Culture

Can a reimagined Cobbs Creek fulfill its promise? Public golf is hoping so

Published

3 months ago

September 19, 2024

Can a reimagined Cobbs Creek fulfill its promise? Public golf is hoping so

Editor’s note: This article is part of The Changemakers series, focusing on the behind-the-scenes executives and people fueling the future growth of their sports.

PHILADELPHIA — From the eastern boundary of Merion Golf Club, water flows southeast along the property, cutting inward across the 12th hole, framing the famed 11th green, where Bobby Jones clinched the 1930 Grand Slam. Veins of tributaries shoot from the stream, slicing through the course. One sidles up to the fifth fairway, what some consider the best par 4 in the world. Everything about Merion is immaculate. Generations of wealth in this city have assured so. Shaping, reshaping. Renovating, restoring. Installing a multi-million dollar underground turf conditioning system.

The water moves on from Merion, meandering alongside estates with houses set far off the street. It flows out of Haverford toward Ardmore, along roadsides and lawns, into Penn Wynne, and cuts through Powder Mill Park in Wynnewood.

Then comes Township Line Road, the stretch of Route 1 that divides Philadelphia from its western suburbs. The water ripples underneath an overpass, entering the city, and flows past a shuttered driving range. A little further, it zigs and zags through the remains of a municipal golf course, past the site of an old clubhouse, one that burned down in 2016. Connected to the same creek as Merion, built by the same architect who designed Merion, once praised in the same breath as Merion, Cobbs Creek Golf Club is now a ghost. Overgrown and unrecognizable. Nature has reclaimed what history created and time neglected.

Two sides of the street, two versions of the same game, four miles apart.

Anywhere else, Cobbs, as it’s known, might’ve been left for dead years ago. The last time it was operational, dying trees, severe erosion and holes in various stages of disrepair made it not only unplayable, but borderline unsafe. Without a clubhouse, the course operated out of two double-wide trailers. It closed in October 2020.

But there had always been these rumors. Anyone familiar with municipal golf in a major city knows the kind. Chatter of some magnificent renovation, the kind that might bring Cobbs back to its original glory and give the public a place as nice as the private clubs. The buzz began what seems like forever ago, back in the early aughts. Word that a nonprofit group was working to save Cobbs. We talked about it while sitting around the old plastic tables in what was the clubhouse. And in the parking lot, where the old-timers sat around in folding chairs with cards in their hands and coolers in their trunks. And around the first tee box, where foursomes stacked up, being told which holes had temporary greens due to flooding, before being sent out five minutes apart for a five-hour round.

Everyone wondered the same thing. What if?

For all its issues, Cobbs Creek carried an unmistakable mystique, even in the end. You didn’t need to squint to see the quality of the design. The land is shaped by features money can’t buy — elevation, natural water flow, vistas, a rail system rolling past. The original 18 holes opened in 1916, immediately establishing Cobbs among the country’s premier public golf courses. A century later, that old layout is referred to only as “the bones.” They’re down there, somewhere.

When the course closed, the non-profit Cobbs Creek Foundation, comprised of local corporate executives and golf architecture enthusiasts, took over the facility in a private/public partnership. At first, the scope was confined to restoring the course and providing an educational program for young people in the surrounding neighborhood. Price tag: Roughly $20 million. Proposed opening date: June 2023.

Two years later, in 2022, that plan was no longer tenable. Work to lower the creek’s floodplain came with endless other hurdles. Between necessary approvals from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, along with countless other state and federal organizations, the project grew exponentially. The Cobbs Creek Foundation signed a 70-year lease for $1 to take over the property and mapped a new plan. This one required rebuilding over 3 miles of creek and tributaries, creating dozens of acres of wetlands, fully renovating Cobbs’ original 18 holes, creating a new nine-hole course, a driving range and a short course, and building a youth education center. Price tag: Roughly $65 million. Proposed opening date: Sometime in 2024.

As it goes in Philadelphia, skepticism built and controversy grew. The clearing of several hundred trees drew outrage from environmental organizations and neighborhood groups. Improper campaign contributions from the foundation to a local councilman drew blowback. Multiple stages of project planning were stunted by denied permits, delaying steps until approved.

There was every reason to see Cobbs’ return as a pipe dream.

Except now, along Lansdowne Avenue, stands the framework of what will be a 30,000-square-foot building. It will be the country’s second TGR Learning Lab, an education center operated by Tiger Woods’ TGR Foundation, where over 4,500 local youth will receive year-round Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education and college readiness programs. In front of the building, bulldozers are kicking up dirt, building a nine-hole, par-3 short course. Both are expected to open spring 2025. Nearby, land is being prepped for a two-story driving range that will include a restaurant, pro shop, area for community events and a museum. That’s also where a junior putting green will be installed, courtesy of a $250,000 grant from Jordan Spieth’s family foundation.

Seeing this in person is mind-bending to anyone who came up playing Cobbs. Knowing what’s coming next is even more so. The course renovation and wetland installation is scheduled to begin next summer. An additional new 9-hole course will follow.

New price tag: $150 million, of which $100 million has been raised. Final completion date: 2027.

