In the back-to-back seasons of 1904 and 1905, the violence at the heart of football was so extreme, the future Great American Pastime was on the brink of existence. A whopping 37 prep and college players died of football-related football, causing universities like Stanford and Duke to drop their programs. Saving the pigskin found noted gridiron and mustache-enthusiast Teddy Roosevelt using his presidential bully pulpit to call for a football safety quorum. The rulebook was never the same. Among the suggestions was the “forward pass,” an alteration so shocking to the games brutish nature the New York Times reported that “many predict the ruination of the game through the drastic reformation.”

Last October, Evangel Christian Academy quarterback Peyton Houston completed 53 of 68 passes for 817 yards and eight touchdowns….

In a 77-76 overtime loss sure, but the point is, sports are evolving all the time in ways big and small. A pitch clock was added to baseball two years ago and the game now moves at a much quicker pace, a universally loved adjustment that didn’t alter the sport one iota. Various basketball entities like the G League and the Canadian Elite League have adopted the “Elam Ending,” which turns off the game clock late in the fourth quarter and teams play to a target score set by adding 8-points to the leading squad’s current point total. The Elam doesn’t guarantee a buzzer beater, but it sure beats the excessive clock-stoppage fouling that squeezes the life out of what should be the climatic final moments.

Author and tennis lifer Gabriel Allen wholeheartedly believes it’s high time his beloved sport rid itself of its colonizer roots by ditching the love-duece-ad scoring system that separates it from every other sport on Earth. His advocacy for a “tiebreaker match” is just one of the thought-provoking ideas permeating Tennis Tensions: Class, Race and Gender in the Evolution of the Sport, a book that delivers a blistering overhead smash to any number of conventional wisdoms in its tight 185-pages. Allen is a didact, but never off-putting or smug. At various points, I found myself feverishly nodding along with him that a lot of what we “know” about the history of tennis is wrong, and yes, there is a basic universal  unfairness at its core. Other times, I vociferously shook my head in defense of tradition, because honestly, who gives a shit if a casual fan feels the need to post about how they can’t understand 15-30-40? Try harder, dummy.

Tennis Tensions is never dull. And while Allen may be a contrarian, it’s from his head and his heart and not a hot take. He spoke to OPEN Tennis about the sport’s “white tennis unconscious” undergirding, his Dad’s bespoke grip, DIY book hustling, and how, fingers crossed, it may be the beginning of the end of tennis as we know it.

How did your life in tennis begin and evolve?
I usually say my tennis background began right around the time I first got consciousness. My Dad was huge into the sport, coached at Temple University. The story goes I was rallying from the baseline at age four, but then it was three… The legend is growing every year, but it was a big part of my youth. I played juniors, went to the Super Nationals and various other tournaments, but by high school I drifted away from the USTA stuff and wasn’t playing as much. I enjoyed playing on the high school team itself, but I was burned out. During my first couple of years in college at Temple, I didn’t play at all.

What got you back into it?
When my Dad retired from his professor position, I was no longer going to get free tuition at Temple, so I jumped back across the river for in-state fees. I landed at the College of New Jersey in Trenton and decided to pick up my racket again. I made the varsity tennis team and have been playing ever since. I graduated with a journalism degree some 10+ years ago, looked around, and realized it was going to be a lot easier to make a living coaching and teaching tennis than as a writer.

Brilliant decision on your part.
Yeah, it’s really worked out. I teach private lessons year-round, coach boys and girls tennis at Moorestown High School, and write in my spare time. Strangely enough, I think I’m playing the best tennis of my life, better than my collegiate years. Last summer, I had a successful grass court run in the 35-and-up Nationals at the Germantown Cricket Club outside Philadelphia, and my 73-year-old Dad and I won our first gold ball in the senior doubles tourney at Piping Rock out on Long Island.

What kind of game do you play?
Well, I’m 5’6”-and-a-half on a good day. A big serve is not really my thing. I’m left-handed, so growing up, my game was centered around athleticism to move around the court while playing a typical leftie style. Dad taught me an unusual grip I would call “extreme Continental,” which I eventually got away from. As I got older, I needed to put more pressure on opponents beyond just keeping the ball in play. I gravitated to more of a serve-and-volley game.

I ask this out of curiosity not condescension, why did you go the self-publishing route for Tennis Tensions?Around a decade ago, I had a couple of pieces in Sports Illustrated about my problems and frustrations with the tennis scoring system, a topic I had first written about in college. In 2017, I had an article in the Washington Post comparing it to the unfair ridiculous Electoral College. I thought I was done with the topic but then I read Ball Don’t Lie!: Myth, Genealogy, and Invention in the Cultures of Basketball by Yago Colas, a book about my other favorite sport. It introduced me to the notion of “white basketball unconscious,” the racial blind spots and inequities in how the sport’s origins are presented as opposed to how it actually evolved. The book stirred up a lot of ideas in me about how it applies to tennis. I began researching the sport from its earliest days and found a myriad of topics and issues beyond the archaic scoring system. It took off from there.

I knew I wanted to take my time and not be beholden to a deadline, so I never wrote up a Tennis Tensions book proposal. After five years, when I knew the book was close to being done, I showed it to a literary agent who felt it was more academic than commercial. Well, I’m not in the academic world and didn’t see the book that way. Rather than pitch it to an academic publisher and have them in turn say it was too commercial, I decided to do it myself. The financial set-up also made a difference. I get $8.50 per Amazon sale, as opposed to a buck or two from a traditional publisher.

Can you please explain what the “white tennis unconscious” is and how it’s defined the sport for most of its existence?
It’s the privileged upper-class perspective that’s shaped the narrative, rules, and etiquette since lawn tennis was introduced in 1873 by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield. Yes, he invented lawn tennis, but not out of whole cloth. He took bits and pieces of other games that already existed, so the actual lineage of tennis gets lost to time. The origin story becomes one of well-mannered pastoral English aristocracy. It sets the course of the sport being for the country club set and not for everyone else.

How did the games of badminton and rackets influence tennis, and why were they written out of the story
Badminton was originally called poona after the city in India, Pune, where it was invented. British soldiers took to the game; there’s evidence they brought it to the U.K. as far back as the 1860s. At that time, badminton was played with a rubber ball, the nets were between 5-and-6-feet, and players only served once. Originally, lawn tennis had basically the same rules and regulations, the one change in deference to the windy conditions was allowing for a single bounce. In those days, there was also a game played primarily in prisons and grimy English pubs called rackets. A ball was hit against a wall so there was no net, but was definitely around long before lawn tennis. Both sports had a simple scoring system, first to fifteen points, the same one Wingfield used.