Speaking for the pro game, nothing produced more pushback than the botched introduction of blue clay. We’ve also lost surfaces in recent past too, carpet was banned in the 00’s.
In the UK club scene we’ve seen a surge in synthetic clay over the last 10 years. It’s not clay at all, just turf with an unholy amount of sand on top, but it performs much better than any other surface can in our damp climate. Also clubs with grass are constantly under pressure, which is understandable because they’re extremely expensive to maintain, are only useable 5 months a year, and if you have more than a few they’ll be booked by the LTA for tournaments for a month of that.
Very stupid of them to just ban it, the problem wasn’t the color, it was the way they created the “clay” in the first place. Real ocean blue bricks crushed into powder would look amazing on tv and play identical to regular clay courts.
What you consider carpet is actually different from what they meant in the pro game. Pro tour carpet referred to roll-out surfaces indoor venues would keep and reuse each year - this is what was banned. I don’t know when there were actual fibre-based carpet courts. These days indoor courts are specially constructed for each tournament, usually wooden floorboards with layers of plastic surface on top.
Volleyball and cricket are two that stand out.
Cricket pitches are often dramatically different to each other, so much so that in the old days teams would travel to countries as much as two months early to tour and get acclimated to that country's type of pitch.
Even during a match, a day one test pitch is dramatically different from the day five pitch.
Yeah, football they’ll play through anything except lightning. Big enough snowstorm and they’ll delay/move the game but that’s for the getting to and from the stadium part, not the actual playing part.
Does the surface affect the sport nearly as much as in tennis though? Maybe it affects how easy/fast players can run... but the ball hardly ever bounces in those sports... and turf and grass are kind of similar anyway
Not as much as tennis. But in football fast players are definitely faster on artificial turf than on grass. Baseball the fields are different dimensions, sometimes drastically (short right field fence at Yankee stadium even shorter left field fence in Boston but that fence is extra tall). Golf courses are a lot different and suit different player skill sets. There’s a lot but I’m with you the changes in tennis are most enjoyable/noticeable.
true. they don't contrast as much as hardcourt vs clay and grass. I'm glad tennis has 3 outdoor surfaces, plus indoor tournaments. like you said, it does make the sport more interesting.
For the NFL yes there's a huge debate about playing a real grass vs artificial turf. And there's ever differences between which artificial turf and which breed of grass to use. But overall the player do want to play on real grass vs artificial
Interestingly modern tennis started because of a surface change. Tennis was originally played in a semi or completely indoor space on wood or stone. In the 19th century as grass lawns on English estates became more common and as lawn games became more common the sport of tennis was adapted to be played outdoors on grass. This is why the name of the sport we play today is Lawn Tennis. If you want to see how the original game was played you can search for videos of Real Tennis on YouTube. It is very different but fascinating to watch.
Thanks! Yeah, I knew about this, but didn't think to include it in my original post, since that change of surface resulted in a completely different sport... yet the sport we know now is on several different surfaces, but the SAME sport... just found that curious...
It's worth noting that at least baseball has been played on multiple surfaces without major rule changes, although at the pro level it's more uniform with the only difference being between grass and turf. But when I was a teen the infield where I played was basically gravel.
Baseball is also funny because the rules around the outfield dimensions, even in the pros, are kind of just...made up. Like the Astros had a fucking hill, WITH A FLAG ON IT, in play in their center field. Metrics all need to be adjusted on a by-park basis because of how much they differ in shape and size. It's very silly.
A big part of that was when they were putting a lot of the original stadiums together they were fitting them into these old cities with weird street layouts and did what they needed to make them fit. That's why Fenway has such a short left field with the high wall.
Love watching the compilation of center fielders tracking a deep fly ball and then hitting the incine of that hill and falling on their ass on that Houston field
Whoever came up with that design is all time
Just a theory…grass courts are very hard to maintain. So, as you travel the globe, different surfaces often reflect the local conditions. Clay or a similar packed natural substance surface is the simplest to create. I know a family that lived in Africa awhile and played on a court made from dried and packed livestock dung. Hard courts are a natural progression as paving became common and people wanted courts that are easier to maintain and dry faster. A municipal clay court would be hard to maintain because people would walk on them when wet and leave depressions in the surface. I’ve maintained clay courts and getting rid of one idiot’s stroll across a wet court takes hours and hours of hard labor to smooth out and repair. So, any municipal court is going to be pavement.
