Last week, I finished* adding complete** 1967 women’s results to the Tennis Abstract site. I’ll talk about those asterisks in a bit, but for the moment I’d prefer to revel in how cool this is.
The “Open Era” starts in 1968, and in the near-decade since I launched TA, I took that year as my starting point. Along the way I added men’s slams and Davis Cup back to the beginning, but it’s buried on the site as an afterthought. I can’t imagine that anyone uses the site for amateur-era results.
Even late 60s and 70s results were spotty for women. I initially built my database from the results published on the WTA and ITF websites, neither of which is (how to put this mildly?) primarily focused on the thoroughness and accessibility of its historical data. Add in the mistakes and omissions that come from building my own database from scratch, and you end up with a lot of gaps.
A more complete Tennis Abstract
A few weeks ago, I started filling in those gaps by adding about 20 missing tournaments with a Chris Evert–Martina Navratilova match. That head-to-head is now complete. Soon it will be “more than complete,” as I add various exhibitions that don’t count in the official tally. From there, I used various sources (more on that below) to fill in the remaining gaps of top-level Open Era women’s tennis back to 1968. The result is about 50 full tournaments per year, sometimes more, with various bonuses like Federation Cup and a lot of grand slam qualifying.
The further back I went and the more I stumbled on stories about the women’s game at the beginning of the Open Era, the more I wanted to know. 1968 is an important year, but a lot of tennis was unchanged from 1967 to 1968–almost all of the same players excelled, on the same surfaces and mostly at the same events. It seems a little silly to have a statistical record that starts smack in the middle of all-time-great careers like those of Billie Jean King and Margaret Court.
Into the unknown
One of the most incredible online tennis resources is one you’ve probably never heard of. On the “Blast From the Past” section of tennisforum.com, a group of contributors have assembled a unparalleled collection of women’s match results going back to the 1800s. They’ve dredged up results and tournament information from old annuals, newspapers, and just about any other source you can imagine.
The disadvantage of their forum-based, text-based format is that it is only awkwardly searchable. (Just to be clear, I am not taking anything away from their outstanding efforts.) The forum approach does allow for a certain kind of serendipity, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who has lost hours scrolling, reviewing results, reading the tournament recaps and anecdotes collected there. But it precludes the kind of serendipity made possible by sites like Baseball Reference and Tennis Abstract, where you see one result, get curious about a player, click the player’s name, and find yourself looking at a whole new list of unfamiliar scores and stats.
The further back in history we go, the more I want that kind of serendipity. Now, Tennis Abstract has that for 1967, and soon it will go back further still.
Okay then: 1967
The site now includes results from over 100 events in 1967, from familiar names like Rome and Queen’s Club to lesser tournaments such as the Pan-American Games (held that year in Winnipeg) and the Soviet Championships in Tblisi. I don’t have complete data for every draw–some are missing a handful of first-rounders, and others have only the final round or two. All told, the database now includes almost 2,300 matches from that single year. By comparison, there were about 3,000 tour-level WTA matches in 2019.
Since there was no formal “tour” in 1967, there’s no official definition of what’s “in” or “out.” A match is a match. I didn’t include every single event with some kind of data available, but I did import the entire main draw of any tournament with even a single “big-name” player, using a fairly broad definition of that term. (1969 Wimbledon champ Ann Jones may make me regret that decision. She played a lot of tennis.) Because the various circuits were more fractured, that means more events: There were many weeks with three or four tournaments each, and a couple with five.
Creating records for those 2,300 matches meant adding almost 300 players who weren’t in my database. The majority of those are early-round losers in small events, women who didn’t seriously pursue tennis. But where I had a full name, I did at least a cursory search for each one, turning up a noted Spanglish poet, the “first grunter,” a squash Hall of Famer, and Marat Safin’s mom.
100 events sounded like a lot until I started working on 1966. I have a provisional list of 160 tournaments to include from that year. Even with all those caveats on the meanings of “finished” and “complete,” this is going to take a while.
Diving in
Here are direct links to 1967 results for a few players:
If you go to the main page for one of those players (for example, here’s Peaches Bartkowicz), you’ll find a cool addition that all the new 60s and 70s data has made possible: women’s Elo ratings back to the end of 1967. Player pages for women who played at least 20 matches in a season include their year-end ratings and rankings, including surface-specific figures.
Here is a very provisional overall top 10 for year-end 1967:
Rank Player Elo 1 Billie Jean King 2221.3 2 Virginia Wade 2114.9 3 Nancy Richey 2113.2 4 Judy Dalton 2083.3 5 Ann Jones 2042.7 6 Lesley Bowrey 2018.8 7 Kerry Reid 2006.0 8 Francoise Durr 2005.4 9 Rosie Casals 1940.4 10 Annette Du Plooy 1926.8
I say provisional because there’s so much left to add. (You know, the entire history of tennis prior to 1967.) At the moment, the algorithm doesn’t know anything about any of the players prior to January 1st, 1967. As it learns more, each player’s rating will be different at that point, and the year-end results will be tweaked as well. That goes for all Elo ratings and rankings throughout the 60s and 70s. The broad strokes will remain constant, but the exact numbers will change, and sometimes players will swap positions. As I add more data, King, Court, and Richey (among others) keep creeping up the all-time list.
As for the project as a whole, I have no idea how far I’ll get. While fascinating, it’s a time-consuming project, and the further into history we go, the less information is available on players beyond the all-time greats. Still, every small step back in time improves the accessibility of this period of women’s tennis data, which includes some of the most important players in the history of the sport.
About those sources
I’ve mentioned tennisforum’s Blast From the Past, which is truly essential. Another exhaustive source for match results starting 1968 is John Dolan’s book, Women’s Tennis 1968-84. Wikipedia has oddly spotty coverage: the Italian Wikipedia is good for tournament data, while the French Wikipedia seems to cover more players. (For Swedish players, Swedish Wikipedia is awesome. All that time spent learning Norwegian is finally paying off.) English Wikipedia is disappointingly lacking in comparison.