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Real tennis and the scoring system

THE ANCIENT GAME FROM WHICH lawn tennis was adapted had been played at least since the early Middle Ages. Its roots lay in spectacle. The origins of ball games are ‘shrouded in mystery’ according to the German historian, Heiner Gillmeister, who believes they emerged out of the ceremonies that took place at weddings, when a show was put on that would be memorable to all those present. At aristocratic nuptials these would be courtly tournaments and jousts. The tournament was a stylised version of armed combat, a festive version of or preamble to it, at which knights displayed their skills before an audience that included the ladies of the court. Echoes of this still linger at the modern Spanish bullfight. Gillmeister speculates that these tournaments originally took place in front of the castle portcullis, a grid that became in tennis a grille at one end of the court. This would also explain the tennis term ‘dedans’ or ‘within’, the passage of arms being between those outside and those within the fortification.1

At a more humble level tennis may have developed out of the manic and often violent football of the common people, the difference being that the ball was hit with the hand, not the foot, hence its early name, jeu de paume, game of the palm. It appears to have originated in France or the Netherlands, but a similar game was recorded around the same period in many parts of Europe and even in the Mayan civilisation in Latin America. As it developed in Europe, the ball came to be hit with a gloved rather than a bare hand and finally, by the sixteenth century, the gloved hand had been replaced by a racquet.

The terms ‘real tennis’ and ‘royal tennis’ (in the USA ‘court tennis’) were only adopted in the 1870s to distinguish the traditional game from the newfangled ‘lawn’ version. ‘Real’ was conflated or confused with ‘royal’ and this term seems to have been based on the fallacy that originally only kings and princes played the game. Henry VIII certainly did play tennis and was indeed fanatically devoted to the game. It was widely played in the courts of Europe and the famous ‘tennis court oath’ that kick-started the French Revolution in 1789 took place in the tennis court at Versailles.

Such evidence as exists suggests that the game was more widely played by plebeian citizens than later generations realised. An early version of the jeu de paume probably evolved from other team games and was played in the street. It was also popular with monks. They were forbidden to participate in the rough football of the times, but a ball game where the ball was hit with the hand was more suited to the confines of the cloister. It is therefore plausible to suggest that the real tennis court developed from the medieval monastic cloister with its gothic arches and slanting roof and gallery onto which the ball must first be served, a design maintained to this day in real tennis, but one of the many complications abandoned by the Victorian military men who developed the modern game.

Gillmeister cites a court case in the city of Exeter in the southwest of England that relates to a dispute about the game. In 1447 the Dean and Chapter of the cathedral attempted to close the cathedral cloisters and adjacent open area on account of the noise and damage caused by young people of the town playing tennis there, especially during religious services. Gillmeister also mentions examples of it being played in the street and by larger teams. Gambling was closely associated with tennis, as with all sports.

An alternative theory has it developing in the streets of northern Italian towns at the same period. Medieval shop fronts often had a sloping roof to protect the goods laid out below and the style developed of hitting the ball up onto the roof, known as a ‘pentys’ (later, penthouse) to begin the point.2

Whatever its origins, tennis became something of a craze during the Renaissance, when the first professional players – women as well as men – appeared. In France their incorporation into the Communauté des Maitres Paumiers-Racuertiers elevated the status of tennis ‘from a mere game to an art, like horsemanship or fencing’, argues one of today’s real tennis players.3

The ancient game featured regularly in the literature and art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Tennis seems to have been more frequently illustrated and written about than the other games, such as cricket and football, that were played in these early times, partly, perhaps, because of its special association with court life and the aristocracy.

