Wooden Tennis Racket Butt Caps / 1880-1890

First Published January, 2022

Left - Circa 1885 Horace Partridge racket

Right - Spalding “The Slocum” racket, which was first offered in 1888

Without a doubt, the single worst innovation in early American lawn tennis racket development has to be the wooden butt cap or “knob,” as it was called in the vernacular of 1880’s racket advertising. Early tilt top rackets from the 1870’s and 1880’s usually had a simple butt strap at the bottom of the handle, it they had anything at all.

The wooden butt cap, which was essentially an American racket characteristic, was introduced on a wide scale in the early 1880’s and died out around a decade later. Rackets in the 1883 Wright & Ditson and the 1885 D.W. Granbery racket lines employed the wooden butt cap, as did all nine rackets offered in the 1887 Spalding catalog.

The purpose of the racket knob, according to Virgil Kent (founder of what became the E. Kent Company) in an 1885 patent application was that it “prevents the racket from slipping from the hand while in use”.

Page from 1887 Spalding Catalog

Kent’s patent proposed securing the butt cap with two dowels, which was rarely used. Generally, as you can see in the accompanying photo of an early Horace Partridge racket with the butt cap detached, it is glued to the racket by a single circular piece protruding from the butt cap itself. I have also seen the opposite application, where the circular piece emanates from the racket handle.

So, why do I call wooden butt caps the worst innovation in early American racket development? The answer is simple - fragility. If you have collected rackets for any amount of time, you probably have encountered rackets with chipped or missing butt caps. The wooden butt caps were so fragile that simply dropping a racket on the court could result in all or part of the cap breaking off. The original owner of the circa 1888 Spalding “The Slocum” racket in the photo was obviously keenly aware of this fault and proactively protected it by inserting a screw and rows of nails to prevent against breakage.

As the 1880’s came to a close, fewer and fewer rackets were being produced with wooden butt caps, instead they were being replaced by leather ones that did not break and were cheaper to produce.

If you have a racket in your collection with a pristine wooden butt cap, congratulations, your racket beat the odds.

Good Collecting.