The Ball (10 page)

13th June 1494: To a Spaynyard the tenes player, £4.

For the Kinges loss at tenes, to Sir Robert 14th August 1494: At Windesor . . .

To Sir Charles Somerset Curson, with the balls, £1. 7s. 8d.

8th March 1495 . . . To Hugh Denes for the Kinges losse at tenes, 14s.

30th August 1497: To Jakes Haute for the tennis playe, £10.

This and other similar accounts suggest that the loser, in addition to paying out cash, was often considered responsible for paying for the balls. As for the cash that changed hands, the most common coin used for such bets in medieval France was worth 15 pence. Thus, for each point lost 15 pence went with it: 15, 30, 45, for a total of four coins and 60 pence for a sweep of the game. At some point the 45 was abbreviated to 40, and voilà, we had the quirky system still used today.

At Fontainebleau's center court, I was glad no money was on the line as Matty continued to tie me in knots, now in front of a few spectators who had wandered in, no doubt at the smell of fresh meat. Matty finally took some pity on me and came around to my side to offer encouragement and some remedial instruction.

“As you've probably noticed by now, being able to swing a racket well or hit a fast serve doesn't get you all that far in this game,” he said. “In lawn tennis, you can have a fellow like Ivanisevic, right? The great ape can bash a serve 135 miles an hour and can win just on his serve. He wouldn't stand a chance in real tennis, where you can't win with just a strong serve or a crashing forehand. Real tennis is often called ‘chess in motion' and that's not far from the truth. It's all about positioning your opponent, thinking three shots ahead, and forcing the other guy into checkmate situations.”

“Speaking of serves, why don't you give it a try?” he suggested.

Now normally—and this is where real tennis begins to make the brain hurt—as the receiver of the serve I would have to win the chance to serve by winning a “chase,” as it's called. There's no automatic change of service after each game as there is in lawn tennis. If a ball I hit bounced twice on the server's end, rather than win the point outright I'd have “set a chase.” The value of the chase is measured using numbered lines that divide the court—the nearer to the back wall, the better the chase. Later in the game, my opponent would have a chance to replay the same point from the receiving side and would attempt to beat my chase with a lower number. If I won the chase, I'd get to serve the next game. If not, I'd be stuck on the receiving end and at a clear disadvantage. With chases, it's possible, though not likely, for a strong player to hold onto service for an entire match. Clear? No, it wasn't to me either.

Matty stepped around to demonstrate his full arsenal of serves, each of which is designed to achieve a different effect. “You've got the ‘giraffe,' a high serve that comes down hard on the penthouse usually with a bit of side- or overspin to give the ball an extra kick. Or there's the ‘caterpillar,' which makes a lot of low long bounces, hits the back penthouse, balloons up in the air, and comes down flush with the back wall. Or the ‘railroad,' which flies down the edge of the penthouse with a reverse spin, kicking the ball back into the sidewall. There are about seventy-five variations on serve, depending on what you're trying to do.”

“Maybe I'll just try the old standard ‘get the ball over the net and into the right box' serve?” I suggested.

He retreated to the receiving end while I grabbed a ball from a quaint picnic basket and settled into proper serving position.

“Tenez!” I shouted as warning for the rocket I was about to launch.

“Uh, we don't say that anymore.”

“Sorry, I couldn't resist.”

I sliced the ball rather nicely, I thought, enjoying the musical twang of the tightly wound strings as the ball strummed across them. It bounced off the side penthouse, bobbled sideways along the back penthouse and dropped to Matty's backhand. He punched it back low toward my forehand but this time I was ready. I drilled it down the line and smack into the tiny Plexiglas window that looks into the court's changing room.

“Brilliant!” called Matty. “You hit the grill and that's an instant point!”

The grill is one of the most indisputable connections between the modern real tennis court and its monastic origins. In the medieval monastery, the cloisters were originally restricted to the monks, who were closed off from the outside world. If relatives or visitors wanted to communicate with someone inside, they would have to do so through a barred window, called the grill.

