jsackmann – Page 19 – Heavy Topspin

April 13, 1973: Vilas Stops South Africa

South Africa was a problem. Many world leaders were quick to condemn the racist policies of the apartheid government. Less clear was what exactly to do about it. As always, international sporting events fell in the crosshairs.

Eastern Bloc nations were willing to sacrifice the most. In 1968 Davis Cup play, South Africa advanced to the final of the European Zone when Romania gave them a walkover. (There was no separate Africa zone, and “zoneless” nations were free to choose another region in which to compete.) In 1969, both Poland and Czechoslovakia refused to play them. In 1970, South Africa was banned from the competition altogether.

There was never a consensus to exclude the country, and South Africa returned to competition in 1973. It chose to enter the South American zone, where the political ramifications were likely to be the least. Conveniently enough, the competition wasn’t particularly strong, either. In March, South Africa brushed aside Uruguay while Argentina defeated Brazil, setting up a zonal semi-final between the two, set to be hosted in Argentina.

The Argentines found themselves in a sticky situation. The federation had anticipated no problems; golf and rugby teams from South Africa had visited in the previous two years. But Davis Cup was one of the biggest events on the global sporting calendar, and the public outcry couldn’t be ignored. If the tie were played in Argentina, there would be protests, possibly substantial ones. On the other hand, it was unthinkable to forfeit the round, as the Eastern Europeans had done. Thanks in large part to charismatic 20-year-old star Guillermo Vilas, the tennis boom had reached Argentina. If they could get past the South Africans, Argentina would face regional rival Chile in the zonal final and push the sport’s popularity to even higher peaks.

It’s difficult to overstate just how much the South African issue roiled international sports. Arguably, it was an even more prominent, divisive issue than the fate of Russian and Belarussian athletes in 2023. The same week that Argentina’s tennis federation made its final preparations, New Zealand Prime Minister Norman Kirk settled a long-standing dispute by barring a visit from the South African rugby team. “Arguments over the tour,” wrote the New York Times, “have continued more than two years, spilling over party and racial boundaries and far eclipsing such international issues as the Vietnam War.”

Back in Argentina, the federation, pressured by the country’s Foreign Ministry, settled on a compromise. The tie would be held in Montevideo, just across the border in Uruguay. And to keep publicity down even further, the dates would be moved up by a month, from mid-May to mid-April. Once again, politics served as a cover for a bit of gamesmanship. Fiddling with the dates would keep South African standouts Cliff Drysdale, Bob Hewitt, and Frew McMillan on the sidelines. All three were committed to the World Championship Tennis circuit and couldn’t accommodate the revised schedule.

*The 1972 Davis Cup draw, with South Africa nowhere to be seen*

On April 13th, at the Carrasco Lawn Tennis Club, the sides could finally get down to business. With the WCT stars out of commission, the inexperienced Argentinian squad faced an even greener South African squad. In the first rubber, Argentina’s Julián Ganzábal held off doubles specialist Pat Cramer 6-2, 6-0, 3-6, 6-0. In the second, Vilas shut down 18-year-old Bernard Mitton in straight sets.

Vilas was far from the superstar he would later become, but the left-hander’s potential was becoming clear. He had reached finals in Cincinnati and Buenos Aires the previous year, and the Mitton match was his fifth straight victory of Argentina’s 1973 Davis Cup campaign. On the slow clay of the Carrasco Club, he may well have beaten Drysdale or McMillan, too.

But he didn’t have to. After the South Africans won the doubles on day two–the country was second only to Australia in its ability to churn out top-tier doubles players–Vilas made quick work of another teenager, Deon Joubert. Argentina’s top player lost just five games in three sets.

The international tennis community breathed a collective sigh of relief. Fractures were everywhere: The same day that the South Africans were eliminated, a spokesman for the International Lawn Tennis Federation threatened to suspend the women of the Virginia Slims tour if they continued to defy their national federations. Had Argentina lost, the Marxist government in Chile may well have forced its side to forfeit the zonal final. South Africa would have advanced to a bigger stage and the controversy would have multiplied.

