Basketball is a team sport in which two teams of five active players each try to score points against one another by propelling a ball through a 10 feet (3 m) high hoop (the goal) under organized rules. Basketball is one of the most popular and widely viewed sports in the world.Points are scored by shooting the ball through the basket from above; the team with more points at the end of the game wins. The ball can be advanced on the court by bouncing it (dribbling) or passing it between teammates. Disruptive physical contact (fouls) is not permitted and there are restrictions on how the ball can be handled (violations).Through time, basketball has developed to involve common techniques of shooting, passing and dribbling, as well as players' positions, and offensive and defensive structures.
While competitive basketball is carefully regulated, numerous variations of basketball have developed for casual play. In some countries, basketball is also a popular spectator sport.While competitive basketball is primarily an indoor sport, played on a basketball court, less regulated variations have become exceedingly popular as an outdoor sport among both inner city and rural groups.In early December 1891, Dr. James Naismith,[1] a Canadian physical education student and instructor at YMCA Training School[2] (today, Springfield College) in Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, sought a vigorous indoor game to keep his students occupied and at proper levels of fitness during the long New England winters to keep the students in shape. After rejecting other ideas as either too rough or poorly suited to walled-in gymnasiums, he wrote the basic rules and nailed a peach basket onto a 10-foot (3.05 m) elevated track.
In contrast with modern basketball nets, this peach basket retained its bottom, and balls had to be retrieved manually after each "basket" or point scored, this proved inefficient, however, so a hole was drilled into the bottom of the basket, allowing the balls to be poked out with a long dowel each time.The peach baskets were used until 1906 when they were finally replaced by metal hoops with backboards. A further change was soon made, so the ball merely passed through, paving the way for the game we know today. A soccer ball was used to shoot goals.
Whenever a person got the ball in the basket, they would give their team a point. Whichever team got the most points won the game. [3]Naismith's handwritten diaries, discovered by his granddaughter in early 2006, indicate that he was nervous about the new game he had invented, which incorporated rules from a children's game called "Duck on a Rock", as many had failed before it. Naismith called the new game 'Basket Ball'.[4]The first official game was played in the YMCA gymnasium on January 20, 1892 with nine players and the game ended at 1-0 and the shot was made from 25 feet, on a court just half the size of a present-day Streetball or National Basketball Association (NBA) court.
"Basket ball", the name suggested by one of Naismith's students, was popular from the beginning.By 1897-1898 teams of five became standard.Women's basketball began in 1892 at Smith College when Senda Berenson, a physical education teacher, modified Naismith's rules for women.Shortly after she was hired at Smith,she went to Naismith to learn more about the game.Fascinated by the new sport and the values it could teach, she organized the first women’s collegiate basketball game on March 21, 1893, when her Smith freshmen and sophomores played against one another.Her rules were first published in 1899 and two years later Berenson became the editor of A.G. Spalding’s first Women's Basketball Guide, which further spread her version of basketball for women.
Basketball's early adherents were dispatched to YMCAs throughout the United States, and it quickly spread through the USA and Canada. By 1895, it was well established at several women's high schools. While the YMCA was responsible for initially developing and spreading the game, within a decade it discouraged the new sport, as rough play and rowdy crowds began to detract from the YMCA's primary mission. However, other amateur sports clubs, colleges, and professional clubs quickly filled the void. In the years before World War I, the Amateur Athletic Union and the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (forerunner of the NCAA) vied for control over the rules for the game.The first pro league, the National Basketball League, was formed in 1898 to protect players from exploitation and to promote a less rough game. This league only lasted 5 years.
By the 1950's basketball had become a major college sport, thus having the way for a growth of interest in professional basketball. In 1959 a basketball Hall of Fame was founded in Springfield, Massachusetts. Its rosters include the names of great players, coaches, referees and people who have contributed significantly to the development of the game.
