Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Halep hopes this is her breakthrough year in Stuttgart, Ivo Karlovic plays like he’s still 39, and Angela Mortimer celebrates a birthday.
Scroll down for a transcript.
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Music: Love is the Chase by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2021. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: Apoxode
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Rough transcript of today’s episode:
The first number is 7, the number of different clay court tournaments where Simona Halep has won a title. She has nine tour-level clay titles in all, from Roland Garros in 2018 to multiple wins at home in Bucharest. The one important clay-court tour stop that the world #3 hasn’t mastered is Stuttgart, where she has entered five times and amassed a mere 5-5 record, losing twice in her first match, and twice to unheralded German Laura Siegemund. The indoor surface plays differently from the more traditional clay of Rome and Roland Garros, giving an edge to bigger hitters such as three-time champs Lindsay Davenport and Maria Sharapova. As Elo’s highest-rated woman on clay, the Tennis Abstract forecast has Halep as this year’s favorite, with a 40% chance of finally taking home the Porsche awarded to the winner. But rumors swirled last week that Simona wouldn’t even play, as she recovers from the injury that knocked her out of Miami last month. At least she has a few days to round into form—top seed Ashleigh Barty, former winners Petra Kvitova and Karolina Pliskova, and Stuttgart-specialist Siegemund all sit in the other half of the draw.
Our second number is 31, the number of aces struck by Ivo Karlovic yesterday in a first round match at the Tallahassee Challenger against Bjorn Fratangelo. The 6-foot, 11-inch Croatian turned 42 in February, and while his ranking is steadily tumbling, he clings to a spot in the top 200 and continues to frustrate opponents who are accustomed to occasionally putting returns in play. The match was as one-dimensional as they come: Over the course of three tiebreaks and more than two and a half hours, Fratangelo earned only one break point, which Karlovic saved. Dr Ivo couldn’t generate even one. This sort of thing stands out on a live scoreboard, but it’s just another day for the Croatian, for whom 31 aces is merely a good day at the office. Karlovic is up to 141 career best-of-threes decided by tiebreaks, more than 40 of which have required a breaker in all three sets. The first of those matches was more than 20 years ago, and with the way Ivo is playing in his 40s, another decade of tiebreak specials isn’t out of the question.
Today’s third and final number is 89, the birthday celebrated today by Angela Mortimer, 1961 Wimbledon champion and tennis Hall of Famer. The prominence of the All England Club in British tennis memory ensures that the Wimbledon title comes first in her biography, but that accomplishment merely crowned a decade of top-five play in which she won over 100 events. While she also won Roland Garros in 1955 and the Australian Championships in 1958, most of her titles came on home soil, where she rarely let a countrywoman get the better of her. She beat Ann Haydon Jones in 19 of 29 meetings, and against the other four women she faced ten times or more—all Brits, including her opponent in the 1961 Wimbledon final, Christine Truman—she won 38 times against only 7 losses. In more limited opportunities, she also maintained a positive head-to-head record against Althea Gibson, and she was part of the 1960 squad that beat the Americans in the Wightman Cup. Most remarkably of all, she won her Wimbledon title while partially deaf. At her peak, four senses out of five were enough to get the job done.