“Be sure to tell your friends you hit the grill on your first outing!” said Matty, piling on the praise before properly dismantling me: six games . . . to one egg.

T
he Renaissance did wonders for tennis, and for sports in general. The same medieval church that had given over its monastic courtyards and earthly passions to the game also regarded hitting, chasing, and sweating over bouncing balls as morally suspect. In one incident from England in 1451, an illicit pickup tennis league that had started within church grounds got so out of hand that the bishop of Exeter sentenced the monks to nothing short of excommunication:

Some members of the clergy, as well as of the laity . . . apparently have no scruples about playing a game, or rather, an evil game called “tennis” in the vernacular, in the churchyard and the above-mentioned collegiate church of St. Mary, consecrated for Christian burials. . . . In so doing they inveterately voice vain, heinous and blasphemous words and utter senseless curses.

As if blaspheming weren't enough, the rowdy monks were also accused of dismantling a wooden structure on the cloister's penthouse roof because it got in the way of ball play. Meanwhile, in the same general time frame over in Orléans, France, a church council felt the need to pass a decree forbidding “priests and all others in sacred orders from playing tennis without shame, in their undershirts, or not decently dressed.”

And so, despite (or more likely because of ) the obvious pleasure young clerics took in playing the game—in their underwear, no less—the official stand of the church seems to have been that tennis and other ball games led to sinful acts unworthy of a proper Christian. They were, in other words, far too much fun.

With the emergence of humanism in the Italian Renaissance and its emphasis on the education of
l'uomo universale
, the “whole man,” tennis and other sports came into their own, taking their place alongside science and the arts as essential character-building pursuits. The ideal Renaissance man was a scholar-athlete who was as physically capable as he was intellectually sound and morally righteous—the complete package.

In the writings of the day, tennis consistently made the short list of recommended activities befitting a gentleman of the court, alongside traditional arts of war such as archery, swordplay, and horsemanship. Baldassare Castiglione provided the most detailed how-to manual on the subject in
The Book of the Courtier
, published in 1528. Through a series of fictional conversations with the duke of Urbino and his attendants, Castiglione describes the ideal courtier as “well built and shapely of limb.” Along with other forms of exercise, he recommends tennis as a game “very befitting a man at court . . . in which are well shown the disposition of the body, the quickness and suppleness of every member.” The health benefits of tennis were extolled by many authors of the day, including one who went so far as to suggest it as a cure for constipation in slow-moving nobles:

Water which stands without any movement finally transmutes into putrescence and begins to stink. . . . In order to forestall such worrisome evils, some amusing movements have been devised for such personages whose nobility and rank consist in all manner of stillness and but little motion.

Constipation aside, the game's upper-class, aristocratic associations—which linger to this day—can be traced, like so much else about the sport, to its monastic origins. In the medieval period, the children of kings and dukes were sent off to monasteries to be educated. In between Latin and theology classes, they took to the cloister courtyard with their shameless, defrocked teachers to work on their forehands. It wasn't long before these young students were heading back to their parents' castles for summer break, insisting that they simply must build a court of their own.

The royalty of Renaissance Europe took to tennis with a passion and it quickly became popular on the palace circuit. Unlike football, which involved mobs of unruly commoners strewn across village fields, tennis was a genteel sport that required fewer players, less physical exertion, and a small, delicate ball. Tennis was contained within expensive private courts, whereas football could be played almost anywhere and required nothing more than a homemade ball. Thus, early on, class lines were drawn around these games.

In England, Henry VIII had even more rackets than he had wives. He received Hampton Court as a gift from Cardinal Wolsey and is said to have heard of the execution of Anne Boleyn while in the midst of a heated game there. Across the Channel, Francis I was so passionate about the game that he had a tennis court built on his royal yacht. Henry II built his courts at the Louvre, where he was known to play daily “dressed all in white,” hitting the ball “heatedly but without any pomp, except when his servants lifted the cord for him.”

