How Diana Shnaider Beat Zhu Lin in Hua Hin

Also today: Bublik’s quartet of comebacks; top seed upset trivia

Diana Shnaider at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion

Diana Shnaider lost her place in the WTA top 100 after her first-round exit at the Australian Open. But before we had time to reevaluate her place on the prospect list, she hurled her momentum back in the other direction, going through the top three seeds in Hua Hin, Thailand, to win her first career tour-level title. (More later on the trivia aspect.)

The Russian left-hander is only 19 years old, and her new ranking of #73 places her fourth among all women under 21. (She’s also up to 76th on the Elo list, ranked among the top 70 on hard courts.) The only younger players ahead of her are Coco Gauff, Linda Noskova, and Mirra Andreeva. Gauff is already a major winner, and Andreeva is three years younger, the impossibly young sensation of the moment. Noskova, though, is just seven months younger; coming off a quarter-final showing in Australia, she has already cracked the top 30. Shnaider trails the Czech by some distance on the points table, but she is every bit as promising of a prospect.

Zhu Lin, the Chinese veteran seeded third in Hua Hin, was no match for Shnaider yesterday. A second-set tactical shift–and a delayed response from the Russian–sent the match to a decider, but when Shnaider adjusted and Zhu failed to offer any new problems, it became a race to the finish. The 19-year-old completed her sixth top-50 victory, collecting the trophy by the score of 6-3, 2-6, 6-1.

Shnaider’s response to the final-round challenge was a fitting end to the week. Her three seeded victims–Zhu, Magda Linette, and Wang Xinyu–play different styles of tennis. Each one, at times, threatened to derail the Russian’s own game. She doesn’t yet have the weapons to impose herself on a top-tier opponent; her game may never be quite big enough for that. But her ability to handle the variety on offer in Hua Hin is an encouraging sign that she is maturing as a player. It could be a very long time before she gives up her place in the top 100.

Pushing around

The Russian has described herself an aggressive player. “I never wanted to be a pusher,” she told Christopher Clarey. “I was always like: ‘OK, here’s the shot. I’m killing it.'”

She isn’t a pusher, but by the standards of modern-day women’s tennis, she isn’t particularly aggressive, either. Her serve isn’t big enough to dictate play: 80% of them come back, setting her equal to Elina Svitolina or Emma Navarro. She uses her groundstrokes as weapons in every direction, but she plays within herself and leaves winners on the table. She ends points a bit more often than the typical WTAer from the baseline in exchange for a tour-average rate of unforced errors. Her Rally Aggression Score, across six charted matches from the last year, is +13, slightly above the norm and similar to that of Maria Sakkari.

It’s tempting to label her a counterpuncher, especially after watching a highlight reel or two. The broadcast commentator for her first-round victory over Linette was reduced to sputtering “No way!” after one unlikely recovery; my own reaction was less printable. She’s extremely fast, deceptively so. Woe betide the opponent who approaches the net. A singles court is 27 feet wide, and Shnaider needs only a few inches.

But “counterpuncher” isn’t right either. She’s not a pusher, she’s a pusher-around. Her relatively flat crosscourt groundstrokes off both wings are daunting, especially the left-handed forehand. The Russian rarely squanders an opportunity to do something with a groundstroke, whether that means widening the court or dislodging her opponent from the baseline. She doesn’t go for broke, but there’s not much passivity in her approach.

Shnaider’s brand of pushing-around works best against an opponent with an exploitable backhand. Linette’s backhand was too steady, which is what made the first rounder the Russian’s closest contest of the week. (Each woman won 75 of the first 150 points before the knot was finally untied.) Against Wang Xinyu and Zhu Lin, the crosscourt forehand consistently took control of points:

MATCH          W/FE%  PointsWon%  
SF vs Wang       27%         76%  
FI vs Zhu        30%         66%  
-- DS Avg        20%         59%  
-- Tour Avg      14%         53%  
R1 vs Linette    22%         47% 

These numbers are for crosscourt forehands only. When she hits them, Shnaider ends points in her favor one-fifth of the time, and she came close to one in three yesterday against Zhu. More commonly, the pressure created by that stroke–not the individual shot itself–is what wins the point. The average WTA player picks up barely half of points in which they hit a crosscourt forehand. It’s just not an overwhelmingly offensive shot. Iga Swiatek wins 60% of those points; Aryna Sabalenka wins 58%. Shnaider, like Iga, wins nearly 60% of them, claiming two of three against Zhu and more than three out of four against Wang.

She’s not killing the ball, not most of the time anyway. But it doesn’t matter. Her crosscourt forehand is the tennis equivalent of death by a thousand cuts.

Adjustment periods

Shnaider’s game is a work in progress, no criticism for a 19-year-old who balanced college tennis with the tour for half of last year. She will almost certainly develop more power, especially on the serve, where there is a wide gap between her biggest strikes and her more pedestrian offerings. She will probably also learn to take more chances from the baseline, an adjustment that would give her more control over her own fate.

On a smaller scale, each one of her three seeded opponents last week threatened to take control of their encounters; each time, the left-hander recovered in time to advance.

Linette, as we’ve seen, had no problem with the barrage of crosscourt forehands. After Shnaider won the opening frame, the top seed roared back with a 6-1 second. From there, though, the Russian was a different player. She sent more first serves to the wide corners–reliable weapons for many a left-hander–which sealed the first game of the decider with the loss of just one point. She also moved away from the crosscourt forehand, letting Linette test her own backhand with crosscourt forehands of her own. At 30-40 in the Pole’s first service game of the decider, Linette hit her plus-one shot down the middle. Where Shnaider might prefer to attack crosscourt, she instead went inside-out, setting herself up for a backhand crosscourt winner on the following shot. Linette would break back in the following game, but her momentum was broken. Shnaider had opened up new tactical options and would take the third set, 6-1.

Wang’s threat was less serious, but it represents bigger dangers that the 19-year-old will face on tour. Shnaider won the first set easily, aided by Wang’s own mistakes. But the Chinese player brought her power under control at the beginning of the second, breaking for a 3-1 advantage. The fourth game demonstrated what a big hitter can do: Wang needed only five shots to reach 40-30. There wasn’t anything to push around.

While Wang wasn’t exactly dominant on serve, she was good enough. The only way to handle a (temporarily) unbreakable server is to take care of your own deal, and Shnaider did her best. She took more chances with first serves, seeing that number fall below 50%, compared to a usual rate above 60%. When she was able to extend rallies, she let Wang make mistakes. The second-set tiebreak ended with a combination of the two: At 4-5, Wang missed a swinging volley to end a 20-stroke rally. Two points later, Shnaider cracked a wide first serve that didn’t come back.

Zhu Lin proved to be the knottiest problem of the three top seeds, even if she didn’t play the best tennis. Though Zhu doesn’t have big weapons, she knows the dangers of passive tennis, especially against someone like Shnaider who will push her around. After the first set went to the Russian, 6-3, Zhu did everything she could to shorten points. For one set, it worked:

RALLY LEN  Shots/Pt  
Set 1           4.6  
Set 2           3.7  
Set 3           4.6 

Zhu picked up the second set, 6-2, in large part because Shnaider reacted so badly to the shift. After balancing winners and unforced errors in the first set, the 19-year-old hit just two winners against ten errors–including six on the forehand–in the second.

