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:
- Eva (Mannschatz) Johannes, the “Grande Dame” of East German tennis
- Valeria Kuzmenko Titova, an important early figure in the Soviet game
- Nina Vosters Moyer, two-time U.S. squash champion
- Joy Valderrama, once known as the “Shirley Temple of Hawaii“
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.