Lawn tennis was patented in 1874 and sold as a boxed set, complete with an hourglass-shaped court that Wimbledon squared off three years later. These thirty-six stories run from there to the open era: a Wimbledon champion who gave up tennis for golf and archery, a major named after a fighter pilot, and a first-round match that took three days.
Every tile in a Tennis game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Champions
nine stories
1The 15-year-old who won Wimbledon and then left
On the tile: Lottie Dod1887
In July 1887 Lottie Dod beat the defending champion Blanche Bingley 6-2, 6-0 to take the Wimbledon ladies' singles title. She was 15 years and 285 days old, and no one younger has won that title since. She collected five Wimbledon crowns, the last in 1893 at 21, and lost only one set across all five championships. Then she gave up tennis for golf, and won Britain's national championship in 1904. Four years after that she took an Olympic silver medal in archery.
Bill Tilden won the U.S. mixed doubles title in 1913, but his first major singles title did not come until 1920, when he was 27. After that he barely stopped. He took seven U.S. national singles titles, went 78-1 in the 1925 season, and won 42 matches in a row at the U.S. championships between 1920 and 1926. He was ranked the world's best six years running. His last Wimbledon singles title came in 1930, when he was 37.
In 1938 Don Budge won the Australian, French, Wimbledon and United States singles championships in a single season, something no player had managed before. The weapon was a backhand that other players described with something close to awe. Hall of Famer Sidney Wood called it the most destructive shot in the game, swung with a bat fit for Paul Bunyan. Budge turned professional not long after, which in that era meant giving up the major championships altogether.
Maureen Connolly was 18 when she became the first woman to win all four major singles titles in one calendar year. Sportswriters called her Little Mo, a nod to the battleship USS Missouri, which was Big Mo. She won nine major singles titles in all. In July 1954, a year after the Grand Slam, a cement truck struck her while she was out riding her horse and badly injured her right leg. She never competed again and retired at 20.
In August 1950 Althea Gibson became the first African American to play the U.S. National Championships, winning her first-round match 6-2, 6-2. Six years later in Paris she won the French singles title, the first major championship won by a Black player. Wimbledon and the U.S. title followed in 1957, and she held both again in 1958. Professional women's tennis paid little, so she turned to golf, and in 1964 she became the first African American woman to join the LPGA tour.
Rod Laver won all four major singles titles in 1962 as an amateur, then turned professional, which barred him from those same tournaments for the next five years. When the majors finally admitted professionals in 1968 he came back, and in 1969 he won all four again. He had done it twice, seven years apart, and the seasons missing from the middle of his record are the ones he spent in his prime, playing for money on a circuit the championships would not recognize.
Arthur Ashe won the U.S. Open in 1968, beating Tom Okker in five sets. Because he was still an amateur, paid only a per diem as a member of the Davis Cup team, he could not take the $14,000 prize. It went to Okker, a registered player who was allowed to collect prize money. Ashe had already become the first African American chosen for the U.S. Davis Cup team, back in 1963. He won the Australian title in 1970, and in 1975 he took Wimbledon by beating the top-seeded Jimmy Connors in four sets.
In 1984 Martina Navratilova won 74 consecutive matches, a streak that began at an indoor tournament in February and did not end until December. She won nine Wimbledon singles titles, six of them in a row between 1982 and 1987, and finished her career with 167 singles tournament wins and 177 more in doubles. She had asked for political asylum in the United States in September 1975, at 18, and became an American citizen in 1981.
In 1988 Steffi Graf won the Australian Open, the French championship, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, and then added the Olympic gold medal at the Seoul Games. The hall of fame calls her the only player to take all four majors and an Olympic title in the same year. She finished with 22 major singles titles and spent 377 weeks ranked number one, including 186 weeks in a row between August 1987 and March 1991.
The French major is played at Stade Roland Garros, named for a man who, by the tournament's own account, was not an avid tennis player. Garros was an aviator. He set altitude records, flew across the Mediterranean in 1913, and is credited as the first pilot to shoot down another aircraft with a gun firing forward through the propeller. He was killed in action in October 1918, the day before his thirtieth birthday. When Paris needed a name for its new tennis stadium in 1928, a former business school classmate of his suggested it.
The tournament now called the Australian Open began in 1905 as the Australasian Championships, a joint venture with New Zealand, and twice it was played there: Christchurch in 1906 and Hastings in 1912. At home it moved constantly as well, turning up over the years in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. The name changed to the Australian Championships in 1927, the first year New Zealand had no organizational role. It settled at Flinders Park, later renamed Melbourne Park, in 1988.
