jsackmann – Page 14 – Heavy Topspin

July 16, 1973: The Ninth Maccabiah

*An Israeli stamp commemorating the 1973 Maccabiah Games*

In 1973, tennis was still not an Olympic sport. It hadn’t featured as a full medal discipline since 1924, and its appearance as a demonstration sport in 1968 had yet to bear fruit. The original break in the 1920s was due to differing definitions of professionalism. By the early 1970s, the sport and the Games were further apart than ever. Stars could rake in sums of money that watered the eyes of promoters and offended the amateur sensibilities of the Olympic movement.

Tennis, however, had long been a staple at the Maccabiah Games, the quadrennial “Jewish Olympics.” Dick Savitt, the 1951 Wimbledon champion from New Jersey, won medals at the event. Tom Okker of the Netherlands starred at the Maccabiah in 1965, three years before reaching the final of the first US Open. And in 1969, Julie Heldman made the trip to Israel and ran the table, winning the singles, doubles, and mixed.

The Open era didn’t do Maccabiah tennis any favors. There was no money involved, and a medal carried little prestige within the tennis world. The schedule was awkward, too. It wasn’t a typical Monday-to-Sunday tournament, so participation would effectively lop two weeks off of a player’s schedule. Tel Aviv wasn’t exactly geographically convenient to the circuit, either.

As a result, the Maccabiah went the way of many long-standing amateur events. It became, more and more, a de facto junior competition. Okker had been 21 when he waltzed through the field, and Heldman did so well because she had more experience than the rest of the women combined. The stars of the 1973 Games would be the youngest yet.

No one at the Ninth Maccabiah, regardless of age, could ignore the fact that this one was different. The opening ceremonies honored the eleven Israeli athletes killed by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics just ten months earlier. Security at Ramat Gan Stadium was tight.

Tensions ran high, too. Two Dutch athletes had withdrawn from the Munich Games out of respect for the Israeli victims; they were invited to participate in Tel Aviv, despite not being Jewish. They would have full status as competitors, except that they couldn’t win medals. At the event, however, they–along with a few other non-Jewish athletes–were sidelined due to last-minute disputes. An American coach protested just five minutes before one race was set to begin. His complaint: It would be ridiculous if a guest won the race and a second-place finisher were awarded the gold medal.

Or as he put it in the heat of the moment: “If somebody doesn’t get that Norwegian off the track, I’m going to punch someone.”

Another American, a doctor traveling with the United States delegation, actually did punch someone. He roundhoused an official over a decision in the boxing event.

The tennis competitions progressed unaffected. The standouts came from South Africa: 17-year-old Ilana Kloss in the women’s tournaments and 18-year-old David Schneider in the men’s. Neither had much international experience, and both were several years away from their peaks. Still, on July 16th, Kloss won the singles gold medal, beating Janet Haas of Florida, 6-1, 6-3.* It was her second triumph in two days. She had picked up the doubles title the day before, and she would leave Tel Aviv with three gold medals, including the mixed doubles prize with Schneider.

* Haas was no slouch, and she deserves more than this footnote. She captained the University of Miami tennis team in 1972 and 1973. The first woman tennis player awarded an athletic scholarship by the school, she now has a place in Miami’s Sports Hall of Fame.

For the time being, the Maccabiah was the closest a tennis player could get to the Olympics. The International Olympic Committee remained behind the times, failing to grapple with the questions of professionalism that continued to roil tennis. The Jewish Olympics offered an occasional reminder that the whole debate was dumb. Somehow, the few hundred dollars in prize money amassed by Kloss and Schneider in their young careers did not irreparably soil the Games.

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This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

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July 14, 1973: The Swedish Surge

*Stan Smith and Björn Borg with King Gustaf of Sweden*

Given the excitement over 17-year-old Björn Borg at Wimbledon, you can imagine the splash he made back home in Sweden. The Scandinavian nation had always clung to a position on the edge of the tennis firmament. Now the Swedes had a superstar they could call their own.

The week after Wimbledon, many of the game’s top men headed to the coastal resort of Båstad for the Swedish International, a stop on the 1973 Grand Prix tour. The quick surface change from British turf to European clay wasn’t as harsh as usual, since many of the participants had skipped Wimbledon as part of the ATP boycott. Stan Smith was here, and his doubles partner was none other than Niki Pilić, the Yugoslavian cause célèbre whose desire to make his own schedule had started the controversial ball rolling.

