Category: History

451 Games in 10 Days

When Margaret Court won her first major title at the 1960 Australian Championships, the wonder isn’t that she broke through as a 17 year-old. It’s that she remained standing at all.

The news coverage ahead of the final praised Court’s game and foresaw great things for her future, but it also predicted a win for her opponent, 18-year-old Jan Lehane, who had beaten Court 6-1 6-0 in the 1959 juniors final. While Court (then unmarried, playing as Margaret Smith) had posted a more recent win over her rival, the issue that led the pundits to favor Lehane was scheduling. Court had barely stepped off the court for two weeks.

That’s where my title comes from: A preview of the final claimed that the teenager had played 451 games in 10 days. Unlike Lehane, who entered only the adult singles event, Court played singles and doubles, as well as girls’ singles and doubles. She reached the finals in women’s doubles and girls’ singles, as well as the semi-final in junior doubles.*

** one news report claimed she reached three other finals, but I have a score from the girls’ doubles semi-final showing Court and her partner, Val Wicks, as the losers.

She lost her first two finals, including the junior singles to another future tour stalwart, Lesley Turner, which suggested that fatigue was a factor. Making matters worse, both of those championship matches went three sets.

451 games?

In those days, the Australian Championships were a more modest affair than the present-day Australian Open. The field was mostly Australian, though in 1960, two elite foreigners, Brazilian Maria Bueno and Britain’s Christine Truman, made the trip. Bueno and Truman won the doubles, while Bueno lost to Court in their singles quarter-final, and Lehane saw off Truman in the semis. Still, the singles draw was only five rounds.

Since early-round matches were often blowouts (Court won her opener 6-1 6-0), I struggled to come up with those 451 games. Here’s a quick rundown of Court’s known matches in the tournament:

Sum it up, and we have 292 games, plus the total from two more probable rounds of girls’ doubles. (It’s also conceivable that there is one more early round of junior singles, though it seems unlikely that the juniors draw would be bigger than the adult field.) But even in the pre-tiebreak era, a few doubles matches probably didn’t account for more than 150 games.

One event is not enough

Just like today, the top players of six decades ago carefully managed their schedules. For instance, they might play only doubles in the week before Wimbledon. But in January 1960, Court was not a top player, and her schedule was largely at the whim of her state federation.

For Australian juniors, the few days before the Championships were given over to the Wilson Cup, an interstate team event. (Boys played a parallel Linton Cup event.) The 1960 Wilson Cup was a Fed Cup-style round robin among six Australian states, with each tie consisting of two singles and one doubles match.

Court, representing Victoria, got her fair share of warmup matches. I’ve found results from three days of Wilson Cup play. (There were likely five rounds, partly because that is the logical number in a six-team round robin, partly because the first day of results I found are listed as the “third round.”) Here are Court’s results:

  • Jan 19th vs New South Wales: singles d. Lehane, 6-1 6-3; doubles loss to Lehane/Dawn Robberds, 6-3 6-2.
  • Jan 20th vs Tasmania: singles d. Gourlay, 6-0 6-0. (Court didn’t play the doubles rubber.)
  • Jan 21st vs South Australia: singles d. Felicity Harris, 6-0 6-0. (I didn’t find a doubles result, and several matches that day appear to have been unplayed or unfinished due to rain.)

That’s 57 more games. A post-Wilson Cup note reported that Court dropped only eight games in her singles matches. If she played one more match, that’s another 16 games (say, a 6-2 6-2 win); if she played two, it’s 28 (for instance, 6-0 6-1 and 6-3 6-0). It also seems likely that she participated in another doubles match or two. Wilson Cup play started on the 18th and the “third round” took place on the 19th, so it’s possible that she three or four matches on the first day alone.

A fortnight to remember

While I can’t account for all 451 games (plus 20 more in the women’s singles final), we do have records of Court playing 13 singles matches, almost definitely 14, and possibly 15. We have scores for 5 doubles matches, almost definitely 7, and possibly as many as 10. We can be confident of a total of at least 365 games, with several more scores unaccounted for. All of this happened between the opening of the Wilson Cup on January 18th and the adult singles finals on February 1st.