In the end, if this works, Cobbs Creek will operate as a financially self-sustaining nonprofit that funnels educational opportunities into the community, offers local residents affordable play, and will perhaps bring a PGA Tour event to the city. It all makes one wonder, if a game so long-tied to barriers can be co-opted by those who want it to be something different, and if land that’s tied to one story can suddenly tell another — if that kind of change is possible, then what isn’t? And where else can public golf be reimagined?

In the early 1990s, as Cobbs slipped into an escalated decline, about to be passed around by various management companies for the next three decades, Merion weighed a heavy decision. The club was set to host the 1994 Women’s U.S. Open but was rattled by a new USGA policy stating all clubs chosen to host national championships must feature inclusive membership policies. Merion hired a consulting firm to survey its all-White membership, asking if the club should consider integration. The membership couldn’t commit to having minority members by tournament time and Merion withdrew as host of the national championship.

Shocking, yes. Surprising, no. Aronimink Golf Club, another elite private club in the Philadelphia suburbs, withdrew from hosting the 1993 PGA Championship because of an all-White, all-male membership. Pine Valley, the top-ranked golf course in the U.S., about 20 miles outside Philly, did not open its door to women until 2021.

Policies aside, these courses, along with plenty other elite clubs dotting the tri-state area, are products of a merry band of early-20th-century golf course architects known as “The Philadelphia School.” They worked with and occasionally for each other. A.W. Tillinghast, George Crump, George Thomas and Hugh Wilson, along with Boston transplant William Flynn, all helped shape much of the Golden Era of course design in the United States.

But today almost all their courses come with high hedges. Places you can’t see into. Places the membership doesn’t necessarily want to see out of.

Cobbs is the exception. In 1914, when the Golf Association of Philadelphia pegged Wilson to lay out the city’s much-needed public course, the 35-year-old was fresh off designing 36 holes at Merion, including the acclaimed east course. His work was a product of both natural genius and thorough study. Wilson, a product of Philadelphia high society and a Princeton education, began his design career traveling across Great Britain to research the game’s greatest layouts — St. Andrews, Prestwick, Muirfield, North Berwick, Hoylake. On and on. According to family lore, he was originally ticketed to return to the U.S. in the spring of 1912 aboard the Titanic but missed departure.

Wilson’s design of Cobbs Creek was both classic and imaginative. He tabbed Flynn, who later created the likes of Shinnecock Hills, Cherry Hills and Lancaster Country Club, to personally build every green and every bunker. From Day 1, the course was heralded as a triumph of public golf. It was open to juniors, first-timers, working-class players, women and minorities.

When some wonder why Cobbs is worth saving, the answer is not only its design, but its place in the history of a sport so steeped in exclusion.

In 1940, Charlie Sifford, then a 17-year-old caddie in Charlotte and 21 years away from being the first Black man to gain membership to join the PGA Tour, jumped town after an encounter with a drunken White store owner who levied threats and racial slurs at him. In his 1992 biography, “Just Let Me Play,” Sifford recounted smashing a Coke bottle across the man’s face and knowing he’d never get a fair trial in Jim Crow South. He instead hopped a train to Philadelphia, where he heard the jobs were available and the golf was good.

Sifford moved in with an uncle in North Philadelphia, not far from what’s now Temple University, and landed a job as a shipping clerk at the Nabisco plant. One weekend, with a fresh paycheck, Sifford spent a long night playing poker, emerging early on a Sunday morning to find a rising sun. Outside, he saw a man catching a street car with a golf bag slung on his shoulder. From “Just Let Me Play”:

“Say, where you going with them clubs,” I called out to him.
“I’m going to Cobbs Creek,” he called back over his shoulder.
“Where’s that?”
“It’s all the way out to the end of the Market Street trolley.”

Sifford joined the man and made his way to Cobbs. He later wrote: “The course was intended for everyone to use, and I was both surprised and delighted to see both black and whites playing side by side there. I’d never seen anything like that in North Carolina.”

At the time, Cobbs was already well-established as a haven for Black golfers. Howard Wheeler and others called the course home well before Sifford. The United Golf Association (UGA), founded in the mid-1920s to provide minority golfers with an opportunity to compete on an organized tour, hosted its national championship at Cobbs in 1936, 1947 and 1956. Heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis played at Cobbs. So did trailblazers Lee Elder and Ted Rhodes. In 1961, the Philadelphia NAACP hosted a tournament at Cobbs Creek to raise funds for the Freedom Riders jailed in Mississippi that summer.

The relationship between Tiger Woods, left, and Charlie Sifford drove Woods to be a part of what is happening at Cobbs Creek.

Cobbs meant so much to so many, and served so many different needs to so many different backgrounds, but, like any municipal course, was vulnerable. Heavy play exceeded reasonable usage. Conditions slipped. For years, it was also used as a cross-country course. Those hills punished generations of runners.

Around 1952, in the throes of the Cold War, the U.S. Army scouted multiple sites around Philadelphia to install anti-aircraft batteries. The location chosen? The 13th green of Cobbs Creek. Massive silos were dug and the course was rerouted around the installations. Six years later, the Army filled in the silos and left a vacant expanse behind. Cobbs’ routing was never returned to Wilson’s original design.

In time, a driving range and batting cage facility was built atop the old anti-aircraft installation. The City Line Sports Center, controlled by the same various management companies as Philly’s public golf courses, would end up, in time, just as run-down as Cobbs.

