December 1990 in Palm Springs, California), world champion of women's tennis in the 1930s and a woman of extraordinary courage, resourcefulness, and spirit.

Marble was to the fourth of five children of Harry Briggs Marble, a high climber lumberjack, and Jessie Wood, a former nurse. When Marble was five, her family moved from the Sierra Nevada town of Beckwith to San Francisco. Sadly, her father died two years later on Christmas Eve, plunging the family into poverty and causing her two older brothers to leave school to help support the family.

Marble was blessed with a photographic memory, extraordinary athletic ability, and a keen love of sports. At thirteen her baseball skills earned her the title "Little Queen of Swat" as an unpaid warm-up player and official mascot of the San Francisco Seals, a feeder team for the New York Yankees. Alice loved baseball, but when she was fifteen her brother Dan bought her a tennis racket, encouraging her to pick a more ladylike sport. In spite of her initial disappointment, within a week she was hooked on tennis, and soon was playing and winning local and then statewide tournaments.

Three years later Marble represented California in the Eastern Tournaments and the U.S. Nationals. Her excellent hand-eye coordination, natural athletic ability, quick foot speed, and years of practice pitching had given her an aggressive game and a powerful serve. At first her ground strokes were terribly performed, but she improved as she watched others play. Coming from a family with few economic resources, Alice at first felt uncomfortable, as if she didn't belong in the rarefied atmosphere of tennis. By 1932 she knew she belonged. That year, as an unknown, Marble beat a seeded player in the first round at Forest Hills, where she earned a national ranking in singles and in doubles.

In 1932 a famous tennis coach, Eleanor "Teach" Tennent, discovered Marble, and would guide her career and her life for the next thirteen years. By 1933, with Tennent's help, Marble had sharpened her game with a change in grip, improved ground strokes, and a winning attack game at the net, and improved her singles national ranking to third. Because of her ability to get to every shot, and her ferocious net game, she was also a great doubles player. It was said that Marble, both a golden blond beauty and a bold and free powerhouse on the tennis court, could play like a man. This was because unlike other women players of her time, she used her powerful serve and attack and volley game to dominate her opponents. She pioneered an aggressive style of power tennis for women, a strategy followed by later champions, such as Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova.

There was no questioning Marble's tennis skills. One day in 1933, in a final qualifying tournament on Long Island, Marble showed the world that she also had great spirit, fortitude, and courage. Tournament officials decreed that she play five matches on a scorchingly hot day of over 100 degrees. She played a total of 108 games and was on the court without much rest from ten o'clock in the morning to seven in the evening. Losing twelve pounds, she managed to finish out the day. Later that evening she collapsed from sunstroke and anemia. Although she would play the following season, she could not recover her health. At the French Open in 1934, she played in pain until she collapsed and had to be carried off the court and rushed to a hospital. Suffering from anemia and pleurisy, she was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis, and doctors said she would never play competitive tennis again. Marble returned to her family to recuperate, but soon realized that her care was an added burden to her overworked and economically precarious family. She asked her coach for help, and Tennent responded by taking over responsibility for Marble's care, including the costs of a stay in a tuberculosis sanitarium. Later, at Marble's insistence, Tennent smuggled her out of the facility against the director's orders. Together, the two engineered Marble's return to competitive tennis. Tennent worked to provide for them financially, while Marble worked to recover her health and her tennis skills.

Two years later, in 1936, Forest Hills tournament officials had to be convinced of Marble's readiness to return to tennis competition. They made her play a demonstration match against a male player, who faded under her relentless power and stamina. When finally given permission to enter, she proved them wrong again when she beat Helen Jacobs to win the U.S. Singles Championship and the mixed doubles title (with Gene Mako) as well. She had made her way back and became the top woman player in the United States. For the next four years, her tennis skills, determination, and winning spirit would win her three more U.S. Singles Championships, three doubles championships (with Sarah Palfrey Fabyan), and three mixed doubles championships (with Donald Budge [1938]; Harry Hopman [1939]; and Bobby Riggs [1940]). In 1937 she won the mixed doubles at Wimbledon (with Budge); in 1938 she won both the doubles and mixed doubles there (with Fabyan and Budge); and in 1939 she reached her ultimate goal, winning Wimbledon Championships in singles, doubles (with Fabyan), and mixed doubles (with Riggs).

In the years from 1936 to 1940, Marble dominated women's tennis. She was ranked number one in the world, and the Associated Press named her Female Athlete of the Year in 1939 and 1940. Then, at the height of her career, Marble's personal financial obligations and her desire to contribute to the war effort caused her to sign a professional contract. She toured the country in exhibition matches, promotedphysical fitness for the Office of Civilian Defense, entertained servicemen and -women with tennis exhibitions, visited military hospitals, helped sell war bonds, and tried to enlist, always being turned down because of her continual health problems.

In 1941 Marble met and fell in love with Captain Joseph Crowley, an army intelligence officer. They were secretly married during one of Joe's brief military leaves. The couple was deeply in love, but had only brief interludes of marital happiness. Marble was thrilled when she learned she was pregnant, but suffered a miscarriage. This tragedy was compounded in 1944 when she learned that her husband had been killed in action. When she learned of his death, she unsuccessfully attempted suicide and plunged into despair.

As Marble was slowly emerging from her depression, Army Intelligence recruited her as a spy. She went to Switzerland on a tennis tour, and while there courageously gathered information about German financial accounts. She was shot in the back while escaping a counteragent, was rescued, and then went on with her life. Always needing to earn a living and to repay Tennent, this multitalented woman sang in New York City nightclubs, debuting at New York's Waldorf Hotel in 1938; served as a sports announcer for WNEW in New York in 1940; and designed a line of tennis wear. She had a long-standing affair with television writer Rod Serling, and made a cameo appearance in the movie Pat and Mike with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. She coached future champions Billie Jean King, Darlene Hard, and Maureen Connolly. In 1950 her editorial in American Lawn Tennis Magazine shamed the tennis establishment into breaking its whites-only policy to allow Althea Gibson, a woman Marble had mentored, to play in the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association tennis tournaments.

Throughout her busy and productive life, Marble suffered from health problems, but nothing seemed to stop her, including colon cancer and the loss of a lung to pneumonia. In 1964 she was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. By 1965 she was happily settled at the Palm Desert Country Club in Palm Desert, California, where she taught tennis and continued to follow and visit with the young champions of the day until her death there in 1990.

Marble wrote two autobiographical works, The Road to Wimbledon (1946) and, with Dale Leatherman, Courting Danger (1991). Her place in tennis history and her powerful style of play is covered in Owen Davidson and C. M. Jones, Great Women Tennis Players (1971); Virginia Wade's and Jean Rafferty, Ladies of the Court: A Century of Women at Wimbledon (1984); and Janet Woolum, Outstanding Women Athletes, Who They Are and How They Influenced Sports in America (1998). An obituary is in the New York Times (14 Dec. 1990). There is a discrepancy in her birthdate, most sources giving it as 28 September rather than 13 September 1913.

Julianne Cicarelli