Lynchburg doctor to be inducted into International Tennis Hall of Fame

Dr. R. Walter Johnson is gone, but hardly forgotten.

Certainly not by the world tennis community, which will honor Johnson on Saturday by inducting him into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I.

And not in Lynchburg, where the name of the city’s pioneering physician and tennis coach has probably been invoked more in the last five years than at any time since his death 38 years ago.

Among other things:

• An addition was built last year at the medical clinic named for him, the Johnson Health Center on Federal Street
• Doug Smith’s book on Johnson, “Whirlwind: The Godfather of Black Tennis,“ angered some members of the Johnson family with a few unflattering references to Johnson’s personal life. This caused former Johnson pupil Helen Witt to confront Smith (another former Johnson pupil) at his Lynchburg book-signing event earlier this year
• When a public forum was held recently on what sort of statuary to place in the middle of the Fifth Street traffic circle when it’s completed, several attendees suggested a statue of Johnson
• Johnson’s house on Pierce Street, where black tennis greats Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson honed their games, was named one of 11 historic places in the state “on the verge of ruin” by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. It remains boarded up and unoccupied, while his former tennis court slumbers beneath a thatch of grass and weeds

On Saturday, however, the Johnson news will be all upbeat. Despite what some considered an overly honest portrayal of his one-time teacher in print, the Washington-based Smith led the fight to get Johnson into the Hall of Fame.

“Left up to me,“ he said in 2007, “a plaque honoring Whirlwind would have been placed at Newport years ago. His legacy is something that should be honored and cherished not only by African-Americans, but by tennis lovers everywhere.“

Instead, it was left up to a panel of 125 tennis writers, historians and hall-of-famers. They passed Johnson by in 2007 but selected him in 2008 to join an induction class also consisting of Monica Seles, Andres Gimeno and Donald Dell.

Johnson’s place in tennis history is unique. In his own way, he was as influential a force for social change within his sport as Jackie Robinson was for baseball.

Originally, his game was football, and he was a touchdown-making machine as a running back at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. His speed and power on the football field earned him his life-long nickname, Whirlwind.

But professional football was not a lucrative profession in the 1940s, and Johnson decided to become a doctor. He came to Lynchburg because the black community here needed a general practitioner. His sister and fellow doctor, El Dorado, joined him, and he channeled his athletic ability and competitiveness into tennis.

Johnson is best known for - and no doubt is being honored for - his work with Ashe and Gibson, both of whom began coming to Lynchburg in the summer to be drilled in the hot sun on his green clay court. Yet there is far more to his stewardship of the game than that.

“A lot of people forget that he really started the tennis team at Dunbar High School,“ said Witt, arguably Lynchburg’s best female player of the 1940s and early 1950s. “What he did later came out of that.“

In the age of segregation, Johnson’s court was the only place in Lynchburg where both races could play. Very quickly, word got around, and Pierce Street became the end destination of an Underground Railroad for tennis players. Through a close-knit fraternity of black tennis coaches, Johnson learned about talented minority youngsters from all over the Southeast - and, ultimately, the nation - who needed a place to train, and invited them. Or, they invited themselves.

More than 100 young people trained under Johnson in all, and they learned very quickly that this was not a country club. They did chores to earn their “tuition.“ They drilled endlessly to learn fundamentals of the game. They did what he told them to do.

“There was one boy from Lynchburg who could beat Arthur (Ashe) sometimes when they played,“ recalled Ethel Miller, “but he had an attitude that Dr. J just wouldn’t tolerate, and so he didn’t stay around long.“

Miller will never forget her first experience with Johnson.

“I lived across the street,“ she said, “and I saw all this going on over there and went over out of curiosity. He asked me if I wanted to learn how to play tennis, and I said yes - I was around 8 or 9 at the time. So he gave me one of his rackets, which was much too big for me, and sent me into his garage to practice on a ball attached to a tether rope.

“That was in mid-afternoon, and I just kept hitting that ball, wondering when he was going to come back for me. Finally, after supper, he went out to feed the dog and there I was, still banging away at that ball. He told me, ‘Since you’re that determined, you’re on my team.‘“

Joining Johnson’s team was not only a leg up in the tennis world, but a doorway to the outside world.

“We traveled to Baltimore, Roanoke, North Carolina,“ said Geraldine Wood, a member of the first Dunbar High tennis squad, “and we didn’t have to pay for a thing.“

Althea Gibson came from Harlem, a tall (5-foot-11), rangy young woman with remarkable athletic ability. She went on to win Wimbledon and the U.S. and French tennis championships in the 1950s.

“I could beat her in table tennis and cards, but never tennis,“ said Helen Witt, Gibson’s roommate at Florida A&M. “She was just so good at everything. She practiced with the men’s basketball team. She played professional golf later in life. It seemed like there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do.“

Ashe, on the other hand, seemed like anything but a prodigy when he first showed up in Lynchburg, painfully shy and pipe-stem skinny. More than perhaps anyone else, he blossomed under Johnson.

Johnson also trained a number of other future professionals. One, Juan Perrow from Lynchburg, won the national Division II college championships two years in a row at Southern Illinois. Another, John Lucas, became an NBA basketball player.

At the other end of the spectrum, there were students like Ethel Miller.

“My nickname was ‘one set,‘“ she said with a laugh. “I was cursed with bad reflexes, so I had to run twice as much as most players because I couldn’t anticipate where the ball was going. I’d do real well in the first set, but then I’d be worn out.

“Dr. Johnson still spent a lot of time with me, though, and he taught me things outside of tennis. Later, I became the first black engineer at Babcock & Wilcox (now Areva), and having been trained under him helped me to stick that out.

“He taught me so much more than tennis.“