player – Tennisarchives.com

General First nameRobert Duffield (Bob)
LastnameWrenn
GenderMale
CountryUnited States of America
Date of birth1873-09-20
Place of birthHighland Park, Illinois, United States of America
Date of death1925-11-12
Place of deathNewYork, NY, United States of America

About

Adapted from Wikipedia, at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wrenn

Robert Duffield Wrenn was born in Highland Park, Illinois. He attended Harvard University, where he was a prominent quarterback on the football team. He was also considered “one of Harvard’s greatest all-around athletes”, a star player at football, ice hockey, and baseball.

Wrenn played a small role in the formation of college ice hockey in the United States. In the fall of 1892, Wrenn and fellow tennis champion (and doubles partner) Malcolm Greene Chace played in an international tennis tournament in Niagara Falls, New York, where they met some Canadian athletes who invited them to return the next winter to learn about their sport of ice hockey, which differed from the game of ice polo which was then played in American colleges.

Wrenn and Chace gathered some friends from other northeast colleges including Cornell University and returned to Canada over Christmas break 1894-95 for a series of hockey matches. Each of the students returned to their respective campuses to promote the sport of ice hockey. Wrenn later played for the Saint Nicholas Hockey Club.

Wrenn won the men’s singles title at the U.S. Championships in 1893, 1894, 1896 and 1897. He was the first lefthander to take the title. In 1895, he was runner-up to Fred Hovey in the same event. In 1895, he and Malcolm Chace won the men’s doubles event at the U.S. Championships, beating Clarence Hobart and Fred Hovey in the final match, 7-5, 6-1, 8-6. One year later, Wrenn and Chace were runner-up to the Neel brothers, Carr and Sam, in the same event.

In 1898, Wrenn served in Cuba with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. He contracted yellow fever while in Cuba.

Together with his brother George, Robert Wrenn was a member of the U.S. Davis Cup team in 1903. The final was played at the Longwood Cricket Club, where the challengers, the British Isles, defeated the USA by 4 rubbers to 1. Robert Wrenn lost both of his singles matches, to Lawrence and Reginald Doherty, and he and his brother were defeated by the Doherty brothers in the doubles match.

Robert Wrenn was vice-president of the United States Tennis Association from 1902 until 1911, and president from 1912 until 1915.

In 1914, a car Wrenn was driving ran over and killed Herbert George Loveday, the choir director of Saint Mary’s Church in Tuxedo Park, New York. Wrenn was exonerated when, according to a May 21, 1914 article in The New York Times, “The Grand Jury, finding from testimony that the mechanism of the car had become disarranged, and the steering gear powerless, declined to find an indictment, and the complaint was dismissed.”

During World War One, Wrenn was an aviator. He died of Bright’s disease in November 1925, in his apartment in the Hotel Madison in Manhattan. He was 52. He was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1955.

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