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| History of Tennis |
‘The idea of two people hitting a ball back and forth across some obstacle, with their hand, feet or some implement, has probably been acted out for centuries. Indeed, tennis historians who have looked hard enough claim to have found evidence of tennis in ancient Greece. But the first recognisable form of what we think of as tennis came in the 13th century, and the game we know today dates from the second half of the 19th century.’ – The Book of Tennis by Chris Bowers (JWM, 2002)
1316 - The French king Louis X dies after a strenuous game of tennis (the form we know today as Real Tennis, Royal Tennis, Court Tennis or Jeu de Paume), but the blow does nothing to dampen the popularity of the pastime.
1530s - The English king Henry VIII builds a tennis court at Hampton Court Palace. It no longer exists, but a similar court built there in 1625 survives and is used today.
1870 - The All England Croquet Club is founded in the Wimbledon district of London. Tennis isn’t even thought of and is somewhat in decline, as it is still an indoor game played only where royal and rich benefactors have built a court.
1873 - An English army major Walter Clopton Wingfield designs, patents, manufactures and markets a version of Real Tennis that can be played outdoors on a lawn. He calls it ‘Sphairistike’ (from the Greek word for ball games), offering the term ‘lawn tennis’ as a helpful explanation. Wingfield sells Sphairistike in boxes that feature two net posts, a net, rackets, and India rubber balls, plus instructions about laying out the court and actually playing the game. They cost five guineas (5.25 British pounds), a lot of money at the time. Wingfield’s boxes kickstart the modern form of tennis, though the one thing that doesn’t work is the name, and Wingfield soon realises that his subtitle ‘lawn tennis’ is much better than ‘Sphairistike’.
1874 - Two brothers, Clarence and Joseph Clark, take one of Wingfield’s boxes to America, leading to the first lawn tennis tournament in the USA later that year.
1875 - The All England Croquet Club’s members vote to give one of the croquet lawns over to tennis. The following year four more are converted as the club considers staging a formal tournament.
1877 - The first Wimbledon tournament is staged at the (by now) All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. The first winner is Spencer Gore.
1881 - The United States National Lawn Tennis Association (today the USTA) is founded, and in the same year it holds its first National Championship, the forerunner of the US Open but then restricted to American residents. It is held at Newport, Rhode Island, and is won by Dick Sears.
1891 - The French national championships – also restricted to French nationals – are inaugurated in Paris.
1896 - Tennis is one of the core sports in the first modern Olympic Games.
1900 - A Harvard university student Dwight F. Davis decides to stage a team challenge match between the USA and the British Isles. He has the cup engraved as the ‘International Lawn Tennis Challenge Trophy’, but it soon becomes known as the Davis Cup.
1905 - The Australasian National Championships, the forerunner of today’s Australian Open, are founded, with the venue alternating between cities in Australia and New Zealand.
1913 - An international governing body, the International Lawn Tennis Federation (now the ITF), is founded with 13 members representing 14 countries. The aim is to ensure the sport grows with uniform scoring and minimum divergence from one country to another. (The ITF dropped the word ‘Lawn’ from its name in 1977.)
1919 - Tennis’s first superstar, Suzanne Lenglen, wins the Wimbledon title, the first of 12 titles at what are later to become the Grand Slam tournaments. She combines relentless accuracy with balletic elegance, and enhances tennis’s profile as a fashionable sport.
1924 - Tennis withdrew from the Olympic Games citing a lack of professionalism in the organisation and the Olympics’ desire to not schedule Wimbledon in an Olympic year.
1927 - The French win the Davis Cup for the first time, thereby guaranteeing themselves the right to host the following year’s final. To provide a fitting setting, the national association obtains land on the western edge of Paris from the city authorities, builds a new tennis stadium, and names it after a French war hero, Roland Garros, an aviator who died in the last days of the First World War. (Roland Garros wasn’t actually a tennis fan – his sporting passion was rugby!)
1933 - Australian Jack Crawford comes within one set of winning all four major titles in the same year. There are mutterings that he is on the verge of a ‘Grand Slam’, a term taken from the card game Bridge.
1938 - The American Donald Budge becomes the first man to win all four major titles in the same year. In describing the achievement, the New York Times tennis correspondent Allison Danzig uses the phrase ‘a Grand Slam in tennis’, thereby entrenching the term in tennis vocabulary.
1947 - Jack Kramer wins Wimbledon. He had intended to turn professional the previous year but was determined to win Wimbledon once, to give credibility to his assault on the professional circuit, both as a player and as an entrepreneur and administrator. He was to become one of the most influential figures in the advent of the modern tennis world.
1953 - Maureen Connolly becomes the first woman to win all four Grand Slam tournaments in a single year while still a teenager. Within two years, her playing career was to end following a riding accident, and she died at 35 from cancer.