Aside from a tight second-rounder against Jan Kukal, Borg cruised to the semi-finals as the homegrown hero. Surprisingly, he wasn’t the only Swede to go deep. Leif Johansson, a 21-year-old rarely spotted outside of his home country, won six straight sets–including two against the as-yet-unheralded Guillermo Vilas–for a spot in the final four.

Semi-finals day was July 14th, when five thousand patriotic fans packed the grandstand. Among them was Sweden’s 90-year-old King Gustaf VI. The king’s father, Gustaf V, had been a keen player and rabid fan until his death in 1950. Since the 1930s, the royal family had sponsored the King’s Cup competition, coaxing superstars to Scandinavia since before World War II. When tennis stars like Jean Borotra found themselves caught up in that conflagration, the elder Gustav worked behind the scenes to keep them alive.

All the Swedish pride in the world couldn’t save Johansson. He won just three games against Spanish clay-court maestro Manuel Orantes. Borg did better, breaking for an early lead over Smith. The American was one of the best players on earth, but he had never won a clay-court title of note. The venue and the surface suited Björn perfectly.

On the other hand, a hostile crowd in Båstad was nothing compared to what Smith had withstood in Bucharest, where he led the American side to the 1972 Davis Cup title. His serve was impervious to conditions, and it quickly gave him the ascendancy. He recovered the early break, took another for the lead, and never looked back. Big Stan advanced to the final, 6-4, 6-4, 6-2.

Still, Smith was impressed. “All the members of the pro circuit will definitely have another player to fear,” he said of his opponent. Soon, Davis Cup campaigners would come to the same realization about the rising power from Sweden.

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July 13, 1973: An Irish Refuge

*Virginia Wade (left) and Margaret Court*

Few players took a post-Wimbledon break. As soon as the Championships were over, the world’s elites dispersed to points all over Europe: Båstad in Sweden, Dublin in Ireland, Gstaad in Switzerland, and Newport in Wales. Four top-level men’s tournaments jammed the slate this week; all were joint events. There was a women’s competition in Düsseldorf, too.

The strongest group of men–Stan Smith, Björn Borg, and Manuel Orantes–headed for the resort on the Swedish coast. Two superstar women–Margaret Court and Virginia Wade–opted for the Irish Championships, a once-prestigious tour stop that had settled into second-tier status.

The relative calm of Dublin was exactly what Court and Wade needed. The British standout faced immense pressure during the Wimbledon fortnight, and she had never handled it particularly well. Even in Ireland, she “alternated brilliance with mediocrity in bewildering proportions,” according to one man on the scene. But after fighting through an up-and-down quarter-final against Wendy Turnbull, she recovered on July 13th, winning the first seven games of her semi-final with another Australian, Pat Coleman. She advanced to the title match, 6-0, 6-4.

Court was far steadier. At the business end of majors–or in exhibitions against aging hustlers–Margaret seemed to invite speculation about her nerves. When the world wasn’t watching, though, she might have been the greatest of all time. In Dublin, she cast aside Wimbledon junior champ Ann Kiyomura, 6-3, 6-2, then double-bageled Irish hope Geraldine Barniville. In the semis, she allowed her countrywoman Helen Gourlay just three games.

The Irish Championships were a refuge for a pair of men, as well. The British Lawn Tennis Association, the national federation most embarrassed by the ATP’s Wimbledon boycott, felt they had to respond to the union’s power grab. The symbolic gesture they settled on was a temporary ban: British players who participated wouldn’t be allowed to compete on home soil. Mark Cox, a leading voice within the players’ union and the second-best Brit behind Roger Taylor, was the prime target.

Instead of the traditional trek to the Welsh Championships in Newport, then, Cox and fellow ATPer Graham Stilwell crossed the Irish Sea. Both men reached the semis, where little-known South African John Yuill knocked out Stilwell. Cox was challenged by another Springbok, dropping a tight first set to Bernard Mitton before running away with the last two sets, 5-7, 6-1, 6-0.

These were just a few of the storylines filling out the post-Wimbledon landscape.

Spare a thought for the tennis enthusiast, fifty years ago today, trying to keep up with the action. Roy Emerson and Ilie Năstase advanced in Gstaad, while Borg, Smith, and Marjorie Gengler recorded wins in Båstad. Evonne Goolagong moved toward a title in Düsseldorf. At Newport, Julie Heldman picked up a trophy with a wild 1-6, 6-1, 11-9 decision over the young Dianne Fromholtz, who had beaten her four weeks earlier in Beckenham and threatened Wade at Wimbledon. In men’s action at the Welsh, Taylor overcame both tennis elbow and uneven umpiring to advance to the final over countryman John Paish.