When the deciding set began, it was as if both players realized that Zhu couldn’t keep playing with borrowed tactics. Shnaider continued to put service returns close to the baseline–her Return Depth Index was 2.83, by far the best of the charted matches in her career so far–making it more difficult for Zhu to attack. Her forehand recovered, ensuring that she would keep points alive. A better player, or one with more experience, might have reacted to Zhu’s shift more quickly, but it is to Shnaider’s credit that she did so, so comprehensively, well before the clock ran out. The Russian concluded her title run with a 6-1 final set.

If the course of this week’s triumph is any indication, Shnaider’s march to the top of the rankings will be a steady one. She has too much to figure out before she consistently beats the best, and that will take time. But her run of upsets in Hua Hin showed us that she is making progress, and that her in-match problem-solving skills far surpass those of the typical 19-year-old. As the problems get tougher, we’ll find out just how far she can go.

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Alexander Bublik’s four comebacks

Alexander Bublik won the Montpellier title the hard way, coming back from one-set deficits against all four of his opponents. It’s the first time anyone has ever won an ATP title despite losing the first set of each of his matches. It’s never happened on the Challenger tour, either.

However, the key word here is four. Bublik was the second seed in Montpellier, so he didn’t have to play a first-round match. No titlist has ever lost the first set in all of their matches, but many players have won a tournament despite losing four first sets.

I found 20 previous occasions when a player came back so often at the same event, en route to a title. (Presumably there are even more, if we look for finalists, quarter- and semi-finalists at majors, and so on.) Bublik was the first since 2009, when Radek Stepanek recorded back-to-back wins against Andy Roddick and Mardy Fish to claim the San Jose title. He recovered from a one-set deficit four times, straight-setting only Chris Guccione.

The feat was more common at the beginning of the century, occuring twice each in 2001 and 2002. Tommy Haas recorded four comebacks on the way to a title at the 2001 Stuttgart Masters, the single Masters-level title run on this list. His only straight-set victory was the best-of-five final against Max Mirnyi. Nicolas Escude won Rotterdam in 2002 against an all-star cast including Roger Federer, Juan Carlos Ferrero, Tim Henman, Sebastien Grosjean, and Tommy Robredo, losing the first set to all but Robredo. Don’t be too hard on Tommy, though: He took the first set from Paul-Henri Mathieu in Moscow the same year, where Mathieu dropped four first sets yet still took home the trophy.

Two major winners appear on this list: John McEnroe for his 1981 US Open run, and Andre Agassi for his 1992 championship at Wimbledon (where, in another coincidence, he beat McEnroe in the semis). Those feats aren’t really in the same category as Bublik’s, as they had seven chances to come back. On the other hand, McEnroe recovered from a one-set deficit against Bjorn Borg, so I’m not about to disqualify him from anything.

Finally, there’s one oddball occasion that–if you squint hard enough–really is a precedent for Montpellier last week. Emilio Sanchez led Spain to the 1992 World Team Cup title, beating Stefan Edberg, Guy Forget, and Jakob Hlasek in the round robin, then defeating Petr Korda in the final round. In each one, he came back after losing the first set. It’s not quite the same thing, but Sanchez went home a hero, and he came back in all four of his matches. Whether it qualifies or not, it was one hell of a week.

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Shnaider’s top-three upsets

As I mentioned at the top of today’s post, Diana Shnaider went through the first, second, and third three seeds in Hua Hin en route to the title. (Unlike Bublik, she won all five of her first sets, too.) She beat top seed Magda Linette in the first round, third-seeded Wang Xinyu in the semi-finals, and second seed Zhu Lin in the final.

Shnaider’s feat is not so rare as Bublik’s. Excluding year-end tour championships, where seeds clash in every match, Hua Hin is the sixth time in a decade that player has gone through the top three seeds to win the title. Remarkably, Barbora Krejcikova has done it twice in two years, beating Anett Kontaveit, Belinda Bencic, and Beatriz Haddad Maia to win Tallinn in 2022, then upsetting Aryna Sabalenka, Jessica Pegula, and Iga Swiatek (not to mention seventh-seed Daria Kasatkina and twelvth-seed Petra Kvitova) to win Dubai last year.

The list of previous such winners is a glittering one, usually when a superstar returns from a prolonged absence. Serena Williams beat Martina Hingis, Jennifer Capriati, and sister Venus to win Miami in 2002. Steffi Graf won the 1999 French Open by knocking out Lindsay Davenport, Monica Seles, and Hingis in succession.

Graf wasn’t the first player to win a major title in such a fashion: Virginia Wade picked up the first US Open, in 1968, by eliminating Judy Tegart, Ann Jones, and Billie Jean King.

Conchita Martinez is probably the best player who won a title this way when she was still on the rise: She upset Sabrina Goles, Katerina Maleeva, and Barbara Paulus to pick up the 1988 Sofia crown. Hana Mandlikova, like Krejcikova, did it twice: At the 1984 Oakland tourney, she beat Andrea Jaeger, Pam Shriver, and Martina Navratilova. She returned the next year and did it again, knocking out Wendy Turnbull, Helena Sukova, and Chris Evert.

Finally, a twist: Margaret Court also appears on the list twice. Shortly after returning from her first pregnancy, she won the 1972 Newport title–where she was seeded sixth–with victories over Rosie Casals, Evert, and King. The odder instance is her other appearance, for the Locust Valley (New York) event in 1969. Court plowed through top seeds Denise Carter, Patti Hogan, and Betty Ann Grubb, losing just 12 games in the process.

Margaret had already won two majors that year–so why wasn’t she the top seed? Traditionally, foreign players were placed on a separate seeding list. Carter, Hogan, and Grubb were the top three Americans at the rather weak event. Court was designated 1F–the top foreign seed, ahead of 2F Kerry Harris, with whom she won the doubles, too. Foreign seeds were placed in the draw so they would avoid local seeds (and each other) until later rounds. So this example doesn’t really count: By modern standards, Court was herself the top seed, and Harris probably outranked one or more of the Americans.

Even if we toss out Locust Valley, Shnaider finds herself in good company. She joins Wade, Court, Mandlikova, Martinez, Graf, Amelie Mauresmo, Serena, and–thanks to a sparkling week in Luxembourg in 2016–the great Monica Niculescu.

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What Is Going Wrong For Novak Djokovic?

Also: Arina Rodionova (probably) in the top 100

Novak Djokovic practicing at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Amaury Laporte

Fifteen break points. A week has passed, a new champion has been crowned, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. In the first two sets of his Australian Open quarter-final match against Taylor Fritz, Novak Djokovic failed to convert fifteen straight break points.

It’s so far out of character as to defy belief. Djokovic has converted more than 40% of his break chances in the past year, even counting the 4-for-21 showing in the entire Fritz match. The American, one of the better servers on tour, typically saves only two-thirds of the break points he faces. The chances that Novak would come up short 15 times in a row are about one in seven million.

Even stranger, it wasn’t because Fritz served so well. He missed his first serve on 7 of the 15 break points. He hit two aces and another four didn’t come back, but that leaves nine rallies when–under pressure, in Australia–Taylor Fritz beat Novak Djokovic. Five of those lasted at least seven strokes, including a 25-shot gutbuster at 4-3 in the second set that was followed, two points later, by yet another Fritz winner on the 17th shot. All credit to the American, who walked a tightrope of down-the-line backhands and refused to give in to an opponent who, even in the first two sets, was outplaying him. But clearly this wasn’t a matter of Fritz intimidating or otherwise imposing himself on Novak.

