This book reassess how tennis evolved from a cloistered amateur game to a more inclusive and thoroughly professionalized global sport. Tennis began in Britain in 1873. The game grew quickly along the east coast of the United States before moving west, where it found a home in California. For most of its history, tennis remained a sport that separated amateur and professional players. In the minds of the private clubs and associations that organized the game for the first half century of its existence, control rather than commercialization was paramount. The Great Depression and World War II si ... More

This book reassess how tennis evolved from a cloistered amateur game to a more inclusive and thoroughly professionalized global sport. Tennis began in Britain in 1873. The game grew quickly along the east coast of the United States before moving west, where it found a home in California. For most of its history, tennis remained a sport that separated amateur and professional players. In the minds of the private clubs and associations that organized the game for the first half century of its existence, control rather than commercialization was paramount. The Great Depression and World War II significantly undermined the authority of those associations by introducing a new generation of less affluent and working-class players with social backgrounds different than those of the men who ran the amateur associations. The best of those athletes challenged the amateur associations about the role of money in their sport. From 1945 to 1968, they professionalized tennis with annual barnstorming tours throughout the world. The visibility, viability, and popularity of those tours finally coaxed the reluctant leaders of amateur associations to allow the opening of their major tournament venues to professional players in 1968. Almost simultaneously, sports marketers, professional promoters, and sports publishers popularized and further globalized so-called Open Tennis into much the same form it retains today.