Grass-court tennis - the best surface on which the game is played and long may it survive, or an anachronism that may be declining towards the point of extinction?

At Wimbledon each year our view becomes slightly skewed. With sunshine, which has been mercifully plentiful this time, illuminating the green stuff, it looks such an enticing surface on which to play that it is hard to imagine anyone wanting to do so on anything else. The reality, though, is that the overwhelming majority of tennis players around the world have never played on grass and would probably find it somewhat alien if they ever did.

It has been the case for some years now. In 1973, when Jan Kodes of Czechoslovakia won Wimbledon, it was said that the grass court presented to him when he returned home was the first one to exist in his country. And yet, when tennis was invented in the 19th century, a stretch of mown grass was the first requirement for a game to take place. The genteel classes of Victorian England took to the sport as a form of garden-party activity, undemanding exercise that helped to while away long summer days.

So genteel, in fact, that to start with females were not encouraged to join in and the first seven Wimbledons (1877-83) took place without a women's singles. Lottie Dod, the Englishwoman who was one of the first to encourage a more vigorous approach to the game by women, recalled the days when a lady might step on to a lawn "to play a single on a broiling June morning, dressed in black velvet with long black kid gloves!"

The English having invented lawn tennis, they then set about uninventing it. The English brothers Willie and Ernest Renshaw, famous names at Wimbledon where Willie won seven singles titles (including six in a row), started to experiment with what would later be known as clay courts while playing in Cannes in 1880. Because the grass courts on the Riviera wore out quickly and were hard to maintain, the Renshaws looked around for an alternative surface. They came up with the idea of breaking up and crushing terracotta pots and using and making courts out of this.

Little did they know that in time this new surface would become hugely popular and the number of so-called clay courts around the world would easily outnumber grass.

Now, two of the three grand slams that were originally played on grass, the Australian and US, have gone over to hard surfaces in the past 30 years and very few grass events are left on the men's and women's tours. Those that are have been squeezed into June and July and take place during the build-up to Wimbledon - when there are events in Holland, Germany and England - and, for men only, during the week after Wimbledon in Newport, Rhode Island.

While dispensing with grass-court tournaments altogether would be a pity, it has become something of an anomaly that the tournament that likes to think of itself as the premier event on the tennis calendar represents a form of the game that is played regularly by a minute minority of players.

Time will tell whether this is a sustainable situation.