No one could blame an aficionado who opted to sit back and wait for next month’s issue of World Tennis. In the meantime, experts and casual fans alike could mull a bet on the upcoming spectacle between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. In Las Vegas, Jimmy the Greek had Riggs as an 8-5 favorite.

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July 11, 1973: Libber Versus Lobber

*Bobby Riggs hopping the net a little more gingerly than he once did*

Bobby Riggs wanted another day in the spotlight, a sequel to his Mother’s Day dismantling of Margaret Court. Billie Jean King just wanted him to shut up.

There was only one way to settle this.

On July 11th, just three days after Billie Jean secured the mixed doubles leg of her Wimbledon triple, the reigning champion and the 55-year-old hustler made it official. They would duke it out on court, after the US Open and–of course–on national television.

Two weeks earlier Riggs had proposed a $100,000, winner-take-all prize pot. He got that, plus an additional guarantee of another $100,000 for each competitor. Jerry Perenchio, the producer handling the event, aimed even higher. He suggested that the match could earn $400,000 by filling an arena. His opening salvo to television networks was $750,000, the price of a John Wayne special.

Perenchio wasn’t just blowing smoke. In 1971, he had helmed the richest sporting event in history, the Ali-Frazier “Fight of the Century.” “I’m more excited about this,” he said, “than I was about the fight.”

Billie Jean proved at this initial press conference that she was better equipped than Court to beat the hustler king at his own game. She knew how Riggs had defeated Margaret, and there was no question of the stakes. Court still pretended her loss was just another exhibition. King understood that the pride of womankind was on the line. No pressure.

Well, pressure is a privilege, as a famous woman once said.

Nobody talked a better game than Bobby, but somehow Billie Jean scored the last word. Riggs teased her about hitting three straight double faults at Wimbledon–something the control artist claimed he had never done. (He may have been right: Legend had it that he once went six months without double-faulting. On the other hand, the main source of Riggs stories was the ever-running mouth of the man himself.)

“How many did I serve against Chris?” King retorted, referring to her comprehensive victory over Chris Evert in the Wimbledon final.

“None,” said Riggs. “You played a helluva game.”

“I’ll let you hustle off the court,” said Billie Jean. “I’ll hustle on the court.”

The most famous women’s libber in sports would finally take a crack at the first 55-year-old man to become a celebrity by lobbing female tennis players. The sport would never be the same.

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July 7, 1973: The Triple

*Billie Jean King with her newest hardware*

After twelve days of sunshine, the rain finally arrived. The women’s singles final, scheduled for its traditional Saturday, was pushed to Sunday, alongside the men’s championship match. It wasn’t exactly the equal treatment that Billie Jean King had in mind when she hinted at a boycott before the event began, but it invited its share of direct comparisons.

The women’s showdown, on July 7th, would feature greats of the present and future, King and the teenage Chris Evert. The men’s title came down to two Eastern Europeans, Jan Kodeš and Alex Metreveli. Both were excellent players; Kodeš had won the French Open twice in the last four years. But they were clearly beneficiaries of the 80-player ATP boycott. At this “Women’s Wimbledon,” the American ladies could claim responsibility for yet another packed house.

Billie Jean had no problem getting herself psyched up for the match. In early 1972, Evert destroyed the Old Lady on a clay court in Fort Lauderdale, allowing King just one game. While they had played three times since then, the memory was still enough to motivate the veteran.

For a little while, King was on track to return the favor. She took the first set 6-0. Evert looked lost. “It was the loveliest, meanest set of tennis I’d ever seen,” wrote Grace Lichtenstein. “From the first point, she carved up Chris’s game like a Benihana chef slicing up meat on a hibachi table.”

The 18-year-old found her way back into the match, winning ten straight points as part of a push from 0-2 to 5-4 in the second set. But King wasn’t going to let this one slip away. “When I thought I was getting into it in the second set,” said Chrissie, “well, Billie Jean just served and volleyed even better. She didn’t make a mistake all afternoon.”

The final score was 6-0, 7-5 to King, in a little more than an hour. It was her fifth Wimbledon title, and she already had her eye on Suzanne Lenglen’s mark of six.

Before she could look too far ahead, though, she had two other campaigns to see out. With Rosie Casals, King polished off another title, winning the semi-finals and finals in the women’s doubles. She also teamed with Owen Davidson to take a mixed doubles quarter-final. (Their victims: Kodeš and the girls’ runner-up, Martina Navratilova.)

No one could blame Billie Jean when she skipped the traditional Wimbledon ball. She had spent five hours on court, with at least one more match to play the following day. The rest was somehow sufficient: She and Davidson came back to secure two more victories on Monday. The Old Lady had won everything there was to win, the “triple,” a feat she had also accomplished at Wimbledon in 1967.

