Lost Australian Trophies re-emerge from Jack Crawfords past

Owing to the success of Australian Player, Jack Crawford many famous trophies went missing, whereabouts unknown.

Jack won the Junior Australian Championships in the mid 1920′s three times running and that forced the retirement of  that trophy. He then proceeded to win the Australian Mens Championship in 1931, 1932, 1933 and 1935.  The three straight wins retired the original Australasian Championship trophy originally donated by Slazenger and brought back to Australia by the 1905 Davis Cup Team for the first championship later that year.

After Jack had taken this into his possession it was replaced by the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup which will never be won outright. In his later years, Jack was not in a sound financial state and so many of his International and domestic trophies were sold. The story goes that Jack took the Australasian trophy to a Sydney based jeweler to melt down for the value of the silver sometime in the 1980′s along with some other prized trophies including the Wimbledon Renshaw Cup, numerous Davis Cups and the Australian Men’s singles trophy for 1931 to name a few. Sadly,  these trophies disappeared off the radar. That was until late last year when the Albury Museum negotiated their donation from  the jewelers family who were keen to honour the region in which Jack was born and developed as a junior player.  So now, Australian Tennis has the full historic record of  the complete span of the Men’s Singles event on the two perpetual trophies.

Amazingly, if you did a google search of the Wimbledon Gents Trophy, you would find this one to be almost a replica and was stated as such in newspaper articles explaining that Slazenger had donated such a trophy for our inaugural event.

In addition to having ones name inscribed on the Slazenger Cup, the winner would also receive two other trophies or medals.

The main cup was called the SUN CHALLENGE CUP and the secondary prize was the Anthony Wilding Memorial gold medal in the 1920′s which switched to a green lead trophy in the 1930′s (see below).

Fellow collector, Tom Paton with the 1935 Anthony Wilding memorial trophy and the Australian Junior Cup won outright by Jack in 1926, 1927,1928,1929. Special thanks to the Albury Museum who acquired quite an array of Jacks lost trophies late last year.