January 7th, 2010 The Score on Tennis Scoring
It would seem strange that there would controversy over not necessarily tennis scores but how to keep them, yet there are two completely different ideas on how to keep tennis scores. The strain of thought about how to keep tennis scores comes to us from the medieval time period. Because superstitions ran high in those times, daily life was affected by their superstitions, right down to how tennis should be scored. Originally, those in the period persisted in the notion that the number sixty a good number to score the name by because it was a whole number, a round number, similar to how the number one hundred is now thought to be a whole number. We count out dollars according to it and so on.
It had 4 levels in the game, coming in fifteen point increments from fifteen to sixty. Today, most people know, even those not involved in tennis, that forty is now the whole number in tennis. Why it went from forty to forty-five is another whole slew of theories as well.
The second theory about why we score the way we do in tennis today is actually based on time, specifically how we make an hour and a minute based on increments of 60 for each unit of time. Those in the old tennis days actually used a clock to score their matches, moving the small hand of the clock to the different fifteen units it holds on its face: from twelve (which would be 0 point) to three (which would be fifteen), from three to six (which would be thirty), from six to nine (which would be forty-five), and from nine to twelve (which would be sixty points in total).
Such trivia might seem silly and strange to know for the average tennis fan or those that watch the sport simply to pass the time when there’s nothing else on the TV, but for those with a deep appreciation for the sport, it can only deepen it more. It demonstrates how far tennis has come and what different factors affected it throughout the years. They are interesting facts to to know, in particular because of the Australian Open Tennis that is coming up, one of the highlights of the tennis world.
Related posts:
- U.S. Open Tennis Tournament Coverage On The Tennis Channel
- U.S. Open Tennis Championship Coverage Set to Be Intense
- Secure Chennai Tennis
- Summertime Fun with the Tennis Channel
- French Open Tennis