Real tennis courts are like secrets. Unless you know they exist, it’s hard to stumble upon them. Often, they hide in plain sight. There is something very pleasing about walking through the gates of former royal palaces – Hampton Court, the Château de Fontainebleau near Paris – and knowing you won’t be stopped because you’re carrying a wooden racket. Other courts are more tucked away. In upstate New York, the Tuxedo Club, founded in 1886 by playboy and tobacco heir Pierre Lorillard IV, stands behind locked park gates, atop a series of winding roads flanked by vast Gilded Age piles. Thousands of miles away in rural Victoria, about an hour’s drive inland from Melbourne, there is a court nestled among the vineyards at a winery in the Macedon Ranges. You can play real tennis inside a private Catholic university in New Jersey, or on courts fronted by unassuming timber-clad cafes in the Basque region of France. The Racquet Club in downtown Philadelphia houses a real tennis court, the first swimming pool in the country constructed above ground level, and a full-size German beer hall.
Somewhere in the countryside by the River Thames, down a little track sandwiched between paddocks and flooded fields, sits Hardwick House Tennis Club. The club is attached to a sprawling Victorian red-brick house that is rumoured to have inspired Kenneth Grahame’s Toad Hall. In 1896, Joseph Bickley, a master builder who oversaw the construction of several real tennis courts across Britain and the United States, built one at Hardwick for the landowner, Sir Charles Rose. Finding it slightly too far to walk from his house, Rose demanded another. (The original building, derelict and open-roofed, is still visible from the narrow drive as you approach.) Inside, Hardwick is ferociously cold, even in summer, so players arrive wrapped up and ready to light the fire in the dining room. Dogs toast themselves in front of it or bark at the sight of loose balls. The court is large, high-roofed and echoey, with a slippery, terracotta-coloured floor and slate-grey walls showing the blotches made by balls and sweaty palms.
I first played at Hardwick at a tournament about ten years ago. On the train up from London, a stranger spotted the long handle of my racket and introduced himself; it turned out he was heading to the same place. We were given a lift from the station in an open-top sports car and handed Bloody Marys (non-virgin, non-negotiable) on arrival. This, I learned, was the way things were done. Showing up with a sports drink or a banana would have been a faux pas; likewise refusing the cocktail or trying to get out of having pudding until after playing. At Hardwick, trying too hard is frowned upon. Undue physical exertion is held to be inelegant. ‘Is she running?’ I remember one opponent asking incredulously, as I flung myself, sweating, after a ball.
I discovered real tennis – the historical precursor to the sport played at Wimbledon and Roland Garros – by chance at Oxford, assigned one afternoon to shepherd a group of summer-school students to a trial session. We arrived at a small, white-painted building in the heart of town, which I’d walked past roughly daily for the previous half-decade and never given a second thought. I had played tennis since childhood and a lot of squash; I assumed this would be a mixture of the two and that I’d pick it up easily enough. It was humbling to discover that it was unlike either: or, more accurately, that it combined the hardest bits of both, with elements of hockey and billiards thrown in for good measure. The ball dropped like a stone, the racket’s sweet spot was minuscule, and trying to read a shot spinning off the walls was like being asked to decipher a line of code at high speed. For a long time, I was hopeless, foxed by everything. A man in his nineties who could barely move but had a devilish serve trounced me regularly. Frustration and humiliation drew me in, as they do many obsessive types. A friend who played tennis for the Netherlands in the 1980s, making it to the second round of Roland Garros, got thrashed 6–0, 6–0 in his first real tennis match and never looked back.
