Another year, another installment of the dominance of Margaret Court. I’ve added almost 3,000 matches across more than 200 events from the 1962 women’s tennis season, a year when Court went an unbelievable 80-2. She won three of the four majors, but one of the losses came in the first round of Wimbledon against Billie Jean King. In both that match and her other loss a few weeks earlier, in Manchester to Carole Graebner, she still took a set.
The further we go back in time, the less familiar the list of top players becomes. For those of us raised on Open Era records, Court and King are known quantities, but what about Leslie (Turner) Bowrey, Angela Mortimer, and Sandra Reynolds, all of whom finished 1962 in the Elo top five?
I’ll leave it to you to explore. Here’s the season page, which offers a snapshot (ok, maybe a bit more than a snapshot) of the goings-on in 1962 women’s tennis.
If you’d like to hear more about this project, check out the most recent podcast, in which Carl Bialik interviewed me about 1960s women’s tennis data.
As usual, the raw data is on my GitHub, and I tip my hat to the enormous efforts of the Blast From the Past contributors at tennisforum.com, who took the first step in moving so many of these results from the analog to the digital world.