ABOUT REAL TENNIS

Real tennis (also known as royal tennis, court tennis and jeu de paume) is the original racquet sport from which the modern game of lawn tennis, or tennis, is descended. Real tennis is still played at a small number of active courts in the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States and France.

​Though scored in fifteens like lawn tennis, real tennis has a dizzying assortment of additional rules that can make the sport difficult for casual viewers to comprehend. Take the “chase,” for example. When a ball bounces twice, a point isn’t necessarily awarded. Instead, the ball’s second bounce on the ground is noted, and, once the players have switched sides, the point is replayed, and the receiving player tries to win the chase by playing their ball out of reach of the server and closer to the back wall on its second bounce than his or her opponent did.

​The balls are solid like a cricket ball, the rackets are wooden, pear shaped and lopsided with a very small sweet spot, so it is a challenging game to master. The court, meanwhile, is lined with potential traps. There are sloping roofs above three of the four walls, for instance: you can hit the ball off of these. There are galleries you can hit the ball into, a move that forces a variety of outcomes depending on the score at the time. Players often say that real tennis is a mix of squash, lawn tennis, and chess, because of the seemingly limitless situations that can arise during a game.