There’s no shortage of explanations. Djokovic is recovering from a wrist injury that hampered him in his United Cup loss to Alex de Minaur. He apparently had the flu going into the Melbourne semi against Jannik Sinner. The whole Australian adventure might be nothing more than a health-marred aberration; in this interpretation, none of Jiri Lehecka, Dino Prizmic, Alexei Popyrin, or even Fritz would otherwise have taken a set from the all-time great.

But… the man is 36 years old. If other tennis players his age are any guide, he may never be fully healthy again. He will continue to get slower, if only marginally so. He personally raised the physical demands of the sport, and finally, a younger generation has accepted the challenge. Djokovic has defied the odds to stay on top for as long as he has, but eventually he will fade, even if that means only a gentle tumble out of the top three. After a month like this, we have to ask, is it the beginning of the end?

Rally intolerance

The two marathon break points that Fritz saved were not exceptions. 64 of the 269 points in the quarter-final reached a seventh shot, and the American won more than half of them. Even among double-digit rallies, the results were roughly even.

Here’s another data point: Djokovic fought out 53 points in his first-rounder against Prizmic that reached ten shots or more. The 18-year-old Croatian won 30 of them. Yeah, Prizmic is a rising star with mountains of potential, but he’s also ranked 169th in the world. This is not the Novak we’ve learned to expect: Even after retooling his game around a bigger serve and shorter points, he remained unshakeable from the baseline, his famous flexibility keeping him in position to put one more ball back in play.

Down Under, though, those skills went missing. Based on 278 charted matches since the start of 2015, the following table shows the percentage of points each year that he takes to seven shots or more, and his success rate in those rallies:

Year  7+ Freq  7+ Win%  
2015    23.3%    54.9%  
2016    26.7%    53.1%  
2017    29.1%    53.3%  
2018    24.4%    52.6%  
2019    25.0%    55.1%  
2020    26.0%    54.3%  
2021    23.8%    53.6%  
2022    23.2%    54.7%  
2023    23.4%    54.1%  
2024    26.0%    49.8%

By the standards of tennis’s small margins, that’s what it looks like to fall off a cliff. The situation probably isn’t quite so bad: The sample from 2024 is limited to only the matches against Lehecka, de Minaur, Prizmic, Fritz, and Sinner. On the other hand, matches charted in previous years also skew in favor of novelty, so upsets, close matches, and elite opponents are overrepresented there too.

It is especially unusual for Djokovic to see such a decline on hard courts. Over the last decade, he has gone through spells when he loses more long rallies than he wins. But they typically come on clay. Carlos Alcaraz shut him down in last year’s Wimbledon final as well, winning 57% of points that reached the seventh shot and 63% of those with ten or more strokes. The only period when hard-court Novak consistently failed to win this category was late 2021, when Medvedev beat him for the US Open title (and then outscored him in long rallies in Paris), and Alexander Zverev won 62% of the seven-plusses (and 70% of ten-plusses!) to knock him out of the Tour Finals.

Protracted rallies are a young man’s game, and Djokovic’s results are starting to show it. Before dissecting Alcaraz in Turin last November, Novak had never won more than half of seven-plusses against Carlitos. He has barely held on against Sinner, winning 43% of those points in their Tour Finals round-robin match and 51% at the Davis Cup Finals. In 13 meetings since 2019, Medvedev has won more of these long rallies than Djokovic has. Zverev, too, has edged him out in this category since the end of 2018.

Against the rest of the pack, Djokovic manages just fine. He dominates seven-plusses against Casper Ruud and Stefanos Tsitsipas, for instance. But it’s one of the few chinks in his armor against the best, and if January represents anything more than the temporary struggles of an ailing star, more players are figuring out how to take advantage.

Avoiding danger

For players who lose a disproportionate number of long points, the best solution is to shorten them. Djokovic may never have thought in exactly those terms, but perhaps with an eye toward energy conservation, he has done exactly that.

Especially from 2017 to 2022, Novak drastically reduced the number of points that reached the seven-shot threshold:

In 2017, 29% of his points went that long; in 2022 and 2023, barely 23% did. It remains to be seen whether January 2024 is more than a blip. In his up-and-down month, Novak remained able to control his service points, but he was less successful avoiding the grind on return. As we’ve seen, that’s dangerous territory: Djokovic won a healthy majority of the short points against Fritz but was less successful in the long ones, especially following the American’s own serve.

Much rests on the direction of these trends. If the players Djokovic has faced so far this year can prevent him from finishing points early, how will he handle Medvedev or Zverev?. If Novak can’t reliably outlast the likes of Fritz and Prizmic, what are his chances against Alcaraz?

Djokovic is well-positioned to hold on to his number one ranking until the French Open, when he’ll be 37 years old. By then, presumably, he’ll be clear of the ailments that held him back in Australia. Still, holding off the combination of Sinner, Alcaraz, Medvedev, Zverev, and Father Time will be increasingly difficult. The 24-time major champion will need to redouble the tactical effort to keep points short and somehow recover the magic that once made him so implacable in the longest rallies. Age is just a number, but few metrics are so ruthless in determining an athlete’s fate.

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Arina Rodionova on the cusp of the top 100

In December, Australian veteran Arina Rodionova celebrated her 34th birthday. Now she’s competing at the tour-level event in Hua Hin this week, sporting a new career-best ranking of 101. With a first-round upset win over sixth-seed Yue Yuan, she’s up to 99th in the live rankings. Her exact position next Monday is still to be determined–a few other women could spoil the party with deep runs, or she could climb higher with more victories of her own–but a top-100 debut is likely.

Rodionova, assuming she makes it, will be the oldest woman ever* to crack the top 100 for the first time. The record is held by Tzipi Oblizer, who was two months short of her own 34th birthday when she reached the ranking milestone in 2007. Rodionova will be just the fifth player to join the top-100 club after turning 30.

* I say “ever” with some caution: I don’t have weekly rankings before the mid-80s, so I checked back to 1987. Before then, the tour skewed even younger, so I doubt there were 30-somethings breaking into the top 100. But it’s possible.

Here is the list of oldest top-100 debuts since 1987:

Player                    Milestone  Age at debut  
Arina Rodionova*         2024-02-05          34.1  
Tzipi Obziler            2007-02-19          33.8  
Adriana Villagran Reami  1988-08-01          32.0 
Emina Bektas             2023-11-06          30.6  
Nuria Parrizas Diaz      2021-08-16          30.1  
Mihaela Buzarnescu       2017-10-16          29.5  
Julie Ditty              2007-11-05          28.8  
Eva Bes Ostariz          2001-07-16          28.5  
Maryna Zanevska          2021-11-01          28.2  
Ysaline Bonaventure      2022-10-31          28.2  
Mashona Washington       2004-07-19          28.1  
Laura Pigossi            2022-08-29          28.1  
Maureen Drake            1999-02-01          27.9  
Hana Sromova             2005-11-07          27.6  
Laura Siegemund          2015-09-14          27.5

* pending!

