02·Its Origins

The story of tennis does not begin on a grass court in England. It begins much earlier — in the stone corridors of medieval French monasteries, sometime in the 12th century, where monks began hitting a ball against walls and over ropes using the palm of their hand.

They called it jeu de paume — the game of the palm.

It spread quickly. From monasteries to courtyards, from courtyards to royal palaces. By the 13th century it had reached the French nobility, and by the 14th it had become an obsession across Europe. King Louis X of France was so devoted to the game that historians believe he died from it — catching a severe chill after an intense session in 1316, making him arguably the first person in recorded history to suffer for tennis.

The Catholic Church tried to ban it. They failed. Pope Clement V issued a prohibition in the early 14th century. The game continued anyway.

By the 15th and 16th centuries, jeu de paume had become the sport of kings. Francis I of France built courts across his kingdom. Henry VIII of England was an obsessive player — his court at Hampton Palace still exists today, one of the oldest tennis courts in the world.

Shakespeare referenced it. In Henry V, the French Dauphin sends the young English king a gift of tennis balls — an insult implying he is better suited for games than governance. Even then, tennis carried weight.

The transition from palm to racket happened gradually through the 15th century. Early versions were simple — wooden frames strung with sheep gut, producing a harder, more controlled strike than the hand alone. The ball evolved too, from leather stuffed with hair or wool to more consistent constructions.

This indoor, roofed version of the game became known as real tennis (from the French royal) or court tennis in America — a highly complex game played in asymmetric enclosed courts with angled roofs, galleries, and specific rules about wall bounces that have barely changed in 500 years. Real tennis still exists today, played by a small devoted community of enthusiasts worldwide.

But the version that would conquer the world had not yet been born.

In December 1873, a Welsh army officer named Walter Clopton Wingfield patented a new outdoor game he called Sphairistikè — from the Greek for ball game. He designed it to be played on a lawn, with an hourglass-shaped court, a portable net, and a rubber ball that bounced on grass.

He began selling boxed sets in 1874. Each box contained a net, poles, rackets, balls, and a rulebook. For the price of five guineas, any country house in Britain could set up a game on their lawn.

The name Sphairistikè did not survive. Players quickly began calling it lawn tennis — and it spread with extraordinary speed through British society. By 1875, the Marylebone Cricket Club had codified the first unified rules.

The All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club in Wimbledon, southwest London, held its first lawn tennis championship in July 1877. Twenty-two men entered. Spencer Gore, a rackets player, won the title and the prize of twelve guineas.

The following year, Gore did not defend his title. He reportedly found tennis too simple a game to be worth his continued attention. He was wrong, of course. But his dismissal captures something about those early years — no one yet understood what this game would become.

The Wimbledon Championships grew steadily in prestige. By the 1880s it was the defining event in world tennis. The rules evolved — the court became rectangular, the scoring system (15, 30, 40, deuce) was standardised, the service rules clarified.

Women were allowed to compete beginning in 1884. Maud Watson won that first ladies' title. Thirteen women entered. The prize was a silver flower basket.

Lawn tennis followed the British Empire. British diplomats, merchants, and military officers carried the game with them across the globe. Courts appeared in India, Australia, Egypt, South Africa, the United States, and across South America within years of Wingfield's invention.

In the United States, Mary Ewing Outerbridge is credited with introducing tennis to America in 1874, setting up one of the first courts at the Staten Island Cricket Club after observing British officers playing in Bermuda.

The United States National Championships — later the US Open — began in 1881 for men and 1887 for women. In France, the Roland Garros tournament — named after a French aviator — began in 1891. The Australian Open began in 1905, making it the youngest of the four Grand Slams.

In 1900, a young American tennis player named Dwight F. Davis purchased a silver bowl and proposed an international team competition between the United States and Great Britain. The United States won that first tie 3–0.

The Davis Cup became the oldest international team competition in tennis — and one of the oldest in any sport. Over the following decades it expanded to include dozens of nations, becoming a measure of tennis development worldwide.

For the first half of the 20th century, tennis was an amateur sport. Players competed for trophies and prestige, not prize money. This created a peculiar situation — the best players in the world were technically forbidden from earning a living from their sport.

The great champions of this era were often wealthy individuals who could afford to travel and compete: Bill Tilden, the dominant American of the 1920s; René Lacoste, the methodical Frenchman nicknamed The Crocodile — a name that later became a global fashion empire; Fred Perry, the last British man to win Wimbledon before 1977.

