Wilding at Heart (1)

Roger Federer became the eighth player in Wimbledon championship history to win three consecutive men’s singles titles. Federer joins William Renshaw, the Doherty brothers: Reggie and Laurie, New Zealander Anthony Wilding, Fred Perry, Bjorn Borg and Pete Sampras to have won the singles title three years in a row. Meanwhile the University of Canterbury Press has published the biography of Anthony Wilding written by Christchurch historians Len and Shelley Richardson. Anthony Wilding: A Sporting Life tells the story of one of our greatest sporting champions. Wilding won the Wimbledon men’s lawn tennis title in 1910 and remains the only New Zealander to have done so. In the years that remained before the Great War, he dominated the international tennis world by defending his Wimbledon title at three successive championships. In 1913 he won world titles on clay, grass and wood, and was thought invincible. The handsome, athletic New Zealander, given to motorcycling around Europe, became the matinee idol of a sport keen to widen its popular appeal, until his death in a bombardment that took place near Neuve Chapelle in Belgium in 1915.