Category: The Tennis 128

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

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Frank Parker [USA]
Born: 31 January 1916
Died: 24 July 1997
Career: 1931-50
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1948)
Peak Elo rating: 2,103 (1st place, 1941 and 1945)
Major singles titles: 4
Total singles titles: 73
 

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It’s possible to tell the story of men’s tennis in the 1930s and 1940s with only a passing mention of Frank Parker. When Bill Tilden went pro, he passed the baton to Ellsworth Vines, who gave way to Fred Perry and Jack Crawford. In the late 1930s, Don Budge emerged to dominate the circuit, followed by Bobby Riggs, a wartime hiatus, Jack Kramer, and Richard “Pancho” González.

Parker wasn’t a match for any of those men. He won the US National Championships in 1944 and 1945, the editions most affected by World War II. The 1944 field was only 32 players, only a handful of them serious contenders. Even the typically exuberant Allison Danzig wrote of that year’s title match, “It was not a brilliant match … but it was a worthy final for a wartime championship.”

Still, any retelling of the era is much richer with Parker in the story. During his two decades in amateur tennis, superstars came and went, winning a few majors before (understandably!) bolting for the professional ranks. The serve-and-volleying “Big Game,” exemplified by Kramer, steadily took over. Parker’s career is a reminder that there was an alternative path. Especially if, like the two-time Forest Hills champion, you had a world-beating backhand.

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Parker’s signature shot was often compared to the famous Budge backhand. Frequent competitor Gardnar Mulloy called it “uncanny” and “a thing of beauty.” Pancho Segura said simply that it was “the finest.” The backhand was a gift from God. Frank owed just about everything else to Mercer Beasley.

Beasley was a super-coach at a time when many players didn’t even have regular coaches. Though he stumbled into the profession at age 40, he made his mark right away, discovering a 14-year-old Ellsworth Vines in 1925. The coach’s reputation spread quickly, so when a wealthy member at the Milwaukee Town Club in Wisconsin thought he spotted promise in an 11-year-old ballboy, he arranged to hire Beasley as the club pro.

That ballboy, working for a nickel a set, was Franciszek Andrej Pajkowski. The Americanized “Frank Parker” was, in part, a sop to chair umpires who couldn’t handle the Polish mouthful. Under Beasley’s guidance, he quickly developed into a star. He won the national boys’ championship at age 15, and he added the national junior title a year later. In 1933, aged 17, Frankie added his first significant adult trophy at the US Clay Courts.

Parker posing

By then, Mercer and his wife Audrey had effectively adopted the young man. They even wanted to make the arrangement official. But while Frankie’s mother Anna recognized the advantages that the Beasleys could offer a talented boy from a poor family, she wasn’t willing to give up her son. Still, when Beasley chased coaching opportunities first to California and then to Tulane University in Louisiana, Frank followed. When Mercer couldn’t accompany him to tournaments, Audrey served as chaperone.

Parker became Beasley’s ideal player: a steady, conservative baseliner who rarely showed emotion on court. He took things one step further when he began wearing dark glasses on court, earning the nickname “Mr. Incognito” to go with the expression that reporters invariably called a poker face. Only when Frank finally won the US national title in 1944 did the New York Times claim to detect “a muffled cry of exultation barely breaking the bounds of his habitual restraint.”

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The only things Beasley couldn’t do for his charge were to make him taller–Frankie never grew beyond five feet, eight inches tall–and to fix his forehand. It was a challenging pair of handicaps for an elite player, and they prevented him from getting as far as the semi-finals at Forest Hills until 1936.

Beasley tweaked Parker’s forehand every offseason. When Frank described his own game in 1935, he said he used three different grips on that side, a hint that none of them worked that well. Oddly, the coach may have been responsible for wrecking a natural shot nearly as effective as the backhand. Jack Kramer wrote in The Game:

[A]s a boy he had this wonderful slightly overspin forehand drive. Clean and hard. Then for some reason, [Beasley] decided to change this stroke into a chop. It was obscene; it was like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

Both player and coach acknowledged that the forehand was a problem, but Kramer may have overstated his case. Parker made his first Davis Cup team in 1937, when the Americans traveled to Britain to win back the trophy. Playing second singles behind Don Budge, Parker lost to Bunny Austin in the first rubber, but bounced back to win in straight sets against Charles Hare and secure the Cup. The Milwaukee Journal reported, “Even his forehand, long a weak chink in his armor, was a thing of beauty. Shots made off that side had power and perfect length and accuracy.”

On the other hand, Kramer’s criticism had some relevance even five years later. Parker reached his first major final at Forest Hills in 1942, where he met Ted Schroeder. Schroeder attacked the backhand and eventually broke it down, but he didn’t mince words about Frankie’s weaker side:

Frank’s forehand was so bad. On a crucial shot, Frank did not know where he was going to hit it. It was a matter of execution. On Frank’s forehand, you did not know where it was going to go.

Fortunately, Parker’s court coverage–plus that backhand–were usually good enough to make up for everything else. When author Stan Hart tracked down the 68-year-old Frank in 1984, he wrote that the former champion still “covered his baseline like an ocelot.” Bobby Riggs paid him more conventional praise, writing, “His footwork is marvelous. You never see Frankie hitting the ball from an awkward position.”

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Beasley also–to put it crudely–gave Parker his wife. Audrey traveled with Frank for years, ensuring that the handsome young player kept his focus on tennis and away from off-court enticements. Parker seems to have found a distraction anyway. In 1938, Audrey and Mercer went to Reno for a quickie divorce, and shortly thereafter, Frank and Audrey got married. It was, in Parker’s words, “a love match,” and they remained together until Audrey’s death.

In Frank’s later telling, the Beasleys had long since grown apart. But in the 1930s, the triangle was prime gossip-page fodder. It even drew comparisons with the scandal of the day, the affair between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII. The player “stole” his coach’s wife, and the age difference invited constant jokes. Parker was only 22, and the middle-aged Beasleys had a 21-year-old daughter. Even a decade later, when Audrey tagged along on Frank’s first professional tour, Pancho Segura made a game at international borders of trying to get a glimpse of Audrey’s passport. He wanted to see just how old she really was.

Remarkably, the divorce and marriage changed very little, at least as far as Parker’s tennis was concerned. Reporters noticed that he loosened up a bit–but only a bit. Somehow he and Mercer remained friends, to the extent that when Frank won at Forest Hills in 1944, the New York Times story led with Beasley’s pride that his student finally became the national champion. And Audrey kept at her chaperoning. She accompanied the American Davis Cup team to Australia in 1946, and she carefully managed her husband’s training and rest schedule.

Apart from the unusual player-wife-coach triad, Parker’s life and career progressed steadily and predictably. He won multiple singles titles every season from 1932 to 1949, with the exception of the war years. He reached the fourth round at Forest Hills every year from 1934 to 1949, including during World War II. He took part in four Davis Cup campaigns, from the 1937 title effort against Great Britain to the 1948 defense against Australia.

Even the war didn’t really slow him down. He served in the Army, but his superiors saw his value as an entertainer. He spent much of the conflict based on Guam, touring with other stars in uniform like Bobby Riggs and Don Budge.

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In fact, World War II is responsible for many of Frank Parker’s mentions in the history books, both directly and indirectly.

His two national titles came in 1944 and 1945. The fields were not strong ones, and they were smaller than usual–Parker needed only five match wins to secure each championship. Not only was almost every entrant American, but many US standouts were missing. Ted Schroeder, who beat Parker in the 1942 final, didn’t return to Forest Hills until 1949. Joe Hunt, who won the 1943 title, missed the opportunity to defend in 1944 when his Navy flight training course was delayed by weather, and he died on a training mission the following year. Jack Kramer, who would beat Frank in the 1947 final, didn’t play the tournament in 1944 or 1945.

Instead, Parker played two finals against Billy Talbert. Both years, he had the advantage of all that time on the road with Riggs, Budge, and others. On the other hand, Forest Hills was nearly the only proper tournament he was able to play. Maybe that kept the pressure off. His always-troublesome forehand served him well in the 1944 final, working even better than his backhand despite Talbert’s attack in that direction.

Frank’s 1945 title deserves an even bigger asterisk. Talbert was a particularly dangerous challenger this year, as he had won ten straight tournaments before the national event. But he pulled a tendon in his left knee during his semi-final against Pancho Segura and visibly limped through the final. Still, Talbert fought Parker to 12-all in the first set, once coming within two points of victory. But once the 66-minute opening frame was decided in Parker’s favor, there was no coming back.

The two national championships raised Parker’s stature, and his resulting ranking at the top of the 1945 American list upped it even more. He never had the time or money to play the European circuit, but in 1948, the USLTA sponsored him to enter the French Championships and Wimbledon. The 32-year-old took the title at Roland Garros, beating Jaroslav Drobný, and he made it a twofer the following year, overcoming young American Budge Patty. He teamed with Richard González in 1949 to win the doubles titles at both European majors.

In the late 1930s, there were always Americans ahead of Parker in line, so when he was at his physical peak, international opportunities just weren’t there. But the two French titles raise some interesting questions. If the man who had won the US Clay Court championship five times had made a habit of traveling to Roland Garros, just how many majors could he have won?

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Parker’s record of four major singles titles and two more finals–all that wartime context aside–is an outstanding one. Oddly enough, they don’t have much to do with his ranking on this list.

In 1944 and 1945, he entered only a handful of events, and most of his matches were against middling competition. He probably was competing at a high level, but the evidence we have just doesn’t tell us much either way. Aside from the fact that he lifted a famous trophy in early September, Parker didn’t add much to his resume as a would-be all-time great during the war.

In 1949, he turned pro after Forest Hills, and promptly started losing to Pancho Segura. He had always beaten Segura outdoors; on the indoor courts that constituted most of the professional circuit, Pancho got the better of him. By tacking a bunch of losses onto an otherwise sterling campaign, Parker lessened the value of his 1949 season, at least in the eyes of algorithms like mine.

Still, my ratings show that Parker was a world top-tenner at the end of 1936, 1937, 1939-41, and 1945-49, with peaks in ’41 and ’48. His performance in 1941 was particularly steady. He tallied eight titles, one of them at the prestigious Pacific Southwest, where he beat Bobby Riggs and Frank Kovacs in the last two rounds.

In 1946, Jack Kramer made the case that his pal Ted Schroeder–not Frank–should play second singles in the Davis Cup final against Australia. Schroeder was rusty, but Kramer argued, “Frankie doesn’t ever upset anybody. He doesn’t get upset himself either, he just plays the same level every match. Here, that’s not good enough.” Maybe so–although weekends like that Riggs-Kovacs double in 1941 suggest otherwise.

More importantly, what matters in Davis Cup selection is not what matters to the broader question of a player’s legacy. Frank Parker won the matches he was supposed to win–more than 600 of them–for two decades. Eddie Moylan, who faced him several times after the war, said, “There were no easy points with him. When you won a point from Frank, you deserved it.” Few men on the circuit were up to the task.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

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Zina Garrison [USA]
Born: 16 November 1963
Career: 1981-96
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 4 (1989)
Peak Elo rating: 2,160 (5th place, 1985 and 1990)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 14
 

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Stories tend to lose their nuance over time, and sports history is no exception. One sportsmanlike act slowly morphs into a narrative that a player was one of the kindest ever to walk the earth. A few ill-judged remarks from a young player affect their reputation for years to come.

This tendency is reliable enough that if you come across a cartoonish, extreme description of a person or event, it’s usually safe to assume that the truth isn’t quite so one-sided. That great sportman had his warts; the outspoken youngster was selectively quoted.

Sometimes, though, the germ of the story that has survived over the decades isn’t extreme enough. So it is with the case of Zina Garrison, the grand slam finalist without a clothing sponsor.

You’ve probably heard about this. Zina spent most of the late 80s and early 90s in the top ten. She was seeded fifth at Wimbledon in 1990, in line with her WTA ranking at the time. She had the greatest fortnight of her career, racing through the first four rounds, then knocking out Monica Seles and Steffi Graf in succession to reach her sole major singles final.

Through those six matches–and for years prior to her standout run–she had no clothing sponsor. The most prominent companies didn’t believe that Black women constituted a big enough market to justify signing up a top-five player, and they didn’t have the imagination to consider that Garrison might appeal to fans outside of her own race. Only after Zina beat Graf did Reebok make her an offer commensurate with her new status as a grand slam finalist.

It’s bad enough that a perennial top-tenner didn’t have a clothing deal in large part because of her race. It gets worse.

It isn’t that no company wanted to associate themselves with Garrison. Early in 1990, her agent told the Washington Post that she had turned down offers that didn’t suit for various reasons. And for three years in the mid-80s, Zina had represented the Pony brand, a deal worth $125,000 per season. When that contract expired, she was 23 years old, continuing to perform at a high level, still showing signs that she might climb even higher.

Pony didn’t renew the deal. The company cited tight budgets while they signed blonde, blue-eyed Anne White. White was best known for wearing a lycra bodysuit at Wimbledon. Her ranking peaked at #19, and she never reached the quarter-finals of a major. Pony’s new “Golden Girl” concept had little to do with on-court achievement, and apparently it had no room for a diminutive Black woman, no matter how talented.

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If we adjusted the career achievements of all-time greats by the difficulty of the obstacles they overcame, Garrison would rocket several dozen places up this list. Her years without a clothing sponsor are just one example of the systemic racism that still permeated tennis. Zina never grew taller than five-foot-five, and she struggled with bulimia for much of her career. Her height meant she had to execute her strokes that much more perfectly to succeed, and the eating disorder often robbed her of the energy needed to see out a tough match.

If it hadn’t been for the early intervention of a Houston-area coach named John Wilkerson, Garrison probably wouldn’t have become a tennis player at all. Wilkerson was a former player who set up a public-parks program, and he heard about Zina from her older brother, a baseball player at nearby Texas Southern. Around the same time, Wilkerson was introduced to Lori McNeil, another young talent just a month younger than Garrison.

