Yesterday I was watching Australian Open final between Nadal and Djokovic with my friend. Like millions of others who have never held a tennis racket properly in hand, we exchanged (rather showed off) many facts and opinions about current state of Tennis world. Out of the blue, my friend Ashvin grew curious why all other racket sports like Squash, Badminton, even the younger cousin Table Tennis- all have regular point system, but Lawn Tennis has such a useless 15-30-40 kinda system? If you look at it, it's nothing but simple 4 points.
Well, he was right. Never had i looked at it this way, and that made me explore the history behind it. Some of you already might know these facts if you are a sports fan, but nonetheless, it's an enriching historical trivia to know.
The most popular theory speculates that in the medieval France clocks were used to maintain the respective scores in jeu de paume, a court game considered to be the precursor to Tennis, with hands used instead of rackets. French believed 60 or a full circle on the clock to be a perfect number, much similar to the number 10 or 100 now. Even today you'd find luxury watchmaker Rolex as more or less a mainstay associate sponsor, while various big Banks or Auto brands alternating as prime sponsors. The minute hand of the clock used to signal 15, 30, 45 or 60 ticks on the clock face.
With two players tied at 45-45, an idea of deuce (deux- meaning 'two' in French) was introduced. A lead of two more points was required by either player to win over the other. Advantage of first point was marked by another movement of minute hand, but was restored to previous position if that lead was lost. So, this 45th tick signal was adjusted to 40th, to keep the game within 60th tick mark. And thus, the scoring effectively became 00-15-30-40-50-60.
Another story believed goes this way. When the scores were 'called out', French would have called it quinze (15), trente (30) and quarante-cinq (45). You can see quarante-cinq is a bit of a mouthful compared to the other two, so it was shortened to simply "quarante" or 40. In the late 19th century, when rules were standardized by Britishers, he kept it as love-15-30-40-deuce-game, mostly along the French tradition.
A slight variation in this version is, Britishers used standardized cannon calibre onboard the ships as scoring units, with 15 pounders, 30 pounders and 40 pounders as defined standards.
Lastly, the term for 00 or naught, which is popularly called 'love'. It has no correlation whatsoever to the commercial romance shoved down one's throat by global firms around second week of February. It's rather the French word for zero itself, pronounced as l'oeuf. Like many other spoilt stuff in history, credit for this also goes to Englishmen for standardizing it as 'Love'.
That was a brief Monday trivia for this week. Stay tuned for an interesting folktale tomorrow.
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