When asked if his new book would shock people, Richard A. Hillway immediately responded in the affirmative.
“Yes, oh yes,” he said. His co-author, Robert T. Everitt, nodded.
Their book does not deal with any of the inflammatory topics typical of sports: no cheating, no greed, no steroids. Rather, it’s about the order in which people started playing tennis in the 1870s.
The subject, esoteric as it is, has been a point of contention for those who think they can claim to have been first, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Leaving no stone unturned in finding answers and verifying those answers, Hillway and Everitt’s book, “The Birth of Lawn Tennis,” weighs in at around seven pounds, filled with lush archival images from the sport’s earliest days , and the many similar games that came before it.
“It’s about looking for the real story, the real story,” Hillway said. “And we have evidence to back it up.” Now, it’s possible for a family to say, well, for 110 years it’s been passed down. Well, it’s possible that this happened, but there’s no verification.
The tome – of which only 500 limited edition, leather-bound copies were printed – does not use the word “invented” lightly. The authors confirm the prevailing theory that lawn tennis was invented in 1874 by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, who published his first rule book for the sport in February of that year. He received patents for the game in Britain and the United States later that year.
“There is no doubt that people were experiencing a game outdoors, perhaps many years before lawn tennis was invented by Wingfield,” Everitt said. “According to the patent offices, we have included nine reasons why his idea qualifies as an invention. Others can provide nothing to support this.
Hillway and Everitt relied solely on contemporary accounts from the sport’s early days. The only fully documented origin story at the time, they concluded, was Wingfield’s. Various plaques and signs in England claim otherwise, claiming to be the birthplace of lawn tennis.
“We must have heard 10 different stories from people who had invented it before Wingfield,” Hillway said. “If you believed all this? We followed each one, and there was nothing there.
“One story is that Harry Gem and his friend Augurio Perera, in 1859, had a game that was the same as Wingfield, that they played it but didn’t tell too many people about it, and they were the true inventors,” Hillway added. “But we looked for primary evidence and written evidence, not a story that comes out 100 years later about someone’s great uncle. We found nothing to support this.
Hillway, 75, is a former tennis coach from Colorado who once competed against Arthur Ashe and others of that era in the American West. Everitt, 62, is an illustrator from Wolverhampton, England. Both share a keen interest in tennis history and collecting. When they realized they were working on books on similar subjects – Hillway on Wingfield, Everitt on the first Wimbledon championships in 1877 – they decided to join forces.
The book, published this year with the help and funding of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, was seven years in the making.
Once they began writing the book, it became a catch-all repository for sources of knowledge that historians had acquired in the early days of lawn tennis, including the debate over who introduced the game to the States -United.
“I’ve been working for 20 years” on this issue, Hillway said. “So I thought I’d put that in this book too.”
Authors have recently disputed this popular claim detailed in a series of New York Times obituariesthat Mary Ewing Outerbridge brought a lawn tennis set back to Staten Island after spending the winter in Bermuda in 1874.
By examining ship manifests between the United States and Bermuda from this period, they discovered that Outerbridge had only made a short voyage in January 1874, before Wingfield codified the sport. They believe that a second, longer trip that Outerbridge made to Bermuda in 1877 is one from which she returned with tennis equipment, as there is no contemporary evidence of lawn tennis being played on Staten Island before 1877, nor any evidence of the presence of women on Staten Island. Island Cricket and Baseball Club before this year.
According to the authors, Outerbridge’s initial claim came from a letter written by his youngest brother, Eugenius, in 1923, decades after his sister’s death. The authors said more specific details about what the still-evolving rules of lawn tennis looked like when the sport arrived in the United States with Outerbridge could have been revealing.
“It is troubling that Eugenius gave no detailed description of the game Mary had played in his letter,” they write in the book. “What was the shape or size of his court, the height of the net, the scoring system or the location of the service line? These details would have helped us date his trial.
Hillway says he hopes their book remains an authority on the origins of the sport.
“A hundred years from now, they will have this book that shows how it all started,” he said. “It is going to last. But we encourage other people to come in and add other things. And they might find other points of view.
Hillway said Wingfield deserves to be as famous for tennis as James Naismith is for inventing basketball.
“You should tell people what these seniors did,” Hillway said, “because it won’t be long before Nadal and Federer are the seniors. And then it’ll be, ‘Oh, who wants to know about them ? »
