Totem tennis (also known as tether tennis or swingball) is a game where two players use racquets to strike a tennis or sponge ball which has been attached with string to the top of a vertical pole. The pole is either driven into soft ground or anchored with a heavy base.

Tether tennis has been known since the early 1900s. The British company Mookie Toys claims that in 1993 it acquired the global rights for the Swingball brand, the product sold since 1974. In Mookie Toys Swingball, there is a helical coil of wire at the top of the pole and the competitors hit the ball clockwise or anticlockwise around the pole to make it go up or down the coil, the winner being the person who gets the ball to their end of the coil, top or bottom. Other commercial swingball toys have a rotating component to attach the string, so that it does not wrap around the pole. The mother of British tennis star

Andy Murray Sir Andrew Barron Murray (born 15 May 1987) is a British professional tennis player from Scotland. He was ranked world No. 1 by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) for 41 weeks, and finished as the year-end No. 1 in 2016. Murray h ...

asserts that part of Andy's success may be attributed to swingball he used to play at their home in

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...

in early childhood. The game was once sold in the United States under the name Zimm Zamm.

References

External links

"Why I Love Swingball"
Rod Gilmour, ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', Wednesday 30 June 2004 Ball games {{Sport-stub