Did You Know? 10 Stella Artois Facts From the Past

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By Mark Staniforth, PA Sport

1. 1995 finalist Guy Forget and Nigerian Nduka Odizor featured in the tournament's longest ever match in the second round in 1987. In a marathon 65-game struggle Odizor finally triumphed 7-6 4-6 22-20.

2. The Queen's Club courts had to be cleared midway through semi-finals day in 1989 after a bomb scare.

3. Ivan Lendl caused consternation in the tournament's banqueting suite midway through his 1990 final win over Boris Becker. Despite soaring temperatures Lendl insisted on stopping play before all the suite's windows had been closed because he was disturbed by the chink of cutlery.

4. Jeremy Bates was the first and only British winner of a Stella Artois title. He scooped the doubles title with his partner, the former Wimbledon finalist Kevin Curren, in 1990.

5. All four seeds reached the tournament semi-finals for the first time in 1990. The lowest ranked player ever to reach the final was Laurence Tieleman in 1998 when he was a qualifier ranked 253 in the world. The man who beat him in the final, Scott Draper, was ranked 108.

6. Through his own choice, John McEnroe elected not play the Stella Artois Championship for six years after being banned by the Queen's Club for insulting the then chairman's wife on a practice court less than a week after his 1984 win. He finally returned in 1991, reaching the quarter-finals, after apologising and expressing his desire to play again.

7. 70.2mm of rain fell in just one and a half hours on the Tuesday of the 1992 tournament, disrupting the progress of defending champion Stefan Edberg. Pictures of the Swede being carried through waist-high waters by a steward made front pages around the world. The steward in question, coincidentally, had been president of the Cambridge boat race crew the previous year.

8. Goran Ivanisevic made ball girl Amy Kavanagh briefly famous in 1997 when, exasperated by the powerful serves of his opponent Mark Philippoussis, he handed her his racket and took a well-earned breather. The ball girl coped marginally better than Goran during a brief rally with the Australian power-hitter.

9. Goran Ivansevic admitted: "I love the Stella Artois , but the Stella Artois doesn't love me" following his embarrassing first round defeat to unknown Italian Cristiano Caratti in 2001. He went to Wimbledon full of woe and two weeks later emerged with his first ever Grand Slam title.

10. The new Sports Minister Richard Caborn had reason to regret his inaugural media interview in 2002. Asked by BBC Radio's Clare Balding to name any of the four Stella Artois semi-finalists, Caborn was stumped - even though British number one Tim Henman was one of them.

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