Wilkerson said, “It was as if God handed these two young girls to me. They were meant to play tennis.” The coach trained all of his charges as serve-and-volleyers, and both women would rely on the strategy for their entire careers. At her best, McNeil was every bit as dangerous as Zina. She also cracked the top ten, and she twice upset Steffi Graf.

Garrison bloomed within what McNeil called Wilkerson’s “highly disciplined program.” When she was 14, Zina won the junior division of the American Tennis Association (ATA) Championships, the annual event of the leading organization of Black tennis. She and McNeil dominated ATA tournaments until they moved on to the main tour.

Wilkerson didn’t just teach technical nuts and bolts. McNeil said, “He emphasized the mental side of the game. You had to be able to think your way through a match and be mentally tough and know how to handle difficult situations.” Tough situations were plenty common for Black players in Texas. At one junior tournament, Zina overheard a tournament organizer say, “Throw the n—–s in the same bracket.”

Zina and Lori McNeil (front L and R) with the
1988 Wightman Cup-winning US team

Garrison became a WTA tour regular in 1982, and she quickly proved she belonged. In February at her hometown event in Houston, she pushed Pam Shriver to three sets. Within seven months, she had reached the quarter-finals at Roland Garros and the fourth round at both Wimbledon and the US Open, recording wins over Evonne Goolagong at the All-England Club and former champion Mima Jaušovec in Paris.

In 1983, the 19-year-old Zina improved her won-loss record to 38-19. It was the first of eleven straight seasons in which she’d win two-thirds of her matches. She reached her first final in Indianapolis, where she lost to the Hungarian top seed, Andrea Temesvári. She would go on to reach a tour-level final for 13 consecutive years, a streak only seven women in the Open Era have bettered.

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A further obstacle stopping Zina Garrison from becoming a multiple major titlist was the quality of the opposition. When she arrived on tour, Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert ran the show. Steffi Graf and Gabriela Sabatini arrived soon after. By the late 80s, a new superstar was arriving on tour seemingly every year.

By won-loss record, Zina’s best season was 1989, when she went 59-15 and won three titles. She had a rough couple of weeks on grass, losing in Eastbourne to the unheralded Etsuko Inoue and at Wimbledon to the unknown Louise Field. Aside from that pair of puzzling results and a loss in Houston to Temesvári, check out the list of players who beat her:

Gabriela Sabatini
Lori McNeil
Steffi Graf
Chris Evert
Monica Seles
Martina Navratilova
Steffi Graf
Martina Navratilova
Martina Navratilova
Mary Joe Fernández
Martina Navratilova
Gabriela Sabatini

Garrison’s career haul of only 14 titles would seem to argue against her inclusion on the Tennis 128 list, but remember that at least one of these women–and often several of them–stood in her path at nearly every event she played for a decade or more.

The women’s field wasn’t as deep then as it is today, but the players on top were as strong as in any other era, before or since. Zina’s best position in my historical Elo rankings was fifth, even worse than her peak at number four on the WTA computer. But the women in front of her set a nearly unreachable standard. Her peak rating of 2,160 is the equal of many players who ranked higher in other eras, such as Shirley Fry, Angelique Kerber, and Li Na.

Zina played 108 different women at least three times in her career, and she broke even or better with 83 of them. 37 never beat her at all. The damage was done by the handful of women who kept her stuck in the 4th or 5th spot on the ranking list. She was 2-9 against Evert, 2-12 versus Graf, 2-11 with Arantxa Sanchez Vicario, 3-10 facing Sabatini, and most painful of all, 1-33 against Navratilova.

Simply to reach her one major final, she had to beat both Seles and Graf. She was the first player–and one of only two ever–to defeat both in the same tournament. The reward for that superhuman effort was a date with Martina in the final. Zina wrote in her autobiography, “I’ll forever remember Martina as the villain of my professional career. Nearly every time we played she beat my brains out.” So it was at Wimbledon in 1990, when Garrison won only five games in the final.

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It’s easy to focus on Zina’s near-misses, so let’s take a moment to review the times that she broke through. Her 14 titles include a 1985 win on clay at Amelia Island over Chris Evert, two grass-court triumphs over Pam Shriver, and a pair of final-round victories over Lori McNeil, including one in 1992 that required a 22-point deciding-set tiebreak.

She won 20 women’s doubles titles as well, including a 1988 Olympic gold medal with Shriver, three tour-level championships with McNeil, and another six with Katrina Adams. With Sherwood Stewart and Rick Leach, she won two Wimbledon mixed doubles crowns plus a third major title at the Australian Open.

Given the challenges Garrison faced, it’s remarkable that she not only ascended to the elite ranks of women’s tennis, but that she stayed there for more than a decade. In their 2007 book Charging the Net, Cecil Harris and Laryette Kyle-DeBose put her achievements in context:

[Her struggles made] her accomplishments in an anxiety-filled sport even more commendable. She split with the coach that taught her the game, and split with the best friend with whom she shared so many tennis memories, suffering silently from a negative body image and a failed marriage. Through it all, Garrison persevered. Her career serves as a reminder that it is never just a mastery of tennis strokes that makes a player what she becomes.

Zina put it a bit more succinctly: “I never allowed the fact that I was short, pigeon-toed, and black stop me from doing anything.” By the time Reebok signed her up, she had long since come to terms with the reality of the times. She learned early on to focus on what she could control, and as long as someone other than Martina was standing across the net, that meant winning an awful lot of tennis matches.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Tom Okker [NED]
Born: 22 Februrary 1944
Career: 1962-81
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1974)
Peak Elo rating: 2,190 (1st place, 1974)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 40
 

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For a man who never won a major singles title, Tom Okker was amply rewarded for his tennis career. When the world’s major tennis federations agreed to try “open” tennis in 1968 and allow competition between amateurs and professionals, Okker became the world’s first “registered player,” a hybrid category that allowed him to earn prize money but still–unlike professionals–compete for his country’s Davis Cup team.

He was lucky that the Dutch federation was so swift to give him the new designation. At the US Open in 1968, he beat pros Richard “Pancho” González and Ken Rosewall to reach his sole major final. His opponent in the final was the still-amateur Arthur Ashe, so even though Okker lost the match, the $14,000 winner’s check was his.

At the beginning of the following year, promoter Lamar Hunt convinced Okker to join his burgeoning World Championship Tennis (WCT) circuit. Experts rated him no higher than third-best in the world, and some listed him as low as fifth. But Hunt was confident enough in his value to the tour that he offered more than $200,000 over four years.

$50,000 per year was a big payday for a recently converted amateur. But it seemed was chump change just a few years later. When the newly-formed World Team Tennis (WTT) organization drafted squads at the end of 1973, Okker was the first choice of the Toronto/Buffalo Royals, who wanted the veteran to do double duty as a player-coach. He said, “If they offer me enough money, I’ll play.” They did, and he did, on a five-year contract for a reported $136,000 per year.

Barely a half-decade into the Open Era, a select few players were already getting rich. Debates more familiar to fans of team sports took over the tennis headlines–were these men and women worth all the money? A rival WTT owner, Boston’s Ray Ciccolo, griped:

[F]rom what I’ve seen of the owners’ mistakes, I see why 80% of them are in trouble. Most made their first mistakes at the draft, before the first set of tennis. They came unprepared or didn’t have enough money to do it right. But Okker’s signing was the worst thing Toronto/Buffalo could’ve done to the league.

One reading of Ciccolo’s complaint is that elite-level money was getting handed out to players that didn’t deserve it. Okker didn’t seem like a top-tier talent next to names like Billie Jean King, Jimmy Connors, and John Newcombe. The Dutchman ranked as low as tenth on one journalist’s year-end list for 1973, and he didn’t have any unusual level of celebrity to make up for it.

Royals owner John Bassett may have misjudged Toronto’s interest in team tennis–his club folded after just one last-place finish. But he was more right than wrong in picking–and paying–Tom Okker. In addition to Okker’s doubles prowess, which was particularly valuable in the WTT format, he was a better player than either the public or the rankings gave him credit for. He was at his peak in 1973 and 1974, a frequent runner-up in a field full of all-time greats. Okker was one of the first tennis players to earn $1 million on court, and he deserved every penny.

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No sketch of Tom Okker is complete without a reference to his nickname, “The Flying Dutchman.” Forgive my ignorance: I always assumed people called him that just because it was the only term they knew with “Dutch” in it, and he wasn’t noticeably slow. In fact, the man from Amsterdam was as fast as it gets.

He needed to be. A generous measurement put him at five-foot-ten-inches tall, and after his retirement, Okker said he “should have been just a bit bigger and stronger and had a dominant service.” Had those wishes been granted, no one could have stopped him.

At Queen’s Club in 1968, Okker was the first amateur to beat Rod Laver since Laver turned pro six years before. The New York Times wrote that the “lean, wiry, and fantastically fast” underdog “outmaneuvered and outran the little Australian redhead.” When the Times previewed the Forest Hills final later that year, it reported, “His contemporaries insist that he is the quickest man in the history of tennis.”

This isn’t to say that Okker relied only on speedy retrieving. He was one of the first players to hit a heavy topspin forehand, and in an era when so much spin was still a novelty, it took some getting used to. The 1968 Times preview warned:

More than once today, Arthur [Ashe] will be tempted into letting Tom’s wicked top-spin drive go by, convinced the ball will land well beyond the base line. It will take a sharp eye, indeed, to discern balls from those sharply dipping inbounds. And when at net Ashe’s best defense may well be to reach for every ball originating from Okker’s forehand side.

The Dutchman’s combination of weapons was almost enough to win the first-ever professional major played at Forest Hills. He pushed Arthur Ashe to five sets, including a 26-game first set. The American needed one of the best serving performances of his career to come through. At 5-5 in the first set, Okker was already exasperated by his inability to get into points. After Ashe hit two more aces, Okker faced the wrong way to return Arthur’s next delivery, earning a laugh from the crowd as he signaled his surrender.

Okker quickly resumed the fight. Ashe’s game plan involved wearing out his opponent, a strategy that proved to be built on wishful thinking. The Dutchman didn’t noticeably tire, but Arthur’s serve was just enough to make the difference. The final score was 14-12, 5-7, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, a near-miss in Okker’s one shot at a major title.

* * *

As we’ve seen, Okker had plenty of reason to be pleased with his performance in 1968. He earned over $20,000 in prize money in his campaign as a “registered player,” and his results garnered the big contract with Lamar Hunt in 1969.

What wasn’t clear at the time was just how close the Flying Dutchman came to the top of the rankings. Before 1973, rankings were unofficial, generally published by veteran sportswriters only once per year. The phenomenon of a slam-less number one is very modern, because it wasn’t possible without computer rankings. The men who used to make the lists believed that Wimbledon and Forest Hills were the only two tournaments that mattered.

Okker (left) with Ashe, after the 1968 Forest Hills final

According to weekly Elo ratings I’ve assembled, Okker was the second-best player in the world for about four months between June and September of 1969. His status was built in part on the runner-up showing at the US Open, combined with a 78-24 record–including eight titles–in the year that followed. When he wasn’t winning, he was reaching finals. He lost title matches in 1969 to Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, and (three times!) to Tony Roche.

Laver was in the middle of his second Grand Slam season, so second place was as good as a mere mortal could hope for. My ratings report an imposing top ten that Okker nearly surmounted in June 1969:

1  Rod Laver
2  Tom Okker
3  Tony Roche
4  John Newcombe
5  Andrés Gimeno
6  Roy Emerson
7  Ken Rosewall
8  Arthur Ashe
9  Stan Smith
10 Fred Stolle

As if that weren’t enough, 1966 Wimbledon champion Manuel Santana was 15th and ageless wonder Richard González was 17th. It was a great time to be a tennis fan, and a tough time to cling to a spot at the top of the game.

* * *

The cast of characters steadily changed, but the level of competition remained sky-high. Okker somehow kept up.

In 1973, he went 91-23 and won seven more titles against the likes of Ashe, Gimeno, Newcombe, and Ilie Năstase. After finding out that the Toronto/Buffalo Royals coveted his services for World Team Tennis, he continued strong into 1974, winning another title against Năstase and defeating Tom Gorman to secure a championship at home in Rotterdam.

As in 1969, Okker’s reputation was built on these occasional titles, frequent victories over strong competition, and his ability to avoid too many poor showings. Still, no one considered him much of a threat at grand slam events, and he did little to change their opinion. He reached only one major quarter-final–at the French in 1973–between 1971 and 1975.

In traditional terms, his case for a spot near the top of the rankings was even less compelling than it had been in 1969. But returning to my Elo ratings, Okker was briefly–for just one week!–the best player in the game.

It was a spell at number one worthy of Pat Rafter. Okker comes out on top for the week of June 24, 1974, when that year’s Wimbledon Championships began. John Newcombe was number one the week before, but a bad loss handed the top spot to Okker, who didn’t play that week.

The All-England Club didn’t see anything special in Okker’s play that year. The committee seeded him seventh, and he didn’t even live up to that, losing to Alex Metreveli in the fourth round. Third seed Jimmy Connors won the Wimbledon title, which was enough to leapfrog both Okker and Newcombe. Jimbo–again, according to the Elo algorithm–would keep the number one ranking until June of 1978.

Like Rafter’s week at number one 25 years later, Okker’s brief spell at the top feels like a footnote. But the unheralded feat is much more impressive when we consider the cast of characters. There weren’t many easy matches in men’s tennis in 1974. Here is the Elo list for Okker’s sole week at number one:

1  Tom Okker
2  John Newcombe
3  Jimmy Connors
4  Ilie Năstase
5  Rod Laver
6  Stan Smith
7  Björn Borg
8  Ken Rosewall
9  Arthur Ashe
10 Alex Metreveli

For the Flying Dutchman, it was a last hurrah. He was slowing down, and his topspin didn’t bewilder opponents like it once did. He would fall to fifth on the Elo list by the end of the year, and he dropped out of the top ten before Wimbledon in 1975.

