The Improbable Rise of Emma Navarro

Also today: New stat leaderboards

Emma Navarro at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion

When Emma Navarro beat Elise Mertens for her first WTA title in Hobart on Saturday, it was only part of a natural progression. For more than a year now, she has shown a knack for winning, regardless of level, surface, or just about anything else. While most fans still don’t know her name, she’s up to 26th in the official rankings and 22nd on the Elo list.

The former collegiate champion–winner of the national title as a Virginia Cavalier in 2021–started her 2023 campaign just inside the top 150. She arrived at the brink of the top 100 with back-to-back ITF titles on clay in April, then cracked the top 60 with a grass-court final in Ilkley. Her first top-ten win came in September on hard courts, against Maria Sakkari in San Diego, and after a busy fall that included another two ITF titles, she broke into the top 40. She’s 8-1 so far in 2024; the only blip is a loss to Coco Gauff.

Altogether, that’s 72 victories since the beginning of last year. Not many women can boast so much success at the W25 level or higher in that span:

Player                   2023-24 Wins  
Arina Rodionova                    79  
Iga Swiatek                        73  
Emma Navarro                       72  
Oceane Dodin                       64  
Jessica Pegula                     62  
Julia Riera                        59  
Aryna Sabalenka                    59  
Martina Capurro Taborda            59  
Yafan Wang                         58  
Carlota Martinez Cirez             57

The remarkable part of Navarro’s rise is not the sheer quantity of positive results; it’s that she rose through the rankings so fast at the age she did. She first cracked the top 100 last May just before her 22nd birthday–hardly old by any rational standards, but nearly geriatric on the youth-driven WTA tour. The 25 players standing in front of Navarro in this week’s rankings broke into the top 100, on average, before their 20th birthday: The median is Aryna Sabalenka’s arrival at 19 years, 5 months. Late developers like Jessica Pegula, Barbora Krejcikova, and Navarro are exceptions to a long-standing rule.

It’s not unusual for a player to finally achieve a double-digit ranking when they are 21 or older, but it’s rare for a future star to do so–and now that Navarro is a tour-level title-holder ensconced in the top 30, she deserves that label. Since 1990, there have been 207 players who finished their age-21 season ranked between 101 and 200 without a previous appearance in the top 100. Only 25 of them reached #100 at the end of the following year; Navarro was only the fourth to crack the top 50.

Of those 200-plus players, only 35 of them ever achieved a top-40 ranking. (A few more, including Katie Boulter and Katie Volynets, could still join the group.) On average, it took them 1437 days–just short of four years–to do so. Navarro needed only 315 days, the second-fastest in the last 30-plus years. Here are the players who made the fastest move from the end of their age-21 season to the top 40:

Player                 Age 21  top 40 debut  Days  
Elise Mertens            2016    2017-08-28   245  
Emma Navarro             2022    2023-11-06   315  
Veronika Kudermetova     2018    2019-11-11   315  
Kurumi Nara              2012    2014-06-09   525  
Jamie Hampton            2011    2013-06-24   546  
Casey Dellacqua          2006    2008-07-28   581  
Tathiana Garbin          1998    2000-09-25   637  
Liudmila Samsonova       2019    2021-11-01   672  
Bethanie Mattek Sands    2006    2008-11-03   679  
Anne Kremer              1996    1999-04-12   833  
Jil Teichmann            2018    2021-04-26   847  
Zi Yan                   2005    2008-05-05   861  
Paula Badosa             2018    2021-05-24   875  
Yone Kamio               1992    1995-06-12   896  
Alison Riske Amritraj    2011    2014-06-09   896  
Johanna Konta            2012    2016-02-01  1127

It’s possible that Navarro could have been ready for the big time earlier had she not spent two years playing college tennis. Her sub-100 ranking at the end of 2022 was partly due to a limited schedule, as she played only a handful of tournaments before leaving school after the spring semester that year. But she wasn’t playing top-100 tennis when she did step on court: Elo ratings respond much more quickly to quality results (and do not reward quantity for its own sake), and her ranking by that algorithm, 148th, was virtually identical to her place on the official list.

Whatever the benefits and (temporary) costs of her stay at the University of Virginia, Navarro seemed to learn from the step up in competition–and quickly. She lost her first 11 matches against the top 50; in the last four months, she has won 5 of 6.