I have no idea if this is a record. One challenger immediately springs to mind: The John Isner–Nicolas Mahut match totaled 183 games, but Mahut lost his first-round doubles with another 46 games played. (Isner withdrew from doubles, and neither played mixed.)

Another contender is Martina Navratilova‘s 1986 Wimbledon campaign. As she tells it, rain forced her to play a whopping 17 matches in the second week alone. Yet despite reaching the finals in women’s singles, women’s doubles, and mixed doubles, she played “only” 333 games over the fortnight. (Her per-day rate in the second week might have surpassed Court’s.)

At least Court had the good sense not to enter mixed.

I don’t have a comprehensive doubles database, and junior records are even more sparse, so it’s not an easy record to confirm. A man, playing best-of-five in singles and (for many years) best-of-five in doubles, would be more likely to reach 400 or 500 games at a single major. It’s also possible that Navratilova tallied more games at a different major with fewer memorable scheduling problems; her 1986 effort easily cleared 300 games despite every match being settled in straight sets.

As for Court, she celebrated with a well-deserved break … of about one week. Within ten days, she was in New Zealand, where she lost to Ruia Morrison (a Maori tennis great, and a good story for another day) in another final. The national federation didn’t send her abroad that year, so she played a modest schedule for the remainder of the season. With our modern understanding of the importance of recovery, it seems like that was an excellent idea.

New at Tennis Abstract: Over 3,000 Match Results from 1965

Welcome to the latest update on a project that has well and truly spiraled out of control. I’m pleased to announced that the Tennis Abstract site now features a huge amount of women’s tennis data from 1965. I hesitate to call it “complete,” because it is not, and it probably never will be. But the word “substantial” will do just fine:

  • 3,200 matches
  • 248 events (plus Federation Cup)
  • 400 players that weren’t previously in my database

The 1965 dataset is even more sizable than the 1967 and 1966 results that I’ve recently discussed in other blog posts. To put those 3,200 results in perspective, there were “only” about 3,100 tour-level WTA matches in 2019.

For an bird’s-eye view of the 1965 women’s season, check out my season page. I introduced the season pages with my post on 1966 last week, and I’ve since made several improvements:

  • The full event calendar has some new information to indicate the strength of the tournament: the number of top 10 players in the draw (as per that week’s Elo ratings), and the “geographic concentration” of the field–that is, the percentage of women in the draw who hail from the most common country. The second number isn’t perfect, especially when I only have a few results from the event, but as a general rule, the lower the geographic concentration, the stronger the field.
  • The year-end Elo rankings table includes some helpful additional information: each player’s age, her number of titles, and her won-loss record on the season.

The season page tends to highlight the best players, and I’d imagine that’s what most of you will find the most interesting. Margaret Court dominated the 1965 campaign, winning over 100 matches, losing only 8, and posting the best year-end Elo on all surfaces. The page will also tell that you she drew Lesley Bowrey ten times–nine of them in finals!–and Bowrey accounted for 4 of her 8 losses.

(Court and Bowrey were already familiar foes: They met in the 1960 Australian Championships girl’s final. Court lost, but bounced back quickly, winning the women’s final–her first major title–the next day.)

Equally fascinating for me are the names you almost never hear in their tennis context. Since I’m working backward, the players I added to the database for 1965 were those who finished their careers that year. (Or played predominantly at lesser regional events, and only briefly popped up on my radar.) Here are a few of the ladies whose tennis careers I stumbled upon:

I could list many more.

Data and acknowledgements

Once again, I note the huge debt I owe to the contributors at tennisforum.com’s Blast From the Past section. They’ve converted newspaper and annual results into online content that I could then further organize into a proper dataset.

All of the raw data is available in my women’s tennis GitHub repo.

The 1966 Women’s Tennis Season Like You’ve Never Seen It Before

I’ve been working hard to organize 1960s and 1970s women’s tennis results so that you can view and search it as easily as if they took place last month. It’s an enormous task, and probably never to be completed, but I do have some progress to share.

A couple of weeks ago, I announced the inclusion of the 1967 women’s tennis season on Tennis Abstract and discussed why it’s so important. Today, I give you 1966, along with a much easier way to dive in.

