1583 Nanteuil
1608 Rollo's
1675 Mitelli
1767 Garsault
Modern Court Tennis Racquet
Adapted from Tennis: Origins and Mysteries by Malcolm D. Whitman.
best record in the house.” The world championship, played every two years, is not a regular tournament. Once a challenger is determined (in the old days by committee fiat; more recently by a series of matches weeks earlier elsewhere), he faces the champion in a nerve-wracking, soul-sapping, mano-a-mano format: best of thirteen sets spread out over three days. Tasmanian versus South Carolinian. Fahey’s challenger, Camden Riviere, turned twenty-nine during the world championship. He had wanted to be world champion since he was seven years old and first playing the game in Aiken, a hamlet just over the border from Augusta, GA. A child prodigy, Riviere turned pro at seventeen and almost beat Fahey when they met in the world championship in 2008 at Fontainebleau, outside Paris. After a meteoric rise, a sharp fall. He bounced around, leaving college after a semester, working as a court tennis pro in Boston and then living in Charleston. He damaged both wrists and tore the labrum in his shoulder. After nearly a year off, he returned in 2012 and went on a tear. He topped the world rankings, won Slams left and right and never lost to Fahey again, six matches on the trot— except for the 2014 world championship in
Two hundred years ago was the first recorded match contesting the world championship of court tennis. The latest champion until May, Rob Fahey, held the title for twenty-two years—court tennis measures its champions as much by a royal reign as by titles won. Fahey was utterly brilliant, mentally tough, strong as an ox, crackling with life. He was dominant—he has notched a record forty-eight Grand Slam titles. He has been an athletic marvel of all- time but because this is court tennis he is almost completely unknown. Born and raised in Tasmania, Fahey took a job as an assistant pro at the court tennis club in Hobart, Australia having never played the game once. After a picaresque apprenticeship that included a year house-sitting in a French chateau while training at the court in Bordeaux, Fahey won the world championship in 1994 and never relinquished it. Now forty-eight, silver-haired, Fahey was based in London, worked part-time as a broker at Marianas Capital Markets and recently married Claire Fahey, the women’s world champion; in April they had their first baby, Sophie. “Claire is an incredible athlete,” Fahey said of his wife who has the best handicap rating of any woman ever. “I ended up marrying the one person who will smash all my records. I’ll have the second-
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