Tennis is a game rich in tradition, personalities, exciting events and even controversy. To attempt to reach back and try to capture all — or at least most of this — and put it inside the covers of a single book is a monumental endeavor. I must congratulate Grimsley on his enterprise and his bravery.
This must be the most comprehensive and ambitious volume written on the sport. Library shelves are loaded with excellent books dealing with every phase of the game but I know of none that has tried to explore the broad reaches from the first primitive bats and balls right up to open competition, with all that has happened between.
It was just a half century ago that I lifted a tennis racquet for the first time and, with dire results, hit my first tennis ball. There was something about the delightful sound of ball on gut, even if slightly marred by the jingle of glass from the broken window, that entered my soul with a never-to-be-forgotten thrill. It was a new emotion to my six years, but one that now, at fifty-six, still carries the thrill-even if not the broken glass. I can, at least, hit the ball in the court most of the time.
I urge you-play tennis! Tennis is the most valuable sport that any individual can learn, even more so than golf. It is the most universally played of all athletics, and its rules are the same the world over. A good game of tennis is the open-sesame on every continent and in almost every nation. Language is no barrier to tennis players, since whether a ball is out or in can be seen and understood without spoken words. Individual sport is always more valuable than team sport in adult life, since team sport requires too much effort to organize in the press of the business world.
Tennis, by its small requirements of time and playing space, and its comparatively inexpensive equipment, lies within the reach of practically everyone. The tremendous increase in public courts in almost all cities has taken the game away from the classes and put it in the hands of the masses, which is a healthy and splendid thing in every way. Even our schools and colleges, steeped in the English tradition of team sport rather than individual sport, are gradually yielding to pressure and giving more and more importance to tennis. The steady growth of tennis courts at schools and colleges, together with the increase in the number that provide professional coaching for their students, shows that at last the importance of the individual sport for the adult life of the citizen of the future has been recognized by our educators.
Certainly the greatest benefit that tennis gives its follower is the means to keep physically fit. It is a game that can be played practically from the cradle to the grave-and it is apt to aid in postponing the latter many years. I started to play tennis at the age of six-and I was not unique in that. King Gustav of Sweden was still playing in his late eighties.
I remember a few years ago watching a doubles match at The West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills, between four men who met about three times a week to fight it out-and the combined age of the quartet was three hundred years. It is a game that can be carried on along with practically any form of human endeavor. The businessman, doctor, lawyer, actor, singer, writer, etc., are all able to find enough leisure time to play and, by so doing, increase their productivity by better physical condition.
The better one plays tennis, the greater its rewards, materially, spiritually, and psychologically. The champion, whether he is the champion of the world or just champion of the particular city block where he lives, is a big man in his own world and carries added weight socially and in every other way. The great players who attain international fame gain rewards in travel and the chance to meet peoples of other lands that no amount of money could buy. I would not trade the great people I’ve met, or the wonderful places I’ve visited through my tennis, for all the money in the world.
Therefore, I urge all who can to play tennis, and if you do play it, play it to the very best of your ability and opportunity. Enjoy it as a game, keep it a sport. if you become great in it, the material rewards will come to you without your playing it with that in mind. Sometimes I feel that the game has become ton commercialized today.
It may still be called Amateur, but it has been organized into Big Business, which, in turn, has taken away much of the sporting element and made it too grim and serious.