[ARETE] Ruth. Tennis, A history

[Duncan Jamieson]

All,
Please find below and attached Jeff Segrave's review of Greg Ruth, *Tennis:
A history*.
Thanks
Duncan

Jeffrey O. Segrave

Department of Health and Human Physiological Sciences

Skidmore College

Saratoga Springs, NY 12866



Email: jsegrave at skidmore.edu



Word count (body): 1018



Ruth, Greg. *Tennis: A History from American Amateurs to Global
Professionals*. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2021, 319 pages.



Greg Ruth’s book is an important and significant contribution to the extant
academic literature on the history of the modern game of tennis. As Ruth
rightly notes, in the past, book-length studies of tennis by academic
historians—and, I might also add, sociologists—have been few and far
between. The two most notable exceptions are Heiner Gillmesiter’s *Tennis:
A Cultural History* (1990) and E. Digby Baltzall’s *Sporting Gentleman:
Men’s Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar* (1995).
More recently, however, greater attention has been paid to the history and
cultural evolution of the sport of tennis. Among the most notable studies
of late may be included Susan Ware’s Game, *Set, Match: Billie Jean King
and the Revolution in Women’s Sport* (2011), Eric Allen Hall’s *Arthur
Ashe: Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era* (2004), Robert Lake’s *A
Social History of Tennis in Britain* (2014), and Kristi Tredway’s *Social
Activism in Women’s Tennis: Generations of Politics and Cultural Change*
(2020). While Ruth’s *Tennis* covers some of the same ground as these
previous publications, it offers a new comprehensive perspective by
propounding an historic periodization of tennis that traces the
transformation of the sport from a *fin de siècle* pastime of a western
social elite into a global mass entertainment spectacle and by putting
noteworthy events, such as the Kramer Cup and the Laver Cup, into
historical context.

            Ruth identifies three constitutive eras. Period one spans the
years 1873-1926 and traces the emergence of the game from its humble
beginnings in Wales to the privileged courts of Australia, France, and,
especially, America where the game was codified, defined, and popularized
as an exclusively amateur sport. However, the era is also marked by a
nascent professionalization as the game travelled from the east to the west
coast of America and to the luxuriously sundrenched courts of the French
Riviera. If the era started with Major Walter Winfield on the singular
green lawn of a Welsh country estate, it ended in 1926 with Suzanne Lenglen
cavorting on courts all across the United States as part of the first
commercially promoted international professional tennis tour.

            The second era runs from 1926-1968, and depicts the
ever-triumphant progress of the commercialization and professionalization
of the game. This era is primarily marked by the evolving confrontation
between the tradition-minded associations who wanted the game to remain an
exclusively amateur pursuit and the professional players and promoters who
embraced the game as a way to maximize the financial rewards of a
burgeoning entertainment industry.

The final period runs from 1968-date, the era of money matters and the
ascendance of the professional game, an era marked by open tennis, the rise
and fall of Lamar Hunt’s World Championship Tennis, the emergence of sports
agents and agencies, and the establishment of the Association of Tennis
Professional’s Tour and the Women’s Tennis Association’s Tour. Since 1990,
professional players dominate the game whose direction and fate they now
largely control.

In his tripartite periodization of tennis, Ruth identifies and integrates
into his discourse two primary threads that ran throughout the history of
the game, namely competition for control of the game, a competition waged
primarily between those who skirmished to protect the amateur sanctity of
the game and those who powered its growth as a professional sport, and
competition for the money, the story of how the financial benefits
associated with the sport became increasingly evident and alluring as the
sport increasingly attracted a world-wide audience.

There are two other ways in particular that make this book appealing and
compelling. First, Ruth offers snapshot biographies of critical figures who
came to personify the myriad issues and conflicts that characterized the
contentious growth of the sport. Some of the figures, including Bill
Tilden, Pancho Gonzales, Althea Gibson, Ted Tingling and Suzanne Lenglen
are well known. Others, like Charles Pyle, Gene Mako, Lew Hester, Gladys
Heldman, and Mark McCormack are perhaps less well known. But, by
intermingling history and biography, event and personality, Ruth brings the
conceptual narrative of the book to life, saving it from becoming a
pedantic report on historical developments. Second, and perhaps most
importantly, Ruth pays close attention not only to the racial and gender
inequalities that were baked into the institutionalization of the game but
also to the challenges that arose in the face of the stodgy white
paternalism that exercised hegemony over the game. With regard to women, in
particular, Ruth exposes the dynamics of play, fashion, gender, and sexual
identity, and reveals how pioneering women, from Elizabeth “Bunny” Ryan to
Althea Gibson to Billie Jean King to Renée Richards, championed the
feminist cause and paved the way for tennis to become the most prominent
global sport for women.

In order to tell his story, Ruth relies on a wide variety of primary and
secondary sources. Most impressively, he uses archival records, oral
history collections, organization and association minutes, interviews,
diaries, published player and promoter memoires and instructional
materials, newspaper articles, press releases, as well as academic books
and articles.                            Moreover, the book is heavily
documented with 50 pages of endnotes, a 14-page bibliography, and a 10-page
index. In short, the book is meticulously researched and authenticated.

The ultimate result is an exhaustive and absorbing account of the
massification of one of our most hallowed sports, the quintessential
history of a sport that has moved from class to mass, from amateur to
professional, from leisured pastime to celebration capitalism, to use
historian Jules Boykoff’s apt description of modern sport. There may be
some who will find the detailed attention to the dynamics of organizational
politics, and the constant reference to an alphabet soup of tennis
organizations and associations, tedious and confusing. But, for those of us
intrigued by the history of a sport that has epitomized the tension between
the private and privileged and the public and polyglot, and that has
showcased the problematic treatment of women in a sport in which they excel
on a global scale, this, simply put, is a must read. It is, quite frankly,
the best comprehensive treatment of the development of modern tennis yet
written.
Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ku.edu/pipermail/sport_literature_association/attachments/20211206/c138f049/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Ruth. Tennis, A history.docx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size: 16384 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ku.edu/pipermail/sport_literature_association/attachments/20211206/c138f049/attachment-0001.docx>