The Ball

by John Fox

  Henry’s court burned down in 1701 but was rebuilt from the original walls in 1732. Napoleon restored the court in 1812. Then, during World War I it was put to use as a recovery ward for wounded soldiers and later became a concert hall before being reinaugurated as a tennis court in 1981.

  As I stepped out on the court, which as recently as 1991 was still surfaced with the original Normandy limestone tiles, I could almost picture Marie Antoinette cheering on Louis XVI from the gallery. Or Cardinal Richelieu coaching Louis XIII on his forehand. A total of eight French monarchs had played on this court. Now it was my turn.

  I felt honored to be learning the particulars of real tennis from a player of the Ronaldson pedigree who, by his own estimate, would be ranked around 20 in the world—that is, if the sport had a proper ranking system. Despite being among the elite players on the planet, Matty complained that it didn’t mean much in a sport as obscure as his. And, worst of all for a young single guy, it didn’t get him very far with the girls.

  “I was with another player recently, chatting up some girls at a pub. When we told them we were among the top real tennis pros in the world and then had to explain what real tennis is, you could just see their eyes glazing over.”

  He handed me a racket, and for a second I thought he was having a good laugh at my expense. It looked like a relic of an earlier age, the kind of antique racket you might pick up at a country flea market and hang on your wall next to, say, your coat of armor. It was long, wooden, and incredibly heavy, with a tiny head and an unforgivably small sweet spot—what in lawn tennis would count as five excellent reasons to upgrade to a better racket.

  This was no joke, however. The rules of real tennis require that rackets be made “almost entirely of wood.” The heavy weight is required to handle the heavier balls and the head is kept small to allow for extremely tight strings. Most unusually, the racket head is curved slightly up from the handle like the blade of a hockey stick to make it easier to hit balls close to the floor or scoop them out of corners.

  Matty held out his right hand. “If you look at the racket, it’s shaped like a hand. Since the game started out with just the palm of the hand, when they got around to making rackets they modeled them after the anatomy of the hand.”

  The racket I held in my hand was made, like most real tennis rackets, by Grays of Cambridge, England, a five-generation family business that’s had a virtual monopoly on the industry since 1885. Four long-term employees handcraft each racket from willow staves and loops of ash and, in a rare concession to modernity, strengthen and make it rigid by adding up to three layers of a vulcanized fiber. The fiber performs like graphite but is actually made from paper, which means almost the entire racket, in accordance with regulation, is made from wood or wood products.

  When the racket was first introduced to the game of tennis in the 16th century, it wasn’t immediately seen by all as such a great advance. In the first account to mention the racket in 1505, King Philip of Castile played a match at Windsor Castle against the marquis of Dorset while King Henry VII of England watched. The marquis used only his hand while Philip used a racket, so Philip took a one-point handicap. In another account written by the Dutch scholar Erasmus, one player suggests to the other that they employ rackets: “We shall sweat less if we play with the racket,” he argued. But his opponent, either a purist or a glutton for punishment, had no time for such newfangled inventions. “Let us leave the nets to fishermen; the game is prettier if played with the hands.”

  Jeu de paume in a royal Paris court, 1632, and at Fontainebleau, 2009.

  We took our positions at either end of the enclosed court. Though they vary in dimensions, all real tennis courts have the same layout and are both wider (about 32 feet) and longer (about 96 feet) than a lawn tennis court. The lofty ceiling at Fontainebleau is 35 feet high, tall enough to allow all but the highest lob shots. The features of the court unmistakably resemble the medieval cloister they’re based on. Three sides of the court have sloping roofs, known as penthouses, below which are netted galleries from which spectators can watch the game.

  Unlike lawn tennis, there is a service end and a receiving, or hazard, end, and each has different features and means of scoring points. Having been forced to play lawn tennis by my mother as a kid, I was hopeful I could hold my own or at least keep from embarrassing myself. Matty’s first serve was a slice serve that, as required by the rules, bounced off the penthouse on my end before crumpling up and dying against the back wall.