The many images of tennis from the thirteenth century onwards assisted Gillmeister in tracing the development of the game, for example, when the racquet began to be regularly used, the height and arrangement of the net and even styles of play. He shows its particular hold on the artistic imagination and how it had a special relationship to courtly literature and to a conception of the ideal human being. It appeared as a recommended part of a young man’s education, contributing to a ‘civilising process’, teaching good manners and appropriate behaviour, as well as providing a suitable form of bodily exercise, so long as it was not taken to excess – although Charles V dismissed it as one of the games that did ‘nothing to teach the manly art of bearing arms’. Its appearance in the medieval romance literature added to its glamour and eroticism, for it was associated, long before the Victorian garden party, with dalliance as well as sporting vigour and courage in combat. It was also considered an intellectual game and known as ‘chess in motion’, so it is easy ‘to see why such a game should so have fascinated the intellectuals of the Middle Ages – who were the monks’.4 Indeed, one writer thought ‘the art of the racquet the most appropriate sport for the man of letters’.5

The most unusual aspect of the sport was its peculiar scoring system. This, as we saw earlier, was retained for lawn tennis against the advice of the MCC and like much else about the jeu de paume its origins are mysterious.

In the first place, tennis was and is unlike most sports in that a game has no fixed duration. There is no such thing as a ‘draw’; the game has to continue until one player (or pair) is victorious. As Clerici wrote: ‘Its method of scoring had no limits and, theoretically at least, could last for days on end and not even come to an end then.’ (In 2010 a match at Wimbledon between the Frenchman Nicolas Mahut and American John Isner did continue over three days and more than eleven hours, ending when Isner prevailed 70-68 in the final set.)

The scoring of most sports is cumulative – the side or individual with most points wins. In some sports one additional point or goal is sufficient; in others, table tennis, for example, the winner must gain a margin of at least two.

None of this applies to tennis. It bears some resemblance to snooker in that the match is divided into smaller sections, in snooker known as ‘frames’, and in tennis as ‘sets’. A set like a match is equally of indeterminate duration. The first player to reach six games wins the set, but must win by a margin of two games. A score of 6–5 is therefore not a winning margin; the set will then have to go to at least 7–5.

There are further subdivisions within each game. A game is scored not by simple addition, but by an elaborate system using arcane language. Both players start at zero, which is called ‘love’. The game then progresses to fifteen – thirty – forty. If both players reach forty, this then becomes ‘deuce’ (à deux in French, although today the usual French term is égalité). Once deuce is reached a player must win two more consecutive points to win the game.

Critics have argued that this system is ‘unfair’ because it is possible for a player to win a match having won fewer points than his opponent. (One such critic was Charles Lenglen, father of Suzanne Lenglen, the 1920s tennis star.) It has also been criticised for being too bafflingly elaborate. It was at first considered beyond the intelligence of a woman to grasp it. Why the sub-committee of the MCC chose the ‘real tennis’ system against the wishes of the committee is not recorded. The serendipitous result, however, was that, together with the indeterminate length of a match, it creates a game and a spectacle that is more dramatic and that contains more possibility of changes of fortune than almost any other sport.

The system permits mini-crises at crucial points in the course of a match and the enhanced possibility of dramatic reversals. Of course, a sudden change in fortune is possible in most sports, but there is no other that sees ebbs and flows on the same scale. For example, with three minutes left to play, it is unlikely that a football team leading by a margin of three goals will lose the match. The outcome is clear before the end of play. Even if the losing team scores, say, two more goals, that does not nullify the lead. In tennis, by contrast, a lead can be nullified: when a one-set lead becomes set all, for example; or within a single game when break points (15–40) disappear and the score moves back to deuce.

The Indian player, Vijay Amritraj, argued that the beauty of the system was that in tennis you can craft a victory from almost certain defeat. Describing a match in which he was match point down against one of the greatest of all players, Rod Laver (the score was 6–7, 5–6, 0–40), he wrote: ‘In tennis you can take it by stages. Every game won is a staging post back from the desert: one more step back towards the oasis where you can look your opponent in the eye again on something like level terms. I saved the three match points and just kept playing point by point – the old cliché that is the best one in the book. Point by point and somehow I won seven straight games for victory.’ 6

This was also what happened in one of the most famous matches at the beginning of the open era, in 1969. The match was between the ageing Gonzales and the Puerto Rican Charlie Pasarell, who played for the US. Gonzales had turned pro too young to achieve what he might have done as an amateur and was now forty-one years old, but still a formidable and, some felt, terrifying player. Pasarell had been briefly America’s number one ranked player, but had never gone beyond the quarter finals at any major tournament. On the other hand, for the previous two years at Wimbledon he had brought drama to the Centre Court in incredible five-set matches. This third year surpassed even those.

