Sudden Death

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The oldest written record of the word tennis makes no mention of athletic shoes; rather, it refers solely to the sport from which they take their name, a sport that — along with fencing, its near kin — was one of the first to require a special kind of footwear.

In 1451, Edmund Lacey, Bishop of Exeter, defined the game with the same suppressed rage with which my mother referred to the falling-apart Converse I wore as a kid: ad ludum pile vulgariter nuncupatum Tenys. In Lacey’s edict, the word tenys—in the vernacular — is linked to phrases with the acid whiff of court cases: prophanis colloquiis et iuramentis, vanis et sepissime periuriis illicitis, sepius rixas.

At the collegiate church of Ottery St. Mary, under Lacey’s rule, a group of novices had been using the roofed gallery of the cloister to play matches against townies. In those days, tennis was much rougher and noisier than it is today: some were attackers, others defenders; there were no nets or lines; and points were won tooth and nail, by slamming the ball into an opening called a dedans. Since it was a sport invented by Mediterranean monks, it had redemptive overtones: angels on one side, demons on the other. It was a matter of death and the afterlife, the ball as allegory of the soul flitting between good and evil, scheming to get into heaven, Lucifer’s messengers waylaying it. The soul rent asunder, just like my tennis shoes.

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