Henry Wilfred "Bunny" Austin was an English tennis player.
20 Facts About Bunny Austin
2.
Bunny Austin was a finalist at the 1937 French Championships and a championship winner at Queen's Club.
3.
Bunny Austin is remembered as the first tennis player to wear shorts.
4.
Bunny Austin was educated at Repton School, and studied history at Pembroke College, Cambridge.
5.
Bunny Austin bought a pair of shorts to use at Forest Hills and subsequently became the first player to wear them at Wimbledon.
6.
Bunny Austin reached the quarter finals or better at Wimbledon 10 times.
7.
At Wimbledon 1932 Bunny Austin beat Frank Shields and Jiro Satoh before losing the final in straight sets to Ellsworth Vines.
8.
At the French championships in 1937, Bunny Austin beat Yvon Petra before losing to Henner Henkel in the final.
9.
At Wimbledon 1938 Bunny Austin beat Henkel but won just four games in the final against Don Budge, who was at the peak of his form and went on to win the Grand Slam.
10.
Bunny Austin would be the last British man to reach the final of a Grand Slam tournament until Andy Murray in 2012.
11.
At Wimbledon 1939 Bunny Austin was top seed, but lost early.
12.
Bunny Austin married actress Phyllis Konstam in 1931, after meeting her in 1929 on a transatlantic liner while travelling for the US Open, and together they were one of the celebrity couples of the age.
13.
Bunny Austin played tennis with Charlie Chaplin, was a friend of Daphne du Maurier, Ronald Colman, and Harold Lloyd, and met both Queen Mary and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
14.
In 1933, concerned by increasing threats of a renewal of European, and indeed wider, war, Bunny Austin became involved in the Oxford Group, later Moral Re-Armament, speaking on public platforms and writing press articles.
15.
Bunny Austin and Fred Perry were the only players to raise their voice, in a letter to The Times, against the Nazi ban on Jews joining the German team for the Davis Cup.
16.
When he returned to Britain in 1961, a voting member of the Membership Committee of the All-England Club who had been removed from the Cambridge tennis team during Bunny Austin's captaincy used Bunny Austin's alleged proselytism for the Oxford Group as an excuse for denying him reinstatement in the All-England Club after a lapse of dues payment.
17.
Bunny Austin's autobiography, written with his wife, A Mixed Double, was published in 1969.
18.
Bunny Austin's grave is in the village churchyard of Stoke St Gregory in Somerset.
19.
Just 56 days before his death, Bunny Austin had joined other past Wimbledon champions and finalists on Wimbledon's Centre Court for a pre-millennium parade of champions.
20.
Bunny Austin was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1997.