Modern-day tennis, the sport we all know, has a surprisingly short history. In 1874, Walter Clopton Wingfield, a retired army major, secured the patent for an outdoor ball game he called ‘sphairistiké’ (botched Greek for ‘the game of ball’). The new sport could be played on any decently sized patch of mown grass or croquet lawn and was considered decorous enough for women to take part. Soon to be renamed ‘lawn tennis’, it took off because it was straightforward and accessible: all you needed were rackets, rubber balls, a makeshift net, and some paint or tape to mark lines. Wingfield marketed boxed sets of equipment for five guineas and sold more than a thousand between the summers of 1874 and 1875. Soon, rival enthusiasts came forward with their own versions of the new racket game; rival manufacturers, picking up on the key features, produced pirate equipment sets. In 1877, in an effort to pin down what the sport was about, a commission at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club laboriously formalised the rules. On 9 July, the first ball was served at a tournament in Wimbledon.
The fact that something called ‘tennis’ had existed long before ‘lawn tennis’ created a problem. Those who clung to the older sport, a game dating from the medieval period, saw the new version as an interloper and felt the threat of extinction. They engaged in a swift rebranding exercise: what they played was not tennis but real tennis, the real thing, the authentic game. ‘I believe you occasionally play tennis, I mean “real” tennis?’ an interviewer asked the German lawn tennis champion Victor Voss in 1900.
For years, I believed that the ‘real’ in ‘real tennis’ referred to its royal heritage. ‘No, real as in royal. You know, like Real Madrid,’ I’d say smugly if anyone asked. (Usually a variation on: ‘You play real tennis? What, as opposed to fake tennis?’) In fact, the obvious meaning of the word is the right one. As Wingfield’s newfangled game took off in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States (one 1898 French book called it, not unkindly, le bâtard), men and women who preferred duking it out on Gothic-looking indoor courts with slippery stone floors stuck an adjective in front of what they were playing. ‘Real tennis’ was born, or born again.
The way real tennis is played now, by about 4,000 active players on approximately fifty surviving and new-built courts in Britain, France, the US, and Australia, has changed little since the early modern period. Like lawn tennis, it is played on a double-ended court divided by a net. Like squash, it is played indoors and players can hit the ball off the walls to create angles and spin (a type of shot known as a ‘boast’). The serving player opens the game by sending the ball onto a sloping roof (the ‘penthouse’) that runs along the length of the court to her left. Her opponent waits at the opposite end (the ‘hazard side’) and may either volley the ball or wait for it to bounce. The goal of both players is either to hit one of several point-scoring targets dotted around the court (more on those later), or to force their opponent to make an error – to miss the ball, hit it into the net, or put it out of bounds.
In lawn tennis, if a player is unable to reach a ball before it bounces twice, she loses the point. In real tennis, a double-bounce doesn’t automatically mean a lost point. Instead, an ancient and complicated set of rules known as the ‘chase system’ comes into operation. Players must take note of the spot where the ball bounced the second time. If it landed four yards from the back of the court, for example, a chase of ‘four’ is called. (Numbered lines painted on the walls and floor help to mark the yardage.) The chase is then held in reserve (‘banked’), until the game score reaches forty or another chase – a second double-bounce point – occurs in the same game. As soon as one of these things happens, the players switch ends. The player now at the receiving end must ‘beat the chase’ – that is, she must play a shot which, if her opponent fails to get to it before the second bounce, will land nearer to the back wall than the original ball. Given our chase of ‘four’, a ball whose second bounce fell three yards from the back of the court, or two, would win the point. Are you still with me here?
Precision, rather than power, is key. If you are the sort of person who likes to smack the ball (I’m guilty of this myself ), you have to try and fight your instincts, because an overhit shot will ricochet off the back wall and land, most likely, past that original four-yard mark – at five yards, say, or six – which will lose you the point. Subtler shots, ‘stroked’ or ‘cut’ into the corners using slice, are the holy grail. There is also an element of what you might call negative capability. In most sports, you’re conditioned to hit every ball you can. In real tennis, one of the hardest things is learning to leave certain balls. Let’s say your opponent, aiming to beat a chase of ‘four’, instead plays a shot that you know will land beyond it, at ‘six’. You win the point by allowing the ball to bounce twice. For months, as a novice, I was unable to fathom this. Sometimes my brain would kick into gear (‘DON’T HIT IT!’) and sometimes it wouldn’t. But even when it did, my body wouldn’t obey. Time after time, I would move, reach out, hit the ball, let my opponent off the hook.
