A LITTLE COLOR GOES A LONG WAY
Why Tennis Balls Are Yellow
In the spring of 2018, a debate raged on Twitter about a question that you might think easy to answer: What color is a tennis ball? Yet, it proved to be a bit harder for people to agree on. Some said yellow, others said green. Even champion tennis player Roger Federer chimed in (“It’s yellow, right?”). Fortunately, there is an answer to this question; Federer was right—they are in fact yellow. If you really want to insist that they are green for the sake of avoiding that “I told you so” from a friend, that’s fine, too; there is a bigger question here, after all: Why aren’t tennis balls white? Or, more accurately, why aren’t they white anymore?
That’s right: tennis balls used to be white—and as recently as the mid-1980s! When top pros took to England to participate in the annual Wimbledon tournament of 1986, for example, they weren’t hitting yellow balls, but white ones. So, what changed? TV.
TVs first became commercially viable in the 1920s, and then became commonplace in consumer homes over the next decade. In 1937, the BBC aired a tennis match at Wimbledon for the first time. But it didn’t look like the matches you see on your TV nowadays. For the first thirty years of Wimbledon on TV, it was broadcast in black-and-white, as for most of that time period, the color TV hadn’t been invented. The white tennis balls were easy to see in this two-color format.
Then in the 1960s, color TVs became increasingly popular, and the sports world had to react. In 1967, the BBC broadcast the Wimbledon tournament in color for the first time. You might think this would be a wonderful change, but the experience wasn’t great for fans watching at home. The reason? The white tennis balls. As Tennis Week noted, “research showed that TV viewers had a tougher time seeing the ball in motion on the courts.” Further, as an ESPN TV producer reported, the balls “turned green from grass stains. They blended so much with the grass the visuals were compromised.”
In the 1970s, the International Tennis Federation responded by looking for a nonwhite option for tournament balls. After much research, they decided on a color that would appear well on TV: fluorescent yellow. Though this color may not be appealing to many, it made it a lot easier for tennis fans watching matches at home. In 1972, the ITF officially authorized the yellow tennis balls for competitive use.
In 1986, Wimbledon—the final holdout of tennis’s four major tournaments—finally gave in to the needs of advancing technology and adopted the yellow ball. Since then, players of all levels and abilities have done the same, even though few will ever play a match on TV. And today, most take for granted that tennis balls are yellow (or lime green, if you prefer to call it that color).