Modern Times: How Tennis Turned Professional
Modern Times: How Tennis Turned Professional
Edward Becker
Longwood University
In 1884, Maud Watson, a demure nineteen-year-old vicar’s daughter, won the the inaugural Wimbledon Ladies Singles Championship. Strictly amateur, she received a silver cup and the congratulations of the twelve other competitors and a handful of spectators. On court she wore a long wide dress with an hour-glass waist and bustle.
In 1985, Martina Navratilova, a twenty-eight-year old self-proclaimed bi-sexual millionairess, triumphed in the one hundred and first Ladies Singles Championship. Thoroughly professional, she celebrated her victory from a draw of 128 by waving aloft a silver salver for the television cameras and the capacity crowd of 16,000. She stowed away a cheque for £117,000. Her clothing a footwear were predominantly white but clearly recognisable were a batch of manufacturer’s logos and remunerative advertising labels (Jeffreys, 2009, p.2238).
Kate Brasher highlights the stark differences between two competing ideologies that have shaped tennis today: amateurism and professionalism. While today nearly all sports are designated as professional, many of them, including tennis, began as amateur pursuits which, as is clearly obvious, had polar values to today’s professionals. The second half of the twentieth century saw dramatic shift in sports ideology, culminating in the development of professionalism in sports. Prior to this shift, the amateur notion that sport should be devoid of financial appeal reigned supreme (Jeffreys, 2009). Kevin Jeffreys (2009) viewed amateurism was viewed as “a marriage of honour and competition, of an upper class ideal of chivalry and a new middle-class belief in the moral value of strenuous effort”(p. 2238), which helped to shape the cultural identity of the upper middle class. It was only after the Second World War that professionalism superseded amateurism values and became the guiding principle for competitive sport and that continues to
Edward Becker
Longwood University
In 1884, Maud Watson, a demure nineteen-year-old vicar’s daughter, won the the inaugural Wimbledon Ladies Singles Championship. Strictly amateur, she received a silver cup and the congratulations of the twelve other competitors and a handful of spectators. On court she wore a long wide dress with an hour-glass waist and bustle.
In 1985, Martina Navratilova, a twenty-eight-year old self-proclaimed bi-sexual millionairess, triumphed in the one hundred and first Ladies Singles Championship. Thoroughly professional, she celebrated her victory from a draw of 128 by waving aloft a silver salver for the television cameras and the capacity crowd of 16,000. She stowed away a cheque for £117,000. Her clothing a footwear were predominantly white but clearly recognisable were a batch of manufacturer’s logos and remunerative advertising labels (Jeffreys, 2009, p.2238).
Kate Brasher highlights the stark differences between two competing ideologies that have shaped tennis today: amateurism and professionalism. While today nearly all sports are designated as professional, many of them, including tennis, began as amateur pursuits which, as is clearly obvious, had polar values to today’s professionals. The second half of the twentieth century saw dramatic shift in sports ideology, culminating in the development of professionalism in sports. Prior to this shift, the amateur notion that sport should be devoid of financial appeal reigned supreme (Jeffreys, 2009). Kevin Jeffreys (2009) viewed amateurism was viewed as “a marriage of honour and competition, of an upper class ideal of chivalry and a new middle-class belief in the moral value of strenuous effort”(p. 2238), which helped to shape the cultural identity of the upper middle class. It was only after the Second World War that professionalism superseded amateurism values and became the guiding principle for competitive sport and that continues to
References: Bodo, P. (1995). The courts of Babylon: Tales of greed and glory in the harsh new world of professional Tennis Gillmeister, H. (1998). Tennis: A cultural history. New York, U.S.A: New York University Press Gould, D Jefferys, K. (2009). The heyday of amateurism in modern lawn tennis. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 26(15), 2236-2252 Jefferys, K. (2009). The triumph of professionalism in world tennis; The road to 1968. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 26(15), 2253-2269 tennis. (2011). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/587387/tennis Thurmond, S., & Tignor, S. (2007). 10 moments that changed tennis forever. Tennis, 43(10), 62-67. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.