Author: jsackmann

Podcast Episode 89: Rebuilding the History of Women’s Tennis

Episode 89 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast reverses roles, with Carl Bialik, of the Thirty Love podcast, interviewing Jeff about his recent efforts to add pre-Open Era women’s tennis data to Tennis Abstract.

High-level tennis did not begin in 1968 with the introduction of Open tennis, but official statistical records often give the mistaken impression that it did. We talk about the existing state of the data, the players whose reputations rest heavily on pre-Open Era accomplishments, and the value of simply getting historical records into an accessible format. We also cover two very different #1s, Althea Gibson and Margaret Court, and dip into what people get right and wrong in the Serena-vs-Court debate.

You can read a lot more about the new data here at the blog–yesterday I posted about the 1963 season, and you can also check out a one-page portal to that year’s data here.

Also, a reminder: In a couple of weeks we’ll be talking about our first book club pick, A Handful of Summers by Gordon Forbes. Let us know if you have thoughts about the book, questions for us to discuss on the show, or suggestions for future book club selections.

Fans of the TA podcast will also want to check out Dangerous Exponents, the new Covid-19 podcast that Carl and I are doing. We released episode 7, about mutations and the vaccine rollout, today.

(Note: this week’s episode is about 50 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.

Happy New Year! (By Which, Of Course, I Mean 1963)

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.

277 Events From the 1964 Women’s Tennis Season

The quest continues, and there are now another 3,200 matches in the women’s tennis database at Tennis Abstract. If you’d rather dive in to the data than read my ramblings about it, click here for the 1964 season page.

(If you’d like to read more of my ramblings, here are my intros to 1965, 1966, and 1967 data.)

The further back we go, we more we confirm the dominance of Margaret Court in the decade before the Open Era. In 1964, she won two majors, reached the final of a third, posted a year-end Elo just shy of 2500, and went undefeated over 44 matches on clay courts. Just about the only stats she didn’t dominate were three-set numbers, because she almost always won in straights.

Of course, there’s a lot more to 1964 than one Australian star. Importing these thousands of match results meant adding 360 new players to the database, including some important contributors whose career ended this season. Here are a few:

The women’s season pages are now available for every year from 1964 up to 1978. You can navigate between seasons using the links in the upper-left corner of every page. I’ll further integrate the season pages into the rest of the site soon.

As usual, the raw data is available in my women’s tennis GitHub repo.

Finally: Another round of thanks are due to the contributors at tennisforum.com, who searched out newspapers and annuals, then typed up all these results. The same group is responsible for the Blast Encyclopedia of Female Tennis Players, an essential source for biographical data, especially married names.

Enjoy!

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 Isner–Nicolas 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.

New at Tennis Abstract: Over 3,000 Match Results from 1965

Welcome to the latest update on a project that has well and truly spiraled out of control. I’m pleased to announced that the Tennis Abstract site now features a huge amount of women’s tennis data from 1965. I hesitate to call it “complete,” because it is not, and it probably never will be. But the word “substantial” will do just fine:

  • 3,200 matches
  • 248 events (plus Federation Cup)
  • 400 players that weren’t previously in my database

The 1965 dataset is even more sizable than the 1967 and 1966 results that I’ve recently discussed in other blog posts. To put those 3,200 results in perspective, there were “only” about 3,100 tour-level WTA matches in 2019.

For an bird’s-eye view of the 1965 women’s season, check out my season page. I introduced the season pages with my post on 1966 last week, and I’ve since made several improvements:

  • The full event calendar has some new information to indicate the strength of the tournament: the number of top 10 players in the draw (as per that week’s Elo ratings), and the “geographic concentration” of the field–that is, the percentage of women in the draw who hail from the most common country. The second number isn’t perfect, especially when I only have a few results from the event, but as a general rule, the lower the geographic concentration, the stronger the field.
  • The year-end Elo rankings table includes some helpful additional information: each player’s age, her number of titles, and her won-loss record on the season.

The season page tends to highlight the best players, and I’d imagine that’s what most of you will find the most interesting. Margaret Court dominated the 1965 campaign, winning over 100 matches, losing only 8, and posting the best year-end Elo on all surfaces. The page will also tell that you she drew Lesley Bowrey ten times–nine of them in finals!–and Bowrey accounted for 4 of her 8 losses.

(Court and Bowrey were already familiar foes: They met in the 1960 Australian Championships girl’s final. Court lost, but bounced back quickly, winning the women’s final–her first major title–the next day.)

Equally fascinating for me are the names you almost never hear in their tennis context. Since I’m working backward, the players I added to the database for 1965 were those who finished their careers that year. (Or played predominantly at lesser regional events, and only briefly popped up on my radar.) Here are a few of the ladies whose tennis careers I stumbled upon:

I could list many more.

