Pioneer Roberta Alison Left an "Unprecedented" Mark on the SEC

The former Crimson Tide tennis player had many feats in a standout career, but one is perched above the rest.

The University of Alabama

It’s one of life's simpler understandings, really: An immortalized name in stone, brick, marble or whatever material means you’ve made an impact worth more than an eloquent eulogy can articulate.

The name, any name, on any building represents enough that its limitation to just a handful of letters still tells a compelling story. As does any annual, in-memory-of recognition.

Which is what the Alabama women's tennis program does every October. 

This weekend, the Crimson Tide hosts the Roberta Alison Fall Classic in memory of a former player whose name is carved into the indoor practice facility as subtext of her greater impact.

Alison, from Alexander City, Alabama, was the first female athlete in the Southeastern Conference in 1963. Upon an exception made on her behalf, she played on the Crimson Tide men’s team as Title IX wasn’t existent until nine years later.

Learning of the watershed moment and its subsequence is an unofficial initiation into the Alabama tennis program. Women’s coach Jenny Mainz discovered that soon after being hired in 1998.

The former standout was only two hours away, after returning to her hometown post-playing career, and Mainz understood the importance of an introduction. Actually, as she recalls it, hopping in the car with Alison in mind was one of the first things she did once arriving at Tuscaloosa.

“I’m so glad I had the foresight to do that because she was an extraordinary person, obviously, and for sure a pioneer since she was so special at the Capstone,” Mainz said. “To be able to do what she did, it’s unprecedented.”

That’s probably the most accurate description, unprecedented. That is, of a female tennis player competing against all-men’s teams in the SEC. In the 60s.

People around the state knew the name early on. Her bedroom was filled with trophies of tournaments won, likely enough to occupy time for even the fastest shelf-stocker eager to rearrange. 

She outgrew the local tennis circuit before it was time to pass a driver’s test, which made adding Alison to the roster an easy decision for then-coach Jason Morton, who was hired on by Alabama athletic director Paul “Bear” Bryant after serving as tennis pro for the Tuscaloosa Racquet Club.

According to Alison's former teammate, Fred Feinberg, the football coach-turned-AD laid out the specifics: Be competitive and beat Auburn and we'll give you what you need. 

Morton approached the Southeastern Conference to pass Roberta’s eligibility exception thereafter, after following her successes leading up to college. 

And that was that.

"I’m in this thing by myself and for myself," Alison told Kelso Sturgeon of Associated Press in 1965. "I wanted to play tennis in the SEC because I could get the best competition possible. That is the only reason."

To introduce the conference’s first female athlete, she and three other players made a halftime appearance at the Alabama basketball game against LSU in Foster Auditorium prior to her debut season of 1963. Alison was "just one of the guys" after that, former teammate Ed Terrell said.

A net was brought to half-court and fans, for the first time, got to lay eyes on the school's new player. Interest piqued, too. In the first match that year, temporary stands shifted to the tennis facility in anticipation of the Crimson Tide’s opener versus in-state Spring Hill College.

Unheard of? Absolutely. 

"We had 300 people show up, when normally somebody’s parents or fraternity brother might have stopped by and we might have had half a dozen people watching," former teammate Fred Feinberg said. "That was major."

The national media thought the same thing, enough that Alison was featured in TIME magazine, Newsweek magazine and the Washington Post in the aftermath. Feinberg still has one in particular, the one in which his spur-of-the-moment reference to the rising star’s ability on the court almost made print.

"They [Newsweek] asked me about Roberta and I said, "Well, there’s nothing new about this to me. I played her in high school," he remembers. "And I said, "As a matter of fact, she just beat me really bad one time and I was very tempted to leave the ‘A’ off her first name."

Losing to Robert was easier to reconcile. At least for someone who was tasked with reported prep tennis scores to newspapers in Montgomery. 

But plenty more people experienced the same thing Feinberg did, beginning in Alexander City where Alison's roots were firm. Her father Cal, who played tennis at Alabama in the 1920s, married Elizabeth Russell whose family was prominent beyond state borders.

What's now Russell Athletic was founded by Roberta's grandfather, Benjamin. Immediate family members lived in houses built on the same, sprawling property. 

It's also where Cal began as the local tennis instructor for anyone interested in learning the game. However, there was one condition: you had to choose which single day out of the year you didn't practice, your birthday or Christmas. The other 364 were spent with him and, inevitably, his competitively-minded daughter.

He meant it. 

"She worked hard. And her daddy worked her hard to achieve. And she did, incredibly so, particularly for the time when women weren’t supposed to play sports," friend Nel Moeling said. "He very much wanted to share that love with her and see her do well at it. It was his gift."

Alongside the future groundbreaker around the Russell property was Moeling, who met Roberta when they were about four years old and remained close until Alison died in 2009 at the age of 65.

They lived near each other and before lessons began on the clay court at "the compound," they'd play everything that can occupy a kid's time. Everyone knew, though, that once you decided to commit to Cal's training, you did so seriously. 

Even if that meant you moonlighted as maintenance staff.

"Even when the courts were frozen there were jobs you would have to do," Moeling said. "I remember going home and my mother would put me in the tub because I would be so cold when I came home."

He had his way and it worked, and Alison immediately was invested. It was time they'd spend together, both doing something far from torturous. It was what formed the foundation of who she'd later become individually. 

It was more than a hobby after a certain age, her friend said, and when faced with decisions of what to give up the answer was never tennis for Roberta. It was a fabric unable to be frayed in the family.

Tournaments were won there in abundance, including the annual Blue Gray National Tennis Classic down the road in Montgomery. 

Once in college, she was back-to-back winner of the women's collegiate championship in 1962 and 1963. She "predated Billie Jean King," as Feinberg explained, considering there wasn't a professional women's tennis circuit then. 

The 19th Amendment had yet to reach the 50-year mark since its introduction in 1920, yet the the famous Battle of the Sexes tennis match was still a decade away.

Still, the men's players for the Crimson Tide didn't think one way or another about it. Until opposing teams and coaches took issue with the idea of Alison competing against them, that is, and winning.

"We went to Mississippi State one time and they brought the team out in skirts in protest," Terrell said. "They did until Jason Morton said, "Well, y’all can default.""

Meanwhile ... 

It's as foreign now as it was then to Bulldogs players. This Friday marks more than 30 years of the Classic, and the indoor facility in her name gives the women's program a "standard" to ambitiously reach, Mainz said.

The impact hasn't wavered all these years later.

It was and still is, in fact, unprecedented.