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.