The Origin Of Tennis

The Origin Of Tennis

Tennis (Lawn tennis) is a game which is enjoyed worldwide by many people. It is a game where two or pairs of opposing players utilise a tautly strung racket to hit a specified ball size, weight where it bounces on a rectangular court over a net.

Points are given to a team or player whenever the opposite team fails to return the ball correctly within the given dimensions of the court. Organised tennis is played based on the rules certified by the ITF (International Tennis Federation), which is the global governing sports body.

Some individuals believe that various tennis versions were played by ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans. Descriptions and drawings of any game similar to tennis have not been found. However, there is cited evidence of few Arabic words.

Most historians show that the origin of tennis was from the 11th to 12th -century French monks.

The French monks started playing a simple handball over a rope looped across a courtyard or against the monastery walls.

The game was named jeu de paume, meaning game of the hand. Most people who dispute ancient origins stated that tennis comes from the French tenez whose meaning was anything to the effect of (take this) stated as one of the players would pass the ball to the other.

As the game started to be more popular, the courtyard playing spots started to be improved into indoor courts in which the game was still played against the walls. After discovering that it was uncomfortable to play bare-handed, players started to use gloves. The gloves were either with webbing in between the fingers or the other with a solid paddle, then the webbing linked to a handle fundamentally a racquet.

There were no rubber balls at that time; instead, the balls were made of a wad of wool, hair-wrapped cork in a string, and clothes or leather. The nobility learned to play the game from monks, where some accounts show about 1800 courts by the 13th century in France.

They grew in a popular diversion, where Louis IV and the pope tried to ban it where they didn’t succeed. It became popular in England where Henry VIII and VII were playing, which led to building more courts.

By 1500 they adopted a wooden frame racquet strung and a cork-cored ball that weighed about three ounces. The game grew to what we call now real tennis. The popularity of the game dwindled nearly to nothing in the 1700s. However, in 1850, Charles Goodyear came up with a vulcanisation development for rubber. The players started experimenting with the bouncier rubber on grass courts. The outdoor game was different from the indoor game, which led to various rules.

In 1874, Major Walter C. Wingfield registered in London the rules and equipment for a game similar to the current tennis. The 1st tennis court was introduced in the US in the very year. By 1875 equipment sets were already set in India, Russia, China, and Canada.

The Croquet was very popular, and smooth Croquet was adaptable for tennis. The original court of Wingfield had an hourglass shape, narrow and the net and shorter than the current court. His rules were based on considerable criticism. He revised them and left the further modifications to others.

The All-England Club held its first Wimbledon tournament in 1877, and the committee invented a rectangular court and rules that are vitally the current game we know. The net was 5feet high on the sideways, a carryover from an indoor ancestor of the game and service box26 feet deep.

In 1882 the features had been modified to the modern form.