Archdeacon: For Dr. Alpha Alexander, life has not been a beach

After she had graduated from Jefferson Township High, finished a Hall of Fame sports career at the College of Wooster and had gotten her master’s and PhD from Temple University, Alexander had come to California.

Her parents had passed away and she had no brothers and sisters, so folly filled some of the space of family.

That is until Dr. Carole Ogelsby – the former pro softball player, first president of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) and a well-known sports psychologist who had befriended Alexander at Temple – got wind of the sun and surf scheme.

“She told me, ‘You know your parents would want you to do better than that!’” Alexander remembered.

Ogelsby’s reminder set off a course correction that turned Alexander into one of the most accomplished sports leaders the Miami Valley has ever known.

She would go on to become:

She would travel the world – seven excursions to South Africa, seven to China, trips to Cuba, Russia, Australia, Japan, across Europe, South America and the United States – doing work for the USOC and promoting the development and advancement of girls and women on behalf of her foundation.

She became good friends with another Dayton sports icon, Olympic hurdler and clean sport proponent Edwin Moses who has come to speak to her athletes on a few occasions.

She also had a bond with the late tennis legend, Arthur Ashe, who wrote about her in his final book.

“He was the epitome of what an athlete should be,” she said. “He was a great man.”

And the late George Steinbrenner, the former New York Yankees owner and the guiding force of the U.S. Olympic Overview Commission in the late 1980s, especially admired Alexander and had a standing offer that she be his special guest in his owner’s box at Yankee Stadium.

Over the years Alexander often has been singled out:

ESPN named her one of the 100 Most Influential Student Athletes in History. The New York Times gave her its Women of the Year Sports Award in 1996.

The Women’s Sports Foundation honored her with its Billie Jean King Contribution Award, while the USOC made her only the second woman in history to win the prestigious Olympic Shield Award.

Black Enterprise magazine named her “one of the 30 prominent people in the business of sports.”

This past weekend at the Dayton Convention Center her commendation list got even longer.

Friday night, she, along with former Cincinnati Bengals’ quarterback Ken Anderson, and five other sports figures of note were the featured speakers at “An Evening with Ohio Sports Legends.”

Saturday night – in front of a throng of family members; well-wishers from the old Hopewell Avenue neighborhood of her childhood; Jefferson High classmates; some former teammates from the College of Wooster; and members of BWSF who flew in from Philadelphia – she was inducted into the Ohio Sports Hall of Fame.

Sunday, several of her friends from the Jefferson High Class of 1972 – including well-known local DJ, Stan “The Man” Brooks, her across-the-street neighbor growing up who first taught her to throw a ball and has remained her lifelong friend – treated her to brunch at Lily’s in the Oregon District.

After a quick visit to the Paul Laurence Dunbar House in West Dayton – “He’s my all-time favorite poet,” she said – the 71-year-old Alexander returned to her home in Morristown, Tennessee, northeast of Knoxville, to continue her busy schedule.

She’s on the city’s planning committee; works in the counseling and testing division at Walters State; is involved in the Lakeway Tennis Association’s effort there to promote the sport to middle school and high school students; and she chairs the nonprofit Morristown Task Force on Diversity.

She also has a special interest in the preservation of legacies of often-forgotten places and figures of the past. That has led to videos of “Morristown History Makers” now found on YouTube.

She told the story of Morristown College, the all-black school her mother attended that was closed after 113 years of operation and torn down.

It was turned into Fulton Hill Park, which is named, in part, after Andrew Fulton, who was sold at the Morristown Slave Mart in 1862 when he was seven years old and shipped off with his mother to Alabama.

He returned to Tennessee some 20 years later, graduated from Morristown College and ended up teaching there until his death in 1932.

“We want to leave some legacy marking so people can go back and learn about people of color, Hispanic people, people of different ethnicities, people from Eastern Appalachia, all the people who contributed to life here over the years,” she said.

When you hear that you realize Oglesby was right.

Alpha Alexander was meant to have history in her hands, not just sand between her toes.

Big Alpha and Little Alpha

Her father, Rufus Alexander, played football at Knoxville College where she said: “They called him The Goat because he butted his way down the field.”

He joined the Army during World War II and served in India. He would end up getting his master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin.

“He was the first black to do that,” she said.

Returning to Tennessee, he started working for the U.S. Post Office and eventually was asked to relocate to a postal job in either Los Angeles or Dayton.

He chose Ohio to be closer to his family.

He met his wife to be on a blind date, and they married soon after on Valentine’s Day.

