Sport Science

The bulk of tennis historiography has tended to project a Southern-centric image of the sport, through descriptions of its clubs and tournaments, its players, and associations. Both the Lawn Tennis Association and the Wimbledon Championships began and have remained bastions of Southern hegemony, but there existed (and continues to exist) a large and active ‘tennis culture’ in the North that has been overlooked. The aim of this paper is to critically explore the notion of a north-south divide in tennis, commencing from the late nineteenth century to the early post-war period. Comparing both northern and southern regions, including Scotland and Wales, it focuses on the emergence of clubs and tournaments, the attitudes, values and behaviours of players and spectators, and the formation of associations. Evidence suggests the existence of a north-south divide, but one that is qualitatively distinct from that experienced in popular team sports; less a reliance on the construction of Northern sporting heroes, with their concomitant representative personalities and characters, and more a focus on the construction of regional stereotypes of clubs, tournaments and players, and the focus on different values, all set in broader historical contexts of rising and waning fortunes of Northern regions in industry and commerce.

This paper concerns the former professional tennis player from 1991 to 2007, Greg Rusedski, who was born in Canada but shifted national allegiance to Great Britain in 1995. Despite an impressive playing career, that saw him reach the US Open final in 1997 and attain a world-number-four ranking, alongside his steadfast efforts to ingratiate himself to the broader public, Rusedski’s British identity remained contested throughout his career. Focusing on four mainstream newspapers covering the political left and right, this paper analyses the British media’s treatment of Rusedski, and aims to develop an understanding of how his constructed identity as more or less ‘British’ fluctuated so markedly throughout his career. While his on-court results were certainly a factor in Rusedski’s swings between acceptance and rejection, this paper suggests a more nuanced analysis that takes into account, firstly, how Rusedski was positioned and characterised in relation to his countryman, the ‘quintessential Englishman’ Tim Henman, particularly in relation to his accent, ostensible personality, personal appearance and physique, and playing style, and, secondly, how Rusedski’s key period of success, in the latter half of 1997, can be contextualised in the light of broader socio-political events and developments.

Within sport media, it is customary for sportsmen rather than sportswomen to be accorded the privileges and responsibilities of competing not just for the nation but also on behalf of it. However, under certain circumstances, it is apparent that the typically gendered media conventions may shift to accommodate nationally important sportswomen. This study concerns the British tennis player Virginia Wade, and via a textual analysis, the print-media discourse surrounding her 1977 Wimbledon triumph is analyzed. It is argued that the wider sociohistorical and personal contexts of her victory helped facilitate a shift, whereby her national identity rather than her gender becoming the primary media frame. Not only was Wade’s win considered significant amidst the mid-1970s economic downturn in Britain, it also coincided with Wimbledon’s centenary and a visit by the Queen during jubilee year. Consequently, her victory was imbued with national symbolism through displays of “banal nationalism.” Coupled with Wimbledon’s “invented traditions,” Wade was represented as embodying the British “imagined community” through her play and approach. This study’s findings reassert the importance of examining the intersections of gender and national identity in sport media and urges for more research that foregrounds historical context as a key factor for female athlete national transcendence.

This paper critically examines the life and career of Daniel “Dan” Maskell OBE CBE (1908-92), the much-loved British professional coach and BBC commentator for Wimbledon, and position his social ascendancy during the inter-war and post-war periods within the contexts of shifting class relations in British society, and the professionalisation of tennis and growing performance orientation of amateur tennis authorities in Britain. Given his working-class origins, Maskell’s gradual acceptance into the British lawn tennis fraternity and rise to become “the voice of Wimbledon” and, for some, the personification of traditional British sporting amateur values, was something of an enigma, and reflected key contradictions in what amateurism constituted in the twentieth century. Despite enduring systematic discrimination in clubs and exclusion from amateur competitions, as a consequence of him being a “professional”, he remained a chief proponent of the amateur ideology throughout his lifetime and exhibited numerous personal qualities that endeared him to the upper-middle-class establishment: modesty, loyalty, integrity, conservative views on player behaviour, deference to authority, strong work-ethic, and good-humoured nature. Once tennis went “open” in 1968, and throughout a period when professionalism and commercialism threatened to undermine the sports’ core ideals, Maskell continued to represent and promote amateur ideals through his broadcasting ethics and values.

This article examines the lives of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century lawn tennis coaching-professionals, notably Tom Burke, Harry Cowdrey, Charles Haggett and George Kerr. These men, considered equally if not more gifted than the first-ranked amateur players of the period, have received scant attention or recognition, either as “expert” players or for their role as coaches/instructors within the “amateur” game. Ostensibly, these working-class boys/men sought employment in clubs, as ball-boys, groundskeepers, stringers and instructors, but, being immediately classified as “professionals”, were subsequently marginalised within clubs and barred from amateur competitions. Few outside of the club environs encountered them, few observed or learned of their skills, and fewer still reported their exploits. While many of the top amateur players of the period recognised the need for coaching-professionals, the British Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) was intransigent. They staunchly refused to sanction professional competitions in Britain, fearing they would provide a pathway away from amateurism, and propel the amateur to seek remuneration from their tennis. Coaching-professionals had little choice but to remain as “servants” within their clubs, confined by the rigid class system and unyielding amateur ethos. Hitherto largely ignored within lawn tennis historiography, these men are the “ghosts” of lawn tennis past.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Lawn Tennis Association introduced numerous policies to remove barriers associated with social exclusion in tennis clubs. Ethnographic research was conducted within one club to analyse the incidence of social exclusion, and consider the success of LTA policies in these regards. Findings suggested the club made structural changes to receive LTA funding, such as removing exclusive membership and clothing restrictions, hiring coaches and establishing school–club links, yet its culture remained almost entirely inaccessible to new members. For analysis, Elias and Scotson’s ‘Established-Outsider Relations’ theoretical framework is applied: to discover who was excluded, how and why, and, to set the outcomes of power struggles between members in the wider social and historical contexts of changing LTA policies.

This article examines recent developments in etiquette in contemporary mixed-doubles tennis (MDT), to position different behavioural expectations for men/women in the broader context of shifting gender relations. Content analysis of coaching guides published from the 1960–1980s revealed that historically rooted gender distinctions in terms of court positioning, tactics, and playing roles/expectations were reaffirmed, continuing to undermine and marginalize females yet privilege males based on assumed innate differences in physical attributes. Etiquette norms in this era were compared to those found in the early twenty-first century (2000–2010s), through content analysis of online forums/blogs for recreational and elite-level MDT. It was found that while gendered tactics related to court positioning and playing roles were sustained, an important shift in etiquette norms related to chivalry occurred, but was not comprehensively accepted among all players. This development was attributed to third-wave feminist challenges to male chivalry, alongside the burgeoning ‘crisis of masculinity’ that increasingly pushed men towards adopting a ‘hybridized masculinity’ to assuage public critiques of hegemonic/orthodox masculinity in sport.