Tennis Association Sued By a Former Top Umpire

New York City has given the USTA an exclusive 99-year-lease to run the public U.S. Tennis Center in Flushing Meadow. The association takes the lion's share of the profits from stadium, court and parking fees, as well as from food and merchandising revenue.

Last month, the USTA's attorney, Darrell S. Gay of DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, wrote a four-page letter to Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) in which he declined to provide any information on the association's hiring of blacks and women or on how it assigns umpires to matches. But he accused Hollins's attorney, Gary Ireland, of "contacting every possible press contact he can identify."

Gay contended that Ireland and Hollins are motivated by "an apparent desire to receive significant economic benefit as opposed to . . . improvement for equal opportunities in sport."

Maloney said Gay's letter missed the point. The USTA runs a public court, she noted, and so has a special obligation to run an equal-opportunity workplace.

"The USTA is the face of tennis in America and it's important that they respond . . . quickly and fully," Maloney wrote in an e-mail to The Washington Post. "The public needs to be assured that an umpire's gender or ethnicity won't prevent them from working at the highest levels of their sport."

Professional tennis has long struggled with the race question. For centuries, the greatest players of tennis -- the favorite sport of the French and British aristocracy -- came out of private, all-white clubs. Professional tennis did not integrate until 1950, when such pioneers as Althea Gibson (who won the U.S. Open in 1957 and 1958) and, later, Arthur Ashe played in the tour.

The USTA in the past decade has embarked on a program to promote tennis, and it says that last year 1.1 million people played the sport for the first time, "of which 2 out of 5 people were of multicultural background."

But the success of such modern black stars as Venus and Serena Williams obscures the fact that the professional tour still has just a handful of black players.

"The tennis establishment likes to pat itself on the back for its minority tennis programs, but it's not translating into the professional ranks," said Sundiata Djata, a professor of history at Northern Illinois University and author of "Blacks at the Net: Black Achievement in the History of Tennis." "There are fewer blacks at the high end than in the 1970s."

Hollins is an unlikely rebel. A freckle-faced, lean and personable man, with a head of neat braids, he played a strong game of tennis in college. He became a lawyer and, while on vacation, took a shot at line umpiring. He loved it. For four years, he traveled across the nation and Europe, seeking out matches and schools for umpires.

By 1994, Hollins had acquired a gold badge. That was only three years after he reached the prestigious position of chair umpire, making his one of the fastest progressions in tennis history. He soon had Grand Slam credentials -- Wimbledon, the French Open and the Australian Open, as well as the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. "I was out there umpiring matches with McEnroe, Becker and [Andre] Agassi," he recalls. "It was excitement beyond belief."

He envisioned sitting on the umpire's chair in Arthur Ashe Stadium overseeing the finals of the men's singles. Tennis-savvy black friends tamped down his expectations. "They told me, 'Cecil, don't get too excited. They don't let blacks work top matches.'