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NEW YORK: Asked if his new book will upset people, Richard Hillway answered immediately in the affirmative. “Yes, oh yes,” he said. His co-author, Robert Everitt, nodded.
Their book is not about any of the typical inflammatory topics in sports: no cheating, no greed, no steroids. Instead, it is about in what order which people started playing tennis in the 1870s.
The topic, however esoteric, has been a point of contention for those who think they have a claim to having been first, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Leaving no stone unturned in the search for answers and verifications of those answers, Hillway and Everitt’s book, The Birth of Lawn Tennis is replete with lush archival images from the earliest days of the sport, and the many similar games that preceded it. “It’s a search for what the real story is, the true story,” Hillway said. “And we have evidence to back it up. Now it’s possible that some family will say, well, since 110 years ago, it’s been passed on that this happened. Well, it’s possible that it happened, but there’s no verification.”
The tome — of which only 500 limited-edition copies, leatherbound, were printed — does not use the word “invented” lightly. The authors confirm the prevailing theory that lawn tennis was invented in 1874 by Maj. Walter Clopton Wingfield, who published his first rule book for the sport in February of that year. He received patents for the game in Britain and in the United States later that year. “There’s no dispute as to people experimenting with a game outside, perhaps many years before lawn tennis was invented by Wingfield,” Everitt said. “According to the patent offices, we’ve included nine reasons why his idea can be termed as an invention. The others can’t provide anything that backs that up.”
Hillway and Everitt relied solely on contemporary accounts of the earliest days of the sport. The only origin story fully documented at the time, they concluded, was Wingfield’s. Various plaques and signs around England contend otherwise, claiming to be the birthplace of lawn tennis. “We must have heard 10 different stories of people who had invented it before Wingfield,” Hillway said. “If you believed every one of those? Each one we followed, and there was nothing there.”
“One story is that Harry Gem and his friend, Augurio Perera, in 1859, had a game that was the same as Wingfield’s, that they played it but didn’t tell too many people about it, and they’re the real inventors,” Hillway added. “But we looked for primary evidence and written evidence, not a story that comes out 100 years later about a great-uncle of somebody. We found nothing that could back that up.”
Hillway, 75, is a former tennis coach from Colorado who once competed against Arthur Ashe and others of that era around the American West. Everitt, 62, is an illustrator from Wolverhampton, England. Both share a keen interest in tennis history and collecting. When they realized they were working on books on similar topics — Hillway on Wingfield, Everitt on the first Wimbledon championships in 1877 — they decided to join forces.