The champion had once said, “We’ve got to get women’s tennis off the women’s pages and into the sports pages.” Mission accomplished, at least this fortnight. Newspaper editors around the world could lead with either King or Kodeš. Nearly all of them broke with tradition to focus on Billie Jean.

Madame Superstar, as couturier Teddy Tinling called her, was finally ready for a rest. She had played six matches and 139 games on Centre Court in two days. “I’m gonna sleep twenty hours a day for six days,” she told Lichtenstein. “Zonkereno!”

She already knew what her next challenge would be. It wasn’t official yet, but it had to be done. She was ready.

“Bring on Bobby Riggs.”

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July 4, 1973: An American Day

The Wimbledon crowd had no trouble picking sides in the 1973 women’s semi-finals. Australian veteran Margaret Court was a three-time champion, including her dramatic 14-12, 11-9 defeat of Billie Jean King for the title three years earlier. She got the nod, both analytically and sentimentally, over 18-year-old American Chris Evert in the first match.

The second semi was an even easier call. If the Brits couldn’t have a local product in the final, they’d happily settle for Evonne Goolagong. The young Australian was a crowd favorite everywhere she went, and she had taken Wimbledon by surprise with her title in 1971. The London public wasn’t so positive about Billie Jean, the defending champion. Americans were widely thought to be responsible for the ATP boycott of the event, and King’s role with the new Women’s Tennis Association made her seem even guilty as well, if only by the flimsiest logic.

“I am tired of being portrayed as a villain,” Billie Jean told the press earlier that week. “We just wanted to form an association, and we have.” Still, emotions ran high, and the American wouldn’t get much love from the gallery.

On July 4th, both Evert and King silenced the crowd. Chrissie finished the job that she left undone at Roland Garros. No one gave her much of a chance against Court on grass: The last time the two women met on turf, Evert won just three games. But she seized an early lead, taking the first set, 6-1, with a dazzling array of lobs over her six-foot-tall opponent.

Margaret chose her spots more carefully in the second and evened the score with a 6-1 frame of her own. But on this day, she couldn’t overcome her reputation as a choker. By the third game of the decider, wrote Fred Tupper in the New York Times, “you could almost hear Margaret’s nerves twanging.” The former champion piled up nine double faults. There was none of the drama of the Paris final: Evert took the final set, 6-1.

In the second semi-final, King didn’t execute much better than Court had. “Her volleying was off-key,” Bud Collins wrote of Billie Jean, “her serving mediocre.” Not a good combination for a serve-and-volleyer.

Her mental game proved considerably stronger. The Old Lady could still befuddle an opponent. “Billie Jean has you in a tizzy,” said Goolagong. “I worried so much about where she was I took my mind off what I was doing.” The Aussie was right to worry: King was usually at the net, coming in behind every serve and many of her returns as well.

With an erratic King and the always unpredictable Goolagong, the match was topsy-turvy. Billie Jean won the first set, closing out the final five games with the loss of just six points. She reached match point at 5-4 in the second, but Evonne passed the attacking American for a winner. Goolagong rode her momentum to a break of serve and two more games, and the two ladies headed to a decider.

Finally, King earned another match point at 3-5 on the Australian’s serve. Goolagong chose this moment to play her most glittering tennis of the day, keeping herself alive with a nifty half-volley, an untouchable drop, and a series of shots that kicked up the sideline chalk. Billie Jean needed seven match points before Goolagong finally missed a backhand volley.

It wasn’t the outcome that the viewing public would have chosen, but it set up one heck of a final. Evert had proved she could compete with the elites on grass; no longer was she the novice who had won just five games against King at Forest Hills in 1971. Billie Jean had an injury-marred season to salvage, and she’d take aim at her fifth Wimbledon title.

This was a women’s Wimbledon, something that had been clear from the moment that the ATP boycott devastated the men’s field. So far, the ladies had exceeded expectations.

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July 3, 1973: Justice Done

*Roger Taylor in the 1973 Wimbledon quarter-finals*

With matchups like these, who needed the ATP? The 1973 Wimbledon quarter-finals pitted 31-year-old Yorkshireman Roger Taylor against the tournament’s 17-year-old sensation, Björn Borg of Sweden.

It was a study in contrasts. Taylor, a left-hander, was a veteran with an attacking serve-and-volley game. Borg was more comfortable at the baseline, where he astonished spectators with both his topspin and his go-for-broke approach whenever the opportunity for a groundstroke winner arose. Taylor had the backing of a nation; Borg the support of legions of screaming teens.

