The doors tennis has opened, and the rooms where the game still gets shaped

I watched the Cincinnati Open reach its final weekend and caught myself thinking about how far tennis has traveled in my lifetime. Coco Gauff had made the women's final. Frances Tiafoe and Arthur Fils had made the men's. Three of the four singles finalists were Black, and since Fils is French, this wasn't only an American story, which made the picture land even harder for me, because it wasn't the product of any single country's racial history. Nobody arranged it as a diversity showcase or a commemorative exhibition. One of the biggest tournaments in the world simply arrived at its final day, and three of the four people still standing were Black. My first feeling was the obvious one. Look how far we've come. My second feeling took longer to surface, and it's the reason I'm writing this. Getting through the door and being handed the keys are not the same thing, and tennis has gotten a lot better at one of those than the other.

That second feeling matters to me because I'm old enough to remember a very different sport. I don't mean a version of tennis I read about in a history book. I mean a sport lived in by people my own age, people I knew, people whose stories sat close enough to me that they shaped what I understand opportunity to actually be. Tennis has come an extraordinary distance, and I think we ought to be able to say so plainly before we ask where it still has ground to cover.

I thought first about Kyle Copeland. Kyle is roughly my age, played professionally, and competed in the Wimbledon doubles draw. Years ago she told me a story I've never been able to shake. She had earned a place at the Championships and needed grass-court shoes, and the closest place carrying the ones she needed was a club in the Philadelphia area. She went to buy them and was sent around to the back door.

Sit with that for a second. She wasn't trying to join the club or use its courts. She wasn't asking anyone for the privilege of playing tennis at all. She was already a professional preparing to compete at Wimbledon, and she needed a piece of equipment to do her job, and somebody still decided the front door wasn't for her. In that story the door isn't a figure of speech. It was a door with hinges.

Then I thought about Zina Garrison, who is also roughly my age. She became one of the best players in the world and reached No. 4 in the rankings. In 1990 she went to Wimbledon without a clothing endorsement, and Martina Navratilova supplied her with clothes to wear. Zina beat Monica Seles, then beat Steffi Graf, and reached the final. Only then did the commercial world decide one of the four best women's tennis players on the planet might be worth dressing.

That's almost hard to process from where Coco Gauff sits today. Coco isn't simply accepted as an elite player. She's one of the faces of the sport. She gets evaluated as Coco, with all the expectation, criticism, endorsement money, pressure, and celebrity that come with being one of the best-known athletes in American tennis. She doesn't have to win Wimbledon first before somebody decides there's a market for clothes with her name on them.

That's progress. Real progress, and I've got no interest in shrinking it to set up some other point. But progress doesn't move everywhere at the same speed, which is exactly why the Cincinnati finals also put me in mind of Doug Williams. On January 31, 1988, Williams became the first Black quarterback to start and win a Super Bowl, and he was named the game's MVP. People younger than me sometimes have trouble grasping what quarterback represented back then. The barrier at quarterback wasn't about whether Black men were athletic enough to play football, since Black players were already everywhere on the field. The assumption around quarterback was about intelligence, leadership, judgment, and command. The quarterback was treated as the one who had to read the whole field and make the decisions, and that was the seat people weren't sure they wanted to hand over.

Today, Black quarterbacks are common enough that a young fan doesn't need a history lesson before picturing one behind center, and that's an enormous cultural shift. But climb the stairs from the field and start counting head coaches, general managers, senior executives, and owners, and you find out fast one breakthrough doesn't automatically produce all the others. A frontier can move without disappearing. I learned a version of the same lesson the morning after Barack Obama was elected president.

My middle daughter, Rhiannon, climbed into the car repeating something she had picked up from the other half of her family, the general idea being the country was going to hell in a handbasket. We had a long talk. I told her she needed to understand what had just happened and be grateful for the opportunity it represented. She's of mixed heritage, and a man of mixed heritage had just been elected President of the United States. Whatever anyone made of his politics, a child like her could now look at that office and know somebody who resembled her had been given the chance to hold it.

Then I told her the other half. I couldn't tell her whether Barack Obama would be a good president, because nobody could. He had been elected the day before and hadn't even been inaugurated. Ask me in four years, I said. Ask me in eight. The opportunity and the performance were two different questions, and his election mattered before any of us knew what he would do with it.

I remember thinking something else that morning too. Obama had gotten through the door, but I wasn't convinced he had kicked it open. It felt more like the door had opened just wide enough for one extraordinary man to get through, and I suspected it might swing shut behind him. I figured it could be a long while before another person of color got the same opportunity.

That distinction has stayed with me ever since. A first can be a breakthrough without being a normal thing yet. One exceptional person can pass through a door that stays just as hard for the next person to open. I've got my own much smaller version of that inside tennis.

In 1992 I was a board member of USTA New England and chaired the sectional Community Development Committee. When I moved to Atlanta a while later, the USTA there was looking for people of color to get involved, and I remember showing up with the attitude of, well, here I am. I had already served on a sectional board. I had already chaired a sectional committee. I wasn't walking in and asking anyone to take a chance on a green volunteer.

