The Grand Slam in tennis is the achievement of winning all four major championships in one discipline in a calendar year. In doubles, a team may accomplish the Grand Slam playing together or a player may achieve it 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".[1][2]
The Grand Slam tournaments, also referred to as majors, 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 field, and 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),[3] rather than the separate men 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.[4]
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With the growing popularity of tennis, and with the hopes of unifying the sport's rules internationally,[5] 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.[6] 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.[7] 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.[8] Three tournaments were established, being designated as "World Championships":
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.[12][7] 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.[9][13] A new category of "Official Championships" was created for the national championships of Britain, France, Australia, and the US.[14][15] By the 1930s, these four tournaments had become well defined as the most prestigious in the sport.[16]
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,[17] a feat described as a "Grand Slam" by sports columnist Alan Gould of The Reading Eagle,[18] and later that year by John Kieran of The New York Times.[19][20] The term 'Grand Slam' originates from the card game contract bridge, where it is used for winning all possible tricks, and entered tennis via golf, where it was used for the first time to specifically describe a total of four wins, specifically Bobby Jones' achievement of winning the four major golf tournaments three years earlier in 1930.[20] "Grand Slam" or "Slam" has since also become used to refer to the tournaments individually.[4]
At the time, only amateur players were allowed to participate in the Grand Slam and other ILTF-sanctioned tournaments.[21] 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.[21] Amateurs who "defected" to become professional were banned from competing in amateur tournaments and dropped from their national associations. The first 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.[21][22] Over the next decades many other head-to-head tours were run and professional tournaments established,[23] with three, the U.S. Pro Tennis Championships, French Pro Championship and Wembley Championships, standing out, and now considered to have been the professional majors and equivalents to the then-amateur Grand Slam tournaments.[24] By the 1950s, largely due to efforts of player/promoter Jack Kramer, this lucrative parallel circuit was luring in most of the star amateurs on the men's side, much to the ire of the ILTF and organizers of the Grand Slam tournaments.[25] It was an open secret that those that remained as amateurs were receiving under-the-table payments from their national associations to dissuade them from joining the pro ranks and secure their availability for the majors and Davis Cup, a practice derisively referred to as 'shamateurism' that was seen as undermining the integrity of the sport.[26]
Organized by the Fdration franaise de tennis (FFT), formerly known as the Fdration Franaise de Lawn Tennis until 1976,[66] the French Open is the only Grand Slam tournament played on a red clay surface.[67] It is generally considered to be the most physically demanding tennis tournament in the world.[68][69]
Wimbledon is organized by a committee of management consisting of nineteen members, with twelve being club members and the remaining seven nominated by the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA).[76][77] As the world's oldest tennis event,[78] it is widely regarded as the most prestigious tennis tournament,[79] and it is known for its commitment to longstanding traditions and guidelines.[80] It is one of few tournaments and the only Grand Slam event that is still played on grass courts,[81] tennis's original surface, and where "lawn tennis" originated in the 1800s.[82] Players are required to wear all-white attire during matches,[83] and they are referred to as "Gentlemen" and "Ladies".[84] There is also a tradition where the players are asked to bow or curtsy towards the Royal Box upon entering or leaving Centre Court when either the Prince of Wales or the monarch are present.[85]
The ILTF officially designated it as a major tournament in 1923.[9] Today, the event has draws that host 256 singles players, 128 doubles teams and 32 mixed doubles teams, with the total prize money for the 2020 tournament being US$53,400,000,[106] and a US television viewership of 700,000.[107][108] Since 2004, the tournament has been preceded by the US Open Series, composed of North American hardcourt professional tournaments that lead up to and culminate with the US Open itself.[109] The season is organized by the USTA as a way to focus more attention on American tennis tournaments by getting more of them on domestic television.[45]
In 1982, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) began offering a $1 million bonus to any singles player to win the four majors consecutively regardless the tournaments order of winning them while the Men's International Professional Tennis Council, which was the governing body of men's professional tennis at the time, stated that 'Grand Slam' need not necessarily be won in the same year. This revision by the Council and reportedly the ITF was approved by the representatives of the four Grand Slam tournaments at Wimbledon.[111][112] However, in a 1983 letter from ITF General Secretary David Gray to tennis journalist Paul Fein, Gray claimed that it was never the intention of ITF to alter anything regarding the definition of the classic Grand Slam.[113]
When Martina Navratilova won the 1984 French Open and became the reigning champion of all four women's singles discipline, she was the first player to receive the bonus prize in recognition of her achievement. Some media outlets did, indeed, say that she had won a Grand Slam.[115][116] Curry Kirkpatrick of Sports Illustrated wrote "Whether the Slam was Grand or Bland or a commercial sham tainted with an asterisk the size of a tennis ball, Martina Navratilova finally did it."[117]
Soon after the Open Era began in 1968, the new professional tours each held a year-end championship; elite tournaments featuring only the top performers of the season. The return of tennis to the Olympics in 1988 gave rise to the notion of a "Super Slam" as a combination of the Golden Slam and year-end championship title.[139][140][141] The year-end championships are currently the ATP Finals for the men's tour, WTA Finals for the women's tour, and the Wheelchair Tennis Masters for the wheelchair tennis tour.
Several players have won three of the four majors in the same year, missing out on the Grand Slam by only one title, an achievement sometimes referred to as a "Three-Quarter Slam".[145][146][147] In five notable instances, singles players won the first three events of the year and went to the final major tournament with the opportunity to complete the calendar-year Grand Slam but lost. These were Jack Crawford in 1933,[148] Lew Hoad in 1956,[149] and Novak Djokovic in 2021[150] in men's tennis, and Martina Navratilova in 1984[151] and Serena Williams in 2015[152] in women's tennis.
Since their inceptions, the French Open has been contested on clay or sand courts and Wimbledon on grass courts, surfaces that favor very distinct play styles from each other.[159] Wimbledon usually starts a few weeks after the end of the French Open,[160] meaning that the players who have deep runs in the French Open have little time to recover mentally and physically and to adapt to the different surface conditions found at Wimbledon. This has thus made winning both tournaments consecutively in the same year considered to be one of the challenging feats in a tennis season.[161][162] Players who do so are said to have achieved a "Channel Slam",[160] in reference to the English Channel, the body of water separating France from the United Kingdom, the host countries of the French Open and Wimbledon.[160] In singles tennis, this feat has been achieved by 12 men and 10 women. In the Open Era, Rod Laver, Bjrn Borg, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic are the only players to accomplish the feat in men's singles, and Margaret Court, Evonne Goolagong, Billie Jean King, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf and Serena Williams in women's singles.[160][161][163] e24fc04721
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