Tennis, Anyone?

Cincinnati becomes a nest of raving tennis aficionados when the nationally recognized tournaments are held here this time of year. There was even a somewhat misguided tennis match played on top of that strange new skyscraper downtown, with tennis balls bouncing down to Fourth Street. So I’ve been thinking about tennis.
Tennis is a complicated game. Did you know that there are two forms of tennis? Yep, court tennis and lawn tennis.
Court tennis, also known as “real” tennis dates back to the Middle Ages, and that great athlete King Henry VIII was a devotee of the game. It is an indoor game played on an asymmetrical rectangular cement court with a sloping roof, a hard ball, a lopsided racket, and windows on the walls that came into play. Only a handful of courts still exist in the United States.
Lawn tennis, which is tennis as we know it today, is barely a hundred years old. A Welshman, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, devised the game as a diversion for his guests to play on his lawn. The members of the Wimbledon Cricket Club adopted Wingfield’s game for use on their own underutilized lawns, which had stood empty since croquet had waned in popularity in the late eighteenth century.
Lawn tennis became the more popular of the two kinds of tennis, but it continued to use the arcane scoring system that came from court tennis, probably because they thought it would confuse the most people.
In court tennis, each score in a game was worth fifteen points: 15-30-45-Game. Lawn tennis kept the same scoring system but changed it to 15-30-40-Game. Why? Apparently, the 45 was changed to 40 to make the scores easier to announce. (Seems to me that everything would have been easier if they just scored it like Ping-Pong.) In court tennis, there were six sets of four games. The match concluded when a player had completed a circle of 360 degrees (24 × 15).
Lawn tennis changed from six sets to three or five. So the scoring system now makes no sense at all. When the game is tied after six points, it is called “deuce.” That comes from the Italian a due, meaning two points needed to win and leads me to wonder how in the “deuce” did I ever get started writing this thing?