Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Opelka’s success in Rome suggests he has skills that the stats don’t bear out, and 60 years ago this week, an armada of past and future stars gathered on hard courts in Los Angeles.
Scroll down for a transcript.
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Music: Love is the Chase by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2021. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: Apoxode
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Rough transcript of today’s episode:
The first number is 32.7%, Reilly Opelka’s rate of return points won through three matches in Rome this week. He reached his first tour-level clay-court quarterfinal with an upset yesterday of Aslan Karatsev, converting one of two break chances despite winning barely one-quarter of the Russian’s service points. The 23-year-old American is the next generation’s John Isner, a near-seven-footer who dominates with a monster serve. The conventional wisdom is that Opelka doesn’t have quite the first-strike offensive weapon that Isner does, but that his better movement makes him a more effective defensive player. So far, the numbers don’t bear that out. Isner has won almost exactly 30% of return points over his career, while Opelka’s career average barely reaches 28%. On a slow surface, against three unseeded players, he has failed to win even a third of his opponents’ offerings. It isn’t all bad news: At Opelka’s current age, Isner had yet to crack the top 100, and if all the younger man does is match his countryman’s achievements, he has a few trophy cabinets to buy. But a quarter-final on the Roman clay implies skills that Opelka simply hasn’t demonstrated. Lucky for him, they may not be tested until Saturday, as his opponent in the round of eight is an even bigger surprise, Argentine qualifier Federico Delbonis.
Our second number is 60, the number of years since Karen Hantze defeated Billie Jean Moffitt to win the 1961 Southern California Championships. In the amateur era, Los Angeles was the center of the hard court universe, so while the Italian Championships drew many of the best players in the world the same week, SoCal played host to what would turn out to be a remarkable inter-generational field. Moffitt, of course, soon became Billie Jean King, and would win Wimbledon six times between 1966 and 1975. Hantze, known as Karen Susman after her marriage, got there first, beating Vera Sukova to win the 1962 Wimbledon title. Only 11 months older than King, Susman won 7 of their 10 meetings, Billie Jean’s only American contemporary to hold a winning record against her. The two teenagers teamed up to reach the SoCal doubles final as well, losing to Kathy Chabot and Sally Moore. That lesser-known Californian pair must have felt pretty good when Susman and King won their first of six major doubles titles together at Wimbledon just two months later.
Today’s third and final number is 36, the total number of Wimbledon championships won by the players on court for a single women’s doubles semi-final at that 1961 Los Angeles tournament six decades ago. I’ve told you about Susman and King, who won 23 singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles between them at the All England Club. The remaining 13 belonged to Louise Brough, four-time singles champ between 1948 and 1955, another Southern California product who still played competitive doubles at age 38 and would win WTA singles matches in a brief comeback more than a decade later. Brough and partner Barbara Green Weigandt pushed the younger duo before losing 9-7, 8-6. As if that one match isn’t sufficiently star-studded, the women’s doubles draw also featured 16-year-old Cathy Lee Crosby, who was runner-up in the junior event and would become TV’s original Wonder Woman in 1974. While Brough played the SoCal Championships for more than two decades, King moved on after winning the event for the third time in 1966, aged only 22. Eventually she even made it to Rome, where in 1970 she accomplished something Brough never did: winning the Italian Championships.
