Category: History

100 Years of Women’s Tennis History

Exactly one year ago, I updated Tennis Abstract with some missing 1970s and 1980s WTA tournaments. I tweeted this progress report:

https://twitter.com/tennisabstract/status/1332072224858255363

I didn’t know it then, but it was the beginning of an all-engrossing project to massively increase the amount of historical women’s tennis data available–not just on TA, but in any organized, easily-accessible form.

In the last year, TA has gained nearly a quarter of a million women’s singles match results going back a full century, to 1921. We all now have the ability to browse through the results of players from the 1920s the same way that we do players of the 2020s. It’s incredibly cool, and it constitutes a huge step toward a better understanding of tennis history.

The state of play

Until last November, Tennis Abstract’s database of women’s results was built on a combination of what I was able to find from the WTA and ITF websites. For contemporary players and their predecessors from the last few decades, that was enough. But as my tweet indicates, it didn’t even encompass the 80 matches of the greatest rivalry in tennis history. The WTA site still doesn’t display records of many top-tier events from the 1970s.

With Evert-Navratilova squared away*, I went to work on the remainder of the Open Era. Thanks to the Blast From the Past forum and John Dolan’s book, Women’s Tennis 1968-84, I was able to add results for the entire Open Era, including qualifying rounds and challenger-level events.

* I now have 81 of the 80 Evert-Navratilova matches, including one exhibition.

Of course, top-flight women’s tennis didn’t begin out of nowhere in 1968, and once you can look at a few thousand matches from 1968 and 1969, curiosity begins to take hold. Margaret Court and Billie Jean King began their careers in the early 1960s, so wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly what they were up to for the better part of the decade?

The amateur era

However incomplete the historical record was for the 1970s, it was considerably worse before 1968. Wikipedia has grand slam draws and not much else. The heroes of the next phase are the contributors to tennisforum.com’s Blast From the Past section.

Blast contains extensive results for the entire history of women’s tennis, accumulated over two decades. It’s a truly incredible project, the sort of thing that no single person could’ve accomplished on their own. The year-by-year forum entries have complete singles draws for notable events (and many minor ones), and doubles and mixed doubles finals for most tournaments. To give you an idea of just how serious an undertaking this is, the forum topic for 1930 has over 5,000 singles match results from that season alone. A small group of tireless contributors typed all those up.

The downside of typed-up results is that they are very cumbersome to search. There are other issues, like inconsistent player names, since a single player might go by a maiden name, a married name, abbreviations or initials, and nicknames over the course of her career. (Not to mention typos!) To address those inherent limitations, you need a proper database.

247,000 singles matches

That database is what I’ve been doing for the last year. Working backwards one year at a time, I’ve pushed the dataset back to 1921, which–incidentally–gives us almost the entire career of Helen Wills. The project has involved hundreds of hours of proofing, player matching (all those name variations I mentioned), and lots of good old-fashioned data entry. While I’ve developed some automated tools to speed things up, there’s a limit to how much a process like this can be accelerated.

In the process, I’ve jumped over to the newspaper-research side of things, filling in the gaps of the Blast From the Past forum’s extensive coverage. My best estimate is that I’ve added about 20,000 results to the dataset, mostly for North American events before World War II. It’s fascinating if occasionally mind-numbing, and looking at old newspapers can be distracting enough to threaten my progress entirely.

All told, from 1921 to the mid-1990s, the Tennis Abstract database has gained almost a quarter of a million matches since that tweet last year, and it now encompasses a reasonably complete view of the final 47 years of the amateur era.

How you can dig in

Amateur-era players are shown on Tennis Abstract in a nearly identical manner to that of current players. In addition to Wills, here are links for Althea Gibson, Maureen Connolly, and Simonne Mathieu. You can find most of these players using the search box or via the exhaustive yearly summary pages, like these for 1925, 1945, or 1965.

Player and yearly summary pages show Elo ratings for women who played a certain number of matches. There’s a ton of information beyond the simple list of results.

For those of you who would like to do your own calculations, ratings, or other data exploration, I’m also releasing all the raw data on GitHub. Releases of new seasons usually happen several weeks later than the results first hit the TA website, so the GitHub repo currently goes back to 1927. The format is the same from 1927 to the present, so if you’ve worked with my data before, you’ll find the historical results to be in a familiar format.

