The Perfect Gentleman Issue 4 | Page 39

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”.