The Making of a Tennis Ball continues with the chapter this whole series exists to reach: the colour.
Everything up to this point — the core, the felt, the pressurisation, the bounce — describes a ball that could, in principle, be any colour at all. None of those properties depend on colour in the slightest. And yet colour is the one thing about a tennis ball that most people would say they know for certain: it’s yellow. Except that’s a comparatively recent fact, not an old one.
The Default, Not the Decision
For the first century of organised tennis, balls were white — not because anyone chose white over other options, but because white was simply what the felt looked like before anyone thought to dye it otherwise. It matched the white kits, the white lines, the whole visual grammar of the sport as it existed on grass and clay long before broadcast television had any say in the matter.
Yellow only entered the picture in 1972, when the International Tennis Federation approved it as an alternative colour, largely because it read better on the colour cameras of the period. Wimbledon held out until 1986. Within a generation, yellow had become the default everyone assumes tennis always had.
What’s Actually Different
Mechanically, almost nothing. The dye applied to the felt doesn’t change the wool-nylon blend’s durability or its grip on the strings in any meaningful way — colour is a surface treatment, not a structural one. What changed was entirely about visibility on a screen, not about anything happening on the court itself.
That’s the detail this series keeps circling back to: almost everything about a tennis ball is engineered for how it performs. Colour, alone among all of it, was engineered for how it’s watched. If you want the fuller story of that shift, we’ve written about it at length in Why White? and in the Journal piece Before Yellow, There Was White.
Next in the series: The Can.
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