Black tennis

An interest that has grown into a sizable side project is the history of segregated tennis. In most histories, Black tennis starts with Althea Gibson. Yet the American Tennis Association and various local outfits created a thriving tennis scene for Black players as early as the 1910s, long before the USLTA (now USTA) integrated their events.

Beyond contemporary newspaper writeups, results from Black tournaments have rarely been published. Using sources such as the Chicago Defender, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Baltimore Afro-American, I’ve been able to reconstruct draws, discover forgotten tournaments, and start to piece together career records for women who weren’t allowed to compete elsewhere.

One fascinating place to start is the player page for Ora Washington, the greatest Black player of the pre-Althea era. She spent her winters playing basketball so well that she’s now a member of that sport’s Hall of Fame. Based on her record as a tennis player, the folks in Newport ought to honor her tennis exploits as well.

Challenges and caveats

This is the sort of project that, quite simply, will never be finished. Yes, we can close the door on certain tournaments, such as most majors and certain other events with top-flight competition. But there’s no clear line between amateur era tournaments worth including and worth skipping, so there’s always more to hunt down. And even some of the events of the greatest historical interest–like the national tournaments of the aforementioned American Tennis Association–are poorly represented in the dataset, simply because I can’t find more than a few match results.

Another central challenge has to do with names, and it gets worse the further back we go. Newspapers often identified players only by their last name, sometimes including a first initial. Is this “M Smith” in a London-area draw in the 1920s the same as that “M Smith” in a different London-area draw in the 1920s? I have no idea! There are hundreds of questions like this, and I can’t imagine we’ll ever answer even a fraction of them. Newspapers also made lots of mistakes. Even an august publication like the New York Times would occasionally mix-and-match the first names of players. “Madelon Westervelt” is surely the same as “Madeleine Westervelt,” but is “Margaret Westervelt” the same person? (In this case, probably, but you get the idea.)

When you combine spotty source data, hand-made tools to help automate things, and the bleary-eyed researcher that I often am, you end up with bugs. Lots and lots of bugs. If you poke around the site for long, you’ll surely find some. When you do run across something that looks wrong, feel free to let me know, and please be patient. I want to resolve known bugs, but I also want a more exhaustive dataset. Balancing those two goals–along with other aims such as not alienating my family–often results in long wait times for bugfixes.

Thanks for reading all this far. I’ll be writing more about pre-Open Era topics in 2022, and when I’m not doing that, I’ll be pushing back in the 1910s and beyond.

Serena’s 23 vs Margaret’s 24

Since 2017, Serena Williams has held 23 major titles, leaving her just one shy of Margaret Court’s 24. The Williams-Court comparison forces us to think across eras in the same way that Federer-vs-Laver does, with the additional complication that Court has earned herself extreme dislike among many fans and fellow champions.

Let’s set aside the off-court stuff and work this out. The pro-Court case is simple: 24 is greater than 23, and you have to evaluate players relative to their own eras. The pro-Serena side is equally straightforward: 11 of Court’s 24 titles came in Australia, before Melbourne was a mandatory tour stop. Regardless of the era, Court’s home event was weaker back then.

As much as possible, I’m going to try to hold to the “relative to their own era” assumption. Everyone seems to accept it when it comes to Laver-vs-Federer. Plus, if we drop that constraint, the whole exercise is meaningless. With improved technology, fitness, and coaching, of course today’s players are better. But that’s not what people are talking about when they pick a side of Serena-vs-Margaret or Rod-vs-Roger.

Attentive readers of this blog might recall I took a stab at this problem back in 2019. That attempt relied on some extreme approximating due to the lack of pre-Open Era women’s tennis data. Regular readers will also know that the state of pre-Open Era women’s tennis data has vastly improved in the last few months. Tennis Abstract, plus the associated GitHub repo, now contains thousands of match results back to the mid-1950s.

Adjusting Australia

Let’s be clear: I’m not about to settle whether Margaret Court or Serena Williams (or someone else) is the GOAT of women’s tennis. That debate depends on much more than grand slam titles.

Today’s question is: How do Williams’s 23 titles stack up against Court’s 24?

That boils down to an even simpler question: How do Court’s 11 Australian titles measure up against other slams, then and now?

