TENNIS TRIVIA AND FACTS
A selection of tennis trivia and facts;
Yellow tennis balls were used at Wimbledon for the first time in 1986.
The fastest serve in the women's tennis was done by Venus Williams who recorded a serve of 205 km/h.
Henry "Bunny" Austin was the first player to wear shorts at Wimbledon in 1932.
The game of tennis comes from Great Britain.
Every year, 24 tons of strawberries are ordered for the Championships at Wimbledon.
Wimbledon is the only major tennis tournament still played on grass.
Venus and Serena Williams became the first set of sisters to ever win Olympic gold medals in tennis.
The longest tennis match in history was played between between American John Isner and Frenchman Nicolas Mahut at Wimbledon on June 22-24, 2010. The first-round match took 11 hours and 5 minutes over three days, lasting so long it was suspended because of darkness two nights in a row. The match was won by Isner 6-4, 3-6, 6-7 (7), 7-6 (3), 70-68. The fifth set was the longest set in history as determined by both duration and number of games (8 hours 11 minutes, 138 games) and the set itself would have broken the previous longest match record of 6 hours 33 minutes.
The longest Grand Slam final in history. In 2012, The current world No.1 Novak Djokovic added to his legacy by fighting back from a 2-4 fifth-set deficit to defeat Rafal Nadal, 5-7, 6-4, 6-2, 6-7 (5), 7-5, and captured his third Australian Open championship title in the longest Grand Slam final in history, a five hour, 53-minute epic.
The longest women's tennis match was played in 1984 between Vicki Nelson and Jean Hepner at the 'Ginny of Richmond' tournament in Richmond, Virginia. That match took 6 hours, 31 minutes with a score of 6–4, 7–6(11), and featured a 29-minute, 643-shot rally, the longest in professional tennis history.
Possibly the shortest tennis match is the match that lasted just 20 minutes, when Susan M. Tutt beat Marion Bandy 6-0, 6-0 at the Wimbledon tournament in 1969.
Margaret Smith Court holds the record with 24 Grand Slam singles titles.
The first women to play in the Wimbledon tournament wore full length dresses.
The first African American to win the US open was Arthur Ashe.
The US Open was known as the Patriotic Tournament in 1917 during World War I.
The strings or guts of the tennis racket have in the past been made out of a cow and sheep guts.
The French Open is named after the stadium it is played in, which is in turn named after a World War I pilot named Roland Garros.
Boris Becker became the first unseeded player to win Wimbledon in 1985 when he was only 17 years old. He also became the youngest player to win the title, as well as the first German.
The open era of tennis started in 1968. The first Grand Slam to go open was the French Open.
Tennis was first played at the Olympics in 1896, but was removed from competition after the 1924 games. It was played as a demonstration sport in 1968 and 1984, was then re-introduced as an actual event for the 1988 Olympic Games.