By the turn of the century, Cobbs was little more than a portrait of neglect. Floodwaters washed away greens in the spring. The sun baked out fairways and tee boxes in the summer. The Karakung Course, a second 18 built on the property in 1927 by Abner “Ab” Smith, was somehow worse. A string of superintendents did with it what they could, but no effort could overcome a staggering deficit of resources. The property deteriorated. Vandalism went ignored. Occasional abandoned cars were dumped here and there.

In time, what once was faded from view.

A few weeks ago, on a Monday morning in Philadelphia, Enrique Hervada and Don Dissinger sat in a far booth inside the Llanerch Diner on Township Line Road. The two are current proxies for reams and reams of people who’ve taken on the Sisyphean group effort to complete Cobbs Creek’s reclamation.

Hervada, COO of the Cobbs Creek Foundation, is one of seven full-time staff members. He’s among those trying to raise the final $50 million of what’s ballooned to a price tag three times that number. At least $30 million will be spent fortifying the creek and creating wetlands to prevent flooding both on the course and in the surrounding neighborhoods.

“It might kill us by the time we’re done,” Hervada said over breakfast. “It’s just — it’s a massive project cost-wise and permitting-wise.”

Hearing this, Dissinger put his fork down. “You have no idea,” he said. The 70-year-old quasi-retired architect and engineer was overseeing the construction of two high-rises in Miami when the foundation called him in December 2022. Having helped in the restoration of Merion Golf Club in 2014, Dissinger was an ad hoc member of the Cobbs restoration committee. But the foundation needed more.

A former partner at the design firm EwingCole, Dissinger built Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia and MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. His career has been one of municipal red tape, zoning laws, and state and federal licenses. But with a property covering 350 acres, and touching three counties (Philadelphia, Montgomery and Delaware), he’s never seen anything quite like the project at Cobbs Creek.

“The number of permits I have on this exceeds the number of permits I had between those stadiums — combined,” Dissinger said.

(Courtesy Cobbs Creek Foundation)

This all began years ago, around 2007, with a few hobbyists digging into archives, retracing Cobbs’ history and comparing notes online. These early archivists, notably Dr. Joseph Bausch, a chemistry professor at Villanova University, and Mike Cirba, an Information Management Executive, planted the seeds of what became the Friends of Cobbs Creek. Two idealistic outsiders (Bausch from Indiana, Cirba from Northeast Pennsylvania), they became, as Cirba puts it, “obsessed with what it was and what it could be.” The two began compiling information into a book. Today it is up to 400 pages long, in its 12th volume, and is the source material for everything written about Cobbs Creek, including much of this article.

In those early days, Bausch and Cirba thought it was obvious what needed to happen. Then they met Philadelphians.

“And there was always a sense that this can’t happen here. It was a pervasive negativity,” Cirba says. “I think we came into it with a certain level of naiveté, but that was probably a good thing.”

Bausch and Cirba held the earliest meetings with City of Philadelphia officials about saving and renovating the course. They were told, great idea, but where’s the money?

A board was formed. Interest grew from powerful, connected local businesspeople, including Cobbs Creek Foundation founding CEO Chris Lange and president Jeff Shanahan, along with Chris Maguire and the Maguire Foundation. The group grew larger and ideas got bigger.

Cobbs and the TGR Foundation came together. Since 2006, Woods’ charitable arm has operated a year-round learning lab in Anaheim, Calif., offering over 30 classes and workshops for 5th-12th grade students. According to TGR, 98 percent of its scholars graduated from high school and enrolled in college, 91 percent of whom were first-generation college students. Woods, himself, was familiar with Cobbs Creek even before the partnership. Charlie Sifford, he has said, was like a grandfather to him. Woods named his only son after Sifford.

Somehow, now, the thought of restoring 18 holes feels almost peripheral. The foundation hopes to serve 4,500 local students a year. The property is now referred to in two parts — as a course and as a campus.

Sitting in his office at Villanova all these years later, Bausch can only shake his head. “I always thought that this was going to be an incredible project,” he says, “but it has far exceeded anything I could ever imagine.”

There is, though, the matter of that golf course.

Appropriately, two locals are handling what comes next. Hanse Design — the renowned golf architecture firm of Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner — is based in Malvern, about 15 miles from Cobbs.

Wagner grew up nearby, playing Cobbs as a high school golfer at Cardinal O’Hara. Hanse is a transplant, but knows the territory. Before his firm handled high-profile restorations like Merion, Aronimink, Oakmont and Winged Foots, Hanse developed a soft spot for the West Philly course. A little-known architect at the time, he rebuilt Cobbs’ third and fourth greens in the early 2000s after extensive flood damage. He did it for free.

That pro bono work will now continue in 2025 through 2026. Hanse and Wagner will not only rebuild Cobbs Creek Golf Club to Hugh Wilson’s original design, but will also lay out the new nine-hole course on the old Karakung land.

The scale of the project is immense.

On my recent visit, I stood near the old 12th tee box, scanning an area that once included the 11th green, the 13th green and crowded and long views of tree-lined fairways. If I didn’t personally know what had been there, I wouldn’t believe it. Anyone imagining a “restoration” is misguided. The original Cobbs Creek is gone, reclaimed by the land.