Data and acknowledgements

Once again, I note the huge debt I owe to the contributors at tennisforum.com’s Blast From the Past section. They’ve converted newspaper and annual results into online content that I could then further organize into a proper dataset.

All of the raw data is available in my women’s tennis GitHub repo.

The 1966 Women’s Tennis Season Like You’ve Never Seen It Before

I’ve been working hard to organize 1960s and 1970s women’s tennis results so that you can view and search it as easily as if they took place last month. It’s an enormous task, and probably never to be completed, but I do have some progress to share.

A couple of weeks ago, I announced the inclusion of the 1967 women’s tennis season on Tennis Abstract and discussed why it’s so important. Today, I give you 1966, along with a much easier way to dive in.

The season view

Here’s a one-page overview of the 1966 season. On that one page, you’ll find:

  • The results of the four majors, at a glance
  • Some key statistical leaders
  • A full calendar of all the tournaments in the database, along with finalists and semi-finalists (in 1966, that’s 159 events!)
  • Year-end Elo rankings, including surface-specific ratings (yes, Elo for the 1960s!)
  • Elo number ones for the season (Margaret Court made that rather uninteresting for much of the decade, monopolizing the top spot this year and several others)
  • Sortable stats for the 30 most active players, including won-loss records in finals, in three-setters, and on all surfaces
  • The most common head-to-heads
  • Country-versus-country won-loss records, which offers a glimpse of which nations predominated at the time

Of course, the page contains links galore. One more click gets you detailed player pages just like the ones available for current players, or event-specific pages with full tournament draws. The database contains over 2,600 matches from the 1966 season.

(Once I work out all the kinks, I’ll generate similar pages for later seasons as well.)

What’s here and what’s not

To repeat myself from the 1967 post: This project owes a tremendous debt to the contributors at tennisforum.com’s Blast From the Past section. They’ve typed in tens of thousands of results compiled from newspapers and annuals. Without their efforts, I would barely be getting started. I highly recommend browsing that forum. In addition to the singles results, it contains doubles and mixed doubles scores, as well as descriptions of some of the top events. It’s one of the truly invaluable corners of the internet.

Newspapers and annuals didn’t report everything, and even the tireless Blast compilers haven’t scanned every possible source. Thus, some tournaments are missing rounds or specific matches. For some events, I have only the final. There are still other events that I would love to include, but am unable to for lack of data, such as the annual ATA championships and many of the tournaments that took place in the USSR.

I also haven’t imported every single possible result. There was no clear demarcation between “tour-level” and the rest back then, but some events were much stronger than others. Just because the results of the Wyoming state championships have survived doesn’t mean you can find them on Tennis Abstract.

That said, I’ve erred on the side of over-inclusion. There is at least one result from over 150 different 1966 events, and that number will be over 200 from 1962 to 1965! If a tournament has even one great player, I’ve imported the entire draw. (Ann Jones, who seems to have played just about every tournament in Great Britain for 15 years, has repeatedly made me question that commitment.) I’ve included virtually everything from the USSR and the former Eastern Bloc nations, along with nearly every tournament that included players from Eastern Europe. There was much less East-West mixing than there is now, so these results are particularly important for establishing the level of play behind the Iron Curtain.

About these Elos

It’s particularly exciting to be able to rate these players, both to find unheralded women from this era, and to see how the stars of the 1960s stack up against those of later eras. Of course, a certain Elo rating doesn’t mean the same thing in 1966 as it did in 2016, because the level of play has risen, and the game has changed in innumerable ways. That said, my Elo algorithm doesn’t suffer from any kind of inflation, so a certain rating–say, Billie Jean King‘s 1966 year-end 2274–means roughly the same thing relative to her peers as it does now.

These Elo ratings are provisional, however. For one thing, there’s a lot more historical data to be added. As the algorithm can look at more matches from the early 1960s, it can better calculate proper ratings for each player in 1966.

Also, the less-structured nature of the tennis tour in the 1960s may necessitate some tweaks to the algorithm. As I’ve said, there’s no clear top level, and there’s certainly no helpful classifications like Satellites or Challengers or ITF W15s. While the best players did a lot of traveling, they represented a much smaller core than the hundreds of full-time nomads who populate today’s tour. Thus, 1960s stars played more early-round matches against locals who–at least in tennis terms–would never be heard from again.

So far, my Elo algorithm is spitting out plausible results for the 1960s without any era-specific alterations. Adding thousands more matches and hundreds of new players is not causing any noticeable inflation in the ratings of later players. But any of those things might change.

The data

I’m making all of this data available in my GitHub repo for women’s tennis results.

In addition to “new” seasons like 1966, I’m also working on filling in lower-level events and qualifying rounds for the 1970s. I have about 50 tournaments per year from 1968 through the mid-70s, but I’m finding that there are 100 or more per year that could be added, plus qualifying for the big events. I recently added 1,500 such “additional” matches from 1974 alone.