On July 3rd, the match proved as scintillating as promised. Taylor crashed his way to a 6-1 first set before the young Swede found his bearings. Borg, however, had already played two five-setters (not to mention a 20-18 tiebreak) and wouldn’t go quietly. He swung away against the Brit’s second serves, forcing Taylor to take more chances. The left-hander ultimately tallied 20 double faults.

Borg rode his high-risk backcourt tactics to a two-sets-to-one advantage. But his energy ebbed, and Taylor grabbed the fourth set with a break to love in the sixth game. The Swede swung so hard at one ball that he shattered his racket.

For a few minutes, it appeared that the contest would end in a whimper. The Brit raced out to a 5-1 lead in the fifth and earned two match points at 15-40 on Borg’s serve. Björn saved them both–with a smash winner and an ace–and suddenly it was Taylor who looked tired. Borg held serve and took control, tying the score at 5-all. Only then did the Yorkshireman find another gear, and he broke for 6-5.

Taylor reached match point again at 40-15 on his own serve. He squandered the first with a double fault. His next serve was an apparent ace, an untouchable wide delivery that failed to draw a call from either line judge or chair umpire. But Borg protested, and Taylor agreed: One point away from a Wimbledon semi-final, and the third seed called a fault against himself.

“I did not want to win on a ball which was three inches out,” Taylor said after the match.

“This was too good a match,” wrote David Gray in the Guardian, “to be ended by an umpire’s mistake.”

Borg responded with a backhand winner to tie the game at deuce. Taylor struck a service winner for a fifth match point, and sealed the victory when the Swede missed a backhand. The final score was 6-1, 6-8, 3-6, 6-3, 7-5.

More than one British journalist reached the same conclusion: Justice was done. Yes, Taylor had done the right thing when he refused to accept the match-winning ace. But it was more than that. The veteran had defied the boycott and given home fans their greatest chance of a native champion since World War II. Whatever his ATP colleagues would say about it, Taylor’s participation in the tournament was, to so many of his countrymen, nothing less than an act of bravery.

Borg, for his part, could find consolation in the teenyboppers who streamed on court after the final point was played. Unlike Taylor, he would have many more chances to win Wimbledon. “Yesterday he was good; very very good,” wrote David Talbot of the sensational Swede. “One day he will be great.”

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Is It Ever Better To Be Unseeded?

As draw-probability takes go, this one is pretty spicy:

it’s better to be unseeded than 25-32.

25-32 guarantees 1-8 opponent in the third round.
— Ricky Dimon (@Dimonator) June 20, 2023

Satisfyingly counterintuitive if true. Is it?

A few reasons for skepticism: As an unseeded player, you could get a top-eight seeded opponent in the first round. Or the second. Or, after upsetting a lower seed–you are almost guaranteed to get one in the first or second round–you could still end up with a top-eight seed in the third round. Going into the draw unseeded is hardly protection against a top-eight opponent.

I could theorize further, but why not just delve into the numbers?

The men’s draw

Let’s look at a few examples from the draw. The 25th seed is Nicolas Jarry, who was drawn to face Carlos Alcaraz in the third round (ouch!). His grass-court Elo (gElo)–the number I use to generate forecasts–is 1698.5. The closest unseeded player to him on the gElo list is Adrian Mannarino, who has a rating of 1700.8. In Elo terms, a difference of 2.3 points is basically just a rounding error.

If Ricky’s theory is correct, on the morning of the draw, it was better to be Mannarino than Jarry. Except–oops!–Mannarino was drawn to face third-seed Daniil Medvedev in the second round.

How does all that good and bad luck shake out in the forecast? Jarry has a 7.5% chance of reaching the round of 16, 2.6% for the quarters, and 1.0% for the semis. Mannarino has 6.3% for R16, 3.2% for the quarters, and 1.1% for the semis. Those are awfully close, just like the near-identical gElo ratings would imply. The luck mostly washed out.

(If you look at my forecast after the tournament begins, the numbers will no longer be the same. That’s partly because every result has an effect on many other probabilities, and partly because the gElo ratings will slightly change when I add this week’s results from Eastbourne and Mallorca, which are not yet in the system.)

What about 26th seed Denis Shapovalov? Shapo has a gElo of 1675.1, roughly equal to unseeded Ugo Humbert’s 1676.1. Would it be better to be Ugo?

Shapovalov got lucky: His top-eight counterpart in the draw is Casper Ruud, a not-grass specialist who is barely rated higher than the Canadian. Shapo’s odds of going further than Ruud into the round of 16 are 25.3%. He has a 10.5% chance of making the quarters and a 3.4% shot at the semis.