What works

The most memorable victory so far was Saturday’s triumph over Mertens for a debut WTA title. It was a grind, taking two hours, 50 minutes, and spanning 14 breaks of serve en route to a 6-1, 4-6, 7-5 finish. There was little first-strike tennis on display, as the average point ran to 5.5 strokes. 69 points required seven shots or more, and 37 reached double digits.

The battle for openings worked to Navarro’s advantage. In a sample of eleven previous matches logged by the Match Charting Project, she struggled in longer rallies, winning just 46% of points that reached a seventh shot compared to 49% overall. On Saturday, she reversed that trend in a big way, out-point-constructing her veteran opponent and winning a whopping 59% of the longer points. Of 84 charted Mertens matches, it was only the eighth time that she played at least 20 long points and won so few of them. Among the few players to beat her so soundly on rally tactics: Pegula and Simona Halep.

While Navarro’s results have steadily improved, her game plan is still recognizable form her days as a college champion. After defeating Miami’s Estrela Perez-Somarriba for the 2021 NCAA title, she described her approach: “I was able to dictate with my forehand and finish a lot of points with my backhand.” In Hobart, her backhand continued to populate the highlight reel, with seven clean down-the-line winners. But it was the forehand that opened the court in the first place.

She played, essentially, a clay-court match, using the forehand to create opportunities for the next ball. She hit winners with 7% of her forehand groundstrokes, slightly below tour average. But when she was able to hit a forehand, she won the point 62% of the time, an outstanding figure for a close match. One point serves as an illustration of the rest: At 2-all, 15-all in the third set, Navarro converted a return point with a down-the-line backhand winner on the 14th shot of the rally. After a deep forehand return, Navarro was forced to hit two backhands. When she was finally able to deploy the forehand on the 8th shot, she stabilized the point by going down the middle. The 10th shot took advantage of a let cord with a heavy crosscourt forehand, a weapon that worked in her favor on Saturday more than two-thirds of the time. Her next forehand went the other direction, creating the space for–finally–a backhand out of the Belgian’s reach.

While not every point was quite so tactical, point construction always lurked. Mertens frequently attempted a pattern where she would go the same direction with two consecutive groundstrokes then, having wrong-footed Navarro with the second of them, go for a winner. The sequence doesn’t work against a big swinger because the points don’t last long enough. That wasn’t a problem against the American, but Navarro’s resourcefulness nullified the tactic nonetheless. Unlike many players her age, Navarro is able to use slices off both wings to neutralize points, and she often did so on the second shot of Mertens’s would-be pattern. The Hobart champion hit 40 slices over the course of the match, ultimately winning the point on 20 of them. For a defensive shot, rescuing 50% of those situations counts as a victory.

There is little in Navarro’s game that advertises her as a world-beater: The weapons I’ve described work best as part of a carefully-managed package. She may prove to be most dangerous on clay, where aggressive opponents will have a harder time keeping points short. She might also develop yet another level. Twelve months ago, only a reckless forecaster would have predicted she could rise so high, so quickly. We still haven’t seen her peak.

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Deep leaderboards

Among the cult favorites on the Tennis Abstract site are the tour leaderboard pages, which contain nearly 60 sortable stats for the top 50 players on each circuit. Many of those stats aren’t available anywhere else, including things like average opponent ranking and time per match. It’s also possible to filter the matches for each calculation to determine things like the best hold percentages on clay.

Last week I introduced three new pages that extend the same concept:

Here’s just one example of what’s possible, the best WTA players outside the top 50 by ace percentage:

These are a great way to identify standout skills of lesser-known players. All of the leaderboards update every Monday.

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What Is Ben Shelton’s Ceiling?

Also today: First serve stats, and new Tennis Abstract reports.

Ben Shelton. Credit: 350z33

Ben Shelton is one of the rising stars of men’s tennis, the most exciting young player this side of Carlos Alcaraz. He possesses a monster serve, he’s not afraid to unleash old-school tactics, and he wears his heart on his sleeve. It’s impossible to root against this guy.

Shelton is also, by the standards of the game’s elite, not a very good returner.

Any discussion of his potential has to come to terms with this most obvious limitation. His rocket of a lefty serve will never hold him back; indeed, it’s already earned him places in the US Open semi-finals and the Australian Open quarters. You don’t have to do much dreaming to see him going even further and winning a major outright. What’s tougher to forecast is the sort of sustained performance that would take him to the top of the rankings.

