Month: January 2021

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:

• Flo Blanchard, better known as a tour-level chair umpire
• Becky Birchmore, a pioneer at the University of Georgia
• Nancy Meiss, a noted ice skating judge
• Bunny Vosters, whose 11 US National squash titles were enough to get her a French Wikipedia page, but not an English one

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!

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.

Another week, another enormous tranche of new women’s tennis data on Tennis Abstract. Today I present an extensive view of the 1963 season, including about 250 events and almost 3,000 matches. The season page is here, so jump in whenever you’d like.

This is the fifth amateur-era season I’ve added. I hesitate to use the word “complete,” because there is no clear line separating “tour level” from the rest, and for many of the tournaments I have only partial results. Even for the top players, some early-round matches may be lost to history. But as an in-depth view of the era, we continue to break new ground. For comparison, there were about 3,100 WTA tour-level matches in 2019, and we now have almost the same number of results from 1963.

I’ve made a few more improvements to the season pages, which are now available from 1963 to 1986:

• The Elo rankings table now includes columns for “iElo” — ratings specific to carpet (and wood and tiles and whatever artificial surfaces that organizers put on the floor of their indoor facilities). The “i” stands for “indoor,” although iElo does not include indoor hard or clay results. Those were rare at the time, and are included with the hard- and clay-specific ratings.
• The list of number-one ranked players now shows how long each woman held the top spot–including in other seasons. For 1963, the “list” is rather boring, as it consists solely of Margaret Court, but it does show that Court owned the number one position from the end of 1961 through to her first layoff in 1967. The exact numbers and start/end dates are very much subject to change as I add more data, correct errors, and improve the Elo algorithm, but all told, I have Court at #1 for a total of 536 weeks.

Coincidentally, I recently charted the 1963 Wimbledon final between Court and Billie Jean King. While it was their only meeting this season, it was one of more than 30 in their careers between 1962 and 1973.

As usual, the raw data is now available in my GitHub repo, and I gratefully acknowledge the work done by the Blast From the Past contributors at tennisforum.com.