The United States Tennis Association: Raising the Game
472
The United States Tennis Association: Raising the Game
472eBook
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Overview
The United States Tennis Association is an in-depth look at the history of the United States Tennis Association (USTA) and how this sports organization has helped cultivate and organize tennis in the United States over the past 135 years. Starting as a group of elite white men from country clubs in the Northeast, the organization has become the largest tennis association in the world, with women in top leadership positions and an annual revenue of well over $300 million. The USTA was key in establishing the Open Era in tennis in 1968, when professionals began competing with amateurs in Grand Slam events; for expanding the game in the United States during the 1970s tennis boom; and for establishing the U.S. Open as one of the most prestigious and largest-attended sports events in the world.
Unique among sports-governing bodies, the USTA is a mostly volunteer-run organization that, along with a paid professional staff, manages and governs tennis at the local level across the United States and owns and operates the U.S. Open. The association participates directly in the International Tennis Federation, manages U.S. participation in international tennis competitions (Fed Cup and Davis Cup), and interacts with professional tennis within the United States. The story of how tennis is managed by the nation’s largest cadre of volunteers in any sport is one of sports’ best untold stories.
With access to the private records of the USTA, Warren F. Kimball tells an engaging and rich history of how tennis has been managed and governed in the United States.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496204622 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 472 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Origins
The Major and the Ladies
"After a day or two, I went over to see what Mrs. Bailey had done. To my surprise, I found her out playing tennis."
— Martha Summerhayes, October 1874
Who invented tennis, lawn or otherwise? In America's rule-bound society, what often matters is not so much the game, but the rules and structure of the game. People have hit objects (balls?) over obstacles (nets?) for eons. It might be pushing things a bit to claim the Greek god Apollo played lawn tennis, though that is the conceit found in the foreground of the oil painting The Death of Hyacinth, done by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in 1752–53, over a hundred years before "lawn tennis" appeared on the scene. A sagging net in the background, a strung wooden racket and three balls — equipment that looks much like that of early court and lawn tennis — lay on the ground next to the body of Apollo's lover. (See gallery, image 1.) All that prompted one wag to suggest that either the racket was flung across the net, John McEnroe style, killing poor Hyacinth, or that Apollo had a "killer" serve.
What came to be called "court tennis" (later "real tennis") evolved from an earlier ball game played around the twelfth century in France. Called palla, pallacorda, fives, pelota, or handball, it involved hitting a ball with a bare hand and later with a glove. Whether it started with monks in their cloisters or on medieval city streets and squares, such games became popular and spread across Europe. By the sixteenth century, rackets had appeared, and the game moved to indoor playing areas with somewhat regularized rules. A landscape painting dating to 1538 depicts two men hitting an object over a net using some sort of rackets on what appears to be a sand court boxed in by walls that may have been in-play. In the late 1560s, the brother of French intellectual and essayist, Michel de Montaigne, died after being hit in the ear by a "tennis" ball (which suggests a much harder ball than what is used today). Whether or not the Italian Renaissance master, Caravaggio, killed a tennis opponent in 1606 as some contemporaries accused, there is no question that a form of tennis was being played in Italy at that time. A Venetian ambassador reported in 1600 that there were 1,800 courts in Paris alone. Courts were "erected" at various universities including Cambridge, where the poet John Milton may have played. They were built near many European palaces including the Louvre in Paris and, most famously, Hampton Court in England — hence the connection with King Henry VIII, whose second wife, Anne Boleyn, was watching a court-tennis match when she was arrested. Shakespeare mentions the game in act 2 of Henry V when Henry challenges his cousin, the Dauphin (heir to the French throne), to a court-tennis match with France as the prize. No wonder the sport gained the label, the "Game of Kings." Frederick, Prince of Wales died after being struck by a tennis ball in 1851; at least two kings of France reputedly died playing tennis; while a third, Louis XVI, had a very bad tennis day on June 20, 1789. That was the game's most (only?) revolutionary moment, for the French Third Estate (commoners) defied the king by proclaiming the famous Tennis Court Oath (Le Serment du Jeu de Paume). Because tennis was so closely associated with the nobility (the leisure class), selection of the Royal Tennis Court at the Versailles Palace for the statement was calculated defiance of the Crown. The oath turned out to be the declaration of the French Revolution — and eventually it was game, set, and match for the commoners. Tennis nearly disappeared in revolutionary France, but continued to grow in popularity elsewhere. Something called "field tennis" appeared in England by the end of the eighteenth century, when it was described as a challenge to the popularity of cricket. By the 1860s, various adaptations of court tennis had moved outdoors, and there were desultory attempts to make up rules. But such rule making "never traveled," leaving the court wide open (so to speak).