Last year, Shelton won 32.6% of his return points at tour level. Average among the top 50 was 37.1%, and the top four players on the circuit (and Alex de Minaur) all topped 40%. Of the top 50, only Christopher Eubanks, at 30.9%, came in below Shelton.

There’s plenty of time for Ben to improve, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, let me show you the list of the year-end top-ten players with the lowest percentage of return points won (RPW%) since 1991, when the ATP began to keep these stats:

Player              Season  Rank   RPW%  
John Isner            2018    10  29.4%  
Kevin Anderson        2018     6  33.7%  
Milos Raonic          2014     8  33.8%  
Andy Roddick          2007     6  34.0%  
Hubert Hurkacz        2023     9  34.3%  
Greg Rusedski         1997     6  34.5%  
Matteo Berrettini     2019     8  34.6%  
Ivan Ljubicic         2005     9  34.6%  
Hubert Hurkacz        2022    10  34.7%  
Greg Rusedski         1998     9  34.7%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas    2023     6  34.7%  
Mark Philippoussis    2003     9  34.8%  
Andy Roddick          2010     8  34.9%  
Pete Sampras          1996     1  35.3%  
Jo Wilfried Tsonga    2009    10  35.3%  
Goran Ivanisevic      1995    10  35.4%  
Andy Roddick          2009     7  35.5%  
Pete Sampras          2000     3  35.5%  
Pete Sampras          2001    10  35.6%  
Andy Roddick          2008     8  35.6%

In 33 years, out of 330 top-ten finishes, only one man has reached the threshold with a RPW% lower than Shelton’s last year. And it’s someone you can’t exactly pattern a career after: If you look up “outlier” in the dictionary, you find John Isner’s face staring back at you.

Even more striking to me is that no one has finished in the top five with a RPW% below 35%. Then comes another outlier, Pete Sampras and his 1996 campaign. If your goal is to finish a season at number one, you’ll usually need a strong return. Sampras and Andy Roddick are the only two men who have topped the rankings with a RPW% below 38%. Otherwise, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Are you Pete Sampras?

Here are the lowest RPW% numbers for top-three finishers since 1991:

Player           Season  Rank   RPW%  
Pete Sampras       1996     1  35.3%  
Pete Sampras       2000     3  35.5%  
Andy Roddick       2005     3  36.0%  
Milos Raonic       2016     3  36.1%  
Andy Roddick       2003     1  36.4%  
Casper Ruud        2022     3  36.9%  
Pete Sampras       1999     3  37.3%  
Andy Roddick       2004     2  37.5%  
Boris Becker       1994     3  37.6%  
Michael Stich      1993     2  37.9%  
Pete Sampras       1998     1  38.0%  
Marat Safin        2000     2  38.1%  
Grigor Dimitrov    2017     3  38.2%  
Patrick Rafter     1997     2  38.2%  
Roger Federer      2009     1  38.3%

(Did you expect to see Casper Ruud on this list? I did not.)

Shelton’s serve means that he could reach the top without the return-game success of Alcaraz or Novak Djokovic. But if he wants to move beyond the fringes of the top ten, this second table shows the range he needs to aim for. Setting aside the hot-and-cold tactics of Pistol Pete (we’ll come back to that, too), we can simplify things and say that a would-be world-beater needs to get his RPW% up around 36% or 37%.

How much can a return improve?

Bettering your core stats is possible, but not easy. Another lefty, Feliciano Lopez, offers a cautionary tale. In his age-20 season, he won 31.7% of return points, not far below Shelton’s mark. Here’s how his career developed:

Lopez didn’t top 34% for more than a decade, and he only reached 35% when he was 34 years old. In seven of his ten seasons between the ages of 21 and 30, his return was no more than 1.5 percentage points better than that first season.

Here’s another one. Milos Raonic won 33.5% of his return points as a 20-year-old. He’s a better comp for Shelton, because Raonic’s serve was similarly effective as well. This graph shows how Raonic’s return evolved:

He barely improved on that 33.5% mark until 2016, when he peaked at number three in the ATP rankings, and he couldn’t sustain it. His career RPW% went into the books at 33.9%.