  I stood there helplessly looking at the little cork-stuffed ball still wedged into the corner of the court, appreciating like never before what the introduction of rubber did for the world of sport.

  “That ball didn’t bounce at all!” I whined.

  Matty was clearly enjoying this. “Sorry, I served it with enough backspin that it never got out of the corner.”

  15–love.

  Unlike lawn tennis, where a hard-hit topspin kicks the ball up and out of the back court, making it hard to return, in real tennis it’s the opposite. Topspin brings the ball high off the back wall and gives your opponent an easy opportunity to smash it back and score a point. Real tennis is all about the backspin, all about killing what absurdly little bounce there is in the ball in the first place.

  He served again. This time the ball didn’t so much bounce as roll off the side penthouse and around to the back. I readied my racket for a forehand return only to see the ball roll behind me and over to my backhand. I tied myself in knots trying to spin the heavy racket around to the other side in time, but it was too late.

  30–love, and I’d yet to touch the ball.

  Matty served for a third time and this time I was paying more attention to the ball’s trajectory. I caught it off the back wall with a decent, if slightly shaky, backhand. He snapped the ball back to my left again. I pulled back early, ready to swing when suddenly the ball changed course, now moving sideways across the court and nowhere near my racket.

  “Ha! I got the tambour,” he declared cheerily. “You see, you thought you knew where the ball was going, and suddenly it was in a corridor of uncertainty.”

  From my own experience, I was quite used to dealing with base paths, alleys, sidelines, and baselines but I wasn’t sure I was up for playing a sport that involved “corridors of uncertainty.” Matty had quite artfully and intentionally placed the ball into an inconveniently angled buttress that protrudes into the service end of the court, just as the flying buttress would have in a medieval courtyard.

  40–love.

  Before going any further in describing my utter humiliation at Matty’s hands, I should address one of the most obvious mysteries in this strange game of tennis. It’s a question that seems to have kept etymologists busy for the past century. One has argued for the game’s Arabic origins, claiming that its name refers to the ancient sunken city of Tinnis in the Nile Delta; it was famous for its fabrics, which, he guessed, could have been used to stuff balls. Good try.

  Another speculated that it derived from the old German word for a threshing floor, tenni, which may have at times doubled as a tennis court. Yet another thought it was an English word that came from an early version of the game played with ten players. And so on.

  It turns out, however, that the word “tennis,” like everything else about the game, has French roots and derives from tenez, which means “take heed.” This was what the server once called out to warn his opponent as he put the ball in play. Although French in origin, the word first appeared in Italy in 1324 in a strange account of 500 French cavaliers, “all noblemen and great barons,” who arrived in Florence one day with their fancy French game (not realizing, apparently, that Italians couldn’t care less about tennis and were quite content playing football for the rest of history). An Italian priest, the account states, “played all day with them at ball, and at this time was the beginning in these parts of playing at tenes.”

  So that’s the word tennis. Now what about the bizarre scoring system t
hat assigns 15 points instead of one and “love” instead of zero? Leave it to the French once again. Most scholars (though debate rages in esoteric tennis history circles) agree that it comes from the French l’oeuf, meaning “egg” (which, if you think about it, closely approximates the number zero). Over time, the English bastardized the term—as they tend to do—into “love” and we’ve never looked back or asked whether zero might not make more sense.

  As for a scoring system that assigns 15 points for winning one measly shot, it appears that people were already scratching their heads over this one as early as 1415. Unable to find a logical explanation for the peculiar system in the here and now, one writer of the time turned to God and the afterlife: “In much the same way as a tennis player wins fifteen points for a single stroke, those who support and further righteousness and justice are also awarded fifteen times or more than normal for their good deed.”