The anecdotal evidence is strongly anti-Margaret. As I mentioned in this morning’s Expected Points, the 1960 Australian Championships–Court’s first major title–had a 32-player draw (strike one), and 30 of those players were Australian (strikes two and three). Yes, it was a strong era for Australian women’s tennis, especially a few years later, but the tournament was hardly a showcase of international superstars. As such, it isn’t what we think of as a “major” tournament these days.

I’ve done a lot of “slam adjustments,” mostly to track the difficulty of the majors won by Djokovic, Federer, and Nadal. (Here’s the most recent.) The basic approach is simple. For each tournament, take the winning player’s draw, and for each match, calculate the chance that an average slam winner on that surface would beat that set of opponents. (Odds are determined by my Elo ratings, which are based on results before the event.) Take the resulting probabilities–on average, around 14% between 1952 and 2020–and normalize them, so that a mid-range slam draw is 1.0. Tougher draws are higher than 1, and easier draws are lower.

Equalizing the eras

This type of adjustment gets us most of the way there, but it doesn’t directly confront the “relative to the era” issue. The field in general was more lopsided in the 1960s than it is now, with a handful of very strong players swatting away a pack of also-rans who struggled to win more than a game or two per set against the elites. That in itself is a point in favor of Serena (and modern players in general), but again, on the Laver-vs-Federer principle, that’s not what we’re talking about today.

The easiest way to express this idea that all eras are equivalent is to use as a standard each season’s Wimbledon, the one tournament that everybody always wanted to play, and almost everyone actually did play. To avoid year-to-year fluctuations based on short-term injuries, we’ll make things a bit more resilient and compare the strength of each year’s Australian draw to the average strength of that year’s Wimbledon and US draws.

For example, my slam adjustments consider 1960 to be a strong year. Maria Bueno’s Wimbledon title was 40% more difficult than the average slam draw, and Darlene Hard’s US victory was about 30% tougher than usual. Court’s Australian title that year comes out as exactly average, so we compare Australia’s 1.0 to the average of Wimbledon and the US ( (1.4 + 1.3) / 2 = 1.35), and the 1960 Australian title, relative to the era, measures as:

1 / 1.35 = 0.75

The mostly-Australian field wasn’t as weak as the caricature makes it out to be, but it was weaker than the marquee majors that year.

Here is how the strength of the Australian draw has evolved relative to the other grass- and hard-court slams from 1952 to the present:

Except for an outlier in 1965, when Bueno, Billie Jean King, and several other international stars turned up, the Australian Championships was a second class member of the grand slam club until around 1980. It’s had plenty of weak years since then, as well, partly because of players who skipped due to injury, and partly due to contenders losing early, giving the eventual winners easier paths.

The main event

Margaret Court won the Australian 11 times. By this measure of relative strength, those titles were worth 62% as much as the other majors in those years. The strenght of individual titles ranged from a low of 0.29 in 1961, when no international elites made the trip, to a high of 1.02 in 1965, when the field was positively star-studded.

Serena Williams has won the Australian seven times. It is tempting to leave that “7” as is, because Melbourne is now a mandatory tour stop and virtually every woman on tour considers it one of the top targets in her season. However, we should treat Serena’s seven the same way we adjusted Court’s 11. For all the era differences, some things remain the same, like jetlag and the difficulty of playing top-flight tennis only a few weeks into the season.

Williams’s seven were worth, on average, 88% as much as the other majors in their respective years. The weakest of the bunch was her last, in 2017. So many top players lost early that Serena never faced a top-eight opponent.

Court’s 11 titles, then, are equivalent to about 7 non-Australian majors–a penalty of four. Serena’s 7 are worth about 6 non-Australian majors–a penalty of one.

The final, adjusted tally: Williams 22, Court 20.

Margaret Court was one of the greatest players of all time, but her position the all-time grand slam singles list depends too much on the shifting status of her home event. When we properly account for the Australian tournament’s position for decade as the most minor major, Court loses her remaining claim to the top spot. Serena may yet win 24, but to match or exceed Court, she shouldn’t have to.

Recreating the 1957 Women’s Tennis Season in 2,600 Easy Steps

Another historical season in the database! In 1957, Althea Gibson was so good it was almost boring. She was in the middle of a 161-week streak at the top of the Elo rankings, and with a 66-2 won-loss record this year, she finished the campaign more than 200 Elo points ahead of the number two player, Dorothy Head Knode.

