Tennis champion keeps it real

1:19pm Thursday 13th December 2007

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Before Wimbledon made lawn tennis popular, another game kept the royal court active. REBECCA LOWE tries out her 'bobble', 'poop' and 'pique'.

"It's really very simple," I was told the first time I ventured along to play real tennis - the forerunner of lawn tennis - at the Burroughs Club at Middlesex University, Hendon. "The scoring is just like normal tennis. Except you have chases, which happen if the ball bounces twice at the server's end, and hazards, which happen at the receiver's end, and if two chases occur during a game, you change ends and play it out - oh, and if you hit it in the dedans, you automatically win a point..."

Sounds painful, I thought. But hey, I'll give it a go - and proceeded to spend the next 45 minutes waving my racquet in the air as if being besieged by swarms of invisible flies while streams of balls rocketed past me into the rafters.

Real tennis, it turns out, is straightforward in the same way that the Rubik's Cube or Times cryptic crossword is straightforward - easy for those who have dedicated their life to mastering its complexities, but a complete bleedin' nightmare of frustration, ineptitude and embarrassment for the rest of us.

To me, it wouldn't look out of place in a Lewis Carroll book; the kind of game you might expect to play at the bottom of a rabbit hole where talking caterpillars smoke hookahs and croquet mallets are made from flamingoes.

Ok, maybe not quite. But everything about it is just a little bit odd: the warped racquets, the handmade melton cloth balls, the tinkling bells and colourful sloping roofs. Even a serve is not just a serve, it is a "railroad", a "bobble", a "poop", "pique" or "giraffe".

So is it just our natural British affinity for the absurd that attracts us to the game? With five players ranked in the top eight in the world, we are the true masters at the sport - despite the fact that world champion Rob Fahey, who won the International Real Tennis Professionals Association (IRTPA) tournament at the Burroughs Club last week, is an Aussie and has retained the title since 1994.

Fahey, 39, says it was the "fun aspect" of the game that first attracted him. "There is nothing boring about it. Every new game is a new experience, every court is different. You are constantly adjusting."

British number one and world number three Ruaraidh Gunn got hooked on real tennis 16 years ago in Bordeaux. He believes it is the difficulty of the game that is its main attraction.

"Once you grasp the rules, it challenges you," he says, sipping champagne at the VIP bash after his IRTPA finals defeat to Fahey. "It is so much about physics and understanding spins and angles. It's fascinating to discover all the different ways of hitting the ball to outfox your opponent."

Players all agree that real tennis is not a sport of half-measures. You either play it once and flounce off-court in a stormy fit of humiliation, or you get obsessed. But if the game is so brilliant, why are there only 46 courts and a few thousand players in the world?

Perhaps it has something to do with its elitist lineage. A corruption of "Royal Tennis", its name comes from the patronage it enjoyed in the sixteenth century from the French Royal family, with many subsequent Kings continuing the tradition. Although Queen Elizabeth has not shown a great passion for defending her dedans, son Edward is a passionate patron of the sport. It even helped him find a bride, meeting PR girl Sophie Rhys-Jones at a challenge event in 1993.

But Fahey and others are keen to change this image. After all, now we Brits are officially rubbish at football, surely we need it more than ever. Rugby league star Ellery Hanley, who attended the IRTPA final, certainly seems to think so.

"I think it's fantastic. I like the weight of the racquet, the speed of the ball, everything. I felt privileged to be watching these players, who have achieved so much."

So comedy spectacle or future national pastime? You decide: call the Burroughs Club on 020 8411 6768 and take up their offer of a free lesson for anyone who has never played the game before.