* * *

Of course, no one was optimizing tennis rating systems during Tom Okker’s career, and few fans do so even today. Okker was known as a perennial runner-up, an entertaining and talented player who didn’t have quite what it took to reach the top of the game. It didn’t help his reputation that he stuck around into the early 80s, losing ten matches to Borg, eight to Connors, and another seven to Brian Gottfried.

Like his near-contemporary Tony Roche–who did manage to win a major singles title–Okker was born at the right time to share the court with a long list of Hall of Famers, even if it didn’t help him build a strong resume of his own. Also like Roche, he proved his mettle on the doubles court, winning two majors in that discipline and amassing 78 titles, a record that would stand into the 21st century.

The men with the checkbooks knew what they were doing. Okker didn’t make as much money from tennis as he would have a decade or more later, but it would’ve been difficult to imagine World Championship Tennis or World Team Tennis without him. His era was so strong that even an also-ran could earn a spot among the 100 best players of the century.

* * *

Thanks to Kees Haasnoot for research and translation help from the Dutch.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Dorothy Round [GBR]
Born: 13 July 1909
Died: 12 November 1982
Career: 1927-39
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1937)
Peak Elo rating: 2,179 (1st place, 1934)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 54
 

* * *

If someone in 1930s England told you that tennis was a game of matchups, they were probably talking about Dorothy Round. In the span from 1929 to 1939, she lost only 64 matches–barely more than the number of titles she won. Eight of those defeats came at the hands of a single player: the crafty American, Helen Jacobs.

Round and Jacobs faced off 13 times, and the stakes were almost always high. They played three matches at Wimbledon, one of them the 1934 final. Five more of their encounters were part of the Wightman Cup, the annual team competition between Britain and the United States. Another two were title matches. The American was a litmus test for Round’s game. When Dorothy could beat her primary rival, she could beat anyone.

Fortunately for us, Jacobs was not just a five-time major winner, she was an eloquent and prolific chronicler of the game. A chapter of her book, Gallery of Champions, is devoted to Round. It charts the progression of a brilliant young player with tactical limitations who eventually learned how to beat even the savviest opponents. When Round made her Wightman Cup debut in 1931 against Anna Harper, Jacobs wrote, “Dorothy lacked the experience and the patience to nullify the heavy spin or to defeat the game that had to be attacked by sheer power.”

A year later, Round met Jacobs for the first time in Wightman Cup play. Helen recapped the straight-set victory:

My chops and slices, disturbing to an exponent of the uncompromising flat drive, broke up her game, forced errors at critical points and affected the timing of her ground strokes to such an extent that she was unable to recover it…. It was some months before Dorothy learned the knack of handling the heavily spinning ball.

Helen could’ve been more specific. It was eleven months. Round would never fully solve the Jacobs conundrum–few players ever did. But less than a year after that Wightman Cup loss, Dorothy got her revenge and scored a series of victories that established her not just as the best player in Britain, but one of the very best in the world.

* * *

As early as 1928, when the 19-year-old Round had played only a single match at Wimbledon, her game appeared to be “almost perfect.” The Birmingham Gazette credited her with “perfect stroke production and rhythm … allied to speed on the court and almost unerring accuracy in driving.”

The Gazette‘s correspondent can be forgiven his overexcitement. Round was from the nearby town of Dudley, and she was the best prospect the Midlands had seen for some time. Dorothy’s brothers had taught her the game at home, and like everyone else, they quickly realized she was destined for a bigger stage.

Jacobs gave a more technical rave review of the youngster after seeing her in action at Wimbledon in 1929:

[T]here was something in her game to catch the eye: besides force and aggressive tactics it was the sweep of her strokes; the absolutely effortless swing that could produce great pace; the sliding, the springy movement in her gait as she covered court from baseline to net or across the baseline with equal facility. There was the deceptive speed which enabled her, with apparently little movement, to intercept drives at the net, to run back for the sudden, deep lob.

It took some time for the raw talent to manifest itself in results. Round piled up local titles in places like Malvern and Wolverhampton, and she increasingly made her presence known on the national stage. In 1931, she got to the final in Beckenham at the prestigious Kent Championships, and she reached the quarter-finals at Wimbledon.

She was better still in 1932, but the losses emphasized just how far she still had to go. At the British Hard Court Championships* in Bournemouth, Round reached the final, where she won just three games against the Gallic counterpuncher Simonne Mathieu. After losing to Jacobs in Wightman Cup, she cruised to another Wimbledon quarter-final. Waiting in the round of eight was eventual champion Helen Wills Moody, who left her reeling, 6-0, 6-1.

* At the time, “hard courts” were what we now call clay.

There’s a long list of players who never figured out how to keep Wills Moody on court for more than half an hour. An equally sizable roster couldn’t handle the eerie consistency of Mathieu. But Round had more than talent; she had the ability learn from her losses. She wouldn’t suffer another such lopsided defeat for seven years.

* * *

The Dorothy Round that returned for the 1933 season was prepared to handle the spin of Jacobs, the persistence of Mathieu, and much more. A month into her season, she returned to Bournemouth, where she turned in a pair of statement wins on back-to-back days.

Round met the Frenchwoman in the semi-finals, and she straight-setted the defending champion, 6-1, 7-5. The Birmingham Gazette delivered its usual over-the-top praise of its favorite daughter:

No such lawn tennis had been seen at the meeting since its institution…. Mme. Mathieu is one of the most difficult players in the world to beat outright either with a drive or a drop shot, yet Miss Round was continually doing so with perfectly produced shots.

Waiting in the final was Helen Jacobs. Round lost the first set, but once she hit her stride, the American’s chops no longer bothered her. The London Herald summarized:

The last set will not be forgotten by anybody who was privileged to see it. Never has a British woman player revealed such uncanny accuracy coupled with the speed that Miss Round imparted to her backhand in this final and triumphant set…. Miss Jacobs fought back with courage, but when she came up court she was passed like a flash; when she went back she was outdriven. It was as complete a victory as could be wished.

Round soon added the Beckenham title to her growing list of credits, and she reached the Wimbledon semi-finals, where she met Jacobs again. It was another close fight, and the result was the same as in Bournemouth. Jacobs took the first set, and Dorothy came back for the win.

Her reward was a rematch with Helen Wills Moody. Dorothy was at her best on Wimbledon’s fast turf, but the surface offered just as much of an advantage to the dominant American. The home fans were ready to see the “Sunday school teacher from Dudley” break through–it had been seven years since an Englishwoman won the title, and back then, seven years was a long time for British fans to wait. On the other hand, Wills Moody had conceded only one game in their previous meeting on the same court. Queen Helen hadn’t lost a set to anyone in six years.

For the first time in memory, Queen Helen met an equal. Round lost the first set, 6-4, despite having multiple break points for 5-all. The Englishwoman was even better in the second, matching Wills Moody hold for hold through 12 games, then breaking for a 7-6 edge. The American reached break point on Round’s serve, but a controversial line call went Dorothy’s way, and she won the second set, 8-6. It was the first set lost by the champion since Wimbledon in 1927. The New York Times raved:

[Round’s] forehand drives brought nods of approval from Mrs. Moody as they nicked the lines, her service was strong, and she consistently brought out a weakness in the champion’s forehand.

Oddly, the overruled line call seemed to disturb Round more than it did her opponent. She stumbled early in the third set, dropping serve to give Moody a 4-2 advantage, and she never recovered. Still, she proved herself a near-equal of the greatest player in the game–perhaps the greatest in the history of the sport up to that time. British fans could be forgiven for assuming it was only a matter of time before Dorothy won the Wimbledon title herself.

* * *

Midway through Wimbledon in 1934, Fred Perry wrote in his newspaper column, “[T]here is no doubt that Dorothy’s game is much more suited to a grass than a [clay] court, as those beautifully produced drives on both wings gain a lot of pace off the ground.”

While Perry was right, Round continued to be a force on clay. She won back-to-back events on the surface in May of 1934, including a defense of her title at the British Hard Court Championships. In the final there, she saved five match points against Peggy Scriven, a fellow Brit who had won the French Championships in 1933 and defended her title in Paris a month after losing to Dorothy.

Round never played singles at Roland Garros. She made the trip at least once, when she reached the women’s doubles semi-finals. But as a devout Methodist, she refused to play on Sundays, and the officials in Paris wouldn’t accede to her scheduling preferences. There’s no telling how Dorothy would’ve fared in the French singles, as the surface differed from the clay courts in Britain. But a woman with victories on clay over Scriven and eight-time French finalist Simonne Mathieu surely would’ve been a factor there.

Despite the momentum of her British Hard Courts title and her status as the previous year’s runner-up, Round entered the 1934 Wimbledon Championships under a cloud. She lost both of her Wightman Cup singles matches, the first in a particularly poor display against Sarah Palfrey. The second came against her old foe, Helen Jacobs. Both players used their full arsenal of shots–the Times credited Dorothy with “a veteran’s cunning”–but Jacobs ended up on top, 6-4, 6-4.

* A small consolation: At 4-4 in the second set, Round hit “one of the craziest net cord shots ever seen at Wimbledon.” According to the Times: “The ball struck the net and then rolled along the top for at least a foot before dropping into Miss Jacobs’s court.”

The Brits lost the competition to the Americans, five matches to two, and for the third year running, Round’s losses were the difference between victory and defeat. Yet somehow, Dorothy shook it off. The Wightman Cup disappointments would be her last losses for ten months.

Round drew Simonne Mathieu in the Wimbledon semi-finals. The Frenchwoman was never an easy opponent. The Birmingham Gazette called it “dull tennis, but a keen battle of wits.” It took ninety minutes, during which time Mathieu overhit the baseline only three times. Dorothy was occasionally lulled by her opponent’s soft hitting, but she came through in three, 6-4, 5-7 6-2.

Waiting in the final–perhaps inevitably–was Helen Jacobs. Defending champion Helen Wills Moody was absent, and while Jacobs was not as strong a player, she had always given Dorothy a test. Thoroughly shaking off her Wightman Cup loss, Round played what Dan Maskell called “cool, calculating and chess-like” tennis. In another three-setter, the woman from Dudley brought the Wimbledon crown back home, 6-2, 5-7, 6-3.

* * *

Next stop: Australia. No woman from overseas had yet won the Australian Championships, in large part because few had entered. Without the pull of the Davis Cup, which sometimes forced top European and American men to make the trip, there was little reason for a world-class female player to spend so much time on an ocean voyage.

Traveling with countrywomen Nancy Lyle and Evelyn Dearman, Dorothy was unbeatable down under. She racked up at least 18 wins against no defeats, and dropped only two sets–one of them to Lyle. Australian women’s tennis wasn’t as deep as it would become, but we shouldn’t rate the country’s competitors too weakly. A. Wallis Myers believed, “Australia had more young players of championship mettle than any country in the world, with the possible exception of the United States.”

The best of the local challengers was 22-year-old Joan Hartigan, who had lost to Jacobs in the 1934 Wimbledon semi-finals. Hartigan was the only Aussie to take a set from Round on her tour, and she would beat Dorothy at Wimbledon the following year. Unfortunately, Hartigan missed the Australian Championships due to illness, making it that much easier for Round to waltz through the draw and pick up her second career major title.

The long-term effects of Round’s trip were less positive. The Englishwoman had covered a lot of distance in two years: A year before her trip to Australia, she took the long route home from Los Angeles and toured Japan, China, and the Malaysian Peninsula. Helen Jacobs made it clear just how unimportant the Australian titles were considered at the time:

Perhaps she would have been wiser to have foregone the anti-climactic ending to a strenuous season. She didn’t need the experience. Rest would undoubtedly have been more to her advantage.

Dorothy wasn’t the same player upon her return. She retired from a match in her second tournament back on British soil, and she lost before the final in two of the other five tournaments she played. For most women, it would be a successful season, but for Round, a semi-final loss at the British Hard Court Championships and a quarter-final exit at Wimbledon meant that her results were trending in the wrong direction.

1936 was only a little better. Her won-loss record of 41-4 suggests a dominant campaign, but the four losses tell us more than the pile of wins did. She suffered another quarter-final ouster at Wimbledon–this time to Hilde Sperling–and lost time to Anita Lizana, a young player who was beginning to win all the titles that Round had monopolized just a few years earlier. The one bright spot was a pair of wins over Helen Jacobs and Sarah Palfrey in Wightman Cup. It wasn’t enough to push the Brits over the line, but it was proof that Dorothy was still capable of playing world-class tennis.

* * *

Round’s 1937 season started in the same vein. She arrived at Wimbledon having lost two of three finals with Lizana. Everyone, including the petite Chilean herself, thought it was Anita’s year to be crowned Wimbledon champion.

The Wimbledon committee gave Dorothy the 7th seed, a sign that her stock her fallen even since the end of the previous year, when most experts still placed her in the top five. Jacobs was the defending champion, Sperling had reached the 1936 final, and Lizana was poised to take the next step. Also seeded ahead of Round were Jadwiga Jędrzejowska, a Polish star riding a 16-match win streak; Alice Marble, a kick-serving American on the brink of greater things; and the redoubtable Simonne Mathieu.

The Sunday school teacher from Dudley reached the semi-finals with a decisive, 6-4, 6-2 victory over Jacobs. In the final four, she once again drew Mathieu. The Frenchwoman had upset Lizana, but for the third time in a row, she was no match for Round. The scoreline of 6-4, 6-0 was proof–if anyone still needed it–that Dorothy had developed the patience to handle any sort of game.

