Tennis

• 1. Introduction

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  Tennis began not with rackets but with bare palms. Historians trace the game's roots to 12th-century northern France, where players struck a ball with their hands across a net, in courtyards and cloisters. From that modest beginning grew one of the most widely played sports on earth, with millions of recreational players and four annual tournaments so prestigious they are simply called the majors. What turned a medieval hand game into the global sport played today on grass, clay, and hard courts? The answer runs through royal palaces, a Welsh country estate, a Staten Island cricket ground, and a century of equipment revolutions that changed how the ball moves and how players stand to meet it.

• 2. Kings, Courts, and Real Tennis

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  Louis X of France died in June 1316 at Vincennes, Val-de-Marne, after drinking a large quantity of cooled wine following a particularly exhausting match. Because of the accounts written at the time, Louis holds the distinction of being the first tennis player known by name. He had been a devoted player of jeu de paume, the game of the palm, and was so unhappy playing outdoors that he ordered enclosed indoor courts built in Paris around the end of the 13th century. That design spread across royal palaces throughout Europe.

  Henry VIII of England was another prominent enthusiast of the indoor game now called real tennis. The word tennis itself most likely comes from the French tenez, meaning hold, receive, or take, an interjection the server called to an opponent before striking the ball. King Charles V of France had a court installed at the Louvre Palace, and the sport became fashionable among clergy, lawyers, and aristocrats across the continent.

  An epitaph in St Michael's Church, Coventry, written around 1705, used the game as a metaphor for a life well spent, reading in part: "Here lyes an old toss'd Tennis Ball: Was racketted, from spring to fall, With so much heat and so much hast, Time's arm for shame grew tyred at last." By the 18th century, real tennis was declining, and the invention of the first lawn mower in Britain in 1830 is thought to have helped catalyze a new era, making it possible to prepare the smooth grass surfaces on which modern lawn tennis would eventually be played.

• 3. Birmingham and the Birth of Lawn Tennis

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  Between 1859 and 1865, Harry Gem, a solicitor, and his friend Augurio Perera developed a game combining elements of racquets and the Basque ball game pelota, played on Perera's croquet lawn in Birmingham, England. In 1872, they and two local doctors founded what is recognized as the world's first tennis club on Avenue Road, Leamington Spa. This is where the name lawn tennis was first used by a club for an organized activity.

  In December 1873, British army officer Walter Clopton Wingfield designed and patented a game he called sphairistike, from the Greek for ball-playing, for a garden party at Nantclwyd Hall in Llanelidan, Wales. The game was soon nicknamed sticky. Honor Godfrey, museum curator at Wimbledon, described how Wingfield produced a boxed set including a net, poles, rackets, and balls, along with a printed rules booklet. She credited him as being absolutely terrific at marketing, noting that he sent thousands of sets out in the first year or so, in 1874, to his connections in the clergy, the law profession, and the aristocracy.

  The world's oldest annual tennis tournament took place at Leamington Lawn Tennis Club in Birmingham in 1874, three years before Wimbledon held its first championships in 1877. In the United States, a young socialite named Mary Ewing Outerbridge returned from Bermuda in 1874 with a sphairistike set after watching British army officers play. She laid out a court at the Staten Island Cricket Club at Camp Washington in Tompkinsville, Staten Island. The first American National championship was held there in September 1880, when an Englishman named O.E. Woodhouse won the singles title and a silver cup worth one hundred dollars by defeating the Canadian I. F. Hellmuth.

• 4. Rules, Organizations, and the Open Era

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  On the 21st of May 1881, the United States National Lawn Tennis Association, now the United States Tennis Association, became the oldest nationwide tennis organization in the world, formed specifically to standardize rules and organize competitions. The US National Men's Singles Championship, now the US Open, was first held that same year at the Newport Casino in Newport, Rhode Island. The US National Women's Singles Championships followed in 1887 in Philadelphia.

  In 1913, the International Lawn Tennis Federation was founded, establishing three official global championships. Great Britain received the World Grass Court Championships, France received the World Hard Court Championships (clay courts were called hard courts at the time), and the World Covered Court Championships for indoor play rotated among Sweden, France, Great Britain, Denmark, Switzerland, and Spain. At a meeting held on the 16th of March 1923 in Paris, the title World Championship was dropped in favor of Official Championship, and the four events we now know as the Grand Slams were designated. The comprehensive rules promulgated by the ILTF in 1924 have remained largely stable in the following eight decades.

  Tennis withdrew from the Olympics after the 1924 Games, returning 60 years later as a demonstration event for players 21 and under in 1984. ITF president Philippe Chatrier, general secretary David Gray, and vice president Pablo Llorens, backed by IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, drove that reinstatement. The 1984 event's success persuaded the IOC to restore tennis as a full-medal sport at Seoul in 1988.

