First Wimbledon Championship

In July 1877, the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club in Wimbledon, London, staged the first lawn tennis championship, an event now simply called Wimbledon. It was a small, modest tournament, but it became the oldest and most prestigious tennis competition in the world, and it helped turn a new garden pastime into a global sport.

The roots of the event lie in the 1870s, when lawn tennis was a very recent invention. In 1874 Major Walter Clopton Wingfield patented a game he called "sphairistike," played on an hourglass-shaped court with rackets and rubber balls. It spread quickly among the Victorian upper and middle classes, who already enjoyed croquet and had lawns to spare. Rules varied from place to place, however, and the sport needed some standardization. The All England Club, founded in 1868 for croquet, had added lawn tennis to its name in 1877 and was looking for a way to raise money, reportedly to pay for a new pony roller used to maintain its grounds.

The club organized a tournament and drew up a set of rules for it, which were based on those of the Marylebone Cricket Club and differed from Wingfield's original game. These rules, including the court dimensions and the method of scoring, formed the basis of the modern game with only small later changes. The event was open to amateur players, and only a men's singles competition was held. Around two dozen men entered, and the final was played in front of a crowd of a few hundred spectators. Spencer Gore, a former rackets player, defeated William Marshall to take the title. Gore favored an aggressive style of play near the net, which some contemporaries found unsporting, though the approach would later become standard.

The tournament was a success and it became an annual fixture. Over the following years, the club's rules were widely adopted, and in 1884 women's singles and men's doubles were added, with women's doubles and mixed doubles following later. Wimbledon moved to its current site on Church Road in 1922, and for most of its history it has been played on grass, which is unusual among the major tournaments today.

The championship eventually became one of the four Grand Slam events, alongside the Australian, French, and US Opens. It admitted professionals when tennis entered the Open Era in 1968. Traditions such as the all-white dress code and the strawberries-and-cream refreshments are part of its identity. What began as a fundraising effort by a small London club is now a major international sporting occasion watched around the world.