The start of something special
The Championships at Wimbledon started in 1877 and the inaugural tournament was a far cry from today's two-week celebration of tennis

The competition was set up in an effort to raise money for the repair of a roller and comprised of 22 entrants in the men's singles.

It was the first organised tennis tournament in the world and the 27-year-old W Spencer Gore finished as champion - receiving 12 guineas for his efforts. The success of the tournament - bar the rain on the day of the final - ensured that it returned 12 months later and was going to become a constant on the sporting calender.

Since 1877, the Championships, as they are fomallly known, have only ever been disrupted by the World Wars, four years being lost during the First and six during the Second.

For the first 30 years Britons dominated proceedings, with the likes of Ernest and William Renshaw and Laurie and Reggie Doherty to the fore.

The Renshaws created such an interest in the game that the 1880s were dubbed the 'Renshaw Rush' as people took to the sport.

America's May Sutton became the first overseas champion, winning the women's title in 1905, and was followed two years later by Norman Brookes as the first men's champion from outside the UK.

The Australian's victory was a watershed in the men's game and only two British men have won the title since.

Following the cessation of play during the First World War, the Championships resumed in 1919 under the spell of Suzanne Lenglen who won five titles in a row.

And in 1922 they moved to a new site on Church Road, the one that is familiar to tennis fans around the world today, although it has undergone some major overhauls since.

The Centre Court housed less than 10,000 spectators, with standing for 3,600, which helped popularise the game.

America's Bill Tilden, one of the game's greatest players, won back-to-back post-war titles, but within three years French men were following Lenglen's lead in dominating their event.

Known as the 'Four Musketeers', Jean Borotra, Jacques Brugnon, Henri Cochet and Rene

Lacoste won six singles and five doubles titles between them over the course of a decade.

The haul included every singles title from 1924-29 in a golden era for French tennis.

Lenglen's six titles were bettered by Helen Wills-Moody, eight times a singles winner in the 1920s and 30s.

However, the big story of the immediate pre-war era was Fred Perry's hat-trick of titles. Perry won each of his finals in straight sets, the third in an astonishing 40 minutes, before he turned professional.

His first title came in 1934, the same year that Dorothy Round won the women's singles to set the seal on a British double.

The home crowds never had it so good.

Wimbledon goes international

Tennis returned to Wimbledon after the Second World War in 1946 and it was immediately apparent a new era had begun.
Post-war Wimbledon was a far more international event than it had been prior to the outbreak of war.

The 1930s British renaissance, with Fred Perry and Dorothy Round to the fore, gave the home crowd something to cheer and hinted at a resurgence in domestic dominance.

But come the resumption it was America and the Stars and Stripes that were flying high.

At least one American reached each of the first six post-war finals - men and women - with only one, the first men's final, not being won by an American.

Frenchman Yvan Petra took the plaudits instead and has a place in history as the last man to be crowned champion having played in trousers.

But if the American men enjoyed success at Wimbledon, for their female compatriots it was a case of total domination.

Billie Jean Moffitt (King) came on the scene in the sixties

The first 10 post-war women's finals were all-American affairs with the first 13 champions hailing from the 'other side of the pond'.

Louise Brough, Pauline Betz and Maureen Connolly vied for the title with 'Little Mo' winning three times, one coming in her 1953 Grand Slam, before her career was ended by a riding accident when she was 20.

The last in the list of American heorines was Althea Gibson who became Wimbledon's first black winner in 1957, before succesfully defending her title 12 months later.

The American hegemony was finally broken by Maria Bueno in 1959, the Brazilian winning back-to-back titles before Angela Mortimer and Christine Truman contested the first all-British final since 1914.

During the 1960s, Australia's Margaret Smith and American Billie Jean Moffit first came to prominence.

The pair met in the 1963 final, when Smith came out on top. One of the pair was involved in each final for the next decade, be it under their maiden or marital names.

Smith's victory made her the first Australian woman to win at Wimbledon and came in a rare year when a fellow Australian did not take the men's title.