But what really matters for lawn tennis is how it became structured with standardized rules, and why. The broad answer is organization, but there is a bit of story behind all that.
The story starts with Major Walter Clopton Wingfield. Born in 1833 Wingfield became a "career" British cavalry officer in the Kings Own 1st Dragoon Guards and spent ten years on active duty (India and China, of course — this was the Victorian Era of the British Empire) before retiring to take up his true calling, being of the landed gentry (minor aristocracy) and a professional dilettante. Unlike many of that class who suffered from a persistent shortage of ready money, Wingfield seems to have been financially secure, although "well-off" might be a bit of an exaggeration. Photographs routinely show him with a full beard and moderate handlebar moustache, like a true aristocrat of the Victorian-Edwardian era. (See gallery, image 2.) A family castle (or perhaps a "folly") in Suffolk, a mad (mentally ill) wife, membership in the right London clubs — he seems to have stepped from the pages of a Victorian novel. He "invented" a better bicycle, wrote a book titled Bicycle Gymkhana and Musical Rides, founded and became Supreme Don of a gourmet society (perhaps inspired by Edward, the quite ample Prince of Wales), and became a member of the Royal Victorian Order for his longtime service to the royal family particularly as a Gentlemen-at-Arms, and ... he produced the first written set of rules for lawn tennis, at least the first set that "traveled."
I take one writer at his word when he claims that tennis was "a Wingfield heirloom," a centuries-long presence in the family. It seems that in the 1430s an early ancestor of Major Wingfield, one John Wingfield, was for a time the host and jailer of Charles d'Orleans, who had been captured by the English at the battle of Agincourt (1415). Charles, in line for the French crown, enjoyed the enforced hospitality of various of the English nobility for twenty-five years, a time he spent writing poems (he is sometimes referred to as the father of French lyric poetry) and playing his favorite game, jeu d'paume (handball). While comfortably ensconced in Wingfield Castle, he wrote a lyric poem about that game. Major Walter Wingfield, nearly 450 years later, allegedly thought of that poem (with its "evocative refrain 'Naught fear I but Care'") when he "christened his embryo, 'Lawn Tennis.'"
The creation of a set of written lawn-tennis rules, generally conceded to be the first written rules for the game, is Wingfield's one true claim to fame. To distinguish his game from court tennis, played by kings and courtiers in whatever often bizarrely shaped large hall was available, Wingfield gave it a proper name — Lawn Tennis, although even that nearly fell prey to Victorian England's obsession with classical Greece. Wingfield tried to name his game "Sphairistiké," Greek for playing ball, leading to jokes about playing "sticky." Fortunately, sticky didn't stick. "Lawn" disappeared from the United States Tennis Association's name in 1975, in an obvious, and quixotic, attempt to escape the country-club image that came with the game's roots in croquet and cricket clubs, whose members were often of the leisure class ("a beneficiary" is how one well-to-do USTA president referred to himself). But the preoccupation with rules that began with the major, survives intact in the USTA of the twenty-first century.
