The mentality might have been the same in Europe as well; there's a lot of grass there, too, right? But the climate and traditions were different - as were the games you played at home. You played bocce, and most of its cousin sports, on dirt, right? The priorities were different, and so were the options. I'm not really up on where the world's great stores of terre battu and clay lie, but I'm pretty sure that if the British wanted to play tennis on clay instead of grass, they had more than ample opportunity to do so. It just didn't make much sense to go that way, for reasons unrelated to why we as fans prefer one surface or another.
The French and Italians did not go with clay because they were afraid that big servers and ruthless volleyers would destroy the appeal of game, or the spectator's viewing pleasure, or because they had more television air-time to fill and thus wanted longer matches. Clay just made sense. After all, what do you need to play tennis, surface-wise? It isn't Frisbee, which can be played on fairly rugged terrain because the disk, unlike a tennis ball, doesn't ever touch the ground. The one thing tennis requires is a (literally) level playing field. Clay just happened to be a workable material that was superior to most other naturally occurring forms of ever-abundant dirt, while still being relatively easy to obtain. And when some genius came up with the idea of a loose top-dressing, clay morphed from a merely practical, bare-bones surface into an ingenious one.
You can just hear the proverbial first-man-to-play-on-clay declare: It's kind of weird at first, with all that slipping and sliding, but once you get used to it, its fun! Of course, that same sporty gent, visiting England the following year and having been invited to a game of tennis on grass, probably exclaimed: Zut alors! This stuff sure is different, I'd better learn to run up to the net!
Thus was born the great tradition of surface-driven tennis or the original and still most valid justification for using that mindless expression, Different strokes for different folks. . .
Back then, though, equipment and even the degree of importance most people assigned to sport (it was rarely seen as an activity that you became good at just for its own sake) tended to suppress the potential differences in the way the game might or should be played on different surfaces. Nobody was cracking 140 MPH aces with a lollipop-shaped wooden racket and bakery twine for sting. But as tennis evolved and became a more serious undertaking, ultimately, even a profession, the difference between surfaces, and the styles bred on those surfaces, became increasingly important.
But the International Tennis Federation was a British body, and partly for that reason The All-England Club and New York's West Side Tennis Club were way ahead of the curve when it came to promoting the game as a spectacle. Thus, grass became the most important surface in tennis. It's significant that the French Open was a "closed" to non-French players until the relatively late date of 1925, and the tournament stood in grave danger of losing its prestige as a Grand Slam event, if not the actual designation, until Philippe Chatrier embarked on what has been a wildly successful rehabilitation of the event in the mid-1970s. However you feel about it, historically and factually, the French Open was both provincial and exotic until Chatrier brilliantly converted its greatest drawback (it was the only major not played on grass) into an enormous and bewitching asset (it's the only major played on clay, the surface of choice in many parts of the world).
The divide between the surfaces began to grow smaller with the demise of grass-court tournaments, and reached critical mass when the U.S. Open abandoned grass in favor of hard courts. The Australian Open soon followed suit, and only Wimbledon's brilliant ability to retain its prestige saved that event from either oblivion - or a surface change (the effort is multi-pronged, but based on walking a tightrope between retaining its privileged place as the official shrine of tennis and keeping up with changing times - something at which few institutions are nearly as good as the All-England Club).
But at the same time, radical advances in equipment and the generation-by-generation improvement in the game and players helped sustain appreciable differences in the way the game was played by surface. The growing success of the European clay circuit also ensured that clay would not become irrelevant, even as slow hard courts threatened to make clay redundant. Instead, those hard courts seemed to highlight the beauty and novelty of tennis on clay. In a way, clay has become what grass was before the Open era - a common surface but no longer a particularly practical surface, with distinct playing properties and appealing aesthetics in a world suddenly choc-a-bloc with utilitarian, boring hard courts.
This is pretty much were we are today, but with one other noteworthy difference. Given the technologies available today, both to racket manufacturers and court-builders, maybe even because of them, clay-court tennis is like auto racing with mandated governors (devices that keep a car from going over a pre-set speed). The up-side is that you have more players in the mix, because raw horsepower, and the ability of the support personal to squeeze it out, is de-emphasized. The down-side is that the playing field is not really leveled - it's just tilted to accommodate more people.
Keep in mind that this is an act of will (maybe desire is a better word), not, as was the case in the beginning, a practical choice or unconscious part of some evolutionary process. We have the wherewithal to have a truly level playing field on which all skills - including naked power - are more equally rewarded, and all shortcomings more equally punished. In fact, we may have it at the U.S. Open, and TMF's recent dominance there supports this idea. Has there ever been a more versatile, multi-talented, weakness-free, weapon-toting pro out there? That he, as well as his buddy, Pete Sampras, haven't won the French makes a pretty good case for the argument that there's more wrong with clay than there is with Federer or Sampras.
That's okay, though, this isn't a complaint. For all the grief it brings tennis, you have to love the way the game has clung to certain traditions and convictions, the chief of which is that using different surfaces is an asset rather than a detriment to the game, and not for purely economical reasons I'll admit I erred in this when the Boston Red Sox decide to reverse the grass-dirt geometry at Fenway Park for a change of pace, or the some NBA team goes with peach baskets and a nice, hard, dirt court.
Meanwhile, I'm going to settle back and enjoy tennis on clay, the new grass.
