A history of tennis scoring
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All sports have their own vocabularies, the shorthand lingo to communicate intricacies of rules and how play proceeds. But usually the scoring can at least be counted on to be fairly straightforward. Not so much forFor the unfamiliar, tennis starts with both players at zero, called love: “Love-all.” One person scores: 15 to love. The server’s score is said first, the receiver’s second. The other now scores, and they’re tied at “15-all.
But those less familiar with the game may once again ponder an inevitable question: Why count this way? Disappointingly, the origins of pretty much every part of the scoring system are a mystery. “I don’t think anybody really knows how it started or why it developed how it did,” says Elizabeth Wilson, who“There are various theories, all sorts of romantic theories have been built up about it.” says Wilson. “That’s partly what makes tennis into a kind of romantic game, because it had all this history that isn’t really history, it’s legend more than actual history.
Records of scoring systems related to today’s date back almost to the beginning of the sport, but in these years the scoring was 15, 30, 45 — the math of which at least makes more sense than the modern system, as each increment was 15 points. A poem written a few years after the 1415 battle of Agincourt
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