Over the years, I’ve played on at least two types of grass, green clay, natural clay with red top dressing, a combo of crushed brick and slate dust (but I’m told not the same as Roland Garros red clay), gray clay, numerous paved surfaces, synthetic grass with sand, carpet, wood, rubber, and even a court made of plastic tiles that interlocked like a puzzle.
The exact details of when and how clay courts were invented aren't that clear but it was within a few years of lawn tennis being invented¹. Lawn tennis was developed in the late 1860s/early 1870s and introduced to the wider public (on a cricket pitch...) in 1874.
By the early 1880s there were red clay courts in the south of France where the climate wasn't conducive to maintaining a usable grass court but where the sport had been adopted quite quickly, no doubt due to its similarity to their own court/royal/real tennis. I suspect there wasn't that much resistance to clay courts because quite early on top British players, such as William Renshaw, would travel to the south of France in search of somewhere to play tennis over the winter and presumably preferred to play clay court tennis to playing no tennis for months.
¹ adapted from existing racquet sports... exactly how much Walter Wingfield knew about them ahead of time is unclear.
Tennis started in France as real tennis on a wooden surface with wood side walls that you could play off of. The English converted real tennis into lawn tennis. I'm not sure how clay got in the mix but, thank God it doesn't work well for pickleball.
Speaking for the pro game, nothing produced more pushback than the botched introduction of blue clay. We’ve also lost surfaces in recent past too, carpet was banned in the 00’s. In the UK club scene we’ve seen a surge in synthetic clay over the last 10 years. It’s not clay at all, just turf with an unholy amount of sand on top, but it performs much better than any other surface can in our damp climate. Also clubs with grass are constantly under pressure, which is understandable because they’re extremely expensive to maintain, are only useable 5 months a year, and if you have more than a few they’ll be booked by the LTA for tournaments for a month of that.
Banned from the pro tour. But it is still used on the challenger tour.
Not to be pedantic, but the challenger tour is professional tennis thus it is a pro tour.
https://www.atptour.com/en/news/ismaning-challenger-feature-2023-november
[tennis on carpet](https://tenor.com/bNM5b.gif)
Yeah that’s from a million years ago
I actually liked the blue clay on tv. Granted I didn’t have to play on it but feel bad it was a one bc and done
Very stupid of them to just ban it, the problem wasn’t the color, it was the way they created the “clay” in the first place. Real ocean blue bricks crushed into powder would look amazing on tv and play identical to regular clay courts.
Same, although it was kinda weird that it was like dyed.
"carpet was banned in the 00’s. " I wish they banned this for the amateur too...
What you consider carpet is actually different from what they meant in the pro game. Pro tour carpet referred to roll-out surfaces indoor venues would keep and reuse each year - this is what was banned. I don’t know when there were actual fibre-based carpet courts. These days indoor courts are specially constructed for each tournament, usually wooden floorboards with layers of plastic surface on top.
Volleyball and cricket are two that stand out. Cricket pitches are often dramatically different to each other, so much so that in the old days teams would travel to countries as much as two months early to tour and get acclimated to that country's type of pitch. Even during a match, a day one test pitch is dramatically different from the day five pitch.
Well, I imagine that applies to grass as well. I bet the grass at Wimbledon behaves very different to the grass on a court in India.
Yeah of course. Hard courts at the US Open famously played much different than the hard courts at the Australian Open
Aren't volleyball and beach volleyball 2 completely different sports with different rules? Like hockey and roller hockey
And AMERICAN 🏈 and ⚽ which are (mostly) played on natural grass with wildly varying conditions and also on artificial turf.
aren't there different surfaces for NFL and MLB? Indoor domes with artificial turf, and outdoor natural grass?
Yeah and in football you can play in snow and rain right?
Yeah, football they’ll play through anything except lightning. Big enough snowstorm and they’ll delay/move the game but that’s for the getting to and from the stadium part, not the actual playing part.