Many of you, I’m sure, are ready to object: Lopez was never the pure athlete that Shelton is! Raonic certainly wasn’t, and he played through one injury after another. Fair enough–if there are natural gifts that make it more likely that a player develops a tour-average return game after arriving on tour, Ben probably has them. Tough to argue with that.

Still, the numbers are brutal. There have been 99 players who racked up 20 or more tour-level matches in their age-20 season since 1991. 22 of them never improved–they never won return points at a higher rate than they did when they were 20. Of the lucky ones who managed to do better at some point in their careers, their peak was, on average, 1.7 percentage points higher than their age 20 number. For Shelton, that’s a peak RPW% of 34.3%, well below the targets established above.

Of that group of 99 20-year-olds, one out of ten improved (eventually) by at least ten percent–not percentage points–a gain that would move Shelton up to 35.9%, essentially the border of where he needs to be for a top-three finish. Let’s not understate the difficulty of the task. Players who reach tour level by age 20 are extremely promising, almost without exception, and Ben needs to put himself in the top tenth of that group.

It’s not obvious why boosting your return-game results is so difficult, or so rare. (It’s harder than improving serve stats, but that’s a topic for another day.) One factor is that as you climb the rankings, you face tougher opponents, so even if your game gets better, your stats appear to stagnate. The median rank of Shelton’s opponents last year was 54.5. The same number for Andrey Rublev is 40, and Daniil Medvedev’s was 27.

Another reason is that returning is a young man’s game. The skills that contribute to the service return–vision, reaction time, quickness, speed–peak early. I have no doubt that Lopez, Raonic, and just about everybody else on tour worked hard to get more out of their return over the years, but many of their gains simply cancelled out the losses they suffered from the aging process.

Beyond RPW%

Sampras was famous for tanking some return games, then going all-out late in the set. The energy-saving strategy was time-tested, going back another half-century to the “Big Game” theories of Jack Kramer and his mentor Cliff Roche. If you hold your serve (almost) every time you toe the line, you only need to break once–or win the tiebreak. Why waste the effort on every return point?

Shelton doesn’t go quite that far; he rarely looks apathetic on return. But he clearly gets energized when an opportunity presents itself, or when he decides it’s time to create one. If a player can consistently play better in big moments, his RPW% won’t tell the whole story. Nick Krygios did this on break points, though it wasn’t enough to get him into the top ten.

There’s some evidence that Shelton does as well. If he always played the same way–the level that earned him 32.6% of his return points–a simple model would predict that he would break serve 13.3% of the time. Instead, he broke 16% of the time, a rate that the model would have predicted for a returner winning 34.4% of points. Still not top-three territory, but getting closer.

Isner often overcame his return woes by securing more tiebreaks than his first-twelve-game performance would have suggested. He won more than 60% of his career breakers, coming close to a 70% mark in two separate seasons. Shelton might be using similar tactics, but he isn’t yet getting the same sort of results: He went a modest 18-16 in tiebreaks last season.

What about break points? This is one area where Sampras noticeably stepped up his game. From 1991 to 2000, he won 44 more break points than expected, based on his return-point stats on non-break points. It’s not a huge advantage–about one extra break of serve every 16 matches–but most players break even. This is one way in which Pete’s RPW% understated his effectiveness on return.

Here, Shelton really shines. My model suggests that he “should” have won break points at a 35.0% clip last year, since on average, players win break points more frequently than other return points. (Break points arise more often against weaker servers.) Incredibly, Ben won more than 41% of his break point chances. Instead of 96 breaks of serve, he earned 114. Since 1991, only a few dozen players have ever outperformed break point expectations by such a wide margin for a full season. Sampras never did, though he once got close.

If Shelton can sustain that level of break-point play, we might as well make room for him in the Hall of Fame right now. A modest improvement in RPW%, combined with reliably clutch performance in the big moments, would move him into the Sampras/Roddick range, where big servers can break serve just enough to catapult to the top of the rankings.

But… it’s a big if. Sampras averaged just four or five extra breaks per season, and he’s one of the all-time greats. In 2003, James Blake also exceeded break-point expectations by a margin of 18. The next year his score was negative 5. Across 2,600 pairs of player-seasons, there’s virtually no correlation between break point performance one year and the next. Shelton may defy the odds, just as Isner rewrote the book on tiebreak performance. But the smart money says that he won’t be so lucky this year.

