Tennis sports
There are actually two tennis sports - the tennis played with large, stringed tennis racquets played on large open courts, and table tennis played on tables with small wooden tennis bats and tiny table tennis balls. The Chinese excel at the later, having won many world table tennis tournaments, but only slowly making headway in open court tennis. The tennis sport we are referring to in this post is the first one, a game played between two players (singles) or between two teams of two players (doubles) on a large open court, Tennis players use a stringed racquet to whack a hollow felt covered rubber ball into the opponent's court.There are more than one version of tennis, the original lawn tennis is played on a large rectangular, flat grass covered surface, and other tennis are played on clay, or a hard court of concrete or asphalt.
Grass courts are used at Wimbledon, the premier tennis tournament. Grass is a fast surface used at three of the Grand Slam tournaments. Other major tournaments include the four Grand Slam tournaments: Australian Open, French Open and the U.S. Open. However, the Australian Open and the U.S. Open has changed to hard courts. Grass courts can cause unpredictable ball bounces which depend on the how worn out the grass may be. The speed of grass courts may be dependent on the number of matches played on a court, and how recently it has been mown, etc. Tennis is now once again an Olympic sport.
Clay courts are considered "slow" as the loose surface causes the ball to lose speed rapidly. While hard courts are generally considered to be faster than clay courts, actually there are many different types of hard courts, and they can be slow or fast.
Professional players wear different tennis shoes for the different surfaces. Grass-court shoes have to be designed to grip the more slippery grass surface and prevent sliding. Clay court, on the other hand, sliding is in fact an accepted and part of techniques for playing tennis.
Chinese tennis champions, equipment manufacturers and tennis associations
Tennis have been perceived as a mainly Caucasian sport, and dominated by them because of larger physique, but there are many Chinese who loves the sport too and there are some Chinese champions like Jie Zheng who was named “Promoter of gender equality” by the Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, during the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) tournament in Beijing. Then there is the former French Open champion Michael Chang, whose winning championship match I witnessed on television. And let us not forget Athens Olympic women's doubles tennis champion Sun Tiantian who paired with Li Ting, won the first Olympic gold for China's tennis in Athens by beating Conchita Martinez and Virginia Ruano Pascual from Spain 6-3, 6-3 in the final.There are also many Chinese tennis racquets manufacturers too as you can see from
http://www.chinasuppliers.globalsources.com/china-suppliers/Tennis-racquets.htm
There is also the Washington Area Chinese Tennis Association (WACTA) which have organized and are organizing many tournaments. Then there is GCCTA (Greater Chicago Chinese Tennis Association) which is a non-profit organization for amateur Chinese tennis players living in the Greater Chicago land area.
So forget about the notion that tennis is only for Caucasians. Chinese have a part too in the sport.