The championship match pitted Round against Jędrzejowska, whose career was nearly the equal of Dorothy’s. “Ja-Ja” was a heavy hitter, but tactically she couldn’t compare with the likes of Jacobs and Mathieu. Both players struggled with the wind, and the conditions contributed to the topsy-turvy final score of 6-2, 2-6, 7-5 in the Englishwoman’s favor. Dorothy said after the match, “I went into the court with a tactical plan, but in the heat of the moment I’m afraid I forgot all about it.”

It was enough for Dorothy to play defense. The Newcastle-upon-Tyne Sunday Sun recapped the action:

[Round] was not in the least upset by the ferocious drives that continually sped over the net. The way in which she dealt with these shots on her backhand, which was under suspicion, was magnificent.

With Fred Perry lost to the professional ranks, British fans considered Dorothy’s achievement all the more meaningful. With two Wimbledon singles titles in four years–not to mention another three in mixed doubles–Round had restored what the Sunday Sun called Britain’s “lost prestige.” She had ended that painful eight-year wait back in 1934. The pair of titles would only loom larger as the years went by. Wimbledon wouldn’t crown another British woman champion until Angela Mortimer in 1961.

* * *

For Dorothy Round herself, the 1937 Wimbledon title was the culmination of an outstanding career. She married in September, becoming Dorothy Round Little, and when Helen Wills Moody retook the Wimbledon crown in 1938, Dorothy was preparing to welcome her first child into the world. She didn’t play competitive tennis again until the following year.

It seems unlikely that Mrs. Little would ever have returned full-time to the circuit, but history rendered the question moot. When war broke out in Europe, she took her young son to North America, where she spent a half-decade coaching and playing exhibition matches in Canada and the United States. She was a frequent feature of Red Cross benefit matches, often appearing with fellow Brit Mary Hardwick. She continued in the same vein when she returned to Britain in 1944.

More than most female champions of her era, she spent much of the rest of her life coaching and writing about tennis. She had plenty of lessons to impart: Her early-career losses against Wills Moody, Jacobs, and Mathieu forced her to become a more careful, tactically sound player at an early age. Her students may not have been particularly interested in learning how to handle a vicious chop stroke, but none could’ve doubted that the two-time Wimbledon champion had something to teach them.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Ashleigh Barty [AUS]
Born: 24 April 1996
Career: 2012-22
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2019)
Peak Elo rating: 2,220 (1st place, 2021)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 15
 

* * *

During this year’s Australian Open, the American player Jessica Pegula said of Ashleigh Barty, “She does everything a little bit better than everybody.” Pegula should know. They met in the quarter-finals, where Barty beat her, 6-2, 6-0, in just over an hour.

A tiny edge over the field is enough to set a player apart in this era of women’s tennis. The tour is full of talented players who have struggled to separate themselves from the pack. In the two and half years before Barty first took over the top spot in the WTA rankings in June 2019, seven different women held the position. All but Caroline Wozniacki are still active, and new contenders emerge every year.

Notwithstanding Pegula’s judgment, the gap between Ash Barty and the field felt awfully big. When the Australian announced her retirement last month, she hadn’t conceded a set in her last ten matches. Only two of those opponents kept her on court for more than 75 minutes. She owned a 2,200-point lead over then-#2 Iga Świątek in the official rankings. In her last three seasons, she played matches against top-tenners 23 times. She won 19 of them.

It had been a long time since the WTA boasted such a clear number one. In some categories, such as her precise forehand and her ruthlessly executed tactics, Barty probably was just a hair better than the strongest of her peers. But in other areas, her game could barely be measured on the same scale. She was one of the few 21st-century players to rely on a backhand slice, a shot that most active players use only as a last resort. And while she was one of the shortest players on tour, she got more out of her serve than anyone else.

For years, fans had an easy retort for any naysayer claiming that women’s tennis was boring: Watch some Ash Barty. With the Australian’s retirement at age 25, the sport lost one of its best and most unique performers.

* * *

Let’s start with the slice. Volunteers have charted 28 of Barty’s matches from the last year for the Match Charting Project, and in those matches, she sliced 68% of her backhand groundstrokes. Tour average is about 13%, and since that number is propped up by Barty and a few other extreme outliers, the median is a couple percentage points lower still. No matter which number you prefer as representative of the tour as a whole, Barty hit her slice more than five times as often as her typical opponent.

In previous generations, especially in men’s tennis, slice backhands covered up for weak flat or topspin strokes. You might conclude that someone who hits a lot of slices isn’t that good off the ground. Though Barty’s slice certainly wasn’t the equivalent of the devastating Aryna Sabalenka backhand or Simona Halep’s unbreakable stroke, she held her own.

The following graph shows every player in the WTA top 50 with at least five charted matches in the 52 weeks preceding this year’s Miami event. The horizontal axis is slice percentage (as a fraction of all backhand groundstrokes), from 2% for Alison Riske up to 68% for Barty. The vertical axis is return points won, from 39.8% for Liudmila Samsonova to 48.5% for Halep.

The main reason to visualize this is to emphasize just how extreme that 68% slice rate really is. The next highest belongs to Sara Sorribes Tormo, at 48.5%, and her stubborn, passive game is as unusual as they come.

The plot also shows that while Barty was hardly an elite returner like Halep, Sorribes Tormo, or Iga Świątek, she was better than average. After Indian Wells, she ranked 16th in percentage of return points won among the top 50 players on tour. There’s no strong relationship between slice percentage and return points won, and for those few women who rely on their slices, it’s possible to construct an excellent return game around what is typically a defensive shot.

Pundits tended to overemphasize the novelty value of Barty’s slice, but there’s plenty of evidence that her backspin backhand was no liability. On average, opponents served much more to her backhand than to her forehand–almost twice as often in the ad court. Yet the Aussie won about the same number of points on both wings when a serve landed in one corner of the box or the other. She didn’t hit quite as many return winners as the average woman on tour, but even for the most aggressive returners, that rate is usually in the single digits. Return winners are better for highlight reels than for a coherent tactical approach. Barty’s slice, by contrast, reliably neutralized points and snatched the server’s advantage from her opponents.

* * *

The Ash Barty skill that truly separated her from the pack was her serve. Between last year’s Miami tournament and her retirement, she won 65.5% of her service points. The entire WTA top 50 is jammed into a 12-percentage-point range between Barty and Sorribes Tormo at 53.4%, yet Barty still retired with a 3-point lead over the second best player in this category, Belinda Bencic.

There is hardly a serve-related category that the Australian didn’t dominate. In the same time frame, since Miami in 2021, she hit 10.4% of her deliveries for aces, a tie at the top of the list with Karolína Plíšková. She won 76% of her first serve points, more than 4 percentage points above the next best player, Elena Rybakina. Barty was one of only three women in the top 50 winning more than half of her second serve points. Combine all those advantages, and she held almost 84% of her service games. No other woman held as much as 78%, and fewer than one-third of top 50 men–in a much more serve-dominated game–held as often as Barty did.

Even Serena Williams posted only a handful of seasons in which she won service points at a higher clip than peak Barty.

You get it, I hope. Barty’s serve wasn’t just good. It wasn’t just a little better than everybody else. It was probably the most valuable single shot in women’s tennis.

And it shouldn’t have been possible. Barty is five-foot-five-inches tall. That’s four inches shorter than Serena, six inches shorter than Naomi Osaka, and eight inches shorter than Plíšková, her only equal in the ace category.

Here’s another graph, this time showing height (on the horizontal axis) and percentage of serve points won for every player in the WTA top 50 when Barty said goodbye.

You don’t need a scatterplot to tell you that tall people tend to serve better than short people, and this particular plot won’t contradict you. The three women in the top 50 who are shorter than Barty–Camila Osorio, Jasmine Paolini, and Yulia Putintseva, are among the weakest servers in this group. Most of the best servers are among the tallest women on tour.

Then there’s Ashleigh Barty. It’s almost as if Diego Schwartzman were outserving John Isner. But Barty’s signature weapon was so effortless, and she wielded it for so long, that we rarely noticed how unusual it was.

* * *

All of this leaves one giant unanswered question. How did one of the shortest women on tour get Serena-like results?

Barty didn’t hit as hard as many of her peers. 20 different women hit at least one 115mph serve at the 2022 Australian Open, and the champion wasn’t one of them. She made up for it by doing everything right, from technique to tactics.

The one statistical serving category in which Barty lagged behind tour average was the rate at which she made her first serves. The typical top-50 player lands 62% of them, and in her last 52 weeks on tour, Barty’s number was 59%. She took more risks on the first serve, a necessary part of the approach for a five-foot-five server to hit so many aces.

High-risk first serves were a particularly important part of her tactical arsenal on clay. Five-time doubles major winner Paul McNamee explained, “If you just hit an 80% first serve on clay, it is coming back; on a hard court, not necessarily.” Barty applied that reasoning across surfaces, aiming for the corners with nearly every first serve. And thanks to flawless technique, her opponents rarely knew which corner.

Another reason to take chances on the first serve is that her second serve–at least relative to the average tour player–may have been even better. Barty got far more kick on her second serve than most of her peers did, forcing opponents to hit uncomfortable returns at heights they hadn’t practiced as much. Barty’s coach Craig Tyzzer said, “Most players like to get the ball at hip height but when you do a kick serve you’re basically putting more rotations on the ball, so it jumps quickly off the court and often changes direction. Not a lot of girls hit kick serves, so it’s a definite point of difference.”

Barty said of her focus on the serve, “It’s more about the placement, thinking about what kind of return I’m going to get to try to set up the rest of the point.” As we’ve seen, she hit as many aces as anyone on tour, but she didn’t have to. If every serve came back, she’d still have been in good position to end the point on her second or third shot.

There’s no single answer to the puzzle of Barty’s serving prowess, because in this area Pegula is right. The Australian did everything a little bit better. When you combine all those incremental gains across every aspect of the serve, you end up with a devastating weapon.

* * *

There’s one more quality that separates Ash Barty from the typical player, and it’s been all over the news for the last few weeks. Even before her sudden retirement announcement, she kept tennis at arm’s length and was always willing to step away from the game–even when she was at her best.

She never played more than 20 events in a single year, and she said her permanent goodbye to the tour after one of the most dominating starts to a season in recent memory. Her final WTA ranking was based on 13 tournaments, while Barbora Krejčíková had played twice as many events and Paula Badosa counted a whopping 31. Barty skipped the entire 2015 campaign, and in 2020, she stayed at home rather than grapple with Covid restrictions in order to play the US Open and Roland Garros.

The layoffs were as strategically sound as every other part of her game. When she came back, she was often better than before. After her first long layoff, she won her first comeback doubles tournament, and when she resumed singles competition later that year, she won 13 of 17 matches. She missed nearly a full year to the Covid-19 pandemic, then won her first tournament in 2021. Five months later she hoisted her first Wimbledon crown.

The last couple of decades have seen enough high-profile comebacks on the women’s tour that it’s easy to imagine Barty picking up her racket again. Her personality suggests otherwise, and her career results leave little for her to prove–at least in tennis. It may turn out that she’s just a little bit better than everyone else in her next pursuit, as well.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Jadwiga Jędrzejowska [POL]
Born: 15 October 1912
Died: 28 February 1980
Career: 1929-62
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1937)
Peak Elo rating: 2,207 (1st place, 1938)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 67
 

* * *

When Jadwiga Jędrzejowska made her first appearance at Roland Garros in 1931, a French newspaper referred to her as “the Polish woman, whose name is as massive as her drives.” It didn’t take long for fans to catch on to the sheer power of her forehand, which made her the best player in Poland before her 16th birthday.

Her name was more difficult for international fans to grasp. In 1933, a London newspaper explained that Jędrzejowska’s rise “is why BBC announcers turn grey.” American reporters were still clarifying the pronunciation four years later. She simplified it to “Yen-dray-ow-ska … not really accurate but it is close enough.” When Alice Marble assisted an English reporter with his own representation, the printed result was–and I can only hope this was a joke–“Eeadjeffska.” Fans resorted to nicknames, calling her “Jed” or “Ja-Ja” or “Zsa-Zsa.” At home, she was “Jadzia.”

Opponents might have struggled with her name as well, but their primary difficulty was keeping up with her forehand. At the 1933 Surrey Championships, where she played only her second-ever tournament on an indoor wood court, the London Sunday Dispatch wrote, “she made a number of shots which no woman player in the world could have returned.” Even with practice, few of her colleagues could match her on the ground. Marble played competitive tennis for almost a decade before facing Jędrzejowska, but after a match with the Polish woman in 1937, she said, “I believe it was the first time I was ever outhit.”

Ja-Ja’s raw power, coupled with a steady backhand and surprising speed, was enough to reach three major singles finals and defeat every significant player of her era. In Poland, she nearly wiped out the competition altogether, winning 22 national singles titles, one of them because no one else dared challenge her. Her homeland wasn’t known for producing Wimbledon champions, but then again, as she often said, she was born on a tennis court.

* * *

Jędrzejowska’s quip was almost literally true. Her parents were poor, but their house was adjacent to the courts of the Krakow Academic Sports Association. From a young age, she worked for tips as a ballgirl to contribute to the family coffers. It was a small step from there to a borrowed racket and a glimmer of the power to come.

Her father gave her a homemade racket, and when her friends copied her to make their own, they staged tournaments. Before long, Jadzia was much better than her friends, and she similarly outstripped her fellow teenage girls at the local club. The alternative was to play with the boys. Reporters would later write that she hit her forehand like a man–well, that’s part of the reason why.

By age 15, she had gained national recognition. The newspaper Przegląd Sportowy wrote that no one in Poland hit such drives. She was the sensation of the national championships. Two years later, she took a new crowd by storm at the German Championships, just her second international trip. She forced eventual finalist Hilde Krahwinkel (later Sperling, and a future three-time major champion) to three sets in the second round. A few months later in Merano, she nearly upset Cilly Aussem–the woman who beat Krahwinkel in Hamburg and would win Wimbledon the following year–pushing her to 10-8 in the decider.