Basketball was originally played with an association football ball. The first balls made specifically for basketball were brown, and it was only in the late 1950s that Tony Hinkle, searching for a ball that would be more visible to players and spectators alike, introduced the orange ball that is now in common use. Dribbling was not part of the original game except for the "bounce pass" to teammates. Passing the ball was the primary means of ball movement. Dribbling was eventually introduced but limited by the asymmetric shape of early balls. Dribbling only became a major part of the game around the 1950s as manufacturing improved the ball shape.
Basketball, netball, dodgeball, volleyball, and lacrosse are the only ball games which have been identified as being invented by North Americans. Other ball games, such as baseball and Canadian football, have Commonwealth of Nations, European, Asian or African connections. Although there is no direct evidence as yet that the idea of basketball came from the ancient Mesoamerican ballgame, knowledge of that game had been available for at least 50 years prior to Naismith's creation in the writings of John Lloyd Stephens and Alexander von Humboldt. Stephen's works especially, which included drawings by Frederick Catherwood, were available at most educational institutions in the 19th century and also had wide popular circulation.
The object of the game is to outscore one's opponents by throwing the ball through the opponents' basket from above while preventing the opponents from doing so on their own. An attempt to score in this way is called a shot. A successful shot is worth two points, or three points if it is taken from beyond the three-point arc which is 6.25 meters (20 ft 6 in) froGames are played in four quarters of 10 (international) or 12 minutes (NBA). College games use two 20 minute halves while most high school games use eight minute quarters. Fifteen minutes are allowed for a half-time break, and two minutes are allowed at the other breaks. Overtime periods are five minutes long. Teams exchange baskets for the second half. The time allowed is actual playing time; the clock is stopped while the play is not active. Therefore, games generally take much longer to complete than the allotted game time, typically about two hours.
Five players from each team (out of a twelve player roster) may be on the court at one time. Substitutions are unlimited but can only be done when play is stopped. Teams also have a coach, who oversees the development and strategies of the team, and other team personnel such as assistant coaches, managers, statisticians, doctors and trainers.
For both men's and women's teams, a standard uniform consists of a pair of shorts and a jersey with a clearly visible number, unique within the team, printed on both the front and back. Players wear high-top sneakers that provide extra ankle support. Typically, team names, players' names and, outside of North America, sponsors are printed on the uniforms.
A limited number of time-outs, clock stoppages requested by a coach for a short meeting with the players, are allowed. They generally last no longer than one minute unless, for televised games, a commercial break is needed.
The game is controlled by the officials consisting of the referee ("crew chief" in the NBA), one or two umpires ("referees" in the NBA) and the table officials. For both college and the NBA there are a total of three referees on the court. The table officials are responsible for keeping track of each teams scoring, timekeeping, individual and team fouls, player substitutions, team possession arrow, and the shot clock. And the basket in international games and 23 ft 9 in (7.24 m) in NBA games.
In basketball, a personal foul is a breach of the rules that concerns illegal personal contact with an opponent. It is the most common type of foul in basketball. Due to the nature of the game, personal fouls occur on occasions and are not always regarded as unsportsmanlike. However, a contact foul involving excessive or unjustified contact is classed as an unsportsmanlike foul (or in the NBA, flagrant foul).
In basketball, a technical foul is an infraction of the rules usually concerning unsportsmanlike non-contact behavior, and is generally considered a more serious infraction than a personal foul, but not as serious as a flagrant foul.
Positions and structures
Basketball positions in the offensive zone
Although the rules do not specify any positions whatsoever, they have evolved as part of basketball. During the first five decades of basketball's evolution, one guard, two forwards, and two centers or two guards, two forwards, and one center were used. Since the 1980s, more specific positions have evolved, namely:
1. point guard: usually the fastest player on the team, organizes the team's offense by controlling the ball and making sure that it gets to the right player at the right time
2. shooting guard: creates a high volume of shots on offense; guards the opponent's best perimeter player on defense
3. small forward: often primarily responsible for scoring points via cuts to the basket and dribble penetration; on defense seeks rebounds and steals, but sometimes plays more actively
4. power forward: plays offensively often with his back to the basket; on defense, plays under the basket (in a zone defense) or against the opposing power forward (in man-to-man defense)
5. center: uses size to score (on offense), to protect the basket closely (on defense), or to rebound.
