Wimbledon 2023 will close its tournament with the Spanish Carlos Alcaraz and the Serbian Novak Djokovic fighting on center court for the privilege of showing the world the AELTC Challenge Cup, the golden trophy crowned with a pineapple on top that immortalizes the champion. Curiously, the changes in the entity’s criteria over the years regarding the male award have meant that legends such as Fred Perry, Jack Kramer, Donald Budge, René Lacoste, Henri Cochet, Bill Tilden or Manolo Santana could not raise it to heaven in Your day. The history of the Wimbledon men’s trophy is all gibberish.
Although they are now the property of the Wimbledon Museum, two cups disappeared from the clubhouse of the All England Club Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in Wimbledon during the first ten editions of the tournament. They both ended up at the Renshaw mansion. The founding trophy, the Field Cup (1887), as well as the AELTC Challenge Cup (1884), were regulated by the Wimbledon board as a ‘challenge’ and, in the regulations, it was specified that they would become the property of the player who won them in three consecutive or five alternate years. William Renshaw appropriated both by winning the tournament between 1881 and 1886.
In 1887, the rectors of the All England Club were not about to lose a new trophy. From the profits generated by the competition in 1886, they earmarked 100 guineas for the purchase of a new trophy which, as specified in the rules, would ‘never be the property of the winner’. They named it the Challenge Cup AELTC, like its predecessor. The new trophy, 18 inches high and 7.5 inches wide, and silver-gilt, with the manufacturing date marked 1883, is the one currently held by the champion. It is not a revolutionary trophy in its design, with two handles at the base of which are two heads with a winged helmet, and with classic floral decorations on the edges.
Several curious details mark this piece, a symbol of tennis glory: the pineapple that crowns it, the name of the tournament as the World Championship, the large number of champions who have never lifted it on the court, and an engraved inscription in which, if were strict, it could only be held by tennis players who play one handed: The All England Lawn Tennis Club Single Handed Championship Of the World.
There is no confirmed explanation why the trophy was crowned with a pineapple, a tropical fruit not cultivated in Europe. One theory derives from the custom of the time, in which sailors decorated their houses with a pineapple at the entrance as a symbol of their return. The pineapple was also a symbol of welcome, hospitality, and recognition, once in the portrait of King Charles II of England he poses with one of them as a privilege of the powerful at that time and, perhaps for this reason, it was placed at the top of the trophy .
The name World Championship engraved on the trophy was a decision by the Board of Directors of the All England Club to mark territory and reaffirm it as a reference, once the Americans had already staged what is now the US Open in 1881. However, the excess of protocol, due in large part to the irruption of the royal family at Wimbledon, left the new trophy somewhat ostracized, barely visible, which gave rise to enormous gibberish.
Until 1946, when the Frenchman Yvon Petra went up to the Royal Box to collect the trophy from the President of the United Kingdom, Labor Clement Attlee, at Wimbledon there was no award ceremony on the grass of the center. In 1949, for the first time, the Dukes of Kent went down to the track to present the trophy to the American Frank Schroeder. But the trophy that was delivered was not the AELTC Challenge Cup crowned with the pineapple.
The All England Club had staged two other trophies for the men’s event. In 1905 he created the Renshaw Cup, which the Renshaw family itself awarded to the champion of the All Corners Final, the match that decided who would challenge the previous year’s champion. After the Challenge Round was abolished in 1922, the Renshaw Cup, whose design features a winged figure holding the cup, was awarded to the champion until 1989. The cup remains the property of the club and the champion received a miniature replica.
With the acceptance in 1907 of the presidency of the club by the Prince of Wales, in the end King George V, he also wanted to award a trophy, the Presidents Cup, which further complicated the protocols. And he complicated it because it was engraved on the cup that would be given to the champion of the All Corners Final and World Champion, two terms that could not coincide in the same person until the abolition of the Challenge Round in 1922.
But being a Royal Trophy, the Presidents Cup usurped all the prominence and was the one that the champions showed on the track until 1968, when the club finally decided to present Rod Laver with the trophy crowned with the pineapple, a protocol that is maintained to this day. .
Since 1949 all Wimbledon champions have had a miniature replica of the AELTC Challenge Cup, which ran out of space to engrave the names of the winners. Also until 1994 they had a replica of the Presidents Cup, which in that year was withdrawn from all formal acts once a new trophy case was built in the Summer Tea Room of the clubhouse. The last tennis player with his name engraved on the pineapple trophy is Rafael Nadal, champion in 2008, since in 2009 a black base was added to the trophy to continue incorporating the names of the winners on it.