I extended the list to 16 places in order to include Laura Siegemund. She and Buzarnescu are the only two women to crack the top 100 after their 27th birthdays yet still ascend to the top 30. The odds are against Rodionova doing the same–the average peak of the players on the list is 67, and the majority of them achieved the milestone a half-decade earlier–but you never know.

A triumph of scheduling

Rodionova has truly sweated her way to the top. She played 105 matches last year, winning 78 of them, assembling a haul of seven titles and another three finals. When I highlighted the exploits of Emma Navarro a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t help but draw attention to the Australian, who is one of only two women to win more matches than Navarro since the beginning of last year. Iga Swiatek is the other.

Most of the veteran’s recent triumphs–44 match wins and five of her seven 2023 titles–have come at the ITF W25 level. She didn’t beat a single top-200 player in those events, and she faced only five of them. In her long slog through the tennis world last year, Rodionova played just one match against a top-100 opponent, and that was a loss to 91st-ranked Dalma Galfi.

The point is, the Aussie earned her ranking with quantity, not quality. No shame in that: The WTA made the rules, and the Australian not only chose a schedule to maximize her chances of climbing the ranking table, she executed. Kudos to her.

What her ranking does not mean, however, is that she is one of the 100 best players in the world. Elo is a more reliable judge of that, and going into this week, the algorithm ranks her 207th. (She peaked in the 140s, back in 2017.) You can hack the WTA rankings with a punishing slate of ITFs, but it’s much harder to cheat Elo.

Here are the players in the official top 150 who Elo considers to be most overrated:

Player             Elo Rank  WTA Rank  Ratio  
Caroline Dolehide       124        41    3.0  
Peyton Stearns          145        54    2.7  
Arantxa Rus             103        43    2.4  
Tatjana Maria            94        44    2.1  
Arina Rodionova         207       101    2.0  
Laura Pigossi           221       114    1.9  
Elina Avanesyan         120        62    1.9  
Varvara Gracheva         89        46    1.9  
Nadia Podoroska         127        67    1.9  
Lucia Bronzetti         109        58    1.9  
Dayana Yastremska        54        29    1.9

Once you climb into the top 100, savvy scheduling is increasingly impractical. Instead, this kind of gap comes from a deep run or two combined with many other unimpressive losses. Caroline Dolehide reached the final in Guadalajara followed by a quarter-final exit at a WTA 125, then lost three of five matches in Australia. Arantxa Rus won the title in Hamburg and reached a W100 semi-final, then lost five of six. The WTA formula lets you keep all the points from a big win for 52 weeks; Elo takes them away if you don’t keep demonstrating that you belong at the new level.

The sub-200 Elo rank suggests that Rodionova will have a hard time sustaining her place on the WTA list once the ranking points from her W25 titles start to come off the board. Until then, she can continue to pad her total and–fingers crossed–enjoy the hard-earned reward of a double-digit ranking.

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The Highest-Ranked Slam Qualifier

Today, Aslan Karatsev plays for a place in the French Open main draw. He is the top seed in qualifying on the strength of his ATP ranking of 62. A top-70 ranking would normally guarantee main draw entry with room to spare. But when the list was finalized about six weeks ago, Karatsev lingered outside the top 120. Since then, he reached the semi-finals in Madrid.

It is rare for such a high-ranked player to appear in qualifying. (Or to put it another way, it is unusual for a player outside the top 100 to make such gains in just a few weeks.) But it is not unprecedented. Here are the 13th highest-ranked top seeds in men’s slam qualifying since 2000:

RANK  Year  Tourney        Player              
57    2013  US Open        Federico Delbonis   
59    2017  US Open        Leonardo Mayer      
62    2009  Roland Garros  Fabio Fognini       
62    2023  Roland Garros  Aslan Karatsev      
67    2004  Roland Garros  Albert Montanes     
68    2000  US Open        Harel Levy          
69    2007  US Open        Frank Dancevic      
69    2009  US Open        Thomaz Bellucci     
70    2015  Roland Garros  Hyeon Chung         
75    2005  Roland Garros  Andreas Seppi       
75    2008  Roland Garros  Eduardo Schwank     
75    2022  US Open        Constant Lestienne  
77    2007  Wimbledon      Nicolas Mahut

I extended the list to 13 for a reason: to include Wimbledon. The top 12 spots are monopolized by the French and US Opens, because there are so many ranking points available in the weeks leading up to those events. We have to go much further down the list to find someone at the Australian Open: Taylor Fritz was ranked 91st when he played 2018 Aussie qualifying.

While Karatsev has progressed smoothly this week, a high rank is no guarantee of success. Federico Delbonis was ranked 57th when he began qualifying rounds at the 2013 US Open. He was fresh off a run to the Hamburg final the month before. He lasted just 55 minutes against Mikhail Kukushkin, then headed home a first-round loser.

Vijay!

I’ve only gone back to 2000 because I don’t have full qualifying results for tournaments before that. But we can find some qualifiers from earlier years, because we know which main draw players came through the preliminary rounds.

Peter Wetz ran this query for me and found a surprise. In 1982, 35th-ranked Vijay Amritraj reached the Wimbledon main draw as a qualifier. 35! Arguably, he was even better than that. He had finished the 1981 season ranked 20th, in large part on the strength of a quarter-final showing at Wimbledon, where he couldn’t convert a two-sets-to-love lead on Jimmy Connors. Amritraj was considered one of the best grass-court players in the world.

The 28-year-old Indian star was stuck in qualifying because he was at odds with the tennis establishment. The men’s Grand Prix–roughly speaking, the equivalent of today’s ATP tour–established a new rule, that players must commit to at least ten Grand Prix events in order to be eligible for the slams. Another protester was Björn Borg, who wanted to keep playing only if he could pick his spots more carefully.

Amritraj had a lot of things going on, and he didn’t like being “press-ganged” into playing all those events. He was pursuing an acting career and would appear in the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy. Still, this was Wimbledon. He claimed he had received hundreds of letters from fans begging him to play. In India, he said, the only two events that mattered were Wimbledon and Davis Cup.

So Vijay went to qualifying. He was the biggest story of the event, which typically didn’t make headlines at all. He opened his campaign with a win, something he had waited 11 years for. He hadn’t entered qualifying since 1971, when he was 17 years old and failed to clear the first round.

He won his second match with ease as well, straight-setting Christo van Rensburg. He learned that day that he had already earned a main draw place thanks to a withdrawal. In those days, there was no lucky loser lottery. When a main draw position opened up, the highest-ranked loser from the final round got in. So Amritraj would make the 128-man field either way.

As it turned out, he earned his ticket–but just barely. Vijay overcame an unheralded American, Glen Holroyd, 6-7, 3-6, 6-4, 7-5, 6-2. “I will need to be better than this,” he said, “if I am to do anything at Wimbledon.”

He did something, but not as much as he would’ve liked. The 35th-ranked qualifier came back from a two-set disadvantage in the first round to beat Jeff Borowiak, then he straight-setted Pascal Portes to reach the round of 32. There, he capitulated to Roscoe Tanner in what must have been a fine display of grass court tennis. Tanner, the 14th seed and 1979 finalist, beat him, 6-4, 6-4, 4-6, 4-6, 6-3. For the fifth year in a row, Vijay exited the Championships after a five-set loss.

