The very first Wimbledon Championship was held in 1877. In the final, W. Spencer Gore defeated William Marshall 6-1, 6-2, 6-4, in front of a crowd of about 200 curious spectators. Today, Wimbledon is televised throughout the world and draws millions of viewers.

In 1957, American Althea Gibson became the first black player to win a Wimbledon singles title. She successfully defended her title the following year.

The traditional colors of Wimbledon are green and purple. Players traditionally wear all white.

In 1933, Bunny Austin became the first male player to wear a pair of shorts at Wimbledon. He would later say, "I found sweat-sodden cricket flannels were weighing me down, so my tailor ran up some prototype shorts." Austin reached the quarter-final that year but was defeated by Japan's Jiro Satoh.

Gertrude "Gorgeous Gussy" Moran shocked the tennis world in 1949 when she wore lace-trimmed panties under her skirt at Wimbledon. Ted Tinling, a former tennis player who had designed Moran's risqué outfit, was accused of introducing "sin and vulgarity into tennis," but the scandal certainly didn't hurt the club at the box-office. Moran's undergarments were front page news worldwide, and all of this free publicity made the 1949 Wimbledon Championships one of the most talked-about tennis events in history.

Slazenger has provided every tennis ball for the Wimbledon Championship since 1902. The original balls were actually hand-sewn. Today, Dunlop Slazenger accounts for about a fifth of the 240 million tennis balls made each year.

Wimbledon is played on grass, an unpredictable surface which forces players to adapt their games somewhat as the ball often bounces in strange ways. Although the grass surface is a long-held Wimbledon tradition, there has been a recent push from some circles to switch to a hard surface as the other grand slam tournaments did in the 1970s.

At 15 years and 285 days, Charlotte "Lottie" Dod is the youngest woman ever to win a singles title at Wimbledon (1887). A multi-sport athlete, Dod also won an Olympic silver medal in archery (1908), as well as the British Ladies Golf Championship (1904).

The Ladies' Singles Trophy at Wimbledon, a silver salver decorated with mythological figures, is often called the "Rosewater Dish" or the "Venus Rosewater Dish."

The No. 2 Court at Wimbledon has earned the nickname "Graveyard of Champions" because so many top-seeded players have been eliminated there by lower ranked opponents. It's victims have included such superstars as Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Roger Federer, and Serena Williams.