Tennis probably dates back to prehistoric time. Presumably a caveman one day fashioned a round object from, let’s say, the fruit of a gum tree and amused himself by throwing it against a tree, rolling it down a hill or belting it with a stick. His neighbors joined him in the fun. Some hit the object along the ground with various-shaped sticks: a primitive version of hockey, croquet and polo.
Others preferred to knock it through the air like Neanderthal baseball, cricket and golf enthusiasts. Still others flung their rude missile against a wall or back and forth among themselves. At first they used bare hands and when calluses resulted, they wrapped their palms in lion hide. Eventually they carved small paddles to strike the ball and refined this implement with a mesh of catgut. Tennis was far from being as we know it today but it was on its way.
Modern tennis, initially associated with the aristocracy, was slow to reach the masses. Even as late as the 1930’s it was regarded as a “sissy” pastime to be shunned by redblooded athletes, and young men were reluctant to be seen on the street carrying a racket. Archaic customs prolonged this effeminate image. Tennis was played largely at exclusive clubs restricted to persons of more than modest means. Players were required to wear white attire — an inflexible rule at Wimbledon and Forest Hills until 1968 when the American Davis Cup team broke tradition by donning yellow shirts. Spectators were prohibited from “whooping it up” as they might in less proper sports, and there were snickers at use of the word “love” to signify no-score.
The game finally started to lose its starchiness after World War II. Gardnar Mulloy, an international tennis star for a quarter century, was the most militant spokesman in a campaign to rid the sport of its stuffed-shirt customs. In Britain the Wimbledon fathers succeeded in eliminating barriers preventing professionals from competing with amateurs. By mid-century the men had exchanged their long flannel trousers for shorts that revealed their thick masculine calves while the ladies had traded in their ankle-length dresses and multiple slips for ballerina skirts that bounced up on every serve to display sexy lace or embroidered panties.
Tennis showed the sporting public it was no sissy sport but one which put a premium on speed, endurance and basic athletic skills. The game grew in popularity. It offered a quick means of exercise, since a single hour did the work of a full day on the golf course. Equipment wasn’t overly expensive and facilities became readily available as public courts, indoor and outdoor, for rich and poor alike, sprang up. By the late 1960’s tennis players in the United States numbered nine million, exceeding golfers by a million. Some fifty million played in other countries while in Australia the sport was almost a religion.
The game had changed in other ways too. Grass surface courts were superseded by turf surfaces of various types. Concrete and hard courts provided a quick bounce for the ball and scientists developed plastic materials that promised to make all natural surfaces obsolete. Tennis had come a long way from its primitive beginnings when our playful caveman first batted his makeshift ball over an earthen net.
Lawn tennis, as the sport is formally known, was invented in 1873 by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, a British Army officer who was seeking to liven up a lawn party. It was actually a variation of a game called court or royal tennis, played almost exclusively by royalty and titled gentry.
A scholar of sorts, Wingfield had done some research on the sport and believed he had proof it dated back to ancient Greece. Homer, in The Odyssey, for instance, tells how white-armed Princess Nausicaa, playing a game with her handmaidens, knocked the ball into the river. Horace, describing his journey from Rome to Brundisium in the Fifth Satire, relates that during one stop Maecenas “goes to play at Tennis while he and Virgil sleep.” On the other hand, though Grecian vase art shows a sport played with a ball and a curved stick, it resembles hockey more than tennis. Nevertheless, right or wrong, Wingfield was sufficiently convinced of his theory to dub his own version of the game “Sphairistike,” a Greek word meaning “to play.”
Attempts have also been made to trace tennis back to ancient civilizations of the Near and Far East. Antiquarius, an English chronicler, wrote that the Greeks acquired the game from the Persians or Egyptians as far back as the fifth century, B.C., and it found its way into France as a result of the Saracen invasion. During the fourth century, A.D., the Persians had a game called “tchigan” which was played in an enclosed space with rackets four feet long and which resembled “chicane,” an ancient sport in Languedoc.
Most tennis historians cut through these vague conjectures and pick up the game in thirteenth century France. Here it was known as “jeu de paume” or “a game played with the palm.” The indoor version was called “jeu de courte paume,” meaning short game, while the long game was “jeu de longue paume.” As the name suggests, the ball was struck with the palm, a gambit which the French borrowed from the Irish sport of handball. The balls were made of soft cloth sewn into a hard, round shape.
The first “nets” were wooden obstacles or mounds of dirt. Participants played each other or hit the ball against a wall. In time, instead of using bare hands, they substituted gloves or crude bats. Nearly a century after its introduction in France the sport reached England where Edward III ( 1327-1377) ordered a court built in his palace and encouraged his subjects to take up the game.
