Sporting Gentleman
Lawn Tennis
The Court is large, some 110 feet long by 39
feet wide, usually with an exceptionally high
ceiling. It is played with wooden racquets that
are asymmetrical and with a cork based ball,
which is much less bouncy than a modern
Tennis Ball. The scoring is pretty much the
same as the tennis we are familiar with today;
6 games in a set and 3 or 5 sets in a match.
Real Tennis declined over the course of the
18th/19th Century, as the simpler game of
Lawn Tennis took hold.
Now, Real Tennis, has been relegated to an
obscure sport that few have heard of and even
fewer play. Currently there are only 43 Real
Tennis courts in the world, with over half of
them in Britain.
39
Modern Lawn Tennis came from many
sources on the green fields of Britain.
Between 1859 and 1865 Harry Gem and
Augurio Perera combined elements of
racquets and the Basque ball game pelota,
played on perrera's croquet lawn in
Birmingham. Along with two doctors, they
founded the first tennis club in Leamington
Spa in 1872.
Just down the road, December 1873, Major
Walter Clopton Wingfield, an officer in the
British army, designed a game to entertain his
guests at a garden party in his friend's estate
in Llanelidan, Wales. He named his sport
after the ancient Greek work σφαιριστική
(menaing 'ball-playing) or sphairistikè. This
was soon referred to as “sticky”.