The USTA began on May 21, 1881 in NYC’s Fifth Avenue Hotel. (Photo Courtesy of the USTA)
Richard Sears was a 19-year-old college student when he captured the very first U.S. Championships singles title in 1881. Among the first American players to hit a topspin forehand, Sears went on to win the singles championship seven times in a row and also won the doubles title six times—five of them with his cousin Dr. James Dwight, who taught him the game and is considered the “father of American tennis.”
As dominant as the cousins were as a doubles tandem, their most significant match proved to be one they lost. In August 1880, Sears and Dwight traveled to New York’s Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club to compete in the first tennis tournament of national interest, the game of tennis having been introduced to the United States only six years earlier. They won their opening-round doubles match but lost handily in the second round. Dwight promptly lodged a protest against the tennis balls, which he felt were “lighter, smaller, and softer” than the English-made balls to which he and Sears had become accustomed in their native Boston. According to Sears, “At this time dealers here had been selling any sort of ball, stamping them, without any recognized authority, ‘Regulation.’ Hardly any two dealers used the same weight or size.”
Emelius H. Outerbridge, the Staten Island Club’s secretary, backed up Sears and Dwight’s complaint. Stating that the sport’s rules and regulations needed to be standardized, Outerbridge called on clubs where lawn tennis was played to establish an association to “govern the game of tennis throughout the whole of the United States.” Such an association, he hoped, would also serve “the better promotion and interest of the game at large.”
On May 21, 1881, Outerbridge and Dwight joined representatives from 34 clubs based in six northeastern states for a lawn tennis convention at New York City’s Fifth Avenue Hotel. A constitution for a tennis association, drafted by Outerbridge, was presented to the convention and was quickly adopted. The new association—the nation’s first sports governing body—was called the United States National Lawn Tennis Association, a name that would be shortened in 1975 to the United States Tennis Association (USTA).