The less complicated way to score a point is to hit one of a number of targets built into the court. These are known as ‘openings’, because they resemble windows or doors. Here we come to the question of what a real tennis court looks like. (An average court, that is, because all courts vary slightly, with different dimensions and roof angles and floor speeds – another complicating factor.) Trying to describe one is a bit like trying to describe a duck-billed platypus, in that it wouldn’t make much sense even if you were standing in front of it. At the receiving end is the ‘grille’, a small, rectangular opening that looks like a blocked-up window and makes a satisfying sound when you hit it. Behind the server, a large opening resembling a football net, called the ‘dedans’, serves as a target for the receiver. The ‘winning gallery’, the most challenging opening to hit, is fitted with a set of bells that chime when struck. (In Newmarket, the bells make the sound of horseshoes, appropriately for the home of horse racing.) To make everyone’s job a bit harder, there is a slanting buttress in front of the grille called the ‘tambour’, off which the ball glances unpredictably.
A point that involved all of these elements might go something like this. Let’s imagine the server employs a ‘railroad’, one of many possible serves, to put the ball into play. Her opponent, at the hazard end, hits a powerful return (a ‘force’), aiming to send the ball into the dedans, but the server has clocked this and manages to block it in time on the volley. Her volley, aiming for the grille, instead ricochets off the tambour; the receiving player scrambles for it and slides the ball into the opposite back corner, aiming to create a chase. The server is too quick for her and manages to whip a forehand cross-court into the winning gallery. Point over. Thunderous applause.
Spectators – sometimes quiet and well behaved, sometimes loud, partisan, and tipsy – sit directly behind the dedans netting, at a safe distance. Markers, who keep score and call the chases, also sit here during matches, perched on high stools. The braver among them stand just inside the court by the net, ducking as serves whistle over their heads. It’s a fun quirk of the sport that because of its size, it can support only a limited number of professional players, which means that the club pros who mark your games and help you with your backhand are often among the best in the world – like Novak Djokovic watching patiently and saying ‘fifteen–love’ as you fluff an easy ball.
The smallness of the sport is reflected in the kinds of people who play. Real tennis attracts eccentrics like moths to a flame. Clubs can feel like clinics: everyone you encounter has something slightly wrong with them, usually in a benign way. The demographic is small – it sometimes seems as if half the players are middle-aged men called Simon or John – but it is steadily growing. (Years ago, there were men who would ask ‘Whose wife are you?’ when I showed up to matches with my racket and full kit, but they seem to be less in evidence these days.) ‘Realers’ people are also more likely than most to have extremely strange jobs, or no jobs. One man I got chatting to at a dinner at Queen’s Club was involved in some way with South African mines. He offered to cut me in; I said yes politely and hoped he wouldn’t remember. Another claimed to have introduced the sport of padel to the Americas.
The game survives through the efforts of enthusiastic individuals and a culture of near-heroic generosity. During tournaments, locals often host travelling players, offering ‘billets’ for the night like civilians putting up soldiers during the Second World War. In Tuxedo Park, I once reversed a hired SUV into our host’s ornamental rock garden and had to slip out at night to rearrange the stones. On another occasion, a man I barely knew offered to lend me his vintage Jaguar to drive myself back and forth to the club. The conviviality goes hand in hand with intense competitiveness. Players who were seen necking champagne into the early hours arrive on court at 8.30 a.m., whey-faced but determined. At the Royal Melbourne Tennis Club a few years ago, during a hard-fought doubles tournament, a group of ferocious older women had to be officially cautioned for chanting ‘KILL! KILL! KILL!’ from the dedans.