Humbert was not so lucky. Like Jarry, he’s in Alcaraz’s section. He has a mere 3.5% shot at the fourth round, 1.1% for the quarters, and 0.4% for the finals. The way the cookie crumbled on draw day, it was much better to be Shapo than Ugo.

One more. Dan Evans is the 27th seed, with a gElo of 1693.1. The closest unseeded player in the draw is Sebastian Ofner, gElo-rated 1688.5. Evans lines up for a third-rounder with 8th-seed Jannik Sinner, who is much better than Ruud despite the number next to his name. Despite a tricky first-rounder with Quentin Halys and Sinner looming in the third, Evans’s chances of making the fourth round are 14.5%, along with 6.8% for the quarters and 3.2% for the semis.

By unseeded standards, Ofner got lucky. He drew almost-seeded Jiri Lehecka to open, but the seeds in his section are #18 Francisco Cerundolo and #16 Tommy Paul. With the benefit of that good fortune, his chances of lasting to the second week are 16.0%, with a 4.1% shot at the quarters and a 1.3% chance of a semi-final berth. By the numbers, I’d take Evans’s position over Ofner’s, though it’s pretty close.

So: three anecdotal comparisons, one saying it is definitely better to be the seed, one saying it’s marginally better, one saying it’s about even.

There’s one obvious counter-example. Tomas Martin Etcheverry, seeded 29th, landed in Novak Djokovic’s section. He has a mere 0.8% chance at the fourth round, 0.2% for the quarters, and everything else rounds down to zero. His own rating is part of the problem: He has little experience on grass.

The closest unseeded player in the draw to Etcheverry’s 1585.5 gElo is Daniel Altmaier at 1587.8. Altmaier ended up in the Sinner/Evans section, with an unseeded first-round opponent. His chances of reaching the fourth round are 4.8%, with a 1.5 chance of the quarter-finals.

So we can say one thing for sure: If you know you’ll be drawn to face Djokovic early, you might want to not do that.

The general solution

These are all anecdotes, and the forecasts are entirely dependent on this year’s actual Wimbledon draw. That doesn’t answer the question in any comprehensive way.

We can get closer to a general solution by running two simulations. First, forecast the 2023 Wimbledon field, with the actual seeds, without considering how the draw actually played out. So Etcheverry might have landed in Ruud’s section, or Mannarino might have drawn Djokovic in the first round.

Next, forecast the 2023 Wimbledon field, but instead of keeping the actual seeds, assign the 25th to 32nd seeds to the next eight players in the rankings. Instead of the 25th seed belonging to Jarry, we give it to Lehecka, and Jarry is unseeded, and so on.

By keeping the players constant and varying the seeds, we can see the effect of the seedings on 16 players: the actual seeds 25-32, and the “next eight” who just missed.

Here are the chances of those 16 men reaching the fourth round in the two scenarios, seeded and unseeded:

Player                       R16 Seed  R16 Un  
Nicolas Jarry                   15.3%   13.1%  
Denis Shapovalov                12.8%   11.0%  
Daniel Evans                    15.0%   12.8%  
Tallon Griekspoor               30.5%   28.1%  
Tomas Martin Etcheverry          6.1%    4.9%  
Nick Kyrgios                    20.6%   18.3%  
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina     12.8%   11.0%  
Ben Shelton                      4.4%    3.5%  
Jiri Lehecka                     9.7%    8.0%  
Matteo Berrettini               33.5%   30.9%  
Ugo Humbert                     13.2%   11.4%  
Andy Murray                     31.9%   29.4%  
Lorenzo Sonego                  19.8%   17.5%  
Miomir Kecmanovic                8.1%    6.5%  
Botic van de Zandschulp         14.0%   11.9%  
Adrian Mannarino                15.7%   13.6%

On average, these players have a 16.5% chance of lasting to the second week if they have a seed, 14.5% otherwise.

The same thing holds if we care more about other achievements, like reaching the third round, the quarter-finals, or the semis:

            R32    R16    QF    SF  
Seeded    40.5%  16.5%  8.4%  3.8%  
Unseeded  28.7%  14.5%  6.9%  3.1%

It’s better to be seeded.

Going wide

This isn’t a truly general solution, because it is based solely on the 2023 Wimbledon men’s field. You might think of this group of players as top-heavy, which would make it more valuable to avoid the top seeds. But while Djokovic and Alcaraz are well ahead of the pack, the top eight as a whole is not overwhelming dominant–just think of Ruud on grass.