The above descriptions are flexible. On some occasions, teams will choose to use a three guard offense, replacing one of the forwards or the center with a third guard. The most commonly interchanged positions are point guard and shooting guard, especially if both players have good leadership and ball handling skills.
There are two main defensive strategies: zone defense and man-to-man defense. Zone defense involves players in defensive positions guarding whichever opponent is in their zone. In man-to-man defense, each defensive player guards a specific opponent and tries to prevent him from taking action.
Offensive plays are more varied, normally involving planned passes and movement by players without the ball. A quick movement by an offensive player without the ball to gain an advantageous position is a cut. A legal attempt by an offensive player to stop an opponent from guarding a teammate, by standing in the defender's way such that the teammate cuts next to him, is a screen or pick. The two plays are combined in the pick and roll, in which a player sets a pick and then "rolls" away from the pick towards the basket. Screens and cuts are very important in offensive plays; these allow the quick passes and teamwork which can lead to a successful basket. Teams almost always have several offensive plays planned to ensure their movement is not predictable. On court, the point guard is usually responsible for indicating which play will occur.
Defensive and offensive structures, and positions, are more emphasized in higher levels in basketball; it is these that a coach normally requests a time-out to discuss.
In basketball (and derivatives like netball), a jump shot is an attempt to score a basket by jumping, usually straight up, and in mid-jump, propelling the ball in an arc into the basket. It is accomplished by the player bringing his or her elbow up until it is aligned with the hoop, then sent towards the hoop in a high arc. It is considered the easiest shot to make from a distance.Dribbling is the act of bouncing the ball continuously, and is a requirement for a player to take steps with the ball. To dribble, a player pushes the ball down towards the ground rather than patting it; this ensures greater control.A block is performed when, after a shot is attempted, a defender attempts to alter the shot by touching the ball. In almost all variants of play, it is illegal to touch the ball after it is in the downward part of its arc; this is known as goaltending. It is also illegal to block a shot after it has touched the backboard, or when any part of the ball is directly above the rim.
In violations the ball may be advanced toward the basket by being shot, passed between players, thrown, tapped, rolled or dribbled (bouncing the ball while running).The ball must stay within the court; the last team to touch the ball before it travels out of bounds forfeits possession. The ball-handler may not move both feet without dribbling, known as traveling, nor may he dribble with both hands or catch the ball in between dribbles, a violation called double dribbling. A player's hand cannot be under the ball while dribbling; doing so is known as carrying the ball. A team, once having established ball control in the front half of the court, may not return the ball to the backcourt. The ball may not be kicked nor struck with the fist. A violation of these rules results in loss of possession, or, if committed by the defense, a reset of the shot clock.
There are limits imposed on the time taken before progressing the ball past halfway (8 seconds in international and NBA; 10 seconds in NCAA and high school), before attempting a shot (24 seconds in the NBA; 35 seconds in NCAA), holding the ball while closely guarded (5 seconds), and remaining in the restricted area (the lane, or "key") (3 seconds). These rules are designed to promote more offense.
No player may interfere with the basket or ball on its downward flight to the basket, or while it is on the rim (or, in the NBA, while it is directly above the basket), a violation known as goaltending. If a defensive player goaltends, the attempted shot is considered to have been successful. If a teammate of the shooter goaltends, the basket is cancelled and play continues with the defensive team being given posses
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
History Of Tennis
History of Tennis
‘The idea of two people hitting a ball back and forth across some obstacle, with their hand, feet or some implement, has probably been acted out for centuries. Indeed, tennis historians who have looked hard enough claim to have found evidence of tennis in ancient Greece. But the first recognisable form of what we think of as tennis came in the 13th century, and the game we know today dates from the second half of the 19th century.’ – The Book of Tennis by Chris Bowers (JWM, 2002)
1316 - The French king Louis X dies after a strenuous game of tennis (the form we know today as Real Tennis, Royal Tennis, Court Tennis or Jeu de Paume), but the blow does nothing to dampen the popularity of the pastime.