These are all on Tennis Abstract as well, so to take just one example, you can see Virginia Ruzici fighting her way through qualifying rounds at the big tournaments to start 1974. Once I finish with 1973, you’ll be able to see evidence of something almost unthinkable: Martina Navratilova playing qualies. It didn’t last long, but it did happen.

Enjoy!

Dangerous Exponents: A Covid-19 Podcast

Pardon the non-tennis interruption!

Carl Bialik and I–the duo that has brought you the Tennis Abstract podcast–are five episodes into a new show, Dangerous Exponents: A Covid-19 Podcast. We’re attempting to bring our usual analytical approach to issues related to the pandemic, while acknowledging that we’re not doctors, epidemiologists, or anything except for inquiring minds with a penchant for research and some skill at separating valuable research from the rest.

Our most recent episode is on herd immunity: Is there really such a thing, how do we get there, and how will we know we have? Previously, we covered the question of holiday gatherings; the role of exponents R0, Rt, and K; the latest on vaccines; and the trade-offs involved in keeping schools open. Each installment runs approximately 45 minutes.

You can find the episodes and subscribe in all the usual spots, such as iTunes and player.fm.

As we develop this new podcast, we’d love your feedback. If you’ve listened to one of our previous episodes, or after you listen to the new one, please take a moment and answer a few questions to help us hone our efforts.

Thanks for listening!

Introducing the Tennis Abstract Book Club

Carl Bialik and I are kicking off a new feature on the Tennis Abstract Podcast: a monthly* book club featuring various classics and curiosities in the game’s literature.

* probably

Our first selection is A Handful of Summers, by Gordon Forbes. Forbes, who died last week, was a long-time tour player from South Africa, and his book is widely considered to be among the best tennis memoirs. Here’s Steve Tignor raving about it.

We’re still working out exactly what it means to have a podcast book club, so feel free to make suggestions. At minimum, we hope you will:

  • read along with us;
  • send us questions, comments, and the like via Twitter;
  • listen to the resulting episode in mid-January.

Our list of future book selections is already spiraling out of control, but we also welcome tips for future picks.

Those of you who are interested in the literary and historical aspects of the sport will find plenty to enjoy in the archives of our podcasts. I’ve spoken with three authors this month (ep 85 on World Team Tennis; ep 87 on Lottie Dod; ep 88 on A People’s History of Tennis) and Carl has been interviewing writers for years (such as Peter Underwood and Julie Heldman, to link just two).

We’ll have our discussion of A Handful of Summers on the podcast in about a month, so you have plenty of time to read the book. At that time, we’ll also announce the next selection.

Happy reading!

Podcast Episode 88: Author David Berry on His People’s History of Tennis

Episode 88 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast welcomes David Berry, author of the book A People’s History of Tennis.

The conversation, like his book, spans the entire history of tennis, with a particular focus on the ways in which the sport isn’t conservative at all. As Berry explains, women were a crucial part of lawn tennis from the very beginning, and a key decision in the game’s first decade ensured that the men’s and women’s games would remain intertwined. We also discuss the role of the local tennis club, the importance of public parks tennis around the world, and the fascinating yet mostly forgotten years of “Worker’s Wimbledon.”

It’s been a good year for tennis books, and of the ones I’ve read, Berry’s book is the best. The scope is ambitious, and I guarantee you will discover corners of the sport’s history you didn’t know anything about. Yet it’s a concise, quick read. Check it out!

Fans of the TA podcast will also want to check out Dangerous Exponents, the new Covid-19 podcast that Carl Bialik and I are doing. We released episode 4, about the virus in schools, earlier this week.

(Note: this week’s episode is about 60 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.

Podcast Episode 87: Author Sasha Abramsky on Lottie Dod, the Little Wonder

Episode 87 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast features Sasha Abramsky, author of the book Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar.

Our wide-ranging chat covers many aspects of the life and times of this 19th century superstar, from her global legions of fans, to her “Battle of the Sexes”-style challenges 80 years before King-Riggs, to her unprecedented and varied string of sporting successes. We also touch on the relative dearth of tennis historiography, the chronological gap between Dod and the next generation of female athletic superstars, and whether there is a natural intersection between progressive politics and the compelling stories of tennis history.

This was a great conversation about a part of tennis history we don’t hear nearly enough about, so I hope you’ll check it out. And for the full account of Lottie Dod, be sure to pick up your copy of Sasha’s book.

Fans of the TA podcast will also want to check out Dangerous Exponents, the new Covid-19 podcast that Carl Bialik and I are doing. We released episode 3 yesterday.

(Note: this week’s episode is about 60 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.