They put me on the Georgia District Minority Participation Committee. I don't point that out because minority participation work didn't need doing. It did. I point it out because of what the placement told me. I had arrived with a résumé, and the first category the system reached for was my race. The committee felt less like a room where the direction of the sport got shaped and more like a room where minority participants could talk about what frustrated them. I wasn't even placed on the sectional version of that committee.

Then I moved to North Carolina, and the experience ran the other way. I became chairman of the USTA North Carolina Coaches Committee and held that role for seven or eight years. That belongs in this story because I don't want to flatten a whole organization into a single accusation. There were people and places in tennis that looked at me and saw a coach with something to add to coaching, and North Carolina handed me real responsibility. Then I moved to Texas, and USTA Texas told me there were no volunteer opportunities for me.

There's a strange thing about institutional recognition. Every time I crossed a sectional border, my résumé seemed to reset. Whatever I had shown somewhere else didn't necessarily travel with me. I would arrive again as somebody to be sorted before I was somebody to be understood.

I've spent enough years turning that over to know I have to be careful with the conclusion. I can't tell you the motive behind every decision every person made. Not every missed opportunity is racism. Not every person who failed to recognize an idea was refusing to recognize a Black man. Institutions are messy. People are busy. Politics are real, personalities clash, and some of my ideas were probably wrong or badly timed. I have never lacked confidence in my own thinking, and confidence can make a person easier to wave off rather than harder. But I also know what the pattern feels like, because I come from a family that has been running into versions of it for generations.

I wrote about that last year in an essay called The Unfurrowed Ground. My grandfather couldn't get hired despite his education, so he built his own company. My grandmother couldn't get a sales job because of her race, so she convinced management that being memorable could be an advantage. My father carried the weight of being the first Black student at an elite school. My mother gave herself to the work of educational integration. It took me most of my life to see what I had filed away as separate family stories were really the same story told four times. Systems can fail to recognize what's standing in front of them, and the people left outside have to decide whether to keep knocking or build another way in.

I always assumed my own work sat outside that pattern. I was a tennis coach. I built programs, developed players, ran facilities, tried out methods, and got a little obsessed with the places where communication between adults and young athletes falls apart. Eventually I started building systems around those breakdowns. Only lately did I understand I had inherited the same question my family had been asking before I was born. What do you do when the existing architecture can't recognize the value right in front of it?

That's why the Cincinnati finals hit me the way they did. Change like this moves in stages. First there's exclusion. Then an exception gets through. Then comes representation, enough people in the space nobody can pretend the first one was a fluke. After that comes normalization, the point where a Black quarterback is simply a quarterback and a Black tennis star is simply one of the stars. And then there's a stage we talk about a lot less, the one that actually decides things. Call it authority.

It's the difference between being trusted to play the game and being trusted to shape it. Who gets presumed capable of understanding tennis, not just performing it? Who gets asked to design player development, to decide what coaches are taught, to sit in the rooms where methodology gets built and resources get handed out, to be treated as a thinker without proving it for the tenth time? That's a different question from whether people of color show up in the photographs and the participation numbers. A sport can grow far more diverse in public while changing much slower in the rooms where its assumptions live. Visibility and authority are not the same thing.

I've said, sometimes with more resignation than I'd like, that I think I'm one of the more thoughtful people in tennis and I'll probably never be recognized as one. I don't think the point of this essay is to talk you into agreeing with my ranking of myself. Maybe I am. Maybe I'm not. That's not the interesting question. The interesting question is whether the ideas ever got a serious hearing at all.

I've spent decades thinking about how players actually develop, how parents and coaches talk past each other, how programs build or destroy a kid's independence, how information does or doesn't carry from practice into competition, and how new tools might help us build systems that adapt to the people inside them instead of the other way around. Some of those ideas will hold up. Some won't. That's what scrutiny is for. What I no longer believe I need is anyone's permission to think them.

That might be a kind of progress I didn't appreciate when I was younger. In 1992, institutional recognition meant something different. If you wanted to move tennis, you wanted a seat on the committee, a place on the board, a spot inside the recognized structure. Those structures still matter, but they're no longer the only way an idea gets to live. I can write, build, and test what I claim in real environments and let people judge the results. I can leave an intellectual record whether or not a legacy institution ever decides to put my name on the door. My grandfather's answer, when the door wouldn't open, was to build a company. Maybe my answer has always been some version of the same move. In 1992 I needed somebody to give me a seat at the table. In 2026 I can build the table.

Which brings me back to Kyle Copeland. A professional preparing for Wimbledon was once sent around to the back door to buy a pair of shoes. I can look at Coco Gauff now and know the world she moves through is a different one. I can look at Frances Tiafoe and Arthur Fils meeting in a Masters 1000 final and know the imaginative walls of the sport have moved, because their presence on that stage no longer requires explanation. The front door is more open than it was, and that's worth celebrating out loud. But every institution eventually meets a harder question. It's one thing to let people through the door. It's another thing entirely to trust them in every room inside it, and another still to let them decide where the walls go, what gets kept, what gets rebuilt, and what the next generation ought to inherit. Kyle Copeland was sent to the back door. Coco Gauff walks through the front. The next question is who gets the keys.

Written with Reggie, Claude, Gemini, Otter, and 64+ trips around the sun.