Sally Ride by Lynn Sherr

Author:Lynn Sherr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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EXPLOSIONS

SPRING/SUMMER 1985–SUMMER 1986

Tam, Atlanta, 1985.

Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life.

—Gabriel García Márquez

TAM

“I was in shock that I was in love with Sally, and that Sally was in love with me. I couldn’t believe it. It was just like, What?”

Tam O’Shaughnessy had first met Sally on the junior tennis circuit, when they were both preteens in the close-knit community of gifted kids and ambitious, carpooling parents. Tam’s mom and Sally’s dad became pals while toting their kids to the tournaments; Tam and Sally melded with a group of Southern California regulars whose friendship endures today. And while Sally was nearly a year older, Tam—a “tall, elegant pixie,” according to one friend, with “beautiful, wide open eyes,” a turned-up nose and high cheekbones, crowned by short brown hair—was by far the bigger star.

“Sally was good, but not the best in the pack,” Tam says, matter-of-factly. “We only played one time. I won.” Tam had grown up hitting with, among others, Stan Smith, who would be ranked number one in the world in 1972. Her childhood coach was Billie Jean King, whose brother, Randy Moffitt, was later Tam’s first serious beau as a teen. Tam and her doubles partner, Ann Lebedeff (now professor and Head Women’s Tennis coach at Pomona-Pitzer Colleges), were among the top-ranked junior teams in the country; in 1969 they were ranked number 3 in women’s doubles nationally (Billie Jean King and Rosie Casals were number 1). As the game got tougher and she joined the fledgling Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) pro tour, founded by King, Tam was ranked as high as number 52 in women’s singles in the world. She played Wimbledon once and the US Open twice.

She was a serious contender despite the “pressure to not be jocks” that Tam saw applied to all the junior girls. One evening in 1970, at dinner with two of the top male players, the men encouraged her (she was eighteen) to quit the game. “They told me that my calf muscles were pretty large and muscular,” Tam tells me, “and that continuing to compete in tennis, and work out, would only make them larger. They said that I was such a nice and attractive girl, they would hate to see me change.”

Tam stuck with tennis for four more years, leaving the circuit at twenty-two to work with Billie Jean and Larry King at their company, King Enterprises, in San Mateo, where she was founding publisher of the first WTA Newsletter among other publications. By then she knew she was gay. She reconnected with Sally at nearby Stanford—while Sally was getting her master’s and doctoral degrees and working at Sports-woman, a small rival to the Kings’ womenSports—where they competed in platform tennis tournaments together and covered some tennis events for their respective publications. On one trip to a WTA tournament in Palm Springs, Tam and Sally wound up playing a spur-of-the-moment set against commentator Bud Collins and sportswriter Barry Lorge. “It was a disaster,” Tam recalls.

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