Once a year, Flushing Meadows in New York turns into a 22-ring circus of tennis, and people start asking me, as a lifelong tennis player, what all those words mean. I wasn’t going to write about tennis lingo in this blog, but a new acronym in the sport put me over the edge. So here goes.
The name of the sport itself seems to have come from the French tenez, or “take,” which is purportedly what the server used to shout before firing the ball cross-court to begin the point. The game we play these days, whether on the red clay at Roland Garros, the grass at Wimbledon, or the hard court of your local public park (which is where I learned the game), is known as lawn tennis, to contrast it with real tennis. How did it get real? Where, that’s where the debates begin. Some say real is a mispronunciation of royal, others that it is the real McCoy, still played (rarely) today as it was in the days of Henry VIII, indoors on a court with four walls and a bunch of different rules that I’m not bothering to learn or explain here. The scoring system, I understand, is the same as for the tennis I know: Love, 15, 30, 40, deuce, ad, game. Weird, right? Apparently Billie Jean King thought so, too, and when she started to get the hang of it, she expected (who wouldn’t?) that at the very least the score following 30 would be 45.
Beginning at love, we find another debate. Is it from the French l’oeuf, meaning “the egg,” a round image similar to the bagel no one wants in the form of a set lost six games to nothing? Or is it a polite way to say zero, allowing that we polite tennis players are out there for the pure love—or honor, which in Flemish is lof—of the game? I tend to think the latter simply because the French don’t actually say l’oeuf when calling the score but pronounce, quite bluntly, zéro. (Then again, despite the etymological connection of deuce to the French deux, when announcing the even score from which a player must win two points to take the game, the French choose to say égalité. Go figure.) The first point you win, or lose, in a game is labeled 15 because the initial concept was that of a clock: if you need four points to win the game, each point is like 15 minutes on the clock’s hour. Yes, some players say 5, but that’s shorthand, never heard in the major tournaments. Then there’s 30; OK. Then 40. Huh? Here again, a controversy. Billie Jean King believed that, given the two games needed to win in the case of deuce, the movement along the “clock” needed to be abbreviated, so the score moved to 40 in order to leave room for 50 and then 60. This convoluted thinking seems unlikely to me. Simpler and more reasonable is another shortening, as from 15 to 5, of 45 to 40. So Billie Jean was right, only the slang got the better of us.
There’s even a twist on the word game Bananagrams, in which players are allowed only to create words used in tennis. Sounds tough, but it’s amazing how many of those terms there are, especially if you count words like breadstick (the 1 in a 6-1 set), shank, gimme, and handcuff. You can’t count acronyms, though, which means that the new “word” I learned during this year’s U.S. Open, SABR, wouldn’t be allowed. I heard the term in an interview with Roger Federer, following his third-round victory, when he was asked if he would be bringing out the saber against the American player John Isner. He doubted he would, he said, and the interviewer made some remark about his surely wanting to be able to produce more twins. I shall leave it to readers’ imaginations as to what I thought, at that point, was the Fed’s saber. But it turns out that SABR stands for Sneak Attack By Roger, also known as the Kamikaze Return and referring to Federer’s new tactic of rapidly approaching an opponent’s second serve so as to hit it near the service line in a sort of half-volley, throwing the server suddenly on the defensive. As to how the Fed thinks Isner might deal with the SABR — well, tennis is a polite sport, and we shall tolerate no further innuendoes.