What remains of the view from the 12th tee box at Cobbs Creek. (Brendan Quinn / The Athletic)

“You can’t put it back,” Wagner said. “It’s impossible to put it back to what it once was because so much has changed in the environment. Mother Nature came in and moved things around.”

But you can return the intention and objective of what the golf course was meant to be. At last, that’s happening. Something bigger than anyone in Philly ever imagined. Something just as nice as all those private courses, except open for all.

Today, this ground is in Philadelphia. But if a successful model is created at Cobbs Creek, combining golf and STEM education under a non-profit, self-supporting model, other cities might have to sit up and take notice. Chicago. Detroit. St. Louis. Los Angeles. Houston. Maybe they’ll see the municipal course that time has forgotten and see something different. Maybe times can change.

The Changemakers series is part of a partnership with Acura.

The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Courtesy Cobbs Creek Foundation, Brendan Quinn / The Athletic)

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Culture

How Magnus Carlsen’s jeans sparked a chess controversy

Published

1 hour ago

December 30, 2024

Press Room

How Magnus Carlsen’s jeans sparked a chess controversy

The world’s No 1 chess player Magnus Carlsen will return to the World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships in New York after initially withdrawing as he refused to change out of a pair of jeans.

The 34-year-old pulled out from the World Rapid Championship on Friday after breaching the dress code and opting not to change his attire.

However, the International Chess Federation (FIDE) announced on Sunday Carlsen would return for the World Blitz Championship. The organisation’s president Arkady Dvorkovich confirmed that while the official dress code would remain in place, it would be relaxed to accommodate “elegant minor deviations”.

A post on Carlsen’s X account read: “Oh, I am definitely playing in jeans tomorrow”.

“I am playing at least one more day here in New York and, if I do well, another day after that,” the Norwegian said, speaking to Take, Take, Take.

Why did Carlsen withdraw?

FIDE deemed Carlsen had broken the dress code for the World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships by wearing jeans on Friday.

He was initially fined $200 and asked to change but he refused to and was subsequently not paired for round 9 of the World Rapid Championships.

Carlsen claimed he had worn jeans for a meeting and “didn’t even think” about swapping into different trousers for the tournament. He said he offered to change for the following day but this was not accepted.

“I had a nice lunch meeting before I came here, I barely had time to go to the room and change so I just put on a shirt and jacket, I didn’t even think about the jeans — I even changed my shoes,” he told Take, Take, Take.

“I got a warning that I would not be paired if I did not change my clothes. They said I could do it after the third round today. I said I’ll change tomorrow if that’s OK. They said you have to change now. At that point, it became a bit of a matter of principle for me.”

Carlsen (Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)

He then said he did not intend to return to defend his title in the World Blitz Championship, which begins on Monday.

“I’ll probably head off somewhere where the weather is a bit nicer than here,” he added. “I don’t know what would have to change for that to happen, but no (I won’t be playing in the Blitz).”

Carlsen continued: “They can enforce their rules, that’s fine by me. My response is that’s fine, I’m out, f*** you.”

OOTD pic.twitter.com/9reOP6zuJv
— Magnus Carlsen (@MagnusCarlsen) December 28, 2024

Carlson was the defending rapid champion but had trailed the leaders at the time of his withdrawal.

Russian grandmaster Volodar Murzin, 18, ultimately won the tournament to become the second youngest world rapid champion in history.

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Why does chess have dress code regulations?

FIDE states its regulations for the tournament, including the dress code, “are designed to ensure professionalism and fairness for all participants”.

The FIDA regulations for the 2024 Rapid and Blitz Championships state: “No players with t-shirts, jeans, shorts, sneakers, baseball caps or inappropriate dress are allowed in the playing area. Any requests to wear national or traditional dress shall be approved by FIDE Supervisor.”

Players are permitted to wear: “Dark-coloured pants, long-sleeved light-coloured (white, light blue, beige, brown, etc.), blue or black shirt, in any case unicoloured. Dark-coloured jacket, waistcoat or cardigan with buttons: black, navy, grey, beige, brown, in any case unicoloured. Jacket, waistcoat or cardigan may be taken off during play. Tie is not mandatory.”

Participating players and FIDE staff, officials and representatives all have to adhere to the dress code policy.

A first infringement of the regulations results in a fine, with the sanctioned player permitted to play the current round, before a second infringement leads to not being included in a pairing for the following round.

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Did anyone else break the dress code regulations?

Russian grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi was also fined on Friday for a dress code breach after wearing sports shoes. However, he changed into “approved attire” and continued in the tournament.

How was the Carlsen situation resolved?

Carlsen said on Sunday “fruitful discussions” had taken place with FIDE president Dvorkovich.

“I love playing blitz,” he told Take, Take, Take. “I want to give the fans an opportunity to see this… For now, I’m here, and there have been, I think, some slight alterations to the rules. As a matter of principle, I’m definitely playing in jeans tomorrow.”

A statement from Dvorkovich read: “I sincerely regret that this situation escalated without a resolution being found by both sides in time to prevent Magnus’s withdrawal.”

He added that Carlsen’s concerns “highlight the need for further discussion about how to modernize the current approach, to ensure that our rules and their application reflect the evolving nature of chess”.

Dvorkovich explained a flexible approach to the dress code would be taken for the World Blitz Championships.