1530s - The English king Henry VIII builds a tennis court at Hampton Court Palace. It no longer exists, but a similar court built there in 1625 survives and is used today.
1870 - The All England Croquet Club is founded in the Wimbledon district of London. Tennis isn’t even thought of and is somewhat in decline, as it is still an indoor game played only where royal and rich benefactors have built a court.
1873 - An English army major Walter Clopton Wingfield designs, patents, manufactures and markets a version of Real Tennis that can be played outdoors on a lawn. He calls it ‘Sphairistike’ (from the Greek word for ball games), offering the term ‘lawn tennis’ as a helpful explanation. Wingfield sells Sphairistike in boxes that feature two net posts, a net, rackets, and India rubber balls, plus instructions about laying out the court and actually playing the game. They cost five guineas (5.25 British pounds), a lot of money at the time. Wingfield’s boxes kickstart the modern form of tennis, though the one thing that doesn’t work is the name, and Wingfield soon realises that his subtitle ‘lawn tennis’ is much better than ‘Sphairistike’.
1874 - Two brothers, Clarence and Joseph Clark, take one of Wingfield’s boxes to America, leading to the first lawn tennis tournament in the USA later that year.
1875 - The All England Croquet Club’s members vote to give one of the croquet lawns over to tennis. The following year four more are converted as the club considers staging a formal tournament.
1877 - The first Wimbledon tournament is staged at the (by now) All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. The first winner is Spencer Gore.
1881 - The United States National Lawn Tennis Association (today the USTA) is founded, and in the same year it holds its first National Championship, the forerunner of the US Open but then restricted to American residents. It is held at Newport, Rhode Island, and is won by Dick Sears.
1891 - The French national championships – also restricted to French nationals – are inaugurated in Paris.
1896 - Tennis is one of the core sports in the first modern Olympic Games.
1900 - A Harvard university student Dwight F. Davis decides to stage a team challenge match between the USA and the British Isles. He has the cup engraved as the ‘International Lawn Tennis Challenge Trophy’, but it soon becomes known as the Davis Cup.
1905 - The Australasian National Championships, the forerunner of today’s Australian Open, are founded, with the venue alternating between cities in Australia and New Zealand.
1913 - An international governing body, the International Lawn Tennis Federation (now the ITF), is founded with 13 members representing 14 countries. The aim is to ensure the sport grows with uniform scoring and minimum divergence from one country to another. (The ITF dropped the word ‘Lawn’ from its name in 1977.)
1919 - Tennis’s first superstar, Suzanne Lenglen, wins the Wimbledon title, the first of 12 titles at what are later to become the Grand Slam tournaments. She combines relentless accuracy with balletic elegance, and enhances tennis’s profile as a fashionable sport.
1924 - Tennis withdrew from the Olympic Games citing a lack of professionalism in the organisation and the Olympics’ desire to not schedule Wimbledon in an Olympic year.
1927 - The French win the Davis Cup for the first time, thereby guaranteeing themselves the right to host the following year’s final. To provide a fitting setting, the national association obtains land on the western edge of Paris from the city authorities, builds a new tennis stadium, and names it after a French war hero, Roland Garros, an aviator who died in the last days of the First World War. (Roland Garros wasn’t actually a tennis fan – his sporting passion was rugby!)
1933 - Australian Jack Crawford comes within one set of winning all four major titles in the same year. There are mutterings that he is on the verge of a ‘Grand Slam’, a term taken from the card game Bridge.
