Grand Slam (tennis)

The Grand Slam in tennis is the achievement of winning all four major championships in one discipline in a calendar year. In doubles, a Grand Slam may be achieved as a team or as an individual with different partners. Winning all four major championships consecutively but not within the same calendar year is referred to as a "non-calendar-year Grand Slam", while winning the four majors at any point during the course of a career is known as a "Career Grand Slam".

The term Grand Slam is also attributed to the Grand Slam tournaments, referred to as Grand Slams or Majors, and they are the world's four most important annual professional tennis tournaments. They offer the most ranking points, prize money, public and media attention, the greatest strength and size of the field and, in recent years, the longest matches for men (best of five sets, best of three for the women). The tournaments are overseen by the International Tennis Federation (ITF), rather than the separate men's and women's tour organizing bodies, the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and Women's Tennis Association (WTA), but both the ATP and WTA award ranking points based on players' performances in them.

The four Grand Slam tournaments are the Australian Open in January, the French Open from late May to early June, Wimbledon in late June to early July, and the US Open in late August to early September, with each played over two weeks. The Australian and the US tournaments are played on hard courts, the French on clay court, and Wimbledon on grass court. Wimbledon is the oldest tournament, founded in 1877, followed by the US in 1881, the French in 1891 (major in 1925), and the Australian in 1905, but it was not until 1923 that all four were designated as "Official Championships".

With the growing popularity of tennis, and with the hopes of unifying the sport's rules internationally, the British and French tennis associations started discussions at their Davis Cup tie, and in October 1912 organized a meeting in Paris, joined by the Australasian, Austrian, Belgian, Spanish, and Swiss associations. They subsequently formed the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF), holding their first meeting in 1913, joined by the Danish, German, Dutch, Russian, South African, and Swedish organizations. Voting rights were divided based on the perceived importance of the individual countries, with Great Britain's Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) receiving the maximum six votes. Three tournaments were established, being designated as "World Championships":

The LTA was given the perpetual right to organize the World Grass Court Championships, to be held at Wimbledon, and France received permission to stage the World Hard Court Championships until 1916. Anthony Wilding of New Zealand won all three of these World Championships in 1913.

The United States National Lawn Tennis Association (USNLTA) expressed disagreement over the power distribution within the ILTF and the designation of "World Championship" status to the British and French tournaments, and thus initially refused to join the Federation, choosing instead to be bystanders to their meetings. By the 1920s, with the World Covered Court Championships failing to attract top players and the growing success of American and Australian tennis, the ILTF worked to convince the USNLTA to join them, meeting their demand to drop the designation of "World Championships" from all three tournaments in March 1923, which led to the demise of both the World Covered Court Championships and the World Hard Court Championships. A new category of "Official Championships" was created for the national championships of Britain, France, Australia, and the US. By the 1930s, these four tournaments had become well defined as the most prestigious in the sport.

In 1933, Jack Crawford won the Australian, French, and Wimbledon Championships, leaving him just needing to win the last major event of the year, the U.S. Championships, to become the reigning champion of all four major tournaments, a feat described as "a grand slam" by sports columnist Alan J. Gould of The Reading Eagle, and later that year by John Kieran of The New York Times, who stated that if Crawford won at Forest Hills it "would be something like scoring a grand slam on the courts, doubled and vulnerable." The term 'Grand Slam' originates from the card game contract bridge, where it is used for winning all possible tricks. In golf it was used for the first time to describe a total of four wins, specifically Bobby Jones' achievement of winning the four major golf tournaments of the era, which he accomplished in 1930. "Grand Slam" or "Slam" has since also become used to refer to the tournaments individually. The first player to win all four majors in a calendar year and thus complete a Grand Slam was Don Budge in 1938.

At the time, only amateur players were allowed to participate in the Grand Slam and other ILTF-sanctioned tournaments. Amateur standing, regulated by the ILTF alongside its associated national federations, forbade players from receiving prize money, earning pay by teaching tennis, being contracted by promoters and playing paid exhibition matches, though expense payments were allowed along with certain monies from sporting goods companies or other benefactors. Amateurs who "defected" to become professional were banned from competing in amateur tournaments and dropped from their national associations. The first major professional tour was established in 1926 by promoter C. C. Pyle with a troupe of American and French players, most notably Suzanne Lenglen, playing exhibition matches to paying audiences.