Once largely the preserve of white upper-class men and women, tennis has become popularized in the years following the Second World War, influenced by patterns of suburbanization, immigration and technological change.

At the beginning of the 1940s, tennis was still dominated by its country club and amateur image. Leading players like “Big” Bill Tilden, from an elite Philadelphia, PA family, Donald Budge, Jack Kramer and Helen Wills Moody epitomized the “old-stock” immigrant backgrounds of most players. By the early 1950s, many players were being drawn into the professional tournaments dominated by Kramer and Pancho Gonzalez, leaving the Grand Slam tournaments like Wimbledon and Forest Hills dominated by Australian amateurs.

The film Pat and Mike (1952) highlighted some of the changes occurring in American society that would influence the development of tennis. Pat, a women’s college physicaleducation teacher, played by Katharine Hepburn, is snatched up by a sports promoter, Mike (Spencer Tracy), who turns her into a professional sportsperson. The film evokes the transformation occurring from amateurism to commercialism, the increasing marketability of women athletes and the increasing access to tennis available for many Americans at this time that would dramatically increase the popularity of the sport.

Suburbanization accounted for much of this transformation. The migration out of the cities following the world war brought middle-class Americans into close proximity with tennis facilities, which were incorporated into the planning of many of the suburban developments and public school building projects. Elite lawn tennis clubs remained, but their influence declined as more communities played on hard court surfaces.

From the 1960s onwards, therefore, shifts in tennis demography began to occur. More tennis players began to emerge from “ethnic” groups, such as Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe (Irish), Vitas Gerulaitus (Greek)—Stan Smith being the obvious exception to this rule. They no longer graduated only from elite Ivy League universities, but instead were gaining their college playing experience from the large land-grant state universities. They were not merely growing up in Northeastern elite urban communities, but were instead coming from the new Sunbelt states, particularly Florida, where the climate allowed for more professional tennis tournaments and intensive camps, like that of Nick Bollitieri which produced such leading players as Andre Agassi and Aaron Krickstein.

Tennis was slow to have a significant impact on African Americans. Excluded from the United States Lawn Tennis Association, African Americans created their own American Tennis Association. Two products of this development were Althea Gibson, the first African American to compete and win at Wimbledon in 1957, and Arthur Ashe.

But the exclusion of African Americans from much of the process of suburbanization occurring at this time meant that these two players were not followed by others until changing demographic patterns (and Ashe’s efforts to bring tennis to inner-city communities) began to alter these things. In recent years the success of the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, has increased the visibility of the game among African Americans, including their triumphs at the 1999 US Open and 2000 Wimbledon.

The game has made a lasting impression on gender relations. The leading American women’s player of the early 1970s, Billy Jean King, helped transform the game both through her court performances and her campaigns off the court for reform away from the amateur elitism of the game and for greater gender equity. King was instrumental in bringing World Team Tennis to fruition, encouraging promoters and sponsors, like Texan Lamar Hunt, to pump money into the game, and in challenging the stereotypes regarding women. She also defeated Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” in 1973 at the Houston Astrodome before a worldwide television audience of nearly 50 million and the largest audience ever for a tennis match. King’s straight-sets victory silenced Riggs’ claims of sexual superiority and brought further attention to the women’s game (which now draws more fans than, but still not equal prize-money to, the men’s game).

The late 1970s was notable mostly for the emergence of the naturalized American Martina Navratilova. Czech-born Navratilova developed a game more akin to the men (serve and volley), forcing American baseline players like Chris Evert and Tracey Austin either to improve the power and accuracy of their baseline shots or increase the range of their games. As a result the men’s and women’s games are now closer to each other in style and power than was the case prior to Navratilova’s ascendancy.

The introduction of new rackets in the 1980s and 1990s has radically altered both the women’s and men’s games. Gone are the old wooden rackets, which produced power in proportion to their weight. The new graphite composite rackets are light and powerful, and allow for much greater spin with a flick of the wrist. In part this accounts for the lessening appeal of the men’s game (dominated by Pete Sampras’ power game) as compared with the women’s. The injection of power into the women’s game has broadened its appeal; it is fast killing the men’s as the importance of the serve has increased.