Why White?

White was never chosen. That’s the simplest way to put it.

There was no committee, no branding exercise, no aesthetic debate. For the first hundred years of the sport, tennis balls were white because that was simply what a tennis ball looked like — the same way a tennis court was grass, and a tennis kit was white. Nobody selected it. It was the default, not a decision.

Yellow Was the Decision

If you’re looking for the moment someone actually chose a colour for tennis, it isn’t 1870. It’s 1972 — when the International Tennis Federation approved yellow as an alternative, largely because it showed up better on television cameras of the era. Wimbledon resisted for over a decade before switching in 1986.

So the real story runs backwards from how most people assume it. Yellow is the considered choice, made for broadcast equipment. White is what came before anyone was choosing anything at all.

Why It Matters Now

We’re not arguing that white performs better, or that yellow was a mistake. Television needed yellow, and it got it. But somewhere in that switch, tennis lost a detail that had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with how the game looked — the quiet visual signature it carried for a century.

That’s what The White Ball is about. Not a performance claim. Not nostalgia for its own sake. Just a return to the colour tennis actually wore, before someone else decided it should wear another one.

Read the full story: Before Yellow, There Was White.