The season view

Here’s a one-page overview of the 1966 season. On that one page, you’ll find:

  • The results of the four majors, at a glance
  • Some key statistical leaders
  • A full calendar of all the tournaments in the database, along with finalists and semi-finalists (in 1966, that’s 159 events!)
  • Year-end Elo rankings, including surface-specific ratings (yes, Elo for the 1960s!)
  • Elo number ones for the season (Margaret Court made that rather uninteresting for much of the decade, monopolizing the top spot this year and several others)
  • Sortable stats for the 30 most active players, including won-loss records in finals, in three-setters, and on all surfaces
  • The most common head-to-heads
  • Country-versus-country won-loss records, which offers a glimpse of which nations predominated at the time

Of course, the page contains links galore. One more click gets you detailed player pages just like the ones available for current players, or event-specific pages with full tournament draws. The database contains over 2,600 matches from the 1966 season.

(Once I work out all the kinks, I’ll generate similar pages for later seasons as well.)

What’s here and what’s not

To repeat myself from the 1967 post: This project owes a tremendous debt to the contributors at tennisforum.com’s Blast From the Past section. They’ve typed in tens of thousands of results compiled from newspapers and annuals. Without their efforts, I would barely be getting started. I highly recommend browsing that forum. In addition to the singles results, it contains doubles and mixed doubles scores, as well as descriptions of some of the top events. It’s one of the truly invaluable corners of the internet.

Newspapers and annuals didn’t report everything, and even the tireless Blast compilers haven’t scanned every possible source. Thus, some tournaments are missing rounds or specific matches. For some events, I have only the final. There are still other events that I would love to include, but am unable to for lack of data, such as the annual ATA championships and many of the tournaments that took place in the USSR.

I also haven’t imported every single possible result. There was no clear demarcation between “tour-level” and the rest back then, but some events were much stronger than others. Just because the results of the Wyoming state championships have survived doesn’t mean you can find them on Tennis Abstract.

That said, I’ve erred on the side of over-inclusion. There is at least one result from over 150 different 1966 events, and that number will be over 200 from 1962 to 1965! If a tournament has even one great player, I’ve imported the entire draw. (Ann Jones, who seems to have played just about every tournament in Great Britain for 15 years, has repeatedly made me question that commitment.) I’ve included virtually everything from the USSR and the former Eastern Bloc nations, along with nearly every tournament that included players from Eastern Europe. There was much less East-West mixing than there is now, so these results are particularly important for establishing the level of play behind the Iron Curtain.

About these Elos

It’s particularly exciting to be able to rate these players, both to find unheralded women from this era, and to see how the stars of the 1960s stack up against those of later eras. Of course, a certain Elo rating doesn’t mean the same thing in 1966 as it did in 2016, because the level of play has risen, and the game has changed in innumerable ways. That said, my Elo algorithm doesn’t suffer from any kind of inflation, so a certain rating–say, Billie Jean King‘s 1966 year-end 2274–means roughly the same thing relative to her peers as it does now.

These Elo ratings are provisional, however. For one thing, there’s a lot more historical data to be added. As the algorithm can look at more matches from the early 1960s, it can better calculate proper ratings for each player in 1966.

Also, the less-structured nature of the tennis tour in the 1960s may necessitate some tweaks to the algorithm. As I’ve said, there’s no clear top level, and there’s certainly no helpful classifications like Satellites or Challengers or ITF W15s. While the best players did a lot of traveling, they represented a much smaller core than the hundreds of full-time nomads who populate today’s tour. Thus, 1960s stars played more early-round matches against locals who–at least in tennis terms–would never be heard from again.

So far, my Elo algorithm is spitting out plausible results for the 1960s without any era-specific alterations. Adding thousands more matches and hundreds of new players is not causing any noticeable inflation in the ratings of later players. But any of those things might change.

The data

I’m making all of this data available in my GitHub repo for women’s tennis results.

In addition to “new” seasons like 1966, I’m also working on filling in lower-level events and qualifying rounds for the 1970s. I have about 50 tournaments per year from 1968 through the mid-70s, but I’m finding that there are 100 or more per year that could be added, plus qualifying for the big events. I recently added 1,500 such “additional” matches from 1974 alone.

