Tennis is a racket sport that is played either individually against a opponent or between 2 teams. Check out Which country invented tennis ?
Which country invented tennis ?
Spectacular, played today on all kinds of surfaces by tens of millions of people, for fun or in competition, tennis has spread all over the world.
Designed and codified in England in the 1870s, it is the direct descendant of jeu de paume, invented in France in the 11th century.
Tennis originally was known as lawn tennis, and formally still is in Britain, because it was played on grass courts by Victorian gentlemen and ladies. It is now played on a variety of surfaces.
The origins of the game can be traced to a 12th–13th-century French handball game called jeu de paume (“game of the palm”), from which was derived a complex indoor racket-and-ball game: real tennis.
This ancient game is still played to a limited degree and is usually called real tennis in Britain, court tennis in the United States, and royal tennis in Australia.
The modern game of tennis is played by millions in clubs and on public courts.
Its period of most rapid growth as both a participant and a spectator sport began in the late 1960s, when the major championships were opened to professionals as well as amateurs, and continued in the 1970s, when television broadcasts of the expanding professional tournament circuits and the rise of some notable players and rivalries broadened the appeal of the game.
A number of major innovations in fashion and equipment fueled and fed the boom. The addition of colour and style to tennis wear (once restricted to white) created an entirely new subdivision of leisure clothing.
Tennis balls, which historically had been white, now came in several hues, with yellow the colour of choice.
History
There has been much dispute over the invention of modern tennis, but the officially recognized centennial of the game in 1973 commemorated its introduction by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield in 1873.
He published the first book of rules that year and took out a patent on his game in 1874, although historians have concluded that similar games were played earlier and that the first tennis club was established by the Englishman Harry Gem and several associates in Leamington in 1872. Wingfield’s court was of the hourglass shape and may have developed from badminton.
The hourglass shape, stipulated by Wingfield in his booklet “Sphairistiké, or Lawn Tennis,” may have been adopted for patent reasons since it distinguished the court from ordinary rectangular courts. At the time, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) was the governing body of real tennis, whose rules it had recently revised.
After J.M. Heathcote, a distinguished real tennis player, developed a better tennis ball of rubber covered with white flannel, the MCC in 1875 established a new, standardized set of rules for tennis.
Meanwhile, the game had spread to the United States in the 1870s. Mary Outerbridge of New York has been credited with bringing a set of rackets and balls to her brother, a director of the Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club.
But research has shown that William Appleton of Nahant, Massachusetts, may have owned the first lawn tennis set and that his friends James Dwight and Fred R. Sears popularized the game.