Where does this leave us? If we’re optimistic about Shelton’s athleticism, commitment, and coaching team, there’s reason to expect that he’ll eventually win more return points–though probably not enough to reach the 36% threshold that usually marks off the top three. If he proves able to execute Kramer/Sampras/Kyrgios tactics under pressure, that might be enough to make up the difference. If he can do that, and he can remain as fearsome a server as he already appears to be, we might have a multi-slam winner, a top-three, maybe even number one player on our hands. The ceiling is high, but the ladder is steep.

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First serve dominance

James Fawcette asks:

[At the United Cup] de Minaur lost only 1 point behind his first serve vs Djokovic, 33 of 34. Has anyone ever won every first serve point vs the then world number one in a completed match?

No!

Going back to 1991, when the ATP started keeping these stats, no one else lost only one, either. Here are the 18 matches in which a player lost three or fewer first-serve points against the world number one. In seven of the matches (noted with asterisks), all that big serving was for naught, and the favorite won anyway.

Tournament         Rd   Winner      Loser       Lost     
2024 United Cup    QF   de Minaur   Djokovic       1     
1992 Tour Finals   RR   Ivanisevic  Courier        2     
1993 Osaka         QF   Courier     Raoux          2  *  
1993 Tour Finals   RR   Sampras     Bruguera       2  *  
1996 Dusseldorf    RR   Kafelnikov  Sampras        2     
2000 Miami         SF   Kuerten     Agassi         2     
2002 Hamburg       QF   Safin       Hewitt         2     
2008 Indian Wells  SF   Fish        Federer        2     
2011 Tour Finals   RR   Ferrer      Djokovic       2     
1992 Paris         QF   Becker      Courier        3     
1992 Brussels      R16  Courier     Leconte        3  *  
1996 Tour Finals   SF   Sampras     Ivanisevic     3  *  
2000 Scottsdale    R16  Clavet      Agassi         3     
2002 Rome          R32  Moya        Hewitt         3     
2008 Halle         SF   Federer     Kiefer         3  *  
2008 Olympics      R64  Federer     Tursunov       3  *  
2010 Tour Finals   F    Federer     Nadal          3     
2018 Canada        R32  Nadal       Paire          3  *

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New toys

Yesterday I added two new features to Tennis Abstract. First, there’s a list of today’s birthdays:

Second, there’s a “Bakery Report” (one each for men and women) with comprehensive stats on 6-0 and 6-1 sets won and lost:

The birthday list will update daily, and the bakery report will refresh every Monday, expect in the middle of grand slams.

Enjoy!

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Men’s Doubles Results

This is part of a series of reference posts that lay out what historical data is available at TennisAbstract.com. I recently did a similar post about pre-Open era men’s singles data. I’ll try to keep this post updated as the site expands.

Amateur-era doubles data–even doubles results from early in the Open era–is thin on the ground. I’m trying, slowly, to change that.

The TennisAbstract.com site now contains over 1,300 men’s doubles results from 1957 to 1967, the last eleven years of the amateur era. That includes:

  • Grand slam finals
  • All Davis Cup doubles rubbers
  • Doubles matches from professional tournaments and barnstorming stops. This varies enormously from year to year, in part because the pro tours sometimes played doubles every night, and sometimes they rarely did. At the extremes, I have 83 pro doubles matches from 1958 and only one from 1961. Reporting of these matches was extremely inconsistent at the time.
  • Doubles finals from all amateur tournaments where at least one member of the Tennis 128 competed–assuming I could find it. This amounts to roughly 60 finals per year, spanning most of the circuit’s most notable events.

Note my focus on finals. Eventually, I may expand on that, especially for grand slams. But collecting doubles results is extremely slow going, and contemporary coverage was much spottier than for singles. There’s nothing quite so disheartening as trying to add a match to the database when the losing side is listed only as “Smith/Smith.” Or worse: “Smith/partner.”

On any player page, you can find doubles results–assuming the player has some–by scrolling down, or by clicking here:

Here’s what you’ll see, at least if you’re on Rod Laver’s page:

Rocket was pretty good at doubles, too.

This “notable” table is limited to 20 matches. For most players, that’s all I have at this point. If I have more, the “notable” table lists a combination of slam finals and the most recent matches.

If there is an “All results” link above the table–as there is for Laver–that means I have more than 20 matches, and you can click through to get the full list. Here, for instance, is Gordon Forbes:

By the time he retired, the man had a lot to write about.