Amritraj never did give up on his favorite event. He returned to the main draw for the next five years, reaching the fourth round in 1985 when he upset Yannick Noah. In 1988, his streak came to end when he lost in the final qualifying round to Heiner Moraing, 7-6(3), 4-6, 6-7(3), 7-5, 8-6. Players didn’t call qualifying “heartbreak valley” for nothing.

In 1990, he came back one more time. 19 years after his first attempt to crack the main draw, Vijay got through. Ranked outside the top 300, the 36-year-old was lucky to have a place in the field at all. But he beat Éric Winogradsky, Stéphane Grenier, and Stephen Botfield to qualify. He lost in the first round, but as usual, it took five sets to stop him.

May 25, 1973: Unbroken

Ion Țiriac in the 1972 Davis Cup Finals

Here’s a trivia question for you: What was the first grand slam singles match without a break of serve?

In 1973, it hadn’t been possible for long. The US Open was the first major to adopt the tiebreak, in 1970. Before that, every set would continue until someone broke serve and established a two-game lead. Only in 1973 did the other slams follow suit. There weren’t any zero-break matches at the Australian Open, just as there hadn’t been in the first three years of tiebreak tennis at Forest Hills. Even with sudden death shootouts in place, it would be unusual for two men to string together a minimum of three unbroken sets, 36 consecutive holds of serve.

The 1973 French Open made it easier. The tournament experimented with best-of-three-set contests for the first two rounds. Now 24 holds would be enough, even if the slow Parisian clay worked in the returner’s favor.

On May 25, Roland Garros delivered such a match. Two veterans–31-year-old American Frank Froehling and 34-year-old Romanian Ion Țiriac–locked horns for a second-round baseline slugfest that, somehow, never resulted in a break. Froehling advanced, 7-6(3), 7-6(3).

It was a strange outcome. Froehling, like most Americans of his generation, served big. Țiriac, despite his barrel chest and “Brașov Bulldozer” nickname, did not. When the two men faced off in a decisive 1971 Davis Cup match, only one of five sets reached 6-all; two others finished at 6-1. The Romanian had played both Olympic ice hockey and international-level rugby, yet on the tennis court he was a jackrabbit. He realized he didn’t have the strokes of a champion, but he was smart, he was stubborn, and he could run.

And if he couldn’t break your serve, Țiriac could usually break your spirit. No one in the sport practiced more gamesmanship, a polite term for what was often outright cheating. The Romanian’s antics in the 1972 Davis Cup final were flagrant enough that the ILTF suspended him. So obnoxious were the hosts in Bucharest that the United Nations gave a “Fair Play” award to Stan Smith, one of the Americans who withstood it all. Smith’s citation: sportsmanship “in the face of a hostile, chauvinistic public, irregularities in the scoring and aggressive behavior by one of his opponents.” The UN was calling out Ilie Năstase, but Țiriac was probably worse.

By May 1973, the Brașov Bulldozer was wondering if it was worth it anymore. For eight years, he had mentored Năstase, now the best clay courter in the world and the top seed in Paris. Now, they were no longer on speaking terms.

“Năstase was becoming impossible,” Țiriac told a British journalist. “I am the sort of competitor who plays to win but, in doubles, Năstase just wanted to clown about. He let me down badly in the French Championships last year when we were the favorites to win the title. We lost in the first round.”

After the 1972 Davis Cup finals, the Romanian quit the national team. He told the same journalist that he’d retire after the 1974 season. It was clear to another spectator at the Froehling duel that “his heart was clearly not in the match.”

No one knew what Țiriac would do once he gave up full-time competition, but he was always a man to watch. Behind his perpetual glower was a brilliant mind, capable of idiosyncratic conversation in six languages. He had raised Năstase up from what he called “a nothing in the streets of Bucharest.” Perhaps he could do it again.

* * *

Coincidentally, Țiriac’s next project was also in action on May 25th, 1973. 20-year-old Guillermo Vilas of Argentina was little known outside of South America, but that was about to change.

In the second round, the young left-hander drew seventh seeded Spaniard Andrés Gimeno. A year before, Gimeno had become the oldest first-time major champion when he won the French at age 34. This isn’t to say he was a late bloomer: He signed up for the professional ranks when he was 23, after a sterling amateur season in 1960. He held his own against Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, and the rest for seven years before the start of the Open era. He faced Laver at least 120 times between 1960 and 1971, winning nearly one in three.

But after a four-title 1972 season, Gimeno suffered a meniscus injury. He was a meager 5-4 on the season coming into the French Open, fading as fast as Vilas was rising.

The inter-generational battle was a dramatic one. The Argentinian finally triumphed, 6-2, 5-7, 8-6. Țiriac would later say that Vilas lacked a killer instinct–“This guy not capable in life to kill a fly”–but he was always able to exhaust opponents into submission. For the second year in a row, the lefty had reached the third round in Paris.

Soon, Vilas’s accomplishments would be measured not in match wins, but in finals–often against rival Björn Borg. The coincidences multiply: Yet another match on May 25th was a delayed opening-round tilt, 16-year-old Borg’s first-ever appearance at the French. He, too, made a statement that day, handing a routine defeat to 1971 Roland Garros quarter-finalist Cliff Richey, 6-2, 6-3.

While Țiriac’s two-tiebreak loss to Froehling was the quirkiest result of the day, tennis history was in the making all over the grounds.

* * *

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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Erasing Love-40 Three Times In a Row

During last week’s marathon fourth-rounder at Indian Wells, Daniil Medvedev tucked an unusual feat inside his 6-7, 7-6, 7-5 defeat of Alexander Zverev. Starting with the 12th game of the first set, he recovered from a 0-40 deficit in three consecutive service games.

Voo de Mar noticed:

Peter asked me if this had ever happened before, so here we are. The short answer is: I’m not sure (at least at ATP tour level), because I don’t have the point-by-point sequence for every match. However, I have the sequence for enough matches to confirm that it’s extremely rare.

Theory first

Just falling behind 0-40 is unusual. ATP-level servers win about 65% of points, so a basic model would predict that 0-40 happens in 4.3% of service games. It’s actually more frequent than that–about 5.4%–partly because the tour does not consist of identical servers, and partly because there’s probably some streakiness involved.

Back to theory: “Erasing” a 0-40 deficit means winning three service points after losing the first three. The odds of that particularly six-point sequence–again, assuming the server wins 65% of points–is 1.2%.

The historical record agrees exactly. Across 18,000 tour-level matches from 2010s, I found that the server falls to 0-40 and recovers to deuce exactly 1.2% of the time.

Three in a row is a different story entirely. If there’s a 1% probability of something occurring once, there’s a 0.0001%–literally, one in a million–chance that it will happen three times in a row. On the other hand, there are a lot of matches and a lot of service games. Using some rough assumptions for the number of games in a match and the number of matches per season, my ballpark estimate is that we should see a rarity like this about once in every 10-12 ATP seasons.

The data

Like I said, I don’t have the point-by-point sequence for every match. But I do have it for over 18,000 ATP matches between 2011 and early 2019. (Much of that data, plus equivalent data for women’s tennis, is here.) In that dataset, there was only one instance when a player apparently erased a 0-40 deficit three times in a row: 2011 Kuala Lumpur, where Mischa Zverev managed it against Philipp Petzschner.

