I played professional tennis and high amateur level squash and raquetball. I also played B national division basketball here in Romania, as far as "loud" team sport are concerned.
My opinion is that tennis and golf can be played in loud noise as well.
The only problem is that you grow up playing all your matches throughout your whole life in utter silence just the game own noise. So it's difficult to change and of course you cannot concentrate. Because all your life it was a quasi noiseless environment.
But if kids would play in a noisy environment right off the bat, it'd be no problem.
I learned also for who is interested, which one is harder : tennis or golf. The person that explained it best was Elsworth Vines, former all time great in tennis and well as top pro in golf later in his career...so basically he played both sports at the absolute highest levels, WITH success.
He stated that it's impossible to determine which is harder because although they are pretty similar games, in golf, the DIMENSIONS of the court change constantly whereas in tennis they remain constant. On the tennis difficult side he mentioned that although in golf you have all the time in the world to set up your shot, in tennis you have to constantly shift your position to get to the ball while at top speed , while your opponent is trying to FRUSTRATE you and FORCE you into making mistakes.
As a personal note I'd like to add that in tennis, there are vastly different conditions from tournament to tournament, like court surface speed, ball speed ( heavier or lighter balls ), and the CONSTANT adjustement of the equipment (shoes, strings, string tension, swing weight, etc ) to suit a particular tournament or situation.
Golf Is Different ( TIME Magazine article )
" The man who had once been the best tennis player in the world was not usually so inept at his new profession as he was last week. In the past year, he had driven his Mercury some 35,000 miles and slept in many a hotel bed too short for his 6 ft. 2 in. No tank-town tourney was too small for him; he played in 44 big & little ones, a grind that would wear out most pro golfers. By sheer persistence, he had earned $12,000 in prize money (compared to $50,000 his first season as a tennis pro). His score varied between seven under par and seven over par. Says Vines: "Tennis got too tough for me. I was beginning to age, and Don Budge helped me decide to get out of it. I can continue as a golfer for years—in tennis I was an old man."
Now 35, Vines has not touched a tennis racket for five years ("and I ain't about to"). He believes that each game has its particular swing, and one interferes with the other. Says Vines: "Golf takes less stamina, and less training. You get very tired playing tennis—but it is so fast that you have little time to think about each shot. I can forget a tennis match the minute it's over . . . but I remember a missed putt or a bad drive for hours."
Forty Pounds On. In 1937, two years before he quit tennis, California-born Ellsworth Vines took his first golf lesson. He had two handicaps from tennis: a pair of glasses, the result of eye-strain in night matches; and an overdeveloped right wrist that once stroked the most devastating forehand in tennis. By 1942, he had chopped his game from the 90s to the 70s and become golf pro at the Southern California Golf & Country Club. When he became a fulltime playing pro last year, his tee shots were usually long & straight, his irons still wobbly. But on the greens, he had a master's putting touch. "The only bad habit I've picked up in golf," says he, "is getting fat." He now weighs 195, about 40 pounds more than his tennis weight.
Several of golf's elder statesmen, including ex-Champion Gene Sarazen, have predicted that Ellsworth Vines will one day become U.S. golf champion.* In his shaky beginning last week, Vines looked as if he had some distance still to go. He finished 15 strokes behind the winner. Said he: "Somehow, there don't seem to be more than two or three good tennis players at one time . . . but golf is different. You must whip an awful lot of fellows to get on top." Some of the "awful lot" were among the 130 who teed off at Los Angeles' Riviera course. There was a top layer, of such men as icy cool Ben Hogan (TIME, Nov. 18), which would take some cracking. Last week Hogan shot four under par, won first place and $2,000. "
" Growing bored with tennis while only in his late twenties, Vines became a professional golfer and, over the years, had a number of high finishes in tournaments, including one professional victory and a semi-final position in the prestigious 1951 PGA Championship when it was a match-play tournament. "He was twice in the top ten of golf money winnings," writes Kramer, "and he was surely the best athlete ever in the two sports." He goes on to compare Vines to another great tennis player, Lew Hoad. "Both were very strong guys. Both succeeded at a very young age.... Also, both were very lazy guys. Vines lost interest in tennis (for golf) before he was thirty, and Hoad never appeared to be very interested. Despite their great natural ability, neither put up the outstanding records that they were capable of. Unfortunately, the latter was largely true because both had physical problems."
Vines was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1962.
Mr Vines former Wimbledon champion
Henry Ellsworth Vines, Jr. (September 28, 1911 – March 17, 1994) was an American tennis champion of the 1930s, the World No. 1 player or the co-No. 1 for four years in 1932, 1935, 1936 and 1937.