Vilas hardly solved the South Africa problem, but he did punt it one year down the road. In the political and bureaucratic mess that was tennis in 1973, that counted as a major victory.

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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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April 12, 1973: Riggs Loses to an Old Man

*Ilie Năstase* *at the Palm Beach Masters doubles tournament*

In April 1973, Bobby Riggs was 55 years old. That put him in just the right demographic to enter the Palm Beach Masters. The $25,000 event was billed as the richest doubles tournament ever. It featured a mix of past and present greats, including Ilie Năstase, Jimmy Connors, and several of Riggs’s contemporaries: Don Budge, Richard González, and Pancho Segura.

The talk of the tournament, of course, was Bobby’s upcoming match with Margaret Court, barely a month away. Most of the men playing in Palm Beach were ready to bet on Riggs. The 55-year-old hustler told anyone who would listen that he was in impeccable shape, practicing every day, jogging, and watching his diet.

The tournament kicked off on April 12th. Budge complained that the organizers didn’t pair up players fairly. Riggs–probably the fittest of the older men–was teamed with 27-year-old Australian Tony Roche, who already had ten doubles majors to his name. Their first-round opponents were Sidney Wood and Hugh Curry: a limping 61-year-old businessman and a local club pro, respectively.

What should have been a rout turned into a farce. Wood, who won the 1931 Wimbledon title on a walkover, always seemed to be in the right place. The grandfather of three volleyed brilliantly and fought through leg cramps that slowed him down for much of the match. He hadn’t played a set in eight months, but on the fifth match point, he and Curry beat Riggs and Roche, 1-6, 6-3, 6-4.

“I’m just glad the sun started to go down,” said Wood, “or I wouldn’t have made it.”

On national television a few days later, Năstase and Vic Seixas beat González and Clark Graebner for the title. It clearly wasn’t how the tournament was supposed to end. Organizers scrambled to put Riggs on the final-day schedule. Bobby was to team with Frank Parker in a “Century Championship” between doubles teams with a combined age of at least 100 years, and he would play singles against Curry in a so-called “Bobby Riggs Hustle Match.”

Riggs’s fame, not to mention his reputation, preceded the Battle of the Sexes.

As for Sidney Wood, his stay in Palm Beach was a short one. He lost in the second round and went back to New York City, where he ran a business that built tennis courts. The 1970s tennis boom treated him well: His firm installed 500 new courts in 1973 alone. Wood also invented the synthetic Supreme Court surface, which the World Championship Tennis circuit used for indoor events that year.

Despite the upset in Florida, Wood continued to back his fellow veteran. “Riggs has been losing to a lot of fellows lately, which surprises me,” he told a reporter in the run-up to the Court match. “I don’t know how his legs are, but if he’s fit, I favor him.”

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April 11, 1973: Return of the King

No one could begrudge Billie Jean King a rest. She played 127 matches in 1971 and 103 more in 1972, winning 27 singles titles in that two-year span. She entered the doubles every week, and she was the face of the budding Virginia Slims tour, besides.

King wasn’t the sort to take a personal day, or even sit out an event on a doctor’s recommendation. But in March 1973, after a three-set final against Margaret Court in Chicago, a stomach injury knocked her out of competition. She could barely serve for a month and the Slims circuit was forced to proceed without her. Court was both beneficiary and victim. The Australian continued to dominate in Billie Jean’s absence. But as the biggest star in the draw, she was also called upon to take over King’s media duties, a full-time job for a lesser woman.

Tournament promoters coast to coast breathed a sigh of relief on April 11th, when Billie Jean returned to action at the Boston Marina Harbor, brushing aside American veteran Farel Footman. King felt like she was “starting on the circuit all over again,” but after dropping the first two games to Footman, she lost only two more for a 6-3, 6-1 victory. Her serve was surprisingly steady for a stroke she had resumed practicing only a few days earlier.