1960 - Dogged by years of accusations of ‘shamateurism’, the International Lawn Tennis Federation’s annual meeting debates a motion to make tennis ‘open’, in other words to end the split amateur and professional circuits that had plagued the sport since the 1920s. The motion is defeated by five votes, with subsequent evidence that several delegates had missed the vote. It meant the four Grand Slam tournaments remained purely for ‘amateurs’, and any man who had won a couple of majors in their early 20s was likely to leave the official circuit to earn money as a touring professional.
1967 - Wimbledon holds a demonstration tournament for professionals, and announces that its 1968 championships will be open to all players, amateurs and professionals. It is the signal for tennis to go ‘open’.
1968 - Tennis goes ‘open’. The first official ‘open’ tournament takes place at Bournemouth on the English south coast, and the first Grand Slam, the newly named French Open, ushers in a new era. Both events are won by a returning professional, Ken Rosewall.
1969 - Rod Laver becomes the first – and so far only – man to win a pure ‘open’ Grand Slam, by winning all four major titles in the same year.
1970 - The tiebreak is introduced to Grand Slam tennis, as the US Open adopts the nine-point shootout (sudden death at 4-4). It is marketed under the slogan ‘We cordially invite you to sudden death in the afternoon at Forest Hills.’ That tournament sees Margaret Court complete a pure Grand Slam.
1973 - Male players form their own union, the Association of Tennis Professionals, and introduce computer rankings to determine fair entry conditions to tournaments for the best players. They also stage a boycott of Wimbledon by 79 male players over the failure of Wimbledon to allow the Yugoslav Niki Pilic to compete because he had declined to play Davis Cup. 1973 also sees the best-attended tennis match ever, when 30,492 pack into the Houston Astrodome to watch Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs, the 1939 Wimbledon champion who had claimed that, even at 55, he could still beat the leading women players. He is proved wrong, King beating him in three straight sets to post a remarkable victory for ‘women’s lib’.
1977 - As Wimbledon celebrates its centenary, the US Open bids farewell to the private setting of the Westside Club at Forest Hills, to move to a non-club national tennis centre nearby at Flushing Meadows. The last US Open at Forest Hills begins bizarrely with Renée Richards, a transsexual who had played in the men’s singles as Richard Raskind in 1960, becoming the first (and only) person to have played in both the men’s and women’s singles at Grand Slam level – she is beaten in the first round by the Wimbledon champion Virginia Wade.
1980 - The tiebreak comes of age in a remarkable 34-point shootout in the Wimbledon final when Bjorn Borg has seven championship points to beat John McEnroe in four sets, but McEnroe saves them all, and converts his seventh point to take the match into a fifth set. Borg wins it 8-6.
1984 - Clay develops into a temporary indoor surface when Sweden becomes the first country to install a makeshift clay court for a Davis Cup tie. And no ordinary tie – it’s the final, and the visit to Gothenburg’s Scandinavium arena of one of the strongest Davis Cup teams in history: world No. 1 John McEnroe, No. 2 Jimmy Connors, and the world’s best doubles team, McEnroe and Peter Fleming. By Saturday night, Sweden is the champion for the loss of one set, and clay is established as a surface option for indoor ties. Tennis also returns to the Olympic Games as a test event for under-21 players at Los Angeles and is won by Stefan Edberg and Steffi Graf.
1988 - The Australian Open, which suffered a ‘dark age’ in the 1970s and early 80s, moves into the modern era with a new national tennis centre at Flinders Park (later renamed Melbourne Park), characterised by the first tennis stadium with a retractable roof. Steffi Graf beats Chris Evert in the first ‘indoor’ Grand Slam final, to begin a run which would see her win a ‘Golden Slam’ (calendar year Grand Slam plus Olympic gold medal) after tennis also makes a return as a full medal sport at the Olympic Games in Seoul.
1989 - The ATP transforms itself from a players’ union into a tour body. In an announcement made in the US Open’s parking lot, it says it will take over the running of the men’s tour in January 1990 from the Men’s International Professional Tennis Council, that had operated under the ITF’s auspices, and henceforth be known as the ‘ATP Tour’. A feature of the new tour is an elite series of nine events, the ‘Super Nine’ (now the Masters Series). With the breakaway denoting a form of civil war in tennis, the Grand Slam tournaments form their own year-ending tournament to start in 1990 called ‘The Grand Slam Cup’. It will share a prize money pool of (a then massive) $1.5 million among 16 players and two reserves. The rival year-ending events were to last another 10 years before peace broke out in 1999.
1994 - Tennis on grass is played in indoor conditions for the first time, when the new retractable roof on the Gerry Weber Stadium in Halle, Germany, is closed to allow play to continue during rain.
2005 - The ATP (having dropped the word ‘Tour’ from its name in 2000) introduces a different scoring system for doubles matches, with sudden death points at deuce (‘no advantage’) and a first-to-ten-points tiebreak in place of a final set.
2006 - The right for players to challenge dubious line calls by electronic review is introduced in the Miami Masters Series tournament and makes its Grand Slam debut at the US Open later that year.
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