  The true answer, scholars have determined, is far less noble and has to do with a practice that’s been inseparable from sport since ancient times: gambling. Betting was standard practice in tennis matches for most of the game’s history. As the historian Heinrich Gillmeister has documented in his study of tennis, judging by the king’s own accounting book, poor Henry VII of England was about as versed in the game as I am:

  13th June 1494: To a Spaynyard the tenes player, £4.

  For the Kinges loss at tenes, to Sir Robert 14th August 1494: At Windesor . . .

  To Sir Charles Somerset Curson, with the balls, £1. 7s. 8d.

  8th March 1495 . . . To Hugh Denes for the Kinges losse at tenes, 14s.

  30th August 1497: To Jakes Haute for the tennis playe, £10.

  This and other similar accounts suggest that the loser, in addition to paying out cash, was often considered responsible for paying for the balls. As for the cash that changed hands, the most common coin used for such bets in medieval France was worth 15 pence. Thus, for each point lost 15 pence went with it: 15, 30, 45, for a total of four coins and 60 pence for a sweep of the game. At some point the 45 was abbreviated to 40, and voilà, we had the quirky system still used today.

  At Fontainebleau’s center court, I was glad no money was on the line as Matty continued to tie me in knots, now in front of a few spectators who had wandered in, no doubt at the smell of fresh meat. Matty finally took some pity on me and came around to my side to offer encouragement and some remedial instruction.

  “As you’ve probably noticed by now, being able to swing a racket well or hit a fast serve doesn’t get you all that far in this game,” he said. “In lawn tennis, you can have a fellow like Ivanisevic, right? The great ape can bash a serve 135 miles an hour and can win just on his serve. He wouldn’t stand a chance in real tennis, where you can’t win with just a strong serve or a crashing forehand. Real tennis is often called ‘chess in motion’ and that’s not far from the truth. It’s all about positioning your opponent, thinking three shots ahead, and forcing the other guy into checkmate situations.”

  “Speaking of serves, why don’t you give it a try?” he suggested.

  Now normally—and this is where real tennis begins to make the brain hurt—as the receiver of the serve I would have to win the chance to serve by winning a “chase,” as it’s called. There’s no automatic change of service after each game as there is in lawn tennis. If a ball I hit bounced twice on the server’s end, rather than win the point outright I’d have “set a chase.” The value of the chase is measured using numbered lines that divide the court—the nearer to the back wall, the better the chase. Later in the game, my opponent would have a chance to replay the same point from the receiving side and would attempt to beat my chase with a lower number. If I won the chase, I’d get to serve the next game. If not, I’d be stuck on the receiving end and at a clear disadvantage. With chases, it’s possible, though not likely, for a strong player to hold onto service for an entire match. Clear? No, it wasn’t to me either.

  Matty stepped around to demonstrate his full arsenal of serves, each of which is designed to achieve a different effect. “You’ve got the ‘giraffe,’ a high serve that comes down hard on the penthouse usually with a bit of side- or overspin to give the ball an extra kick. Or there’s the ‘caterpillar,’ which makes a lot of low long bounces, hits the back penthouse, balloons up in the air, and comes down flush with the back wall. Or the ‘railroad,’ which flies down the edge of the penthouse with a reverse spin, kicking the ball back into the sidewall. There are about seventy-five variations on serve, depending on what you’re trying to do.”

  “Maybe I’ll just try the old standard ‘get the ball over the net and into the right box’ serve?” I suggested.

  He retreated to the receiving end while I grabbed a ball from a quaint picnic basket and settled into proper serving position.

  “Tenez!” I shouted as warning for the rocket I was about to launch.

  “Uh, we don’t say that anymore.”

  “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”

  I sliced the ball rather nicely, I thought, enjoying the musical twang of the tightly wound strings as the ball strummed across them. It bounced off the side penthouse, bobbled sideways along the back penthouse and dropped to Matty’s backhand. He punched it back low toward my forehand but this time I was ready. I drilled it down the line and smack into the tiny Plexiglas window that looks into the court’s changing room.

