Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 February 1915 — LAWN TENNIS BIRTHDAY. [ARTICLE]

LAWN TENNIS BIRTHDAY.

Proposed Celebration to Honor Name of the Inventor. To celebrate the fortieth birthday of lawn tennis it is proposed to erect a memorial to the man who introduced —if he did not actually invent—the game, says Pearson’s Wekly. Major Walter Clapton Wingfield, M. V. 0., was the name of the pioneer of lawn tennis, so far as the British Isles were concerned, and he brought the game to England In 1874. Major Wingfield’s lawn tennis was not, in some ways, the same game that is so popular today, however. “Sphairistike" was the name under which he patented It, and one great point of dlffernce was in the shape of the lawn on which it was played. The first tennis courts were marked out in the shape of an hourglass. "Sphaldstlke" soon became very popular, and a year after its Introduction it was being played all over the country. Prom being a sort of compromise between real tennis and badminton, it rapidly became a far more popular game than either. Improvements to cope with the "speeding up” of lawn tennis soon came about The net was lowered from five feet at the sides and four feet In the middle to three and a half and three set respectively. The out-down racquet bats at first used were replaced by tightly strung special racquets, and tennis balls were made much more ‘lively” than they were in the beginning. A schoolboy discovered the present way of cutting the flannel used In covering the balls, and the patent brought in many thousands of pounds. As a boy King George played Major Wingfield’s “Sphairistike,’* and that the game gave him a lasting fondness for lawn tennis was shown by the fact that he engaged in several "sets” as recently as last summer. ■» “Sphairistike” officially became lawn tennis in 18S8, when the English Lawn Tennis association was formed.