​This excerpt has been adapted from Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer, by Julie Kliegman, and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2026.Renée Richards never set out to become a household name. She just wanted to play tennis. This is how she found herself entering the women’s 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. “Look, Renée, you look just like a woman who’s had a hysterectomy and no one would know any different,” Richards remembered him saying, “but you go into that big windup on your forehand, there isn’t a tennis player in the country that isn’t gonna know whose it is.” Serves, he continued, are as distinctive as fingerprints.Richards, then 41, laughed at Rubell’s warning. She had moved across the country six months before the San Diego–area tournament to start a quiet new life for herself, with her new name, Renée, 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’s 35-and-over amateur tennis. Despite the risk, Richards simply couldn’t resist the urge to return to competitive sports: “I was like Eve in the Garden of Eden, but with a tennis ball instead of an apple.”So Richards, posing as 31-year-old “Renée Clark,” arrived in the beachfront town of La Jolla with one mission: to win the mostly unremarkable amateur-circuit tournament on behalf of Wayne’s 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 “Clark” 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. “Please, not a word to anyone out there,” she had pleaded to the couple in a coming-out letter just before she moved west. She also assured them: “Don’t be too apprehensive about seeing me—I don’t look all that different—and my personality is just as eccentric as ever.” She stayed with the Gellers during the La Jolla tournament.Amazon “I wasn’t a dummy,” Richards later told the journalist and activist Eleanor Foa Dienstag, who in the late ’70s was working with her on an autobiography. (It would never be published.) “I knew I was playing brinksmanship,” Richards said, even with the name Clark. As she picked off opponent after opponent en route to the championship match, rumors swir