Tennis Book 2009 - TIA UK

Of course a lot of this can also be obtained from The Lawn
Tennis Association (LTA), the national governing body of tennis
in Great Britain. Their website which is comprehensive, can be
found on www.lta.org.uk.
The tennis court, the playing area.
For the benefit of the uninitiated, the basic ingredients of our
sport are as follows:
The first is a court which requires a playing dimension of 78
feet x 36 feet and these days the surface can vary from the
traditional grass, to clay, hard and artificial (grass or carpet).
When Major Wingfield came up with his game in 1873, it was
intended to be played on grass, in the back gardens of the
Victorian upper classes. His original court was shaped in an
hourglass design but with similar markings as basically used
today. It was modified in 1875 when the first rules of the sport
were published by the MCC. Two years later the All England
Club staged the first men’s singles championships at
Wimbledon.
For the next 100 years, the majority of tournaments were played
on grass including three of the four Grand Slams – Wimbledon,
Australia and the US.
Clay, originally in the form of crushed brick, was the natural
surface’s biggest rival with the French, the fourth of the majors,
its greatest advocate.
The US Open was the first of the big
ones to switch from grass when they
adopted an all-weather synthetic clay
surface in 1975 but then, three years
later, switched to a hardcourt when the
event was moved from Forest Hills to
Flushing Meadows.
The home of the US
Open, Flushing
Meadows.
Pic. Barbara Wancke
Australia also decided to opt for a
hardcourt in 1988 when they moved
their championships from Kooyong to
Melbourne, having first flirted with the
idea of adopting an artificial grass
surface which would have meant all the four Grand Slams
would have been on very different surfaces. At the time many
felt it was an opportunity missed!
Then there is the ball and racket. In general the ball employed
must have a uniform surface, be stitch-less and not weigh less
than two ounces and not more than two and one sixteenth
ounce, while bouncing no more than 53 inches (and not less
than 58 inches) when dropped, onto a concrete base, from a
height of 100 inches. All this is monitored by the ITF who
accredit the balls supplied by manufacturers thereby ensuring
they conform to the rules. It would certainly be difficult for
individuals to check that!
Initially balls were always white but for the ease of TV viewers,
a change to yellow started in the mid-1970s with Wimbledon
itself adopting the change of colour in 1986.
The size of rackets is now also regulated following the
introduction of the loosely strung ‘spaghetti racket’, Jimmy
Connor’s ‘steel’ racket, Prince’s ‘Jumbo’ model, and the
progressive change from wood to graphite and composite
materials. The ITF eventually produced a universally agreed
racket specification limiting the length to 29 inches and a frame
width of 12.5 inches. These rules were first mooted in 1976 but
it wasn’t until 1996 that they really became effective following
very lengthy consultations with the manufacturers, agents and
lawyers.
Though the rules were formalised in the 20s, the scoring has
remained much the same for the past century except for the
introduction of tie-breaks in 1971 and, in 2006, the sudden
death deuce point which is now prevalent in doubles play.
The biggest shake-up of the sport came in 1968 when it went
Open and finally consigned ‘shamateurism’ to the history
books. The inception of professionalism that year has proved to
be the major watershed of the sport for up to that time, the
game had continued to be a ‘hobby’. The introduction of prize
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