Of course, no one knew about Elo in 1957, and there weren’t even week-by-week rankings. It didn’t take an advanced algorithm to know that Gibson belonged at the top of the heap. However, the newspapermen who published the most respected year-end ranking lists had at least as many blind spots as the WTA computer does these days. While Althea was comfortably on top, Knode was never considered to be better than 5th.

About 240 events worth of results–that’s about 2,600 matches–from this season are now on Tennis Abstract, and you can jump in via the 1957 season page. There’s a week-by-week calendar, year-end rankings, stats breakdowns for the top players, the most common head-to-heads, and country-by-country comparisons. All of this is now available for 11 pre-Open Era seasons.

The raw data has been added to my GitHub repo, and I offer another hearty round of thanks to the contributors at tennisforum’s Blast From the Past forum, who did the heavy lifting of typing out so many of these results from contemporary newspapers and annuals.

The 1958 Women’s Tennis Season, When Maria Bueno Held It All Together

I’ve added another historical season to the Tennis Abstract database, so we can now see thousands of results per year for a full decade before the beginning of the Open Era. 1958 might be the most interesting year of the bunch.

You can jump right in to the 1958 calendar, year-end Elo rankings, player stats, and more by clicking here for the season page.

1958 was the final full season as an amateur for Althea Gibson, and it was an awfully good one. She won her last 33 matches, including the Wimbledon and US Open titles. She turned 31 in August, and her performance in her age-30 campaign will forever leave us wondering what kind of career numbers she could have posted had she continued to play amateur tennis. Her lifetime totals are also clipped by the institutional racism that prevented her from competing on the world stage until well into her 20s.

Two of Gibson’s three losses in 1958 came at the hands of Janet Hopps Adkisson, herself an excellent player, one who just missed a top-ten year-end Elo finish in both 1957 and 1958. Hopps spent the years 1954-56 at Seattle University, where she played on the men’s tennis team (there was no alternative for women) and won 70% of her matches. When the ITA Women’s Collegiate Tennis Hall of Fame honored her in 1999, she quipped, “I never played in [an official] women’s match. I should be in the men’s hall of fame.”

Compared to later years, 1958 looks noticeably fractured. Gibson played almost four-fifths of her matches on grass, while British up-and-comer Shirley Bloomer Brasher played 47 of her 66 contests on clay, and American vet Beverly Baker Fleitz fought 23 of her 35 bouts on hard courts.

The only top player to tie it all together was Brazilian teen Maria Bueno, who played at least 102 matches in a year when no other notable player reached 70. Bueno started the year in Florida, played the Caribbean circuit (beating Hopps in five of seven meetings, all by early April), then shifted operations to Europe where she won Rome and reached the semis at Roland Garros. She followed the tour across the channel, losing a grass-court final in Manchester to Gibson, beating Angela Mortimer for the title match the following week in Bristol, and falling in the Wimbledon final eight. Then back to Europe, after which she competed at Forest Hills and other US events before finishing the year at home in Brazil.

Bueno’s eleven-month marathon left her in 7th place in the year-end Elo rankings, but not for long: She would reach the top spot by the end of the following year. Like Mortimer, who held the number one position in early 1956 and would win it back in mid-1959, Bueno would have to wait until Gibson left the scene.

Again, I invite you to dig in to the 200+ events and 2,500+ matches from 1958 on Tennis Abstract. The season page provides an easy introduction.

I’ve added the raw data from 1958, along with all other historical seasons I’ve added, to my GitHub repo. My work rests heavily on the shoulders of the contributors to tennisforum.com’s Blast From the Past section, who have painstakingly recovered all of these results from newspapers and annuals, organizing and double-checking the often-messy records along the way. As always, a big round of thanks to them.

Hello, 1959

Another season, another 2,300 matches on the Tennis Abstract site. The latest addition is the 1959 women’s tennis season, which you can dig into here.

Althea Gibson more or less retired from the amateur circuit after a dominant 1958 season. She did a bit of acting, some lounge singing, and returned to the courts only long enough to win the Chicago Pan-American Games in August. That left the field open for three other women to spend some time at number one–according to Elo, anyway.

Angela Mortimer was the first to unseat Gibson, holding the top spot for 18 weeks on the strength of her perfect 15-0 record in finals this season. Maria Bueno took over for a week in November, losing her position to Beverly Baker Fleitz for two weeks, then reclaiming the honor, which she would hold well into 1960. For Baker Fleitz, who was ambidextrous and played with two forehands (!), it was a fitting sendoff into retirement after an outstanding decade of top-level tennis.

