Written by: Alissa Flores
Alice Tym, who has lived in McDonald, Tenn., for 48 years, achieved the 13th rank globally as a professional tennis player in 1969, and in 2013, she was inducted into the Tennessee Tennis Hall of Fame.
Not only was Tym distinguished throughout her tennis career, but she was also a crucial figure in advancing women’s opportunities in professional tennis.
Tym said she was a tomboy growing up and frequently enjoyed playing baseball for fun, but her true love, tennis, wasn’t a common activity among women in the mid ‘50s.
On a summer afternoon at Glencoe Park in Peoria, Ill., 15-year-old Alice — at the time Alice Luthy — heard about a clinic being held by Wimbledon winner Maureen Conley and jumped at the opportunity to attend.
“I took one look at her, and I said, ‘That’s what I want to be.’ I never looked back,” Tym said.
By age 16, Tym was thoroughly involved in tennis and had decided she wanted to pursue it as a career. After graduating from Peoria High School, it was time to transition to college. Tym’s father and brothers had all attended Yale University, and although she wanted to go there also, Yale was strictly a men’s university at the time. Tym was determined to play tennis in college, but her challenge was finding a location where she could play.
“In those days, there weren’t indoor tennis courts. So if you wanted to learn how to play, you had to go [to] Texas, California or Florida — someplace warm,” Tym said. “So I went to the University of Florida.”
Tym said that during the mid- to late-1900s, competitive women’s sports were practically non-existent, so she had to take matters into her own hands.
“You get to a point in time where you have to make a choice,” Tym said. “You can either accept that things are the way they are, or you can change them. And I wanted to play.”
With a set goal in mind, she marched to the University of Florida dorms, determined to find any talented and willing young women to join her team.
“There were good women tennis players; there was just no way to play [against other college-level women’s teams]. So I started the women’s tennis team,” Tym said.
“You get to a point in time where you have to make a choice; you can either accept that things are the way they are, or you can change them. And I wanted to play.”
With this new team, the Lady Gators, Tym competed and served as captain in Division 1 from 1960 to 1964, traveling throughout the United States while still managing regular classes and the pangs of missing her family at home. As a sophomore around age 18, she ventured to Europe on her own to compete in the European tennis circuit. She said in her early college years, she had to write letters to her family instead of calling home, because phone calls in those days were very expensive.
Despite the obstacles she faced in achieving her dream tennis career, Tym was able to push through them and ended up playing on the international circuit after she graduated from the University of Florida in 1964. Two years later, as a Ford Foundation Fellow, she completed a master’s degree in geography.
After graduating, Tym was on the international circuit for 52 weeks a year in more than 11 countries. She competed in all four Grand Slam events and won 44 career tournaments between 1962 and 1970.
“I’d start in Chicago. I’d play San Francisco, Los Angeles, Honolulu, then go up to Tokyo, then down to Hong Kong and then drop down to Australia, and 52 weeks later, I’d buy another ticket in Chicago and do it again. All with one suitcase,” Tym said.
Throughout her time on the international circuit, Tym recalled her adventures traveling. While certain milestone moments — like the one at Monte Carlo, when she was able to hit a “backhand down the line,” or the experience of winning the Kenyan nationals — are important to her, the people and the countries are what she remembers most fondly.
“You do remember those [achievements], but it’s nothing like the jungles and the interesting cultures and people,” Tym said.
Tym recalled a specific time when she was 21 and in Northern India, attempting to fall asleep, when she found a rat licking the salty residue of dried sweat from the back of her neck. She informed the concierge where she was staying, but because the Hindu religion in India considers animals sacred, they would do nothing about it. It was moments like those, learning about people’s cultures, that stand out to Tym.
Life on the circuit wasn’t always perfect, Tym explained. Whether it was the physical challenges of non-stop traveling and competing, or the language barriers that come with entering numerous countries, Tym experienced it all.
She also had to learn to deal with the mental pressure of intense competition.
“You either win or move on,” Tym said “If you didn’t win, you went home.”
She also emphasized that while playing tennis, she hardly made any money, and in order to pay her way, she had to play a lot. An alternate source of income she managed to gain was to write for tennis magazines. While on the circuit, she was able to cover different stories in the locations she was competing in.
“At one time I wrote for five different magazines a month,” Tym said with a grin.
“The women who accepted that little girls couldn’t play are now very bitter. I didn’t win them all, but I fought them all.”
After coming off the circuit in 1970, Tym moved to the Bahamas with her husband, Bill Tym, a tennis player for the Florida Gators men’s team. Shortly after they married in 1963, they were hired to coach the children of Alex Guerry, a popular tennis personality in Chattanooga. Then, after they moved to Tennessee, both became coaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where Alice established the Lady Mocs and coached them from 1974 to 1978. She then became the head coach of the Yale Bulldogs tennis team, and after just four seasons, her team won Ivy League Championships in 1980 and 1981.
Due to the traveling requirements Tym had as a coach, she wasn’t able to be at home with her three kids very often.
“It was hard, because I wasn’t home a lot,” Tym said. “I had to decide to either let someone else raise my children or [make changes so that] I could raise my children.”
Eventually Tym decided to quit coaching and dedicate time to raising her family.
“One of my boys played professional tennis. He played number one for Vanderbilt, and then he played professionally for Germany,” Tym stated proudly. “Then he met this girl, fell in love and ruined his tennis; [it] broke my heart,” she joked.
Tym always looked for ways to give back to her community and her sport, such as by going to Latin America and helping smaller countries with their tennis programs, or by promoting the upkeep of the Chattanooga area. Now living in nearby McDonald, sheenjoys her life on the outskirts of the Scenic City.
“I really fell in love with Chattanooga on its own because of the rivers. I just finished testifying in a case of [district] zoning, because this is a beautiful area, and if they trashed this place, it’ll be gone forever,” Tym said in reference to the local government and board’s efforts to install more urban plans to the Chattanooga area.
Tym has been fighting to keep her town, McDonald, rural. She hopes the city planners will impose restrictions on the building of more large communities and shopping centers, because she believes it’s a gorgeous place and very historic. She wants to preserve it.
Despite her retirement, Tym continues to play competitive sports, including badminton, table tennis and pickleball, with local friends. She also won the 2023 National Senior Games in the sport of pickleball and has been writing for PickleBall magazine.
Tym ended her interview by mentioning the importance of Title IX, her role in it and how it impacted her life.
“The women who accepted that little girls couldn’t play are now very bitter. I didn’t win them all, but I fought them all,” Tym said, referencing her early equal rights activism for girls and women to play school sports. “I’m just ready for the next fight. It’s up to [the newer] generation to keep Title IX in place.
“I had so many opportunities to make a difference,” she added. “ … I had fun doing it; I got to travel everywhere in the world.”
