Spare a thought for tennis fans who find themselves answering dozens of questions from their friends who are now on the Australian Open bandwagon.
"Why can't they use the big boxes on the outside of the court?," they'll inevitably be asked. "That's the tramlines, it's used for doubles," they'll grumpily reply. "Why are they grunting so loud," their loved ones will inevitably question again. "Because they're trying their best," the even grumpier tennis fan will reply.
Yet, there is always one question non-tennis watchers ask which will, almost certainly, trump even the most diehard racket fanatics. "The scoring system...why is it 15, 30, 40 and game, instead of 15, 30, 45?" Until recently, few, if any, had an answer to that question.
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The scoring system has been one of the greatest mysteries in the sport. In fact, there are various explanations as to why it is what it is. Tennis, or many variations of the sport, has its roots all the way back to the days of Henry VIII.
Before the beheading loving former King of England piled on the timber, he was an athletic man who enjoyed playing tennis in the 16th century. That's how old the sport is.
The scoring system, which sees players start each game at zero (which is known as love) dates all the way back to the Victorian period. In it's earliest years, the scoring system went 15, 30, 45, which makes sense from a mathematical perspective. Legend says, 45 was changed to 40 in the 16th century so they could shorten the word, according to Heiner Gillmeister, a linguistics scholar from Germany.
What other unusual traditions in sport can you remember? Let us know in the comment section below
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DAZNHowever, the origins of the scoring system became a topic of huge debate in a comment section within the Guardian. One fan wrote: "Tennis scores were shown in the middle ages on two clock faces which went from 0 to 60. On each score the pointer moved round a quarter from 0 to 15, 30, 45 and a win on 60. Somehow the forty five got truncated to forty when the clock faces dropped out of use.
"Zero was shown as an oval - an egg shape - 'l'oeuf' in French, giving us 'love' for no points. 'Tennis' probably derives from French 'Tenez!'" Others also claimed the scoring system was inspired by a clock, saying: "The scoring was originally done using a clock face - hence 0, 15, 30, 45. But 45 was too long to say so it was changed to 40."
All the different theories and explanations would be fun to debate at the local, if anybody was to skip the typical boozer conversations for the intricate history of tennis. However, in the same way football's greatest fence sitters like to boringly tell fans to not compare Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo and simply enjoy them, one of the sport's great scholars says the different historical explanations are what makes the sport fun.
“I don’t think anybody really knows how it started or why it developed how it did,” Elizabeth Wilson, the writer of 'Love Game:A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon' said in a previous interview with Time. “That’s partly what makes tennis into a kind of romantic game, because it had all this history that isn’t really history, it’s legend more than actual history. Some of the ideas about how it began are quite fanciful.”
