Tennis History:
"The 700-year-old French game of tennis, traditionally as much a lady's as a man's game, was introduced to the U.S. in 1874 by a woman, Mary E. Outerbridge..."
See more from this Sept. 9, 1946, TIME Magazine cover story on women's tennis and 1946 Wimbledon and Forest Hills champ Pauline Betz now on the Tennis Articles page.
TIME Magazine, May 23, 1955:
In her first column, the San Diego Union's new Women's Sports Editor Maureen ("Little Mo") Connolly, retired as the world's greatest lady tennis star at a ripe old 21, showed that sports punditry is as easy for her as smashing a tennis ball down an opponents throat.
Lamented Little Mo in great pontifical style: "[On] the American scene today ... we're reducing sports to a cluster of numbers on a board ... We ... are expecting our champions to be stadium automatons, the human equivalents of the balls in a super pinball machine ... We're watching for the numbers to light up and forgetting the play."
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TIME articles:
Maureen Connolly's 1st US Open & Wimbledon titles
Book Excerpt:
The Courts of Babylon: Dawn of the Pro Tennis Tours
more tennis history book excerpts in the nav menu (top of page)
WTA Top 20 Rankings 1989-2010
International Tennis Hall of Fame
Lawn Tennis 1873-1938
The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club site still has some good Wimbledon history pages.
The USOpen.org History
has stats and year-by-year finals descriptions since 1968 (but nothing about the Forest Hills and Newport Casino US Nationals before the "Open era").
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Free Online Tennis Books:
Lawn Tennis 1908 with a chapter by Blanche Bingley Hillyard
Lawn Tennis for Ladies 1910 by Dorothea K. D. Lambert Chambers
Tennis for Women 1916 by Molla Bjurstedt Mallory
Lawn Tennis for Girls 1920 by Suzanne Lenglen
Lawn Tennis 1886 by James Dwight
Game of Lawn Tennis 1888 by "Cavendish" of The Field
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Apologies for the typographical errors on this page occasionally. These cut-and-paste errors result when faulty brain wiring impairs one person trying to keep up a large website. I try to keep errors to a minimum, but some always creep in.
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new in 2008, at Amazon