Then there is the tendentious dispute over who brought the first set of Wingfield's lawn-tennis game to America or, more properly, to the Americas. His first edition of The Major's Game of Lawn Tennis, probably published in February 1874, but perhaps in December 1873, proclaimed: "The game is in a painted box, ... and contains Poles, Pegs, and Netting for forming the court, 4 Tennis Bats, ... a bag of balls, a Mallet [presumably to strike the poles and pegs], and Brush, and 'Book of the Game.' It can only be obtained from the inventor's agents, Messers. French and Co., ... Price Five Guineas." Just stating the price in obsolete guineas was an appeal to upper-class sensibilities.
Whether or not that allowed time for one Mary Outerbridge to be the first person to bring one of Wingfield's tennis sets to the United States depends upon one's faith in the accuracy of passenger lists for that year, in the memories of early players, and in the recollections of her younger brother Eugenius Harvey (E. H.) Outerbridge. In 1923 he regaled the then assistant secretary of war and Association president Dwight Davis (yes, the Davis of Davis Cup) with a story of how Miss Outerbridge brought the game back to Staten Island, New York, from Bermuda (where the Outerbridges were "thick as thieves") in 1874. "It is certain," he wrote, "that the first net ever put up on a club grounds was the one my sister brought from Bermuda." Whatever the smell of politics — New York versus Boston, for in a game of traditions, ownership of origination is no small asset — the truth is impossible to determine. Bermuda historians have argued that Mary Outerbridge may well have brought a game developed in England by one J. B. Perera (Pereira) that he called "pelota" and renamed "lawn tennis" shortly after Wingfield's book on lawn tennis appeared. Either way, the Outerbridge claim is hotly contested by tennis historians. Nor is Mary Outerbridge the only contender for the title of having played "the first set of lawn tennis ... in the country." For the first five decades of lawn tennis in America, those writing about the game assumed that James Dwight, a sometime physician who much preferred lawn tennis to doctoring, played the Major's game in the summer of 1874 on a lawn at the home of William Appleton in Nahant, Massachusetts. But as with the publication date of Major Wingfield's first book and with the date when Mary Outerbridge brought a lawn-tennis set to Staten Island, the problem is that Dwight himself offered two different years, 1874 or 1875, for that "first" game, with the latter year most likely the correct one. All that, despite Dwight's famous attention to detail, particularly tennis rules, demonstrated during his twenty-one years as president of the United States National Lawn Tennis Association — the longest serving president, by far, in the Association's long history.
But the most compelling and engaging and persuasive "first" story is that of one Martha Summerhayes. (See gallery, image 26.) Her recollections have solid dating, whatever the other questions raised. An army officer's young wife, she mentions tennis being played in Camp Apache in the Arizona Territory in early October 1874! Her memoir, constructed from old letters and papers, is clear, if lacking in detail:
The question of getting settled comfortably still worried me, and after a day or two, I went over to see what Mrs. Bailey had done. To my surprise, I found her out playing tennis, her little boy asleep in the baby-carriage, which they had brought all the way from San Francisco, near the court. I joined the group, and afterwards asked her advice about the matter. She laughed kindly, and said: "Oh! you'll get used to it, and things will settle themselves. Of course it is troublesome, but you can have shelves and such things — you'll soon learn," and still smiling, she gave her ball a neat left-hander.
Mrs. Ella Bailey may well have been the game's first possessor of "a neat lefthander," but Martha Summerhayes reinforced two facts: first, that the game was already popular in the United States in autumn 1874, and second, that women played from the outset. The problem is, what game and where did it come from? "Lawn" tennis did not require a lawn (it is hard to imagine a finely groomed, green lawn at Camp Apache, located in the high plains of east central Arizona, despite its location on the White River). Like the "foot" in American football, lawns were part of the game's name, not integral to the sport. Even the Major had referred to setting up a court "on a lawn, on ice, or in any suitable sized space either in or out of doors." "The ground need not even be turf," he wrote, "the only condition is, it must be level." Ice may not have been used for serious tennis, at least not until 2008 when some Russian polar experts slid around in a doubles match on snow-covered ice (see gallery, image 3), but the Wedgemere Club in Winchester, Massachusetts, which existed only from 1886 to the early 1890s, "had two cinder and four grass courts." Californians were playing lawn tennis on dirt courts at least by 1881 and on "cement" and probably asphalt by 1887. As tennis grew in popularity, cold-weather clubs laid boards over their dirt ("clay") courts to allow winter play. Since Summerhayes later wrote of tennis in San Francisco and Nebraska, one assumes she referred throughout to the same game — the Major's game — as that was the only one we know of that "traveled" to the United States. But how did it get to that isolated army camp on the high plains of east central Arizona?