As usual, the raw data is available in my GitHub repo. Another round of thanks are due to the contributors at the Blast From the Past forum, who did much of the heavy lifting you see here.

The 1960 Women’s Tennis Season, When Quality Topped Quantity

Our dive into the history of women’s tennis keeps getting deeper. Tennis Abstract now includes hundreds of events and thousands of matches from the 1960 season, which you can browse here.

1960 was the year of the first major title for Margaret Court, when the 17-year-old proved that, if nothing else, she was a glutton for punishment. But she didn’t travel abroad, which made her a non-factor for the rest of the season. With Althea Gibson out of the picture on the pro tour*, the field was open for stars such as Maria Bueno, Darlene Hard, and the largely forgotten Zsuzsa Kormoczy. Bueno won Wimbledon and narrowly lost to Hard in the finals at Forest Hills, spending most of the year at number one in the Elo rankings.

* I’m collecting pro results when I come across them, but the return so far is sparse. Most professional women’s matches were one-offs, akin to today’s exhibitions, and were generally played among a very small group of competitors.

For sheer endurance, the 1960 crown should go to Ann Jones. She played over 120 matches, won 106 of them, and took home 15 titles. (15.5, actually, as she reached the Montego Bay final, which was rained out.) Yet according to Elo, those eye-popping numbers weren’t quite enough to overtake Bueno. Amateur era tennis is full of tricky comparisons like this, with one elite player opting for a shorter schedule against top-flight competition, and another choosing to play almost every week, which out of necessity included weaker regional tournaments. Jones might be the best exemplar of the second category. I now have records of her playing over 1,300 career matches, and that figure is almost certainly missing some early-round tilts.

In 1960, Bueno played exactly half as many matches (evenly splitting her eight meetings with the Brit), yet narrowly edged Jones in the year-end Elo race, 2240 to 2237. The Brazilian held the number one position all year except for four weeks in May and June. That was to Kormoczy, who played an even more selective schedule. But while the 36-year-old Hungarian stayed home for most of the year, she reeled off a 19-match win streak on the Riviera circuit, capped by a win over Jones in the Rome final.

You can take your own look at the 1960 women’s season here. The linked page includes a full calendar of events, year-end Elo rankings, season stats, head-to-heads, and country comparisons.

The raw data, along with that of every season from 1961 to the present, is available in my GitHub repo. I’ve also recently added thousands of matches from second-tier events and qualifying in the early Open Era. This project owes a huge debt to the contributors at tennisforum.com’s Blast From the Past, who have been moving tennis data from dusty annuals and newspaper archives to the internet for the last decade.

A Glimpse at Women’s Tennis Before Margaret Court Took Over

Tennis Abstract now includes extensive results from the 1961 women’s season. Margaret Court won her second major at January’s Australian Championships, but it wasn’t until the end of 1961 that she claimed the top spot in the Elo rankings. In her first tour abroad, she racked up six titles in Europe but failed to reach a major final away from home.

Thus, this was the last year for some time in which everything was truly up for grabs. Court, Ann Jones, Angela Mortimer, and Darlene Hard each won a major, and Jones was the only player to reach two slam finals. The top Elo-rated player for much of the season was someone else entirely: Maria Bueno. The Brazilian had a glittering spring, beating Jones twice and Hard three times on the Caribbean circuit, then knocking out Court en route to the Turin title. Unfortunately, she contracted hepatitis during the French Open and wouldn’t return to competition for nearly a year.

You can dig into the rankings, stats, tournaments, and more than 2,500 match results via the 1961 season page.

Adding 1961 results to my database entailed more than just recording a bunch of meetings between Hard and Yola Ramirez, though there were eight of those. I added about 250 players who did not appear in a match in 1962 or later. A few of them are quite famous, such as Angela Buxton. Others flew further under the radar, at least for their top-tier tennis exploits:

It’s becoming a familiar refrain at this point, but that doesn’t make it any less genuine: This ongoing project relies heavily on the work of the contributors to Blast From the Past at tennisforum.com, to whom I am very grateful.

The raw data, from 1961 to the present, is available in my tennis_wta GitHub repo. I’ve also been adding extensive results from the 1970s (both to GitHub and the Tennis Abstract site) that are missing from the WTA’s database.

