Tennis

Tennis, original name lawn tennis, game in which two opposing players (singles) or pairs of players use tautly strung rackets to hit a ball of specified size, weight, and bounce over a net on a rectangular court. Points are awarded to a player or team whenever the opponent fails to correctly return the ball within the prescribed dimensions of the court. Organized tennis is played according to rules sanctioned by the International Tennis Federation (ITF), the world governing body of the sport.

Tennis originally was known as lawn tennis, and formally still is in Britain, because it was played on grass courts by Victorian gentlemen and ladies. It is now played on a variety of surfaces. The origins of the game can be traced to a 12th–13th-century French handball game called jeu de paume (“game of the palm”), from which was derived a complex indoor racket-and-ball game: real tennis. This ancient game is still played to a limited degree and is usually called real tennis in Britain, court tennis in the United States, and royal tennis in Australia.

The modern game of tennis is played by millions in clubs and on public courts. Its period of most rapid growth as both a participant and a spectator sport began in the late 1960s, when the major championships were opened to professionals as well as amateurs, and continued in the 1970s, when television broadcasts of the expanding professional tournament circuits and the rise of some notable players and rivalries broadened the appeal of the game. 

While tennis can be enjoyed by players of practically any level of skill, top competition is a demanding test of both shot making and stamina, rich in stylistic and strategic variety. From its origins as a garden-party game for ladies in whalebone corsets and starched petticoats and men in long white flannels, it has evolved into a physical chess match in which players attack and defend, exploiting angles and technical weaknesses with strokes of widely diverse pace and spin. Tournaments offer tens of millions of dollars in prize money annually.

History

Origin and early years

There has been much dispute over the invention of modern tennis, but the officially recognized centennial of the game in 1973 commemorated its introduction by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield in 1873. He published the first book of rules that year and took out a patent on his game in 1874, although historians have concluded that similar games were played earlier and that the first tennis club was established by the Englishman Harry Gem and several associates in Leamington in 1872. Wingfield’s court was of the hourglass shape and may have developed from badminton. The hourglass shape, stipulated by Wingfield in his booklet “Sphairistiké, or Lawn Tennis,” may have been adopted for patent reasons since it distinguished the court from ordinary rectangular courts. At the time, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) was the governing body of real tennis, whose rules it had recently revised. After J.M. Heathcote, a distinguished real tennis player, developed a better tennis ball of rubber covered with white flannel, the MCC in 1875 established a new, standardized set of rules for tennis.

Meanwhile, the game had spread to the United States in the 1870s. Mary Outerbridge of New York has been credited with bringing a set of rackets and balls to her brother, a director of the Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club. But research has shown that William Appleton of Nahant, Massachusetts, may have owned the first lawn tennis set and that his friends James Dwight and Fred R. Sears popularized the game.