“I took the decision to trial an approach to provide more flexibility to FIDE officials in judgements regarding the suitability of the attire,” he continued. “Special assistants will be requested to help in those judgements and make final conclusions, shall any doubts arise.

“The principle is simple: it is still required to follow the official dress-code, but elegant minor deviations (that may, in particular, include appropriate jeans matching the jacket) are allowed. In the end, it is New Year time, and I sincerely hope that nobody would try to undermine the festive mood, including by abusing this additional flexibility.”

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(Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP via Getty Images)

Culture

Test Yourself on the Books Used in These 2024 Film Adaptations

Published

9 hours ago

December 30, 2024

Press Room

Test Yourself on the Books Used in These 2024 Film Adaptations

Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. As the year winds down, this week’s challenge is focused on books that were adapted into biographical movies that were released in the United States sometime in 2024 — and have already collected a few awards, nominations or buzz for film prizes.

Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their movie versions.

Culture

Two women lived with the secret of an assault by the same tennis coach. Then they found each other

Published

17 hours ago

December 30, 2024

Press Room

Two women lived with the secret of an assault by the same tennis coach. Then they found each other

Say nothing.

That’s what Caroline Ullring kept telling herself through the final days of March 1999.

She had accused her college tennis coach of sexually assaulting her in a Texas motel room during a spring break trip with the team. In late March, she had told athletic department officials about it, including a counselor and the senior women’s administrator, who briefed the athletic director about the allegations. The message Ullring felt she was getting from officials at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was that it would be best to keep this quiet.

The coach, Lew Gerrard, told the same officials what he told The Athletic earlier this year. He admitted to drinking in the presence of the team, perhaps touching Ullring’s thigh and giving players massages. Nothing else.

He agreed to resign. He denied assaulting Ullring.

Ullring says she was told that if she took her story to the police or other authorities, it would be her word against his. Everything would become public. There was only one way to ensure privacy.

Say nothing.

For the next 20 years, that’s largely what she did.

A teammate who heard rumors about the reasons behind Gerrard’s departure asked Ullring about them shortly after he resigned. She said she couldn’t talk about it. She didn’t share details of the alleged assault with her parents or her friends. In 2006, after her boyfriend died suddenly, Ullring was hospitalized, and received treatment from psychologists and psychiatrists. But she hardly discussed the incident with Gerrard, so doctors didn’t diagnose her with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I was a good girl,” she said during a recent series of video interviews from her home in Norway.

Gerrard, an 87-year-old from New Zealand who has spent most of his adult life coaching tennis in the U.S., said during a phone interview in May: “I’ve never had any sexual relationship with any player I have been teaching.” He described being presented with the allegations as “a shock,” and said he remembered thinking Ullring had “made it up.”

In a second phone interview in November, Gerrard said that Wake Forest officials had never told him about any allegations of sexual assault, though he had acknowledged in May that they had done so.

“They didn’t present me with anything like that at all,” he said in November. “A sexual assault, absolutely not.”

In an interview in early December, Ron Wellman, who was Wake Forest’s athletic director at the time and is now retired, said he had presented Gerrard with the allegations. He also said that he did not recall ever advising an athlete to remain silent.

“We talked in detail about everything,” Wellman said of his meeting with Gerrard. “At the end of that meeting, he agreed to resign.”

Wake Forest declined to provide any information about the incident, or the process that led to Gerrard’s resignation for “personal reasons” (according to a press release) days after Ullring reported it, citing privacy regulations. It offered the following statement:

“Lew Gerrard was hired in 1988 and resigned on March 26, 1999. Additionally, Caroline Ullring was enrolled at Wake Forest from 1995-99 and was a member of the Demon Deacons women’s tennis team.”

In 2019, Ullring began seeing a therapist who specializes in treating people struggling with the effects of trauma. She discussed the alleged assault with her in detail for the first time.

Through her long silence, Ullring sometimes thought she had done something wrong that night in Texas years ago. She didn’t know anyone else who had this experience with her coach. So many of her teammates seemed to love Gerrard.

“I felt I had to do it for the team and the university and I did not see any other way,” Ullring said recently.

Then last spring, she looked at her phone and saw the message from an old teammate that would become a hinge moment in her life. A 67-year-old woman from Colorado named Karen Clark wanted to speak with Ullring.

She wanted to talk about a tennis coach who she said had sexually assaulted her in the early 1970s: Lew Gerrard.

Karen Clark, then Denison, third from right at a Girl’s National City Team Tournament in 1974. (Courtesy Karen Clark)

The stories that Ullring and Clark say they have lived with for decades are all too common in sports, especially individual ones like tennis. Young players spend long hours training and traveling with older, mostly male coaches. Too many of those coaches use their power to try to take advantage of those players sexually, sometimes resulting in incidents and relationships that range from inappropriate to criminal.

The United States Tennis Association currently has 137 coaches on its Safe Play Disciplinary list, meaning they have been banned or suspended for mistreating players. Seventy-three of those individuals have been accused or convicted of sexual misconduct with minors.

It happened to Pam Shriver, a Grand Slam doubles champion and member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It happened to Kylie McKenzie, who successfully sued the USTA in 2022 after the U.S. Center for SafeSport found it “more likely than not” that she had been assaulted by her coach, Anibal Aranda, when she was 19 and he was 34. (Aranda, who was suspended and then fired by the USTA, denies the allegations.) It happens to largely unknown juniors whose stories ended up in the hands of prosecutors, and to others who carry their secrets forever.