Jędrzejowska made her major debut at Roland Garros in 1931. The draw did her no favors, but she managed to impress local experts, going three sets against 5th-seeded veteran Elizabeth Ryan and reaching the semi-finals of the consolation draw. A month later at Wimbledon, she held her own against two-time champion Kitty Godfree, losing another three-setter. Her 8-9 record in 1931 hardly presaged the feats to come, but only two of those losses were in straight sets.

The London Observer offered a brief profile in 1934, when Jędrzejowska was still working her way up the ladder:

Small, dark, and incredibly active, the Polish champion is most attractive to watch. No half measures with her: a fiery and sustained attack is the basis of her game. She hits the ball as if she hated it, and covers the court as quickly as any girl has ever done. Full of courage, the more renowned her opponent the more determinedly does Mlle. Jedrzejowska set about the task of beating her–and her pluck often carries her through.

The Observer sketch turned out to be a bit of a jinx; Ja-Ja fell in the Wimbledon fourth round in a lopsided match against Sarah Palfrey (later Palfrey Cooke). Her ascent to the top of the game would take time.

* * *

1935 brought another step forward. The Polish star improved on her Wimbledon result, reaching the quarter-finals before losing to Helen Jacobs, 6-1, 7-5. She went on a tear after the Championships, winning four titles, including two on English grass over the newest star on the British circuit, Anita Lizana. The Birmingham Gazette reported that “the two girls played a titanic match” to decided the Midland Counties championship in Edgbaston. The paper added of the Polish-Chilean pair, “Although they could not understand one another a firm friendship sprang up between the girls.”

1936 was even better. Jędrzejowska opened her season on the French Riviera, where she–like her pal Lizana–had trouble with the steady Frenchwoman, Simonne Mathieu. After losing two matches to Mathieu in Monte Carlo and Cannes, Ja-Ja got her revenge in Vienna, winning the Austrian national title in what one Viennese newspaper called “an almost endless, nerve-wracking struggle.” The Pole saved seven match points in the second set of a two-and-one-half-hour battle that was finally decided in her favor, 4-6, 7-5, 15-13.

At Wimbledon, she continued her steady progress, this year reaching the semi-finals. In a quarter-final against British hope Kay Stammers, Jed may have played her best tennis yet. “Such was the hair-line judgment of Miss Jedrzejowska’s driving … that it was never perfectly safe to go up, even on the widest and deepest balls.” The London Evening Standard continued, “After she had been passed on three occasions, Miss Stammers abandoned her net campaign.”

This year, she met Jacobs one step closer to the title match, but the result was the same, a 6-4, 6-2 semi-final loss to the woman who would win the tournament. The London Daily Herald wrote, “She appeared to be overwhelmed by the occasion,” a criticism Ja-Ja would hear again.

Jędrzejowska defended her post-Wimbledon victories at the Midland Counties and Welsh Championships. Both titles came against German opponents, prompting one testy letter to the editor about the inappropriateness of a championship of Wales decided between women named Jędrzejowska and Kraus. Presumably, that correspondent was happier when Jed finished her season at home, winning a couple of tournaments in Poland.

She could count eight titles–plus the Wimbledon semi-final–from her 1936 campaign. For the first time, Ja-Ja was a consensus top-ten player, slotting in at sixth on most of the lists published in contemporary newspapers. The best was still yet to come.

* * *

1937 brought a new challenge: Alice Marble. In a little over two months, Jędrzejowska would face the American five times. Unlike anyone else Marble played so many times, Jed got the better of the matchup, winning four of their 1937 duels.

They played twice in the run-up to Wimbledon, and both matches went three sets. Despite the scorelines, the Polish star was clearly the better player. The Observer told the story of the second final, at the Kent Championships in Beckenham:

[Mlle. Jędrzejowska drove] with tremendous power and [showed] complete superiority as far as ground shots were concerned. Mlle. Jędrzejowska’s shots certainly do travel at a rate of knots, and often so completely beat her opponent that Miss Marble’s “Ah! beautiful!” was heard more than once…. [Miss Marble’s] ground-strokes were not comparable to her opponent’s: service and volleying are great assets, but they will not win matches by themselves.

Their third meeting, in the Wimbledon semi-finals, continued in the same vein. The crowd oohed and awed over Ja-Ja’s power, and the Evening Standard neatly summed up the contrast between “Marble, perhaps the finest volleyer, and Miss Jędrzejowska, certainly the hardest driver, among the Wimbledon women”

Jed was often described as “sturdy,” a diplomatic adjective from reporters who could hardly let a paragraph pass without describing a woman player’s physical appearance. But the Evening Standard made clear that her game was more than just power:

Miss Jędrzejowska herself is no mere ‘hit and hope’ player; now and then she pulled out an awkwardly angled short ball and made the other scamper…. Miss Jędrzejowska would be a wonderful recruit for any club of women track runners. Over and over again she raced wide one way, then wide the other to pick up the apparently unreachable. A destroyer for speed, a battle cruiser for power.

The women played twice more on the American swing, splitting two finals in Seabright and Rye. After Marble lost the final in Rye, her coach Eleanor Tennant had seen enough, saying, “Stupid cautious tennis ruins the game for players as well as spectators. You can’t specialize in patball tennis from the backcourt. Go to the net and gamble.”

Alice would take the advice, and she lost only two more matches in the remainder of her amateur career. Jędrzejowska couldn’t claim Marble’s five-major singles haul, but she deserves some credit for the final nudge that pushed the American to greatness. At one point in their rivalry, Marble said that the Polish star was the best player in the world–high praise from the woman who would soon hold that mantle herself.

* * *

Marble’s assessment is jarring, since Jadwiga Jędrzejowska never won a major, and no writer ever placed her at the top of an international ranking list. The consensus among contemporary journalists was that she came in third at the end of 1937 and that she belonged in the middle of the top ten in 1936, 1938, and 1939.

My Elo ratings agree with the year-end assessments, placing her between 3rd and 6th from 1936 to 1939. But had a more modern, week-by-week ranking system been in place in the late 1930s, we might remember Ja-Ja as the first Polish number one.

The Elo ratings first award Jędrzejowska with the top spot on May 30, 1938, after she claimed her first British title of the season with wins over Nell Hopman, Sarah Palfrey (at that point Mrs. Fabyan), Mary Hardwick, and Dorothy Bundy. Her 52-week record at that point was a whopping 64-4, including 13 titles. The span covers her four wins over Marble, two against Palfrey, and one against her former nemesis, Helen Jacobs.

Ja-Ja (left) with Helen Jacobs, who saved
her personality for the court

History is preoccupied with two of the defeats: Ja-Ja lost in the finals of both Wimbledon and the US National Championships. The first match was a tight loss to Dorothy Round, and the second was more lopsided, against Anita Lizana. Both were great players who could rise to the biggest of occasions. But neither one sustained their form into 1938. Round married and gave birth, skipping the entire 1938 season. Lizana struggled to cope with the pressure as the new national hero of Chile.

Jędrzejowska, on the other hand, just kept winning. She dropped a final to Marble in June of 1938, then defended her titles at Beckenham and Queen’s Club, conclusively beating both Palfrey and Hilde Sperling. On the strength of those wins, despite a quarter-final loss to Jacobs at Wimbledon, she held on to the retrospective, Elo-based number one ranking until August, when Marble finally took it over.

* * *

After Ja-Ja lost in the round of 16 at Forest Hills in 1938, she had less than one year remaining before the European War wiped out competitive tennis for the duration. Rising political tensions–combined with a lingering foot injury–limited her play during that time.

Still, she had a few more highlights in store. In 1939, she reached the Roland Garros final, battling inconsistency in the early rounds before ultimately falling, 6-3, 8-6, to Simonne Mathieu in the title match. Two weeks later, she won her third straight Queen’s Club title with another drubbing of Hilde Sperling. And in July, barely a month before Germany invaded, she won yet another pair of Polish Championships.

When the war began, Jędrzejowska was just shy of her 27th birthday. She may never have regained her 1937 form, but the six-year conflict prevented her from finding out. Instead, she struggled through the war, waiting tables until she could no longer endure serving the German occupiers. Despite a chance to escape to Sweden–arranged by tennis aficionado King Gustav, who also intervened to save Jean Borotra–she stayed at home. By the end of the war, she had lost more than 40 pounds. Her home, along with family mementos and tennis trophies, had burned to the ground.

Yet the woman who was born on a tennis court wasn’t about to give up so easily. When Wimbledon resumed in 1946, Ja-Ja was there. She lost her first match, but she picked up the Wimbledon Plate after winning six matches in the consolation draw. Now in her mid-30s, she successfully defended the Plate in 1947.

Jędrzejowska cut back on her travel, but she continued playing Polish events for more than a decade. She finally retired after winning the triple–singles, doubles, and mixed–at the 1961 national tournament. Even then, she wasn’t done, accepting the invitation of Gladys Heldman to travel to New York for the 1962 US Championships. 25 years after her 1937 run to the final, she lost in the first round. Still, she took a set off of Margot Dittmeyer, a West German 23 years her junior.

More than a decade after her last tournament appearance, a journalist asked Ja-Ja if she was still playing. The 64-year-old said yes–the obviously was implied. “How can you stop?”

* * *

Thanks to Damian Kust and Peter Wetz for research and translation help from the Polish and German, respectively.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Tony Roche [AUS]
Born: 17 May 1945
Career: 1961-80
Plays: Left-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1969)
Peak Elo rating: 2,132 (2nd place, 1969)
Major singles titles: 1 (1966 French)
Total singles titles: 55
 

* * *

If you’re anything like me, you’ve heard quite a lot about Tony Roche, just not for reasons that would put him on this list.

The Australian lefty is not only better known for his doubles prowess than for singles–he won 13 men’s doubles majors, 12 of them with John Newcombe–but he’s most familiar to younger fans as a super-coach, the man in Roger Federer’s box from 2005 to May of 2007. That was a pretty good run for Federer. Before that, Roche worked with Ivan Lendl, Pat Rafter, and Lleyton Hewitt.

It’s true that, in contrast with double-digit majors as both a coach and a doubles specialist, Roche’s singles career pales in comparison–whose wouldn’t? His sole slam title as a singles player came at the 1966 French Championships over István Gulyás, and he lost his other five other major finals. Those five defeats summarize the challenge of men’s tennis in his era: Four different opponents, all multi-major winners, all number ones at some point in their careers, and all Australian.

How obscenely loaded was Australian men’s tennis in the 1960s and early 70s? Roche didn’t play a Davis Cup singles rubber until 1974, when he was 28 years old. Yes, he missed some chances because he turned pro as a member of the “Handsome Eight” in 1968, a bit earlier than the Aussie establishment approved of. Yet he won 11 singles titles in 1966 and another 14 in 1967, and he still spent those two years relegated to doubles duty while Newcombe and Roy Emerson handled the singles.

The dawn of Open tennis made things even worse. Once professionals were again welcome at majors, the road to a title often went through Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, or both. I’m not sure that Roche was the player of his era that suffered the most from bad timing, but there sure were a lot of roadblocks in his path.

* * *

Tony Roche’s peak years ran from about 1966, when he turned 21, to 1970. My Elo ratings place him in the top ten (combining both amateurs and professionals) for only those five seasons. He rated a top-five place from 1967 to 1969.

He peaked at #2 in 1969 behind Laver, who won all four majors that year. When I wrote about Frank Kovacs as part of this series, I listed several ways that players can be underrated in the eyes of history. Let’s add one more piece of advice for would-be legends: Don’t have your best year when one of the greatest players of all time is putting together one of the outstanding seasons in the game’s history.

Take a look at this list of slam exits for Roche. I’ve omitted a handful of bad early-round losses, but only a few.

Year  Major  Round  Opponent  
1964  AO     QF     Emerson   
1964  US     QF     Emerson   
                              
1965  AO     SF     Stolle    
1965  RG     F      Stolle    
                              
1966  AO     QF     Ashe      
1966  W      QF     Drysdale  
                              
1967  AO     SF     Emerson   
1967  RG     F      Emerson   
1967  W      2R     Richey    
                              
1968  W      F      Laver     
1968  US     4R     González  
                              
1969  AO     SF     Laver     
1969  RG     SF     Rosewall  
1969  W      SF     Newcombe  
1969  US     F      Laver     
                              
1970  W      QF     Rosewall  
1970  US     F      Rosewall 

This isn’t bad draw luck, at least not most of the time. It was a field so packed with great players, especially when the pros returned in 1968, that there were almost no cheap majors. The one time that a draw really opened up for Roche–at Roland Garros in 1966–he won it.

The most striking thing to me about the list of losses is that Roche could–and did–beat these guys. He won a set in four of his five major final defeats, and he came within a whisker of stopping Laver’s grand slam before it began. Their 1969 semi-final in Australia ran to 7-5, 22-20, 9-11, 1-6, 6-3, and that’s right after Roche played a five-set, 63-game quarter-final to get past John Newcombe!

Roche (right) with John Newcombe

In Laver’s career year, Rod lost only seven matches between the beginning of the year and the US Open in tournament play. Four of them were against Tony.

It wasn’t just Rocket Rod who was vulnerable. Here are Roche’s career head-to-head records against his main rivals:

Opponent  Record  
Emerson   8-13    
Laver     8-9     
Newcombe  16-28   
Rosewall  9-7     
Stolle    8-12

Roche wasn’t quite the equal of his multi-major-winning countrymen, but he wasn’t far off, either. Newcombe said, “Some of the hardest matches I’ve ever played, real blood and thunder five-setters, were against Tony.” The long-time doubles partners played eight five-set matches on tour, and they each won four.

