Sport: Recondite Racquets

Racquets is often confused with squash racquets, squash racquets with squash tennis, squash tennis with court tennis, court tennis with lawn tennis. Always recondite pastime, racquets has traversed the social gamut more completely than any other game. It started in London debtors' prisons, where no other form exercise was practical, in the 18th Century. A prison alumnus, Robert Mackay was the first recognized world's champion in 1820. In 1822, Harrow schoolboys took up the game. In 1853, when London Prince's Club built a racquets court, racquets became exclusively a pastime of patricians. Racquets' rise in the world was accompanied by...

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