Drive across the southernmost span that connects New York with New Jersey and you are on the Outerbridge Crossing, named in honor of Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge, the first chairman of what is today the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. You won’t find his name memorialized at any tennis center, club, or institution. He has yet to be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame—unlike his sister, Mary, who may have set up America’s first tennis court. Yet without his visionary efforts 140 years ago, we might not be watching the US Open today.
E. H. Outerbridge was just 20 years old in 1880, when he came up with the idea of holding “a grand national championship tournament.” Lawn tennis—an outdoor version of the centuries-old game of court-tennis—had been invented in England six years earlier and spread quickly across America. By the time Outerbridge began to formulate his plan for the first national championship, “more than 10,000 tennis sets have been sold in this City to be forwarded to all parts of the country,” The New York Times reported.
Outerbridge approached the directors of the Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club, on the north shore of Staten Island, where he was the club secretary, and persuaded them they could hold a successful event. Newspapers spread the word about the tournament, and 23 players arrived to play singles on September 1, 1880, including three from Flushing, N.Y., now the home of the US Open.
James Dwight, a 28-eight-year-old physician from the Boston area who much preferred playing lawn tennis to practicing medicine, traveled to Staten Island with his new tennis partner, Richard Sears, the 18-year-old younger brother of Fred Sears, Dwight’s usual doubles teammate.
Right off the bat, Dwight started complaining about the tennis balls, which he claimed were “lighter, smaller, and softer” than the Ayres English balls to which they had become accustomed in Boston and which were required by the tournament regulations. The officials looked into the matter and decided not to replace the balls since they had already been used in singles matches.
Displeased by the club’s decision, Dwight filed a formal protest. Then he and Sears went on the court and won their opening match. Although they lost their next match that afternoon, the tournament marked the debut of American tennis’s first great doubles duo. Between 1882 and 1887, Dwight and Sears won five U.S. National Championships—now the US Open—a total matched only by Bob Bryan and Mike Bryan nearly one-and-a-quarter centuries later.
Outerbridge, like Dwight, was upset by the controversy. When complaints about the balls, as well as the net height, arose a few months later during an interclub tournament, he decided something needed to be done about “such essential differences in the rules of the game.” He began contacting other clubs where lawn tennis was being played to invite their cooperation in forming a national association to “govern the game of tennis throughout the whole of the United States.”
By spring 1881, Outerbridge had completed his organizing work and was ready to unveil his plan publicly. On April 24, the Times announced there would be a lawn tennis convention the next month to “adopt one code of rules and one ball to govern the game throughout the United States.” Two weeks later, the magazine American Cricketeer, which would become American lawn tennis’s official publication, printed a more detailed call for the meeting, to be held the following month in New York City. The announcement was signed at the bottom by Outerbridge, Dwight, and another official.
“I wrote the original letter first to the leading organizations to invite their cooperation in organizing such an association, and then later to all of the other recognized clubs." —E. H. Outerbridge
Thirty-five lawn tennis clubs, representing different parts of the country, answered the call to form what would become America’s first national governing body for a sport. Their delegates met on Saturday evening, May 21, at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a five-story, block-long building along Madison Square. Although the call for the organization proposed adopting the name, "United States Lawn Tennis Association," the word “National” was added at the meeting—and remained in place until 1975, when the name was shortened to the United States Tennis Association, or USTA.
All of the convention’s proceedings were orchestrated by Outerbridge, who not only prepared the agenda but had a constitution already drafted, which the delegates swiftly adopted. He was also placed on the committee that nominated the association’s first officers. Dwight would step into the role of president a year later, and wound up heading the association for 21 years—more than a dozen years longer than any other USTA president—and guided it through the sport’s early decades of growth.
Outerbridge, who became a successful businessman, never took a leadership position in the sport following the convention. Perhaps his preference to pull strings behind the scenes and leave the administration of the sport to others explains why he seems to have been forgotten by history.
Before the 1881 convention ended, the delegates addressed the issue that had brought them together in the first place: standardizing the rules and equipment. A version of the rules was adopted, and general agreement was reached on the ball size and weight. The official ball chosen was the Ayres ball, the English ball Dwight had argued for during the 1880 championship.
A month later, the new association made a pair of landmark decisions: to hold the first official U.S. National Championship that same summer and to stage it at the year-old Casino in Newport, R.I., which had hosted a tournament after the Staten Island championship and had impressed everyone as an attractive place to play. Only players belonging to clubs that had joined the association were allowed to enter the upcoming championship. The entry fee was set at $5.00, which permitted clubs to enter up to four singles players and two doubles teams, and 50 clubs signed up.
The 1881 USTA National Championships got underway on Wednesday morning, August 31, with 25 men competing in singles. Play began in “the presence of a large and brilliant assemblage,” reported the Times, and was accompanied by a string quartet playing classical music. Because there were no grandstands at the Casino, spectators sat by the roped-off courts on stools or chairs, two to three rows deep. Late-comers had to stand. “A large number of the players wore knickerbockers, with blazers, belts, cravats, and woolen stockings in their club colors,” observed Richard Sears.
A bespectacled Harvard student, Sears confounded the other players with his volleying tactics—a major departure from the customary style of singles play, which was to stand at the baseline and take the ball on the bounce. Although he and Dwight lost in the second round in doubles, Sears won all five of his singles matches without losing a set and received a medal for capturing the singles title at the first U.S. National Championships because there had not been enough time to create a silver trophy.
Sears would make up for the omission. The next year, he began amassing a collection of U.S. National Championship trophies no man in tournament history has rivaled. Even though nearly every player came to adopt Sears’ playing style, he never lost another singles or doubles match at the tournament. America’s first bona fide tennis superstar, he won the first seven U.S. National Championships singles titles, to go along with six consecutive doubles championships, and left the game at age 26 with a record that still holds today: 13 U.S. National Championship men’s crowns.
Thanks to Outerbridge and his pioneering work to get American tennis and the national championship up and running, the exploits of Dwight and Sears—and all of the other players who have followed them—is history.
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