Exhibitions – Heavy Topspin

The Tensions of Exhibition Tennis

*The 2019 Laver Cup. Credit: Sportsfan77777*

2024 was a good year for exhibition tennis. The Saudi-banked Six Kings Slam set a new standard for prize money. Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz took the long tradition of Las Vegas tennis challenges to Netflix. The Ultimate Tennis Showdown made three glitzy stops. Novak Djokovic helped Argentina celebrate Juan Martin del Potro. Even Scandinavia got involved, with a home-and-home duel showcasing Casper Ruud and Holger Rune.

The tennis season is long. Put enough money on the table, though, and it can always get longer.

Exhibitions tend to highlight the gaps between the game’s haves and have-nots. Even the official tours are headed in that direction. The ATP and WTA aim to trim the number of small events to better focus attention on longer, 1000-level tournaments. Rumors persist of a Premier League-style “super tour” that would go even further.

It’s a delicate balance. You can’t hold exhibitions without bona fide stars. You can’t have stars without universally recognized events like Wimbledon. And you can’t have Wimbledon without a thriving ecosystem of tournaments that both identify contenders and allow future champions to develop. The Six Kings Slam was about as far as you could possibly get from an ATP 250 in Santiago, but one relies–however indirectly–on the other.

These tensions are not new. There has always been a scarcity of megastars whose celebrity transcended a couple dozen standard tour stops. Though the ultra-bankable Big Four is fading into history, other trends–exemplified by Saudi money and Netflix-style starmaking–will continue to raise the incentives for exhibition-style tennis. It’s too early to tell whether things will get better or worse, but they’ll almost certainly get different.

How did we get here?

For nearly as long as there have been tennis champions, there have been promoters trying to put them in front of more fans for more money. In 1926, Suzanne Lenglen, the greatest woman player up to that time, became the first superstar to go pro. Her 40-stop series was more like a modern concert tour than anything in the tennis world. She made $100,000 for three months’ work, the equivalent of nearly $2 million today.

Lenglen soon hung up her racket, but the template had been proven. For the final four decades of the amateur era, a rotating cast of standout players from Bill Tilden to Rod Laver slogged through grueling barnstorming tours. Apart from occasional appearances in New York, London, and Australia, it wasn’t glamorous. But it was a more reliable living than taking under-the-table “expense money” from organizers of amateur events.

It didn’t take long before the business model became clear. A pro tour could support four athletes: Two big names (preferably rivals), plus two more who could play a warm-up match, then later join their colleagues for doubles. The tour did best when one of the headliners was a recent Wimbledon champion. It wasn’t unusual for the newly-minted titlist at the All-England Club to sign a contract within days of collecting his trophy.

Attempts to broaden the base of professional tennis usually failed–or, at least, didn’t become any more than another quickie tour stop. To fill out a proper tournament field, promoters had to invite retired champions and teaching pros. The would-be pro “majors” had an appeal not unlike a senior tour event, giving fans a chance to see, say, Don Budge far past his prime.

Amateur officials, as you might expect, detested this state of affairs. Wimbledon was turned into a glorified qualifying tournament, the winner to receive a six-figure check to never appear at SW19 again. While they could have stopped the exodus by offering prize money, it’s easy to sympathize. The pro tour was a parasite, trading on the fame of stars it did nothing to create.

Won’t get fooled again

The Open era kicked off in 1968, quickly consigning amateur tournaments to also-ran status. A few players began to get rich, and it was possible to make a living as a second-tier tour regular. Within a decade, though, exhibition tennis threatened the burgeoning pro circuit.

The tennis boom of the 1970s created vast numbers of fans, and with the help of television, the era’s stars became more famous than ever before. The 1973 Battle of the Sexes was not just a turning point for women in sport. It proved the potential of a one-off spectacle. Why bother with a whole tournament when you could pit Jimmy Connors against Rod Laver at Caesar’s Palace?

In the early 70s, there wasn’t much tension between the tours and exhibitions, because the unified tours didn’t exist. A national federation might gripe about a big name skipping a circuit stop in favor of a bigger payday elsewhere, but federations were losing their grip on the sport. There was little they could do about it.

Soon, though, battle lines formed. World Team Tennis muscled their way onto the stage in 1974, offering players guaranteed contracts to play up to 60 dates from May to September. WTT was expansive enough to accommodate lesser names alongside the box office draws, but the very nature of the league made the pecking order clear. Superstars demanded six-figure deals and often forced trades so that they could play for a chosen franchise. WTT could be nearly as grueling as the old pro tours, but it beat the procession of smaller events between Wimbledon and the US Open.

By the end of the decade, the ATP and WTA had organized themselves into circuits that resemble what we have today. Stars like Chris Evert and Bjorn Borg were raking in prize money. The problem was, on the exhibition market, they were worth even more. Borg, in particular, would cash in at any opportunity, sometimes playing dozens of exhibition matches in a single season.

The men’s tour eventually responded by requiring that players enter a minimum number of sanctioned events each year, one factor in Borg’s early retirement at the age of 26. But most players were willing to compromise, entering a couple dozen official tournaments, then jetting from Europe to Japan and back to pad their bank accounts.

The compromise

Six Kings aside, we’re still far from the peak era of exhibition tennis, when Borg and Ivan Lendl played one-nighters for well-heeled fans around the globe. The ATP has steadily tweaked its rules–no exhibitions that clash with bigger tour events, for instance–while upping its own prize money.

The tours have also indirectly limited exhibitions by their own natural growth. One of the biggest exho markets in the 70s and 80s was Japan, where an increasingly rich population wanted a taste of what Westerners could enjoy at home. As the tours gave more prominence to sanctioned tournaments in Tokyo, Osaka, and elsewhere, there was less demand for one-off player appearances.

That, in short(?), is how we got here. Stars are able to play non-tour events, but only sometimes. They hardly need to, since an athlete with any kind of box office value is making seven figures in prize money, not to mention endorsements. Most localities that can support a top-tier event have got one, within the framework of the official tours.

However, it wouldn’t take much to render this equilibrium unstable.

Threat models

The biggest immediate danger to the existing structure of pro tennis is Saudi money. The nation’s Public Investment Fund basically blew up golf, poaching stars for a rival tour and leaving the sport fractured.

Fortunately, tennis officials were able to watch and learn. The Saudis have been welcomed as partners, hosting the WTA Finals and the ATP NextGen Finals, as well as sponsoring both tours’ ranking systems. The Six Kings Slam doesn’t seem like so much of a threat in the context of so much collaboration.

If the Saudis decide to make a bigger move, even that will likely be in partnership with the majors–the so-called “super tour” proposal. The resulting circuit would probably have fewer, higher-paying tournaments. By extension, it would support a smaller group of players. Breaking onto the tour would be more lucrative than ever, but many currently-fringe competitors would be stuck on an expanded version of the Challenger tour.