  “Brilliant!” called Matty. “You hit the grill and that’s an instant point!”

  The grill is one of the most indisputable connections between the modern real tennis court and its monastic origins. In the medieval monastery, the cloisters were originally restricted to the monks, who were closed off from the outside world. If relatives or visitors wanted to communicate with someone inside, they would have to do so through a barred window, called the grill.

  “Be sure to tell your friends you hit the grill on your first outing!” said Matty, piling on the praise before properly dismantling me: six games . . . to one egg.

  The Renaissance did wonders for tennis, and for sports in general. The same medieval church that had given over its monastic courtyards and earthly passions to the game also regarded hitting, chasing, and sweating over bouncing balls as morally suspect. In one incident from England in 1451, an illicit pickup tennis league that had started within church grounds got so out of hand that the bishop of Exeter sentenced the monks to nothing short of excommunication:

  Some members of the clergy, as well as of the laity . . . apparently have no scruples about playing a game, or rather, an evil game called “tennis” in the vernacular, in the churchyard and the above-mentioned collegiate church of St. Mary, consecrated for Christian burials. . . . In so doing they inveterately voice vain, heinous and blasphemous words and utter senseless curses.

  As if blaspheming weren’t enough, the rowdy monks were also accused of dismantling a wooden structure on the cloister’s penthouse roof because it got in the way of ball play. Meanwhile, in the same general time frame over in Orléans, France, a church council felt the need to pass a decree forbidding “priests and all others in sacred orders from playing tennis without shame, in their undershirts, or not decently dressed.”

  And so, despite (or more likely because of ) the obvious pleasure young clerics took in playing the game—in their underwear, no less—the official stand of the church seems to have been that tennis and other ball games led to sinful acts unworthy of a proper Christian. They were, in other words, far too much fun.

  With the emergence of humanism in the Italian Renaissance and its emphasis on the education of l’uomo universale, the “whole man,” tennis and other sports came into their own, taking their place alongside science and the arts as essential character-building pursuits. The ideal Renaissance man was a scholar-athlete who was as physically capable as he was intellectually sound and morally righteous—the complete package.

  In the writings of the day, tennis consistently made the short list of recommended activities befitting a gentlema
n of the court, alongside traditional arts of war such as archery, swordplay, and horsemanship. Baldassare Castiglione provided the most detailed how-to manual on the subject in The Book of the Courtier, published in 1528. Through a series of fictional conversations with the duke of Urbino and his attendants, Castiglione describes the ideal courtier as “well built and shapely of limb.” Along with other forms of exercise, he recommends tennis as a game “very befitting a man at court . . . in which are well shown the disposition of the body, the quickness and suppleness of every member.” The health benefits of tennis were extolled by many authors of the day, including one who went so far as to suggest it as a cure for constipation in slow-moving nobles:

  Water which stands without any movement finally transmutes into putrescence and begins to stink. . . . In order to forestall such worrisome evils, some amusing movements have been devised for such personages whose nobility and rank consist in all manner of stillness and but little motion.

  Constipation aside, the game’s upper-class, aristocratic associations—which linger to this day—can be traced, like so much else about the sport, to its monastic origins. In the medieval period, the children of kings and dukes were sent off to monasteries to be educated. In between Latin and theology classes, they took to the cloister courtyard with their shameless, defrocked teachers to work on their forehands. It wasn’t long before these young students were heading back to their parents’ castles for summer break, insisting that they simply must build a court of their own.

  The royalty of Renaissance Europe took to tennis with a passion and it quickly became popular on the palace circuit. Unlike football, which involved mobs of unruly commoners strewn across village fields, tennis was a genteel sport that required fewer players, less physical exertion, and a small, delicate ball. Tennis was contained within expensive private courts, whereas football could be played almost anywhere and required nothing more than a homemade ball. Thus, early on, class lines were drawn around these games.