1938 - The American Donald Budge becomes the first man to win all four major titles in the same year. In describing the achievement, the New York Times tennis correspondent Allison Danzig uses the phrase ‘a Grand Slam in tennis’, thereby entrenching the term in tennis vocabulary.
1947 - Jack Kramer wins Wimbledon. He had intended to turn professional the previous year but was determined to win Wimbledon once, to give credibility to his assault on the professional circuit, both as a player and as an entrepreneur and administrator. He was to become one of the most influential figures in the advent of the modern tennis world.
1953 - Maureen Connolly becomes the first woman to win all four Grand Slam tournaments in a single year while still a teenager. Within two years, her playing career was to end following a riding accident, and she died at 35 from cancer.
1960 - Dogged by years of accusations of ‘shamateurism’, the International Lawn Tennis Federation’s annual meeting debates a motion to make tennis ‘open’, in other words to end the split amateur and professional circuits that had plagued the sport since the 1920s. The motion is defeated by five votes, with subsequent evidence that several delegates had missed the vote. It meant the four Grand Slam tournaments remained purely for ‘amateurs’, and any man who had won a couple of majors in their early 20s was likely to leave the official circuit to earn money as a touring professional.
1967 - Wimbledon holds a demonstration tournament for professionals, and announces that its 1968 championships will be open to all players, amateurs and professionals. It is the signal for tennis to go ‘open’.
1968 - Tennis goes ‘open’. The first official ‘open’ tournament takes place at Bournemouth on the English south coast, and the first Grand Slam, the newly named French Open, ushers in a new era. Both events are won by a returning professional, Ken Rosewall.
1969 - Rod Laver becomes the first – and so far only – man to win a pure ‘open’ Grand Slam, by winning all four major titles in the same year.
1970 - The tiebreak is introduced to Grand Slam tennis, as the US Open adopts the nine-point shootout (sudden death at 4-4). It is marketed under the slogan ‘We cordially invite you to sudden death in the afternoon at Forest Hills.’ That tournament sees Margaret Court complete a pure Grand Slam.
1973 - Male players form their own union, the Association of Tennis Professionals, and introduce computer rankings to determine fair entry conditions to tournaments for the best players. They also stage a boycott of Wimbledon by 79 male players over the failure of Wimbledon to allow the Yugoslav Niki Pilic to compete because he had declined to play Davis Cup. 1973 also sees the best-attended tennis match ever, when 30,492 pack into the Houston Astrodome to watch Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs, the 1939 Wimbledon champion who had claimed that, even at 55, he could still beat the leading women players. He is proved wrong, King beating him in three straight sets to post a remarkable victory for ‘women’s lib’.
1977 - As Wimbledon celebrates its centenary, the US Open bids farewell to the private setting of the Westside Club at Forest Hills, to move to a non-club national tennis centre nearby at Flushing Meadows. The last US Open at Forest Hills begins bizarrely with Renée Richards, a transsexual who had played in the men’s singles as Richard Raskind in 1960, becoming the first (and only) person to have played in both the men’s and women’s singles at Grand Slam level – she is beaten in the first round by the Wimbledon champion Virginia Wade.
1980 - The tiebreak comes of age in a remarkable 34-point shootout in the Wimbledon final when Bjorn Borg has seven championship points to beat John McEnroe in four sets, but McEnroe saves them all, and converts his seventh point to take the match into a fifth set. Borg wins it 8-6.
1984 - Clay develops into a temporary indoor surface when Sweden becomes the first country to install a makeshift clay court for a Davis Cup tie. And no ordinary tie – it’s the final, and the visit to Gothenburg’s Scandinavium arena of one of the strongest Davis Cup teams in history: world No. 1 John McEnroe, No. 2 Jimmy Connors, and the world’s best doubles team, McEnroe and Peter Fleming. By Saturday night, Sweden is the champion for the loss of one set, and clay is established as a surface option for indoor ties. Tennis also returns to the Olympic Games as a test event for under-21 players at Los Angeles and is won by Stefan Edberg and Steffi Graf.
