{"id":4040,"date":"2020-12-22T19:17:27","date_gmt":"2020-12-22T19:17:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/?p=4040"},"modified":"2020-12-22T19:17:27","modified_gmt":"2020-12-22T19:17:27","slug":"new-at-tennis-abstract-over-3000-match-results-from-1965","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/22\/new-at-tennis-abstract-over-3000-match-results-from-1965\/","title":{"rendered":"New at Tennis Abstract: Over 3,000 Match Results from 1965"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Welcome to the latest update on a project that has well and truly spiraled out of control. I&#8217;m pleased to announced that the Tennis Abstract site now features a huge amount of women&#8217;s tennis data from 1965. I hesitate to call it &#8220;complete,&#8221; because it is not, and it probably never will be. But the word &#8220;substantial&#8221; will do just fine:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>3,200 matches<\/li><li>248 events (plus Federation Cup)<\/li><li>400 players that weren&#8217;t previously in my database<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The 1965 dataset is even more sizable than the <a href=\"http:\/\/tennisabstract.com\/seasons\/1967_Womens_Season.html\">1967<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/tennisabstract.com\/seasons\/1966_Womens_Season.html\">1966<\/a> results that I&#8217;ve recently discussed in other <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/07\/welcome-to-1967\/\">blog<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/18\/the-1966-womens-tennis-season-like-youve-never-seen-it-before\/\">posts<\/a>. To put those 3,200 results in perspective, there were &#8220;only&#8221; about 3,100 tour-level WTA matches in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For an bird&#8217;s-eye view of the 1965 women&#8217;s season, <a href=\"http:\/\/tennisabstract.com\/seasons\/1965_Womens_Season.html\">check out my season page<\/a>. I introduced the season pages with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/18\/the-1966-womens-tennis-season-like-youve-never-seen-it-before\/\">my post on 1966 last week<\/a>, and I&#8217;ve since made several improvements:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>The <a href=\"http:\/\/tennisabstract.com\/seasons\/1965_Womens_Season.html#full-calendar-h\">full event calendar<\/a> has some new information to indicate the strength of the tournament: the number of top 10 players in the draw (as per that week&#8217;s Elo ratings), and the &#8220;geographic concentration&#8221; of the field&#8211;that is, the percentage of women in the draw who hail from the most common country. The second number isn&#8217;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.<\/li><li>The <a href=\"http:\/\/tennisabstract.com\/seasons\/1965_Womens_Season.html#elo-rankings-h\">year-end Elo rankings table<\/a> includes some helpful additional information: each player&#8217;s age, her number of titles, and her won-loss record on the season.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The season page tends to highlight the best players, and I&#8217;d imagine that&#8217;s what most of you will find the most interesting. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/wplayer.cgi?p=MargaretCourt\">Margaret Court<\/a> dominated the 1965 campaign, winning over 100 matches, losing only 8, and posting the best year-end Elo on all surfaces. The page <a href=\"http:\/\/tennisabstract.com\/seasons\/1965_Womens_Season.html#head-to-heads-h\">will also tell that you<\/a> she drew <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/wplayer.cgi?p=LesleyBowrey\">Lesley Bowrey<\/a> ten times&#8211;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/wplayer-classic.cgi?p=MargaretCourt&amp;f=A1965qqC2&amp;q=LesleyBowrey\">nine of them in finals!<\/a>&#8211;and Bowrey accounted for 4 of her 8 losses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">(Court and Bowrey were already familiar foes: They met in the 1960 Australian Championships <em>girl&#8217;s<\/em> final. Court lost, but <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/tennisabstract\/status\/1341152872206131201\">bounced back quickly<\/a>, winning the women&#8217;s final&#8211;her first major title&#8211;the next day.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Equally fascinating for me are the names you almost never hear in their tennis context. Since I&#8217;m working backward, the players I added to the database for 1965 were those who <em>finished<\/em> 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/wplayer.cgi?p=SandyWarshaw\">Sandy Warshaw<\/a>, who later become <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tampa.gov\/city-clerk\/info\/previous-mayors\/freedman-sandra-warshaw\">mayor of Tampa<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/wplayer.cgi?p=LillianOdonnell\">Lillian O&#8217;Donnell<\/a>, a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Lillian_O%27Donnell\">noted detective novelist<\/a> who set one of her stories at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Death-Grass-Lillian-ODonnell\/dp\/B000HT7A3O\">Forest Hills<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/wplayer.cgi?p=ChiaraRamorino\">Maria Chiara Ramorino<\/a>, who became better known in the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Maria_Chiara_Ramorino\">orienteering world<\/a>, and has an <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ramorino_Glacier\">Antarctic glacier<\/a> named after her<\/li><li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/wplayer.cgi?p=RitaHorky\">Rita Horky<\/a>, a Hall of Famer in <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rita_Horky\">women&#8217;s basketball<\/a><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I could list many more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Data and acknowledgements<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Once again, I note the huge debt I owe to the contributors at tennisforum.com&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tennisforum.com\/threads\/1965-results.468562\/\">Blast From the Past<\/a> section. They&#8217;ve converted newspaper and annual results into online content that I could then further organize into a proper dataset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All of the raw data is available in my <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/JeffSackmann\/tennis_wta\">women&#8217;s tennis GitHub repo<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to the latest update on a project that has well and truly spiraled out of control. I&#8217;m pleased to announced that the Tennis Abstract site now features a huge amount of women&#8217;s tennis data from 1965. I hesitate to call it &#8220;complete,&#8221; because it is not, and it probably never will be. But the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/22\/new-at-tennis-abstract-over-3000-match-results-from-1965\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">New at Tennis Abstract: Over 3,000 Match Results from 1965<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,111,127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-tennis-abstract","category-wta"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}