For the famously energetic serve-and-volleyer, one month on the sidelines was enough. “The first week, while difficult to coordinate,” she told Boston Globe columnist Peter Gammons, “is also easier because one is so enthusiastic.” (Gammons is better known as a baseball writer. True to form, he made sure to ask Billie Jean about her younger brother, San Francisco Giants pitcher Randy Moffitt.)

Still, the 29-year-old King recognized that another 100-match season could do more harm than good. “In a way, being off the tour for awhile may have been beneficial,” she said after her first-round victory. “I’m usually pooped by October, and the rest could help.”

Billie Jean would struggle to stay healthy throughout the season, playing barely 70 singles matches. But when she was able to take the court, she remained one of the most fearsome women on the circuit. And when the world tuned in to watch her in late September, she would prove to have plenty left in the tank.

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April 8, 1973: 78-2

*Margaret Court (right), with Max-Pax Coffee Classic runner-up Kerry Harris*

The Philadelphia Daily News called Margaret Court “the siege-gun of women’s tennis.” It was a useful way to visualize the the Australian’s attack, but most siege victims lasted far longer than Court’s opponents ever did.

On April 8, 1973, Court secured the title at Philadelphia’s Max-Pax Coffee Tennis Classic, the first professional women’s tennis tournament ever held in Philly. The feel-good story of the week was Kerry Harris, a 23-year-old Aussie who came through qualifying to reach the final. No woman had ever done that on the Virginia Slims tour, and Margaret ensured that she went no further.

The final lasted all of 38 minutes. Harris won the fourth game, and that was it. The tournament experimented with no-ad scoring, which might have shaved a couple of minutes off of the championship match, but let’s be honest: Kerry didn’t make it to deuce very often.

Yes, it was brutal. “At your average execution,” wrote Tom Cushman of the Daily News, “they at least blindfold the victim.” At the same time, it was typical. Court won her first-round match in 41 minutes; her second-rounder against Val Ziegenfuss took just 32. After that match, Ziegenfuss spotted Margaret’s husband Barry and teased that he wasn’t doing his job. Court had too much energy.

The Philly champ was unusual in that her family traveled with her; even more so that the entourage included her infant son, Danny. She had stepped away from the tour after discovering she was pregnant in the summer of 1971. She returned a year later and won a title as a mother on her first try, beating Evonne Goolagong in Cincinnati. She finished 1972 with an Australian Open crown and a 29-match winning streak.

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The Court family in March 1973

The rest of the 1973 Virginia Slims circuit didn’t stand a chance. The Max-Pax was Margaret’s tenth event on the tour. She won eight of them. The dismantling of Harris was her 78th victory in 80 matches. She was as strong as ever–Rosie Casals dubbed her “The Arm,” for the oversized limb that did so much damage–and she somehow came back from childbirth lighter and faster than before. Out of ideas, her opponents were reduced to joking about kidnapping Danny to distract her.

The danger of Court’s dominance was that it could verge on the boring. Billie Jean King was injured, so Margaret had little competition among the Slims group. Women pros were split into two factions; Goolagong and Chris Evert headlined the rival USLTA circuit, and functionaries threatened to keep the “semi-outlaw” Slims players out of the grand slams, too. Political maneuvering made for better stories than Margaret’s perfunctory victories.

Another subplot loomed over the Australian’s season, too. She had accepted a challenge from Bobby Riggs to play an exhibition match in Ramona, California, on Mother’s Day, now barely a month away. Neil Amdur of the New York Times reminded his readers of that date on the Philadelphia champ’s calendar. Court was more than just a slugger, Amdur wrote. She “also is a thinker, which some people seem to be forgetting as they forecast doom for her in the much-publicized May 13 match.”

Margaret’s mental strength has always been a subject of debate, and many contemporary pundits were not as kind as Amdur. Would Riggs, the puff-balling veteran, expose her tendency to choke? At the very least, the Mother’s Day clash promised something that the Slims tournaments rarely delivered: a Court match without the certainty of a lopsided victory.