Eventually, these pages will be filterable, like the singles results. For now, it’s just a reverse-chronological list.

Next up, I hope to add men’s doubles from the 1968 season, as well as a few more seasons from the beginning of the Open era. Then I’ll go back to 1956 and add more amateur-era seasons.

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Pre-Open Era Men’s Singles Results

This is the first in a series of reference posts that aim to describe what historical data is available at TennisAbstract.com. My goal is to keep these updated as the site continues to expand.

TennisAbstract.com now contains approximately 37,000 men’s singles results from the years 1957-67, the decade-plus that preceded the Open Era. The site has a reasonably complete set of pro results from 1968 to present, though I occasionally plug gaps and make corrections there as well.

Remarkably, 37,000 matches is nowhere near a complete representation of eleven years of amateur-era tennis.

Here’s what you can now find on the site for the years 1957-67:

  • Complete grand slam singles results
  • Complete Davis Cup singles results
  • Every professional match I’ve been able to find, including matches from pro tours, which often featured just one or two singles matches per stop
  • Every singles match from any tournament where a member of the Tennis 128 competed (not just matches involving Tennis 128ers).

The last category is quirky: It means that I now have results for some minor tournaments, like the Romanian National Championships when Ilie Năstase entered as a young man, or some regional collegiate events where Arthur Ashe or Stan Smith competed. It also means I lack some significant events–for instance, some editions of the U.S. Indoors or Bournemouth–if no 128ers happened to enter that year.

Despite the odd way I’ve drawn the line, the result is a pretty good representation of each season, one that includes most of the notable events. The decision also means that as I work backwards, I’ll complete–insofar as it is possible–the careers of the most historically significant players.

My goal is to make one pass back to 1920 or so before going through each year again, at which point I’ll shoot for a much more thorough level of coverage. Even this “limited” approach means adding more than 3,000 matches per season. That’s enough for the moment, at least if I hope ever to finish.

You can browse all this data the same way you view results for current players. For instance, here are the yearly summaries for Roy Emerson:

Yeah, that peak rank of 12 doesn’t really tell the story. Amateur-era expert rankings are also on my (breathtakingly long) to-do list.

And here are some match-by-match results for Ken Rosewall at the end of his first pro season, in 1957:

#2 isn’t quite right for Muscles, either.

Next, I plan to fill in some gaps in the first few years of the Open era, then jump back to 1956 and work backwards from there.

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Recreating the 1957 Women’s Tennis Season in 2,600 Easy Steps

Another historical season in the database! In 1957, Althea Gibson was so good it was almost boring. She was in the middle of a 161-week streak at the top of the Elo rankings, and with a 66-2 won-loss record this year, she finished the campaign more than 200 Elo points ahead of the number two player, Dorothy Head Knode.

Of course, no one knew about Elo in 1957, and there weren’t even week-by-week rankings. It didn’t take an advanced algorithm to know that Gibson belonged at the top of the heap. However, the newspapermen who published the most respected year-end ranking lists had at least as many blind spots as the WTA computer does these days. While Althea was comfortably on top, Knode was never considered to be better than 5th.

About 240 events worth of results–that’s about 2,600 matches–from this season are now on Tennis Abstract, and you can jump in via the 1957 season page. There’s a week-by-week calendar, year-end rankings, stats breakdowns for the top players, the most common head-to-heads, and country-by-country comparisons. All of this is now available for 11 pre-Open Era seasons.

The raw data has been added to my GitHub repo, and I offer another hearty round of thanks to the contributors at tennisforum’s Blast From the Past forum, who did the heavy lifting of typing out so many of these results from contemporary newspapers and annuals.

The 1958 Women’s Tennis Season, When Maria Bueno Held It All Together

I’ve added another historical season to the Tennis Abstract database, so we can now see thousands of results per year for a full decade before the beginning of the Open Era. 1958 might be the most interesting year of the bunch.

You can jump right in to the 1958 calendar, year-end Elo rankings, player stats, and more by clicking here for the season page.

1958 was the final full season as an amateur for Althea Gibson, and it was an awfully good one. She won her last 33 matches, including the Wimbledon and US Open titles. She turned 31 in August, and her performance in her age-30 campaign will forever leave us wondering what kind of career numbers she could have posted had she continued to play amateur tennis. Her lifetime totals are also clipped by the institutional racism that prevented her from competing on the world stage until well into her 20s.