Except… I’m not so sure. In 2011, betting sites were just starting to collect and publish point-by-point data, and some of it was approximate. For this particular match, there is a suspicious number of streaks, a sign that the data wasn’t reported precisely. For instance, in all three of the 0-40 rescues, Zverev purportedly won the next five points in a row. It’s possible, but we have to leave a question mark next to this one.

We can, however, broaden the search. 6,800 ATP qualifying matches? No one managed three 0-40 recoveries in a row. 28,000 Challenger matches? Now we’re talking–I found five occasions when a player saved three consecutive 0-40 deficits. The most recent was at the 2016 Tallahassee Challenger, where Donald Young accomplished it in a losing effort against Frances Tiafoe. He won the first two of the games, but in the third, serving to stay in the match, he fought back to deuce only to double fault on match point.

I found another five cases out of over 33,000 Futures-level matches. The most recent, a 2017 match between Altug Celikbilek and Francesco Vilardo, was notable because Celikbilek recovered from 0-40 in the 6th, 8th, and 10th games–and in the 7th game, Vilardo did as well!

It’s important to keep in mind that servers do not win as many points at the lower levels of men’s tennis. (Streakiness might also generate more 0-40 scores as well.) In my 2011-2019 data, servers fell to love-40 5.4% of the time at the ATP main draw level, 5.8% in ATP qualifying, 6.4% at Challengers, and 7.7% at Futures. However, that doesn’t end up generating many more recoveries, since servers are more likely to lose those games before evening the score.

If we dump all of these results together, we get 10 occasions (or 11, if you count the Petzschner match) when a player recovered from 0-40 three times in a row, out of approximately 86,400 total matches. That rate suggests that we should see a feat like Medvedev’s once every three or four years on tour. That’s more frequent than my initial calculation, but still quite rare.

Alexander Bublik and Return of Serve Futility

In Sunday’s Singapore final, Alexander Bublik won six return points. Not a typo. Out of Alexei Popyrin’s 52 serve points, that’s a win percentage of 11.6%. The technical term for this level of performance is… bad.

Yet somehow, Bublik concentrated four of those points in the fifth game and broke serve. (Popyrin helped–one of the four was a double fault.) Even more miraculously, it was the only break in the opening set, so the Russian won the set and got halfway to the title. Alas, he cranked the futility up another notch, winning only one return point the rest of the way, and it was Popyrin who came away with his maiden championship.

Freakish statistical feats tend to raise three questions: What are the odds? Has this ever happened before? And, can we learn anything from this nonsense?

What are the odds?

If Bublik had that exact 11.6% chance of winning each service point, his probability of breaking in any given game would be 0.26%, or about 1 in 384. In reality, it’s probably higher than that, because servers aren’t robots. Presumably Popyrin’s level dipped a bit. Still, if we take that 0.26% as the answer, Bublik’s likelihood of breaking serve at least once in the 22-game match were less than 3%.

You probably don’t need the precise numbers to recognize that, if you win six return points in the whole match, your odds of breaking serve aren’t that great.

Has this ever happened before?

The answer depends on what you mean by “this.” In our 30 years of ATP tour matches with stats on things like return points won and breaks of serve, the Singapore final was the first time that a player broke serve and won a set despite winning six or fewer return points.

It’s fairly common for a player to have a very bad return day, or face an extremely hot server. On average, there are about 30 completed tour-level matches per year in which the loser manages six or fewer return points. But of those 900-plus matches, the official stats only show seven times that the loser managed to break serve. (I emphasize “official” here because the ATP’s stats do have errors, and extreme situations like these tend to bring them out of hiding. A simple data-entry error can easily make a routine match look like a record-breaker.)

The most recent instance of six-return-points-and-a-break was in 2010, when Lukasz Kubot concentrated his efforts in a single return game of a Bucharest first-round match against Filippo Volandri. Every match on the list was a first-rounder except for a 1995 quarter-final at the Tokyo Indoors, when Alexander Volkov managed to break Michael Chang despite winning only those few return points.

Every six-pointer was a straight set loss, at least until Bublik came along.

Except… it’s possible to win six or fewer return points and win a set without breaking serve. In fact, it’s theoretically possible to win an entire match with only two return points going your way, if you deploy them in tiebreaks and remain flawless on your own deal. Reilly Opelka did exactly that (well, he won six points, not two) in Basel two years ago against Cristian Garin. Garin won all but 6 of his 69 service points but lost, 7-6(5) 7-6(10).

Bublik’s feat in the Singapore final wasn’t quite that level of oddity, but as an accomplishment amid return futility, his break-and-a-set is a close second.

Can we learn anything from this nonsense?

Bublik is a talented player, but he’s not a very good returner. This was his third career ATP final (excluding a two-game retirement in January), and his rates of return points won in those matches are 26.7%, 18.9%, and now 11.6%. It’s no surprise that he’s still looking for his first title. It turns out that underarm serving doesn’t have any secret advantages for his return game.

He has won 35.6% of his return points over the last 52 weeks–an improvement over his 34.1% mark at tour level in 2019, but still only good for 42nd out of the current ATP top 50. If he continues to serve big, that’s good enough for an Isner-like career, possibly spending considerable time in the top 20, maybe even with a brief stop in the top ten.

But to reach the next level, the Russian will need to return a lot better. Several years ago, I looked at the “minimum viable return game” necessary for an elite player. At the time, I was interested in Nick Kyrgios’s chances at a spot near the top of the rankings despite his own brand of return futility. In the 25 years between 1991 and 2015, when I wrote that piece, only four players finished a season in the top five while winning less than 37% of their return points, and two of those were within a percentage point of the threshold.

Kyrgios wasn’t close to that level then, and he still isn’t. Bublik is closer, but he’s still on the wrong side of the line. Optimists can point to the Russian’s relative youth–he turns 24 in June–and trust he’ll improve. Of course he might, but history isn’t on his side there, either. Kyrgios’s lack of progress is typical of the breed. Mediocre returners may improve their skills and tactics, but as they do so, they face more difficult opponents, keeping their numbers down.

If there is a positive take-away from the Singapore final, it’s that Bublik did manage to bunch his return points. Kyrgios outplays his numbers by saving his heroics for bigger moments. (Another way of looking at “outplaying his numbers” is “underperforming given his skills.”) Bublik shows signs of doing the same, so when he does manage to win more than six return points, he may be able to eke disproportionate gains out of them.

That’s the theory, anyway.

Serena’s 23 vs Margaret’s 24

Since 2017, Serena Williams has held 23 major titles, leaving her just one shy of Margaret Court’s 24. The Williams-Court comparison forces us to think across eras in the same way that Federer-vs-Laver does, with the additional complication that Court has earned herself extreme dislike among many fans and fellow champions.

Let’s set aside the off-court stuff and work this out. The pro-Court case is simple: 24 is greater than 23, and you have to evaluate players relative to their own eras. The pro-Serena side is equally straightforward: 11 of Court’s 24 titles came in Australia, before Melbourne was a mandatory tour stop. Regardless of the era, Court’s home event was weaker back then.

As much as possible, I’m going to try to hold to the “relative to their own era” assumption. Everyone seems to accept it when it comes to Laver-vs-Federer. Plus, if we drop that constraint, the whole exercise is meaningless. With improved technology, fitness, and coaching, of course today’s players are better. But that’s not what people are talking about when they pick a side of Serena-vs-Margaret or Rod-vs-Roger.

