With Lipton's annual tennis tea party getting underway today at the Tennis Center at Crandon Park, I thought that this might be a good time to reflect on the history of the once colorless sport.

The origins of other sports are pretty much common knowledge. Baseball, we all know, was invented by Abner Doubleday, who I believe also owned a bookstore. Basketball was the brainchild of the original Dr. J, Dr. James Naismith, who hung peach baskets in a gymnasium on a rainy day, then sat back and watched the kids invent cross-dribbles, slam-dunks and trash talk. Football evolved from English rugby, lacrosse was once an Indian war game called baggataway, and professional wrestling grew out of a special Charles Atlas' correspondence course for out of work actors.

But where did tennis come from?

To find the answer, I sought sage advice from the most prominent sports history authorities in the world. All of them happen to be employed as bartenders at Flanigan's taverns, where sports play on a myriad of TVs 18 or more hours a day. From the Grove's Laughing Loggerhead to Pompano's Piranha Pat's, I belly-upped to the bars in search of answers, not to mention imported drafts. The experts didn't let me down, or drive home alone, for that matter. But soon the origin of the sport became as clear as a linesman's call.

One school of English sports literature experts contends that the game was named in honor of the famous poet Lord Alfred Tennyson. They argue that some of his most respected works dealt directly with the sport. For instance, "Break, Break, Break" was a renowned piece which described the one-set shutout match for the English national championship in 1842. "Locksley Hall" was a tribute to the original indoor court, and his most famous work, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," recounted the first financially catastrophic attempt to institute a team tennis league.

No one can substantiate these claims, though, and the modern version of the sport is generally attributed to a man named Walter C. Wingfield. He originally called the game "wingfielding," and his efforts led to the first championship match in 1887 at what is now known as the All England Croquet and Tennis Club in Wimbledon.

At that time, Wimbledon's All England Croquet and Tiddledywinks Club employed an illiterate groundskeeper named Montague G. Snarkuss (the "G" stood for James), who was ordered to post a sign announcing the competition. Snarkuss mixed up the new "Wingfielding" sign with an old marquee for a reading by Tennyson.

Since Lord Tennyson was much more famous than the fledgling sport of wingfielding, the sign was larger. Snarkuss could only fit the first part of the name, "Tennys," into the slot allotted, thus christening the sport and infuriating Mr. Wingfield. The new name stuck, but eventually the spelling was bastardized into "tennis" by a London Times sports editor whose headline ran a shade too long.

Now this might sound confusing, but it gets worse. In reality, tennis was being played long before Tennyson applied for his poetic license and a full two centuries prior to Snarkuss' double fault at Wimbledon.

Tennis was actually born during the reign of France's Louis XIV. In 1659, this most pompous of emperors traded a handful of souffle recipes to Austria in return for Princess Marie Theresa's hand in marriage. Although Louis was known to be an absolute monarch to his people, Marie called all the shots in the palace and brought along her own cook. He was an Italian named Luigi whose specialty was spicy meatballs.

Luigi immediately ran into a problem at Versailles because the meat in France was greasier than Austrian mountain goat. However, a great chef also has to be a great improviser, and Luigi was no exception. He devised a meat strainer from a pizza spatula by cutting out the middle and replacing it with stretched and dried cat intestine. Voila, no more greasy meatballs.

At this point, everyone was supposed to live happily ever after. But Luigi fouled things up by imbibing in too much Chianti one day and subsequently forgot to strain the meat.

Finding the spicy meatballs unpalatable, Louis raged into the kitchen and vented his wrath by throwing the inedible meal at the cook, who shielded himself with the renovated pizza spatula. The meatballs caromed harmlessly away, which further enraged the king.

Louis grabbed the cat gut-strung spatula and began using it to smack meatballs at the drunk and defenseless chef. At first, his actions were precipitated by anger, but he quickly realized that it was fun, and even challenging, to aim his shots to hit the drunken chef where it would cause the most pain.

As is often the case with royals, venting his wrath at the expense of another returned the king to good humor. He left the royal kitchen laughing and returned each day to enjoy this splendid new recreation. Meanwhile, poor Luigi grew weary of being walloped in his vitals and splattered with greasy meat, so he bribed one of the royal engineers to invent a fuzzy bouncing ball and a game to go with it.

The engineer, whose name was Tenneaux, created a sport to tickle the king's forehand. He honored Louis XIV's heir by making all points multiples of fifteen. (This was later changed slightly by the English groundskeeper, Snarkuss, when he ran out of "5s" while minding the scoreboard.) When players failed to get a point, it was a sign of "love" for their monarch, hence the unique term for a shutout.

Tennis enjoyed great popularity with the French aristocracy until the revolution in 1789. After that, anyone caught playing the game, or even in possession of a racquet or Tenneaux ball, was automatically convicted of a crime against the people and marched straight to the guillotine.

Thus tennis fell from grace and entered a period of dormancy until it was reinvented by the opportunist Wingfield and immortalized by the poet Tennyson.