These are all on Tennis Abstract as well, so to take just one example, you can see Virginia Ruzici fighting her way through qualifying rounds at the big tournaments to start 1974. Once I finish with 1973, you’ll be able to see evidence of something almost unthinkable: Martina Navratilova playing qualies. It didn’t last long, but it did happen.

Enjoy!

Introducing the Tennis Abstract Book Club

Carl Bialik and I are kicking off a new feature on the Tennis Abstract Podcast: a monthly* book club featuring various classics and curiosities in the game’s literature.

* probably

Our first selection is A Handful of Summers, by Gordon Forbes. Forbes, who died last week, was a long-time tour player from South Africa, and his book is widely considered to be among the best tennis memoirs. Here’s Steve Tignor raving about it.

We’re still working out exactly what it means to have a podcast book club, so feel free to make suggestions. At minimum, we hope you will:

  • read along with us;
  • send us questions, comments, and the like via Twitter;
  • listen to the resulting episode in mid-January.

Our list of future book selections is already spiraling out of control, but we also welcome tips for future picks.

Those of you who are interested in the literary and historical aspects of the sport will find plenty to enjoy in the archives of our podcasts. I’ve spoken with three authors this month (ep 85 on World Team Tennis; ep 87 on Lottie Dod; ep 88 on A People’s History of Tennis) and Carl has been interviewing writers for years (such as Peter Underwood and Julie Heldman, to link just two).

We’ll have our discussion of A Handful of Summers on the podcast in about a month, so you have plenty of time to read the book. At that time, we’ll also announce the next selection.

Happy reading!

Podcast Episode 88: Author David Berry on His People’s History of Tennis

Episode 88 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast welcomes David Berry, author of the book A People’s History of Tennis.

The conversation, like his book, spans the entire history of tennis, with a particular focus on the ways in which the sport isn’t conservative at all. As Berry explains, women were a crucial part of lawn tennis from the very beginning, and a key decision in the game’s first decade ensured that the men’s and women’s games would remain intertwined. We also discuss the role of the local tennis club, the importance of public parks tennis around the world, and the fascinating yet mostly forgotten years of “Worker’s Wimbledon.”

It’s been a good year for tennis books, and of the ones I’ve read, Berry’s book is the best. The scope is ambitious, and I guarantee you will discover corners of the sport’s history you didn’t know anything about. Yet it’s a concise, quick read. Check it out!

Fans of the TA podcast will also want to check out Dangerous Exponents, the new Covid-19 podcast that Carl Bialik and I are doing. We released episode 4, about the virus in schools, earlier this week.

(Note: this week’s episode is about 60 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.

Podcast Episode 87: Author Sasha Abramsky on Lottie Dod, the Little Wonder

Episode 87 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast features Sasha Abramsky, author of the book Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar.

Our wide-ranging chat covers many aspects of the life and times of this 19th century superstar, from her global legions of fans, to her “Battle of the Sexes”-style challenges 80 years before King-Riggs, to her unprecedented and varied string of sporting successes. We also touch on the relative dearth of tennis historiography, the chronological gap between Dod and the next generation of female athletic superstars, and whether there is a natural intersection between progressive politics and the compelling stories of tennis history.

This was a great conversation about a part of tennis history we don’t hear nearly enough about, so I hope you’ll check it out. And for the full account of Lottie Dod, be sure to pick up your copy of Sasha’s book.

Fans of the TA podcast will also want to check out Dangerous Exponents, the new Covid-19 podcast that Carl Bialik and I are doing. We released episode 3 yesterday.

(Note: this week’s episode is about 60 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.

Podcast Episode 86: A New Documentary on Guillermo Vilas and the No. 1 Ranking

Episode 86 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast features Jeff and co-host Carl Bialik, of the Thirty Love podcast, discussing the new Netflix doc Guillermo Vilas: Settling the Score.

The Argentine star was a multi-slam winner in the 1970s, yet he never reached the top of the official ATP ranking list. The film covers journalist Eduardo Puppos’s quest to prove that Vilas deserved to be #1. Over the course of the episode, we ponder the importance of the top ranking, the vagaries of the ATP ranking algorithm, how Elo rates Vilas’s peak years, and the ATP’s response to Vilas’s case for the top spot. We didn’t love the documentary, but the issues it raises are fun to debate.