Maybe a super tour is imminent. I have no idea. It would certainly change the face of the sport, though not beyond recognition.

The bigger threat, as I see it, is in the longer term. Sports–not just tennis–have learned to promote their biggest stars, earlier and more persistently than ever before. Think of all the “NextGen” hype tennis fans have been subjected to for more than a decade now, since Grigor Dimitrov was a teenager. Now we’ve entered the “Drive to Survive” era, where every sport wants Netflix to do what it did for Formula 1. To grow the game–the thinking goes–stars need to develop into global icons, thus attracting new fans. Can’t just sit around and wait for the next Federer to manage it himself.

The risk is that by marketing a superstar, the value accrues to the superstar, not the sport. If more people tune into Wimbledon to watch Sinner play Alcaraz, Wimbledon reaps the benefit of the ratings and sponsorships. Yes, Sinner and Alcaraz get paid well, too, and maybe prize money goes up next year. But at what point does Wimbledon have less status than the stars themselves? When Alcaraz has his own Netflix doc and Sinner is the most popular man in Italy, who cares about the strawberries and cream?

Put another way: Imagine that the Saudis were looking to elbow their way into sport in 2008. After the epic Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final, they offered both men a ten-year, billion-dollar contract to tour the globe (with frequent stops in the Gulf), playing head to head in one sold-out arena after another. Is the offer so implausible? Are we sure that Roger and Rafa wouldn’t have taken it?

Sinner and Alcaraz are hardly Federer and Nadal–at least not yet. But their agents, and the tour’s marketing team, and a film studio or three, are trying very hard to raise them to that status. If it isn’t Sinner and Alcaraz, it’s the next generation of superstars after that. Eventually, someone, or some small group of players, will be big enough that they can sell a two-man product. Team sports don’t have to worry about that; even golf would have a hard time selling much match play. But tennis has sold two-player rivalries for a century.

That, to me, is the logical extension of exhibition tennis, the worst-case scenario that guts the sport as we know it.

Events like the Six Kings Slam, Laver Cup, and UTS are fine when there is a deep, thriving tennis ecosystem for 45 weeks a year. (I’d even settle for 35!) We are quite far, I think, from the point where the number of exhibitions threatens the tour itself. But we are closer to the more dangerous point where a small group of superstars don’t need the tour at all. Any athletes who ultimately cash in their celebrity to go it alone will do very well in the deal. But the rest of us will be left with a much less compelling sport.

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Felix Auger-Aliassime’s Achilles Heel

Also today: February 8-10, 1974

*Felix Auger-Aliassime in 2023. Credit: aarublevnews*

There may not be a more beautiful serve in tennis. When Felix Auger-Aliassime is hitting his targets, returners don’t have a chance. Auger-Aliassime has been particularly deadly on indoor hard courts, winning four such championships in 2022, then defending his Basel title last October.

Before returning to the winner’s circle at the Swiss Indoors, the Canadian’s 2023 season was one to forget. He struggled with a knee injury that knocked him out of Lyon and most of the grass-court season, where he would otherwise have figured to thrive. Between Miami–where he last reached his career-best ATP ranking of 6th–and Tokyo, he won just two matches in a dozen starts. We can’t hold much of that against him; when it wasn’t the injury, it was the recovery or the rust.

But he hasn’t played like a top-tenner in 2024, either. He lost to Daniel Altmaier to open his campaign, got dragged into a five-hour slog by Dominic Thiem in Melbourne, and then fell yesterday in Marseille to Zhang Zhizhen. The Chinese man, who lost to 1,107th-ranked Sebastian Dominko in Davis Cup last weekend, isn’t the sort of player who should threaten the likes of Auger-Aliassime, especially on an indoor hard court. Marseille has a reputation as a relatively slow surface for an indoor event, but according to my numbers, it played almost exactly as fast as Basel did last year.

With such a serve, the rest of Felix’s game should fall into place. But it hasn’t, and even the Canadian’s service games can get messy. Zhang broke him three times in ten tries yesterday, and he came close to a fourth. Last week in Montpellier, Auger-Aliassime saved just one of six break points before squeaking past Arthur Cazaux. Apart from an occasional glut of double faults, the serve itself rarely fails him. He reliably sends in aces on at least one of ten service points. Nearly one-third of his serves don’t come back. So what’s the problem?

The Canadian charge

There’s a certain style of play that has become recognizably Canadian, by some combination of the influence of Milos Raonic and the natural development of players who grow up practicing indoors. While Auger-Aliassime, Denis Shapovalov, and Leylah Fernandez–like Raonic before them–rarely serve-and-volley, they often venture far inside the baseline after serving. The move puts them in excellent position to swat away weak replies, at the cost of getting exposed by a deep return.

(The move also calls to mind Evonne Goolagong, perhaps the most casual serve-and-volleyer in the game’s history. Martina Navratilova said of her, “She didn’t serve-and-volley; she would sort of saunter-and-volley.”)

If Felix’s aggressive court position pays off, it should show up in his second shot stats. This may sound familiar, because I talked about the same thing in my piece about Sebastian Korda earlier this week. Though Korda’s serve isn’t quite the weapon that Auger-Aliassime’s is, the two men are similar in that their overall results don’t seem to reflect the strength of their opening deliveries. Korda, for all of his power, hits a second-shot (plus-one) winner or forced error 17% of the time that a return comes back, almost exactly in line with tour average.

Auger-Aliassime is similarly punchless. I ran the numbers again, this time back to 2019 instead of 2020, to capture most of the Canadian’s career. The plus-one winner rates are a bit different, but not enough to alter the story. I’ve also included more players for comparison:

Player                 Plus-one winner%  
Milos Raonic                      24.4%  
Denis Shapovalov                  21.5%  
Matteo Berrettini                 19.5%  
Carlos Alcaraz                    19.1%  
Holger Rune                       18.6%
Lorenzo Sonego                    18.4%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas                18.2%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime             17.6%  
Sebastian Korda                   17.3%  
-- Average --                     17.2%  
Jannik Sinner                     16.8%  
Daniil Medvedev                   16.3%

Given the potency of his serve and the positioning risks he takes, Auger-Aliassime finds himself in the wrong section of this list. He’s not as one-dimensional as Raonic, and he’s less explosive (and erratic) than Shapovalov, but couldn’t he play more like Berrettini? You might argue that Felix’s ground game is better than the Italian’s, and he can thrive without forcing the issue so quickly. That may be true–I believe the Canadian and his team think this way–but the numbers don’t bear it out.

