Andy Murray the first British man to win Wimbledon -- in shorts?

Andy Murray’s Wimbledon win was indeed a big moment of national pride for the host country, ending a 77-year winning drought for British men. It also, I heard on the TV as I was headed out of the house this morning, makes him the first Brit to win a Wimbledon singles championship wearing shorts.

That may seem like a non sequitur of sorts, but anyone who follows Wimbledon knows the tournament rules have a lot to say about what can and can’t be worn on the court and how things have changed over the years (the Victorian era, for example, included ankle-length dresses with whalebone stays for women and striped shirts, cricket caps and long stockings for men).

We couldn’t establish with any degree of certainty that he was the first to take the win in short pants, but there’s a lot of evidence supporting the assertion that the last British guy to win the Wimbledon men’s singles championship -- Fred Perry (who won it three times in a row 1934-36) -- was wearing long pants when he did the deed. Perry’s pants are, in fact, immortalized in a statue of the champion at the All England Lawn Tennis Club -- in front of which Murray was recently posing for photos.

Perry, of course, would end up leveraging his name into a global sportswear and streetwear label, partnering with Austrian soccer player Tibby Wegner in the late 1940s to invent the sweatband (we shudder at the notion of a pre-sweatband world), followed in 1952 by the slim-fit cotton pique shirt with a laurel wreath embroidered logo that would make the brand famous.

Can Andy Murray, who already has sponsorship and endorsement deals with Adidas, eventually become the Fred Perry of eight decades hence?

We think as long as he doesn’t rest on his laurels, it’ll be a grand slam.

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