Alpha was their only child.

“My mom’s name was Alpha Omega Alexander and I’m Alpha Vernell,” Alexander said. “Or, as my dad would say, ‘Who you talkin’ about, Big Alpha or Little Alpha?’”

She said her mom was “my hero.”

After quitting her studies at Morristown College and moving to Ohio, she later went back to school at Central State and graduated in 1972, the same year her daughter graduated from Jefferson.

Big Alpha taught at Blairwood Elementary until her death.

Little Alpha attended Blairwood and later, at Jefferson High, she played clarinet in the Broncos marching band while Stan “The Man” played drums.

She said no sports were offered for girls until she was a senior and then it was only track and field.

“That’s not my sport, but I couldn’t have done it anyway,” she said. “I was driving my mom back and forth to her college classes then.”

Her parents nurtured her by stressing education. She said her father believed it was important to travel and learn about other places and people:

“Basically, he said, ‘White folks go on vacation and so do we. I want our daughter to see the country.’”

Her junior year of high school she said her parents sent her to Europe as part of a student study program:

“I went to Switzerland, France and England. That started my love of travelling.”

After Jefferson High, she wanted to go to Tennessee State: “They had the Tigerbelles,” she said of the fabled TSU track team. “But my dad insisted I go to College of Wooster.”

The small private liberal arts college southwest of Akron was recruiting black students then, especially black athletes.

Although she had not played on any high school teams, she had shown her prowess with a softball team outside of school and, at the request of her mom, a family friend who was teaching his two sons tennis taught her the sport, too. Soon she was playing in local tournaments in Dayton.

At Wooster – which she said offered 13 sports for women – she excelled for The Fighting Scots in basketball, volleyball and tennis and she played lacrosse.

“There were three great women involved in sports at Wooster while I was there – Maria Sexton, Nan Nichols and Ginny Hunt – and they helped me grow as an athlete and a person,” she said.

“It was a good school for me. I learned how to associate with people who didn’t look like me and I ended up with a lot of lifelong friends.”

She said the lessons you learn from sports can carry through for your entire life:

“You learn how to be a leader. And if you lose, so what? You get up and go on the next day.

“Corporations look for girls who participated in sports because they know how to be team players. They know how to compete. They know how to show up on time and take responsibility. And then there are all the psychological benefits and health benefits you get from sports.

“That’s why I’ve been so involved in bringing young girls into sports.”

One more chapter

Alexander mentioned a few of the athletes she has mentored over the years including Madison McCoy.

After starring at Walters State, McCoy went on to play basketball at Jacksonville State in Alabama.

“She’s a prime example,” Alexander said proudly. “She graduated with her MBA and now is working with an accounting firm in Knoxville.”

Her goddaughter Traci Green – whose mother, Tina Sloan Green, was one of the BWSF cofounders – has been the women’s tennis coach at Harvard for 18 years.

“We mentored her when she was little and now she’s the president of the Black Women in Sports Foundation,” Alexander said. “Now we’ve passed the torch. That’s what it’s about.”

Today, Alexander continues to guide girls and young women.

A big fan of the WNBA, she takes some of her mentees, black and white, to the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville each year to learn the history while also meeting current and former standouts who are appearing there.

This June she brought two of her young charges there to meet Sue Bird, the UConn and WNBA legend.

Thanks in part to her long friendship with Arthur Ashe, the Lakewood Tennis Association had one of its girls get to take part in the U.S. Open.

Another mentee of the BWSF is involved with the Philadelphia Phillies and another girl Alexander mentored is playing college basketball in Alabama.

“When you become my mentee, I’m going to see you through for the rest of your life,” she said. “For the little ones I have now, I hope to be alive long enough to see them grow up and become young women.

“I want to see them continue with their sports and, more importantly, with their academics. I want them to be successful at whatever their dreams may be.”

At present Margarita Tapia – a journalism professor at the University of Oklahoma and former press secretary for a U.S senator with whom Alexander taught at Lane College and became friends – is helping her write her life story.

“We’ve been working at this a while,” Alexander said. “We’ve got the names of each chapter now and hopefully we’ll move forward on it and it will come out in the next year or so.”

When pressed, Alexander laughed and said there was not a chapter dedicated to her long ago flirtation with the sun and surf.

“But after this past weekend in Dayton, I might have to add one more chapter,” she admitted with a quiet, but proud aside.

She could title this one:

“Wanted to be a California Beach Bum, ended up in an Ohio Hall of Fame instead.”