We could construct a variety of other draws with different mixes of ability levels. You could imagine a field in which the top eight players were all outstanding and the rest were not. An extreme example like that might change the results. We’ll save that for another day. In the meantime, players: Keep chasing those seeds.

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June 30, 1973: Exit the Captain

Two days before Wimbledon began, 21-year-old Sandy Mayer was still in New Jersey. He reached the finals of the National Collegiate tournament in Princeton, stepping up at the event where, in 1972, he had won the doubles title with Roscoe Tanner. Now he had a chance not only to repeat, but to claim the singles championship–and by so doing, secure team honors for Stanford over a strong challenge from the University of Southern California.

Mayer made it look easy. He breezed past USC’s Raúl Ramírez, 6-3, 6-1, 6-4. He also partnered Jim Delaney to the doubles crown.

Then he got on a plane.

Mayer was the 11th-ranked American, and among the boycott-weakened Wimbledon field of 1973, that made him a marginal contender. He had barely 24 hours to accustom himself to the grass, a tough transition from the en tout cas surface–an ersatz clay not unlike Har-Tru–at the NCAA’s. Fortunately, the draw did him favors. He reached the fourth round by knocking out three straight lucky losers. He lost just one set in the process.

The cakewalk ended in the round of 16, where the collegiate champion lined up against Ilie Năstase. Năstase was the 1972 runner-up, the top seed, and the odds-on favorite to take the title. He had won 53 of his last 54 matches. He was a member of the ATP, the players’ union that organized the Wimbledon walkout. But he was also a captain–nominally, anyway–in the Romanian Army. Orders from Bucharest said he would play. He played.

At his best, Năstase was one of the most gifted players the game has ever seen, a shotmaker who would dig out from impossible positions for the sheer joy of it. Fortunately for Mayer, Ilie on an off-day was decidedly ordinary.

June 30th was one of those days. Tournament organizers expected a blowout, so they put the match on the No. 2 Court. Ilie liked an audience, and the smaller venue was just one of the things working against him. He had stumbled through his first-round match, claiming kidney troubles and skipping a press conference. The ATP boycott had distracted him, as well: He said he had barely thought about tennis for two weeks, even if he did win the Queen’s Club title amid the distraction.

Against Mayer, Năstase “played like an artist whose normal flair was sadly impaired,” according to the Daily Telegraph‘s Lance Tingay. The Romanian lived off his reflexes, but the American was quicker. Mayer–trained literally from the crib by his tennis-coach father–played returns of serve on the rise and kept Năstase off balance. He kicked his own serves wide, taking advantage of the top seed’s deep return position.

Tournament organizers got a brief reprieve when the Romanian, down two sets to love, broke serve to save the third. But the fourth set was back to business. Mayer took it 6-4, breaking in the third game and never looking back.

The NCAA champ had shown signs of brilliance before. He took a set from Stan Smith at the Championships the year before, and he upset Jan Kodeš at the 1972 US Open. But this was something entirely different. Some pundits whispered that Năstase had tanked, that in solidarity with his fellow ATP members, he had lost at the first plausible opportunity. Maybe. Anything was possible where Ilie was concerned.

As for Mayer, he remained an underdog. Kodeš and Jimmy Connors became 7-2 co-favorites, and the Stanford man would take on 8th seed Jürgen Fassbender in the quarters.

He didn’t have to worry about breaking with the union: He was still an amateur. He didn’t know who would get his prize money, except that it wouldn’t be him. At a Wimbledon torn apart by rich men fighting over slices of the pie, the most shocking blow was delivered by an up-and-comer playing for a few bucks a day in expense money.

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Surface Speed Convergence Revisited

For more than a decade, players and pundits have complained that surface speeds are converging. To oversimplify their gripes: Everything is turning into clay. Hard courts have gotten slower, even many of the indoor ones. Grass courts, once a bastion of quick-fire attacking tennis, have slowed down as well.

I’ve attempted to confirm or refute the notion a couple of times. In 2013, I used break rate and ace rate to see whether hard and clay courts were getting closer to each other. The results said no. Many readers complained that I was using the wrong metrics: rally length is a better indicator. I agree, but rally length wasn’t widely available at the time.

In 2016, I looked at rally length for grand slam finals and found some evidence of surface speed convergence. The phenomenon was much clearer in men’s tennis than women’s, a hint that it wasn’t all about the surface, but that tactics had changed and that the mix of players in slam finals skewed the data.

Now, the Match Charting Project contains shot-by-shot logs of more than 12,000 matches. We can always dream of more and better data, but we’re well past the point where we can take a more detailed look at how rally length has changed over the years on different surfaces.