Grand slam is a bridge term. In 1933 the Australian Jack Crawford had won the Australian, French and Wimbledon titles and needed the United States championship to complete the set. John Kieran of The New York Times reached for the card table: a Crawford win, he wrote, would be something like scoring a grand slam on the courts, doubled and vulnerable. Crawford lost that final to Fred Perry. Don Budge finished the job five years later, and the borrowed phrase stayed with tennis for good.
For thirty years the Wimbledon men's singles title stayed with players based in the United Kingdom. In 1907 the Australian Norman Brookes beat Arthur Gore 6-4, 6-2, 6-2 and ended that run, and because he played left-handed he was the first left-hander to win it as well. He played Davis Cup for Australasia between 1905 and 1920. Since 1934 the man who wins the Australian singles title has been handed the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup.
May Sutton won the Wimbledon ladies' singles in 1905, beating Dorothea Lambert Chambers 6-3, 6-4, and became the first American to win a championship there. She had taken the U.S. national title the year before, at 17. The woman she beat that day at Wimbledon was no passing opponent either. Lambert Chambers won the title seven times between 1903 and 1914.
Anthony Wilding won Wimbledon four years in a row, from 1910 through 1913, and he is still the only New Zealander to have won it. He took the Australasian title twice as well, in 1906 and 1909, back when that tournament was a shared venture between two countries. He was also a member of the combined Australasian Davis Cup team when it won the trophy in 1907, 1908, 1909 and 1914.
William Renshaw won seven Wimbledon singles titles between 1881 and 1889, six of them in consecutive years. Three of those finals he played against his twin brother, Ernest, and he won all three. The twins also took five Wimbledon doubles titles together, and they did so much to popularize the game that the boom in tennis during the 1880s became known as the Renshaw Rush. Ernest finally won a Wimbledon singles title of his own in 1888.
Ken Rosewall won the Australian singles title in 1953, at 18. He won it again in 1972, at 37 years and two months, which left nineteen years between his first major title and his last. In between he turned professional in 1957 and was shut out of the major championships until open tennis arrived in 1968, roughly eleven seasons of his career. He was nicknamed Muscles, an ironic reference to his slight frame.
Evonne Goolagong Cawley, a Wiradjuri woman who faced prejudice growing up, won the French championship and Wimbledon in 1971. Nine years later she came back to Wimbledon, beat Chris Evert in the final, and became the first mother to win the title since Dorothea Lambert Chambers in 1914. She won seven major singles titles in all.
On February 23, 1874, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield took out a provisional patent on a portable court for playing tennis, then sold the game as a boxed set: poles, a net, a mallet, pegs, four rackets, a handful of rubber balls and an instruction manual. He gave it the Greek name Sphairistike, which nobody much wanted to say, and the plainer alternative he offered, lawn tennis, is the one that survived. Within a year the Marylebone Cricket Club had recognized the sport.
Jimmy Van Alen spent years arguing that a set should not be allowed to run on forever, and in 1970 the U.S. Open adopted his tiebreaker over the loud objections of the players. The first version was called sudden death: best of nine points, so both players could stand on match point at the same moment. When a set reached six games all, scarlet banners with a white S and D were unfurled over the lawns at Forest Hills. The gentler version, first to seven, is the one that lasted.
Howard Head had already changed skiing by building skis out of aluminum and other aircraft materials. Turning to tennis, he worked out that widening a racket head only slightly would enlarge its sweet spot a great deal, because of the way the polar moment of inertia scales. Prince put his oversize racket on sale in 1976. Within four years more than 700,000 players were using one. His U.S. patents cover both the laminated ski and the oversize racket.
Rene Lacoste won seven major singles titles in the 1920s, and the American press nicknamed him the Crocodile in 1923, after he was promised a crocodile-skin suitcase if he won an important match. The emblem went onto his shirts and became the trademark of his clothing company. He was an inventor as well. While he was still winning championships he built a hand-cranked ball machine, the lance-balle, and filed a patent on it in 1927. In 1963 he patented the T-2000, a steel racket that Wilson bought and Jimmy Connors famously used.
Wimbledon requires its players to dress predominantly in white. Andre Agassi, whose wardrobe ran hard in the other direction, skipped the tournament altogether from 1988 through 1990 rather than go along with the tradition. Then he changed his mind, and in 1992 he won the thing, beating Boris Becker, John McEnroe and finally Goran Ivanisevic in five sets. He went on to win all four majors and an Olympic gold medal at Atlanta in 1996.
The popular explanation is that love, meaning no score, comes from l'oeuf, the French word for egg, because a zero looks like one. Merriam-Webster calls that folk etymology, since there is no evidence the French ever used l'oeuf to mean zero. The more widely accepted source is the English idea of playing for love, meaning for no stakes, which is recorded from the 1670s. Love already meant nothing on the score in the card game whist by 1742, more than a century before lawn tennis was invented.
