Court Tennis Comes to Aiken | Cabinet of Curiosities
Aiken, a town of scarcely 30,000 people, is home to one of only ten court tennis buildings active in the United States. How did this game of royalty and tradition, played by Henry VIII himself, come to these quiet backwoods? It is a story of sportsmen building “a rustic, sporting retreat.” Court tennis, called “real tennis” outside the United States, predates our modern game of tennis (“lawn tennis”). It likely evolved from a game played in medieval courtyards that involved hitting a ball back and forth with a bare hand, later with a glove. By Renaissance times, there were hundreds of enclosed courts in Europe, and the glove had been
