Sally Wilson Smith

Sally Wilson Smith was on a tennis court at an international tournament in January 2024 when the first alarm sounded because . . . well, of course. She was one of the top 40 players in her age division in the country but couldn’t draw a full breath that day, withdrew from the match and headed toward her car for the long ride home from Fort Lauderdale to see a doctor, get her scans, learn her fate.

Her mother Dorothy had taught Sally the game when she was a little girl in Wilmington, DE, then watched wide-eyed at what happened. A forehand steady as sunrise and a drop shot sly as sake turned the youngest of her four daughters into Delaware state champ at age 16 and No. 3 on the University of South Carolina’s women’s tennis team two years later.

She shelved her game her senior year as her passion for writing grew as deep as her angst over her serve. She became sports editor of the Gamecock newspaper, scored a gig on the tennis beat at the Atlanta Constitution right out of college, and by age 25 was covering Wimbledon and the U.S. Open for the Dallas Morning News, free-lancing for national magazines, doing one-on-one interviews with John McEnroe and Michael Jordan and filling up notepads on three-day weekends in Martina Navratilova’s home.

It wasn’t easy to be one of the pioneer female journalists in men’s locker rooms. A harebrained Baylor football coach accused her of ogling his musclebound men, a charge proven patently absurd when she wed a skinny geek named Gary Smith.

She returned from a walk in the Vermont woods a few years later with another surprise: She was trading in her dream job to become a doctor. What kind, she didn’t know, but fifteen minutes into her psychiatry rotation at the Medical University of South Carolina, riveted by the stories her gentle questions evoked from patients, she’d found the confluence with her Act 1 career. She became a psychiatrist at Charleston’s V.A. hospital for three years, then had her own private practice for the next 2 1/2 decades while working pro bono at the Harvest Free Medical Clinic in North Charleston.

It was during a prior volunteer job, a year into her marriage and just months before entering medical school, that her life took another doozy of a turn. Working for a year at a hospital for indigent patients in the Andes Mountains of Bolivia, she fell in love with a beautiful baby girl who’d been left there for months, decided to adopt her and discovered a couple weeks later that she was pregnant. Her water burst as she was taking her midterm histology exam and suddenly she was facing eight years of med school and residency over a kitchen table covered with fat books and with an infant in each arm.

But damn, was she ever good at saying yes to life. Climb 17,000-foot Mount Kenya for her honeymoon as colobus monkeys swooped from trees to snatch the pens she was trying to write her wedding thank-you notes with? Sign me up!

Walk out of the press box at the 1984 L.A Olympics and into a college classroom in Paris to study philosophy for a year? Kant think why not!

Host 45 in-laws for four-day Thanksgiving blowouts with themes, costumes, skits, DJ’s and cops rapping on the front door at 1 a.m.? Bring ’em on!

Pack up a small suitcase, five-year-old Gabriela, three-year-old Savi and nine-month-old Noah to live in a Basque fishing village in Spain for a year? Si, vamos juntos!

Well, then, Dr. Smith, how about sitting in cross-legged meditation for 10 1/2 hours a day with no phones allowed, no reading, no exercise and no food after 12 noon for ten straight days in a silent meditation retreat . . . then do it again a couple years later when her daughter asked Mom to come as her wingman? (Gulp.) (Deep breath.) Of course!

Her patients, seeking that suppleness, signed on and stayed on, some for all 25 years of her private practice. Among the legions she helped rescue from depression and anxiety were all the friends and family who got free and frequent consults, particularly helpful after those psychotic Thanksgivings, and the dinner-table conversations at home stirred one of her children to become a psychoanalyst and another a psychiatrist.

As soon as all three of her kids had gone off to college, she blew the cobwebs off her racket and her first love, became a deep student of the game and made a treasure trove of new friends as she played tournaments across the country.

And so there she was at age 68: 25 months after withdrawing from that tennis tournament and getting the diagnosis of a rare disease with an 11-month prognosis, metastatic gallbladder cancer. Still pulling from piles of bedside books on how to enhance her mind, her spirit and her #%&! serve. Still studying Spanish so she could volley it with her soon-to-be bilingual grandsons in Miami and New York. Still volunteering at the Harvest Free Medical Clinic and showing up at Charleston Climate Coalition actions. No woe is me, or why me?

Two months before her death on May 13, 2026, she was crouching in the sunshine on the baseline at the National Women’s Tennis Organization Championships at Daniel Island, SC surrounded by that trove of tennis friends all thrilled at seeing her back in a tournament after two years on gurneys and in MRI tubes. All hiding their grins and head shakes that someone that humble and sweet and infirm could still hit a drop shot that vicious.

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Sally Wilson Smith is survived by her husband Gary, her children Gabriela, Saviana and Noah, her grandchildren Nate, Eli, Bruno and Laney, and her sisters Barb Little and Tricia Whetham. Please do not send flowers. Donations in her memory can be given to the Charleston Climate Coalition at charlestonclimatecoalition.org or the Harvest Free Medical Clinic at hfmc.org.