Origin and Early History
Americans call it court tennis, but it's more commonly known as "real tennis" in other countries. The "real" here means "royal," because historically this form of tennis was played by kings and nobles.
Court tennis is the ancestor, not only of lawn tennis and most other racket sports, but also of court handball games. It originated during the 12th century in France, where it was called jeu de paume, or "game of the hand." Originally, it was played outdoors, in enclosed spaces such as cloisters or courtyards, and the ball was hit with the bare hand. The game became so popular among clerics that the Archbishop of Rouen in 1245 forbade priests from playing.
The racket evolved gradually. Italian players began wearing a glove to protect the hand. The glove also allowed a player to hit the ball harder. That gave some forgotten inventor the notion of wrapping leather cords around the hand so that they could be stretched between the fingers, turning the hand into a sort of racket.
But the first racket, developed in the 14th century, was made of solid wood, with a short handle. A long-handled racket with a hitting surface of parchment, stretched tightly over a wooden frame, came next. The racket with strings of sheep gut, laced diagonally across the frame, was developed about 1500.
King Charles V built the first known indoor court at the Louvre in 1368. By then, tennis had spread into Italy, the Netherlands, and England. The English, incidentally, gave the sport its modern name: "Tennis" is an English corruption of the French "tenez," meaning "hold," which is believed to be the warning given by the server to the receiver that a serve would be coming.
The game also became secularized during this period - so much so, in fact, that in 1365 a statute was enacted forbidding the lower classes to play tennis in England. The court also became secularized. Many of its unusual features probably represent the windows, galleries, and openings in merchants' stalls that surrounded medieval marketplaces, although others doubtless are stylized versions of features found in monastery cloisters and royal courtyards.
Gambling on tennis was widespread, in both France and England. Charles V in 1369 placed restrictions on the game in Paris because of the gambling, and that was probably also the major reason for the English statute of 1365.
Interestingly, one of the first historically known women athletes was a tennis player, Margot of Hanault, who arrived in Paris in 1427, when she was 28 and already an accomplished tennis player. She played at a gambling house known as the Little Temple, taking on all challengers and attracting crowds of spectators as well as gamblers.
Court tennis reached its greatest peak in the late 16th and early 17th century. In 1600, the Venetian ambassador to France reported that there were nearly 1800 courts in Paris alone. Henry VIII of England was an avid player. Hampton Court Palace, where he played, still stands and court tennis is still played there.
Shakespeare mentioned tennis in six of his plays. The best-known passage is in Henry V. The Dauphin of France sends Henry a gift of tennis balls, a contemptuous reference to the young king's predilection for fun and games rather than war.
Henry tells the French ambassador, who has presented the gift:
When we have matched our rackets to these balls,We shall in France, by God's grace, play a set,
Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard.
Tell him he hath made a match with such a wrangler
That all the courts of France will be disturbed
With chases. . .
The puns on two court tennis terms, hazard and chases, show that Shakespeare knew a little something about the sport.
During the English civil war and the period of the Puritan Commonwealth, tennis virtually disappeared from England, but it returned soon after the Restoration in 1660. By the second half of the 18th century, though, it had fallen into disrepute because of suspicions that many matches were fixed. It didn't die out entirely in England, but it became a sport for only a few members of the upper class.
The French Revolution did pretty much kill the sport in France. In 1789, the National Constituent Assembly held an impromptu meeting on a tennis court and took an oath to give France a constitution. Ironically, after the Revolution succeeded, court tennis was one of the first institutions to be eliminated because it was a symbol of aristocracy.
Court Tennis in America
Tennis was played in the American Colonies, at least in New Amsterdam, where Governer Peter Stuyvesant in 1659 issued a proclamation forbidding its play on days of fasting and prayer. The only other mention of the sport in America before the late 19th century was an ad in a 1763 New York Gazette announcing the auction of a house with "a very fine tennis court." It's generally believed, though, that the court was actually for a form of handball.