Two of Gibson’s three losses in 1958 came at the hands of Janet Hopps Adkisson, herself an excellent player, one who just missed a top-ten year-end Elo finish in both 1957 and 1958. Hopps spent the years 1954-56 at Seattle University, where she played on the men’s tennis team (there was no alternative for women) and won 70% of her matches. When the ITA Women’s Collegiate Tennis Hall of Fame honored her in 1999, she quipped, “I never played in [an official] women’s match. I should be in the men’s hall of fame.”

Compared to later years, 1958 looks noticeably fractured. Gibson played almost four-fifths of her matches on grass, while British up-and-comer Shirley Bloomer Brasher played 47 of her 66 contests on clay, and American vet Beverly Baker Fleitz fought 23 of her 35 bouts on hard courts.

The only top player to tie it all together was Brazilian teen Maria Bueno, who played at least 102 matches in a year when no other notable player reached 70. Bueno started the year in Florida, played the Caribbean circuit (beating Hopps in five of seven meetings, all by early April), then shifted operations to Europe where she won Rome and reached the semis at Roland Garros. She followed the tour across the channel, losing a grass-court final in Manchester to Gibson, beating Angela Mortimer for the title match the following week in Bristol, and falling in the Wimbledon final eight. Then back to Europe, after which she competed at Forest Hills and other US events before finishing the year at home in Brazil.

Bueno’s eleven-month marathon left her in 7th place in the year-end Elo rankings, but not for long: She would reach the top spot by the end of the following year. Like Mortimer, who held the number one position in early 1956 and would win it back in mid-1959, Bueno would have to wait until Gibson left the scene.

Again, I invite you to dig in to the 200+ events and 2,500+ matches from 1958 on Tennis Abstract. The season page provides an easy introduction.

I’ve added the raw data from 1958, along with all other historical seasons I’ve added, to my GitHub repo. My work rests heavily on the shoulders of the contributors to tennisforum.com’s Blast From the Past section, who have painstakingly recovered all of these results from newspapers and annuals, organizing and double-checking the often-messy records along the way. As always, a big round of thanks to them.

Hello, 1959

Another season, another 2,300 matches on the Tennis Abstract site. The latest addition is the 1959 women’s tennis season, which you can dig into here.

Althea Gibson more or less retired from the amateur circuit after a dominant 1958 season. She did a bit of acting, some lounge singing, and returned to the courts only long enough to win the Chicago Pan-American Games in August. That left the field open for three other women to spend some time at number one–according to Elo, anyway.

Angela Mortimer was the first to unseat Gibson, holding the top spot for 18 weeks on the strength of her perfect 15-0 record in finals this season. Maria Bueno took over for a week in November, losing her position to Beverly Baker Fleitz for two weeks, then reclaiming the honor, which she would hold well into 1960. For Baker Fleitz, who was ambidextrous and played with two forehands (!), it was a fitting sendoff into retirement after an outstanding decade of top-level tennis.

As usual, the raw data is available in my GitHub repo. Another round of thanks are due to the contributors at the Blast From the Past forum, who did much of the heavy lifting you see here.

The 1960 Women’s Tennis Season, When Quality Topped Quantity

Our dive into the history of women’s tennis keeps getting deeper. Tennis Abstract now includes hundreds of events and thousands of matches from the 1960 season, which you can browse here.

1960 was the year of the first major title for Margaret Court, when the 17-year-old proved that, if nothing else, she was a glutton for punishment. But she didn’t travel abroad, which made her a non-factor for the rest of the season. With Althea Gibson out of the picture on the pro tour*, the field was open for stars such as Maria Bueno, Darlene Hard, and the largely forgotten Zsuzsa Kormoczy. Bueno won Wimbledon and narrowly lost to Hard in the finals at Forest Hills, spending most of the year at number one in the Elo rankings.

* I’m collecting pro results when I come across them, but the return so far is sparse. Most professional women’s matches were one-offs, akin to today’s exhibitions, and were generally played among a very small group of competitors.

