Lawn Tennis

LAWN TENNIS

A Family Pastime

Although the first recorded game of lawn tennis in America was played 8 October 1874 at Camp Apache, near Tucson, Arizona, Mary Ewing Outerbridge, a New York socialite, is credited with introducing the game to the United States. In 1874, during her annual winter vacation in Bermuda, she observed British army officers hitting a rubber ball across a net stretched across a frashly mowed lawn with implements strung with catgut. Intrigued by the game, she purchased a box of tennis equipment and brought it back to the United States, whereupon customs agents confiscated the unrecognizable items. Emilius Outerbridge, an influential family member prominent in the shipping business, succeeded in getting the tennis accoutrements into the country. Soon thereafter, the Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club, which Mary's brother Eugenius directed, set up a tennis court in the corner of the cricket field. For nearly a year tennis was an Outerbridge family pastime. As other club members began learning and playing the game, the club devoted one day a week exclusively to it. Tennis, however, did not spread across the nation solely from the Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club. The game had similar beginnings in Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and San Francisco.

Social Aspects of Tennis

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tennis, or lawn tennis, as it was called until the late 1960s, was played and enjoyed almost exclusively by the wealthy. Despite its social stratification, the game did not place any boundaries on gender, as both men and women, separately and together, participated at all levels of ability. In contrast to football, baseball, and other "manly" sports, in which the gender lines were clearly drawn, tennis projected a delicate and effeminate image to some men. In 1878, for example, when several members of the Harvard crew abandoned the sport for tennis, a Harvard Crimson editorialist wrote: "Is it not a pity that serious athletes should be set aside by able-bodied men for a game that is at best intended for a seaside pastime? The game is well enough for lazy or weak men, but men who have rowed or taken part in a nobler sport should blush to be seen playing Lawn Tennis." Paul Gallico, one of the leading sports-writers of the 1920s, remembered that during his childhood in early-twentieth-century New York, boys carrying tennis rackets would be met with greetings such as "Deuce, darling," or "Forty-love, dear."

Birth of the USLTA

Despite the effeminate connotations attached to tennis, many men took up the sport, including Dr. James Dwight, who organized one of the nation's earliest tennis tournaments at Nahant, Massachusetts, in 1876 and the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) in 1881, serving as its president from 1882 to 1884 and from 1893 to 1911. Under the aegis of the USLTA, the men's singles and doubles championships started in 1881, the women's singles and doubles championships in 1887, and the mixed doubles in 1894. From 1881 to 1886 Dwight ranked as the nation's second-best singles player behind his half cousin, Richard D. Sears, who won a then-record seven consecutive men's singles titles from 1881 to 1887. Dwight teamed with Sears to win the doubles championship from 1882 to 1884 and from 1886 to 1887. The 1900s witnessed the rise of one of the twentieth century's most dominating players, William A. Larned, who won the singles title in 1901 and 1902 and from 1907 to 1911, becoming the second player to win seven national championships. Other men's singles champions of the 1900s included Malcolm D. Whitman from 1899 to 1900; Hugh L. Doherty of England, the first foreign USLTA singles champion in 1903; Holcombe Ward in 1904; Beals C. Wright in 1905; and William J. Clothier in 1906.

Rise of the Davis Cup

During the 1880s and 1890s tennis had an international flair, as British players competed regularly in the USLTA championships and Americans played in Wimbledon, the British national championship. In the 1900s international competition increased with the development of the International Lawn Tennis Challenge Cup tournament, better known simply as the Davis Cup tournament. The silver cup awarded to the tournament champion was donated by Dwight F. Davis, the son of a wealthy Saint Louis banker and merchant. Ranked as the second-best men's singles player in 1899 and 1900, Davis captured the 1899 national college men's singles championship as a Harvard junior. After a successful California tennis tour in 1899 with Whitman, Ward, and Wright, Davis decided that an officially sanctioned international tennis competition, especially one that would exploit the already established Anglo-American rivalry, would promote and enhance the reputation of the sport. His format for the three-day tournament, which has not changed since, included two singles matches the first day and a doubles competition the second day, followed by two singles contests on the final day of competition. A point was awarded for each victory, with a team needing three points to win a round. The United States, led by Davis, defeated the British in the first two Challenge Cup tournaments in 1900 and 1902. Britain won the tournament from 1903 to 1906. In 1907 Britain lost the Davis Cup to Australia, which defended its possession until 1912, when Britain reclaimed the title.

Women's Tennis

Tennis at the beginning of the century was one of the few sports that provided women with the opportunity for national and international competition. Ellen F. Hansell, the first USLTA women's singles champion in 1887, was followed by the first two-time champion, Bertha L. Townsend, from 1888 to 1889. Juliette P. Atkinson ranked as the top woman of the 1890s, winning the singles title in 1895 and from 1897 to 1898. An outstanding doubles player as well, Atkinson combined for the doubles championship with Helen R. Helwig from 1894 to 1895, Elisabeth H. Moore in 1896, Kathleen Atkinson from 1897 to 1898, Myrtle McAteer in 1901, and Marion Jones in 1902. Jones, who captured the singles championship in 1899 and 1902, also earned the bronze medal in the 1900 Olympic Games. Moore won the USLTA title three times—in 1901, 1903, and 1905. May G. Sutton, the daughter of a British naval officer, became the first American woman to capture the Wimbledon singles title, in 1905 and again in 1907. She won the USLTA singles title in 1904.

Sources:

E. Digby Baltzeil, Sporting Gentlemen: Men's Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar (New York: Free Press, 1995);

Allison Danzig and Peter Schwed, eds., The Fireside Book of Tennis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972);

Will Grimsley, Tennis: Its History, People and Events (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971).