If you want to learn more about this project, you can listen to the podcast interview I recorded with Carl this week, or browse the recent blog archives for my announcements regarding several more seasons. And stay tuned: there will be more.

Enjoy!

The 1962 Women’s Season at Tennis Abstract

Another year, another installment of the dominance of Margaret Court. I’ve added almost 3,000 matches across more than 200 events from the 1962 women’s tennis season, a year when Court went an unbelievable 80-2. She won three of the four majors, but one of the losses came in the first round of Wimbledon against Billie Jean King. In both that match and her other loss a few weeks earlier, in Manchester to Carole Graebner, she still took a set.

The further we go back in time, the less familiar the list of top players becomes. For those of us raised on Open Era records, Court and King are known quantities, but what about Leslie (Turner) Bowrey, Angela Mortimer, and Sandra Reynolds, all of whom finished 1962 in the Elo top five?

I’ll leave it to you to explore. Here’s the season page, which offers a snapshot (ok, maybe a bit more than a snapshot) of the goings-on in 1962 women’s tennis.

If you’d like to hear more about this project, check out the most recent podcast, in which Carl Bialik interviewed me about 1960s women’s tennis data.

As usual, the raw data is on my GitHub, and I tip my hat to the enormous efforts of the Blast From the Past contributors at tennisforum.com, who took the first step in moving so many of these results from the analog to the digital world.

Podcast Episode 89: Rebuilding the History of Women’s Tennis

Episode 89 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast reverses roles, with Carl Bialik, of the Thirty Love podcast, interviewing Jeff about his recent efforts to add pre-Open Era women’s tennis data to Tennis Abstract.

High-level tennis did not begin in 1968 with the introduction of Open tennis, but official statistical records often give the mistaken impression that it did. We talk about the existing state of the data, the players whose reputations rest heavily on pre-Open Era accomplishments, and the value of simply getting historical records into an accessible format. We also cover two very different #1s, Althea Gibson and Margaret Court, and dip into what people get right and wrong in the Serena-vs-Court debate.

You can read a lot more about the new data here at the blog–yesterday I posted about the 1963 season, and you can also check out a one-page portal to that year’s data here.

Also, a reminder: In a couple of weeks we’ll be talking about our first book club pick, A Handful of Summers by Gordon Forbes. Let us know if you have thoughts about the book, questions for us to discuss on the show, or suggestions for future book club selections.

Fans of the TA podcast will also want to check out Dangerous Exponents, the new Covid-19 podcast that Carl and I are doing. We released episode 7, about mutations and the vaccine rollout, today.

(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.

Happy New Year! (By Which, Of Course, I Mean 1963)

Another week, another enormous tranche of new women’s tennis data on Tennis Abstract. Today I present an extensive view of the 1963 season, including about 250 events and almost 3,000 matches. The season page is here, so jump in whenever you’d like.

This is the fifth amateur-era season I’ve added. I hesitate to use the word “complete,” because there is no clear line separating “tour level” from the rest, and for many of the tournaments I have only partial results. Even for the top players, some early-round matches may be lost to history. But as an in-depth view of the era, we continue to break new ground. For comparison, there were about 3,100 WTA tour-level matches in 2019, and we now have almost the same number of results from 1963.

I’ve made a few more improvements to the season pages, which are now available from 1963 to 1986:

  • The Elo rankings table now includes columns for “iElo” — ratings specific to carpet (and wood and tiles and whatever artificial surfaces that organizers put on the floor of their indoor facilities). The “i” stands for “indoor,” although iElo does not include indoor hard or clay results. Those were rare at the time, and are included with the hard- and clay-specific ratings.
  • The list of number-one ranked players now shows how long each woman held the top spot–including in other seasons. For 1963, the “list” is rather boring, as it consists solely of Margaret Court, but it does show that Court owned the number one position from the end of 1961 through to her first layoff in 1967. The exact numbers and start/end dates are very much subject to change as I add more data, correct errors, and improve the Elo algorithm, but all told, I have Court at #1 for a total of 536 weeks.

Coincidentally, I recently charted the 1963 Wimbledon final between Court and Billie Jean King. While it was their only meeting this season, it was one of more than 30 in their careers between 1962 and 1973.

As usual, the raw data is now available in my GitHub repo, and I gratefully acknowledge the work done by the Blast From the Past contributors at tennisforum.com.