* * *

In his book The Golden Era, with co-author Larry Writer, Laver offers a sketch of Roche’s weapons:

A leftie, there was no match he went into without a chance of victory. He had possibly the best backhand volley, played with heavy top-spin, in the business. He could play it straight, go under it, hit through it. He connected with the ball sharply with a short back-swing, racquet head up. His first serve was a beauty and his second wasn’t too far behind. His approach shots and backhand volley were top-notch; his forehand volley, which had too much whip, wasn’t always accurate. He could mis-hit because he put on too much top-spin. To me, Tony had a great ability to win points, not necessarily to win matches.

Rod’s last remark is a common assessment of the players on the Tennis 128 list who finished their careers with zero or one major titles. The implication is there was some strategic or mental component that prevented him from maximizing his talent. It’s also a familiar refrain when talking about doubles greats with underwhelming singles careers. I hesitate to disagree with the Rocket about anything, but I’m not sure he’s right this time.

The first piece of evidence is the obvious: Roche won more than just points: he won a whole lot of matches. TennisArchives.com gives him credit for 761 of them, including 55 title matches and six major semi-finals. As we’ve seen, those victories included a whole lot of upsets over more highly-regarded players.

Roche at Wimbledon in 1967

Roche was also effective in fifth sets, when mental stamina, strategic thinking, and match management come most dramatically into play. In the first twelve years of his career, before accumulated injuries took their toll on his staying power, he won 31 of 46 five-setters.

As a product of the Harry Hopman system of Australian tennis, he was physically prepared for a grueling match every time he went on court. That off-court mentality was part of what he brought to the young Roger Federer:

[W]hen Tony asked me, ‘can you play seven times, five sets [to win slams]?’ That was the question. I looked at him, I go, ‘I don’t know’.

He said, ‘you want to be able to answer that question, yes, with no problem’. That’s what I’ve worked for. Ever since then, I’m confident I can do it.

It’s never easy to separate a coach’s contribution from how a player might have otherwise developed, but it’s worth noting that while Fed was 7-7 in five-setters before working with Tony and 2-3 during their time together, he has won 24 of 37 since. That’s almost exactly the same win rate as Roche’s own.

* * *

Ivan Lendl said of Roche, “I think he’s the best coach in the business.” What’s remarkable about Tony’s off-court contributions is not just his list of slam-winning charges, but the variety of coaching roles in which he has excelled.

Roche (left) with Federer and Laver

His influence on Federer is a good place to start. As we’ve seen, he encouraged Fed to practice harder and think in terms of the toughest physical challenges he could face on court. Roche also contributed a major element to the distinctive style that would ultimately win 20 majors:

I was able to lift [my backhand slice] up one more level when I started working with Tony Roche, who in my opinion had one of the great slices ever. He explained to me how important it was to punch the ball, how important it was to not have just a defensive slice but also an offensive one, and one with variation that sets up stuff beautifully.

Roche had some motivational tricks up his sleeve, too. In 1974, the first year of World Team Tennis, he served as player-coach of the Denver Racquets. His lineup was uninspiring, with himself and Françoise Dürr as the biggest names on a team that would take on the likes of Billie Jean King’s Philadelphia Freedoms and and the Jimmy Connors-led Baltimore Banners. It’s easy to see how Denver won only two of their first ten matches.

The Australian’s solution? He took his team out drinking. The squad had an opportunity to vent their frustration, and within a week, Denver had narrowly edged out Billie Jean’s Freedoms. Roche’s squad made the playoffs, and with another victory against Philadelphia in the final round, the Racquets were WTT’s inaugural champions. In what must have been the easiest-ever vote for an end-of season award, Roche was named Coach of the Year.

In the late 1990s, after working his magic on Lendl, Roche teamed with John Newcombe as an unorthodox coach/captain duo for the Aussie Davis Cup team. The nation’s dominance had waned since Tony’s playing days, and the trophy hadn’t been in Australian hands since 1986. Armed with Mark Philippoussis, a young Lleyton Hewitt, and the doubles pair of Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde, Roche helped Newcombe bring home the Cup in 1999.

Newcombe said of his long-time doubles partner, “I always felt there was a man with immense talent and strength of character beside me. He was a brick wall, utterly dependable.” Most of those traits have more value in doubles and coaching than in singles, but Newk–with his 40-plus matches against Roche–knew better than anyone just how versatile the man was. The second-best Australian lefty serve-and-volleyer in the Rod Laver era was still pretty damn good.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Vinnie Richards [USA]
Born: 20 March 1903
Died: 28 September 1959
Career: 1918-50
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1927)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 45
 

* * *

In 1933, the Goudey gum company attracted customers with a set of 48 trading cards. The cards–one with every pack–spanned 18 different sports. Every vintage baseball card collector dreams of owning the Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth issues, and other installments in the set, such as Jim Thorpe, Babe Didrikson, Red Grange, and Bobby Jones, can command thousands of dollars in good condition.

Goudey included three tennis players. First was Bill Tilden, of course, as his name was synonymous with the sport in the decades between the wars. Ellsworth Vines merited a spot as the reigning Wimbledon and US champion.

The third was Vinnie Richards. Richards’s inclusion is a bit puzzling. He turned 30 in 1933, and he had briefly retired three years earlier. He hadn’t played a major amateur tournament since 1926, as he turned pro at the end of that season. He won the US Pro championship in 1933, but it was against a weak field. Since Tilden joined the professional ranks at the end of 1930, Vinnie had been a distant number two, at best.

One explanation is that Goudey wanted three American tennis players, and after Tilden and Vines, there weren’t a lot of great candidates. Maybe the ad men in charge of the set struggled to fill out a 48-name list.* Lending credence to that theory, there’s a card for dog-sled racer Leonhard Seppala.

* Helen Wills, anyone?! There were only two women in the set.

The more likely explanation was that Richards had long been a celebrity, and his name recognition far outstripped his recent on-court accomplishments. While Vinnie never really challenged for the top spot, he was the Forrest Gump of 1920s tennis, playing a key role in the sport’s biggest stories for 15 years, especially whenever Tilden stepped aside. He was a frequent test case for the amateur rule, and he ultimately became the first male star to turn pro. He racked up dozens of tournament victories, often without losing a set. As an amateur, he toppled Big Bill more than anyone else, even if Tilden got the better of their career head-to-head.

Vinnie’s crowning achievement was a three-medal performance–two golds and a silver–at the 1924 Paris Olympics. Yet somehow, that story wasn’t even the first or second most newsworthy event of his year. After a season like that, it’s no wonder he became a celebrity.

* * *

The saga began in December of 1923. A few days before Christmas, Richards was one of four men nominated for the Olympic tennis team. Reigning Wimbledon champion Bill Johnston couldn’t go, so the foursome would be Vinnie, Bill Tilden, 1923 Wimbledon finalist Frank Hunter, and veteran doubles star Watson Washburn.

At the end of January, Vinnie got married. Wedded bliss seemed to improve his game, which had sagged in the second half of 1923. He won a title at the Brooklyn Heights Casino event in Feburary, then the newlyweds hit the road for a tennis-themed honeymoon. Richards won titles at the Jamaica International, the Florida State Championship, and the Southeastern Championship. He didn’t lose a set on the trip.

He was back at home in New York the first week of April, when he won the US Indoors with a scintillating final-round victory over Hunter. According to Tilden, Richards was “the greatest volleyer the world has ever known,” and his game agreed with indoor conditions. He retired the trophy, having now won the tournament three times.

While Richards was traveling up and down the East Coast, he found out from the newspapers that his amateur status wasn’t as secure as he thought.

Vinnie made his money from journalism, at least some of which he wrote himself. It was common practice for sports stars to lend their byline to newspapers, which used famous names to boost sales. Richards began making money this way as a teenager, when a writer named Edward Sullivan (yes, that Ed Sullivan!) penned the copy attributed to the tennis star.

Richards attended the Columbia School of Journalism in 1922, so at some point, he must have started contributing more of the prose that went out under his name. Regardless of just how much he sweated over a typewriter, Vinnie considered journalism his profession, and he needed to make money somehow.

The American Olympic Committee expected its athletes to hew to an exacting standard of amateurism. The New York Times summarized the Committee’s ruling in March:

Athletes who are members of the American Olympic team, regardless of the sport of which they are exponents, will be prohibited from writing for newspapers, magazines, periodicals or news agencies during the length of time they are under the direct jurisdiction of the American Olympic Committee.

The US Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) had recently reviewed its own policy on amateurism and paid writing–more on that in a moment–but the Olympic Committee went even further. Vinnie had a contract to cover the Paris games for a national news agency, and there was no way to both fulfill his professional commitments and abide by the Committee’s decision.

Tilden was better known (and presumably much better paid) as a journalist than Richards. He immediately announced that he wouldn’t play the Olympics because of the policy. His decision didn’t pack the punch it might have, as he had already said in December he was unlikely to go to Paris. But the Times hinted that Vinnie might well follow his colleague’s example.

* * *

For two weeks at the end of April and the beginning of May of 1924, tennis was in the news almost every day, none of it because talented men and women were hitting balls across a net.

The USLTA had determined it would adopt a stricter interpretation of its policy on paid writing. Up to that point, the federation had accepted that its most prominent members–of whom Tilden towered over the rest–would earn money from their writing, and that the topic would often be tennis. Now it would take a harder line and consider players who made substantial sums of money that way to be professionals.

The rule wouldn’t go into effect until January 1925, but Big Bill was a prideful man–not to mention a tactician both on and off the court. On April 22, he quit the Davis Cup team, reasoning that if he did not qualify as an amateur in January of 1925, he wouldn’t in September of 1924, either.

In an astonishing coincidence*, reports emerged a week later that promoter Tex Rickard was looking at staging professional tennis events in 1925. Vinnie told the New York Times: “I know it is being thoroughly considered, not only by myself but by Tilden and a number of other top-ranking players.”

* Not a coincidence

It wasn’t the first time Vinnie clashed with the federation. Richards had been suspended by the USLTA back in 1919 for the egregious offense of working for a sporting goods manufacturer. Yes, the arrangement was basically that of endorser and endorsee, and the two sides quickly resolved their differences when Vinnie’s employer pulled advertisements that used his name to sell rackets. But it’s no wonder that Richards was willing to consider options outside the stifling purview of amateur tennis.

The day after the possibility of a pro tennis venture was leaked, Vinnie officially joined Tilden on the sidelines. He removed himself from Davis Cup consideration (possibly an empty gesture, as he hadn’t even made the team the previous year), and made it official that he’d travel to the Olympics only in his capacity as a journalist.

American tennis was in turmoil, yet at least in the New Yorker’s case, the situation was defused quickly. Richards met with a couple of USLTA officials, who assured him that he would retain his amateur status for the rest of the year, and that he’d have the opportunity to defend that status when the new rule came into effect. He was back in the Davis Cup mix, and a week later, he got out of his journalistic commitments and agreed to play in Paris.

The Olympic Committee called Vinnie’s bluff, and he fought to a draw with the tennis federation. Tilden, as always, was the bigger story, and his case would remain unresolved: He would play the US National Championships, but he skipped the Olympics, and his battles with the USLTA were far from over.

In three years, Richards would be playing professional tennis. Another four years after that, Tilden would join him. In the meantime, Vinnie had a lot of matches to win.

* * *

The bureaucratic squabbling didn’t leave Richards much time to prepare for his European trip. His first stop was Wimbledon. It was only his second appearance there. In 1923, he lost in the fourth round to Bill Johnston. Paired with Frank Hunter, who would be his partner this time around as well, he lost in the quarters to the French “musketeers” Jean Borotra and René Lacoste.

In 1924, Vinnie took a step forward in both disciplines. He reached the quarter-finals in singles before losing to Borotra (who won the title), and he and Hunter won the men’s doubles title. It was Richards’s first major final with a partner other than Tilden, and it added to his growing reputation as one of the best doubles players of the era. The only blot on his fortnight was a third-round loss in the mixed doubles with fellow American Olympian Marion Jessup.

Richards and Hunter had established themselves as the team to beat in Paris, but no one seriously considered Vinnie a threat in singles. Nor did they figure on a deep run from the Richards/Jessup duo after their early exit in London.

Vinnie didn’t offer much more hope in the first half of the Olympic week. In the second round, he needed five sets to get past the unheralded Indian, Mohammed Sleem, then went four sets against the Spaniard Manuel Alonso. The Times called it “a magnificent battle,” but it was also another long one for a player competing in three events.

The match of the tournament arrived early, in the quarter-final between Richards and Lacoste. The French “crocodile” had reached the Wimbledon final, and playing at home, he was favored to win. Richards escaped a two-sets-to-one deficit in style:

He played at times brilliantly and always surely. From 1-all, he climbed to 4-1 and then lost two games. But his reserves were unexhausted and, sometimes taking risks but never losing by it, he took first his own and then Lacoste’s service, winning as brilliant and well-fought a match as has ever been played in an Olympic championship.

Richards survived a cautious, wind-blown semi-final against the Italian player Uberto de Morpurgo, while Borotra lost to his compatriot Henri Cochet. The gold medal match went five sets, as the typically slow-starting Cochet lost the first two frames, then charged back to even the score. Despite the dramatic scoreline, the final failed to reach “any great pitch of brilliance,” and Vinnie played more conservatively than usual. Still, it was enough to outwait the Frenchman. Richards won gold, 6-4, 6-4, 5-7, 4-6, 6-2.

By the end of the Olympics, the New Yorker had learned just how formidable the French team would become. In the men’s doubles, Richards and Hunter needed five sets to get past Lacoste and Borotra in the semis and another five to seal Vinnie’s second gold medal against Cochet and Jacques Brugnon.

