{"id":4072,"date":"2021-01-19T11:52:15","date_gmt":"2021-01-19T11:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/?p=4072"},"modified":"2021-01-19T11:52:15","modified_gmt":"2021-01-19T11:52:15","slug":"hello-1959","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2021\/01\/19\/hello-1959\/","title":{"rendered":"Hello, 1959"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Another season, another 2,300 matches on the Tennis Abstract site. The latest addition is the 1959 women&#8217;s tennis season, <a href=\"http:\/\/tennisabstract.com\/seasons\/1959_Womens_Season.html\">which you can dig into here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/wplayer.cgi?p=AltheaGibson\">Althea Gibson<\/a> more or less retired from the amateur circuit after a dominant 1958 season. She did a bit of acting, some lounge singing, and returned to the courts only long enough to win the Chicago <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/1959_Pan_American_Games\">Pan-American Games<\/a> in August. That left the field open for three other women to spend some time at <a href=\"http:\/\/tennisabstract.com\/seasons\/1959_Womens_Season.html#elo-ones-h\">number one<\/a>&#8211;according to Elo, anyway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/wplayer.cgi?p=AngelaMortimer\">Angela Mortimer<\/a> was the first to unseat Gibson, holding the top spot for 18 weeks on the strength of her perfect 15-0 record in finals this season. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/wplayer.cgi?p=MariaBueno\">Maria Bueno<\/a> took over for a week in November, losing her position to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/wplayer.cgi?p=BeverlyBakerFleitz\">Beverly Baker Fleitz<\/a> for two weeks, then reclaiming the honor, which she would hold well into 1960. For Baker Fleitz, who was ambidextrous and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Beverly_Baker_Fleitz\">played with two forehands<\/a> (!), it was a fitting sendoff into retirement after an outstanding decade of top-level tennis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As usual, the raw data is available in my <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/JeffSackmann\/tennis_wta\">GitHub repo<\/a>. Another round of thanks are due to the contributors at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tennisforum.com\/threads\/1959-results.598353\/\">Blast From the Past forum<\/a>, who did much of the heavy lifting you see here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another season, another 2,300 matches on the Tennis Abstract site. The latest addition is the 1959 women&#8217;s tennis season, which you can dig into here. Althea Gibson more or less retired from the amateur circuit after a dominant 1958 season. She did a bit of acting, some lounge singing, and returned to the courts only &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2021\/01\/19\/hello-1959\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Hello, 1959<\/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-4072","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\/4072","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=4072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}