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After years of silence, Shriver finally went public with the story of how her longtime coach, Don Candy, a close friend of Gerrard’s, pursued a sexual relationship with her, beginning when she was 17.

“It was stuffed down there,” she said during a recent interview, describing how she lived for decades in silence about what happened during her time with Candy, who is now deceased.

It’s a common behavioral pattern for sexual assault survivors: Put the nightmare in a box; stow it away.

That’s what Ullring did. Until she didn’t.

Growing up in Oslo in the 1980s and 1990s, Ullring had enjoyed the kind of active youth that many Norwegian children experience in a country that is mad for sports and the outdoors. She played golf, participated in gymnastics and skied plenty. She loved tennis the most. By her teenage years she was among the best girls in Norway, representing the country in national team competitions.

When she was 16 her older brother, Petter, died by suicide. His death sent her into a long battle with depression.

At her parents’ suggestion, after finishing high school in 1994, she took a break from education and attended Dennis Van der Meer’s tennis academy in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Van der Meer had been a longtime mentor for both coaches and players, including, for a time in the 1970s, Billie Jean King. College coaches from the mid-Atlantic region, including Van der Meer’s old friend, Lew Gerrard, often scouted talent at his academy.

Gerrard appeared during Ullring’s first months there. He complimented her game and asked if she might be interested in playing for Wake Forest. She enrolled there in the fall of 1995, intending to study chemistry.

Ullring soon realized life in Winston-Salem, N.C. was going to be different than she had expected. She wanted to play singles but wasn’t, even though she said Gerrard had told her she would. Chemistry labs conflicted with practices, so she had to switch to studying health and exercise science.

Taking college-level classes in English was difficult. Her dictionary had dog ears on nearly every page. She had to miss team dinners and other gatherings because her homework became so time-consuming.

She was terrified that she would fail. Her stress levels spiked. Doctors at the university health clinic prescribed anti-anxiety medication, such as Zoloft, which she would take, as needed, throughout her time at Wake Forest.

From the beginning, she and other teammates noticed some questionable behavior from Gerrard, like drinking alcohol around the team on road trips or during team dinners at his home with his wife. One former player, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the story remains sensitive for her friends and teammates, described Gerrard as a coach who occasionally made inappropriate, suggestive comments but had been something of a father figure to some players, opening his home to them when they were far away from theirs for the first time.

“We would have a few drinks and he would make flirty comments,” said Nicola Kawai, a recruit from New Zealand and close friend of Ullring during their years at Wake Forest. “There were the feelings of awkwardness and the giggles, and we would have to all laugh it off.”

Gerrard told The Athletic he would have a glass of wine at dinners with the team, and might have a drink when the players came to his house for cookouts. He said they did not drink with him.

Then there were the massages, according to multiple former players. Some saw it as a helpful gesture, since the team did not have a dedicated trainer and players were clothed when the massages took place. Others said it made them uncomfortable.

Asked about giving the massages, Gerrard said, “I may have, if there was cramp in the leg or something like that.”

In mid-March 1999, after a loss at the University of Texas, Ullring was sitting at a table drinking with Gerrard during a team night out at a Texas restaurant. He began confiding in her about his marriage and other relationships with women, she said. A co-captain, she was also desperate to make the singles lineup.

At the end of the night, she and Gerrard left the restaurant together in one car, while the rest of the team rode in another with the assistant coach. She remembered thinking that was odd.

Gerrard walked Ullring to her room and then, standing at her door, offered to give her a massage. She declined, but then he coaxed her a few doors down the hallway, to his room. The next thing she knew she was lying on his bed on her back and he was massaging her shoulders, and then her breasts, and telling her that he just wanted her to feel good.

“You just freeze, you dissociate,” Ullring said.

The last thing she remembers is an image of Gerrard at the end of the bed in his boxer shorts. She does not know whether he penetrated her.

Ullring described what experts say is a common reaction for sexual assault victims: A kind of conscious blackout, a survival instinct. The mind shuts down.

A little while later, when she became aware of her surroundings again, she was on her stomach, and Gerrard was telling her that this was going to be their secret. He also told her she would definitely play singles that season, she said. Then he said it was time for her to go back to her room. She did as she was told.

Back on campus, she went to an appointment at the health services center and met with the doctor who was responsible for her medication. She told him what had happened. He told her she needed to report the incident to the athletic department so that other women on the team would not be at risk. Kawai, Ullring’s teammate and friend, who had transferred to Pepperdine, said Ullring called her in the days after the alleged assault to tell her what had happened. She also encouraged Ullring to report it.

Three other women who were on the Wake Forest tennis team during Ullring’s senior year, who asked not to be quoted or identified because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said they had heard some version of the story, but did not have direct knowledge of it. One said she called Ullring seeking details about what had led up to Gerrard’s resignation, but Ullring told her she was not allowed to talk about it.

Ullring sought out Dianne Dailey, the senior women’s administrator in the athletic department. Dailey said in an interview that Ullring told her that she was “uncomfortable and upset” about an incident that had occurred with Gerrard. Dailey suggested she speak with one of the athletic department’s counselors and referred her to Johnne Armentrout, whom Ullring knew from previous counselling sessions. She also briefed Wellman on what Ullring had told her.