Rod Laver led the Australian post-war charge with two singles titles
The 1950s and 1960s were a golden age for Australian men's tennis at Wimbledon with Lew Hoad, Ashley Cooper, Neale Fraser, Rod Laver, Roy Emerson and John Newcombe all taking the title.

In addition, Ken Rosewall, Martin Mulligan, Fred Stolle and Tony Roche played finals without winning.

The most successful of the group, before the advent of the Open era, were the trio of Hoad, Laver and Emerson.

Each of them won back-to-back titles, with Laver adding another two when tennis turned professional.

In effect, it gave him four in a row as he was 'persona non grata' in SW19, having turned his back on the amateur game after winning in 1962 as part of his first Grand Slam.

Newcombe won the final amateur Wimbledon in 1967 - the first in colour on television - and added to his haul with titles in the seventies.

Modern grass-court legends

The Open era of the Wimbledon Championships has been dominated by four players.
In the men's game Bjorn Borg and Pete Sampras won a remarkable 12 times between them in 25 years.

And of the women, Martina Navratilova lifted the ladies trophy on nine occasions, to add to 10 doubles titles, while Steffi Graf captured seven singles titles of her own.

But that quartet are just four on a roll call of celebrated champions since the start of the Open era in 1968, during which time there have been 31 different singles winners.

In the first professional Wimbledon, Rod Laver - in his second Grand Slam year - and Billie Jean King set the ball rolling with victory.

Laver's win was among five successive titles won by Australians, with John Newcombe claiming three.

Margaret Court followed Laver's lead in 1970 with victory in her Grand Slam winning year.

But as well as some of the game's most celebrated champions, Wimbledon also hosted some unlikely winners in the 1970s.

Home Winner

The 1973 tournament was beset by a players' strike which saw 79 players - and 13 of the 16 seeds - withdraw, leaving Jan Kodes, the new number two seed to take the title.

Two years later Arthur Ashe was an equally unlikey victor beating the overwhelming favourite Jimmy Connors in one of the best-ever finals.

And a further two years on, Virginia Wade enjoyed one of the most acclaimed wins - a home victory in the Queen's silver jubilee year.

By the time Wade's win was hailed by a rendition of 'For She's a Jolly Good Fellow' in 1977, Borg was the dominant force in the men's game.

His run of five successive victories stretched from 1976 until 1980, when Borg and John McEnroe served up a treat of a final that included one of the game's most memorable tie-breaks.

Despite McEnroe winning the battle in an engrossing 34-point fourth-set shoot-out, Borg won the war - although the American gained revenge a year on when the Swede lost the final before retiring.

Navratilova was the queen of Centre Court in the 1980s

The year after Wade's momentous victory, Navratilova won her first singles title.

She was to dominate the women's tournament as Borg did the men's, eclipsing King, her friend and predecessor, with six successive titles and nine in all.

However, King trumps Navratilova when it comes to the total number of titles - 20 to 19.

Graf followed their lead with seven singles titles as German tennis dominated Wimbledon on the back of Boris Becker's startling victory in 1985.

Becker came into the tournament as an unseeded 17-year-old. He left two weeks later as the youngest champion, the first unseeded winner and the first German to lift the trophy.

His victory and all-action style endeared him to the crowds and served as a watershed in the men's tournament.

Out went the likes of McEnroe and Connors as Becker fought for titles against fellow grass-court specialists Stefan Edberg, Michael Stich - another German - and Sampras.

Sampras savours his seventh win

The last of Becker's seven finals came in defeat against Sampras in 1995, by which time the American was in his pomp.

That victory secured a first hat-trick for Sampras, and from 1993, until his seventh title in 2000, he lost only once in 57 outings.

He was peerless on Centre Court, and his absence in 2003 allows somebody else to step from the shadows.

Goran Ivanisevic became the first wildcard winner in the memorable Monday final in 2001 and the Williams sisters have stood head and shoulders above allcomers in the women's game.

The future of Wimbledon promises to deliver a story as exciting and intriguing as the past.

Content: BBC