Tennis Ace Fights Against Breast Cancer
By Bill Spring
Maureen Rankine has gone from bettering a good serve to serving the better good.
Eight years ago, she was a full-time tennis teacher and coach. Today, Rankine devotes nearly all her time to Tennis Against Breast Cancer, the nonprofit charity she founded in 1996 to increase awareness about the disease and raise funds to help fight it.
It's amazing that Rankine even ended up in tennis. In the 1970s, she was a teenager growing up, as she puts it, "on the wrong side of the tracks" in her hometown of Montego Bay, Jamaica. The second-eldest of nine children, Rankine played cricket and ran track despite suffering from severe asthma.
But because almost all the tennis courts on the island were at exclusive tourist resorts and hotels, Rankine did not get a chance to play the sport until she was in her mid-teens, when she could work in pro shops or retrieve balls in exchange for court time. She quickly developed a killer game.
Rankine earned her first money as a tennis player by standing in for the absent doubles partner of a vacationing American chicken farmer. The man gave her $20. "Next summer, I saw him on TV," say Rankine. "He was Frank Perdue."
By the time she was 20, Rankine was one of the top three tennis players in Jamaica. In 1981, she won a scholarship to attend Broward Community College in Florida, and then went on to Murray State University in Kentucky, where she led the team to its first conference championship. She was named a Collegiate All-American in 1983.
After graduating with a business degree, Rankine spent over a decade as a coach for tennis camps and resorts, working in Amherst, Mass.; Amelia Island, Fla., and, by the early 1990s, New York City.
It was in New York in 1991 that Rankine, quite by accident, learned about the world of charity fund raising. Rankine was at the Westside Tennis Club to teach a clinic, but it was suddenly cancelled. She ended up playing in a celebrity tournament for charity. "They all thought I was one of the celebrities," she remembers. Rankine was thrilled to play doubles with actor Morgan Englund, one of her favorite soap-opera stars.
Rankine and Englund won the tournament, and the following night attended a star-studded party. Feeling a little homesick, Rankine was thrilled that the fete was Jamaican-themed — and stunned when the organizers presented a large check to the Juvenile Diabetes Fund. "I thought, that's unbelievable!" she says. "You get celebrities together, you get people playing tennis, you have a party, and when it's all over you give the money to a charity? I can do that!"
Rankine had found a new direction in life.
At a tournament at Amelia Island the following year, Rankine ran herself ragged raising $2,000 for the Arthur Ashe Foundation, an AIDS charity. But when she handed the check over, she felt underappreciated, as if the money was just a drop in the bucket for such a huge charity. She promised herself that, next time, the money would go to a smaller organization where it would make more of a difference.
After a few false starts and some time spent looking for a cause that truly spoke to her, Rankine saw journalist Linda Ellerbee on television, openly talking about her battle with breast cancer. Moved and inspired, Rankine organized a small tennis event to benefit SHARE (www.sharecancersupport.org), a New York self-help group for women with breast and ovarian cancer. "The first $250 we ever made," she remembers, "we sent the check to SHARE."
Rankine founded Tennis Against Breast Cancer (TABC — www.tennisabc.org) in 1996. Since then, she has organized many fund-raisers, including the annual Celebrity Tennis Challenge in New York City and the annual Golf, Tennis and Fashion Show during the Bausch & Lomb Championships in Amelia Island.
With these events and others, TABC has collected close to $100,000.
Although she still teaches tennis, Rankine spends the vast majority of her time and effort on TABC. It has not been easy, and there have been moments when the red tape and frustration involved with running a charity have made her feel like walking away.
But when Rankine is able to see the fruits of her labor — for instance, when she gave $500 to a Harlem clinic so five women could get mammograms — she knows it's all worth it.
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