The general feeling is that the word “tennis” evolved from the French “ten-ez,” meaning “to play.” It has been suggested that the earliest players began a contest with the shout “ten-ez,” an equivalent of the golfing expression “play away.” The word “tenililudium,” translated as “play of tennis,” is said to have a Latin derivative. The Greek “phennis,” meaning the same thing, has appeared in some scholars’ works.
Others have related the name to the German “tanz,” referring to the bounding motion of the ball. An Italian account written before 1370 tells how an ecclesiastic played ball with some newly arrived cavaliers, and the author adds that this incident “was the beginning in these parts of playing at tenes.” The first known use of the word in the English language was around 1400 in a message to Henry IV and has been quoted two ways: “Of the tennes to winne or lose a chace” or “Off the tenetz to winne or lese a chace.”
More intriguing, though less believable, is the contention that the game’s name originally derived from an Egyptian city, Tennis, said to have sunk into the sea in 1226. Tennis was renowned for its fabrics and the tennis ball was, in early days, made from cloth. A somewhat far-fetched connection has been drawn between the two facts, a theory which brings to mind the old English poem: My mistress is a Tennis-Ball Composed of cotton fine.
In the beginning “jeu de paume” was the game of priests, then kings, one of whom, Louis X, caught a chill and died after a feverish match at Vincennes. It was first played on monastery courtyards and was responsible for at least one bishop neglecting his duties. In 1245 the Archbishop of Rouen prohibited his priests from playing. For the same reason Louis IX outlawed the sport. But this and succeeding edicts were virtually ignored. One of the oldest known courts was described in a sales notice for the Hotel de Nesle in 1308; Benvenuto Cellini was supposed to have played here. Walled-in courts began to appear in France in 1368 and the people began to bet on matches. By 1600 there were two thousand courts throughout the country, indoor and outdoor.
Tennis came of age not without growing pains. In England it was prohibited in 1388 along with other games because the people were failing to practice archery. Parisians were hit with a similar ordinance in 1397 because they were neglecting their families and jobs. Holland outlawed the sport in 1401 and 1413. There was one grisly episode when James I of Scotland was assassinated while attempting to escape through a castle vault which he himself had ordered walled up to keep from losing tennis balls. In 1447 there was a controversy between the Bishop and the Mayor of Exeter: The Bishop complained his glass windows were endangered because the Mayor allowed youngsters to play tennis in the cloisters and the Mayor counter-charged that the Bishop’s officers were bootleggers. Court records show that in 1508 four men were arrested for “keeping tennysplayes.”
As the game grew in popularity England and France engaged in international matches but these shortly degenerated into gambling fests. The players, holding high opinions of their abilities, often wagered heavily on the outcome, placing the stakes at the net before hitting the first ball. The situation became so intolerable that France banned public tennis exhibitions in the seventeenth century. Many abandoned outdoor courts became overgrown with weeds while locks were put on the public indoor courts. Moving inside the sport once again became the province of the rich.
From this sequence of events emerged court tennis, referred to wryly by commoners as royal tennis. Confined largely to the uppercrust, court tennis was a complex indoor sport involving penthouses, grilles and walls which few men could play or score. The stage was set for Major Wingfield to contribute his own crucial innovation to the game.
Wingfield, a handsome man with beard, sideburns and a flowing mustache, came from one of England’s most distinguished families. In 1860, at age twenty-seven he was put in charge of a cavalry force in the China campaign. He became a major in the Montgomery Yeomanry Cavalry and later a member of the elite Honorable Corps of Gentlemenat-Arms, the bodyguard of the sovereign at all public and state occasions.
Although a military figure, he was also a country gentleman and a sportsman who excelled at popular games of the day — court tennis, racquets, badminton and cricket. He frequently confided to friends his idea for an outdoor sport that would be a variation of court tennis, which was played by batting balls against a wall and picking them up on the rebound. One December afternoon in 1873 he held a lawn party at Nantclwyd and at that time he unveiled what he called “The Major’s Game — Sphairistike or Lawn Tennis.”
The major marked out a court on the lawn. The court had an hourglass figure, narrower at the net than at the base lines. The balls were uncovered hollow rubber. The net was about four feet high in the center and five feet at each of the two posts. The posts were fragile, held by guy ropes with small flags on top of each. The rackets were similar to those used in court tennis, spoon-shaped with long handles. Scoring was the same as in racquets: A one-two-three system with fifteen points needed to win a game. Scoring by “fifteens,” although in existence apparently as early as the twelfth century, was not adopted for lawn tennis until 1877.
Wingfield acknowledged he had incorporated the features of other racket games into his new invention. Though its primary source was court tennis, it contained characteristics of racquets, a slum game until it was taken up in the early 1800’s at Eton and Harrow. It was also obviously influenced by badminton which had originated in India and was played on an outdoor court with small rackets and winged “birds.” The makeup of the court and the net were borrowed from badminton, the equipment came from court tennis.