On Tennis

Tennis--the king of games and the game of kings--was mentioned by Chaucer two hundred years before Shakespeare put the game on the literary map; Erasmus devoted a colloquy to it, Rabelais made Pantagruel play tennis at Orleans, and people playing tennis were a feature of Swedenborg's vision of heaven. A print shows Charles IX of France at the age of two with a tennis racket already in his hand. -Jeremy Potter, Hazard Chase (1964)

[Theodore] Roosevelt put aside his foreign-policy toubles on the new White House tennis court. He played with intense concentration, quite unaware of the strangeness of his style. When serving, he grasped the racket stem halfway, forefinger pointing upward. His myopia kept him close to the net, but his reflexes were so quick that he nevertheless covered the court well, chasing the balls that got past him. After smashing a winning shot, he would rejoice with falsetto shrieks, and hop around on one foot, singing and laughing. -Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex