Elena Rybakina and the Value of Average

Also today: Ugo Humbert in the (Elo) top ten; South American Davis Cup hard courts

Elena Rybakina at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion

Never underestimate average. Establishing oneself on the top level of the pro tennis circuit is extraordinarily difficult; proving that any particular skill is average among one’s tour-level peers is even harder. Most players are better than the norm in some categories, worse in others. Anyone who can beat the middle of the pack in every department is virtually guaranteed to be a superstar.

Average is Elena Rybakina’s secret weapon. You probably didn’t know she needed one, because she has a very effective, very evident non-secret weapon: an unreadable bullet of a first serve. In the last year, over 43% of her first serves have gone unreturned. No one else on tour comes within three percentage points of that, and only five other women top 35%. On a good day, the serve can put a match out of reach nearly on its own. When she faced Aryna Sabalenka in Beijing last fall, 65% of her first serves didn’t come back. Most women barely manage to win that many first serve points, let alone decide them with one stroke.

I’ll come back to the serve in a moment, because it is so remarkable, and it would be strange to talk about Rybakina without discussing it. But what makes her a contender every week–not to mention a champion in Abu Dhabi yesterday–is the way that the rest of her game doesn’t hold her back. Among the other women who end points with more than 35% of their first serves, you’ll find a long list of weaknesses. Qinwen Zheng doesn’t put nearly enough of them in the box. Donna Vekic and Caroline Garcia struggle to break serve. Liudmila Samsonova doesn’t break much, either, and her mistakes come in excruciating, match-endangering bunches.

Lopsided player profiles make sense. Only a few people have the combination of natural gifts and discipline to develop a dominant serve. Tennis skills are correlated, but not perfectly so. Someone who serves like Vekic can often learn good-enough groundstrokes and secondary shots. But players with one standout skill are unlikely to be solid across the board. Just because someone is top ten in the world in one category, why would we expect them to rank in the top 100 by a different measure?

Rybakina has reached the top–or close, anyway–by coupling a world-class serve with a set of skills that lacks defects. (You can nitpick her footwork or technique, but none of that holds her back when it comes to winning enough points.) After we review the devastation wrought by her serve, we’ll see just how average she otherwise is, and why that wins her so many matches.

First serves first

I’ve already given you the headline number: Since this time last year, 43.4% of Rybakina’s first serves haven’t come back. That’s one percentage point better than Serena Williams’s career rate. Serena’s numbers are based on matches logged by the Match Charting Project, a non-random sample skewed toward high-profile contests against strong opponents, so I’m not ready to say outright that Rybakina is serving better than Serena. But I’m not not saying that–we’re within the margin of error.

Some back-of-the-envelope math shows what kind of gains a player can reap from the best first serve in the game. Rybakina makes about 60% of her first serves–lower than average, but probably worth the trade-off. (And improving–we’ll talk about that in a bit.) When the serve does come back, she wins about half of points, roughly typical for tour players. All told, 43% of her serve points are first-serve points won. Tack on about half of her second serve points–she wins 48% of those, better than average but not by a wide margin–and we end up with her win rate of 62.5% of serve points–fourth-best on tour.

Put another way: We combine one world-class number (unreturned first serves) with a below-average figure (first serves in), one average number (success rate when the serve come back), and one more that was slightly better than average (second-serve points won). The result is an overall success rate that trails only those of Iga Swiatek, Sabalenka, and Garcia. That, in case you ever doubted the value of an untouchable first serve, is the impact of one very good number.

The key to Rybakina’s first serve–apart from blinding speed–is its unreadability. She must lead the tour in fewest returner steps per ace, a stat I dreamed up while watching the Abu Dhabi semi-final on Saturday. Samsonova seemed to stand bolted to the ground, watching one serve after another dart past her. After one business-as-usual ace out wide, Samsonova even offered a little racket-clap of appreciation, an unusual gesture for such a routine occurrence.

In addition to the deceptiveness of a nearly identical toss and service motion, Rybakina is effective in every direction. There’s no way for an opponent to cheat to one side, hoping to get an edge on a delivery in that corner of the box. Here are Elena’s rates of unreturned first serves and total points won in each corner of the two service boxes:

Direction   Unret%  Won%  
Deuce-Wide     36%   69%  
Deuce-T        45%   75%  
Ad-T           37%   70%  
Ad-Wide        42%   74%

The average player ends points with their first serve between 20% and 25% of the time and wins 60% of their first serve points. Rybakina obliterates those numbers in every direction. If there’s a strategy to be exploited, it’s that returners ought to lean toward their forehand, because if the serve comes to their backhand, they don’t have a chance anyway.

The scariest thing for the rest of the tour is that the 24-year-old’s biggest weapon may be getting even bigger. Her 43.4% rate of unreturned first serves in the last 52 weeks compares favorably to a career clip of 38.2%. Against Samsonova on Saturday, over 41% of all serves didn’t come back, better than Rybakina managed in any of their four previous meetings.

She may be getting savvier, too. One of the dangers of a game built around a single weapon is that certain players might be able to neutralize it. Daria Kasatkina, Elena’s opponent in yesterday’s final, is just such an opponent, a resourceful defender and a first-class mover. When the two women played a three-and-a-half-hour epic in Montreal last summer, Kasatkina put three-quarters of first serves back in play, something that few women on tour could manage and one of the main reasons the match stretched so long. Rybakina survived, but she was broken ten times.

Yesterday, Kasatkina was as pesky as ever, getting almost as many balls back as she did in Montreal. But Rybakina took fewer chances with her first strike, perhaps as much to counter the wind as to adjust for her opponent. Whatever the reason, Elena made three-quarters of her first serves. She had never landed more than 61% against Kasatkina.

The Abu Dhabi final was an exaggerated example of a longer-term trend. Somehow, Rybakina is making way more first serves than ever before, sacrificing no aces and only a fraction of first-serve points won. The overall results speak for themselves:

Year    1stIn%  1st W%   Ace%   SPW%  
2024     66.8%   70.9%  10.3%  64.8%  
2023     56.8%   73.6%  10.5%  62.8%  
Career   57.8%   71.1%   8.4%  62.0%

It’s not a perfect comparison, because the entire 2024 season so far has been on hard courts. Her season stats will probably come down. But a ten-percentage-point increase in first serves in? Nobody does that. Kasatkina won just five games yesterday, and she won’t be the last opponent to discover that whatever edge she once had against Rybakina is gone.

Average ballast

As Ivo Karlovic can tell you, the best service in the world can take you only so far. Some first serves will go astray, some serves will come back, and then there’s the whole return game to contend with. Women’s tennis rarely features characters quite as one-sided as Ivo, but Vekic and Garcia illustrate the point, struggling to string together victories because their serves alone are not enough.

Here’s a quick overview of how the rest of Rybakina’s game stacks up against the average top-50 player over the last 52 weeks:

Stat     Top-50  Elena  
2nd W%    46.7%  48.4%  
DF%        5.2%   3.9%  
RPW       44.4%  44.2%  
Break%    35.5%  36.9%  
BPConv%   46.6%  43.5%

She’s somewhat better than average behind her second serve, as you’d expect from someone with such a dominant first serve. It’s aided by fewer double faults than the norm. On return, we have two separate stories. Taking all return points as a whole, Rybakina is almost exactly average, matching the likes of Barbora Krejcikova and Marta Kostyuk. The only category where she trails the majority of the pack is in break point conversions–and by extension, breaks of serve.

The discrepancy between Rybakina’s results on break points and on return points in general may just be a temporary blip. Most players win more break points than their typical return performance, because break points are more likely to arise against weaker servers. That hasn’t been the case for Elena in the last 52 weeks, and it wasn’t in 2022, either, when she won 41.9% of return points that year but converted only 40.5% of break opportunities.

Match Charting Project data indicates that she is slightly more effective returning in the deuce court than the ad court; since most break points are in the ad court, that could explain a bit of the gap. Charting data also suggests she is a bit more conservative on break point, scoring fewer winners and forced errors than her normal rate, though not fewer than the typical tour player. It may be that Rybakina will always modestly underperform on break opportunities, but it would be unusual for a player to sustain such a large gap.

In any case, she hasn’t struggled in that department in 2024. In 13 matches, she has won 46.9% of return points overall and 47.3% of break points. It’s dangerous to extrapolate too much from a small sample, especially on her preferred surface, but it may be that Rybakina’s single weak point is already back to the top-50 norm of her overall return performance.

The value of all this average is this: What Rybakina takes with her first serve, she doesn’t give back with the rest of her game. We’ve already seen how a standout rate of unreturned first serves–plus a bunch of average-level support from her second serve and ground game–translates into elite overall results on serve. A tour-average return game generates about four breaks per match. Elena has been closer to 3.5, but either way, that’s more than enough when coupled with such a steady performance on the other side of the ball.

I can’t help but think of Rybakina’s “other” skills as analogous to the supporting cast in team sports. Her first serve is an all-star quarterback or big-hitting shortstop; the rest of her game is equivalent to the roster around them. In baseball, a league-average player is worth eight figures a year. Though Elena’s return, for instance, doesn’t cash in to quite the same degree, it is critical in the same way. A superstar baseball player can easily end up on a losing team, just as Caroline Garcia can drop out of the top 50 despite her serve. Rybakina is at no risk of that.

A final striking attribute of Rybakina’s game is that her array of tour-average skills can neutralize such a range of opponents. Her weekend in Abu Dhabi was a perfect illustration, as she overcame Samsonova and Kasatkina, two very different opponents, each of whom has bedeviled her in the past. Elena is more aggressive than the average player, but she is considerably more careful than Samsonova; her Rally Aggression Score is equivalent to Swiatek’s. She was able to take advantage of the Russian’s rough patches without losing her own rhythm or coughing up too many errors of her own.

Against Kasatkina, she posted the most unexpected “average” stat of all. In a matchup of power against defense, defense should improve its odds as the rallies get longer. On Sunday, the two women played 15 points of ten strokes or more, and Rybakina won 8 of them. In her career, Elena has won 52% of those points–probably more by wearing down opponents with down-the-middle howitzers than any kind of clever point construction, but effective regardless of the means.

Rybakina won’t beat you at your own game. But she’ll play it pretty well. Combined with the best first serve in women’s tennis, drawing even on the rest is a near-guarantee of victory. Abu Dhabi marked her seventh tour-level title, and it will be far from her last.

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Ugo Humbert, Elo top-tenner

You probably don’t think of Ugo Humbert as a top-ten player, if you think of him at all. The 25-year-old left-hander cracked the ATP top 20 only a few months ago, and his title last week in Marseille gave him a modest boost to #18.

Elo is much more positive about the Frenchman. Today’s new Elo rankings place him 9th overall, just behind Hubert Hurkacz, the man he defeated to reach the Marseille final. Humbert has always been dangerous against the best, with a 22-25 career record facing the top 20, and a 10-12 mark against the top ten.

Humbert’s place in the Elo top ten might feel like a fluke; there’s a tightly-packed group between Hurkacz at #8 and Holger Rune at #13, and an early loss in Rotterdam could knock the Frenchman back out of the club. But historically, if a player reaches the Elo top ten, a spot in the official ATP top ten is likely in the offing.

I wrote about this relationship back in 2018, after Daniil Medvedev won in Tokyo. As his ATP ranking rose to #22, he leapt to #8 on the Elo list. In retrospect, it’s odd to think that “Daniil Medvedev will one day crack the top ten” was a big call, and it wasn’t that far-fetched: Plenty of people would’ve concurred with Elo on that one. He made it, of course, officially joining the elite the following July.

In that post, I called Elo a “leading indicator,” since most players reach the Elo top ten before the ATP computer renders the same judgment. This makes sense: Elo attempts to measure a player’s level right now, while the ATP formula generates an average of performances over the last 52 weeks. That’s a better estimate of how the player was doing six months ago. Indeed, for those players who cracked both top tens, Elo got there, on average, 32 weeks sooner. In Medvedev’s case, it was 40 weeks.

Most importantly for Humbert, Elo is almost always right. In October 2018, I identified just 19 players who had reached the Elo top ten but not the ATP top ten. Three of those–Medvedev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, and Roberto Bautista Agut–have since taken themselves off the list. One more has come along in the meantime: Sebastian Korda joined the Elo top ten in early 2023, but his ATP points total has yet to merit the same ranking.

Most of the Elo-but-not-ATP top-tenners had very brief stays among the Elo elite: Robby Ginepri qualified for just one week. The only exception is Nick Kyrgios, who spent more than a year in the Elo top ten, thanks to his handful of victories over the best players in the game. His upsets earned him plenty of notoriety, but his inability to consistently beat the rest of the field kept his points total deflated.

Humbert, in his much quieter way, fits the same profile. His serve means that he can keep things close against higher-ranked players, but he has struggled to string together enough routine wins to earn more of those chances. (Injuries haven’t helped.) Still, the odds are in his favor. In 32 weeks–give or take a lot of weeks–he could find himself in the ATP top ten.

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Surfaces in South American Davis Cup

It dawned on me about halfway through the deciding rubber of the Chile-Peru Davis Cup qualifying tie: They were playing on a hard court! In South America! Against another South American side!

It made sense for Chile, with big hitters Nicolas Jarry and Alejandro Tabilo leading the team, and they did indeed vanquish the Peruvian visitors. But South America is known as a land of clay courts, the home of the “Golden Swing.” It seemed weird that an all-South American tie would be played on anything else.

As it turns out, it isn’t that unusual. Since the late 1950s, I found 252 Davis Cup ties between South American sides. I don’t have surface for 37 of them, almost all from the 1970s. Presumably most of those were on clay, but since that’s the question I’m trying to answer, I’m not going to assume either way.

That leaves us with 215 known-surface ties, from 1961 to the Chile-Peru meeting last weekend. (I’m excluding the matchup between Argentina and Chile at the 2019 Davis Cup Finals, since neither side had any say in the surface.) To my surprise, 37 of those ties–about one in six–took place on something other than clay. That’s mostly hard courts, but five of them were played on indoor carpet as well.

The country most likely to bust the stereotype has been Venezuela, which preferred hard courts as early as the 1960s. Ecuador also opted to skip clay with some frequency; it accounted for the first appearance of carpet in an all-South American tie back in 1979.

Chile has generally stuck with clay, but not always. The last time they hosted a South American side on another surface was 2000, when they faced Argentina on an indoor hard court. The surface probably wouldn’t have mattered, as Marcelo Rios and Nicolas Massu were heavy favorites against a much weaker Argentinian side. Though they won, the home crowd was so disruptive that the visitors pulled out without playing the doubles. Chile was disqualified from the next round and barred from hosting again until 2002.

The crowd last weekend was typically rowdy, but Jarry and Tabilo advanced without controversy. For some South American sides, hosting on hard courts may finally become the rule, not the exception.

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December 1, 1973: Sweep

John Newcombe in Davis Cup action

After twelve months of play around the world, the 1973 Davis Cup came to an end in 66 minutes.

The Australians entered the second day of the final tie, on December 1st, with a two-nothing lead over the United States. American hopes fell to the doubles team of Stan Smith and Erik van Dillen, the country’s best player and its most skillful doubles specialist. Van Dillen was known to be erratic, but at crucial moments–including the 1972 Cup final in Bucharest–he had outshone the much bigger names with whom he shared the court.

The Americans expected to face a pairing of John Newcombe and Ken Rosewall. Instead, the Aussies threw a curveball, sending out Newcombe with Rod Laver, despite the fact that Laver was 35 years old and both men had played more than three hours the previous day. Captain Neale Fraser had been considering using the duo for more than a month; he had suggested the two men team up for the Australian Indoors in November. They did, and they won the title. Newcombe had partnered Tony Roche to ten grand slam titles, and he liked sharing the court with a left-hander.

Rosewall was disappointed to be left out: His professional status had kept him from competing in Davis Cup matches since 1956, and at 39 years old, he knew this might be his last chance. Fraser didn’t take the decision lightly, and by the end of the day, no one was going to second-guess him.

Newcombe served well, and Laver served better. The Americans didn’t earn a single break point, stumbling their way to a 6-1, 6-2, 6-4 defeat. It was the worst doubles loss for the United States in the history of Davis Cup play, and it secured the trophy for the visitors.

“I think it’s the best I’ve played in doubles,” said the usually modest Laver. American captain Dennis Ralston said he’d only seen the Rocket play so well once before–and that was several years earlier in a singles match.

Smith had few answers, and van Dillen had even fewer. Sports Illustrated called the specialist’s play “out-and-out lousy.” Van Dillen didn’t argue, but he didn’t think a better performance would’ve changed the outcome. “I think if I had had eight arms we might not have won,” he said. “You get out there and find it’s tough that your best shots are coming back at you better than they left.”

Aussies exploded in excitement and relief, both in Cleveland and back home. They had waited six years to reclaim the most prestigious trophy in tennis. Laver had sat out the competition for more than a decade. While Davis Cup was no longer the be-all and end-all of the sport–as evidenced by the half-full stadium and non-traditional indoor venue–it had always been particularly treasured Down Under.

Stan Smith was a traditionalist, too, an American who would put his national team ahead of personal interests even when younger countrymen did not. As soon as Laver won his final service game to put the match on ice, Smith headed for the net to congratulate his opponents. “Well,” he told them, “it looks like we go Australia next year.”

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This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

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November 30, 1973: Pure Talent

John Newcombe (left) with Australian Davis Cup captain Neale Fraser

The home fans seemed to know what was coming. The 1973 Davis Cup final, pitting the United States against Australia, was hosted in Cleveland, Ohio, the site of several recent international competitions, many of them attended by full houses of enthusiastic supporters.

On day one of the tie, which featured four of the best players on the planet, Cleveland’s Public Hall was half-empty. Certainly the Cup meant less to Americans than it did back in Australia: The US squad had held the trophy since 1968, while the Aussies hadn’t fallen short for so many consecutive years since before World War II. The matches were broadcast by satellite Down Under, and untold thousands of fans dragged themselves out of bed at five o’clock in the morning to see the first ball struck.

Stan Smith, the star of the US side, didn’t complain about the lackluster crowd. The previous year, his team had overcome hostile crowds, biased officials, and soggy clay in Bucharest. “The only condition against us here,” he said in Cleveland, “is pure talent.”

On November 30th, Smith kicked off the tie against US Open champion John Newcombe, proving that there was plenty of talent on both benches. The opening rubber could hardly have been any closer. Newcombe built a two-sets-to-one lead and led by a break in the fourth, when Smith chanced into a mis-hit return lob winner that brought him back even. The fifth set was a roller-coaster, with the returner taking a lead in eight of ten games, five of which went to deuce. Two overrules forced crucial points to be replayed, and Newcombe won both. Those near-misses, combined with a net-cord winner that gave the Australian match point, were the extent of the difference. In three hours and one minute, Newk pulled out the decision, 6-1, 3-6, 6-3, 3-6, 6-4.

The second match pitted Rod Laver against 27-year-old Tom Gorman. Gorman had sat out the semi-final against Romania, yielding his place to the veteran Marty Riessen. American captain Dennis Ralston felt that Gorman had the higher peak level of the two. (Ralston had also declined to call upon Arthur Ashe or Cliff Richey, two contract professionals who were technically ineligible for Davis Cup competition, but whom Australia had said they would allow to play.)

Gorman did indeed produce some of his best tennis, outplaying Laver for three sets before Rocket–probably the best come-from-behind player in the history of the game–discovered his own. Gorman took a hard-fought first set, 10-8, conceded the second, 6-8, and regained the lead in the third, 8-6. Only then did Laver fully let loose. By the fifth set, the 35-year-old was in control, breaking at love to open the frame and breaking again in the third game on the way to a 6-1 deciding set.

In seventy-plus years of Davis Cup play, only one team had ever come back from a two-love deficit in the final round, and that was Australia, who had overcome Bobby Riggs and the United States in 1939. Newcombe was in top form–Smith said he had never seen his opponent play better–Laver was revitalized, and no less of an alternate than Ken Rosewall was ready on the bench. The crowd in Cleveland was subdued, and it was easy to see why.

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This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

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November 18, 1973: Cleveland-Bound

The acrobatic Jiří Hřebec

When 23-year-old Jiří Hřebec arrived in Australia for the 1973 Davis Cup semi-final, he was coming off the best win of his career: a five-set triumph in Prague over his countryman, Cup teammate, and idol Jan Kodeš. He followed it up–albeit after a three-week break–with another career highlight, an upset win in Melbourne over reigning US Open champion John Newcombe.

Going into that match, Hřebec said, he gave himself a 30 percent chance of winning. That’s confidence for you: Few of the 11,000-plus fans at Kooyong would have given the unknown Czech so much as a 3 percent shot. Yet in four focused sets, the youngster knocked out one of the best players in the game to even up the Davis Cup tie at one rubber apiece.

The Aussies came through a grueling doubles match the next day, and the no-longer anonymous Hřebec was on the hot seat again. On November 18th, he faced none other than Rod Laver in an elimination match. If Laver won, Australia would advance to play the United States for the trophy. If Hřebec pulled off another miracle, the tie would come down to a decider between Newcombe and Kodeš.

On paper, it was a near-guarantee for the lads from Down Under. Hřebec refused to see it that way.

In a tight first set, the Czech made the first move, breaking in the 11th game for a 7-5 opener. He eased up a bit to start the second, and the wily Laver pounced. The 35-year-old Rocket had played seven sets in the previous two days, but he had enough energy to secure two more in succession, 6-3 and 6-4. Hřebec’s game was, according to the Melbourne Age, “not quite so exciting or brilliant” as it had been against Newk, but he didn’t back down, taking the fourth set 6-4.

Once again, Laver immediately seized the advantage after his opponent won a set. In the decider, he broke in the first game and ran out to a 5-2 lead. Hřebec, however, just wouldn’t give up. He needed just five points to break back, then held serve for 5-4. The Australian crowd couldn’t help but cheer on the underdog. Even when Laver took the tenth game to a 40-0 lead and triple match point, Hřebec lashed a cross-court forehand to wrong-foot the Aussie, then came up with one of the best shots of the match, a diving drop-volley that left him sprawled on the ground.

Only then did Rocket fire off an unreturnable serve and complete the victory, 5-7, 6-4, 6-3, 4-6, 6-4.

Laver was unique in the admiration he inspired from opponents. Hřebec declined to speak to the press–his English wasn’t good and besides, it was Australia’s day–but he provided a written statement: “[T]o play the tennis that Laver played today under that sort of pressure was magnificent.”

As for Hřebec, he had turned in his third consecutive career highlight. Never again would an Aussie underestimate him.

Australia had waited a long time to return to the Davis Cup finals. Laver hadn’t played for his country since 1962; Ken Rosewall, incredibly, hadn’t been eligible to suit up since 1956. The competition maintained a ban on “contract” professionals, players who received an annual guarantee from the World Championship Tennis circuit. The restriction had severely limited the pool of Davis Cup players since 1968, but as the economics of the game shifted, stars stopped signing long-term deals and competed strictly for prize money. Laver’s and Rosewall’s contracts had each run out before the 1973 campaign.

After five years in the Davis Cup wilderness due to what it viewed as an unreasonable rule, Australia wanted to win it the right way. Two of the few remaining contract pros, Arthur Ashe and Cliff Richey, were Americans, and both were strong enough to merit a place on the United States squad had they been eligible. Immediately after Newcombe polished off his dead rubber against Kodeš, team captain Neale Fraser invited the Americans to use anyone they wished, including Ashe or Richey.

In two days, the Aussies departed for Cleveland, Ohio, to begin their preparations for the last hurdle. The Davis Cup had, for decades, been the defining competition of the sport of tennis, and no country had mastered it like Australia. The 1973 championship round would, for the first time in years, pit the best against the very best. Laver, revitalized after a frustrating season, was ready to lead one final charge.

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This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

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November 16, 1973: Form Horses

Pundits have always said that Davis Cup isn’t about the chalk: the pressure of the international event is such that you can throw the usual rankings, forecasts, and odds out the window. Anyone, regardless of stature, can step up and deliver a big win for his country.

When Australia met Czechoslovakia in the 1973 Davis Cup semi-finals, both captains took a chance. Aussie honcho Neale Fraser picked the in-form Rod Laver over the steadier Ken Rosewall–admittedly, a choice most captains would have killed to make. Czechoslovakia’s leader, Antonin Bolardt, took a bigger gamble, leaving hard-hitting veteran Vladimír Zedník on the bench in favor of Jiří Hřebec, a 23-year-old who had won just eight career matches on grass.

Rosewall understood Fraser’s decision. He acknowledged that Laver and John Newcombe were the “form horses,” and Rocket had beaten him just a few days previously. By choosing Hřebec, Bolardt went all-in on recent results: The youngster had beaten his countryman, Wimbledon champion Jan Kodeš, in a five-set match just before departing for Australia.

On November 16th, both captains looked like geniuses. Laver straight-setted Kodeš 6-3, 7-5, 7-5, in a match defined by stellar serving, questionable line calls, and bad bounces on the Kooyong turf. Both players frequently appealed to the umpire, and several points were replayed. Kodeš seemed to attribute the outcome to poor officiating, but in truth, Laver was in control of every aspect of the match. “I haven’t served so well in years,” said the Rocket.

Fraser was surprised to see Hřebec’s name on the lineup card. “I immediately reckoned that was two rubbers to Australia,” he said. The press box was even more baffled, as reporters couldn’t agree on the pronunciation of his name. It was “Yearie Schebetz,” clarified Rod Humphries of the Sydney Morning Herald.

Three of the biggest servers in the game–Laver, Newcombe, and Zedník–were in the stadium. Yet Hřebec turned in the day’s star performance from the line. He overpowered an inconsistent Newk to win the first set, 6-4, and held on in the second through 16 games before the Australian took it, 10-8.

One-set all, packed house, Davis Cup pressure: This was where experience should have told. Instead, the youngster kept cool and relied on the support of his teammates. “Whenever Newk got close,” said Fraser, “Hřebec would pull out a tremendous shot.” Often it was an unreturnable serve: He tallied 14 aces in the match. Newcombe couldn’t turn the tide, and the unheralded Czech finished the job, 6-4, 7-5.

The tie was suddenly a whole lot more complicated, and both captains would have restless nights. Should the visitors ride Hřebec’s form in the doubles and leave Zedník on the bench? Should Fraser bring in Rosewall in place of a fatigued Laver or an unsteady Newk? The semi-final was supposed to be an Aussie rout, but after the first day of play, it was clear that for either captain, one bad decision could be the end of his nation’s Davis Cup hopes.

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This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

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November 1, 1973: Cracked Open

Arthur Ashe on his 1973 South Africa trip

With the 1973 South African Open just a couple weeks away, the country’s racial policies were back on the sports page. On October 31st, Arthur Ashe learned that he was granted a visa to travel to Johannesburg; the government had said no in 1970 and 1971 because of the player’s “antagonistic attitude” toward the country’s leadership.

The next day, November 1st, an ILTF committee voted to allow South Africa to remain in the Davis Cup competition. Banned in 1971 and 1972, the Springboks returned to action in the 1973 South American zone and sent a second-string squad to Uruguay, where Guillermo Vilas and the Argentinian team ended their bid for the Cup. In 1974–actually, even before the new year–the South Africans would return, this time opening their campaign against Brazil.

The vote was something of a slap in the face to Argentina. The 1973 tie had barely come off: In the run-up to the matches in April, protests at home had driven the government to switch the venue to neighboring Montevideo. Now, Argentina refused to play the apartheid nation anywhere. The committee’s compromise was that it would not penalize nations for defaulting to South Africa. Between the objections of Argentina and Chile, which had said it would not play South Africa in 1973 before the issue was rendered moot, a default seemed likely to occur.

The decision, made at an ILTF meeting in Paris, had repercussions on yet another continent. New Zealand hoped to host the 1974 Federation Cup, the women’s team event. But the Kiwi government wasn’t willing to host a South African team until the pariah nation allowed multiracial competition.

Ashe’s visa was one of many signs that South Africa was willing–if barely–to consider change. The other marquee sporting event on the country’s calendar was a light-heavyweight boxing match between local hero Pierre Fourie and champion Bob Foster, a black American. The bout, scheduled for December 1st in Johannesburg, would have been unthinkable just a few years before. Throughout 1972 and 1973, South African sporting bodies gradually allowed interracial competition and hosted mixed-race teams, such as New Zealand’s All Blacks and a group of British cricketers. A handful of non-white locals were given places in the South African Open draw, as well.

It remained to be seen whether the policy shift represented a new approach, or was merely a sop to international opinion. South Africa had been excluded from the Olympics since 1964, and the country took it hard. Compromise was on the table for international competition if it would get them back in the world’s good graces. But at the local level, sport was still ruled by apartheid. The government supported a massive fund-raising effort to support black athletic development, while simultaneously seeking to broaden the scope of the Group Areas Act–part of the legal basis for racial separation–to make it harder for black teams to compete against white ones.

Ashe assured his hosts that his aims weren’t political. The purpose of his trip, he said, was “solely to play tennis and to do so in a spirit of goodwill and cooperation.” He would discover an enormous amount of goodwill waiting for him in South Africa, but genuine cooperation–especially for the 20 million blacks who would remain in the country long after the tournament was over–was much tougher to find.

* * *

This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

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August 20, 1973: Friendly Territory

Marty Riessen in the 1973 Davis Cup semi-finals

Davis Cup semi-finals were supposed to be drama-packed clashes of titans. When the United States hosted Romania for a place in the 1973 Cup final, there were titans present, but 6,000 fans waited in vain for the drama.

Stan Smith and Ilie Năstase had already faced off in three late-round Davis Cup ties, not to mention a Wimbledon final. The 1972 Davis Cup final had been one for the ages, with Smith and company venturing into hostile territory in Bucharest. Confronting watered-down clay, biased officials, gun-toting “translators,” and the imposing duo of Năstase and Ion Țiriac, the Americans somehow pulled out a victory.

The United States had spent their entire victorious 1972 campaign on the road, thwarting the hopes of local fans in Jamaica, Mexico, Chile, and Spain before defying the locals in Bucharest. Now they could reap the rewards.

This time, the Romanians trekked to the Round Hill Country Club in Alamo, California, just outside of San Francisco. Canadian referee Fred Bolton would treat both sides fairly. Țiriac, split from Năstase and easing into retirement, was missing. And the matches would be played on cement–a surface that Țiriac’s replacement, Toma Ovici, had encountered only twice before.

Opening day offered few surprises. Smith destroyed Ovici, a result so universally anticipated that the Romanian said that he was proud to have won nine games. Năstase had an equally easy time of it against American veteran Marty Riessen. Riessen mounted a challenge in the second set, but the result was lopsided: Năstase never lost his serve, and he broke five times.

The sellout crowd could do little apart from fidget and engage in idle speculation. Năstase had recently made the news for cursing out an umpire in Cincinnati, but he behaved himself here. When he mildly protested a line call, fans began to ride him–anything to break up the monotony of another lopsided match.

The American faithful also wondered if Riessen was a good choice. He certainly didn’t threaten the Romanian star. The 31-year-old hadn’t played Davis Cup since 1967, ruled out of the competition by his status as a contract pro. Bringing him back meant booting Tom Gorman, a younger player who had won four Cup rubbers in the last two years. Captain Dennis Ralston said he was opting for experience. There was little else to separate the two. When the ATP released its first-ever rankings list later that month, Riessen and Gorman were placed 14th and 15th, respectively. My retrospective Elo ratings have them at 1,967 and 1,964–a virtual tie.

The next day, the doubles continued to follow the script. Smith and Erik van Dillen straight-setted Năstase and newcomer Ionel Sânteiu. The speedy Sânteiu was better than the hosts expected. But he, like Ovici, was unaccustomed to playing on cement, and he had partnered Nastase only twice before.

On August 20th, the Romanians would make one last push to defy the chalk. If Ovici could upset Riessen, a fifth-rubber showdown between Smith and Năstase would determine which side faced Australia or Czechoslovakia (okay, Australia) in December for the championship.

While Riessen wasn’t a unanimous choice, he was more than adequate to finish the job. His big serve was more appropriate for the cement than Ovici’s clay-tuned game, and he turned up the pressure from the start. The veteran won 16 of the first 18 points of the match, as well as the opening point in 19 of the first 24 games. The Romanian fought out a triple-deuce game to sneak off with the second set, but Riessen always seemed to have the matter in hand. He secured the victory for the Americans, 6-1, 4-6, 6-1, 7-5.

The fans, finally, had something to get excited about. Yes, they could celebrate, but more importantly, Smith and Năstase would finally line up in singles. In the 1970s, as long as the schedule allowed, dead rubbers were played. They even counted for Grand Prix points. Năstase had won the lucrative 1972 Grand Prix and was slogging out a punishing 1973 schedule in an effort to defend the crown. Even though Romania’s Cup campaign was done, Nasty had good reason to take this one seriously.

For the fourth time in their long rivalry, the two stars went five sets. Năstase broke at 6-5 to take the first. From there, Smith’s serve allowed the American to take control. The surface, once again, worked in the home team’s favor. Big Stan claimed the Grand Prix points, 5-7, 6-2, 6-3, 4-6, 6-3.

The 1973 final would be held in Cleveland, once again on a surface chosen to suit the home team. All the Americans could do now was wait: Australia and Czechoslovakia wouldn’t settle the other semi-final until November. With Rod Laver, John Newcombe, and Ken Rosewall suiting up for the Aussies, Smith and the gang would take any edge they could get.

* * *

This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

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August 13, 1973: Dream Team, Assemble

Rod Laver in 1973

The 1973 Davis Cup was down to four nations. In early August, the United States beat Chile to advance through the Americas zone. Romania held off the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia cruised past a suspension-addled Italian side to take the two European places in the final four. Back in May, Australia had secured its spot in the semis by defeating India.

The lads from Down Under hadn’t won the tournament since 1967. Their five years in the wilderness were the longest gap the country had suffered since the 1930s. In part, they were a victim of their own success. Aussies won 11 of 13 trophies between 1955 and 1967 on the back of such stars as Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall, Ashley Cooper, Mal Anderson, Neale Fraser, Roy Emerson, Rod Laver, John Newcombe, and Tony Roche. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, many of those heroes turned professional, rendering them ineligible.

While team captain Harry Hopman had a knack for finding replacements, his job got harder every year. The final twist of the knife came in 1968. The Open era began, and nearly every veteran player of note signed a contract with a professional tournament promoter. The Davis Cup, however, didn’t allow “contract” pros. While “independent” pros like Romania’s Ilie Năstase and the USA’s Arthur Ashe and Stan Smith could enter, the Australian team was gutted.

All that changed–finally–before the 1973 campaign. Anybody, regardless of their contract status, could play.

The new rule boded well for the Aussies, though it didn’t solve all of their problems. The Eastern Zone draw required that they travel to Japan in April and, as it turned out, India in May. Laver, Rosewall, and others were permitted to compete, but that didn’t make it convenient. They were committed to World Championship Tennis in the US and Europe, so Captain Fraser managed without them. A makeshift squad of Newcombe–playing a more limited tournament schedule to make a Cup campaign possible–and the 38-year-old Anderson got the job done.

Against the Czechs in the semis, and particularly against the United States in a potential final, Fraser would need a stronger side.

Rosewall was in. And on August 13th, Laver gave the captain a call. “Rod wanted to know if he’d be good enough to make the team,” Fraser said. Rocket wasn’t sure if he would be available for the November tie in Melbourne against Czechoslovakia, but he was definitely ready to suit up for the final in December.

The dream team was complete. Laver, Newcombe, and Rosewall owned 24 singles majors between them. All three were outstanding doubles players, too. Emerson, holder of 12 singles slams and another all-time great on the doubles court, didn’t even make the squad.

With Laver on board, the Australians went from underdog to shoo-in. The American side, which had held the Cup since 1968, suddenly looked shabby in comparison. Assuming they got past Năstase’s lopsided Romanian squad, they’d need Stan Smith to deliver a three-match performance of a lifetime in the final.

Captain Fraser surely liked his odds. No longer concerned about recruiting the best talent in the name of national pride, he had a new problem to solve. There were only two singles slots on a Davis Cup lineup card. In a few months time, he’d have to tell one of the best players on earth–Rosewall, Newk, or the Rocket himself–that they’d be sitting on the bench.

* * *

This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

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August 5, 1973: Woo, Pig! Sooie!

Stan Smith (left, facing) and Erik Van Dillen (right, facing) at the conclusion of their marathon Davis Cup doubles match against Chileans Jaime Fillol and Pat Cornejo

United States Davis Cuppers had a perennial complaint: They played half their ties abroad, where they faced uniformly hostile crowds. Then they came home and heard the same loud, brassy cheers for the opposition.

A small cluster of Chilean fans, it seemed, could make more noise than a sold-out stadium full of laid-back Americans. That was the home team’s experience on the first day of the 1973 Americas Zone final in Little Rock, Arkansas. Tom Gorman and Stan Smith each recorded four-set singles victories. But Smith was underwhelmed by the local support.

“I began to get mad,” Stan said of his feelings when the Chilean contingent got going again during the doubles match on August 5th. “Last year in Santiago, there were 6,000 persons chanting like that [“Chile! Chile! Chile!”] and nowhere did we hear a peep in reply.”

On the second day of the tie, the home fans finally woke up. Only these weren’t just garden-variety Americans packing the grandstand. These were Razorbacks.

Finally, after dropping the first set and losing serve in the second to fall to 25-26 (yes, really–we’ll get back to that shortly), Smith and his partner Erik van Dillen began to hear a roar. It rose to become almost deafening:

Woo, pig! Sooie!

Woo, pig! Sooie!

Woo, pig! Sooie!

Four thousand supporters were “Calling the Hogs,” the rallying cry of the University of Arkansas Razorbacks.

“It was like there were ten cheerleaders leading them in unison,” said Smith. “It was the most tremendous thing I’ve ever heard.”

When the crowd finished their thundering chant–Razorback! Razorback! Razorback!–the Americans felt they were in the match once more. They broke back for 26-all, and the marathon set continued.

* * *

A year earlier in Santiago, the same four men–Smith, van Dillen, Pat Cornejo, and Jaime Fillol–had gone five sets at the same stage of the competition. In 1973, they fought an even tighter battle.

The Chileans took the first set, 9-7. The two Americans were among the best doubles players in the world, but until recently, schedules had prevented them from teaming up since the previous year’s Davis Cup final in Romania. The rust showed. Van Dillen recognized that they weren’t intimidating the visitors. They weren’t showing their opponents enough variety.

The second set saw the two teams settle into their respective trenches. They held serve for fifty consecutive games.

Yes, fifty.

The tiebreak was making rapid inroads in top-level tennis. Most tournaments had adopted it: Television more or less required that match times be more predictable. Even Wimbledon joined the stampede in 1973, leaving only the deciding set to be played the old-fashioned way. Davis Cup was the last holdout for tennis purists.