The answer would seem to be England via San Francisco. The Summerhayes had been in the Bay Area, presumably at Camp Reynolds on Angel Island in San Francisco, which served "as a staging area for troops serving in campaigns against the Apache, Sioux, Modoc [all mentioned in Summerhayes's memoir], and other tribes of First Americans. By 1876 this was a busy camp with over two hundred soldiers and a complete village including a church, bakery, blacksmith, shoemaker, laundry, barber, trading store, and photographer." The description left out only one thing — tennis courts, something Martha Summerhayes mentions when she visited there in 1880. But how on earth could the Major's game have gotten to San Francisco in time for Mrs. Bailey to bring it to Arizona and crank "a neat left-hander" in October 1874? The answer is most likely from England by sea, brought either by someone in the British consulate or a London merchant. The game had achieved speedy popularity in England early that year and could well have arrived in San Francisco by August 1874, when the Summerhayes and the Baileys were there.
So let me offer a new entry into the list of contenders for "first" lawn tennis player in the United States, either Ella Bailey and her partners on the court or the English diplomat or trader who brought the game to San Francisco — before it arrived in New England and New York.
Whatever the truth of the Major, Martha, and Mary, the reality is that lawn tennis arrived in the United States in the mid 1870s separately and independently in at least six different places. The first formal lawn-tennis club in the Americas seems to have been formed in 1876 in New Orleans, after English merchants in the city on business brought the game over with them. But whether the first lawn-tennis court in the Americas was set up in San Francisco (my best guess), in Nahant, Massachusetts (north of Boston), or Staten Island, New York, in Canada, or even at Camp Apache in the Arizona Territory, or elsewhere — all possibilities — the game quickly became popular with the leisure class, on army posts, and wherever British merchants and diplomats traveled, which in the nineteenth century was everywhere.
To return, briefly to the Major, why did he take out a patent on "a new and improved portable court for playing the ancient game of tennis"? No mention of his rules, but they came two days later. One early historian of the game dismisses Wingfield contemptuously. In the midst of Victorian England's sports craze, "He saw, clearer than anyone else, that the inventor of a new game could make a fortune from the sale of patented sets. ... The commercial angle was always foremost in his mind. It was all very well to borrow implements [rackets], tools [the net], and scoring systems from established games. But there must be something new and ingenious about his game which would give him patent rights." Hence the hourglass shape of the court, an original name ("Sphairistiké" or "Lawn Tennis"), and "rackets" scoring (1, 2, 3, 4) rather than the arcane current system of scoring by 15s — sort of.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsForeword by Dave Haggerty
Preface
Note on Citations
1. Origins: The Major and the Ladies
2. The Founding Gentlemen, 1877–1913
3. Evolutionary Revolution, 1913–1922
4. The Money: The Twenties and Thirties
5. Marking Time, 1941–1968
6. Open Tennis, 1968–1990
7. Who Decides? 1990–2002
Appendix 1. “The Founding Myth” by E. H. Outerbridge
Appendix 2. USNLTA Original Constitution and Bylaws
Appendix 3. The ATA and Holcombe Ward, 1947
Appendix 4. Membership Statistics, 1958–1992
Appendix 5. USTA Senior Staff List, 1916 to Present
Notes
Research Guide
Bibliography
Index