The walled-court lineage

A monk steps into the cloister at dusk, somewhere in the south of France, and strikes a ball against the wall with the flat of his hand. The arcade keeps it in. The roof of the gallery sends it back at an angle he has to read on the run. There is no record of the man, no date that would hold up in a court of fact, only the shape of the thing: a ball, a hand, and a wall standing where it had always stood, suddenly part of the game. Ecclesiastical writers were complaining about clergy playing ball by the twelfth century, and one bishop, around 1200, was reprimanded for skipping evensong to do it.

That is the beginning of a line, and padel is the current end of it. The glass at the back of a court in Marbella, the surface a player turns and reads and plays off as the ball drops out of its bounce, is doing the same work the cloister wall did for the monk. Eight centuries of racket games have argued about almost everything. They have not, on the whole, argued about the wall.

The French game came first and came organised. Jeu de paume, the game of the palm, named for the hand that played it before any racket did. The hand wore a glove, then the glove gained a thong, then a paddle, and by the early sixteenth century a strung racket, and the name never changed to match. What changed less than anything was the court. By 1600 Paris counted its courts in the hundreds, something close to two hundred and fifty of them across the city and its suburbs, out of more than five hundred in France as a whole. A Venetian ambassador of the period put the Paris figure at eighteen hundred, which the game's own historians treat as a traveller's flourish rather than a count. The hundreds are enough. They describe a city built around an enclosed ball game. The first roofed court is recorded at Poitiers in 1230. Charles V put one in the Louvre in 1368.

The court that survives from that period, the one still played in England and France and the United States under the name real tennis, is the most eloquent witness the lineage has. Look at what stands inside it. A sloping roof along the side, the penthouse, that the ball is served off and played under. A buttress jutting from one wall, the tambour, that throws a true shot sideways and turns a rally. An opening in the back wall, the grille, and a long gallery beneath the penthouse, the dedans, that score a point when the ball goes in. The historians who describe these features keep reaching for the same comparison, which is the architecture of a church: the tambour for a flying buttress, the grille for a buttery hatch, the penthouse for the roof of a cloister walk. The game inherited those walls. It moved into a building that already had them, the way the monk moved into his cloister, and it kept what it found and made the keeping into rules.

That is the inheritance worth naming, because everything downstream is a variation on it. A wall is not an edge of the court. A wall is a surface the game is played off.

The next chapter is English and starts somewhere humbler than a Paris court. Rackets, the game, came out of the debtors' prisons of eighteenth-century London, the King's Bench and the Fleet, where men with time and a yard hit a hard ball against the prison wall, sometimes choosing a corner so a second wall came into play. The game left the prison the way prisoners themselves rarely did, out into the alleys behind public houses and then, having acquired a little respectability, into the schools. A lithograph from 1795 shows boys hitting up against the wall of the Old Schools at Harrow. Brought indoors, given three more walls for company, and called a court. Robert Mackay held the first claim to a championship of the game, from 1820.

Squash is the child of that, and it was born by accident in a school yard, somewhere around 1830 on the squash historians' usual reckoning. The boys at Harrow, waiting their turn at the hard rackets game, knocked a ball about with a softer one, a punctured rubber thing that squashed against the wall on impact and died there instead of flying back. A slower ball, a smaller court, a game a younger or lesser player could actually rally in. Harrow opened a complex of courts in January 1865, and the boys took their soft game onto them, and a sport detached itself from its parent without anyone quite deciding to found it. The first courts built on purpose for it went up at private houses through the following decades, a stable loft in Lincoln, a wooden court beside the Cherwell at Oxford in 1883, a hall in Norwich in 1890. The constant across all of it is the front wall and the dead, squashing ball that the wall is the whole point of.

So by the time the twentieth century is under way there is a settled family of games, none of them quite aware of being a family. What they hold in common runs from the roof at Poitiers in 1230 to the courts Harrow opened in January 1865, and it is one idea: enclose the court, put the wall in play, and reward the angle and the retrieval over the clean untouchable winner. The walls keep the ball alive. A rally that a net-and-baseline game would have ended goes on, and the skill becomes reading a surface rather than out-hitting an opponent.

Which is where padel arrives, late and from an unexpected direction. Its own origin is told elsewhere, and the short version is enough here: a court built around walls that were already standing, on a plot too small for anything else, kept and made part of the play. The court it settled on is twenty metres by ten, every wall of it live. A lineage of ideas does not require that anyone pass the idea along the line. It requires only that the idea keep being right, and that players in different centuries and on different continents keep arriving at it.

One thing was added late, and squash added it. A partial glass back wall went up at a squash club in Birkenhead in 1966, built with Pilkington, and an engineered toughened one followed at Abbeydale Park in Sheffield in 1971. Through the eighties the professional game wheeled transparent courts into conference halls and theatres for the televised rounds and took them down again on the Monday. The ordinary club court stayed plaster and render, and largely still does. In squash the glass was an occasion, hired in for the cameras. Back and side glass is what a padel court is, the specification a club pours for its own members, glazed for four of them on a Tuesday morning as readily as for a final. The enclosure stopped only keeping the ball in and started also letting everyone see.

The corner at the back of a padel court, where the glass meets the side glass and a player turns to take a ball off two surfaces at once, is the same corner the prisoners in the Fleet chose on purpose to bring a second wall into the game. It is the same instinct that built the tambour into the wall of a French court so a shot could be bent off it. The same monk, in a sense, reading the same bounce off the same surface, eight centuries later. The materials keep changing: wood and stone, then brick, then glass.

The wall is the one thing that never had to be invented. It was always already there.