1988 - The Australian Open, which suffered a ‘dark age’ in the 1970s and early 80s, moves into the modern era with a new national tennis centre at Flinders Park (later renamed Melbourne Park), characterised by the first tennis stadium with a retractable roof. Steffi Graf beats Chris Evert in the first ‘indoor’ Grand Slam final, to begin a run which would see her win a ‘Golden Slam’ (calendar year Grand Slam plus Olympic gold medal) after tennis also makes a return as a full medal sport at the Olympic Games in Seoul.
1989 - The ATP transforms itself from a players’ union into a tour body. In an announcement made in the US Open’s parking lot, it says it will take over the running of the men’s tour in January 1990 from the Men’s International Professional Tennis Council, that had operated under the ITF’s auspices, and henceforth be known as the ‘ATP Tour’. A feature of the new tour is an elite series of nine events, the ‘Super Nine’ (now the Masters Series). With the breakaway denoting a form of civil war in tennis, the Grand Slam tournaments form their own year-ending tournament to start in 1990 called ‘The Grand Slam Cup’. It will share a prize money pool of (a then massive) $1.5 million among 16 players and two reserves. The rival year-ending events were to last another 10 years before peace broke out in 1999.
1994 - Tennis on grass is played in indoor conditions for the first time, when the new retractable roof on the Gerry Weber Stadium in Halle, Germany, is closed to allow play to continue during rain.
2005 - The ATP (having dropped the word ‘Tour’ from its name in 2000) introduces a different scoring system for doubles matches, with sudden death points at deuce (‘no advantage’) and a first-to-ten-points tiebreak in place of a final set.
2006 - The right for players to challenge dubious line calls by electronic review is introduced in the Miami Masters Series tournament and makes its Grand Slam debut at the US Open later that year.
‘The idea of two people hitting a ball back and forth across some obstacle, with their hand, feet or some implement, has probably been acted out for centuries. Indeed, tennis historians who have looked hard enough claim to have found evidence of tennis in ancient Greece. But the first recognisable form of what we think of as tennis came in the 13th century, and the game we know today dates from the second half of the 19th century.’ – The Book of Tennis by Chris Bowers (JWM, 2002)
1316 - The French king Louis X dies after a strenuous game of tennis (the form we know today as Real Tennis, Royal Tennis, Court Tennis or Jeu de Paume), but the blow does nothing to dampen the popularity of the pastime.
1530s - The English king Henry VIII builds a tennis court at Hampton Court Palace. It no longer exists, but a similar court built there in 1625 survives and is used today.
1870 - The All England Croquet Club is founded in the Wimbledon district of London. Tennis isn’t even thought of and is somewhat in decline, as it is still an indoor game played only where royal and rich benefactors have built a court.
1873 - An English army major Walter Clopton Wingfield designs, patents, manufactures and markets a version of Real Tennis that can be played outdoors on a lawn. He calls it ‘Sphairistike’ (from the Greek word for ball games), offering the term ‘lawn tennis’ as a helpful explanation. Wingfield sells Sphairistike in boxes that feature two net posts, a net, rackets, and India rubber balls, plus instructions about laying out the court and actually playing the game. They cost five guineas (5.25 British pounds), a lot of money at the time. Wingfield’s boxes kickstart the modern form of tennis, though the one thing that doesn’t work is the name, and Wingfield soon realises that his subtitle ‘lawn tennis’ is much better than ‘Sphairistike’.
1874 - Two brothers, Clarence and Joseph Clark, take one of Wingfield’s boxes to America, leading to the first lawn tennis tournament in the USA later that year.
1875 - The All England Croquet Club’s members vote to give one of the croquet lawns over to tennis. The following year four more are converted as the club considers staging a formal tournament.
1877 - The first Wimbledon tournament is staged at the (by now) All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. The first winner is Spencer Gore.
