Sports Management Commons^™

Pancho's Racket And The Long Road To Professional Tennis, Gregory I. Ruth

Dissertations

Historians have written little on sports in the United States compared to other topics. They have had even less to say about tennis than other popular sports in large part because the original research necessary to complete a full treatment of the history of the game appeared too daunting to undertake. By contrast, this study has made use of over a dozen arcHIVal collections around the country, many of which researchers have never used before, to tell the story of how tennis went from an amateur sport closely guarded by economic elitists and cultural purists to a professional sport thoroughly …