  In 1926, promoter C.C. Pyle launched the first professional tennis tour, featuring American Vinnie Richards and Frenchwoman Suzanne Lenglen as its most notable players. For decades afterward, players who turned professional were barred from the major amateur tournaments. That barrier fell in 1968, when commercial pressure and reports of amateurs receiving money covertly led to the inauguration of the Open Era, allowing all players to compete in all tournaments. In 1954, Jimmy Van Alen founded the International Tennis Hall of Fame, a nonprofit museum in Newport, Rhode Island, which houses a large collection of tennis memorabilia and honours prominent figures from across the sport's history.

• 5. Equipment: Rackets, Strings, and Balls

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  For the first hundred years of modern tennis, rackets were made of wood and strung with animal gut. Laminated wood construction provided additional strength through most of the 20th century, until manufacturers introduced metal frames and then composites of carbon graphite, ceramics, and lightweight metals such as titanium. Those stronger materials made it possible to build oversized frames that generated significantly more power.

  Natural gut strings were introduced by Babolat and remained the only option until synthetic strings appeared in the 1950s. Roger Federer is among the players who have continued to use natural gut strings, which are made from cow intestines and are considered easier on the arm than most alternatives. Federer also uses a hybrid setup, with natural gut in the mains (the vertical strings) and polyester in the crosses (the horizontal strings). Polyester strings allow more spin than any other type, which is why many advanced players favor them, while Kevlar strings are chosen mainly by players who break strings frequently, as they hold tension well despite being stiff on the arm.

  Tennis balls were originally made of cloth strips stitched with thread and stuffed with feathers. Modern balls are hollow vulcanized rubber covered with felt, and the International Tennis Federation defines the official diameter as between 65.41 and 68.58 mm, with weight between 56.0 and 59.4 grams. The predominant color shifted gradually from white to optic yellow in the latter part of the 20th century to improve visibility. Though the manufacturing process has remained largely unchanged for roughly a hundred years, most production has migrated to the Far East because of lower labor costs and materials.

• 6. How the Game is Played

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  A tennis court is 78 feet long and 27 feet wide for singles matches, expanding to 36 feet for doubles. The net stands 3 feet 6 inches high at the posts and 3 feet high at the centre. The modern court's design traces to Walter Clopton Wingfield's 1873 patent, though his original hourglass shape was modified to a rectangle by 1875. Tennis is unusual for a major sport in being played on multiple surfaces: grass, clay, and hard courts of concrete or asphalt topped with acrylic are the most common, with carpet occasionally used indoors.

  Scoring follows a system unique in sport. Points run love, 15, 30, and 40. When both players reach 40, the score becomes deuce, and a player must then win two consecutive points to take the game. A set goes to the first player to reach six games with a two-game margin, though a tiebreak is played if the score reaches six games apiece. The tiebreak was designed by Jimmy Van Alen, the same person who later founded the International Tennis Hall of Fame. A match is decided over best of three or best of five sets, with men playing best of five at all four Grand Slams and at Davis Cup.

  Service alternates every game. A serve that the opponent never touches is called an ace. A receiver who wins a game while their opponent was serving is said to have broken serve, which is considered a significant advantage since the server is generally expected to hold. In a tiebreak, points are served in an ABBA rotation, which is described in the rules as having been proven fair. A recent addition is the Hawk-Eye electronic review system, which allows players to challenge line calls during a point.

• 7. Great Players and Their Records

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  An Associated Press poll in 1950 named Bill Tilden the greatest player of the first half of the 20th century by a large margin. From 1920 to 1930, Tilden won the US Championships seven times and Wimbledon three times. In 1938, Donald Budge became the first person to win all four major singles titles in the same calendar year, and Tilden called Budge "the finest player 365 days a year that ever lived." Jack Kramer echoed that assessment in his 1979 autobiography.

  Rod Laver remains the only male player to have won the calendar year Grand Slam twice, in 1962 and 1969, and also captured the calendar year Professional Grand Slam in 1967. Jimmy Connors holds the Open Era men's singles records of 109 titles, 1,557 matches played, and 1,274 match wins. Björn Borg won six French Opens and five straight Wimbledon titles before retiring at 26 while still in his prime. John McEnroe reached the No. 1 ranking in both singles and doubles and finished with 77 singles and 78 doubles titles, the highest men's combined total of the Open Era.

  By the early 21st century, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic had collectively won 66 major singles titles. Djokovic holds the all-time record with 24, followed by Nadal with 22 and Federer with 20. Together they were ranked world No. 1 for a combined 947 weeks, with Djokovic leading at 428 weeks. Among women, Margaret Court leads with 24 Grand Slam singles titles, followed by Serena Williams with 23 and Steffi Graf with 22. Andre Agassi was the first player of either gender to complete the Career Grand Slam on all three modern surfaces, hard, grass, and clay, and the only player to win all four Grand Slam titles along with the year-end championships and the Olympic Games. Don Budge, considered by many to have had the best backhand of all time, used a powerful one-handed stroke in the 1930s and 1940s that generated topspin, a technique that continued to influence how the game was taught long after his career ended.