Fans of the TA podcast will also want to check out Dangerous Exponents, the new Covid-19 podcast that Carl Bialik and I are doing. Episode 3 will be available later today.

Thanks for listening!

(Note: this week’s episode is about 48 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.

Welcome to 1967

Last week, I finished* adding complete** 1967 women’s results to the Tennis Abstract site. I’ll talk about those asterisks in a bit, but for the moment I’d prefer to revel in how cool this is.

The “Open Era” starts in 1968, and in the near-decade since I launched TA, I took that year as my starting point. Along the way I added men’s slams and Davis Cup back to the beginning, but it’s buried on the site as an afterthought. I can’t imagine that anyone uses the site for amateur-era results.

Even late 60s and 70s results were spotty for women. I initially built my database from the results published on the WTA and ITF websites, neither of which is (how to put this mildly?) primarily focused on the thoroughness and accessibility of its historical data. Add in the mistakes and omissions that come from building my own database from scratch, and you end up with a lot of gaps.

A more complete Tennis Abstract

A few weeks ago, I started filling in those gaps by adding about 20 missing tournaments with a Chris Evert–Martina Navratilova match. That head-to-head is now complete. Soon it will be “more than complete,” as I add various exhibitions that don’t count in the official tally. From there, I used various sources (more on that below) to fill in the remaining gaps of top-level Open Era women’s tennis back to 1968. The result is about 50 full tournaments per year, sometimes more, with various bonuses like Federation Cup and a lot of grand slam qualifying.

The further back I went and the more I stumbled on stories about the women’s game at the beginning of the Open Era, the more I wanted to know. 1968 is an important year, but a lot of tennis was unchanged from 1967 to 1968–almost all of the same players excelled, on the same surfaces and mostly at the same events. It seems a little silly to have a statistical record that starts smack in the middle of all-time-great careers like those of Billie Jean King and Margaret Court.

Into the unknown

One of the most incredible online tennis resources is one you’ve probably never heard of. On the “Blast From the Past” section of tennisforum.com, a group of contributors have assembled a unparalleled collection of women’s match results going back to the 1800s. They’ve dredged up results and tournament information from old annuals, newspapers, and just about any other source you can imagine.

The disadvantage of their forum-based, text-based format is that it is only awkwardly searchable. (Just to be clear, I am not taking anything away from their outstanding efforts.) The forum approach does allow for a certain kind of serendipity, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who has lost hours scrolling, reviewing results, reading the tournament recaps and anecdotes collected there. But it precludes the kind of serendipity made possible by sites like Baseball Reference and Tennis Abstract, where you see one result, get curious about a player, click the player’s name, and find yourself looking at a whole new list of unfamiliar scores and stats.

The further back in history we go, the more I want that kind of serendipity. Now, Tennis Abstract has that for 1967, and soon it will go back further still.

Okay then: 1967

The site now includes results from over 100 events in 1967, from familiar names like Rome and Queen’s Club to lesser tournaments such as the Pan-American Games (held that year in Winnipeg) and the Soviet Championships in Tblisi. I don’t have complete data for every draw–some are missing a handful of first-rounders, and others have only the final round or two. All told, the database now includes almost 2,300 matches from that single year. By comparison, there were about 3,000 tour-level WTA matches in 2019.

Since there was no formal “tour” in 1967, there’s no official definition of what’s “in” or “out.” A match is a match. I didn’t include every single event with some kind of data available, but I did import the entire main draw of any tournament with even a single “big-name” player, using a fairly broad definition of that term. (1969 Wimbledon champ Ann Jones may make me regret that decision. She played a lot of tennis.) Because the various circuits were more fractured, that means more events: There were many weeks with three or four tournaments each, and a couple with five.

Creating records for those 2,300 matches meant adding almost 300 players who weren’t in my database. The majority of those are early-round losers in small events, women who didn’t seriously pursue tennis. But where I had a full name, I did at least a cursory search for each one, turning up a noted Spanglish poet, the “first grunter,” a squash Hall of Famer, and Marat Safin’s mom.

100 events sounded like a lot until I started working on 1966. I have a provisional list of 160 tournaments to include from that year. Even with all those caveats on the meanings of “finished” and “complete,” this is going to take a while.