In the mixed, Richards and Jessup beat Borotra (with Marguerite Broquedis) in the first round and Molla Mallory (playing for Norway with Jack Nielsen) in the second. Vinnie fell one match short of the triple, losing to the superior American duo of R. Norris Williams and Hazel Wightman. Wightman was probably the strongest doubles player among the women, so if Williams, the team captain, had chosen different teams, Richards may well have taken home three gold medals.

* * *

The US team swept the five tennis events, with 18-year-old Helen Wills winning women’s singles and Wills and Wightman combining for the women’s doubles gold. But for American tennis fans, the real action was yet to come. The Olympic events were marred by the absence of Bill Tilden and Suzanne Lenglen, and they were played on clay, not the grass of Wimbledon and Forest Hills. Plus, Americans won 45 of the 112 gold medals in Paris, so there were plenty of other sporting triumphs to celebrate.

Richards skipped the traditional warm-up events before the national championships, so he didn’t play another competitive match until the national doubles championships in late August. (For most of the amateur era, the doubles tournament was held separately from the singles.) This was the event where Vinnie made his reputation: He had won the event three times, all with Tilden, between 1918 and 1922.

He failed to add another men’s doubles title when he and Frank Hunter lost in a five-set semi-final to the brothers Howard and Robert Kinsey. The Times blamed Hunter, calling Vinnie “the outstanding figure on the court.” Richards made up for it by winning the mixed title with Wills, capping their run with a three-set final against Tilden and Molla Mallory.*

* If a genie ever offers you the chance to travel back in time to the match of your choosing, it would be hard to do better than a major mixed doubles final between Mallory/Tilden and Wills/Richards.

At Forest Hills, the New Yorker’s singles game showed no rust. He reached the semi-finals with four straight-set victories, setting up a semi-final clash with Tilden. The pair hadn’t played since 1922, and even before that, Vinnie held his own, winning four of their first ten meetings. Yet Big Bill was known for rising to the occasion. The one previous Tilden-Richards meeting at the national championship, in 1920, had been all Bill, complete with a 6-0 final set.

Tilden was as prolific a writer as he was a tennis champion, so it’s no surprise to find a full description of the Richards game in one of his early books:

Richards is a player who uses spin on every shot. He has no flat shots in his game, except an occasional overhead. This is one reason why there is a lack of speed and pace to Richards’s ground game. He has even discarded top spin from his game. Every shot, except an occasional wild lift drive off his forehand–a shot I have repeatedly urged him to discard for a more normal drive–is hit with under spin. He slices his normal forehand and every backhand. He slices his volley, overhead, and service. It is only because he mixes the amount of slice with great cleverness, couples it with an uncanny sense of anticipation and unerring judgment in advancing to the net, that Richards is the great player that he is.

Hitting harder and deeper than before, Vinnie finally had a chance. He wouldn’t beat Tilden this time, either, but it was the battle that would seal his reputation in American tennis. The final score was 4-6, 6-2, 8-6, 4-6 6-4, and as Bill wrote, “Richards and I staged the match of the tournament. I never have seen Richards play so well, nor have I played better tennis this year. It was anyone’s match to the last point.” Vinnie’s defeat would look even better after Tilden straight-setted Bill Johnston in the final.

The US National Championships were more compelling to American tennis fans than the Olympics had been, but both paled next to the Davis Cup. The international team competition was the unquestioned pinnacle of tennis in the 1920s. The United States had held the trophy since winning it back from Australasia in 1920, and in 1924, they would face Australia (now excluding New Zealand and limited to the single country) for the fourth time in five years.

The US owed its dominance to Tilden and Johnston–Big Bill and Little Bill. The two men had played all 22 singles rubbers for the American side since the war, and won all but one of them. Tilden patched up his spat with the federation in time for the 1924 title defense, but Johnston was in decline, and he ceded his second singles spot to Richards.

Playing Davis Cup singles for the first time, Vinnie delivered. Facing Gerald Patterson and Pat O’Hara Wood, Tilden and Richards won all twelve singles sets they played. The Aussies managed only to grab a single frame from Tilden and Johnston in the doubles. Johnston would retake his singles role from Richards in 1925, but Vinnie never lost a match–singles or doubles–in Davis Cup competition.

* * *

When Richards turned professional at the end of 1926, he was as famous as ever. He won three of four matches against Tilden that year, and because Big Bill lost early at Forest Hills, the USLTA named Vinnie the top-ranked American.

His status at the top of the table would always be tenuous. Shortly after his first professional tour, he began a high-profile series of matches with Karel Koželuh, who consistently outplayed him on clay courts. Richards would have to settle for triumphs on grass, meeting the Czech at the US Pro finals in 1928, 1929, and 1930, and winning two of the three.

Then in 1931, Tilden turned pro, and Vinnie was back to challenger status on fast courts as well. Veteran journalist Ned Potter wrote of Richards before the 1924 nationals, “The master was no longer a hero to his valet.” Maybe, but between 1931 and 1946, the master–despite a ten-year disadvantage in age–won 54 of their 59 recorded pro meetings.

Richards had to settle for fame and modest fortune. He never lost his desire to compete, entering pro events into his 40s, even after his expanding waistline slowed him down. He once tried to quantify his own career: “I figure I played about 14,000 matches, and in each one I ran about four and a half miles. That means I ran 56,000 miles or about twice around the world.” His assumptions were questionable, but the spirit was sound. No matter what obstacles the USLTA threw in his path, the man played a lot of great tennis.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Petra Kvitová [CZE]
Born: 8 March 1990
Career: 2007-present
Plays: Left-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (2011)
Peak Elo rating: 2,175 (1st place, January 2012)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 28
 

* * *

Petra Kvitová’s serve is so big, it renders rankings irrelevant. She has played 119 matches in her career against opponents in the top ten, and she’s won 57 of them–just short of half. The winning percentage shouldn’t come as a surprise, as she has spent long stretches of time both in and out of the top ten herself. The odd thing is that her ranking–and its suggestion of her form at each stage of her career–has no relationship to her results.

Here are her records against the top ten, split up by her own ranking at the time of each match:

Petra Rank    Record  Win %  
as top 5      15-17     47%  
ranked 6-10   18-27     40%  
ranked 11-20  12-6      67%  
ranked 21-50  8-6       57%  
ranked 51+    4-6       40%

The last row of that table is the eye-grabber, as it represents most of Kvitová’s career from her debut on tour to her breakthrough Wimbledon semi-final run in 2010. Petra’s first encounter with a top-tenner came in only her 14th tour-level match, at Memphis in 2008. 17 years old and ranked 143rd in the world, she qualified for the main draw and met top seed Venus Williams in the first round. Kvitová won in three. After the match, Venus delivered an understated warning to the rest of the tour: “She had a good serve and she was left-handed.”

Williams might have added: And she was inconsistent. The six-footer from the Czech Republic lost her next match to another player with a triple-digit ranking, Alla Kudryatseva, and two events later, she lost to 164th-ranked Elena Baltacha in an ITF $75K draw. Kvitová boosted her ranking exactly 100 places in 2008, from 150th to 50th, but she lost nine matches to players outside the top 100. The form that earned the shock victory over Venus and pushed WTA #1 Ana Ivanović to three sets in Montreal was often absent.

Petra had to wait a year and a half for her next top-ten victory. The delay was a price worth paying. At the 2009 US Open, still ranked outside the top 70, she advanced to the third round and earned a meeting with top seed and world #1 Dinara Safina. After two and half hours, Kvitová came through in a third-set tiebreak despite losing one more point than she won. Two days later, she lost to 50th-ranked Yanina Wickmayer.

* * *

Everyone on tour quickly became aware of the damage that Kvitová and her serve could wreak. The rest of the world took note when she recorded her fourth top-ten victory at Wimbledon in 2010.

Petra’s first three wins at the Championships came against higher-ranked players, including seeds Zheng Jie and Victoria Azarenka. British papers were already calling her a giant-killer before her fourth-rounder with third seed Caroline Wozniacki. Wozniacki was four months younger than Kvitová, but she had won their previous two encounters, and the Danish star was only a few months away from reaching the number one ranking for the first time.

None of that mattered. Kvitová obliterated her. The score of 6-2, 6-0 might even understate how lopsided it was. Petra lost only six points on serve, and the match was over in 46 minutes. Reuters reported that the Czech’s “violent display of hitting” left Wozniacki “aghast.” Remarkably, Petra sustained enough form to get through her next match as well, fighting off three match points to advance past Kaia Kanepi in the quarter-finals. It took a quality performance from top seed Serena Williams to finally stop her.

The inevitable swoon didn’t take long to arrive. She lost five in a row after Wimbledon, four of them to lower-ranked opponents. She won only five more tour-level matches for the remainder of the year, and finished her season with a loss to 52nd-ranked Sofia Arvidsson at an ITF event in Poitiers. No one could take away the “Wimbledon semi-finalist” tag from her bio, but her ranking still wasn’t good enough to merit a place in the main draw of the Australian Open warm-up event in Sydney.

The 20-year-old Czech had gotten this far with a powerful lefty serve and tactics as aggressive as anyone’s on tour. When big hitters are so inconsistent, the usual prescription is to ease up a bit and play higher-percentage tennis. Petra probably heard that advice, but she didn’t listen. She went big in the opposite direction.

* * *

Women’s tennis stats are a bit spotty for the first few years of Kvitová’s career, but we have enough data to get a general idea of how her game–and her serve in particular–has evolved.

In 2010, Petra won 57% of her service points and hit aces on 4.1% of them, two uninspiring numbers that make you wonder what the fuss was all about. She posted an ace rate of 10% or better in only three matches, and one of those was the Wozniacki beatdown, where the total of 5 aces in 33 points is almost too small to count. Kvitová’s serve looked good, and the angles she generated with her left-handed delivery took some getting used to, but the results–at least apart from her best days–didn’t match the reputation.

Everything changed in 2011. She won 61.5% of total serve points, and her ace rate jumped to 5.5%. As usual with tennis stats, the differences sound small, but both improvements were enormous. Her 2010 serve win rate of 57% was (and still would be) below average on tour, and 61.5% moved her into the elite. Petra continues to serve at the same level a decade later: Her 61.2% win rate in the last 52 weeks is good for sixth on tour and a tie with Iga Świątek.

Petra serves to Johanna Konta at Wimbledon in 2019

The ace rate jump, from 4.1% to 5.5%, isn’t quite as dramatic. But the improvement was particularly striking on the fast surfaces where Petra excels, and the difference showed up clearly in her results. In 2011, she recorded a double-digit ace rate in at least 11 different matches (up from 3 the previous year), including the Paris Indoors final against Kim Clijsters and four consecutive matches at Wimbledon. Kvitová’s ace rate at the grass-court major improved from 5.8% in 2010 to 8.9% in 2011–even though Maria Sharapova limited her to a single ace in the 2011 final.

Petra’s grass-court ace rate is important partly because so many her career highlights–starting with her 2011 and 2014 Wimbledon titles–have come on that surface. But even more, they hint that she was serving bigger on other surfaces, too, just that on slower courts, she benefited from more return errors and second-shot putaways. Except for relatively small sample of matches that have been charted, we don’t have stats like “percent of serves unreturned” or “percent of points won in two strokes or less.” The available evidence, such as it is, suggests that Kvitová’s serve–always tricky–developed into a truly fearsome weapon in 2011.

* * *

Petra is best known for her ad-court slice serve out wide. Like the delivery that has saved Rafael Nadal a gazillion break points, it takes advantage of the server’s left-handedness and pulls right-handed returners way off the court to their backhand side.

But here’s something you might not have known. She hits way more aces, and wins more points on her first serve, when she targets a righty’s forehand. Based on over 150 matches logged by Match Charting Project volunteers, here’s how her results break out in the ad court:

Direction  Freq  Won%  Ace%  
T           32%   71%   18%  
Body         9%   56%    0%  
Wide        59%   69%    8% 

She hits the wide serve much more often, but look at that difference in aces! I can understand why she’d opt to go wide most of the time: There’s more room for error, and even an average (for her) first serve in that direction is unlikely to get a strong reply. But because she has her opponents leaning in that direction, her down-the-middle serves are more than twice as likely to go untouched.

The trends are the same in the deuce court:

Direction  Freq  Won%  Ace%  
T           50%   64%    8%  
Body        12%   57%    0%  
Wide        38%   71%   13% 

More serves go to the righty backhand, but when she goes to the forehand, she hits more aces and wins more points overall. And in this direction, the difference in frequency isn’t as stark. It’s as if all those wide serves in the ad court get the returner thinking backhand, and that’s enough to give Petra extra room on the forehand side.

* * *

Let’s go back to something you probably do know about Kvitová. She’s one of the most aggressive players in the modern game. Setting aside the difficulty of defining “aggressive” in a way that accommodates both baseliners and the elite serve-and-volleyers of the past, she may be the most aggressive great player of any era.

The average rally length in those 150-plus charted matches is 3.3 strokes. Of all the players with at least 20 charted matches, only three other women have recorded such short points: Julia Görges, also at 3.3, and CoCo Vandeweghe and Aryna Sabalenka at 3.2. To give an idea of how extreme one’s tactics must be to play such short points, the crowd at 3.4 includes Jelena Ostapenko and Dayana Yastremska.

Rally lengths alone might be enough to prove the accuracy of Petra’s reputation. But Match Charting Project contributor Lowell West went one step further, devising a metric he called Aggression Score to quantify how often players ended points. “Aggression” on the tennis court isn’t necessarily good or bad–it could mean a player is ending points quickly with unreturnable shots, or that she’s hitting tons of unforced errors.

When Lowell wrote up his research, the current wave of young ball-bashers like Sabalenka and Yastremska had yet to arrive. In 2015, Petra truly stood alone. Lowell’s graph shows just how unique she was:

It didn’t matter if she was serving or returning: She ended points more quickly than any of the other big names on tour. In fairness, Görges might have joined her in the extreme top right corner of the graph; we just didn’t have very much data on her at that point. (We’ve added several thousand matches since then, including a few dozen of Julia’s.)