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Elsewhere this week:

Stan Smith won his third consecutive tournament as his half of the World Championship Tennis troupe moved to Europe. In Munich, he straight-setted Cliff Richey in the final. The victory moved him ahead of Rod Laver in the WCT point standings.
The other WCT event of the week, in Houston, gave 38-year-old Ken Rosewall his first title of the year. He avenged his Vancouver loss to Jan Kodeš in the semi-finals, then defeated Fred Stolle for the championship.
The European clay circuit also got underway in Barcelona. Ilie Năstase collected the trophy with a final-round win over Adriano Panatta, who knocked out 16-year-old Björn Borg in the third round.
Chris Evert cruised to another title on the USLTA circuit, picking up a $5,000 check in Sarasota by brushing aside Evonne Goolagong. She lost just five games. Martina Navratilova made her first appearance in a stateside title match, partnering countrywoman Marie Neumannová to a runner-up finish in the doubles.

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April 6, 1973: The Designated Hitter

Many major sports have no compunctions about changing the rules on a nearly constant basis. Too much scoring? Give the defense more freedom. Too little scoring? Unleash the offense. Games too long, or too boring? Stick a clock on the court and force teams to maintain a quicker pace of play.

The two exceptions are baseball and tennis. Both games have been notoriously, persistently reluctant to change in their 150-or-so years as spectator sports. Occasionally, though, circumstances converge to make change possible.

In the early 1970s, a lot of circumstances converged. New leagues sprouted, competition flourished like never before, and–most of all–television forced each sport’s leadership to consider exactly what its product was, and what it should look like.

Baseball’s American League responded to a spate of low scoring seasons and weak attendance by introducing the designated hitter rule. The National League had more history and more stars, but beginning in 1973, the American League–thanks to its willingness to experiment–added more offense. By the end of the decade, it had closed much of the attendance gap.

New York Yankee Ron Blomberg became baseball’s first designated hitter on April 6, 1973. The bat he used for his first time at the plate was sent to the Hall of Fame, even though it barely left his shoulder. In that first appearance of a designated hitter, Blomberg came up with the bases loaded and walked.

Matty Alou, the Yankees veteran who scored on the play, cracked: “See, it’s added offense to the game already.”

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What strikes me about the designated hitter rule is how closely it parallels the adoption of the tiebreak. I’ve already written a few times about the tiebreak in this series about 1973. The now-familiar method of ending sets was still new, and it was still weird.

“Those tie-breakers are such bullshit,” said Raymond Moore after a win in Vancouver in March. “None of the players know how to play them yet.”

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John Newcombe (left) and Stan Smith were considered in 1973 to be among the best tiebreak players in the game. The secret, clearly, was in the mustache.

Some players didn’t like it, but the sport needed to evolve. Jimmy Van Alen had pushed for tie-breaks as part of his “Simplified Scoring System” since the 1950s. We tend to think of long sets as epic, memorable moments. Not so in those days: The typical 12-10 set consisted of two guys who couldn’t return serve for 75 minutes. It wasn’t much fun to watch, and it would never fit into a two-hour slot on network television.

So, nearly a century after competitive tennis began, the sport finally embraced a new idea. The US Open adopted Van Alen’s nine-point “sudden death” tiebreak in 1970, and Wimbledon began playing breakers at 8-all in 1971. World Team Tennis would experiment even further beginning in 1974. While tennis–like designated-hitter baseball–remained easily recognizable, the new rule was a belated acknowledgement that even the most hidebound sports need to change with the times.

For nearly a half-century, purists in both baseball and tennis were left with something to cling to. Pitchers batted for themselves in National League games until 2021, and a first-round match at that year’s French Open ran to 10-8 in the fifth. But the traditionalists could hold out no longer. The designated hitter is now universal in American baseball. Both the grand slams and the Davis Cup have adopted rules to decide every deadlocked set with a tiebreak. The rule changes that represented such a shift 50 years ago finally won the day.

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April 4, 1973: Arthur Ashe, Acing Alone

The knock on Arthur Ashe was always that he was erratic. At his best, he made flashy shots that no one else would even attempt. At his worst, those same shots would go wild, one after another. Early in his career, he lost a lot of matches when his focus betrayed him and he couldn’t recover in time.