Real tennis players like to say that theirs is the only proper racket sport because the rest aren’t difficult enough. Many see it as an intrinsically noble game, a ‘sport of kings’. Henry VIII, one of history’s sportiest royals, played it to a high standard. Not to be outdone, his rival Francis I of France had a tennis court installed on his battleship, the Grande Françoise. Henry VII played, though less well. Henry V is likely to have played too. There is a bit in Shakespeare’s Henry V – apparently without a basis in fact – in which the French dauphin sends Henry a barrel of tennis balls as an insult, prompting Henry to declare (using fiery tennis metaphors) that he will crush the French and defend his ancient claim to French lands. In the medieval period, kings seemed to make a habit of dying from tennis, either through violent quarrels or overexertion or extreme bad luck. In 1498, Charles VIII of France fatally smacked his forehead on a lintel while trying to show his consort, Anne of Brittany, a match played in the castle moat. A very brilliant story tells us that James I of Scotland perished in 1437 after leaping into a privy to escape a band of conspirators; he was murdered because he had ordered the privy’s exit to be bricked up, to prevent his tennis balls rolling into it from the court next door.
Lurid tales like these tend to obscure the fact that tennis began as a game for ordinary people. Plenty of them came to grief over it, but fewer of their stories survive. We know about one nasty altercation in Antwerp in 1567: a man named Pieterssen stabbed his opponent, Van Scherus, the local tennis professional, to death, after Van Scherus hit a ball under the net cord and refused to admit it. The earliest surviving mentions of tennis, or of a game recognisably close to it, come from mid-twelfth-century France, in documents describing the pastimes of the provincial clergy. They indicate that monks and clerks, having been banned by the Church authorities from joining in the local rowdy football matches, sought an alternative closer to home. The stone arches around monastic cloisters were similar enough to the goals used in football to make a new game possible: teams of players would face each other, one team defending the arched opening, or ‘goal’, while the other attacked it. Special features of the cloisters, such as the grille, or barred window through which monks communicated with laymen outside, supplied additional target areas.
Instead of kicking the ball with their feet, players began experimenting with hitting it with their bare or gloved hands, either on the bounce or in the air. Over time, the jeu de paume, or ‘game of the palm’, as tennis was first known, developed, spreading from the provinces to Paris, then to Flanders and eventually across Western Europe. In France, it continued to be known as the jeu de paume even after gut-strung rackets began to be adopted in court circles in the early sixteenth century. Modern rackets reflect this aspect of the game’s origins. Like the human hand, they are asymmetrical rather than perfectly oval, with a rounded side (mirroring the curve of the thumb) and a flattened bottom. Among players with working knees, there is pride in being able to lunge low enough to the ground to strike the ball such that the flat side grazes the floor.
The clergy soon lost its de facto monopoly over the early game. In 1450, the Dean of Exeter denounced a group of youths from the town who had overrun the cathedral cloisters to play tennis, ‘defowl[ing]’ the walls and smashing the glass windows. Sons of the aristocracy, sent to monasteries for their education, learned one important lesson: there was now a game called jeu de paume and cloisters were essential to play it. On feudal estates, as early as the thirteenth century, there was a sudden and suspicious spike in the number of ecclesiastical building projects. The newly founded ‘monasteries’ were fragmentary, often left with half a cloister – the minimum architecture required for a game.
Commoners, meanwhile, played in the streets and on town squares, sometimes negotiating with neighbours for the privilege of using their gable walls as playing surfaces. ‘You may commonly see artisans, such as hatters and joiners, playing at tennis for a crown,’ a sixteenth-century Frenchman reported from England. Sir Robert Dallington, a courtier who travelled in France during the 1590s, noted that French children played well and women too: ‘ye would think they were born with Rackets in their hands’. The most touching evidence of tennis’s broad appeal is perhaps the fact that in the Second Shepherds’ Play, part of a mystery cycle performed by local people in Yorkshire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the baby Jesus receives an unexpected gift: a tennis ball. ‘Hail, hold forth thy hand small; I bring thee but a ball,’ the Third Shepherd tells him gently. ‘Have thou and play withal, / And go to the tennis.’