1881 - The United States National Lawn Tennis Association (today the USTA) is founded, and in the same year it holds its first National Championship, the forerunner of the US Open but then restricted to American residents. It is held at Newport, Rhode Island, and is won by Dick Sears.
1891 - The French national championships – also restricted to French nationals – are inaugurated in Paris.
1896 - Tennis is one of the core sports in the first modern Olympic Games.
1900 - A Harvard university student Dwight F. Davis decides to stage a team challenge match between the USA and the British Isles. He has the cup engraved as the ‘International Lawn Tennis Challenge Trophy’, but it soon becomes known as the Davis Cup.
1905 - The Australasian National Championships, the forerunner of today’s Australian Open, are founded, with the venue alternating between cities in Australia and New Zealand.
1913 - An international governing body, the International Lawn Tennis Federation (now the ITF), is founded with 13 members representing 14 countries. The aim is to ensure the sport grows with uniform scoring and minimum divergence from one country to another. (The ITF dropped the word ‘Lawn’ from its name in 1977.)
1919 - Tennis’s first superstar, Suzanne Lenglen, wins the Wimbledon title, the first of 12 titles at what are later to become the Grand Slam tournaments. She combines relentless accuracy with balletic elegance, and enhances tennis’s profile as a fashionable sport.
1924 - Tennis withdrew from the Olympic Games citing a lack of professionalism in the organisation and the Olympics’ desire to not schedule Wimbledon in an Olympic year.
1927 - The French win the Davis Cup for the first time, thereby guaranteeing themselves the right to host the following year’s final. To provide a fitting setting, the national association obtains land on the western edge of Paris from the city authorities, builds a new tennis stadium, and names it after a French war hero, Roland Garros, an aviator who died in the last days of the First World War. (Roland Garros wasn’t actually a tennis fan – his sporting passion was rugby!)
1933 - Australian Jack Crawford comes within one set of winning all four major titles in the same year. There are mutterings that he is on the verge of a ‘Grand Slam’, a term taken from the card game Bridge.
1938 - The American Donald Budge becomes the first man to win all four major titles in the same year. In describing the achievement, the New York Times tennis correspondent Allison Danzig uses the phrase ‘a Grand Slam in tennis’, thereby entrenching the term in tennis vocabulary.
1947 - Jack Kramer wins Wimbledon. He had intended to turn professional the previous year but was determined to win Wimbledon once, to give credibility to his assault on the professional circuit, both as a player and as an entrepreneur and administrator. He was to become one of the most influential figures in the advent of the modern tennis world.
1953 - Maureen Connolly becomes the first woman to win all four Grand Slam tournaments in a single year while still a teenager. Within two years, her playing career was to end following a riding accident, and she died at 35 from cancer.
1960 - Dogged by years of accusations of ‘shamateurism’, the International Lawn Tennis Federation’s annual meeting debates a motion to make tennis ‘open’, in other words to end the split amateur and professional circuits that had plagued the sport since the 1920s. The motion is defeated by five votes, with subsequent evidence that several delegates had missed the vote. It meant the four Grand Slam tournaments remained purely for ‘amateurs’, and any man who had won a couple of majors in their early 20s was likely to leave the official circuit to earn money as a touring professional.
1967 - Wimbledon holds a demonstration tournament for professionals, and announces that its 1968 championships will be open to all players, amateurs and professionals. It is the signal for tennis to go ‘open’.
1968 - Tennis goes ‘open’. The first official ‘open’ tournament takes place at Bournemouth on the English south coast, and the first Grand Slam, the newly named French Open, ushers in a new era. Both events are won by a returning professional, Ken Rosewall.
1969 - Rod Laver becomes the first – and so far only – man to win a pure ‘open’ Grand Slam, by winning all four major titles in the same year.