The first set alone went to 11–9 in Pasarell’s favour. The light was fading and rain began to fall, but the referee, Captain Mike Gibson, refused to halt the match before the end of the second set, which Gonzales lost 1–6. When play resumed the next day he was thus already in an apparently losing position, needing to win the three remaining sets. He ground out the third set, winning it by 16–14 when Pasarell double faulted twice in one game; and then won the fourth set more easily, 6–3. But in the fifth set the moment came when he was at 4–5 and 0–40 down. That meant three match points for Pasarell. After seven deuces Gonzales won that game to reach 5–all. The situation was repeated at 5–6. Pasarell reached match point, for the third time, now on his own serve, at 8–7, but he lobbed, the ball landed out and that was the end of Pasarell, who lost the next eleven points. Gonzales won the match 11–9 in the final set.7

The nail-biting tension and hysterical excitement of such a match can never be recaptured in print, but it illustrates the superior dramatic potential of tennis. The indeterminate length of the game heightens the tension and allows for several changes in momentum over the course of a match. The scoring system requires an additional skill from the player, because in tennis not all points are equal. The best players will vary the intensity of play according to the importance of the moment, will know how to up the tempo when needed, will judge when to play safe and when to go for broke. As in opera, the building of momentum results in crescendo – lull – crescendo – climax, an experience for both player and spectator that is not quite like the experience of watching other sports.

There have been many suggestions as to the origins of ‘tennis’, ‘love’ and the system based on multiples of three. In the 1920s A. E. Crawley suggested that love, fifteen, thirty, forty, deuce, advantage related to the clock, divided into four quarters (with 45 reduced to 40), by which the monks kept the score. This, though, is speculative and no one really knows. Gillmeister dismissed virtually all these theories.

The word ‘tennis’ itself may have come from the French ‘tenez’, spoken as the server prepared to play. The term ‘love’ is also mysterious, although possibly it had something to do with the universal practice in earlier times of betting on matches (‘for love or money’). That one word has caused more controversy than any other aspect of the game, but these linguistic mysteries only add to the romance of tennis.

In spite of recurring grumbles about the scoring system, the only serious change to have taken place was the introduction of the tie-break, first used at the US Open in 1970. This was a modification of the rule whereby a set could only be won when one player went two games ahead. Although the final set 70–68 score in the 2010 Wimbledon match between Mahut and Isner was unique, before the introduction of the tie-break, sets did fairly often go beyond the 6–all point at which the tie-break is now introduced. While lengthy matches might be exciting, they could also be monotonous, as well as exhausting for the players. The tie-break broke the stalemate that could occur. The first player to reach seven points wins the set, but still has to win by a margin of two points.

The tie-break was invented by Jimmy Van Alen, who presided over the Newport Casino and Tennis Club, Rhode Island, where the very first tournaments in America were played and where he also founded the Tennis Hall of Fame, opened in 1954. Van Alen was one of the upper-class amateurs who directed the sport in the amateur era. Amritraj described him as ‘a New England aristocrat who still dressed like his ancestors must have done at garden parties at the turn of the century’. But in introducing the tie-break he was an unlikely innovator. He had wanted to go further and abolish the two-point-lead rule and have a single nine-point tie-breaker, but the more conservative form prevailed and soon became universal. The only tournaments to retain a no-tie-break final set were the three major tournaments, Wimbledon, Australia and France (the US Open does have a tie-break final set).

The Pasarell–Gonzales match illustrated the lengths to which a match could go. Even in an era in which rallies were much shorter, it lasted over three hours. Then and recently, when matches have become longer, the tie-break was popular and produced its own additional twist of excitement.

The poetic tennis scoring system was more than a nostalgic gesture to its medieval origins; it did perhaps symbolise its courtly and monastic past. More importantly it recreated in the modern game its aesthetic possibilities and creativity. It was – and is – also intensely contemporary – indeed postmodern – in its eclectic elaboration and a reminder of the wonderful eccentricity of the game and indeed of so many of its players, at least in its early years. It remained a powerful exception to the tendencies towards uniformity that were increasingly to encroach on the game in the late twentieth century.