After Ullring met with Armentrout, Dailey asked Armentrout if she had any doubt about whether Ullring was telling the truth about the alleged assault. Armetrout told her she had none, according to Dailey, who retired from Wake Forest in 2018.

A Wake Forest team photo from 1998. Lew Gerrard is first left, Caroline Ullring is fourth left. (Courtesy Caroline Ullring)

Wellman scheduled a meeting with Gerrard for that afternoon and presented him with the allegations. Armentrout, who now provides counseling at the Trinity Center in Winston-Salem, did not return messages seeking comment. She is prohibited from speaking publicly about her sessions with clients.

Both Wellman and Dailey said they could not recall their next meetings with Ullring.

Ullring said Wellman told her about his meeting with Gerrard, and the coach’s resignation. According to Ullring, Wellman told her it would be best for everyone to keep quiet about all this. It would be handled quickly.

“I am a very loyal person,” Ullring said, explaining her decision not to go public for so many years. “It’s very hard for me to tell you.”

Wellman said he could not remember advising an athlete to remain silent about allegations involving a sexual assault, and would instead allow a student make that decision with the help of a professional counselor.

“We never tried to have an athlete keep quiet about something like that,” Wellman said.

Details about Gerrard’s dismissal from Wake Forest never became public.

During his initial interview with The Athletic, Gerrard confirmed that officials told him Ullring had accused him of assaulting her. He denied it but acknowledged drinking alcohol in the presence of players.

“We had a non-drinking rule for the coaches,” he said, explaining what led to his resignation.

He continued to teach privately, but he never coached at a college again, and went on to work in real estate before eventually retiring.

Sven Ullring, Caroline’s father, recalled his daughter calling him and her mother at the end of March 1999 to tell her that Gerrard had been forced to resign because of an incident between the two of them.

“She told me about sexual harassment by her coach, but she didn’t give any details. She said also that she had spoken with the administration at Wake Forest University, who told her that he had been forced to resign,” said Sven, an engineer and the former chief executive of Det Norske Veritas, a Norway-based multinational energy and maritime conglomerate. He said she sounded calm. “She thought it was terrible and she had fainted,” Sven recalled. “But at that time I got the impression that it was not very bad. It was not a question of rape.”

He asked her if she felt they needed to hire a lawyer.

“She said no, because she had been told by the university that she mustn’t talk to anyone about what had happened,” Sven Ullring said.

He did not press her for details. “At that time, it was something that wasn’t talked about,” he said.

In an email to her father days later, Caroline wrote that she was enjoying herself on the tennis court far more with Gerrard gone.

Sven Ullring said his daughter seemed in a good state of mind at graduation in May, but when she returned home for Christmas later in the year, she told them that she had been struggling with bulimia. He began to wonder whether something more substantial than sexual harassment had occurred between her and Gerrard. She had been in a fragile state since her brother had died by suicide.

“And this, on top of that, probably made it very bad,” he said.

Through watching his daughter undergo treatment the past 25 years, he understands all this now as a typical pattern of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I understand that these things don’t come suddenly,” he said. “They develop over time.”

Ullring said the last time she saw Gerrard was from a distance. He was driving in the vicinity of the Wake Forest campus, in the days following her meetings with Wellman and his resignation from the university. Their eyes locked. He appeared extremely angry with her, she said.

A quarter of a century later, the sight of an approaching car, when she doesn’t know the intentions of the driver, can still send her into a panic.

“It’s so deep in my body,” she said. “I was afraid he was going to kill me.”

Ullring planned on playing the rest of that last season for Wake Forest now that she felt better, as she had told her father. Instead, being on the tennis court very quickly became hard to manage.

On April 1, her birthday, her teammates held a celebration at practice. Later that day, when she was alone, she forced herself to throw up for the first time, the beginning of her yearslong battle with bulimia.

She told anyone who asked she could not talk about Gerrard. Within weeks, she stopped attending practices regularly.

“It all fell apart,” she said. “All the strength I built up from when my brother died.”

In 1973, Karen Clark was 15. Then known as Karen Denison, she was a junior player in the Washington, D.C. area, the sixth of seven brothers and sisters, an outgoing athletic girl at a time when opportunities in sports were starting to grow for teens like her. Gerrard, a well-regarded coach in the region, saw Clark play at a tennis camp, she said. He sought out her parents and offered to work with their daughter.

Clark had already done well in regional age-group tournaments. The chance to work with a coach with a growing reputation seemed too good to pass up. Her parents signed on, and she began training with him twice a week at the Tennis Barn in Columbia, Md.

That fall, Gerrard told Clark he would be teaching an adult clinic in Charlottesville, Va. at the Boar’s Head Inn. Did she want to come along? At the time, Clark’s older sister was attending graduate school there at the University of Virginia.

Clark’s mother drove her to Charlottesville from their home near Washington, D.C. There was a little tennis on the first night, and then Gerrard told her they needed to head to his hotel’s bar to meet up with some of the other players at the Boar’s Head’s restaurant, she said.

Except those players weren’t there. She and Gerrard sat down at a table anyway. She remembers drinking a glass of “something brown,” she said. Then Gerrard told her that he had to retrieve something from his room. She had rarely even sipped hard alcohol before. She remembers the nearly empty tavern and remembers stumbling through a hallway and entering the room. Then, similar to what Ullring remembers, she says she experienced a conscious blackout.