For centuries, the authorities did their best to stamp the game out. Medieval prelates disliked the idea of monasteries becoming hubs of rowdy gameplay. In 1451, the Bishop of Exeter summarily excommunicated a group of canons belonging to the parish of Ottery St Mary: they had been playing ‘an evil game called tennis’ in the churchyard, cursing, blaspheming, squabbling among the graves, and tearing down parts of the precincts that obstructed their play. The state outlawed it repeatedly, though always leaving loopholes for the monarch and his friends. In 1409, Henry IV ordained that all servants and labourers must ‘utterly leave playing at the Balls, as well Hand-ball as Foot-ball’, with a penalty of ‘Imprisonment by Six Days’ for infringement. Henry VIII maintained in an Act of 1511 that ‘Teynes Play . . . and other unlawfull games’, though repeatedly banned by ‘many good and beneficiall estatutes’, were behind most of the evils of the day: ‘grete impoverisshement’, ‘many heynous Murdurs’, and the fact that the safety of the realm had become imperilled because no one practised archery any more. Naturally, Henry exempted himself, commissioning his own dedicated tennis facility at Hampton Court Palace.
In the sport’s heyday, which spanned roughly the early modern period, tennis fever swept across almost all major European cities and university towns. In Paris, you could hardly move for courts – a Venetian ambassador once estimated that there were 1,800 of them, though the real number was likely in the hundreds. There were courts in The Hague, in Prague, in Vienna, and in St Petersburg. In Edinburgh, between the early sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries, there were seventeen, including one at Holyrood Palace. In the eighteenth century, a court was built at the British garrison in Gibraltar for the bored officers, along with a library and billiard room. The sport generated a luxury market for clothing and equipment. In 1643, at the height of the Civil War, Charles I, hiding out in Oxford, ordered his Master of the Robes to bring him an extravagant new taffeta suit from enemy-occupied London. Balls were valued according to the material they were stuffed with. In Sudden Death (2013), Álvaro Enrigue’s novel about a violent sixteenth-century tennis match, Anne Boleyn’s executioner, a keen jeu de paume player, requests the queen’s red braids as his fee. The ‘hair of those executed on the scaffold’, he knows, will ‘trade at stratospheric prices among ball makers in Paris’, Anne’s most of all.
Money was integral to the game from the medieval period onwards. One of the earliest pictures we have of a racket, the frontispiece to a 1511 French poem, is also a picture of money. The engraving shows a male corpse stretched out on his tomb, his soul poised to be snatched by the devil. Tightly clasped under his right arm, as though he can’t let go of it, is a gut-strung racket; in his left hand is a bag of gold. Like dice or cards, tennis was a game you bet on. Spectators gambled, heckling from their seats in the galleries under the penthouse after staking their cash on one side or the other. Players gambled on themselves, agreeing with one another beforehand how ‘expensive’ their match was going to be and stashing funds under the net. Huge sums were routinely won and lost. Henry VII’s account books are a melancholy record of what it was like to be a mediocre player: ‘July 5. To a new pleyer at tenes, £4.’ ‘For the Kinges losse at the paune [sic] pley 7s. 8d.’ The 3rd Viscount Campden, MP for Rutland during the seventeenth century, received a wedding gift of £3,000 from Charles I in 1632 and promptly lost £2,500 of it at tennis in a day.
One of the most extraordinary facts about the game is that its scoring system – later taken over by lawn tennis (love, fifteen, thirty, forty) – is a vestige of this gambling culture. ‘Fifteen’ is thought to refer to the gros denier tournois, a medieval French coin worth fifteen deniers (pence), which was the smallest unit used to bet with. Four of these coins, amounting to sixty deniers, represented the maximum allowable stake and so demarcated a game. ‘Love’, the word for zero, seems to have derived from an old Dutch word for ‘honour’, lof. Players who failed to score any points and so win any money were described – presumably mockingly – as playing simply for the honour of taking part, the dignity of the game. To play for lof was to come home with zero.