Over their careers, Auger-Aliassime and Berrettini have hit unreturned serves at exactly the same rate. Yet the Italian wins two percentage points more often on his second shot. The overall picture is even more dramatic: Berrettini’s career tour-level rates of 69% serve points won and 88% service games held are each better than Felix has posted in any single season. Berrettini’s forehand is better, sure, but I can’t believe that accounts for the entire difference. The Canadian’s wait-and-see approach too often turns into a ten stroke rally that ends in favor of the other guy.

The Achilles heel

I promised you a weak spot of mythological proportions, and you’re going to get it.

The story of yesterday’s loss to Zhang was captured, oddly enough, in one of the service games that Felix won. At 1-3 in the second set, he raced to 30-love with two points straight from the textbook: big serve to the backhand, shallow reply, swat away a winner. He scored another classic plus-one at 30-15.

The two points he lost, though, show what happens when someone reads the serve, or when he misses the first serve and doesn’t do much with the second. At both 30-0 and 40-15, Zhang took advantage of a second serve to put the return at Felix’s feet. The first time, the Canadian could only keep the ball in play, and he lost a six-stroke rally. Two points later, Auger-Aliassime unforced-errored the backhand plus-one. He secured the hold with a better second serve at 40-30, but he isn’t always so lucky.

When returns land in the service box, Felix’s results are strong, even if he isn’t as aggressive as Berrettini or his fellow Canadians. Here are several stats profiling what happens to those weak replies: plus-one winner rates (P1 W%), plus-one error rates (P1 UFE%), and overall point winning percentage:

Player                 P1 W%  P1 UFE%  Pt W%  
Milos Raonic             43%      12%    64%  
Denis Shapovalov         36%      16%    60%  
Matteo Berrettini        34%      14%    60%  
Holger Rune              32%      13%    61%  
Carlos Alcaraz           32%      12%    66%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime    31%      13%    62%  
Sebastian Korda          31%      14%    61%  
Daniil Medvedev          30%       9%    63%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas       29%      11%    62%  
Lorenzo Sonego           29%      13%    57%  
-- Average --            28%      12%    60%  
Jannik Sinner            28%      11%    63%

These numbers are from 2019 to present, so Raonic’s stats are probably a caricature of the tactics he used at his peak. Still, it seems like Auger-Aliassime ought to be ending a few more of these points immediately. Either way, there’s no reason to complain about his ultimate outcomes–he wins more of these points than Berrettini does, and almost as many as Daniil Medvedev or Jannik Sinner. (Side note: Holy Alcaraz!)

Here is the same set of stats for returns that are not so shallow, but are still closer to the service line than the baseline. (The Match Charting Project calls these “deep”–as opposed to “very deep” returns.)

Player                 P1 W%  P1 UFE%  Pt W%  
Milos Raonic             31%      12%    56%  
Denis Shapovalov         24%      16%    54%  
Holger Rune              23%      13%    60%  
Matteo Berrettini        20%      14%    54%  
Lorenzo Sonego           20%      14%    54%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas       20%      11%    58%  
Carlos Alcaraz           18%      13%    57%  
Sebastian Korda          17%      16%    55%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime    17%      13%    53%  
-- Average --            16%      12%    55%  
Daniil Medvedev          15%       9%    56%  
Jannik Sinner            14%      10%    56%

Take away a couple of feet of court position, and Auger-Aliassime’s results look awfully pedestrian. He still hits more plus-one winners than average, but barely, and at the cost of more errors. He wins fewer of these points than average, and fewer than anyone in this selected group of players. If we make the reasonable assumption that the returns coming back from Felix’s serves are weaker than average–even if they land in the same sector of the court–those middle-of-the-pack numbers look even worse.

I hope you’ve stuck with me, because you’re about to find out how to beat Felix. It’s not easy, but it worked for Zhang. Here’s how players manage against very deep returns–the ones that land closer to the baseline than the service line:

Player                 P1 W%  P1 UFE%  Pt W%  
Milos Raonic             15%      14%    47%  
Denis Shapovalov         12%      14%    50%  
Matteo Berrettini        12%      11%    52%  
Stefanos Tsitsipas       11%      10%    52%  
Holger Rune              11%      11%    51%  
Sebastian Korda          10%      10%    50%  
Lorenzo Sonego            9%      14%    53%  
-- Average --             8%       8%    51%  
Carlos Alcaraz            8%       7%    54%  
Felix Auger-Aliassime     7%       9%    47%  
Daniil Medvedev           6%       6%    54%  
Jannik Sinner             6%       7%    52%

Auger-Aliassime plays these points like he’s Medvedev, but his baseline game can’t support those tactics. He wins these points at the same rate as late-career, physically compromised Raonic.

This is, in large part, the cost of that aggressive court position. Some players, like Alcaraz, can get away with it. Raonic couldn’t, but he put away so many cheap points that he could live with the drawbacks. It’s exaggerating only a bit to say that Auger-Aliassime gets the worst of both worlds: He doesn’t pick up an unusually high number of freebies, but then he finds himself on the back foot whenever someone manages to land a deep return.

That was the story of Zhang’s upset win yesterday. When the Chinese player hit a shallow reply, Felix won 11 of 15. When the return landed behind the service line, the success rate fell to just 8 of 25. It isn’t always that bad, and even when it is, a uptick in unreturned serves (or a strong return performance) can salvage the day. But opponents will only get better at reading the Canadian’s serve, and perhaps they will recognize that they needn’t attempt any heroics as long as they place the return deep in the court.

Auger-Aliassime isn’t going to wake up one day able to play like Medvedev, however much he might like to. He can, however, choose to play more like Raonic or Berrettini. His current approach is probably good enough for a long stay in the top 20: Elo ranks him 17th, at least until it updates with yesterday’s loss. But if he hopes to crack the top five, he’ll need to do more with the profits from that gorgeous serve.

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February 8-10, 1974: Sideshows take center stage

For a week in February 1974, the women’s tennis circuit had to make do without Billie Jean King. Fortunately, George Liddy was ready to pick up the promotional slack, and then some.

The Slims tour headed to Fort Lauderdale for an event on Chris Evert’s home turf–or, more accurately, her home Har-Tru. Billie Jean didn’t like her odds on clay in enemy territory, so it was a good time for a week off. In her absence, Evert provided the drubbings, Rosie Casals delivered the controversy, and–fulfilling what one newspaperman called Liddy’s “kinky dreams”–none other than Bobby Riggs showed up to sell more tickets.

The biggest story of the week took place off the court. Liddy was promoting more than just the S&H Green Stamps Tennis Classic; he also organized a track exhibition for the Friday night of the tournament. The big attraction was Riggs, who came to town for a much-ballyhooed race against famous miler Jim Ryun. (Earning a living as a professional track star could be complicated: Ryun had taken part in a tennis exhibition the previous June.) Ryun was a world-record holder and Olympic silver medalist, so in true Riggs fashion, some handicapping was in order. The 55-year-old hustler would get a half-mile head start.