1970 - The tiebreak is introduced to Grand Slam tennis, as the US Open adopts the nine-point shootout (sudden death at 4-4). It is marketed under the slogan ‘We cordially invite you to sudden death in the afternoon at Forest Hills.’ That tournament sees Margaret Court complete a pure Grand Slam.
1973 - Male players form their own union, the Association of Tennis Professionals, and introduce computer rankings to determine fair entry conditions to tournaments for the best players. They also stage a boycott of Wimbledon by 79 male players over the failure of Wimbledon to allow the Yugoslav Niki Pilic to compete because he had declined to play Davis Cup. 1973 also sees the best-attended tennis match ever, when 30,492 pack into the Houston Astrodome to watch Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs, the 1939 Wimbledon champion who had claimed that, even at 55, he could still beat the leading women players. He is proved wrong, King beating him in three straight sets to post a remarkable victory for ‘women’s lib’.
1977 - As Wimbledon celebrates its centenary, the US Open bids farewell to the private setting of the Westside Club at Forest Hills, to move to a non-club national tennis centre nearby at Flushing Meadows. The last US Open at Forest Hills begins bizarrely with Renée Richards, a transsexual who had played in the men’s singles as Richard Raskind in 1960, becoming the first (and only) person to have played in both the men’s and women’s singles at Grand Slam level – she is beaten in the first round by the Wimbledon champion Virginia Wade.
1980 - The tiebreak comes of age in a remarkable 34-point shootout in the Wimbledon final when Bjorn Borg has seven championship points to beat John McEnroe in four sets, but McEnroe saves them all, and converts his seventh point to take the match into a fifth set. Borg wins it 8-6.
1984 - Clay develops into a temporary indoor surface when Sweden becomes the first country to install a makeshift clay court for a Davis Cup tie. And no ordinary tie – it’s the final, and the visit to Gothenburg’s Scandinavium arena of one of the strongest Davis Cup teams in history: world No. 1 John McEnroe, No. 2 Jimmy Connors, and the world’s best doubles team, McEnroe and Peter Fleming. By Saturday night, Sweden is the champion for the loss of one set, and clay is established as a surface option for indoor ties. Tennis also returns to the Olympic Games as a test event for under-21 players at Los Angeles and is won by Stefan Edberg and Steffi Graf.
1988 - The Australian Open, which suffered a ‘dark age’ in the 1970s and early 80s, moves into the modern era with a new national tennis centre at Flinders Park (later renamed Melbourne Park), characterised by the first tennis stadium with a retractable roof. Steffi Graf beats Chris Evert in the first ‘indoor’ Grand Slam final, to begin a run which would see her win a ‘Golden Slam’ (calendar year Grand Slam plus Olympic gold medal) after tennis also makes a return as a full medal sport at the Olympic Games in Seoul.
1989 - The ATP transforms itself from a players’ union into a tour body. In an announcement made in the US Open’s parking lot, it says it will take over the running of the men’s tour in January 1990 from the Men’s International Professional Tennis Council, that had operated under the ITF’s auspices, and henceforth be known as the ‘ATP Tour’. A feature of the new tour is an elite series of nine events, the ‘Super Nine’ (now the Masters Series). With the breakaway denoting a form of civil war in tennis, the Grand Slam tournaments form their own year-ending tournament to start in 1990 called ‘The Grand Slam Cup’. It will share a prize money pool of (a then massive) $1.5 million among 16 players and two reserves. The rival year-ending events were to last another 10 years before peace broke out in 1999.
1994 - Tennis on grass is played in indoor conditions for the first time, when the new retractable roof on the Gerry Weber Stadium in Halle, Germany, is closed to allow play to continue during rain.
2005 - The ATP (having dropped the word ‘Tour’ from its name in 2000) introduces a different scoring system for doubles matches, with sudden death points at deuce (‘no advantage’) and a first-to-ten-points tiebreak in place of a final set.
2006 - The right for players to challenge dubious line calls by electronic review is introduced in the Miami Masters Series tournament and makes its Grand Slam debut at the US Open later that year.
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