In the 51st game, Smith finally faltered, netting two volleys and a backhand smash to hand the Chileans that 26-25 advantage. The vocal might of Arkansas saved the day, and the home side broke Fillol to stay alive.

17 games later, it was van Dillen’s turn to slip. The visitors took a 35-34 advantage, and once again, the Americans recovered. Smith missed an easy smash to hand the Chileans another break for 38-37. This time, Fillol finished the job at love.

39-37: The most games ever played in a single Davis Cup set. It represented nearly four hours of tennis. The Americans had squandered 12 set points.

But Smith and van Dillen weren’t dwelling on their new entry in the record book. They faced a 0-2 deficit in the pivotal doubles rubber, and they didn’t intend to quit now.

The home team regrouped and altered their strategy. The six-foot, four-inch Smith moved more frequently across the center line, giving the Chileans something to think about and forcing more errors. The Americans finally broke to secure an 8-6 third set, then raced to a 5-1 advantage in the fourth before darkness halted the match.

The four men had played for nearly six hours, and the score reflected a near-draw. The momentum, at least, rested with Smith and van Dillen.

The following day, Team USA came back with an even sounder tactical plan and required just ten more games. They secured the match and the tie, 7-9, 37-39, 8-6, 6-1, 6-3. The United States advanced to the Inter-Zone semi-finals. In two weeks’ time, they would host Romania, the 1972 runner-up.

* * *

Tiebreaks would have changed this particular tie beyond recognition. Was it time for the Davis Cup to join the modern era? One reporter made the rounds of the American locker room to find out what the victors thought.

Captain Dennis Ralston said no: “The Davis Cup is a test of ability, endurance, and conditioning.” Gorman felt the same, having opened his first singles match by winning a 17-15 set from Fillol. “Stamina is a big part of the Davis Cup,” he said. “I like being in good shape.”

Smith and van Dillen had less to say about it, perhaps because they were still out of breath. Still, van Dillen voiced his support for tradition. “This way, they have to beat us,” he said.

Cornejo and Fillol had turned in one of the sterling doubles performances of the year. With the tiebreak rule in place, the story might have ended differently. But against the combined forces of Smith’s power, van Dillen’s net coverage, and the 4,000-strong voice of Arkansas, they couldn’t quite grab three traditional, advantage sets.

* * *

This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

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July 20, 1973: Replacement Players

Manolo Santana

Italy and Spain began their 1973 Davis Cup campaigns with a shot at going deep. The two Mediterranean strongholds could line up with quality pairs of singles players, even if neither one boasted a world-beating star like Romania’s Ilie Năstase or the USA’s Stan Smith.

Back in May, the Italian duo of Adriano Panatta and Paolo Bertolucci steamrolled Bulgaria, dropping just one set in five matches. The same weekend, Spanish stalwarts Manuel Orantes and Andrés Gimeno overcame Sweden. While the result looked close on paper–the Swedes won two of five rubbers–Orantes set the tone with a 6-1, 6-2, 6-1 drubbing of Björn Borg in the first match.

Those two victories set up Italy and Spain for a semi-final clash. But when the sides met in Turin, beginning on July 20th, Panatta and Bertolucci were missing. Orantes and Gimeno were out of action, as well.

The roster shuffles could be traced back to another Davis Cup tie that took place during that weekend in May. Niki Pilić didn’t make himself available for Yugoslavia, and six weeks of maneuvering later, scores of top men boycotted Wimbledon. Some national federations threatened to retaliate, but most settled on inaction. The newly-united players could make or break tournaments, so there was no use poking the bear any further.

The federations in Spain and Italy, however, insisted on one last flex. During the first week of Wimbledon, the Italians announced that Panatta and Bertolucci–who took part in the ATP boycott–would be suspended for three months. That took them out of the Davis Cup tie and effectively handed the semi-final to Spain.

Except Spain responded with a footgun of their own. The Spaniards suspended Orantes, Gimeno, and Antonio Muñoz for “disobedience of the norms dictated by this federation.” Everybody knew what that meant.

Less clear was who, exactly, would contest that European Zone semi-final. The answers would have been comical had the stakes not been so high.

Suiting up for Spain was 36-year-old Manolo Santana, a former Wimbledon champion who had barely competed in three years. He faced Italy’s second-stringer, 20-year-old Corrado Barazzutti. Barazzutti had a promising career ahead of him, but he had yet to demonstrate much of that potential. He came into the tie on a four-match losing streak and still sought his first quarter-final at a top-level event. Santana, though, was a shadow of his former self. The youngster came out on top in four sets.

The second tie was even more anonymous. Antonio Zugarelli, a 23-year-old Italian best known for upsetting Tom Gorman a month earlier in Rome, took on the 20-year-old Spaniard Jose Higueras. Higueras, even more than Barazzutti, was a prospect to watch. But he had far less experience, especially outside of his native country. Zugarelli took advantage of the novice to give Italy a straight-set victory and a 2-0 lead.

There was no way back for Spain’s ragtag squad. Higueras teamed with Juan Gisbert to grab the doubles rubber, but he lost another straight-setter to Barazzutti on the final day of the series. Italy’s replacement players handily outplayed their Spanish counterparts.

The irony of Italy’s victory is that they would be so much weaker in the next round, the European Zone final. The Spanish federation had suspended its ATP members for a month–just enough for the one Davis Cup tie. The Italian federation had punished Panatta and Bertolucci by keeping them out for three–so long that they wouldn’t be eligible for the final, either.

Barazzutti and Zugarelli, the unlikely heroes of Turin, would have their work cut out for them.

* * *

This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

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