Bobby was old, but he wasn’t that old. On February 8th, after a track clinic, a marching band, a pole-vault exhibition, and a 100-meter dash featuring some football players, the real business of the evening got underway. Riggs emerged, accompanied by a phalanx of young women and sporting a portable microphone to spice up the eventual television broadcast. He made a side bet with Rosie Casals and jokingly pleaded with organizers for an even bigger head start.

Ryun ran a respectable 4:03, but he never caught up with America’s most famous male chauvinist. Riggs ran his 890 yards in 3:22 for an easy victory.

“I’d say he needed another 200 yards,” Ryun said.

As for Riggs, he hadn’t been working out much since the Battle of the Sexes the previous September. His assessment: “I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired.”

* * *

Casals was tired, too. She had spent most of the week griping: The tour came back to Florida too often, she didn’t like to play on clay, it was cold and windy, and the crowd was partisan to the point of rudeness when she faced Jeanne Evert in the second round. Another of her complaints–about thoughtless scheduling–had merit. After a late-night doubles match on Thursday, she was first up on Friday’s order of play.

As if that weren’t enough, her routine defeat of Francoise Durr earned her a place in the semi-finals against Chrissie herself. “Nobody’s unbeatable,” Rosie said. But on Saturday, she salvaged just one game. Casals had to settle for a lesser prize–a local columnist declared her the champion of the press room.

The final had unexpected potential. Evert had been expected to run away with the title, and she hadn’t done anything to call that forecast into question. But second-seeded Kerry Melville looked like she might just make it close, allowing just two games to Nancy Gunter in her semi-final. Melville herself had said that the chance of anyone beating the home favorite in Fort Lauderdale were “very, very slim.” But after a near-flawless match, she felt differently: “If I play like I played today, I think I have a good chance of beating Chris.”

Alas, it wasn’t to be. At the hotel on Saturday night, Melville walked to the bathroom in the dark and fractured her toe. She withdrew, and the title went to Evert.

Liddy, though, had another ace up his sleeve. Riggs was already scheduled to play an exhibition match on finals day, against Miami Dolphins quarterback Bob Griese and wide receiver Ron Sellers. Bobby would play one-on-two, and the crowd would get the full raincoat-and-umbrella handicapping show. Everyone would go home with a smile on their face.

The biggest draw of the day, though, was Liddy’s last-minute replacement. Refunds were available, but only two ticketholders asked for their money back.

To play Evert, the promoter brought in none other than Althea Gibson, the two-time Wimbledon champion who had been the world’s best player in the late 1950s. Gibson had since earned her living as a golfer and made occasional attempts at a tennis comeback now that the sport had gone pro. At age 46, no one expected her to upset Chrissie, and she didn’t, winning just three games. But she impressed nonetheless.

“I don’t think there is anyone in women’s tennis today that serves it with that much pure power,” Evert said. “I was really surprised.” Althea wanted a rematch. After all, as one fan shouted during play, Gibson won more games off of Chris than Casals did.

Rosie, though, could take one consolation from the finals-day slate. The crowd immediately took to Althea, the obvious underdog and a legend to boot. Finally, a stadium full of Florida tennis fans was cheering against an Evert.

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Dayana Yastremska’s Erratic Attack

Also today: February 2, 1974

*Dayana Yastremska at the 2023 US Open. Credit: Hameltion*

Power giveth, and power taketh away. Few women hit as hard as Dayana Yastremska does, and sometimes, when enough of her returns find the court, that translates into victory. She squeaked through Australian Open qualifying by winning three deciding sets against players outside the top 200, then demolished 7th seed Marketa Vondrousova and rode the resulting momentum all the way to the semi-finals.

Then, yesterday in Linz, she managed just two games against Donna Vekic. So it goes.

The Ukrainian is essentially Jelena Ostapenko lite, mixing a middling serve with monster groundstrokes and a do-or-die approach on return. I wrote a few weeks ago about how Ostapenko’s game style leaves her unusually susceptible to chance; that applies even more to her less accomplished colleague.

The good news for Yastremska is that momentum is temporary. She’ll have off days, like the 92-point flop against Vekic, and she’ll occasionally play a perfect hour, like the dismantling of Vondrousova. More often, though, she’ll pack it all into a single match. The 23-year-old’s stats from her third-round adventure in Melbourne against Emma Navarro make for a good illustration:

       SPW%  RPW%  Winners  UFE  
Set 1   64%   54%       12   11  
Set 2   50%   33%        6   15  
Set 3   73%   56%       15    8

I’ll bet you can tell which sets she won. It was a lopsided match, just not always in favor of the same player.

Typically, the wildest fluctuation came in Yastremska’s return numbers. Her serve is a weak point–she holds less than 60% of service games, worse than all but one other top-50 player–and it is no picture of consistency, either. But her return is a shot she can ride to a major semi-final. In the first five matches of her Australian Open campaign, she won 48% of return points, including 21 of 38 break point chances. Against Victoria Azarenka in the fourth round, Yastremska landed only 60% of her returns, but when she put the serve back in play, she won nearly three-quarters of the time. Almost one in six Azarenka service points ended with a Yastremska return that Vika couldn’t handle.

A few days later against Qinwen Zheng, the same attack proved to be too risky. The Ukrainian put just half of Zheng’s serves back in play. More than 20% of those returns ended the point, but against all of the free points she gave away, it wasn’t enough. Unlike the scattershot second set of the Navarro match, there wasn’t enough time to find the range before the contest was over.

The streaky slugger

After Yastremska’s eight straight wins from qualifying to the Australian Open semi-final, it’s tempting to call her a streaky player. Combine the big-picture run with narrow-focus ups and downs like the three sets of the Navarro match, and she looks like a kite blown around by the winds of chance at both the macro and micro levels.

I normally dismiss claims that any player’s results are particularly momentum-driven: While athletes aren’t robots, study after study suggests that if momentum (or “clutch” or “streakiness”) is real, it’s a minor effect, far more minor than commentators or the casual fan seems to believe. But after watching the Ukrainian’s three sets against Navarro, I had to test it.

Here’s a more precise hypothesis: Yastremska is more likely to win a game when she has won the previous game, compared to when she has lost the previous game. That isn’t the whole story of in-match streakiness, but for a single number, I think it gets to the core of the issue.

Result? True!