Diving in

Here are direct links to 1967 results for a few players:

If you go to the main page for one of those players (for example, here’s Peaches Bartkowicz), you’ll find a cool addition that all the new 60s and 70s data has made possible: women’s Elo ratings back to the end of 1967. Player pages for women who played at least 20 matches in a season include their year-end ratings and rankings, including surface-specific figures.

Here is a very provisional overall top 10 for year-end 1967:

Rank  Player               Elo  
1     Billie Jean King  2221.3  
2     Virginia Wade     2114.9  
3     Nancy Richey      2113.2  
4     Judy Dalton       2083.3  
5     Ann Jones         2042.7  
6     Lesley Bowrey     2018.8  
7     Kerry Reid        2006.0  
8     Francoise Durr    2005.4  
9     Rosie Casals      1940.4  
10    Annette Du Plooy  1926.8

I say provisional because there’s so much left to add. (You know, the entire history of tennis prior to 1967.) At the moment, the algorithm doesn’t know anything about any of the players prior to January 1st, 1967. As it learns more, each player’s rating will be different at that point, and the year-end results will be tweaked as well. That goes for all Elo ratings and rankings throughout the 60s and 70s. The broad strokes will remain constant, but the exact numbers will change, and sometimes players will swap positions. As I add more data, King, Court, and Richey (among others) keep creeping up the all-time list.

As for the project as a whole, I have no idea how far I’ll get. While fascinating, it’s a time-consuming project, and the further into history we go, the less information is available on players beyond the all-time greats. Still, every small step back in time improves the accessibility of this period of women’s tennis data, which includes some of the most important players in the history of the sport.

About those sources

I’ve mentioned tennisforum’s Blast From the Past, which is truly essential. Another exhaustive source for match results starting 1968 is John Dolan’s book, Women’s Tennis 1968-84. Wikipedia has oddly spotty coverage: the Italian Wikipedia is good for tournament data, while the French Wikipedia seems to cover more players. (For Swedish players, Swedish Wikipedia is awesome. All that time spent learning Norwegian is finally paying off.) English Wikipedia is disappointingly lacking in comparison.

Podcast Episode 85: Author Steven Blush on 1970s World Team Tennis

Episode 85 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast features Jeff with guest Steven Blush, author of the recent book Bustin’ Balls: World Team Tennis 1974-78: Pro Sports, Pop Culture, and Progressive Politics.

We talk about how drastically WTT has changed from the early days, the crucial importance of Billie Jean King and the 1973 Battle of the Sexes, and how WTT fit into the 1970s cultural milieu. As Steven tells it, the original WTT was revolutionary, even “proto-woke,” with a place for everyone, setting men and women on equal footing, and welcoming everyone from Black NBA star John Lucas to (eventually) transgender trailblazer Renee Richards. This is an in-depth look at a neglected but fascinating part of tennis history.

I had a great time recording this episode, so I hope you’ll give it a listen. And, of course, Steven’s book makes the perfect Christmas gift for the tennis fan in your life.

Fans of the TA podcast will also want to check out Dangerous Exponents, the new Covid-19 podcast that Carl Bialik and I are doing. We released episode 2 yesterday.

(Note: this week’s episode is about 63 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.

Did Jimmy Connors Choke in the 1975 Wimbledon Final?

From our vantage point almost a half-century later, it’s easy to forget just how big an upset Arthur Ashe scored with his 1975 Wimbledon victory over Jimmy Connors. Connors was the top seed and defending champion, still riding high from a 1974 campaign that ranks among the best ever. Ashe was a few days short of his 32nd birthday, had a reputation of coming up short in finals, and had lost to Connors in their three previous meetings.

(For what it’s worth, my Elo algorithm thinks it was a much closer match than the bookies did at the time. It rated Ashe the second-best player in the tournament on grass courts, and gave the underdog a 39% chance of winning.)

Ashe ran away with the first two sets and held on to win in four, 6-1 6-1 5-7 6-4. Perhaps because the two men didn’t get along–apart from striking personality differences, Connors and his manager targeted Ashe with one of many lawsuits–the veteran was uncharacteristically critical of his opponent after the match. Ashe claimed that Connors missed many of his shots into the net (rather than long), a sign of choking.

