{"id":1160088,"date":"2026-08-20T22:27:25","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T22:27:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1160088\/"},"modified":"2026-08-20T22:27:25","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T22:27:25","slug":"renee-richards-just-wanted-to-play-tennis-tucker-carlsons-dad-had-other-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1160088\/","title":{"rendered":"Ren\u00e9e Richards just wanted to play tennis. Tucker Carlson\u2019s dad had other ideas."},"content":{"rendered":"

This excerpt has been adapted from Finding Ren\u00e9e Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis\u2019s Trans Pioneer<\/a>, by Julie Kliegman, and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2026.<\/p>\n

Ren\u00e9e Richards never set out to become a household name. She just wanted to play tennis. This is how she found herself entering the women\u2019s draw of the La Jolla Tennis Tournament Championships in July 1976 under a half-fake identity. Don Rubell, her gynecologist and friend, had warned her that her killer left-handed serve would be recognizable anywhere, even while simply playing for fun at the John Wayne Tennis Club near her new home in Newport Beach, California. \u201cLook, Ren\u00e9e, you look just like a woman who\u2019s had a hysterectomy and no one would know any different,\u201d Richards remembered him saying, \u201cbut you go into that big windup on your forehand, there isn\u2019t a tennis player in the country that isn\u2019t gonna know whose it is.\u201d Serves, he continued, are as distinctive as fingerprints.<\/p>\n

Richards, then 41, laughed at Rubell\u2019s warning. She had moved across the country six months before the San Diego\u2013area tournament to start a quiet new life for herself, with her new name, Ren\u00e9e, and to continue practicing ophthalmology. But her serve was a dangerous link to her old, pre-sex-change identity, when she lived on the East Coast and ranked as high as sixth nationally in men\u2019s 35-and-over amateur tennis. Despite the risk, Richards simply couldn\u2019t resist the urge to return to competitive sports: \u201cI was like Eve in the Garden of Eden, but with a tennis ball instead of an apple.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Richards, posing as 31-year-old \u201cRen\u00e9e Clark,\u201d arrived in the beachfront town of La Jolla with one mission: to win the mostly unremarkable amateur-circuit tournament on behalf of Wayne\u2019s club, which maintained a fiercely competitive rivalry with the host club. (Today, the event, which began in 1917, is the longest-running tennis tournament to be held uninterrupted at the same venue.) The surname \u201cClark\u201d may have suggested that Richards was married at the time, but she was single. Though living in stealth, as transsexual people at the time often did, Richards had confided in her local friends, Jack and Sue Geller. \u201cPlease, not a word to anyone out there,\u201d she had pleaded to the couple in a coming-out letter just before she moved west. She also assured them: \u201cDon\u2019t be too apprehensive about seeing me\u2014I don\u2019t look all that different\u2014and my personality is just as eccentric as ever.\u201d She stayed with the Gellers during the La Jolla tournament.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n By Julie Kliegman. HarperOne.\n <\/p>\n

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\u201cI wasn\u2019t a dummy,\u201d Richards later told the journalist and activist Eleanor Foa Dienstag, who in the late \u201970s was working with her on an autobiography. (It would never be published.) \u201cI knew I was playing brinksmanship,\u201d Richards said, even with the name Clark. As she picked off opponent after opponent en route to the championship match, rumors swirled locally about this powerful new force in women\u2019s tennis. Richards was aware of murmurings that she may be a man in disguise. She remembered that Virginia Glass, the chair umpire for the La Jolla semifinal she won over Tammy Redondo, quickly clocked her as a fellow New Yorker but proceeded to call the match as usual. Later, Glass called the Gellers\u2019 house. When Richards answered, Glass persuaded her not to come clean to the public or offer to furnish evidence from her gynecologist. Meanwhile, others advised her to go home and forfeit the final. Richards stood firm: \u201cI was prepared for people to cheer,\u201d she told Dienstag. \u201cI was prepared for people to throw rotten eggs at me.\u201d<\/p>\n

La Jolla native, top seed, and reigning champion Robin Harris met Richards in the July 11 final. They happened to arrive for the match wearing the same Sergio Tacchini sweater (Harris\u2019 was periwinkle blue, and Richards\u2019 peach). Harris, then 20, remembered scouting out her opponent\u2019s semifinal from a nearby court. \u201cI was a little intimidated,\u201d Harris told me. \u201cI\u2019m only five-foot-three.\u201d Richards is six-foot-two. Harris felt distracted in the final and that she didn\u2019t play her best. \u201cI didn\u2019t know if she was still a man, or if she\u2014what had gone on,\u201d she said. Richards beat the crowd favorite with ease by a score of 6\u20131, 6\u20131.<\/p>\n

Harris recalled that club officials pressed her and her parents to file a complaint against Richards, but they chose not to. \u201cWe\u2019re not sue-happy,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s not who we are or were.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, as the rumors and whispers continued to swirl, Richard Carlson, a scoop-hungry, award-winning San Diego broadcast journalist (and the father of eventual conservative pundit and conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson), was intent on uncovering what he had heard could be the mysterious tennis player\u2019s \u201ctrue identity.\u201d He began checking into her background and records during the tournament. Then, after Richards returned to her ophthalmology practice the following week, Carlson started calling her with pointed questions about the names she used on her personal documents and professional licenses. Richards remembered evading his queries and telling him several times not to contact her again.<\/p>\n

