Do you know who invented tennis? Tennis is a game played by people from all backgrounds in countries all around the world. Though tennis is wildly popular, who invented the sport isn't widely known. Here's a short history of the inventor of tennis.
Tennis has been around for more than 800 years, deriving from a French sport played by monks called paume. In paume, players used their hand to hit a ball. Like tennis, paume was played on a court. It became so popular among monks and nobility that the Pope tried to ban it (but was unsuccessful). Paume evolved, using gloves then rackets, developing rules and spreading across the world.
In the mid-1800s, two men invented a game called pelota, which involved rackets. These men, along with two doctors, founded the first tennis club in 1872. The first official tennis tournament was held twelve years later, in the United Kingdom.
Another man, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, is also credited with developing modern tennis. He called this game sphairistike, a Greek word which referred to a skill at ball games. Though Wingfield's version of tennis wasn't quite original, he did come up with much of the terminology used today.
The first serious tennis championship, Wimbledon, was played in 1877. Wimbledon tennis was designed to determine the best of the best in tennis.
The United States Tennis Association formed in 1881, known then as the United States National Lawn Tennis Association. Their objective was to standardize tennis rules in the US; up until that point there were discrepancies, depending on which part of the country you were playing in.
International rules for tennis were finalized by the International Lawn Tennis Federation (now known as just the International Tennis Federation) in 1924.
1881 was also the year of the first US Open. At the time, only men competed, though women weren't much farther behind, joining the competition in 1887.
Little has changed since the International Tennis Federation set the rules in the 1920s. Much of the game of tennis is the same, and serious tennis matches continue to prove who is the best in the world.
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