Expected Points, my new short, daily podcast, highlights three numbers to illustrate stats, trends, and interesting trivia around the sport.
Up today: Kvitova’s serve deserts her in a third-round loss to Danka Kovinic, Jaume Munar keeps winning on the sweet, sweet clay, and the Charleston event’s history goes back to an unprecedented prize purse nearly 50 years ago.
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 46.7%, the percentage of first-serve points won yesterday by Petra Kvitova in her straight-set loss to Danka Kovinic. The Czech was the third seed in Charleston but didn’t play like it in her round-of-16 match, winning fewer than half of her first offerings for only the third time since 2017. For Kovinic, the 26-year-old pride of Montenegro, it was only her third win in 19 tries against top-20 players. It was also a massive turnaround from the last time she faced an elite, when her stay at the Australian Open lasted only 44 minutes, the length of her double-bagel defeat at the hands of Ashleigh Barty. All of Kovinic’s top-20 wins have come on clay, and she put together a nice run last fall, reaching the quarter-finals in Istanbul and then winning four qualifying and main draw matches in Rome. In all of the Rome victories, along with her second-rounder on Wednesday against Leylah Fernandez and the Kvitova upset, Kovinic won more than half of her return points. That’s small consolation for Kvitova, but at least she’s not the only tour player whose serve has been rendered ineffective by the hard-hitting Montenegrin.
Our second number is 47, the number of clay court matches played by Jaume Munar since the US Open last fall. Munar has won 36 of them in an apparent attempt to prove that there is still a role for a clay-court specialist on the men’s tour—since leaving Flushing, he has entered 15 tournaments, 14 of them on dirt. For the most part, his clay-or-bust strategy has worked: At the Challenger level, he has won two titles, including a final-round victory over Lorenzo Musetti, and reached another three finals. His tour-level results have been more mixed, though he deserves credit for pushing Stefanos Tsitsipas to five sets in a Roland Garros first-rounder last fall. Yesterday in Marbella, he lost only three games in knocking out second-seed Fabio Fognini and advancing to his second ATP quarterfinal of the year. Already a month away from his 24th birthday, it’s tough to argue that the Spaniard is a future star, but there’s still enough slow surfaces on tour for keep guys like him racking up wins for years to come.
Today’s third and final number is $30,000, the first-prize check for the winner of the inaugural Family Circle Cup in 1973. The event, then held in Hilton Head and now in Charleston as the Volvo Car Open, was the first women’s event to offer a total purse of $100,000 and a much-needed anchor of the fledging WTA tour. That first big check went to Rosie Casals, who beat Billie Jean King in the semis and Nancy Richey in the final, thanks in part to 43-shot rally in the final game, when she was two points away from her 3-6 6-1 7-5 victory. The winner’s list since then is a veritable who’s who of women’s tennis, with 8 singles championships for Chris Evert, 4 for Steffi Graf, and 3 for Serena Williams, and 7 doubles titles—to go with 4 in singles—for Martina Navratilova. It’s easy to write off the current incarnation of the event as just another WTA 500, one that happens to be played on the eccentric green clay, but the nearly 50-year history of professional women’s tennis in South Carolina has played a big role in making the tour what it is today.
