The Concise History of Tennis

Author’s message

Welcome dear Visitor,

All available tennis history books tackle tennis history unevenly in two main respects. They usually give very little information on the pre-1919 years and do not give enough weight to professional tennis before 1968. I decided to overcome these limitations in my book.

It was not until the groundbreaking publication of Joe McCauley’s “The History of Professional Tennis” (Short Run Book Company, Windsor, 2000) that substantial information on early professionals became available.As for the first four decades of tennis history before World War I, there is still little detailed information, so I visited the Kenneth Ritchie Wimbledon Library to collect results from contemporary tennis magazines.

I have devoted one page for each year between 1877 and 2016. Each page contains a short summary of the major events in that particular year, and year-end rankings in tabulated form that show the performance of the top players at the major events.

The greatest novelty lies in the rankings, as no world rankings have yet been published before 1913, and professional players have usually been omitted from rankings before 1968. To arrive at my rankings I have taken into account contemporary classifications made by tennis journalists, and official national rankings. In combining amateur and professional players before 1968 I took into account the rankings of Ray Bowers and Robert Geist, and had fruitful discussions with them and some other tennis experts.

You can download a Book Sample for free before purchasing the full version. All the pages have the same structure.

If you had any questions, comments, or simply would like to reach out to me, please use the contact form below.

With kind regards,
The Author, Karoly Mazak, PhD