Forecasting rally length

Start with a simple model to forecast rally length for a single match. You don’t need much, just the average rally length for each player, plus the surface. Men who typically play short points have more influence on rally length than those who play long ones. (This is worthy of a blog post of its own–maybe another day.) Call the average rally length of the shorter-point guy X and the average rally length of the longer-point guy Y.

Using data from the last seven-plus seasons, you can predict the rally length of a hard court match as follows:

X + (0.7 * Y) – 2.6

The numbers change a bit depending on gender and time span, but the general idea is always the same. The short-point player usually has about half-again as much influence on rally length than his or her opponent.

For men since 2016, we can get the clay court rally length by adding 0.16 to the result above. For grass courts, subtract 0.45 instead.

For example, take a hypothetical matchup between Carlos Alcaraz and Alexander Bublik. In charted matches, Alcaraz’s average rally length is 4.0 and Bublik’s is 3.2. The formula above predicts the following number of shots per point:

Hard: 3.39
Clay: 3.55
Grass: 2.94

The error bars on the surface adjustments are fairly wide, for all sorts of reasons. Courts are not identical just because their surfaces are given the same names. Other factors, like balls, influence how a match goes on a given day. Players adapt differently to changing surfaces. The usual dose of randomness adds even more variance to rally-length numbers.

Changing coefficients

These surface adjustments aren’t very big. A difference of 0.16 shots per point is barely noticeable, unless you’re keeping score. Given the variation within each surface, it means that rallies would be longer on some hard courts than some clay courts, even for the same pair of players.

That brings us back to the issue of surface speed convergence. 0.16 shots per point is my best attempt at quantifying the difference between hard courts and clay courts now–or, more precisely, for men between 2016 and the present. If surfaces have indeed converged, we would find a more substantial gap in older data.

That’s exactly what we see. I ran the same analysis for three other time periods: 1959-95, 1996-2005, and 2006-2015. The following graph shows the rally-length gap between surfaces for each of the four spans:

For example, in the years up to 1995, a pair of players who averaged 4 shots per point on a hard court would be expected to last 5 shots per point (4 + 1) on clay. They’d tally just 3.25 shots per point (4 – 0.75) on grass.

By the years around the turn of the century, the gap between hard courts and grass courts had narrowed to its present level. But the difference between hard and clay continued to shrink. The current level of 0.16 additional shots per point is only about one-sixth as much as the equivalent in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The graph implies that hard courts are constant over time. That’s just an artifact of how I set up this analysis, and it may not be true. It could be that clay courts have been more consistent, something that my earlier analysis suggested and that many insiders seem to believe. In that case, rather than a downward-sloping clay line and an upward-sloping grass line, the graph would show two upward-sloping lines reflecting longer rallies on non-clay surfaces.

Women, too

The women’s game has evolved somewhat differently than the men’s has, but the trends are broadly similar. Here is the same graph for women’s rally lengths across surfaces:

For the last two decades, there has been essentially no difference in point length between hard courts and clay courts. A gap remains between hard and grass, though like in the men’s game, it is trending slightly downwards.

Why the convergence?

The obvious culprit here is the literal one: the surface. Depending on who you ask, tournament directors have chosen to slow down hard and grass surfaces because fans prefer longer rallies, because the monster servers of the turn of the century were boring, because slow surfaces favored the Big Four, or because they like seeing players puke on court after five hours of grueling tennis.

That’s probably part of it.

I would offer a complementary story. Racket technology and the related development of return skill essentially killed serve-and-volley tennis. Slower surfaces would have aided that process, but they weren’t necessary. In the 1980s, a top player like Ivan Lendl or Mats Wilander would use entirely different tactics depending on the surface, grinding on clay while serve-and-volleying indoors and on grass. Now, a Djokovic-Alcaraz match is roughly the same beast no matter the venue. If Alcaraz serve-and-volleyed on every point, Novak would have a far easier time competing on return points than the opponents of Lendl and Wilander ever did.

My best guess is that rally lengths have converged because of some combination of the two. I believe that conditions (surfaces, balls, etc) are the lesser of the two factors. But I don’t know how we could use the data we have to prove it either way.

In the end, it doesn’t particularly matter why. Much more than in my previous studies, we have enough rally-length data to see how players cope with different surfaces. The evidence is strong that, for whatever reason, hard-court tennis, clay-court tennis, and grass-court tennis are increasingly similar, a trend that began at least 25 to 30 years ago and shows no sign of reversing. Whether or not surfaces have converged, tactics have definitely done so.

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