Player                 Change after Gm-W  
Alison Riske Amritraj             +11.9%  
Linda Fruhvirtova                  +9.7%  
Lesia Tsurenko                     +8.9%  
Irina Camelia Begu                 +8.7%  
Ajla Tomljanovic                   +7.1%  
Kaja Juvan                         +6.5%  
Polona Hercog                      +6.0%  
Yulia Putintseva                   +5.6%  
Shuai Zhang                        +5.4%  
Dayana Yastremska                  +5.3% 
--- 
Jelena Ostapenko                   +3.2%  
Iga Swiatek                        +1.6%  
-- Average --                      +1.0%  
Aryna Sabalenka                    +0.3%  
Elena Rybakina                     -0.8%  
Coco Gauff                         -1.2%  
Caroline Garcia                    -3.3%

Among the 102 women with at least 20 charted matches since 2017, Yastremska ranks in the top ten, winning games more than 5% more often than average when she has won the previous game. She out-momentums her fellow hyper-aggressor Ostapenko by a modest amount. Another slugger, Aryna Sabalenka, seems to be impervious to previous results, even more so than the slightly streaky average player.

(The exact metric compares games-that-follow-games-won to games-that-follow-games [that is, games that don’t begin a set] within the same match, and excludes tiebreaks. Winning a match 6-0 6-0 isn’t “streaky” by this measure, because it’s impossible to know whether the result is due to a lopsided matchup [or injury] or to momentum–the winner went 10 for 10 in games that followed games won, and 10 for 10 in games that followed any game. With this metric, a streaky player is one who wins 10 of 20 total games in a match including, say, 7 of 10 games that follow other games won.)

So Yastremska is a little tougher to beat when she’s on a roll. She’s really hard to derail if she has just won a game and you have the misfortune of serving. Here is the same metric, only limited to winning percentage in return games:

Player             After Service Hold  
Katerina Siniakova             +13.4%  
Dayana Yastremska              +13.3%  
Lauren Davis                   +13.0%  
Linda Fruhvirtova              +12.2%  
Tatjana Maria                  +11.2%  
Alison Riske Amritraj          +10.8%  
Marta Kostyuk                  +10.3%  
Anhelina Kalinina               +9.9%  
Yulia Putintseva                +9.6%  
Qinwen Zheng                    +8.8% 
--- 
Jelena Ostapenko                +2.7%  
Iga Swiatek                     +2.6%  
Aryna Sabalenka                 +2.2%  
-- Average --                   +1.0%  
Coco Gauff                      -1.3%  
Caroline Garcia                 -4.9%

Yastremska’s success in return games skyrockets after she has held serve. Maybe she feels especially confident after getting through a service game; maybe a hold is a sign that her whole game is clicking. Whatever the reason, she rides this particular type of momentum as much as anyone, trailing Siniakova at the top of the list by a meaningless 0.031 percentage points.

You might suspect–or at least, I initially suspected–that streakiness is related to slugging. It’s easy enough to invent a story to link the two: Big hitting is risky; winners and errors come in batches. But no, there’s virtually no correlation, positive or negative, between these measures of streakiness and any of the metrics I use to quantify aggression. Grinders like Yulia Putintseva share the top of the list with Yastremska, while attackers like Caroline Garcia appear at the other extreme.

For the Ukrainian, it seems, the ups and downs are here to stay. Until she gets more out of her serve, she’ll continue to get dragged into three-set battles against opponents much further down the ranking list. As long as she doesn’t miss too many returns, she’ll keep herself in position to win. The losses will sometimes be ugly, but the victories–like the games that contribute to them–will compensate by coming in batches.

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February 2, 1974: Five-dollar words

My favorite moments in early-1970s tennis came when Billie Jean King got feisty. I don’t mean the take-this-fight-to-Congress, crusading Billie Jean, though there was plenty of that. On the rare occasions when an opponent pushed Madame Superstar to the brink, she could get downright nasty. Pity the poor linesmen.

Fifty years ago today, King faced longtime friend, doubles partner, and punching bag Rosie Casals in the semi-finals of the Virginia Slims of Washington. It was the marquee match of the week, with all of the tour’s other stars absent. Chris Evert and Nancy Richey were taking the week off, Evonne Goolagong was chasing appearance fees on the other side of the globe, and Margaret Court was pregnant. Billie Jean took it upon herself to keep the crowds happy: She went to three sets in the opening round against Kerry Harris, then delivered a 6-0, 6-1 masterclass to win her quarter-final against the 17-year-old Kathy Kuykendall.

Some fans griped about the ticket prices: five bucks for the King-Casals semi and six dollars for the evening session, which featured Australians Kerry Melville and Helen Gourlay in the other semi-final. The 2,800 locals who showed up for the afternoon match, at least, got their money’s worth.

Casals rounded into form just in time, having struggled a bit to recalibrate her game as the tour seesawed between indoor and outdoor events. Her athletic net game outpaced King’s own attack throughout the first set, leading Billie Jean to find a scapegoat among the officials. She berated the service line judge, even threatening to quit; Casals had to calm her down and convince her to stay. (Rosie quipped later that she deserved 60% of the prize money for keeping her pal on court.) After the Old Lady vented her wrath at the chair and two separate linesmen, she settled for moving the offending service line judge to the net cord.

“What this game needs are professional linesmen,” King said. “We’re years behind the times. There are too many questionable situations for a bunch of amateurs to try to master. I’ve suffered through 21 years of bad line calls, and I’m fed up.”

Tennis officiating was certainly a mixed bag. A few months earlier, at the men’s season-ending Masters event in Boston, a last-minute strike forced organizers to pluck fans from the crowd to call the lines.

But not everyone believed that Billie Jean’s reaction was warranted, or that it was triggered by what King called her own “low boiling point.” Melville and Gourlay played their match with the same crew and had no problems. “Most of this arguing with linesmen is done for tactical reasons,” Melville said. “It helps intimidate them. You can get away with it over here, but not in Australia.”

The offending service line judge, Stew Saphier, had a few words of his own. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before, and he wasn’t embarrassed by it. Why not? “Because I was correct in all my calls.”

Whatever the cause of King’s outburst, the day ended as it usually did. After dropping a 7-5 first set to Casals, she came back to win, 6-2, 6-0. The next day, she dispatched Melville 6-0, 6-2, completing the rare feat of a tournament victory that included a 6-0 set won in every match. She was now 14-1 on the young season, her only loss coming in the previous week’s final against Evert. Past her 30th birthday, more famous than ever, she still had plenty of battles ahead.

* * *

Meanwhile, in Ohio…

The men competing at the 1974 Dayton Pro Tennis Classic didn’t draw much in the way of crowds, but tournament organizers slapped together a sure-fire attraction: an exhibition match between Bobby Riggs and Cincinnati Reds star Pete Rose. 4,000 fans turned out for the famous court hustler and baseball’s “Charlie Hustle.” It was clear what they came for: Half of them left before the next regulation match got started.

“This is a disgrace for tennis,” said Yugoslavian veteran Boro Jovanovic. “People don’t come out to see us all week, then they come out for something like this.”

