The inaugural Wimbledon Championship tournament began on this day in British history, 9 July 1877. The 1877 Wimbledon was the world’s first official lawn tennis tournament and was held at the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club in London. The final, which was delayed three days due to rain, took place on Thursday, 19 July in front of about 200 people. The spectators paid an entry fee of one shilling each, and the prize money for the winner was 12 guineas, plus a silver challenge cup valued at 25 guineas donated by the sports magazine The Field. The tournament made a profit of £10. Spencer Gore, a 27-year-old rackets player from Wandsworth, won the first Wimbledon title, after defeating William Marshall in the final in a match that lasted 48 minutes.
September 8, 1957: Althea Gibson wins U.S. Nationals (U.S Open)
How much tennis history can you take today? The day Serena Williams and Venus Williams square off at the U.S. Open is the day in history that Althea Gibson won the first of her back-to-back U.S. National Championships (the precursor to U.S. Open). Gibson won the title on September 8, 1957.
Althea Gibson (1927-2003), a truant from the rough streets of Harlem and emerged as the unlikely queen of the highly segregated tennis world in the 1950s. She was the first African American to play and win at Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals (precursor of the U.S. Open) — a decade before Arthur Ashe.
For the next two weeks, the FDR Library will be celebrating tennis history in honor of the President’s first cousins, Ellen and Grace Roosevelt, pictured here (Ellen, left, and Grace, right).
Ellen won the 1890 singles title and shared the doubles championship that year with her sister Grace. Ellen paired with Clarence Hobart in 1893 to take the mixed doubles title. Hobart found romance with another mixed doubles partner and won the championship with his wife Augusta Schultz in 1905.
Ellen and her sister Grace were fierce competitors, belying the notion that early women’s tennis was merely a genteel past-time for elegant ladies. They actively competed in championships both at tennis clubs in the Hudson Valley (where they resided not far from Springwood, FDR’s birthplace and home) and in tennis centers like Newport and Narragansett, Rhode Island (photo: at play in Narragansett, Rhode Island).
Photos of Ellen and Grace donated by their family after Ellen’s death in 1954 document the early history of the game in the United States. These images include Ellen and Grace in formal portraits as well as in match play. Some images may have been taken by Ellen or Grace or by their father John Aspinwall Roosevelt, FDR’s uncle.
Many have never been seen by a wide audience and may be the only photos of early US championship tennis.
The men’s match shown in this photograph is one of several in our collection documenting the 1887 men’s championships between Richard D. Sears and Henry Slocum on August 30, 1887 at the Newport Casino in Newport, Rhode Island. These may be the only extant photographs of the match in play. Sears defeated Slocum in straight sets (6-1, 6-3, 6-2). Sears won the first seven US National Championships, all contested on grass, in Newport.
December 19, 1887: A 106 round bare-knuckle fight between Jim Smith and Jake Kilrain ends in a draw. The fight started when Smith asked Kilrain, “what the hell you looking at?”
Director and screenwriter Gina Prince-Bythewood workshopped her award winning film Love & Basketballat the 1998 Directors Lab and premiered it two years later at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival.
