Sporting Insights -15
Tennis -Why the Second Serve?
In his engaging book filled with intriguing anecdotes, Tennis: Origin and Mysteries, written by Malcolm Whitman, the US National Tennis Champion for three successive years between 1898 and 1900, the author explores the origin of all quaint practices in Tennis. After searching for evidence of the origin for second serve and not finding anything concrete, he concludes by quoting the gossip of its origin related to a King with poor serving ability, who ordered two serves be allowed; and given his royal position, the rule went unopposed during his rule and later became a part of the rules of the game that prevails till date.
A plausible reason for the King’s poor service record, which could be representative of the players of that era, is their shorter height, a major limitation in effecting a valid overhead serve, standing 12 meters away from the net, and getting the ball over a net one meter in height which should land within 6 meters of the net. Laws of physics require that for a valid fast serve the ball be connected at a height of around 213 centimeters, much higher than what an average European of that era could reach.
If we take Englishmen to be representative of Europeans, in the historical study on heights of English males, the Lead author Dr Gregori Galofré-Vilà, from the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, wrote: ‘Since the early 19th century, average heights for Englishmen have increased substantially, reaching 175 cm in 1950 and 177cm in 1970, being among the tallest of any population worldwide. Our data shows that average heights in England in the medieval era and between the years 1400 and 1700 were similar to those of the 20th century.’
The correlation between height and success in tennis is clearly visible in the average heights of Wimbledon Champions from the year 1877 CE, when the tournament began, which is 183 centimeters, which is just above 6 feet.
To build on the speculation by Malcolm Whitman, did the height of players coupled with the difficulty of mastering tennis service contribute to the practice of second serve being introduced? For without the second serve, many tennis matches would have fettered out to drab games shorn of those engaging long rallies of the ball sailing back and forth across the net.