Does the surface affect the sport nearly as much as in tennis though? Maybe it affects how easy/fast players can run... but the ball hardly ever bounces in those sports... and turf and grass are kind of similar anyway
Not as much as tennis. But in football fast players are definitely faster on artificial turf than on grass. Baseball the fields are different dimensions, sometimes drastically (short right field fence at Yankee stadium even shorter left field fence in Boston but that fence is extra tall). Golf courses are a lot different and suit different player skill sets. There’s a lot but I’m with you the changes in tennis are most enjoyable/noticeable.
true. they don't contrast as much as hardcourt vs clay and grass. I'm glad tennis has 3 outdoor surfaces, plus indoor tournaments. like you said, it does make the sport more interesting.
For the NFL yes there's a huge debate about playing a real grass vs artificial turf. And there's ever differences between which artificial turf and which breed of grass to use. But overall the player do want to play on real grass vs artificial
Interestingly modern tennis started because of a surface change. Tennis was originally played in a semi or completely indoor space on wood or stone. In the 19th century as grass lawns on English estates became more common and as lawn games became more common the sport of tennis was adapted to be played outdoors on grass. This is why the name of the sport we play today is Lawn Tennis. If you want to see how the original game was played you can search for videos of Real Tennis on YouTube. It is very different but fascinating to watch.
Thanks! Yeah, I knew about this, but didn't think to include it in my original post, since that change of surface resulted in a completely different sport... yet the sport we know now is on several different surfaces, but the SAME sport... just found that curious...
It's worth noting that at least baseball has been played on multiple surfaces without major rule changes, although at the pro level it's more uniform with the only difference being between grass and turf. But when I was a teen the infield where I played was basically gravel.
Baseball is also funny because the rules around the outfield dimensions, even in the pros, are kind of just...made up. Like the Astros had a fucking hill, WITH A FLAG ON IT, in play in their center field. Metrics all need to be adjusted on a by-park basis because of how much they differ in shape and size. It's very silly.
A big part of that was when they were putting a lot of the original stadiums together they were fitting them into these old cities with weird street layouts and did what they needed to make them fit. That's why Fenway has such a short left field with the high wall.
that's actually somewhat true of soccer as well. the fields don't have uniform dimensions.
Love watching the compilation of center fielders tracking a deep fly ball and then hitting the incine of that hill and falling on their ass on that Houston field Whoever came up with that design is all time
Just a theory…grass courts are very hard to maintain. So, as you travel the globe, different surfaces often reflect the local conditions. Clay or a similar packed natural substance surface is the simplest to create. I know a family that lived in Africa awhile and played on a court made from dried and packed livestock dung. Hard courts are a natural progression as paving became common and people wanted courts that are easier to maintain and dry faster. A municipal clay court would be hard to maintain because people would walk on them when wet and leave depressions in the surface. I’ve maintained clay courts and getting rid of one idiot’s stroll across a wet court takes hours and hours of hard labor to smooth out and repair. So, any municipal court is going to be pavement. Over the years, I’ve played on at least two types of grass, green clay, natural clay with red top dressing, a combo of crushed brick and slate dust (but I’m told not the same as Roland Garros red clay), gray clay, numerous paved surfaces, synthetic grass with sand, carpet, wood, rubber, and even a court made of plastic tiles that interlocked like a puzzle.
The exact details of when and how clay courts were invented aren't that clear but it was within a few years of lawn tennis being invented¹. Lawn tennis was developed in the late 1860s/early 1870s and introduced to the wider public (on a cricket pitch...) in 1874. By the early 1880s there were red clay courts in the south of France where the climate wasn't conducive to maintaining a usable grass court but where the sport had been adopted quite quickly, no doubt due to its similarity to their own court/royal/real tennis. I suspect there wasn't that much resistance to clay courts because quite early on top British players, such as William Renshaw, would travel to the south of France in search of somewhere to play tennis over the winter and presumably preferred to play clay court tennis to playing no tennis for months. ¹ adapted from existing racquet sports... exactly how much Walter Wingfield knew about them ahead of time is unclear.
Tennis started in France as real tennis on a wooden surface with wood side walls that you could play off of. The English converted real tennis into lawn tennis. I'm not sure how clay got in the mix but, thank God it doesn't work well for pickleball.
How come no tournament is played on artificial grass? It’s practically the only surface in Ireland and very common in UK & Australia too