Money continues to be a powerful presence in the game. After a period of decline, tennis re-emerged in Britain in the 1820s as a favourite pastime of the upper classes. New private courts began to be built on the estates of the nobility – at Stratfield Saye, the residence of the dukes of Wellington; at Hatfield House and Petworth House – and by the wealthy and lesser-titled at their country houses. In London, exclusive clubs sprang up in Mayfair, Kensington, Barons Court, and St John’s Wood. When tennis was reintroduced to the US in the 1870s (a proclamation from 1659, prohibiting it during an upcoming religious day, suggests it was played in colonial New York), it was a symbol of Gilded Age affluence. The Whitney family built courts in Manhasset, Long Island, and Aiken, South Carolina. The Goulds, who made their millions on the railroads, built one in Lakewood, New Jersey. You could play tennis in downtown Boston, in the yachting paradise of Newport, Rhode Island, and in a Venetian-style palazzo on Park Avenue. (The Park Avenue Racquet & Tennis Club is now the only real tennis club in the world not to permit women members. A few years ago, through gritted teeth, I allowed my husband to play there on the condition that he perform a small act of sabotage. Gingerly, he nudged a painting askew.)
In the early modern period, at the height of its popularity, tennis was a language. Its metaphors and images were widely used by writers and artists because just about everyone had some notion of how the game worked: it allowed individuals to imagine abstract things in a shared way. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke illustrated the connection between volition and liberty with reference to a well-known object: ‘A tennis-ball, whether in motion by the stroke of a racket, or lying still at rest, is not by any one taken to be a free agent . . . We conceive not a tennis-ball to think, and consequently not to have any volition.’ Less successfully, a fifteenth-century Dutch theologian counselled trying to understand Christ’s sacrificial body on the cross as a ball cut to pieces, its red cow-hair stuffing bleeding through the leather.
Languages operate by fixed rules, which govern usage and allow us to be intelligible to one another. In sports, rules define playability. Rules are what make it possible to agree on whether a ball is in or out; whether a manoeuvre is legitimate or illegitimate; the point at which someone wins and someone loses. One of the attractions of real tennis, at least for me, is the thorniness of its rule book. Chases of ‘hazard worse than the door’ and ‘more than a yard worse than the last gallery’ make perfect sense within the context of the game. At Hatfield House Tennis Club, there is a small patch of netting, high up on the wall at the receiving end, which looks like it should be out of bounds but isn’t. Hitting it is known as ‘going between the goalposts’: it regularly foxes visiting players. An extraordinary rule known as the ‘bisque’, rarely brought out nowadays, grants players one free point each per match to use whenever they wish. ‘Bisque!’ you might shout frantically, if you were trailing 5–4 in the final set and your opponent just served an ace. The ace would be ‘undone’ and you would take the point instead.
Formal aspects of real tennis are adhered to tenaciously: the predominantly white dress code; the etiquette of who passes whom at the net-post during a change of ends. These rituals shape the game’s identity and distinguish it from its modern offshoots. But inflexibility can make sports seem outdated, detached from the times. At Wimbledon in 2010, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut played a 138-game final set because neither could break the other’s serve. In 2019, the Championships instituted a ten-point tiebreak at twelve games all in the final set, adjusting its rules to respond to developments in playing style. Real tennis is the kind of sport that adjusts slowly, but in one area it is moving fast. Next year, in 2025, the women’s World Championships will adopt a ‘challenger’ format for the first time: a handful of the top players will compete for the right to challenge the current world champion. The hope is that introducing an arrangement similar to that of the men’s World Championships will elevate the women’s game, producing more competitive, elite-level matches. The old ‘sport of kings’ is flexing, expanding gently at the seams.
Tennis Court at Hardwick House, 1896, courtesy of Historic England Archive
