Wimbledon Fortnight Begins

Wimbledon Fortnight begins on the last Monday of June (occasionally the first Monday of July, depending on the calendar), marking the start of The Championships, Wimbledon, the oldest tennis tournament in the world, first held in 1877 at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in southwest London. Wimbledon is the only Grand Slam still played on grass courts, a surface that produces notably faster, lower-bouncing play than the clay or hard courts used at the other three majors, and it maintains a strict all-white dress code for players, a rule dating back to Victorian-era tennis whites and enforced today down to the color of undergarments. British cultural traditions surrounding the tournament are almost as celebrated as the tennis itself, particularly the consumption of strawberries and cream, with roughly 28 tonnes of strawberries and 10,000 liters of cream sold to spectators each year. The tournament is also famous for 'Henman Hill' (later nicknamed 'Murray Mound'), the grassy slope outside Centre Court where fans without show-court tickets gather to watch matches on a big screen, and for its long-standing broadcast partnership with the BBC, which has covered the event since 1937. Rain delays remain a perennial hazard, mitigated since 2009 by a retractable roof over Centre Court.