The Grand Slam in tennis is the achievement of winning all four major championships in one discipline in a calendar year. In doubles, a Grand Slam may be achieved as a team or as an individual with different partners. Winning all four major championships consecutively but not within the same calendar year is referred to as a "non-calendar-year Grand Slam", while winning the four majors at any point during the course of a career is known as a "Career Grand Slam".
The term Grand Slam is also attributed to the Grand Slam tournaments , referred to as Majors , and they are the world's four most important annual professional tennis tournaments. They offer the most ranking points, prize money, public and media attention, the greatest strength and size of the field and, in recent years, the longest matches for men best of five sets, best of three for the women. The Australian and the United States tournaments are played on hard courts , the French on clay , and Wimbledon on grass.
Wimbledon is the oldest tournament, founded in , followed by the US in , the French in major in , and the Australian in , but it was not until that all four were held as officially sanctioned majors. With the growing popularity of tennis, and with the hopes of unifying the sport's rules internationally, [ 5 ] the British and French tennis associations started discussions at their Davis Cup tie, and in October organized a meeting in Paris, joined by the Australasian , Austrian, Belgian , Spanish , and Swiss associations.
In , Jack Crawford won the Australian , French , and Wimbledon Championships, leaving him just needing to win the last major event of the year, the U. Championships , to become the reigning champion of all four major tournaments, [ 17 ] a feat described as "a grand slam" by sports columnist Alan J.
Gould of The Reading Eagle , [ 18 ] and later that year by John Kieran of The New York Times , who stated that if Crawford won at Forest Hills it "would be something like scoring a grand slam on the courts, doubled and vulnerable. In golf it was used for the first time to describe a total of four wins, specifically Bobby Jones ' achievement of winning the four major golf tournaments of the era, which he accomplished in At the time, only amateur players were allowed to participate in the Grand Slam and other ILTF-sanctioned tournaments.