Even at his most uneven, though, Ashe could usually hang in there. He owned a big serve, perhaps the most potent first strike on tour. When other shots betrayed him, he could reel off one ace after another and keep things close. Arthur won the 1968 US Open final on the back of a 14-12 first set. In a Davis Cup match a few weeks before that against Manolo Santana, two sets reached 11-all.

Arthur Ashe was not responsible for the introduction of the tiebreak, but he certainly played some sets that made fans wish for a quicker way of wrapping things up.

On April 4, 1973, Ashe met 21-year-old Roscoe Tanner in the second round of the World Championship Tennis event in Houston. Tanner was another cannonballer, the sort of opponent who would have guaranteed a marathon set or two against Ashe under traditional rules. But the WCT tour was all-in on the tiebreak.

In their best-of-three match, Ashe and Tanner didn’t play one tiebreak… they didn’t play two tiebreaks… they played three tiebreaks. Arthur earned a 5-2 lead in the first-set breaker, but Tanner charged back and took over, 10-8. The second set didn’t feature the same self-assured serving, and both men broke three times. But the end result was nearly the same. They reached a tiebreak, which Ashe won 7-2. The American pair deadlocked another 12 games before Ashe clinched his place in the quarter-finals with another 7-2 decision.

As far as I know, nobody counted aces. Safe to say there were a lot.

The oddest thing about the match, however, wasn’t the slim margin of victory. It was the crowd. Every single face in the gallery was a member at the River Oaks Country Club, the tournament venue.

*Barry MacKay at the River Oaks event in 1959*

River Oaks had staged an event since 1931, when Ellsworth Vines won the inaugural title. It consistently attracted top American talent: Between 1931 and the end of the amateur era, eleven of the men in my Tennis 128 hoisted the trophy. Bobby Riggs won it in 1940. Rod Laver beat Roy Emerson for the title in both 1961 and 1962, and Laver came back as a pro to hold off Ken Rosewall in the 1972 final. The arrival of world-class tennis players was a highlight of the Houston social calendar, an annual tradition that survived into the Open era.

But in 1973, a change in the tax code prevented the non-profit River Oaks club from charging the public for admission. The club failed to find a workaround, funded the event itself, and held the matches behind closed doors.

The players, understandably, didn’t like it. The tournament had long boasted the exclusive sobriquet of the River Oaks Invitational, but times had changed. This was the era of Open tennis, and that applied to fans as well. Ashe, who served as a kind of elder statesman among the pros through his role in the burgeoning players’ union, was the most outspoken of the group. “I don’t think the W.C.T. will play here [again],” he told reporters. “They’d be nuts if they did. They aren’t in the business of promoting closed tournaments.”

Ashe didn’t mention another offense, though many newspapers did. River Oaks was exclusionary on a full-time basis: The club had no Black or Jewish members. Arthur, however, picked his spots. He was more focused off the court than he was on it. In 1973, he fought harder for his fellow players than he did for racial justice. That would change over time, a shift accelerated by his November trip to apartheid South Africa.

Back in Houston, the closed doors of 1973 proved to be nothing more than a blip. River Oaks sorted out their tax issues and the public was welcome when the WCT troupe came through in 1974. In fact, they couldn’t have opened their doors any wider. When Laver returned and defeated Björn Borg in the final, he did so on national television.

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April 1, 1973: Kerry Melville, Finally

*Kerry Melville at the 1973 Virginia Slims Conquistadores of Tucson*

There wasn’t much room at the top of the Virginia Slims circuit. Kerry Melville could have told you all about that.

One knock on women’s tennis was a supposed lack of depth. There were undeniable stars–Margaret Court, Billie Jean King, Evonne Goolagong–and a few more credible contenders, like Virginia Wade, Rosie Casals, and now Chris Evert. That coterie hogged the limelight; everyone else merely crossed their fingers when each week’s draw came out and hoped they’d find a path to the quarters. Lance Tingay ranked Melville fifth at the end of the 1972 campaign, but no one figured she was going to crack the inner circle.