Kvitová aimed for the lines and ended points quickly from the day she debuted on tour. But this is another category where it appears that she adopted more extreme tactics after her first few seasons. In the three matches we’ve charted from her 2010 Wimbledon run, her average rally length was 3.3. In the final three matches of her path to the 2014 Wimbledon title, she lopped about 10% off that number and played just under 3.0 strokes per point.

* * *

The top-line summary of Petra’s career suggests a lot of ups and downs, and she has certainly had her share. She narrowly escaped career-ending injury in a December 2016 home invasion, then she somehow made it back on tour in time for the 2017 French Open. Her other health scares hardly compare to that one, but she has battled a range of other maladies, from ankle problems to mononucleosis.

Yet her results have been remarkably steady. She went five years between her second and third major finals (at 2014 Wimbledon and the 2019 Australian), but she won at least one tournament every season from 2011 to 2019, and won multiple titles in all but one of those years, not to mention an Olympic bronze medal in 2016. In the same span, she won 30 Fed Cup rubbers, helping lead the Czech side to a whopping six championships.

With her singles medal in Rio

Even as her results suffer–she’s 9-8 in 2022 through the Miami third round and has reached only two finals in the 2020s–she remains a thorn in the side of the best players in the world. Early in 2020, she fell out of the top ten. But in her sixth match with a double-digit ranking that year, she upset yet another WTA #1, Ashleigh Barty. Last month, she struck again, ousting top seed and then-#2 Aryna Sabalenka in the Dubai second round. The average rally length in that match was, unsurprisingly, well under three shots.

Kvitová rarely gets much credit as an influential figure in modern tennis history. She never reached the top spot on the ranking table, and as imposing as her serve is, there aren’t that many six-foot lefties to follow in her footsteps. Yet a bullet-point list of the Czech’s attributes–big serves, aggressive returns, go-for-broke tactics, erratic results–fits an increasing number of leading women every year. Her “violent display” at Wimbledon twelve years ago would hardly merit a mention today. The current crop of young stars grew up watching Petra win Wimbledon, and clearly, they were taking notes.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Sarah Palfrey Cooke [USA]
Born: 18 September 1912
Died: 27 February 1996
Career: 1926-47
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 4 (in 1934, and US #1 in 1945, when no world rankings were published)
Peak Elo rating: 2,273 (1st place, 1941)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 33
 

* * *

Sarah Palfrey Cooke was, in the parlance of her time, “much married.” In 1934, when she was 22, she wed upper-crust Bostonian Marshal Fabyan. They split five years later, and in 1940 she married Elwood Cooke, a fellow tennis player who had lost to Bobby Riggs in the Wimbledon final the year before. The second marriage lasted until 1949, and a couple years after that, Sarah went to the altar one last time, with television producer Jerome Alan Danzig.

I bring this up partly to hint at the difficulty of keeping track of players in the amateur era. Newspapers were scrupulous about using married names, so with variations such as “Mrs. Cooke,” and “Sarah Palfrey Fabyan,” Sarah was referred to by at least a half-dozen different monikers. Her most memorable feats on court–the US national titles in 1941 and 1945–came during her second marriage, so tennis history has enshrined her as Sarah Palfrey Cooke.

Elwood’s influence, however, goes far beyond the name. When the couple got together, Sarah was also known by a less-flattering tag: Little Miss Almost. When she won the national junior tournament in 1928, experts viewed her as three years away from annexing the adult championship as well. Yet by 1940, she had entered America’s premier event every year, and she had nothing to show for it besides a couple of straight-set losses to Helen Jacobs in the 1934 and 1935 finals.

Jacobs profiled Palfrey in her 1949 book, Gallery of Champions. Jacobs was as accomplished and independent a woman as you’ll find in the sport’s history, and she was rarely one to attribute a wife’s success to her husband. But in Sarah’s case, she recognized Elwood’s “calm match play spirit” and explained the development that turned Little Miss Almost into a two-time titlist:

Elwood Cooke … worked assiduously with her to develop in her game stylish, effortless stroking similar to his own. Though there appeared to be little room for improvement in the production of Sarah’s strokes, her forehand and service were handicapped by an unorthodox wrist action that robbed them of much pace. This was eradicated and made, I think, the difference between the near-champion and champion.

With another strong tennis mind in her corner, Sarah won the national title in 1941, on her 14th attempt.

* * *

From our perspective 80 years on, the “Little Miss Almost” label is a bit of a puzzler. In Palfrey Cooke’s first 13 tries at Forest Hills, she reached only those two finals against Jacobs, winning five games in 1934 and six in 1935. No spectator walked away from either of those matches thinking that Sarah almost won the title.

From 1928, when she first entered the US championships, to 1937, her other results were equally uninspiring. She lost in her first match on four occasions, three of them when she was a top-five seed. The fact that all four of them went to three sets is little consolation. Jacobs explained what was missing from Palfrey Cooke’s mindset:

Sarah had still to learn that she could spare herself a lot of trouble if she would begin a match with the concentration, resourcefulness and determination that she applied when she found herself in an apparently hopeless position. Too often, she made the task of winning just as difficult for herself as possible by her delayed reaction to the problems of a match.

Case in point: She lost to Dorothy Andrus–a solid but unthreatening veteran who won 14 matches in her 12 entries at the national tournament–in the 1937 first round. Sarah, the third seed that year, was ousted 12-10, 0-6, 7-5.

The “almost” of her nickname rests almost entirely on the 1938 semi-final she played against Alice Marble. Marble was the second seed that year, and Sarah was fourth. After Jacobs, the Wimbledon champion, lost in the round of 16, whoever emerged from the Marble-Palfrey half would be the favorite to win the title. The match would be a nervy one, and it didn’t help that the players had to wait six days for the rain to pass and the turf to dry before they could finally take the court.

Allison Danzig wrote in the New York Times that Sarah “played a beautiful, heady match … only to lose under heart-breaking circumstances.” Somehow, that was an understatement. After a rocky start that allowed Marble to build a 5-1 lead in the first set, “Mrs. Fabyan”–as the Times called her–took a more aggressive tack, and reeled off nine games in a row. That gave her the first set and a head start on the second.

Alice had won five titles that year and lost only a single match, so it was only a matter of time before the momentum shifted again. From near-disaster, with Sarah a point away from a 4-0 advantage in the second, Marble “played as brilliant tennis as she ever has shown at Forest Hills.” Danzig wrote, “Mrs. Fabyan, a valiant retriever and defender throughout, seldom yielded a point without a struggle, but Miss Marble was playing tennis that was simply invincible in its power and control.”

Still, Sarah reached 5-2 in the second set, and held two match points when Marble served at 15-40. But Marble salvaged a hold and didn’t lose another game until the third set. The decider went to Alice by the same score, giving her a 5-7, 7-5, 7-5 victory.

In the final the next day, Marble beat Nancy Wynne, 6-0, 6-3. In retrospect, Sarah’s missed opportunities in the second set of the semi-final weren’t just match points, they were championship points.

* * *

There was nothing “almost” about Sarah Palfrey Cooke on the doubles court. She won her first national title before her 18th birthday, partnering Betty Nuthall to win the US Nationals in 1930. She would ultimately win 11 women’s doubles majors, including three with Helen Jacobs and six with Alice Marble. (One of them was played just a few weeks before their dramatic 1938 semi-final.) She tacked on five more mixed titles with five different partners, including Don Budge and, in 1939, her future husband Elwood.

Jacobs was an excellent doubles player, but she considered Sarah the better half of their team: “There was no question but that my partner was the leading doubles player in the United States. Her forecourt game was equal to any one of the greatest, including Elizabeth Ryan’s.” Pauline Betz, who would play 15 singles finals against Sarah between 1940 and 1945, found her “[hard] to pass … as her anticipation is such that she is usually waiting at the right spot.”

Palfrey and Jacobs made for a daunting duo, but Sarah’s most impressive feats would come alongside Marble. Decades later, she wrote, “Our games and temperaments were completely in sync.” Sarah could hardly have picked a better partner. Alice won more than 100 consecutive singles matches starting after her semi-final loss at Wimbledon in 1938. The pair was equally unbeatable in doubles competition, running off a three-year-long win streak that ended only when Marble turned pro in 1940.

Lest anyone think that Marble carried her partner all those years, Sarah won both national doubles titles in 1941. She took the women’s crown with Margaret Osborne (later duPont), and won her fourth national mixed championship, this one with the 20-year-old Jack Kramer.

* * *

Her most unique doubles feat was still to come. After her “triple” at the 1941 US championships, tennis took second place to motherhood, and she stayed home while Elwood served in the navy. She made a brief comeback to play at Forest Hills in 1943, but she lost in the quarter-finals to Doris Hart and would remain semi-retired until 1945.

In the last year of World War II, Elwood was discharged from his military duties, and Sarah was ready to take on a full season of tennis. With a two-year-old daughter in tow, she was nearly as successful as she had been in her belated breakthrough year of 1941. She spent the first half of the season in California, where she won two singles titles and beat everyone she played except for the woman who dominated Forest Hills in her absence, Pauline Betz. On three separate occasions, she pushed Betz–the best player in the world at the time–to three sets.

The first stop on the family’s summer tour was the Tri-State Championships in Cincinnati. Many players were still fulfilling their military duties, so the men’s field was lighter than usual and quality doubles partners were at a premium. That gave Elwood the excuse he needed to team up with one of the best players in the world. There was no mixed event in Cincinnati, so Mr. and Mrs. Cooke entered the men’s doubles.

The amateur era had its share of oddities, and the war forced people to make do. But tennis still clung to its traditions–a mixed-gender team in a men’s doubles draw in 1945 was weird. The Tri-State was an established feature on the tennis calendar, and it drew strong fields, if not as world-class as the Cincinnati event does today. Very occasionally, a woman would play doubles with three men in an exhibition, but never–as far as I know–in high-level tournament play.

The Cincinnati Enquirer confirmed that everything was above-board: “[A] check of the rule book convinced officials that there is nothing to prevent the pairing of a man and woman if no objection is raised by other contestants.” Apparently no one complained, though within a few days, several men may have wished they had spoken up.

Sarah Palfrey Cooke more than held her own. She and Elwood cruised past three local teams to reach the final four, losing only six games in six sets. Their first real test came in the semis, against a pair of established circuit players, Buddy Behrens and Tom Molloy. The Cookes squeaked through, 6-3, 5-7, 10-8, while Sarah–partnering Dorothy Bundy–also reached the women’s doubles final.

Alas, the Cookes would make history only as the runner-up. Their opponents in the men’s doubles final were top seeds Billy Talbert and Hal Surface. Talbert was the strongest player in the field, having reached the national singles final the year before. An hour after Sarah took the women’s doubles crown over Mary Arnold and Shirley Fry, she and Elwood fell, 6-2, 6-2, to Talbert and Surface.

News coverage of the tournament was surprisingly unconcerned with the out-of-place mixed doubles team. After the marathon semi-final, the Enquirer allowed that “Mrs. Cooke is one of the best doubles players of either sex in the nation.” Two days later, the paper hinted at the gender gap, saying that in the final, the Cookes “could not quite cope with the greater speed and court covering ability of the two men.” The Associated Press report said only that “the unusual husband-wife duo … failed to click.”

The rare loss hardly derailed Sarah’s season. In singles, she went 33-3 the rest of the way, losing only to Betz, Doris Hart, Margaret Osborne–all in three sets. She capped the 1945 campaign with a nine-match winning streak and her second national title, toppling Betz in a hard-fought final.

* * *

Sarah’s second triumph at Forest Hills was the end of her amateur career. Now 33 years old, she left the circuit behind in favor of opportunities in radio and marketing, not to mention her young daughter. Yet she hardly fell into obscurity.

In early 1947, Elwood sent out feelers to tennis clubs around the world to gauge interest for a professional tour featuring his wife and Pauline Betz. Sarah had moved on–she did the color commentary for 1946-47 New York Knicks radio broadcasts, a rare example of a woman in such a role at the time–but Betz remained queen of the courts, holding both the 1946 Wimbledon and US titles.

The governing body of US amateur tennis, the USLTA, got wind of the plan in April. Not a date had been booked; not a dollar had changed hands. But the mere whiff of professionalism provoked an overreaction, and Betz lost her amateur status. (Sarah did too, but it didn’t matter to someone who was effectively retired.) The two women went ahead with a barnstorming tour that took them through dozens of cities and several countries before the end of the year. Unfortunately, women’s professional tennis wouldn’t catch on until the Open Era, despite occasional attempts–often involving Betz–to make the pro game a two-gender concern.

Just as Sarah was content to lose her amateur status, she was fine to miss out on a long professional career. Elwood would play pro tournaments through the end of the decade, but the couple split. She next turned up on the tennis scene in 1950, when she and Alice Marble lobbied the USLTA to drop its color bar and allow Althea Gibson to compete. Sarah escorted Gibson on her first visit to Forest Hills and warmed her up before her debut match.

Like Sarah Palfrey Cooke before her, Althea Gibson wasn’t an immediate success at the national championships. She lost in the 1950 second round to Louise Brough, and she wouldn’t make it past the quarter-finals until 1956. She even lost to some of the same players who had stopped Sarah a decade earlier, falling to Doris Hart in 1952 and Shirley Fry in 1956.

The upper-class Bostonian and the pathbreaking Black player didn’t have much in common, but both women persisted through their early struggles to win multiple national championships. Sarah relegated the “almost” nickname to a curiosity in her biography, and Althea–thanks in some small part to the establishment figures who fought for her–ensured that no one would ever have reason to use the word to describe her.