Rose insisted that Riggs play him “straight,” but after three games of running the outfielder ragged with all the spin that a 55-year-old arm could muster, the clowning began. Riggs donned everything from baseball catcher’s gear to a dress, and he eventually set out beach chairs and carried a briefcase to further aid his opponent’s cause. Final score: five games to two, Riggs.

Bobby recognized that rematches with King and Court were off the table and that neither Evert nor Goolagong were likely to accept a challenge. “I’d like to play women from all the world,” he said, naming Casals as potential foe. In the meantime, he’d take on all comers. With his Battle-of-the-Sexes celebrity still going strong, he knew people would show up to watch.

Click here for other posts about the 1974 season. Or here for dispatches from 1924.

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September 20, 1973: Madame Superstar

*Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs at the end of the Battle of the Sexes*

After all the bluster, all the promotion, all the anticipation, Bobby Riggs laid an egg. Just as he had humiliated Margaret Court, Billie Jean King made him look like the slow-footed, powerless 55-year-old he truly was.

Until the moment the first ball was struck, most onlookers expected a Riggs victory. The man had beaten Court 6-2, 6-1, and he rarely took a bet he couldn’t win. King’s inner circle was confident, too–husband Larry predicted a straight-set win–but the majority of the 30,000-strong Astrodome crowd was ready to watch as tennis’s most famous women’s libber was put in her place.

The mood didn’t last. Billie Jean took a 40-15 lead in the first game, and back at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, 1959 Wimbledon champion Alex Olmedo proclaimed, “Bobby’s on the defensive. Billie Jean’s going to win!” Both players were nervous in the early going. Riggs broke for a 3-2 advantage, but King broke right back.

Cliff Drysdale, a veteran player watching Riggs for the first time, began to worry he would lose his bet. “He’s got no power! How can he be so mediocre?”

Drysdale’s wife, Jean, was more circumspect. She, like many in the crowd, suspected it was all part of the hustle. Back in his heyday, Riggs would lose a few games–or a set, or even two–so that a collaborator in the crowd could lay more bets at favorable odds. He had complained all week that there was no King money in Houston. Perhaps he was trying to juice his payday.

If that was the plan, it backfired miserably. Billie Jean converted the first set, 6-4, on a Riggs double fault, no less. Just an hour earlier, Bobby had arrived on court in a gold-plated rickshaw. That, wrote Bud Collins, was “his last moment of glory.”

For spectators able to see beyond the carnival, it was a quality match. Once Billie Jean settled in, she fired winner after winner. She took advantage of the fast indoor surface to get to the net, where she found that Riggs couldn’t pass her well enough to halt the attack. Madame Superstar won three straight games to close the second set, 6-3.

By then, it was clear that Bobby’s deficit was no sham. “Riggs was out of shape,” wrote former player Gene Scott. “He was a balloon. Mentally and physically.” King had run him ragged. The Happy Hustler gave ammunition to future conspiracy theorists by turning in a tactical performance as shoddy as his physical one. “He played stupid tennis,” said Marty Riessen, another pro watching in the LA Tennis Club locker room. “He never put the ball down her forehand side.”

Billie Jean kept streaking to take the first two games of the third set. After another stumble, she regained the lead, forcing Riggs to hold serve to stay in the match at 3-5. He almost did. With both players hanging on to their last nerve, they seesawed through five deuces before Bobby double-faulted and netted a backhand to gift his opponent the last two points of the match.

In the Guardian, David Gray called it a “crushing tactical, technical and psychological victory” for King. Jean Drysdale thought that the champion could “do more with the tennis ball than any other woman I’ve seen.” Arthur Ashe said, “She’s too good–she hits the ball like a man.”

Ashe’s clumsy compliment was exactly what Billie Jean was playing for. “I’ve always wanted to equalize things for us,” she said after the match. “I don’t care if this was an exhibition. A lot of non-tennis people saw it and they now know what women can do.”

Riggs, for all his bluster, knew when he was beaten. He managed one final burst of energy to hop the net for the handshake. He didn’t make excuses, though he did want a rematch. He had been so confident of victory he promised to jump off a bridge if he lost. Now he thought about which bridge it would be.

“I guess I’m the biggest bum of all time now,” he said. “She played too well…. Girls her age are tough on 55-year-old guys. I have to eat a lot of crow. I said a lot of things and I have to take them all back.”

For tennis, there was nothing to take back. Madame Superstar’s nerves of steel–and a killer backhand volley–had won another battle for the growing women’s game. Promoters saw limitless potential in the sport, even if the “Battle of the Sexes” concept was largely played out. A half-decade of controversy was forgotten–at least for the moment–in the glow of one bizarre, spectacular evening.

“This has made a lot of dreams come true for me and for tennis,” said Billie Jean King. “This is a delight.”

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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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September 11, 1973: Made For Television

*Chris Evert at the 1973 World Invitational Tennis Classic*

What was a tennis player to do after picking up a $25,000 check from the US Open? In 1973, the answer was simple: Find an exhibition, get on a plane, and pick up some more money.

Or, more accurately, simply say yes when the promoters chase after you.

On Saturday, Margaret Court won a tough singles match against Evonne Goolagong for the Forest Hills title. On Sunday, she played the title matches in women’s and mixed doubles, each one going to 5-all in the third. On Monday, she faced off against Goolagong again, now at the new Hilton Head Racquet Club in South Carolina. This one was easy by comparison: The veteran won, 6-4, 6-3.

Finally, on Tuesday, September 11th, Court played Chris Evert–her victim just four days earlier in the US Open semi-final–to conclude the World Invitational Tennis Classic, the bloated moniker of the Hilton Head mini-event. The contest was every bit as close, if not quite as high-quality, as the match in Queens. Margaret failed twice to serve out a straight-set victory, but she ultimately prevailed, 6-4, 6-7, 6-2.

The WITC piggybacked on the US Open to take the notion of equal prize money even further. A total purse of $135,000 included a whopping first prize of $40,000, which would go to the best player–of either gender. The eight-player field, rounded out by Billie Jean King, Arthur Ashe, Rod Laver, John Newcombe, and Stan Smith, competed in singles, doubles, and mixed, fighting for points that would determine the ultimate winner.

While the exhibition was a marketing boon for the new Hilton Head Racquet Club at Shipyard Plantation, the serious financial backing came from television. ABC would broadcast the matches in April and May 1974, with Ford Motors as the lead sponsor. Few newspapers covered the event as it happened–perhaps they were encouraged not to–so viewers could enjoy the matches as if they were live.

Court, on the other hand, left little in doubt. She simply couldn’t stop winning. She teamed with Goolagong for the doubles trophy and with Newcombe for the mixed doubles crown over the duo of King and Ashe. Laver edged out Smith for the men’s title. Margaret was the only undefeated competitor–man or woman–at the event.