Connors denied it, of course. It later came out that Jimmy was dealing with a foot problem which probably affected his play that day. In any case, fans and pundits surely had their fun debating whether Connors was a choker. I don’t know of anyone who took the question beyond simple speculation. No amount of statistical analysis can settle whether a player choked, but we can often answer adjacent questions to shed more light on the issue.

Counting errors

A couple of years ago I charted the Wimbledon final for the Match Charting Project, so we have a full count of errors–forced and unforced, serves and rallying shots, net and deep–for the entire match. We also have similar shot-by-shot stats for 25 other Connors matches for comparison. (Unfortunately, 24 of the 25 are chronologically later than the Ashe match, because there’s not much full-match footage from the early 70s.)

Here’s the tally: Excluding serves, Connors committed 13 unforced errors, 10 of them into the net. I recorded the type of error for 65 more forced errors: 32 into the net, 33 other. (Ashe was a netrusher, so many of Jimbo’s mistakes were failed passing shots.) On serve, he missed 29 first deliveries: 16 into the net, 13 otherwise. And his two second serve faults were split between one into the net and one elsewhere.

The unforced error split of 10-to-3 means that 77% of his UFEs were netted. That’s the most extreme of any of his charted matches; on average, his unforced errors were half nets, half others. While suggestive, that’s an awfully small sample from which to draw any conclusions.

Using larger samples that include forced errors and serves, the Wimbledon final doesn’t particularly stand out among other charted Connors matches. 54% of his non-serve errors (forced or unforced) in that match were netted, compared to 52% over the whole sample. 55% of his service faults against Ashe were hit into the net, versus 49% across the 26 matches. Altogether, Connors made 54% of his total errors and faults into the net in the Wimbledon final, compared to 51% in the broader sample.

Does it matter?

You’ve probably heard the tennis coaching conventional wisdom that it’s better to hit long than to hit into the net. Like most tennis shibboleths, this one has been around for a very long time. Ashe had surely heard it, which partly explains why he made the comment he did. Arthur didn’t have a printout with match stats generated by a consulting company with a gargantuan marketing budget, so he probably recalled a few key points and generalized from there.

If error types matter, we’d expect to see at least a mild correlation between results (say, percentage of points won) and error types. Let’s stay focused on the 26 charted Connors matches for today’s purposes. Here’s a version of the Ashe hypothesis, stripped of emotional content:

When Connors hits more errors than usual into the net, it’s a sign that he’s playing below his standard level.

It turns out that this theory is wrong–or, at best, possibly correct if narrowly defined. I considered five main stats as indicators of errors and faults going into the net:

  • Unforced errors (excluding double faults) into the net as a percentage of total unforced errors
  • Total rally errors (forced and unforced) into the net as a percentage of total errors
  • First serve faults into the net as a percentage of total first serve faults
  • All serve faults into the net as a percentage of all serve faults
  • All errors and faults into the net as a percentage of all errors and faults

The second (total rally errors) and last (all errors and faults) seem like the most valid of the five, because they give us a decent sample of error types for each match. There is almost exactly zero correlation between the last stat and total points won. And there is a very weak negative correlation (r^2 = 0.05) between the second stat and total points won.

In other words, the Ashe hypothesis might be on to something very minor if our focus in on rally shots. But the correlation is so weak that no human observer would ever notice it, unless they lucked into it by watching a few confirming key moments after being primed by the conventional wisdom.

He didn’t choke like that

I said above that statistical analysis couldn’t settle issues like whether a player choked. We can study what happened, but without machines hooked up to a player’s brain, we can’t tell what was going on inside their heads that might have caused it.

So we can’t say that Connors didn’t choke in the 1975 Wimbledon final. But we have seen that his percentage of into-the-net errors wasn’t that unusual for him (except for the small sample of unforced errors), and we’ve recognized that the number of mistakes he made into the net didn’t have much to say about his level of play that day. If Connors choked, then, it didn’t have anything to do with the low trajectory of his missed shots.

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I learned of Ashe’s post-match comment in Raymond Arsenault’s excellent biography, Arthur Ashe: A Life.