The Tennis Ball Selected for the First National Lawn Tennis Tournament

In July of 1881, the recently formed United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) announced what is now regarded as the first official National Championship tournament in the United States. The event that eventually transformed into the US Open was first held at the Newport Casino on August 31 through September 3, 1881.

While the United States National Championships have always been held around Labor Day weekend, that first tournament pre-dated the worker’s strikes that eventually led President Grover Cleveland to sign a law in 1894 that established that national holiday. It is unlikely that the selection of dates had anything to do with the labor movement. There wasn’t a lot of overlap between the people who were playing tennis and the working class who were honored by the holiday.

The announcement of the “National Lawn Tennis Tournament” that ran in the New York Times a month before the first tournament revealed the initial solution to standardization of the tennis ball, which was one of the first objectives established by the recently formed USLTA. The “F. H. Ayers regulation ball” was to be used at the event. That is actually a misspelling of Ayres.

Frederick Henry (F. H.) Ayres was a manufacturer in London, England. The firm produced indoor and outdoor games and well-crafted toys like rocking horses. In 1881, they were the leading supplier of tennis equipment in Britain. They made the ball that was used at “The Championship Meeting” at Wimbledon. The F. H. Ayres company was eventually bought out by Slazenger in the 1940’s.

The declaration that the F.H. Ayres ball would be used in the initial USLTA National Championship wasn’t a specification of ball construction but rather an identification of a manufacturing source. In essence, the Ayres ball became the basis for future standards. The USLTA just adopted the ball used at Wimbledon as the first stab at standardization in the United States.

The site “vintagetennisballs.com” includes a few entries with images of the Ayres balls. These are likely not from the 1890s, but they still give an idea of what the initial balls probably looked like.

Awarding a monopoly to a manufacturing company has obvious drawbacks. Eventually, the Rules of Tennis were established and included the now-familiar specifications for regulation tennis balls. That enables multiple manufacturers of balls to produce a consistent product. However, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) wasn’t founded until 1913. International standardization of the tennis ball was still in the distant future in 1881.

The announcement of the first National Lawn Tennis tournament also established the foundations for conducting tennis tournaments under the USLTA. We will take a closer look at the format of that first event next Wednesday.

1. NATIONAL LAWN-TENNIS TOURNAMENT, The New York Times, July 14, 1881.
2. What Is Labor Day? A History of the Workers’ Holiday., The New York Times, September 4, 2023.