Tennis Abstract now includes extensive results from the 1961 women’s season. Margaret Court won her second major at January’s Australian Championships, but it wasn’t until the end of 1961 that she claimed the top spot in the Elo rankings. In her first tour abroad, she racked up six titles in Europe but failed to reach a major final away from home.
Thus, this was the last year for some time in which everything was truly up for grabs. Court, Ann Jones, Angela Mortimer, and Darlene Hard each won a major, and Jones was the only player to reach two slam finals. The top Elo-rated player for much of the season was someone else entirely: Maria Bueno. The Brazilian had a glittering spring, beating Jones twice and Hard three times on the Caribbean circuit, then knocking out Court en route to the Turin title. Unfortunately, she contracted hepatitis during the French Open and wouldn’t return to competition for nearly a year.
You can dig into the rankings, stats, tournaments, and more than 2,500 match results via the 1961 season page.
Adding 1961 results to my database entailed more than just recording a bunch of meetings between Hard and Yola Ramirez, though there were eight of those. I added about 250 players who did not appear in a match in 1962 or later. A few of them are quite famous, such as Angela Buxton. Others flew further under the radar, at least for their top-tier tennis exploits:
- Flo Blanchard, better known as a tour-level chair umpire
- Becky Birchmore, a pioneer at the University of Georgia
- Nancy Meiss, a noted ice skating judge
- Bunny Vosters, whose 11 US National squash titles were enough to get her a French Wikipedia page, but not an English one
It’s becoming a familiar refrain at this point, but that doesn’t make it any less genuine: This ongoing project relies heavily on the work of the contributors to Blast From the Past at tennisforum.com, to whom I am very grateful.
The raw data, from 1961 to the present, is available in my tennis_wta GitHub repo. I’ve also been adding extensive results from the 1970s (both to GitHub and the Tennis Abstract site) that are missing from the WTA’s database.
If you want to learn more about this project, you can listen to the podcast interview I recorded with Carl this week, or browse the recent blog archives for my announcements regarding several more seasons. And stay tuned: there will be more.