Useless Tennis Fact Day 3

newballs wrote:Is this the same Mr. McCready from children's story?

You know the one about a man cleaning up his house without wearing his glasses. He then vacummed up both his mouse and cat and dog before the vacuum bag exploded and animals and dirt went flying all over his house.

Mr McCready wrote:Around 1873, a patented game sprang out of nobleman's party mood one dreary day in Wales, and the new and improved game of lawn tennis captured the countryside. Indoor court tennis was now professed to be much more funs outdoors, and with the opposite sex no less. Standardized rules, however, were a total magilla. It wasn't until the All England Croquet Club experimented with the first organized tournament, and new set of rules, that the show really got rolling

A couple of summers after lawn tennis took off with the upper crust, a leading group of court tennis enthusiasts spent weekends at a castle retreat called Lullingstone. They hammered out how the game was played and improved it through testing the various boundaries of the court and net. At Wimbledon 1877, the first serve was cracked underhanded, and the extravaganza we know today as the most prestigious tennis tournament in the world got its humble start. 125 years later, the heart of the game still relies on those initial rules.

JuliusHMarx wrote:Wimbledon did indeed take control of the rules in 1877 from the MCC, to create a 'new set of rules'. I don't know what changes they made.