The Australian earned her 1972 ranking by playing some of the best tennis of her career, picking up tournament victories on two continents with wins over Wade and Casals. She reached the final of the US Open, where she beat Evert before falling to King. Her runner-up status became a full-blown jinx in early 1973. She lost four finals in a seven-week span, every one of them to Court. Then she missed two weeks with a torn calf muscle.

Things finally began to go Melville’s way in Tucson, the last week of March. The winter circuit was mostly played indoors, but despite unusually chilly, damp weather, the event in Arizona was held in the open air. Other players, including Casals, griped about the inconsistent conditions, but Melville (known as Kerry Reid after her 1975 marriage) preferred her tennis without a roof.

The second round brought the shock of the tournament. Court, who had lost just one match in nine 1973 tournaments, fell to an unheralded South African named Laura Rossouw. The wind and cold that affected Court’s concentration didn’t appear to trouble the second-seeded Melville: Kerry breezed through three rounds with the loss of only 13 games. Her semi was just as easy: Casals delivered “one service fault after another” and the Australian beat her, 6-1, 6-2.

The Tucson final, on April 1st, was no laughing matter. Nancy Gunter (formerly Nancy Richey) was one of the hardest hitters on tour. Both women aimed for the baseline and stripped any advantage from the server: No one held until the fifth game of the match. Gunter’s weaponry kept misfiring, and what could have been a lengthy war of attrition ended as a brisk, 6-3, 6-4 victory for the Australian.

Skeptics had reason to discount Melville’s title: King was out with a stomach injury, and Court lost early. But with a $6,000 winner’s check in her pocket, Kerry had an answer ready: “I suppose there will be people like that, but it still goes up on the board, doesn’t it?”

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Elsewhere this week:

In St. Louis, Stan Smith beat Rod Laver for the second straight week. This time it took three sets, but he finished the job with a break to love for a 6-4, 3-6, 6-4 victory.
At the Lady Gotham Classic in New York, Chris Evert cruised to a 47-minute victory over Katja Ebbinghaus of West Germany. Looking on was Vice President Spiro Agnew, one of 2,401 spectators at Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum. The $8,000 first prize increased Chrissie’s haul to $26,350 after just one month as a pro.
Pakistan clinched its Davis Cup tie after squeaking through a five-set doubles rubber against South Vietnam. The victory earned them in a place in the Eastern Zone semi-finals against India, with the winner advancing to a likely clash with Australia.
Bobby Riggs told a reporter that women players shouldn’t get as much money as men, “because they’re not as good.” He also said that a no top woman had had a chance against a top man since Maureen Connolly in the 1950s.

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March 31, 1973: Rosewall’s Near Miss

In March 1973, Ken Rosewall was 36 years old. He often played like a young man, but there were two decades of top-level tennis in his legs. He bristled against the requirement that players under contract to World Championship Tennis show up for every tournament, week-in, week-out. He had won the WCT circuit finals in both 1971 and 1972, defeating his friend and rival Rod Laver each time. But in 1973, it wasn’t clear if he’d even qualify for the event.

He arrived at the event in Vancouver, British Columbia at the end of March on a meaningless winning streak: He had won the tournament in 1971 but skipped it in ’72. He also showed up cranky. The previous week, organizers in Washington DC had convinced him and Arthur Ashe to try an experiment in their semi-final match. The crowd would be allowed make as much noise as it wanted, whenever it wanted–complete with an announcer to egg them on. Ashe won the match: It didn’t hurt that the Virginia native was essentially playing in front of a home crowd. Rosewall was diplomatic but direct: “It didn’t do anything to help that particular tourney or that match.”

Rosewall–the diminutive “doomsday stroking machine”–was looking for his first title since December and his first championship on the WCT circuit since beating Laver the previous May. There were no experiments in Vancouver, and only a few hundred fans showed up early in the week, anyway. Back in the quiet, Rosewall cruised though the early rounds. He needed only 40 minutes to beat Graham Stilwell and 50 to beat Tom Okker. In the quarters, Raymond Moore was a bit tougher, but the Aussie vet still lost only six games.* Onlookers knew that Rosewall was rounding into form when his backhand lobs started landing inches inside the baseline.

