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.