For sheer endurance, the 1960 crown should go to Ann Jones. She played over 120 matches, won 106 of them, and took home 15 titles. (15.5, actually, as she reached the Montego Bay final, which was rained out.) Yet according to Elo, those eye-popping numbers weren’t quite enough to overtake Bueno. Amateur era tennis is full of tricky comparisons like this, with one elite player opting for a shorter schedule against top-flight competition, and another choosing to play almost every week, which out of necessity included weaker regional tournaments. Jones might be the best exemplar of the second category. I now have records of her playing over 1,300 career matches, and that figure is almost certainly missing some early-round tilts.

In 1960, Bueno played exactly half as many matches (evenly splitting her eight meetings with the Brit), yet narrowly edged Jones in the year-end Elo race, 2240 to 2237. The Brazilian held the number one position all year except for four weeks in May and June. That was to Kormoczy, who played an even more selective schedule. But while the 36-year-old Hungarian stayed home for most of the year, she reeled off a 19-match win streak on the Riviera circuit, capped by a win over Jones in the Rome final.

You can take your own look at the 1960 women’s season here. The linked page includes a full calendar of events, year-end Elo rankings, season stats, head-to-heads, and country comparisons.

The raw data, along with that of every season from 1961 to the present, is available in my GitHub repo. I’ve also recently added thousands of matches from second-tier events and qualifying in the early Open Era. This project owes a huge debt to the contributors at tennisforum.com’s Blast From the Past, who have been moving tennis data from dusty annuals and newspaper archives to the internet for the last decade.

A Glimpse at Women’s Tennis Before Margaret Court Took Over

Tennis Abstract now includes extensive results from the 1961 women’s season. Margaret Court won her second major at January’s Australian Championships, but it wasn’t until the end of 1961 that she claimed the top spot in the Elo rankings. In her first tour abroad, she racked up six titles in Europe but failed to reach a major final away from home.

Thus, this was the last year for some time in which everything was truly up for grabs. Court, Ann Jones, Angela Mortimer, and Darlene Hard each won a major, and Jones was the only player to reach two slam finals. The top Elo-rated player for much of the season was someone else entirely: Maria Bueno. The Brazilian had a glittering spring, beating Jones twice and Hard three times on the Caribbean circuit, then knocking out Court en route to the Turin title. Unfortunately, she contracted hepatitis during the French Open and wouldn’t return to competition for nearly a year.

You can dig into the rankings, stats, tournaments, and more than 2,500 match results via the 1961 season page.

Adding 1961 results to my database entailed more than just recording a bunch of meetings between Hard and Yola Ramirez, though there were eight of those. I added about 250 players who did not appear in a match in 1962 or later. A few of them are quite famous, such as Angela Buxton. Others flew further under the radar, at least for their top-tier tennis exploits:

It’s becoming a familiar refrain at this point, but that doesn’t make it any less genuine: This ongoing project relies heavily on the work of the contributors to Blast From the Past at tennisforum.com, to whom I am very grateful.

The raw data, from 1961 to the present, is available in my tennis_wta GitHub repo. I’ve also been adding extensive results from the 1970s (both to GitHub and the Tennis Abstract site) that are missing from the WTA’s database.

If you want to learn more about this project, you can listen to the podcast interview I recorded with Carl this week, or browse the recent blog archives for my announcements regarding several more seasons. And stay tuned: there will be more.

Enjoy!

The 1962 Women’s Season at Tennis Abstract

Another year, another installment of the dominance of Margaret Court. I’ve added almost 3,000 matches across more than 200 events from the 1962 women’s tennis season, a year when Court went an unbelievable 80-2. She won three of the four majors, but one of the losses came in the first round of Wimbledon against Billie Jean King. In both that match and her other loss a few weeks earlier, in Manchester to Carole Graebner, she still took a set.

The further we go back in time, the less familiar the list of top players becomes. For those of us raised on Open Era records, Court and King are known quantities, but what about Leslie (Turner) Bowrey, Angela Mortimer, and Sandra Reynolds, all of whom finished 1962 in the Elo top five?

I’ll leave it to you to explore. Here’s the season page, which offers a snapshot (ok, maybe a bit more than a snapshot) of the goings-on in 1962 women’s tennis.

If you’d like to hear more about this project, check out the most recent podcast, in which Carl Bialik interviewed me about 1960s women’s tennis data.

As usual, the raw data is on my GitHub, and I tip my hat to the enormous efforts of the Blast From the Past contributors at tennisforum.com, who took the first step in moving so many of these results from the analog to the digital world.