* Before Rosewall played Okker, Moore was asked which opponent he’d rather face. “Sure, I’ve got a preference. I don’t want to play either of them.”

Waiting in the semi-finals was Jan Kodeš, a 27-year-old Czechoslovakian who had never beaten Rosewall in three tries. Yet the surface favored the European. The WCT circuit didn’t concern itself with consistency: Vancouver was the third in a five-tournament string in which the players changed surface every week. Here, they played indoors at the Agrodome, but on a slow court that reminded Kodeš of European clay.

Then again, Rosewall had won the French Open–twice.

*This ad did not entice quite as many tennis fanatics as the tournament organizers hoped it would.*

Kodeš predicted an extended baseline battle, and the contest on March 31st was exactly that. The two men broke serve 15 times, and the Czech failed to win a single service game in the second set. Yet the underdog survived a first-set tiebreak and bounced back to break in the 8th game of the third set to secure a 7-6, 2-6, 6-3 victory.

Newspapers hailed it as the match of the tournament, and it was certainly that for Kodeš. The following day, the Eastern European found himself against the crowd favorite, Seattle native Tom Gorman, who had beaten Ashe in the early going. Kodeš lost in three, and he said it felt like he was playing in Seattle–even without the authorized crowd noise of the previous week’s event.

Neither Rosewall nor Kodeš left Vancouver with the $10,000 winner’s check, but both men had proved something, if only to themselves. The aging Australian would soon resume his winning ways, and in a few months, the little-known Czechoslovakian would win the biggest title of them all.

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What If Jannik Sinner Made More First Serves?

Jim Courier thinks he should:

"He's added the speed to the serve, what he needs to now incorporate is more consistency," says Jim Courier of Jannik Sinner, adding that at his height he should be around 65 percent first serve pct.

"He just needs time in the cockpit, he just needs hours," adds Courier.
— Chris Oddo (@TheFanChild) March 29, 2023

Among the current top 50, there’s actually a negative correlation between height and first-serve percentage–that is, taller guys make slightly fewer first serves, all else equal–but that doesn’t directly contradict what Courier said. There’s a whole lot that we could investigate in that couple of lines, but let’s stick with the question in the headline.

In the 52 weeks going into the current Miami event, Jannik Sinner made 57.3% of his first serves. That’s the lowest rate of the current top 50, and well below the average of 63%. When he makes his first serve, he wins 74.7% of points–slightly better than average–and on second-serve points, he wins 54.7%, which ranks 11th among the top 50. Altogether, he’s winning 66.2% of service points, again a little bit above top-50 average.

Courier presumably meant that Sinner’s first serve needs to be more reliable, not that he should take something off of it. In the hypothetical, then, he’ll continue to win roughly 75% of first-serve points. He’ll just have more of them.

If Sinner made 65% of his first serves instead of 57.3%, and he continued to win first and second serve points at the same rate, he’d improve his overall winning percentage on service points from 66.2% to 67.7%. That’s equivalent to increasing his hold percentage from 84.9% to 87.1%. (He’s currently holding 83.9% of the time, so he might be a bit unlucky.)

One and a half percentage points–how much does that really matter?

For starters, it would improve his position on the top-50 leaderboard from 24th to 11th. Now, he’s winning service points like Frances Tiafoe and Roberto Bautista Agut. Improved by 1.5%, he’d be in another league entirely, equal to Felix Auger-Aliassime and Taylor Fritz.

Another way of looking at it is within my framework of converting points to ranking places. As a rough rule of thumb, winning one additional point per thousand translates into a improvement of one place on the ranking table. That relationship doesn’t hold at the very top of the rankings, where players are not so tightly packed. But when I first introduced the framework in 2017, the relationship among players ranked 2nd to 10th was that–again, approximately–two points per thousand translated into one place in the rankings.

Back to Sinner. If he won 1.5% more service points, that’s a 0.75% increase overall. (We’re assuming his return game is unchanged.) Call it 0.8%, or eight points per thousand. According to the top-ten version of my rule, that’s worth four spots in the computer rankings.