Attentive readers of this blog might recall I took a stab at this problem back in 2019. That attempt relied on some extreme approximating due to the lack of pre-Open Era women’s tennis data. Regular readers will also know that the state of pre-Open Era women’s tennis data has vastly improved in the last few months. Tennis Abstract, plus the associated GitHub repo, now contains thousands of match results back to the mid-1950s.

Adjusting Australia

Let’s be clear: I’m not about to settle whether Margaret Court or Serena Williams (or someone else) is the GOAT of women’s tennis. That debate depends on much more than grand slam titles.

Today’s question is: How do Williams’s 23 titles stack up against Court’s 24?

That boils down to an even simpler question: How do Court’s 11 Australian titles measure up against other slams, then and now?

The anecdotal evidence is strongly anti-Margaret. As I mentioned in this morning’s Expected Points, the 1960 Australian Championships–Court’s first major title–had a 32-player draw (strike one), and 30 of those players were Australian (strikes two and three). Yes, it was a strong era for Australian women’s tennis, especially a few years later, but the tournament was hardly a showcase of international superstars. As such, it isn’t what we think of as a “major” tournament these days.

I’ve done a lot of “slam adjustments,” mostly to track the difficulty of the majors won by Djokovic, Federer, and Nadal. (Here’s the most recent.) The basic approach is simple. For each tournament, take the winning player’s draw, and for each match, calculate the chance that an average slam winner on that surface would beat that set of opponents. (Odds are determined by my Elo ratings, which are based on results before the event.) Take the resulting probabilities–on average, around 14% between 1952 and 2020–and normalize them, so that a mid-range slam draw is 1.0. Tougher draws are higher than 1, and easier draws are lower.

Equalizing the eras

This type of adjustment gets us most of the way there, but it doesn’t directly confront the “relative to the era” issue. The field in general was more lopsided in the 1960s than it is now, with a handful of very strong players swatting away a pack of also-rans who struggled to win more than a game or two per set against the elites. That in itself is a point in favor of Serena (and modern players in general), but again, on the Laver-vs-Federer principle, that’s not what we’re talking about today.

The easiest way to express this idea that all eras are equivalent is to use as a standard each season’s Wimbledon, the one tournament that everybody always wanted to play, and almost everyone actually did play. To avoid year-to-year fluctuations based on short-term injuries, we’ll make things a bit more resilient and compare the strength of each year’s Australian draw to the average strength of that year’s Wimbledon and US draws.

For example, my slam adjustments consider 1960 to be a strong year. Maria Bueno’s Wimbledon title was 40% more difficult than the average slam draw, and Darlene Hard’s US victory was about 30% tougher than usual. Court’s Australian title that year comes out as exactly average, so we compare Australia’s 1.0 to the average of Wimbledon and the US ( (1.4 + 1.3) / 2 = 1.35), and the 1960 Australian title, relative to the era, measures as:

1 / 1.35 = 0.75

The mostly-Australian field wasn’t as weak as the caricature makes it out to be, but it was weaker than the marquee majors that year.

Here is how the strength of the Australian draw has evolved relative to the other grass- and hard-court slams from 1952 to the present:

Except for an outlier in 1965, when Bueno, Billie Jean King, and several other international stars turned up, the Australian Championships was a second class member of the grand slam club until around 1980. It’s had plenty of weak years since then, as well, partly because of players who skipped due to injury, and partly due to contenders losing early, giving the eventual winners easier paths.

The main event

Margaret Court won the Australian 11 times. By this measure of relative strength, those titles were worth 62% as much as the other majors in those years. The strenght of individual titles ranged from a low of 0.29 in 1961, when no international elites made the trip, to a high of 1.02 in 1965, when the field was positively star-studded.

Serena Williams has won the Australian seven times. It is tempting to leave that “7” as is, because Melbourne is now a mandatory tour stop and virtually every woman on tour considers it one of the top targets in her season. However, we should treat Serena’s seven the same way we adjusted Court’s 11. For all the era differences, some things remain the same, like jetlag and the difficulty of playing top-flight tennis only a few weeks into the season.

Williams’s seven were worth, on average, 88% as much as the other majors in their respective years. The weakest of the bunch was her last, in 2017. So many top players lost early that Serena never faced a top-eight opponent.

Court’s 11 titles, then, are equivalent to about 7 non-Australian majors–a penalty of four. Serena’s 7 are worth about 6 non-Australian majors–a penalty of one.

The final, adjusted tally: Williams 22, Court 20.

Margaret Court was one of the greatest players of all time, but her position the all-time grand slam singles list depends too much on the shifting status of her home event. When we properly account for the Australian tournament’s position for decade as the most minor major, Court loses her remaining claim to the top spot. Serena may yet win 24, but to match or exceed Court, she shouldn’t have to.

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 IsnerNicolas 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.

The Next Five Years, According To a (Dumb) Grand Slam Crystal Ball

Last year, I introduced a bare-bones model that predicts men’s grand slam results for the next five years. It takes a minimum of inputs: a player’s age, and his number of major semi-finals, finals, and titles in the last two years. Despite leaving out so much additional data, the model explains a lot of the variation among players, achieving most of what a more complex algorithm would, but with nothing more than basic arithmetic.

A bit further down, I’ll introduce a similar model for women’s grand slam results. First, let’s look at the revised numbers for the men. Keep in mind that these are not career slam forecasts, but only slams in the next five years. That’s good enough for the Big Three, but it probably doesn’t tell the whole story for, say, Stefanos Tsitsipas.

Player              Projected Slams  
Novak Djokovic                  2.5  
Rafael Nadal                    2.1  
Dominic Thiem                   2.0  
Alexander Zverev                0.9  
Stefanos Tsitsipas              0.6  
Daniil Medvedev                 0.6  
Matteo Berrettini               0.3  
Lucas Pouille                   0.1  
Diego Schwartzman               0.1

A few other players (notably Roger Federer) reached a semi-final in the last two years, but because of their age, the model forecasts zero slams. Also keep in mind that Wimbledon was not played this year, so there was a bit less data to work with.* The sum of the forecasts is a mere 9.2 slams, out of a possible 20. In some previous years, the model predicted as many as 15 titles for the players it took into consideration. Because today’s top players are so old, they aren’t expected to dominate much of the 2021-25 calendar, leaving room for new contenders to emerge.

* My original post describes the forecasting algorithm as counting results from “the last four slams” and “the previous four slams.” We could account for the three-slam 2020 season by following those steps literally, giving greater weights to the last four slams (the 2019 US Open plus the three 2020 slams), and giving lesser (but still non-zero) weights to the four slams before that. I rejected that approach because (a) it would give an awful lot of weight to the US Open, and (b) the relative lack of 2020 data reflects higher-than-usual uncertainty, which ought to show up in the forecasts, as well. Thus, only seven slams were taken into account for 2021-25 predictions, instead of the usual eight.

Interestingly, the 2020 season has barely budged the predicted career totals for the big three. Numbers I published immediately after last year’s US Open forecast Rafael Nadal for 22.5 career slams: his (then) 19 plus 3.5 more. Now he has 20, and the model pegs him for another 2.1. Novak Djokovic was slated for a career total of 19.5: 3.5 more on top his then-total of 16. He’s still penciled in for 19.5: 17 plus another 2.5 in the future. Federer didn’t have reason to expect much a year ago, and it’s no better now.