With another mega-prize in her pocket, Court finally–finally–took a few days off.

Evert and Goolagong, on the other hand, were soon shuttling to their next tournament. They were separated by fewer than 100 points in the year-long Grand Prix race, and neither one wanted to ease the pace. As they concluded their business in Hilton Head, the Four Roses Classic in nearby Charlotte was already underway. Though both women got first-round byes, Evonne would play her first match on Wednesday.

Billie Jean, just nine days away from her ballyhooed match against Bobby Riggs, was moving even faster. Her name was in the draw at the Missouri Coca-Cola Women’s Pro International in St. Louis, with a scheduled first-rounder on Wednesday. On September 11th, it wasn’t clear if she’d be up for any of it. The heat had run her down in New York, and she felt even worse after fulfilling her duties at the WITC. She feared it was a return of the hypoglycemia that had sidelined her a few years earlier. Her doctor suspected it was a more pedestrian case of the flu.

Either way, the tennis world held its breath. Would King show up in Houston? Was the purported illness just a hustle to psych out Riggs? If Hilton Head was any indication, she’d find a way to play. Apart from everything else, there was $100,000 at stake. The sport had yet to produce the superstar who would stay home with that kind of money on the line.

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August 25, 1973: See and Be Seen

*Bobby Riggs as Little Red Riding Hustler*

There was no better encapsulation of the 1973 tennis season than the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Pro-Celebrity Tournament, held at Forest Hills on August 25th, a few days before the US Open was set to begin. The field was packed with tennis stars, Hollywood idols, and Kennedys.

And Bobby Riggs stole the show.

Ilie Năstase played doubles alongside Walter Cronkite. Davis Cup captain Dennis Ralston teamed up with NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle. Ethel Kennedy showed off groundstrokes that would have passed muster on tour. Sidney Poitier held a hand-shaking session–“no autographs, just handshakes.”

So many celebrities took part that the most famous tennis players in the world blended into the background. Stan Smith was forgotten next to his doubles partner, Merv Griffin. Björn Borg, who had attracted so much attention at Wimbledon that the groundskeepers feared his teenage fans would destroy the turf, was ignored entirely.

Some of the stars even cared about tennis. Dustin Hoffman won the event in 1972. “This means more to me than my family,” he said as he attempted to defend the title.

But no one could compete with Bobby Riggs. The 55-year-old Happy Hustler was a walking advertisement for his match against Billie Jean King, now 26 days away. Riggs showed up in a red minidress–“Little Red Riding Hood in drag,” according to the Daily News.

Despite the getup, Riggs singlehandedly took on comedians Alan King and Bill Cosby. Bobby won the first point with a trick serve that barely cleared the net. Cosby was realistic about his chances: He kept a cigar in his mouth for the entirety of the three-game “match.” Riggs won it, 3-0.

He agreed to a rematch–another opportunity to show off. The teams bet $100 a man, with numerous handicaps in place to slow down the former Wimbledon champion. Riggs had to carry valise containing a heavy rock and sit in six chairs placed around the court. All while wearing a trenchcoat–but that might have been a courtesy for those fans who had seen the minidress fall down one too many times.

This time, King and Cosby won. “If they were woman comedians,” said Riggs, “I would have bombed them right out of their socks.”

It was never about the tennis, of course. The stated purpose of the event was to raise money for disadvantaged children. Really, it was an opportunity for the “beautiful people” to mingle. Tennis had always been a rich man’s game. Now tradition was turned on its head: 15,000 fans could come out and watch famous faces try to keep the ball in play. At the height of the tennis boom, it didn’t even really matter if the celebrities could play. A movie star holding a racket was enough.

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June 4, 1973: Cross-Court Crossovers

*Basketball star Artis Gilmore (left) with miler Jim Ryun*

In 1973, tennis was all the rage. But wouldn’t the game be even more fun with stars from other sports? That was the thinking behind the third annual Dewar Sports Celebrity tournament at Kutsher’s Country Club in Monticello, New York.

While the 12-player field was all men, parallels to the recent Battle of the Sexes spectacle were obvious. 62-year-old baseball Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg–a Bobby Riggs pal, no less–was the defending champion. The contrasts were not just between the old and the young. Three of the invitees were basketball players, including seven-foot, two-inch Artis Gilmore, while track and field athletes like Jim Ryun might have passed unnoticed on the street.

Players were picked for their celebrity, not their tennis prowess. Ryun said that he began running because he “couldn’t do anything else,” and he swung and missed on at least one serve. Gilmore’s groundstrokes were softer even than Riggs’s, and Miami Dolphins running back Jim Kiick* griped that the rackets weren’t big enough. Heavyweight boxer Bob Foster was on hand as an alternate, and he was perfectly happy to remain on the sidelines.

* Kiick’s daughter Allie has fared better. She has won seven ITF singles titles and peaked at #126 in the WTA rankings.

The whole tournament took place in one day: June 4th. Hoopster Rick Barry took the individual honors, flashing a big serve and an intensity that suggested he couldn’t simply turn off his competitive streak. After players cycled through a doubles round robin, switching partners throughout the day, the group was whittled down to four. Greenberg and basketball star Gail Goodrich would play for the title against Barry and the man who had just broken the NFL’s single-season rushing record: O.J. Simpson.

In addition to his speed, Simpson had what the New York Times called a “tricky forehand.” But Greenberg and Goodrich were the class of the group, perhaps the only two men present who regularly played tennis. They took the final in a single pro set, 8-2.

Greenberg, his playing days long behind him, was the most accustomed to this kind of half-serious exhibition. He closed the day with a one-liner worthy of a Catskills comedian.

“It’s not so much how you play this game,” he quipped. “What counts is whether you win or lose.”

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March 27, 1973: The Ilie and Jimbo Show

On March 25, Ilie Năstase and Jimmy Connors faced off for the Equity Funding International title at Georgetown University. It was their third official meeting of the season. Counting exhibition matches, though, the number might have already reached double digits.

Duties discharged on the USLTA indoor circuit with the completion of the Georgetown event, Connors and Năstase made their way to Springfield, Massachusetts, where they played the first-ever tennis at the local Civic Center. The exhibition was set up as a mini-tournament. Connors won a pro set against veteran standout Clark Graebner, and Nastase defeated the 18-year-old amateur Vitas Gerulaitis.

The evening of March 27 concluded with a “final”–a standard set between Jimbo and the flashy Romanian for the title. They split twelve games and equally shared the first eight points of the tiebreak. Playing according to James Van Alen’s preferred “sudden death” rules, Connors double-faulted at 4-4 and handed Nastase the match.

