1.3 TENNIS 13 THE EARLY DAYS OF TENNIS The word tennis derives from the mispronunciation, by English players, of the French word Tenez! , which was shouted by players before throwing the ball. What is croquet and how is it played? Search the Internet to find out. The word deuce comes from the French phrase deux du jeu two points away from game, i.e. two consecutive points must be scored to win the game; love derives from the French expression l oeuf , meaning the egg , as this resembles a zero. Winning all of them in the same year makes the player achieve the Grand Slam . 40-all: quaranta pari bare: nudo bat: racchetta deuce: parit hourglass: clessidra paddle: pagaia, pala to patent: brevettare 28 TO PLAY A champion is defined not by their wins but by how they can recover when they fall. Serena Williams The origins of tennis have been traced back to a game played in French monasteries in the 12th and 13th centuries called jeu de paume (game of the palm), where players used to hit the ball with their bare hand, using it like a racket. This game spread all over the courts of Europe, mainly in England and France, in the 16th and 17th centuries; for this reason, it was called real tennis , where real meant royal . At first, players started wearing gloves on their hands, but since the 16th century, paddle-like bats, and rackets have been used. The birth of modern tennis Modern tennis developed in England in the 19th century, when it started to be played on fields of grass, normally destined to the game of croquet , and called lawn tennis . In 1859, two men, Major Harry Gem and a friend of his, Augusto Pereira, played the first game of lawn tennis based on a set of very simple rules, on a croquet field with a net in the middle. Later, in 1874, they founded the Leamington Tennis Club, which was the world s first tennis club in history. In the same year, the Englishman Major Walter Clopton Wingfield patented a game based on the rules of old real tennis to be played on an hourglass-shaped field with a net suspended above the ground in the middle of it. Wingfield introduced some game rules and expressions which are still used in today s tennis, such as deuce , to indicate the score of 40-all in a game, or love to mean zero in scores . The official regulations of lawn tennis were then established in 1875 by the Marylebone Cricket Club in London and were adopted by the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club for the first Lawn Tennis Championship, at Wimbledon, in 1877. The spread of tennis Tennis spread rapidly inside and outside Europe. In the USA, the first tennis clubs were founded in 1881; in the same year, the first American tournament, the US Open, was established. Ten years later, the Roland Garros tournament, also known as the French Open, was played for the first time, followed by the Australian Open in 1905. These three tournaments, together with the Wimbledon one, are called The Grand Slam Tournaments .