tennishistory.com.au

Thanks to the efforts of Andrew Tasiopoulos in South Australia and his permission to use the information on our site, we are pleased to present a comprehensive documentation of SINGLES tennis finals results for many national, state and regional tournaments for men and women from the 1880’s onwards.

It is remarkable to see the names of past champions in easter tournaments such as that held by the Geelong (vic) Lawn Tennis Club. The times were different in the early/mid 1900’s and players travelled the countryside often playing in tournaments and exhibition matches as part of their employment with various sporting manufacturers.

You will be able to search by player, event and year. In each section you can type in a name and search the database with greater precision.

It is a fabulous way to track individual player performances, upsets against top seeds, rivalries that may span a decade etc. This is a massive contribution to our website objective.

Thanks Andrew from the team at www.tennishistory.com.au By clicking this link you will be directed to the results page.

Metal tennis racquets were first developed in the early 1920’s which is often not known. The most famous UK racquet was the Birmal Aluminium racquet which was extremely well forged and certain models had cord wound handles whilst others had the more standard leather grips. Whilst this was the first all metal version, combination metal head-wood handle versions were developed not only by Birmal but with huge success in the USA by a company called Dayton. These racquets were strung with piano wire strings and were reputedly highly regarded by schools for their sheer ability to survive. As a collectable, the difficulty is finding good examples with minimal paint loss.

Spalding by the way, had an aluminium head-wood handle racquet in the 1930’s shaped much like a wood racquet with relatively flat edges. Dayton’s early racquets were quite thin steel frames, however they also started a similar design with a brand called the ‘Aviator’.

Jumping up to the 1960’s, there was little development of successful metal racquets until the launch of the Wilson T-2000 was in fact designed by Frenchman, Renee Lacoste’s firm, Lacoste and versions of the racquet are available under both brands. I am no steel expert, but I believe these were made from carbon steel.

In Australia, as the reign of the local wooden racquet manufacturers was ending due to worldwide shortages in Ash plus the interest in lightweight stronger metals, a few locals began to experiment in metal racquet production. While the likes of Spalding, Slazenger, Yonex and others lauched racquets in Aluminium one innovator in South Australia was an expert in Stainless Steel, which is a much more complex metal to adapt. Nevertherless, from a backyard workshop in the early 1970’s, came the ARCO Stainless steel racquet in a standard size (at first) then oversize version. We gather people loved them. They were super strong and quite flexible and with 19lb/16lb stringing provided strength and power. See www.tennishistory.com.au for more details. If you had one let us know how they played. There were some thousands made so maybe you will be lucky enough to find one for your vintage tennis racquet collection. The green covers are the really early standard size racquets. The later models had blue covers, some were powdercoated and if you find bright silver model called a “Starmaker” that was an ARCO first attempt at a carbon steel racquet before the big switch to Stainless Steel………….. Rod

Tennis History Australia tennishistory.com.au

Well after many months of hard work http://tennishistory.com.au has finally gone live !!

Backing it up we have created this blog. We aim to use this blog to talk about interesting items, maybe if you remember using any racquets, watching any matches, meeting tennis heros etc.

Please feel free to contact us with any suggestions on topics and enjoy the site.

Rod and I worked hard to gather content and create a dynamic web site that we can extend daily.

Subscribe to the RSS feed to never miss an article on this blog. RSS is not too scary. It basically looks at our site, and automatically emails you any new articles it finds.

Simple !

Michael