| | Everything about tennis, except its essential rules, has changed
from the way it was played 100 years ago, when balls, clothes,
players and spectators all were white.
Andre Agassi's baggy shorts and Serena Williams' bright,
skintight halter tops are the latest fashion, far cries from the
days when decorum demanded pleated white trousers and ankle-length
dresses.
|  | | Women, like Serena Williams, routinely serve at 110 mph -- quite a departure from hitting the ball in safely with spin. |
Women routinely serve at 110 mph, rather than merely plopping
the ball in safely with spin. Pete Sampras serves more aces in a
match than turn-of-the-century players did in a season.
Middle class professionals, not upper class amateurs, rule the
courts, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, not merely silver
cups and platters, are at stake at the majors.
The Grand Slam events, once small, provincial affairs, now boast
multiple stadiums and draw tens of thousands of fans each day,
along with worldwide television audiences and millions in corporate
sponsorships.
Where once the best players -- Bill Tilden, Suzanne Lenglen,
Ellsworth Vines, Fred Perry, Don Budge, Pancho Gonzales and Rod
Laver, among others -- were banned from the majors after turning
pro, now they show up with agents cutting deals during matches.
Rackets are bigger, lighter and stronger, crafted from space-age
composites rather than wood. The once-ubiquitous racket press, with
its nuts and bolts and washers in four corners to keep wooden
rackets from warping, is a curiosity found only in antique shops.
Optic yellow balls made white ones obsolete 30 years ago.
Even the lawn in "lawn tennis" has disappeared, except for
Wimbledon and a few other events, replaced by hardcourts and clay.
Although a few wrinkles in the rules have come along, most
notably the tiebreaker, tennis still has the same quaint scoring --
love, 15, 30, 40, deuce, advantage. The dimensions of the court and
the height of the net haven't budged. Faults and double-faults
bedevil players today as they always have.
Cyclops, the electronic eye, guards the service lines at the
bigger tournaments, but linesmen still squat in every corner of the
court and matches still are called by the umpires perched high in
their chairs.
The pride of tennis, and its curse, through the century has been
its heritage as a sport of the upper crust.
The modern game descended from "a portable court" patented in
1874 by Britain's Maj. Walter Clopton Wingfield and sold as a kit,
complete with poles, pegs, netting, four tennis bats, a bag of
balls, and "The Book of the Game" with its six rules.
Laid out on lawns that had been used for croquet, the game was
quickly and enthusiastically taken up by the Prince of Wales, Lords
and Ladies of the Empire and members of Parliament. Sweden's King
Gustav V, Russian royalty and French aristocrats joined in the
rage.
The class lines remained in place when the game traveled across
the Atlantic to high society in America, from Longwood near Boston
to Newport in Rhode Island to the West Side Tennis Club in New
York.
For decades, only genteel amateurs -- those who could afford to
play for nothing -- won the trophies, ran the tournaments and locked
the country club gates to blacks, Jews and others.
The gates widened with the advent of the Open Era in 1968, but
vestiges of the past remain, despite the rise in the rankings of
the Williams sisters, who are among the few pros to have emerged
from public courts.
Wimbledon, the most influential tournament, remains firmly in
control of the doyens of the All England Club. The U.S. Tennis
Association, which runs the mightily profitable U.S. Open and
branches out nationally through sectional chapters, retains an air
of exclusiveness despite an avowed commitment to grow the game in
inner cities.
The International Tennis Federation, based in Paris with a
haughty, rarefied air of its own, and the ATP Tour, based in
Florida, are barely on speaking terms.
The WTA Tour, launched in 1973 and given a boost that year by
the "Battle of the Sexes" match between Billie Jean King and
Bobby Riggs, still can't get equal pay with the men at three of the
four majors.
These kinds of divisions in the hierarchy of the game have
plagued tennis throughout the century, at various times splintering
the sport and hindering its growth among spectators and players.
The huge, gaudy cup that Dwight Davis offered in 1900 to winners
of an international team tennis competition essentially pitted
three Harvard men, among them Davis as captain, against three
British counterparts.
Though Davis Cup matches would expand to include dozens of
countries, and become the most influential and democratic of tennis
events before the Open era, it always stayed under the control of
the sport's main powers.
The men and women who played at all the major tournaments had to
be rich enough so they could afford to travel and practice and play
throughout the year without any hope of prize money.
Those who had the audacity to try to earn a living from their
talents had to give up their amateur status and the chance to
compete at Wimbledon, the U.S. Nationals, Davis Cup and the other
major events.
From the '20s until the creation of Open tennis, when the major
tournaments no longer could afford to lock out the biggest names,
players made sporadic attempts to create pro tours.
Lenglen, an immensely popular Frenchwoman, pioneered
professional play in 1926 when she went on an American tour and won
all 38 matches against Mary K. Browne.
Pro tennis then languished until Tilden, winner of seven U.S.
singles titles and three Wimbledons and one of the biggest sports
stars of the Roaring '20s, joined several Europeans on a tour in
1931. Tilden won his pro debut against Karel Kozeluh of
Czechoslovakia before 13,000 fans at Madison Square Garden.
Tilden toured, playing before crowds large and small, until the
1940s when he was pushing 50. He paved the way for Vines, Perry and
Budge to leave the amateur ranks and play for prize money.
Yet the pro life, despite the occasional jackpot, was more often
a slog through the hinterlands on all kinds of courts, from slick
wood to fast canvas to patchy grass. Tilden would drive all day and
sometimes all night, play a match, then move on.
There would be other tours, some successful, most not.
Bobby Riggs and Jack Kramer, two of the best players of the
1940s as amateurs and pros, became the greatest promoters. Pancho
Gonzales, twice the U.S. champion before turning 21, became the top
pro of the 1950s as Kramer took over as boss of the pro game.
The great Australian players of the '50s, Frank Sedgman, Lew
Hoad, Ken Rosewall, Rod Laver, were quietly put on sporting goods
firms' payrolls so that they could keep their amateur status.
Eventually, they, too, would turn pro and be banished from the
majors.
Kramer kept pushing for open tennis, frequently raiding the
ranks of the amateurs and stiffening the resolve of the powers at
the top until he had to yield to failure at the box office in 1962.
For a brief period, pro tennis was dead.
That began to change in 1963 when Laver, fresh from his Grand
Slam sweep, joined Rosewall and Hoad on their own pro tour while
fellow Aussie Roy Emerson began to dominate the amateur game. The
Aussies, including Margaret Smith on the women's side, would rule
tennis for most of the rest of the '60s.
Finally, in 1968, open tennis between pros and amateurs arrived,
some 40 years after the issue was first raised, and tennis changed
irrevocably.
The first U.S. Open champion that year turned out to be Arthur
Ashe, a black man who could never have gained access to most tennis
clubs in earlier decades.
"In the 1970s," tennis Hall of Fame writer Bud Collins
observed in his encyclopedia of the game, "tennis became truly the
'in' sport of the great middle class, first in the United States,
then abroad.
"In a single decade, the sport threw off and trampled its
starched white flannel past and became a favored diversion of the
modern leisure class -- attired in pastels and playing tiebreaker
sets in public parks and clubs. ... All this was inspired by the
advent of open tennis."
If only that had been envisioned early in the century by those
who controlled tennis, the history of the game, its greatest
players, and, perhaps, part of our culture, might have turned out
different. | |
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