History of tennis

The history of tennis traces the sport from medieval ball games and indoor court play to modern lawn tennis, its rules, competitions, and global culture.

Jeu de paume: A medieval French ball game in which players struck the ball by hand, later using gloves and rackets. Tennis developed from this European hand-ball tradition.
Tennis scoring system: The system of points, games, sets, and matches used to determine a tennis winner. Its unusual vocabulary and structure reflect the sport’s long rule history.
Wimbledon Championships: The oldest tennis tournament, first held in 1877 at the All England Club in London. Its early championships helped establish lawn tennis rules and prestige.
Suzanne Lenglen: A French tennis champion whose playing and public profile transformed women’s tennis in the 1920s. Her celebrity helped make tennis a mass spectator sport.
Battle of the Sexes: The 1973 exhibition tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. Its enormous audience made debates over women’s sport highly visible.
Real tennis: An indoor racket sport played on an enclosed court, descended from jeu de paume. Its court traditions and scoring preserve tennis’s premodern ancestry.
Tennis racket: A strung frame with a handle, used to strike a tennis ball. Racket materials shifted from wood to metal and composite as the game changed.
French Open: The annual Grand Slam tennis tournament played on clay courts in Paris. Its international growth reflects the sport’s expansion beyond Britain.
Bill Tilden: An American tennis champion who dominated men’s tennis in the 1920s and wrote influential instructional books. His success helped build tennis’s popularity in the United States.
Equal prize money: The policy of awarding the same tournament prize money to women and men. Tennis became an early major sport to adopt equal pay at a leading event.

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