At forty all, neither player can win the game without taking two points in a row, and the name for that position is deuce. It has been used in tennis since the 1590s. The word arrived through Old French deus, modern French deux, from the Latin for two, and it means nothing more mysterious than that: two points still to get. It is the same deuce as the two on a die and the two in a deck of cards.
Ted Tinling had been an official Wimbledon host for 23 years when he designed an outfit for Gussy Moran in 1949: a short dress worn over lace-trimmed shorts. The All England Club was not amused, and Tinling was kept away from the tournament for the next 33 years. He went on working anyway, dressing Maureen Connolly, Maria Bueno, Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova, and serving as designer for the Virginia Slims tour in the 1970s. Wimbledon invited him back in 1982.
Wingfield's original court was shaped like an hourglass, pinched in at the net, and his net stood a good deal higher than a modern player would expect. When the All England Club ran its first championship in 1877, it made the court a plain rectangle. The organizers kept adjusting afterward, shrinking the area the server had to hit and bringing the net down further, which made it easier to drive the ball past a player standing at the net.
John Isner and Nicolas Mahut began a first-round match at Wimbledon in June 2010 and did not finish it until the third day. The fifth set alone took 8 hours and 11 minutes and ended 70-68. The whole match ran 11 hours and 5 minutes across 183 games. Isner served 112 aces and Mahut 103. Partway through, the scoreboard stopped working and had to be repaired that evening, because nobody had built it to display a score beyond 47-47.
At Wimbledon in 1969 Pancho Gonzales was 41 and Charlie Pasarell was 25, and their first-round match ran more than five hours, spread over two days. Gonzales lost the first two sets, the opener going to 24-22, and then won the next three, closing it out 11-9. Its 112 games stood as the Wimbledon record for 41 years, until Isner and Mahut went past it in 2010.
The fourth-set tiebreak of the 1980 Wimbledon final ran to 34 points. John McEnroe saved five match points, Bjorn Borg saved six set points, and McEnroe finally took it 18-16 to force a fifth set. Then he lost the match anyway, 8-6 in the fifth. McEnroe finished his career with seven major singles titles, and in 1984 he went 82-3, the best single-season record by any man in the open era.
Bobby Riggs had won the Wimbledon singles, doubles and mixed doubles in 1939. Decades past his prime, he began challenging the best women in the game, and in May 1973 he beat Margaret Court. Four months later, on September 20, Billie Jean King played him in the Houston Astrodome in front of 30,492 people and won in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. That same year King pushed the U.S. Open into becoming the first major to pay its women's champion the same as its men's.
Boris Becker arrived at Wimbledon in 1985 ranked twentieth and unseeded, which at that tournament normally means a short visit. Instead he won it. At 17 years and seven months he became the youngest man to take the Wimbledon singles title, and the first unseeded player to win it. He won Wimbledon twice more, in 1986 and 1989, and finished his career with six major singles titles.
In the fourth round of the 1989 French championship, Michael Chang lost the first two sets to Ivan Lendl, the top seed. He took the next two, but leg cramps set in during the fourth set, and while leading 2-1 in the fifth he considered retiring. He stayed on, improvising, and at one point served underhand to catch Lendl off guard. He won that match and then the tournament, at 17 years and 109 days, the youngest man to win a major.
Jimmy Connors was ranked 174th in the world in 1991 and got into the U.S. Open only on a wild card. He came back from two sets down in the first round, beat Aaron Krickstein in five sets on his 39th birthday, and kept going until he reached the semifinals and lost to Jim Courier. He had already won 109 tournaments and spent 268 weeks ranked number one, including a run of 160 straight weeks that stood as the men's record until 2007.
Goran Ivanisevic had lost three Wimbledon finals, one to Andre Agassi and two to Pete Sampras. By 2001 he was ranked 125th in the world, a shoulder injury earlier that year had him considering retirement, and he got into Wimbledon only on a wild card. Rain pushed the final to Monday, so the club sold 10,000 tickets on a first-come, first-served basis, and that crowd watched him beat Patrick Rafter 9-7 in the fifth set.
In the 1937 Davis Cup Inter-Zone final at the All England Club, the United States and Germany were tied at two rubbers apiece when Don Budge faced Gottfried von Cramm. Von Cramm took the first two sets, 8-6, 7-5. Budge took the next two, then fell behind 4-1 in the fifth as darkness settled over Centre Court. He fought back to lead 7-6, von Cramm saved five match points, and Budge won on the sixth, 8-6, clinching a 3-2 victory for the United States. Tennis pundits called it the greatest tennis match ever played.