In his fourth call, Carlson\u2014who later said on his broadcast that he had spoken with Richards only twice\u2014opened bluntly. \u201cIsn\u2019t it true, Dr. Richards, that your identity was once that of Dr. Richard Raskind, a prominent ophthalmologist and an amateur tennis player from New York City?\u201d<\/p>\n

Richards felt resigned. Carlson must have had her all figured out, including her transition and history of living as a man in New York. \u201cMr. Carlson,\u201d she responded, \u201cit would be an insult to your intelligence to deny this any further. You certainly have done quite a piece of detective work. Everything you\u2019ve suggested is true, but certainly you can see that this is an extremely personal matter. Please don\u2019t reveal it to the public.\u201d<\/p>\n

After more back-and-forth, in which Carlson asserted his right to do his job, Richards made one final, desperate plea: \u201cMr. Carlson, if you break this story, I will hold you responsible for the result.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carlson asked whether this constituted a threat.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d Richards responded. \u201cI just want you to know that you will bear the responsibility for ruining my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDuly noted,\u201d Carlson said, and he hung up the phone.<\/p>\n

On the July 21 local evening news on KFMB-TV, Carlson proceeded to lay out\u2014incorrectly\u2014 that \u201cRen\u00e9e Clark\u201d was really a successful men\u2019s amateur tennis player named Richard Raskind simply masquerading as a woman by the name of Ren\u00e9e Richards.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe women\u2019s singles final match may go down in tennis history as one of the strangest ever played,\u201d Carlson teased viewers while reporting on site from the La Jolla courts. \u201cThirty-one-year-old Ren\u00e9e Richards is actually 41-year-old Dr. Richard H. Raskind. He\u2019s a man. Until recently, a New York ophthalmologist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carlson went on to quickly describe how Richards proceeded to pull off what he clearly thought was a caper for accolades and prize money, saying, \u201cHe\u201d\u2014in reference to Richards\u2014\u201cdonned women\u2019s clothes. He\u2019s been practicing medicine and playing tennis as a woman.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carlson then interviewed a couple of tournament attendees who had no idea how to gender Richards or contextualize her victory. \u201cI\u2019ll say this about him or her, the person played well,\u201d one spectator said. \u201cHe was a gentleman or a lady, whichever the case may be.\u201d The reporter then picked back up: \u201cIt was not until after [Richards] speculated that she might be good enough to beat Chrissie Evert that I told her that I knew she was a man, Richard Raskind.\u201d<\/p>\n

The facts of the matter, which Richards would try to bring to light in the days following that initial report from Carlson, were that she was a transsexual woman with the birth name Richard Henry Raskind, and that all she aimed to do was play her beloved sport at a competitive level while maintaining some semblance of privacy. But before Richards could correct the record, Carlson\u2019s report set off a worldwide media circus. Reporters and photographers swarmed Richards outside her apartment back in Newport Beach in the coming days. She was frightened, even as she had public and private support to lean on. Richards found particular backing from her tennis club\u2014many of whose members, she later came to realize, must have known about her trans identity well before it made headlines. They had chosen to swiftly look the other way.<\/p>\n

Richards, now in her 90s, is a woman who lives with many regrets. She regrets never having pitched for the New York Yankees. She regrets living so publicly for a time in pursuit of high-level tennis opportunities and accolades. She regrets the \u201canimosity and negativity\u201d she thinks she caused throughout her sport. She does not, however, regret her transition to womanhood itself. Richards wrote in her 2007 book, No Way Ren\u00e9e, \u201cThough I am glad that I stood up for my rights and became an inspiration to many disenfranchised people, I regret many of the effects of that decision.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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    For his part, Carlson, who died in 2025 at age 84, never expressed regret, at least publicly, over this particular piece of muckraking. In fact, in a 2021 HBO documentary series about Liz Carmichael, another trans woman he outed in the 1970s, he told the filmmakers, \u201cIf you didn\u2019t think [being trans] was kind of sick, you would think Jeffrey Dahmer was a normal person.\u201d<\/p>\n

    And in 2011, in an interview for Ren\u00e9e, ESPN\u2019s 30 for 30 documentary about Richards, he said, \u201cI have thought that\u2014and I thought then, yeah\u2014you can call yourself a car and you can wear some bumpers and put taillights on your back. It doesn\u2019t make you a car. Chromosomes make you a man or a woman.\u201d (Through a representative, Carlson did not return multiple requests for comment from me in 2024.)<\/p>\n

    Carlson\u2019s bad-faith, misleading attempt at hard-hitting reportage may not have been the coming-out story Richards had wanted or anticipated, but out she was indeed. She was now inarguably the most prominent transsexual person of the day, taking the mantle from Christine Jorgensen, the U.S. Army veteran turned actor and singer who had famously undergone a series of sex-reassignment surgeries abroad beginning in 1951. While Richards was far too strong-willed to let one man ruin her, she understood that her life as she knew it had already changed forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This excerpt has been adapted from Finding Ren\u00e9e Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis\u2019s Trans Pioneer, by Julie…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1160089,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4105],"tags":[3444,2348,5763,194828,79,1068,18745,16,15],"class_list":["post-1160088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-books","tag-history","tag-lgbtq","tag-outward","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-transgender","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117130196819352413","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1160088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1160088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1160088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1160089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1160088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1160088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1160088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}