At Fontainebleau, Louis XIII would relax by watching matches from the window of his doctor's apartment, which looked out on the court. As a player, he was reputed to be a notoriously sore loser who “cried when he lost, because he did not like to be defeated.”

With its royal endorsement, the game of tennis quickly took off among merchants, artisans, students, and others in the 16th and early 17th centuries.
Jeu de paume
halls cropped up throughout the bustling neighborhoods of Paris and other European cities and towns, operated by a growing guild of
paumiers
, master craftsmen who specialized in the making of balls and racquets and the management of courts. Along with rackets and balls, the entrepreneurial
paumiers
provided rooms where players could relax by a fire with some wine, get rubbed down with hot towels, and enjoy a side game of billiards or checkers.

But the game's meteoric rise in popularity would not last. From the late 17th century on, it began to lose its luster, particularly in its French birthplace. The colorful street signs for
paume
halls with names like the Golden Raquet or the Sphere that once dotted the narrow alleys of Paris quickly disappeared. Over time, many had become little more than betting parlors for soldiers, students, and merchants where billiards and card games became more lucrative ventures than tennis. The rise of urban property values and corresponding taxes made the huge
paume
halls an increasingly costly enterprise for their owners. Some were turned into factories, others meeting halls.

As tennis fell out of vogue in the 17th and 18th centuries and
paume
halls began to shut their doors, the theater became the biggest beneficiary of the game's demise. French comedy troupes discovered that the large, enclosed courts with their high ceilings and open viewing galleries worked well as makeshift auditoriums. The young comedic playwright Molière and his popular Illustre-Théâtre set up their roving performances in a number of abandoned or struggling
paume
halls, many of which were eventually converted for good into theaters. Appropriately, Molière's troupe of comedians came to be known as “the children of the ball.”

In France, the final blow to the game came with the French Revolution, which took aim at everything associated with the
ancien régime
. One of the defining episodes of the revolution was played out within the tennis court at the palace of Versailles. In June 1789, deputies of the newly formed National Assembly found themselves locked out of their chambers by Louis XVI's soldiers. The 600 members quickly regrouped and made their way through the rain to the nearby royal tennis court, where they signed what came to be known as the Tennis Court Oath, challenging the monarchy and claiming the right to assemble and form a constitution. The historic moment was captured in a famous sketch by Jacques-Louis David showing the deputies crowded around the court in heated debate and discussion while commoners look on with hope from the galleys and upper windows. A basket of balls and a single racket appear discarded in the corner of the great hall, suddenly frivolous, decadent, and irrelevant.

At the game's peak in 1596, there were 250
jeu de paume
courts in Paris alone. By 1657 there were no more than 114, and by 1783 only 13.

Today, there is only one.

I
emerged from the métro into a throng of spring tourists snapping their obligatory postcard shots of the Champs-Élysées through the frame of the Arc de Triomphe. I pointed myself toward the guiding spire of the Eiffel Tower and made my way along the elegant streets of the 16th arrondissement, one of Paris's highest high-rent districts.

Walking twice past the address I was looking for, I stumbled upon 93, rue Lauriston, the infamous house where the Gestapo secretly interrogated and tortured members of the French resistance during World War II. A plaque marks the somber site. Backtracking carefully up the block in search of my happier destination, I finally spotted a sign with two crossed rackets hanging outside a stately historic structure. Above the entryway a carved lintel read
JEUX DE PAUME.

The interior of the Société Sportive du Jeu de Paume et de Squash Racquets appeared frozen in time, a relic of the gilded age to which it once belonged. When it was founded more than a century ago, the club sported two
paume
courts, but in 1926 the first squash courts in France were built inside one of them. At the top of the marble staircase, the familiar squeak of tennis shoes followed by the sound of swatted balls echoed off the parquet floors and oak panels of the foyer. I had come to Paris's one remaining
paume
hall not only to pay homage to the city's last living vestige of the game it gave birth to, but to take in the competition at an annual tournament known as the French National Open.