US OPEN TENNIS

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

To stay out of trouble, my friend and I decided to learn to play tennis. I purchased each of us a $5.00 wooden racket, and we went to the tennis court. Our tennis shoes cost about as much as our tennis rackets, shorts and a t-shirt was the tennis wear of the day, and we collected coke bottles to purchase our tennis balls. Getting time on the tennis courts back then took longer than today. Everyone was playing; waiting for a court (there was an abundance of outdoor courts and no indoor courts where I lived), could take up to a couple of hours; but we were persistent, and we waited. When we first started playing, we hit balls everywhere. The people playing next to us had to be the most patient people in the world. Chasing balls was what we really did for awhile, but soon we got where we could actually hit a rally. Then we got where we could play for points. Then, we started play other people, and eventually could pretty good. We joined a league which used the ladder challenge system ( y …

Before this point, the history of tennis is the history of a completely different game real tennis. Real tennis is played on indoor courts. In fact, real tennis cannot be played outside the players use the angled walls of a real tennis court to strategically hit and return the ball to their opponents. Yes, real tennis his very similar to today s modern tennis, or lawn tennis, but only in the same way that handball, badminton, croquet, and racquetball are similar to lawn tennis! That is why I choose to start my history of tennis at the point in which lawn tennis diverged from real tennis, and this happened in the 1850 s. It was in the 1850 s that Charles Goodyear, of Goodyear tire fame, invented vulcanized rubber. Vulcanized rubber is a process that prevents natural rubber from deteriorating so quickly (without the vulcanization process, natural rubber could deteriorate within just a few days.) So, with the vulcanization of rubber came rubber tennis balls. The rubber tennis bal …