CELEBRATING 150 YEARS OF TENNIS (AS WE KNOW IT)
By Chris Bowers
How many sports fans know when their sport actually began? Most may be aware of some historical events dating from a year beginning with 18, or even 17, but few will be able to say when their favourite pastime dates from.
With tennis it’s different. Forms of hitting a ball back and forth have existed for centuries, but the sport we know today as tennis was founded at a very specific time – and its 150th anniversary is right now! On February 23, 1874, a retired English army officer, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, obtained a provisional patent for his invention of a portable court for playing tennis, and then published the rules of his new game.
He originally called it ‘lawn tennis’, but after a few months, he toyed with ‘Sphairistike’, a rather bad use of classical Greek (the word is a feminine adjective meaning ‘skill with a ball’) which he hoped would stick. Just in case it didn’t, he kept the tag ‘lawn tennis’. Linguists, spellcheckers and headline writers are probably very grateful that lawn tennis – later just ‘tennis’ – was what stuck.
Orphaned at 13, Wingfield was brought up by his uncle and educated to be an army officer. He served in India and China in the 1850s, returning to England in the early 1860s to retire at 30. His work in the civil judiciary led to him being promoted from lieutenant to major in 1873, well after his army days were over. That good timing allowed him to entitle his book of tennis rules, ‘The Major’s Game of Lawn Tennis’.
Wingfield’s success was as much marketing as sporting. He was aware that the form of tennis today known as ‘real tennis’, ‘royal tennis’ or ‘court tennis’ had been very popular among royal families and the aristocratic classes in the 12th to 16th centuries.
Mindful of the growingly affluent middle classes in Victorian England who could afford houses with lawns for an after-lunch game of croquet, Wingfield saw an opportunity to resurrect medieval tennis in a modern form. So he put two poles, a net, a mallet, some pegs, four racquets, a handful of rubber balls, and an instruction manual into a box, and marketed it to those who wanted to expend a bit more energy after a hearty lunch than simply knocking a ball through a rectangular hoop. The boxes carried both ‘Sphairistike’ and ‘lawn tennis’ on the lid, and the exclusive retailers were the French & Co. sports shop in the Pimlico district of London.
Wingfield’s boxes were an instant success. They flew off French’s shelves, and just a year later, the Marylebone Cricket Club, the premier cricket club in England, became the governing body of the new sport. A mere two years after that in 1877, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, a newish sports club in the south-west London district of Wimbledon, staged a tournament which continues to this day. By 1881 Wingfield’s boxes had spread across the Atlantic to the point where the forerunner of the US Open was held in Newport, Rhode Island, today’s home of the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
The sport’s growth was phenomenally fast. Several tournaments on today’s pro tours date from the 1880s and 90s, tennis was included in the first modern-era Olympics in 1896, and the International Lawn Tennis Federation (today’s ITF) was founded in 1913.
There were racquet sports in existence before Wingfield patented lawn tennis. While many had strong similarities to tennis, they were all played with solid balls. Wingfield insisted that what distinguished lawn tennis from other forms of the sport was the hollow rubber ball. This was one of the reasons he (correctly) anticipated that the game could prove popular among women, who at that time were rather excluded from energetic sports.
There have been suggestions that the modern-day form of tennis began a bit earlier than 1874. Wingfield tried out his game at a few garden parties in the months leading up to applying for his patent and publishing the rules. But suggestions that others were experimenting with a form of tennis in the 1860s have been largely dismissed through the impressive research of the Anglo-American tennis history doubles pair, Bob Everitt and Richard Hillway. Their enormous book, The Birth of Lawn Tennis, makes a convincing case that Wingfield was the inventor, introducer, and populariser of lawn tennis.
Wingfield was inducted 75 years posthumously into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1997 in the contributor category – founding the sport was indeed a major contribution.
Such is the popularity of tennis around the world that, if Wingfield hadn’t invented his boxes, you have to assume someone else would have devised a modern form of tennis shortly after. But credit to the pioneer – Wingfield was the first to introduce his game to the public, which allows us to say in 2024 “Happy 150th birthday, tennis!”
Chris Bowers is one of the world’s leading tennis journalists, and having reported on the global tennis circuit since the late 1980s and written several milestone books. He commentates on radio and television, writes articles and books, lectures on tennis, acts as an after-dinner speaker and master of ceremonies, and sits on the board of the International Tennis Writers Association and the British Tennis Journalists Association. He is also executive director of Tennis Radio Network, a company he founded in 1999 with three other tennis journalists.
