Download e-book for kindle: Sporting Gentlemen: Men's Tennis from the Age of Honor to by E. Digby Baltzell

Tennis is a high-stakes video game, performed via prodigies pointed out early and coached by means of execs in hopes of excessive scores and endorsements. This advertisement international is way faraway from the origins of the game. ahead of 1968—when Wimbledon invited expert avid gamers to compete for the 1st time—tennis was once a part of a sportsmanship culture that emphasised personality over funds. It produced well-rounded gents who expressed a code of honor, now not commerce.

In this authoritative and affectionate background of men's tennis, wonderful sociologist E. Digby Baltzell recovers the consideration of the age. From its aristocratic origins within the past due ninteenth century, to the Tilden years, and during a succession of beginners, the beginner period and its virtues survived a century of democratization and clash. Sporting gents examines the best gamers and fits within the background of tennis. Baltzell explores the tennis code of honor and its roots within the cricket code of the late-nineteenth-century Anglo-American higher class.

This code of honor remained regardless of the later democratization of tennis. therefore, the courtroom manners of the Renshaw twins and Doherty brothers on the previous Wimbledon have been upheld to the letter by way of Don Budge and Jack Kramer in addition to Rod Laver, John Newcombe, and Arthur Ashe. Baltzell's ultimate bankruptcy at the Open period is a blistering assault at the decline of honor and the obliteration of sophistication differences, leaving merely these in keeping with cash. For all who love the sport of tennis, Sporting Gentlemen is either attention-grabbing background and a badly wanted research of what has made the game great.