Sinner is currently ranked 11th on the ATP computer, and after advancing to the Miami semi-finals yesterday, he ranks 9th on the live table. He could head back to Europe as high as 6th if he wins the title. From any one of those positions, a four-place jump would be significant.

Yet the Italian might be better even than that. My Elo ratings place him 4th, behind only Novak Djokovic, Carlos Alcaraz, and Daniil Medvedev. There’s no reliable relationship between points per thousand and ranking places at the very top of the table, but Elo hints at what an elite player Sinner already is. Tack on seven or eight more points per thousand and he might not be the number one player in the world, but he’s right there in the mix.

That is, at least as long as no one else improves even faster. Sinner isn’t alone in his 66.2% rate of service points won. Alcaraz entered Miami with exactly the same number. Sinner has more room to improve his first serve percentage than anyone else at the top of the game, but his rivals will hardly stand around and watch while he does.

March 29, 1973: The Coming Russians

*Olga Morozova (left) and Marina Kroschina*

Nine countries were represented in the 16-player field of the Lady Gotham Classic, but only one of those nations made news for its inclusion. Everyone wanted to get a look at 24-year-old Olga Morozova, the first-ever top-tenner from the Soviet Union. The New York draw was particularly tantalizing: Morozova would open against her 19-year-old traveling companion Marina Kroschina. Kroschina qualified for the event by beating the previous week’s surprise star, Marita Redondo.

It was hardly the first meeting between the two women. Morozova and Kroschina had already played seven times, including once just a few days earlier, for a place in the Akron final. (Morozova won, then fell victim to Chris Evert.) They had even faced off before in the New York metro area. Both women had made the trip to the 1972 US Open, and they met in the final of a small warm-up event in New Jersey. The older woman won that one, 6-2, 6-7, 7-5, and she led the overall series, six matches to one.

Neither that matchup nor the Soviet trip to Forest Hills satisfied American interest in the visitors. Morozova was good for a feature story at every stop on the USLTA circuit. In Akron, she told a reporter that she missed her engineering-student husband back in Moscow, she liked Boston, she didn’t care for New York, she wished she had more time to see the sights of Akron, and she loved Coca-Cola. “It is the real thing,” she said.

Nor was the larger stage of New York City too big for her. Just a few days earlier, gold-medal-winning gymnast Olga Korbut had wowed the gallery at Madison Square Garden. With a temporary tennis court installed, she would compete at the same venue. Alas, there was nothing Korbut-like about her performance on the day.

Perhaps Olga’s homesickness explained her let-down on March 29th at the Lady Gotham. Kroschina, the 1971 Wimbledon girls’ champion, took advantage of the slow, high-bouncing surface at the Garden to negate her friend’s serve-and-volley game, winning 6-4, 4-6, 6-4.

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Morozova on a happier day, at Wimbledon in 1974

Both women were disappointed that the draw had paired them up so early. A tournament official told the New York Times that it was an “oversight.” More likely–I hope–it was just bad luck. Morozova was the third seed, Kroschina was a qualifier; there was a one-in-twelve chance that a random draw would generate an all-Soviet first-rounder. At least they couldn’t complain about lost prize money. Every penny they earned went back to their federation.

Kroschina never lived up to her promise. When she wasn’t traveling for tennis, she went to school to become a sportswriter, and she ultimately spent more of her life as a journalist than she did as a competitive athlete. Morozova, on the other hand, showed the way for later generations of Russian tennis standouts. She reached the final at both Roland Garros and Wimbledon in 1974, and partnering Evert in Paris, she won the Soviet Union’s first grand slam title.

Olga was optimistic about US-Soviet relations: “I think in the future our two countries will become very good friends. I hope.” The USSR didn’t last long enough to realize her forecast. But her goals for Russian tennis were overwhelmingly satisfied. A half-century later, all-Russian first-round meetings are no longer news. Morozova’s countrywomen are so numerous on tour that it wouldn’t even occur to them to complain.

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