In parallel, a professional touring circuit emerged in the shadows — separate from the amateur Grand Slams, where top players could actually be paid. Don Budge, who completed the first Grand Slam in 1938, turned professional shortly after. The sport was fracturing between its amateur ideals and professional reality.

On April 22, 1968, the International Lawn Tennis Federation voted to allow professional players to compete in Grand Slam tournaments alongside amateurs. The decision transformed tennis permanently.

1968 is Year Zero of modern tennis.

The French Open that year became the first Open Era Grand Slam. Ken Rosewall, who had been barred from Wimbledon for years as a professional, finally returned to the major stage. Prize money entered the sport for the first time. In 1968, the total prize money at Wimbledon was £26,150. By 2024, it would exceed £50 million.

The name changed too — lawn was quietly dropped, and the sport became simply tennis.

In 1972, the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) was founded by players including Jack Kramer and Cliff Drysdale to represent men's professional tennis. The following year, the ATP boycotted Wimbledon 1973 in protest over the suspension of Yugoslav player Nikola Pilić. Eighty-one of the world's top players withdrew.

In women's tennis, Billie Jean King was the driving force behind the Women's Tennis Association (WTA), founded in 1973. In 1972, the US Open became the first Grand Slam to offer equal prize money to men and women, a direct result of her advocacy.

On September 20, 1973, before 30,000 people at the Houston Astrodome and an estimated 90 million television viewers worldwide, King defeated Bobby Riggs 6–4, 6–3, 6–3. The Battle of the Sexes became one of the most watched tennis matches in history and a defining moment in the broader fight for gender equality in sport.

Björn Borg — the ice-cold Swede who won five consecutive Wimbledon titles and six French Opens, never losing his composure on court.

John McEnroe — his polar opposite. American, volcanic, endlessly expressive, a genius of touch and feel whose arguments with umpires became as famous as his tennis. Their rivalry — precision against fire, clay against grass — is considered by many the greatest of the era.

Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova defined women's tennis for a decade. They played each other 80 times. Navratilova won 43. They remained friends throughout. Ivan Lendl transformed what it meant to prepare physically — the first player to treat his body as a serious athletic instrument.

Pete Sampras — seven Wimbledon titles, fourteen Grand Slams, a serve so dominant it effectively ended points before rallies began. Andre Agassi — everything Sampras was not. Loud, colourful, a baseline genius who completed the career Grand Slam.

Steffi Graf — who in 1988 achieved the only Golden Slam in history, winning all four Grand Slams plus the Olympic gold medal in a single calendar year. She retired with 22 Grand Slam titles.

Monica Seles — who dominated women's tennis until April 1993, when a deranged fan of Steffi Graf stabbed her in the back during a match in Hamburg. The attack remains one of the darkest moments in tennis history.

Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic — three players of such extraordinary quality that they dominated men's tennis simultaneously for two decades, accumulating a combined 66 Grand Slam titles.

Federer arrived first, winning his first Wimbledon in 2003 and holding the world No. 1 ranking for a record 237 consecutive weeks. Nadal provided the counterpoint — physically relentless, his 14 French Open titles a record that may never be equalled. Djokovic completed the triumvirate, by 2024 holding 24 Grand Slam titles, the most in men's tennis history.

In women's tennis, Serena Williams was conducting a parallel dominance. Between 1999 and 2022, she won 23 Grand Slam singles titles — the most in the Open Era — across a career that navigated racism, sexism, and career-threatening health crises. She retired in 2022, choosing the word evolution over retirement.

Carlos Alcaraz — born in 2003, the same year Federer won his first Wimbledon — won his first Grand Slam at the US Open in 2022 at age 19, becoming the youngest world No. 1 in history.

Jannik Sinner — the Italian from the Alps — won the Australian Open and the US Open in 2024, ending the year as world No. 1. His rise signalled that the transition of power in men's tennis was complete.

In women's tennis, Iga Świątek established herself as the dominant force, winning five French Open titles by 2024. Coco Gauff won the US Open in 2023 at age 19, becoming a focal point for a new American generation.

Tennis in 2025 is a genuinely global sport — played professionally on every continent, watched by hundreds of millions, and structured around a calendar that runs 11 months of the year across clay, grass, and hard courts.

Total prize money across the ATP Tour alone exceeds $200 million annually. Hawk-Eye ball-tracking, advanced analytics, and racket and string technology have transformed how the game is played and watched.

And yet the fundamentals remain exactly what they were in 1877. A ball. A net. A court. Two players. One wins, one loses. They shake hands. The game endures because it is, at its core, irreducible. That has not changed in 150 years. It will not change in the next 150 either.