The next thing she remembers is waking up on the bed, lying on her back with her tennis skirt around her knees. Gerrard was wiping her stomach with tissues, she said.

He gave her a ride to her sister’s apartment. Clark woke up the next day and thought: I can’t ever tell anyone about this.

In an interview with The Athletic, Gerrard said he did not recall coaching someone named Karen Denison in 1973. He coached a lot of players, and that was a long time ago, “more than 50 years.” He denied having any sexual contact with any of his students.

Clark’s sister, Pat Denison, now a professor of drama and literature at Barnard College in New York, said she remembered Clark staying with her to participate in the clinic with her coach, Gerrard.

Shriver said she remembers her coach, Don Candy, taking her to watch Gerrard coach Clark at a tournament in Baltimore.

Gerrard acknowledged that both Candy and Shriver were friends of his. He also said he coached clinics at the Boar’s Head in the 1970s with Dennis Van Der Meer.

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Clark has lived a lot since then. She had a career in business, working at McDonnell Douglas in Alabama as a buyer for Space Lab parts and as a liaison between purchasing and engineering. She coached collegiate tennis. She married, had children, and became a grandmother. She told no one about the alleged incident with Gerrard until 2006. She was nearly 50 years old, a mother of three, married to her husband, Raoul, for 24 years.

Karen Denison Clark in Indian Wells, Calif. in March 2023. (Allison Dinner / The New York Times)

She was also the assistant tennis coach at the University of Denver, working with a young head coach named A.J. Jensen. Jensen, an Australian, was a recent graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, where she had won three NCAA women’s doubles titles.

Before that, Jensen had spent part of a year at Wake Forest.

“I got recruited by this pervert from New Zealand,” Jensen told Clark one day. Jensen had heard that the coach had been fired a few years later because something had happened between him and a player.

Clark knew exactly who Jensen was talking about.

She drove home. It was the middle of the day. Her kids were at school. Her husband was at work. In her first floor sunroom, she doubled over, crying harder than she had ever cried before.

“It was this revelation that it wasn’t just me,” she said.

That night, she told her husband about what she remembered happening to her at the Boar’s Head Inn in 1973, though without much detail. She didn’t talk about it again until she entered therapy in 2015. Raoul Clark confirmed the 2006 conversation, and a later one in 2015, when Clark detailed the alleged assault.

Eventually, she told her kids and her friends. Then, in 2019 she tracked down Gerrard and wrote him a letter.

I had dreams, Lew, big ones. I trusted you to help me fill my potential, only to have you steal it from me. How you thought you could do what you wanted with my body is beyond comprehension. You messed with my head as well as my body, but you didn’t break me.

She told him not to respond and to never contact her.

When she heard Shriver tell her story on a podcast, she tracked her down and shared what Don Candy’s good friend had done to her. Clark says Shriver immediately remembered her and her mother, and Gerrard too. She says Shriver told her that abuse can come in many forms, and often from the people you might least expect.

In early May, Clark learned that when confronted with her story, Gerrard claimed not to remember her, even though he had coached her for nearly a year.

“This is exactly why I didn’t tell anyone, because he was going to deny it,” Clark said. “And it is devastating.”

Clark never stopped thinking about that student at Wake Forest. She wondered if she had struggled alone for years as Clark had. Then, in June 2023, she reached out to Jensen, now a tennis coach at U.C.-Santa Cruz.

Could Jensen help her find that student? Days later, Caroline Ullring’s phone lit up.

For 24 years, Ullring had thought her experience with Gerrard was unique. She had thought that somehow she had done something wrong, that it was her fault.

In 1999, she had returned to Europe with her secret. She eventually enrolled in medical school in Ireland, but in 2006, in the middle of her studies, her boyfriend died of complications from treatments for a brain tumor. She fell into a deep depression and was admitted for the first of multiple stays in the psychiatric wards of various hospitals. She finished her medical degree, but does not practice medicine.

She underwent electroshock treatments and survived multiple suicide attempts. Working with a psychologist who treated her for post traumatic stress disorder in 2019, she delved into all her traumas. A year ago, though, she was still prone to feelings of ambivalence about living or dying.

Hearing Clark tell her story in a series of messages over text and email, leading up to a video call last summer, changed that.

“I wasn’t alone,” she said. “It wasn’t something wrong with me.”

Clark has described Ullring as “a gift.” The idea of her had made Clark double over in tears back in 2006. Now they have a bond that helps sustain both of them. They text each other multiple times every week. They have yet to meet in person. They are sure they will one day.

In late March this year, Ullring decided to do something she had not done in years. Nearing 50, she signed up for Norway’s over-40 indoor singles championship.

Her fitness wasn’t where she wanted it to be. Still, she felt that old urge to compete. She won one match and then another. There were moments when she entered a flow state she remembers from her early years in Oslo, when tennis feels like what you are meant to do.

And then there weren’t any more matches left to win and she was the 40-and-over champion of Norway. Tennis and life had become something else.

There was gratitude, too, for having survived, though she still has good days and bad days.

“I’m lucky,” she said a few days after the tournament. “I’m happy that I’m still alive.”

(Illustration: Kelsea Pietersen / The Athletic)