Tennis
Tennis has been played for a long time. In the 1500s, King Henry VIII liked to play tennis, and he had a tennis court at Hampton Court Palace.
Edweard Muybridge's stop-motion photographs in 1887 included this guy hitting a tennis ball.
Brothers Fred and William Ritter in the 1930s. I saw this photo attributed to Dave Martin of San Francisco, but that can't be right, because he didn't start his physique photography career until the 1950s.
But Dave Martin did take this photograph of Perry Stevenson, probably a local college student, like many of Martin's models.
This is Austrian player Thomas Muster, who had been ranked the #1 tennis player in the world in 1996. Later that year, he played an exhibition match against Yannick Noah in Pörtschach, Austria (Muster won). It turned out to be an exhibition in more ways than one. After the match, to support a children's charity, Muster auctioned off his tennis racquet. Then he started auctioning off his clothes.
He kept stripping off and auctioning his clothes, in full view of the crowd, until he had nothing on but his jockstrap. The auction raised $5,600. I wonder how much more he could have raised if he had auctioned his jockstrap, too?
Top-ranked players who have recently been photographed naked include Swiss player Stan Wawrinka, above, for the 2015 ESPN body issue ...
and Czech player Tomáš Berdych for Cosmopolitan magazine, also in 2015. I score these guys love-love (that's a tennis joke).
We end with French player Arnaud di Pasquale, bronze medal winner at the 2000 Olympics, demonstrating some forehand-backhand action.
2 comments:
Interesting that the Muster's actions went over with so little fanfare, even as recently as the 80s. I can't imagine anything like that happening in the internet era, even in Europe.
I should have been into tennis ...damn
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