Court tennis didn't arrive in the United States until 1876, when Hollis Hunnewell and Nathaniel Thayer of Boston returned from studying at Oxford with an English professional, Ted Hunt, and his 12-year-old apprentice, Tom Pettitt. Hunnewell and Thayer built a tennis court in Boston's Back Bay area and Hunt operated it for them.
Other courts were built at the Newport Casino in Rhode Island in 1880, the Boston Athletic Association in 1888, the New York Tennis and Racquet Club in 1891, the Chicago Athletic Club in 1893, and the Tuxedo Club in Tuxedo Park, New York, in 1900.
The first national singles championship, held in 1892, was won by Richard Sears, who had also won the first seven U. S. lawn tennis championships, from 1881 through 1887.
Sears' victory was emblematic of the fact that court tennis was already being supplanted, to a great extent, by its much younger descendant. While the elaborate, concrete indoor courts took a great deal of time and money to build, lawn tennis courts required much less time and expense. Given a large enough expanse of flat ground, several outdoor grass courts could be set up in a single area, with room to spare for spectators.
A court tennis court, on the other hand, could accommodate four players at most, with a very limited gallery. In the era before public courts, both forms of tennis catered only to the wealthy, but lawn tennis offered social and recreational opportunities that court tennis couldn't.
Nevertheless, other indoor courts were built early in the 20th century, including at least four private courts. One of those was built in 1900 by financier George Gould at his estate in Lakewood, New Jersey. Gould even imported an English professional to tutor his 12-year-old son, Jay, in the intricacies of the sport. Jay Gould went on to win the U. S. amateur championship 19 years in a row. In 1914, he became the first amateur to win the world open championship.
The Myopia Hunt Club in Hamilton, Massachusetts, opened a court in 1902. The same year, a semi-private court was built in Aiken, South Carolina. The Racquet Club of Philadelphia added a court in 1907 and, in 1908, private owners opened a court for Harvard students.
Clarence Mackay built a private court on Long Island in 1915 and Payne Whitney added another, also on Long Island, in 1915. Chicago got a second court in 1923, at the Racquet Club.
But that was the last new court built for more than 70 years. In the meantime, many American courts fell into disuse and were razed or converted to storage - often, storage of maintenance equipment for the growing number of lawn tennis courts.
Court Tennis Today
Court tennis briefly flourished in England during the late 19th and early 20th century. There were nearly 100 private courts when World War I began in 1914.
In France, a new court was built in the Tuileries Gardens in 1862, a second was added in 1880, and the old court at Versailles was reopened in 1885. When the Tuileries courts were converted to exhibition halls in 1907, a group of players got together to finance two new courts at Rue Lariston.
As in the U. S., though, the sport declined rapidly after that brief boom. Most of the English courts were torn down or converted to other uses after the war. The Rue Lariston courts in France are still open, but the former Tuileries courts now house a museum of Impressionist art and the old court at Versailles is a museum dedicated to the French Revolution.
But court tennis has had a mild resurgence since World War II, largely because of the efforts of the U.S. Court Tennis Association, which was organized in 1955. The court at the Newport Casino, which was partially destroyed by a 1939 fire, reopened in 1980 after a $250,000 restoration. George Gould's Georgian Court in Lakewood, NJ, was restored two years later.
In 1997, the Regency Sport and Health Club in McLean, Virgina, opened the first court to be built from scratch since 1923.
There are now 10 courts in use in the United States and an estimated 25 in Great Britain, where both Oxford and Cambridge Universities have active court tennis clubs. In France, where the sport is still called jeu de paume, there are courts in Fontainebleau and Bordeaux-Mérignac, as well as the rue Lauriston court in Paris. Australia, Ireland, and the Netherlands also have courts and national governing bodies.
The Real Tennis Professionals Association, formerly an organization of English professionals, became the International Real Tennis Professionals Association (IRTPA) in 2002. The IRTPA's chief goal is to increase prize money for existing tournaments and to work for the establishment of more tournaments open to both professionals and top amateurs.