I’ve added another historical season to the Tennis Abstract database, so we can now see thousands of results per year for a full decade before the beginning of the Open Era. 1958 might be the most interesting year of the bunch.
You can jump right in to the 1958 calendar, year-end Elo rankings, player stats, and more by clicking here for the season page.
1958 was the final full season as an amateur for Althea Gibson, and it was an awfully good one. She won her last 33 matches, including the Wimbledon and US Open titles. She turned 31 in August, and her performance in her age-30 campaign will forever leave us wondering what kind of career numbers she could have posted had she continued to play amateur tennis. Her lifetime totals are also clipped by the institutional racism that prevented her from competing on the world stage until well into her 20s.
Two of Gibson’s three losses in 1958 came at the hands of Janet Hopps Adkisson, herself an excellent player, one who just missed a top-ten year-end Elo finish in both 1957 and 1958. Hopps spent the years 1954-56 at Seattle University, where she played on the men’s tennis team (there was no alternative for women) and won 70% of her matches. When the ITA Women’s Collegiate Tennis Hall of Fame honored her in 1999, she quipped, “I never played in [an official] women’s match. I should be in the men’s hall of fame.”
Compared to later years, 1958 looks noticeably fractured. Gibson played almost four-fifths of her matches on grass, while British up-and-comer Shirley Bloomer Brasher played 47 of her 66 contests on clay, and American vet Beverly Baker Fleitz fought 23 of her 35 bouts on hard courts.
The only top player to tie it all together was Brazilian teen Maria Bueno, who played at least 102 matches in a year when no other notable player reached 70. Bueno started the year in Florida, played the Caribbean circuit (beating Hopps in five of seven meetings, all by early April), then shifted operations to Europe where she won Rome and reached the semis at Roland Garros. She followed the tour across the channel, losing a grass-court final in Manchester to Gibson, beating Angela Mortimer for the title match the following week in Bristol, and falling in the Wimbledon final eight. Then back to Europe, after which she competed at Forest Hills and other US events before finishing the year at home in Brazil.
Bueno’s eleven-month marathon left her in 7th place in the year-end Elo rankings, but not for long: She would reach the top spot by the end of the following year. Like Mortimer, who held the number one position in early 1956 and would win it back in mid-1959, Bueno would have to wait until Gibson left the scene.
Again, I invite you to dig in to the 200+ events and 2,500+ matches from 1958 on Tennis Abstract. The season page provides an easy introduction.
I’ve added the raw data from 1958, along with all other historical seasons I’ve added, to my GitHub repo. My work rests heavily on the shoulders of the contributors to tennisforum.com’s Blast From the Past section, who have painstakingly recovered all of these results from newspapers and annuals, organizing and double-checking the often-messy records along the way. As always, a big round of thanks to them.