When Aryna Sabalenka and Qinwen Zheng face off for the right to hoist the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup on Saturday, they’ll be vying to have their names etched on to a trophy that was first awarded in 1934.
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Made of sterling silver, the cup was donated by the New South Wales Tennis Association and named after the five-time singles champion.
Similarly, the Australian state tennis associations financed then donated the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup as the prize for the men's singles champion, naming it after an Australian player nicknamed ‘The Wizard’ who won the AO in 1911. He was also the first non-British player to win Wimbledon in 1907, a feat he repeated in 1914.
Made in England, the trophy was first awarded in 1934.
Geoff Pollard, president of Tennis Australia between 1989 to 2010, explained that the two perpetual trophies came into being after the original Australian Open trophies were retained by Akhurst and Jack Crawford respectively.
“If you won the title three times in a row or five times in all, you got to keep the trophy,” said Pollard, noting that the precedent was eliminated in 1934. Crawford claimed a hat-trick from 1931 to 1933, while Akhurst, who died in 1933, clinched the title in 1925, 1926, 1928, 1929 and 1930.
“There was no women’s singles trophy for a few years,” he added.
Although the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup has been lifted by dozens of champions over the past 90 years, it hasn’t always been in its entirety. That’s because, according to Pollard, the cup was separated from its lid for about a decade.
“What we know is the Australian [Open] championships were in Sydney in 1970 and 1971,” he explained. “And whoever was responsible for sending trophies from Sydney to Melbourne only brought the base.”
Pollard said he and his wife were going through cupboards at White City Tennis Stadium in Sydney about a decade later, searching for artefacts to display at what would open as the Australian Tennis Museum in 1983.
Amid the schoolboys’ trophies and various paraphernalia, they found something silver that had no identifying marks on it. “We found a top and no base,” said Pollard. “Suddenly it dawned on us that it belonged to the Australian Open ladies’ singles trophy,” he added, estimating the year of discovery as 1982.
That means winners including Evonne Goolagong Cawley, who triumphed in 1974, 1975, 1976 and 1977, were handed a lidless trophy.
After confirming that the lid, which bears a pair of racquets that are also on the cup, did indeed match the trophy, it was transported to Melbourne and returned to the custody of Brian Tobin, the then-president of Tennis Australia.
Nowadays, AO champions receive full-size replicas of the coveted trophies. Luckily, the perpetual versions haven’t endured any other mishaps.
“Somehow, they’ve survived,” says Pollard.