The women’s model

It turns out that a similar back-of-the-envelope approach gives good approximations of future slam totals for WTA stars, as well. The weights are a bit different, the average peak age is one year sooner, and the age adjustment is slightly smaller, but the idea is essentially the same.

Here’s how to calculate the number of expected major titles for your favorite player:

  • Start with zero points
  • Add 20 points for each slam semi-final reached in the last 12 months
  • Add 20 points for each slam final reached in the last 12 months
  • Add 80 points for each slam title won in the last 12 months
  • Add 10 points for each slam semi-final reached in the previous 12 months
  • Add 10 points for each slam final reached in the previous 12 months
  • Add 40 points for each slam title won in the previous 12 months
  • If the player is older than 26 (at the time of the next slam), subtract 7 points for each year she is older than 26
  • If the player is younger than 26, add 7 points for each year she is younger than 26
  • Divide the sum by 100

To take a simple example, consider Iga Swiatek. For her recent French Open title, she gets 20 points for the semi, 20 points for the final, and 80 points for the title. She will still be 19 when the Australian Open rolls around, so we add another 49 points: 7 years younger than 26, times 7 points per year. Her projected total is (20 + 20 + 80 + 49) / 100 = 1.69.

Here are the results for all of the women who reached a major semi-final in 2019 or 2020 and are projected to win more than zero slams between 2021 and 2025:

Player               Projected Slams  
Naomi Osaka                      2.0  
Sofia Kenin                      1.9  
Iga Swiatek                      1.7  
Bianca Andreescu                 1.0  
Ashleigh Barty                   0.9  
Amanda Anisimova                 0.6  
Simona Halep                     0.6  
Marketa Vondrousova              0.6  
Nadia Podoroska                  0.4  
Garbine Muguruza                 0.3  
Belinda Bencic                   0.3  
Jennifer Brady                   0.3  
Elina Svitolina                  0.2  
Petra Kvitova                    0.1  
Victoria Azarenka                0.1

These forecasts sum to 11.0 slams, more than the men’s total. That’s largely because so many of recent women’s champions are younger, giving the model more reason to be optimistic about them. It still leaves plenty of room for other players to earn some hardware in the next half-decade, which makes sense. The WTA has featured a non-stop succession of breakout young stars for the past few years, and with players like Aryna Sabalenka, Elena Rybakina, and Cori Gauff in the mix, there’s no shortage of talent to keep the carousel turning.

And then there’s Serena Williams. The model projects her for zero slams, despite her three semi-finals and two finals in the last two years. The reason is her age: The algorithm expects players to steadily decline from age 27 onwards, so the age penalty by age 39 is harsh. One one hand, that makes sense: we’re forecasting the results of events that will mostly take place when she’s in her 40s. On the other hand, a player who had so much success at age 37 is probably a good bet to break the mold at 39, as well. Were this a more fully-developed model, we’d probably be smart to tinker with the age adjustment to reflect the reality that Williams is a much better bet to win a major title than Nadia Podoroska.

We could go on all day. For every variable that these forecasts take into account, there are a dozen more than have some plausible claim to relevance. But this simple approach gets us surprisingly far in telling the future–a future in which the men’s all-time grand slam race keeps getting more complicated, and the women’s game continues to feature a wide array of promising young stars.

Monkeying Around With Rafael Nadal’s 19 Grand Slams

The gap is closing. With his marathon victory last night in the US Open final over Daniil Medvedev, Rafael Nadal is up to 19 career major titles, second only to Roger Federer, who holds 20. Lurking in third place is Novak Djokovic, with 16, who was favored at Flushing Meadows this year, but retired due to injury in the fourth round.

Just two weeks ago, Djokovic seemed to be the biggest threat to Federer’s place atop the leaderboard. Now, with Nadal only one back and Djokovic dealing with another round of physical problems, Rafa has the momentum. Federer, now 38 years old, appears increasingly unlikely to pad his own total.

In an attempt to foresee the future of the grand slam leaderboard, I built a straightforward algorithm last month to predict future major titles. In the spirit of baseball’s “Marcel” projection system, it aims to be so simple that a monkey could do it. It uses the bare minimum of inputs: final-four performance at the last two years’ worth of slams, and age. It trades some optimization in favor of simplicity and ease of understanding. The result is pretty darn good. You can review the algorithm itself and look at how it would have performed in the past in my earlier article here.

Solve for RN = 19 + x

Before the US Open, the algorithm seemed tailor-made to aggravate as many fanbases as possible. It predicted that, over the next five years, Djokovic would win four more majors, Nadal two more, and Federer none, leaving the big three in a tie.

One more slam in the books, and the numbers have changed. Here is the revised forecast, reflecting both Nadal’s 19th slam and his rosier outlook after adding another title to his list of recent results:

Player          Slams  Forecast  Total  
Rafael Nadal       19       3.5   22.5  
Roger Federer      20       0.3   20.3  
Novak Djokovic     16       3.5   19.5

Rafa is in line to improve his total by at least three slams. By the time he’s done, perhaps he will have left Djokovic and Federer in the dust, and we’ll be speculating about whether he’ll catch Serena Williamsor Margaret Court.

More forecasts

My basic algorithm allows us to generate future slam forecasts for any player with at least one major semi-final in the last two years. Keep in mind that I’m not forecasting career slam totals–I’m looking ahead to only the next five years. For the big three, I’m assuming we don’t need to worry about 2025 and beyond.

We have current projections for 18 players:

Player                 Forecast  
Novak Djokovic              3.5  
Rafael Nadal                3.5  
Daniil Medvedev             0.8  
Dominic Thiem               0.7  
Stefanos Tsitsipas          0.6  
Matteo Berrettini           0.5  
Hyeon Chung                 0.4  
Lucas Pouille               0.3  
Kyle Edmund                 0.3  
Roger Federer               0.3  
Grigor Dimitrov             0.1  
Marco Cecchinato            0.1  
Marin Cilic                 0.0  
Juan Martin del Potro       0.0  
Roberto Bautista Agut       0.0  
Kevin Anderson              0.0  
Kei Nishikori               0.0  
John Isner                  0.0

Most of these guys have only a single recent semi-final to their name, and the only thing to separate them is their age. It seems logical to be more optimistic about the future slam performance of Stefanos Tsitsipas (age 21) than that of Roberto Bautista Agut (age 31), even though the algorithm sees their results so far–one semi-final appearance in the last 12 months–as identical.

Five years means 20 slams, and you might notice that the above table doesn’t get close to accounting for all of them. The projections add up to 10.8 majors, leaving plenty of room for players who haven’t even qualified for the list–Alexander Zverev and Felix Auger-Aliassime come to mind. At the 2024 US Open, we’re sure to look back at our late-2019 prognostications and laugh.

Federer will keep his spot at the top of the game’s most important leaderboard for at least four more months. Djokovic will probably be the top pick in Melbourne, so Roger could well enjoy nine more months as the only 20-slam man. But you won’t need an algorithm–even a simple one–to identify the favorite at Roland Garros next year. Organized men’s tennis lasted over a century without a 20-time major champion. In less than a year, we could have two.