Sports are always being tweaked. Year after year, some moves that improve the game and some that seem forced and contrived. This season professional baseball changed its game forever by instituting instant replay, forever eliminating the memorable umpire-manager confrontations that have been a part of the game for decades.
College football will unveil its new playoff system this year after the decades-old system of determining the national champion by computer rankings or writer votes. And we all know how active the NFL has been, constantly modifying its rules to adapt to the ever changing landscape of football and its safety concerns.
For tennis, however, the rules have hardly changed and the game watched for generations is, for the most part, the same game that you watch today.
While this may be true for the on-court product, it couldn’t be further from the reality of the equipment used in the field of play, most notably the tennis racket. Earlier this year we got to review the new connected Babalot racquet and it is incredible to see how that racquet compares to its counterpart from the 1950’s.
With the French Open Final this Sunday, Millet Sports put together this historical look at the evolution of the tennis racket to demonstrate how much tennis has actually changed since the late 19th century.