The result didn’t really matter, just as it hadn’t mattered a week before in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, and it hadn’t mattered in Dallas a week before that. The Jimmy-Ilie exhibitions were always suspiciously close–8-6 in the third, 9-8 or 7-6 in a one-setter. The pair was in such demand not because of their rivalry, but because they always put on a show. They were reliably entertaining even when the stakes were higher. Early in the Georgetown final, Năstase missed a shot. Connors hollered, “Even a guy as great as you can’t make it all the time.” Ilie retorted, “If you stay around a while, I’ll teach you something.” The Romanian ultimately won the match in five.

Columnist Gerry Finn wrote of Năstase, “At one moment he’s a charmer, the next he’s a cad.” He was the biggest box-office draw in the game. Graebner said simply, “Tennis needs more Ilie Năstases.” Jimbo was studying hard for the role.

The USLTA indoor circuit was sometimes derided as a “Mickey Mouse” tour, as most of the game’s stars–Rod Laver, Stan Smith, Arthur Ashe, and others–played for the rival World Championship Tennis group. But the USLTA slate had its own perks. Players weren’t required to show up every week–an important provision for men who liked to pad their bank accounts with extracurricular activities as often as Connors and Năstase did. USLTA events were a bit more fun, too, largely because Ilie set the tone.

What appealed most to Connors was the level of play. He and his Romanian buddy could breeze through the early rounds every week. Jimmy racked up seven titles and over $36,000 in prize money in just three months. “I thought it’d be better for me to ease into it and get a little confidence,” said the 20-year-old rising star. “It’s worked out real well for me.”

Coached by Pancho Segura and urged on by Richard González, Jimbo would soon raise his sights. Once, in those early years, he told González that you can’t win them all. Gorgo’s response said all you needed to know about the veteran warrior–not to mention the man that Connors would become.

“Why not?”

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This is the fourth installment in what I fear will be an ongoing series about 1973, perhaps the most consequential season in modern tennis history. Check back throughout the year for the latest news from, uh, fifty years ago.

Podcast Episode 81: Joshua Robinson on Diriyah Cup and the Ethics of Sports in Saudi Arabia

Episode 81 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast welcomes Joshua Robinson (@joshrobinson23), European sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal and co-author of the book The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports. (It’s a great book, and I’m not just saying that because he did the show. I’m not even a soccer fan, and I could hardly put it down.)

We hear from Josh in between his trips to the Gulf, just back from the boxing prize-fight at Diriyah Arena, the venue for the Diriyah Cup, the first professional tennis tournament in Saudi Arabia. We talk about how and why oil-rich states use athletic spectacles to “sportswash” their reputations, and what it means for the sporting organizations and athletes that help them do it. A few megastars–including Nadal, Djokovic, and Federer–have so far steered clear of Saudi money, but they are already in the minority, and Josh explains why it only gets easier for the big names to take the payday and avoid too many tough questions.

We also consider the effect on the fan experience, with what Josh calls the “Qatar-ification” of global sports–events produced in empty arenas for far-off audiences, in wholly unsuitable climates. It’s easy to ignore this stuff during exhibition season, but these are important issues that transcend sport. Exhos aren’t very interesting to me, but these types of questions are.

Thanks for listening — both to this episode and for all of 2019. This makes 40 episodes since the beginning of the year, and unless Aryna Sabalenka calls and demands to record an episode, it wraps up the Tennis Abstract Podcast for the year. (Hi Aryna!) See you in January for more tennis talk.

(Note: this week’s episode is about 50 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.

How Fast Was the Laver Cup Court?

Embed from Getty Images

Italian translation at settesei.it

Laver Cup has redefined what a tennis event can be, and so far, the new definition seems to involve fast courts. Last year, we saw nine tiebreaks out of eighteen traditional sets, plus a pair of match tiebreaks that went to 11-9. This year’s edition wasn’t quite so extreme, with five tiebreaks out of sixteen traditional sets, but it still featured more tight sets than the typical tour event, in which tiebreaks occur less than once every five frames.

As usual, teasing out surface speed comes with its share of obstacles. Yes, there were lots of tiebreaks and yes, there were plenty of aces, but the player field featured more than its share of big servers. John Isner, Nick Kyrgios, and Roger Federer each contested two matches each year, and in Chicago, Kevin Anderson represented one-quarter of Team World’s singles contribution. No matter what the surface, we’d expect these guys to give us more serve-dominated matches than the tour-wide average.

Let’s turn to the results of my surface speed metric, which compares tournaments by using ace rate, adjusted for the serve and returning tendencies of the players at each event. The table below shows raw ace rate (“Ace%”) and the speed rating (“Speed”) for ten events from the last 52 weeks: The four 2018 grand slams, the fastest and slowest tour stops (Metz and Estoril, respectively), the two Laver Cups, and the two events that rate closest to the Laver Cups (Antalya and New York).

Year  Event            Surface   Ace%  Speed  
2018  Metz             Hard     10.6%   1.57  
2018  Antalya          Grass     9.9%   1.28  
2017  Laver Cup        Hard     17.0%   1.26  
2018  Australian Open  Hard     11.7%   1.17  
2018  Wimbledon        Grass    12.9%   1.16  
2018  Laver Cup        Hard     13.3%   1.09  
2018  New York         Hard     15.7%   1.09  
2018  US Open          Hard     10.8%   1.02  
2018  Roland Garros    Clay      7.7%   0.74  
2018  Estoril          Clay      5.2%   0.55

The speed rating metric ranges from about 0.5 for the slowest surfaces to 1.5 for the fastest, meaning that the stickiest clay results in about half as many aces as the same players would tally on a neutral surface, while the quickest grass or plexipave would give the same guys about half again as many aces as a neutral court would.

Last year’s Laver Cup, despite a whopping 17% ace rate, was barely among the top ten fastest courts out of the 67 tour stops I was able to rate. The surface in Chicago was on the edge of the top third, behind the speedy clay of Quito and considerably slower than the Australian Open.

These conclusions come with the usual share of caveats. First, surface speed is about more than ace rate. I’ve stuck with my ace-based metric because it’s one of the few stats we have for every tour-level event, and because despite its simplicity, it tracks closely with intuition, other forms of measurement, and player comments. Second, we’re not exactly overloaded with observations from either edition of the Laver Cup. Last year’s event featured nine singles matches, and this year there were eight. It’s even worse than that, because third sets are swapped out for match tiebreaks, leaving us even less data. That said, while we don’t have many matches to work with, we know a lot about the players involved, which isn’t as true of, say, Newport or Shenzhen, where a larger number of matches are contested by players who don’t make many appearances on tour.

The two Laver Cup surfaces rate as speedy, but not out of line with other indoor hard courts on the ATP tour. There will be tiebreaks and plenty of aces wherever Isner and Anderson go, no matter what the conditions.