Another historical season in the database! In 1957, Althea Gibson was so good it was almost boring. She was in the middle of a 161-week streak at the top of the Elo rankings, and with a 66-2 won-loss record this year, she finished the campaign more than 200 Elo points ahead of the number two player, Dorothy Head Knode.
Of course, no one knew about Elo in 1957, and there weren’t even week-by-week rankings. It didn’t take an advanced algorithm to know that Gibson belonged at the top of the heap. However, the newspapermen who published the most respected year-end ranking lists had at least as many blind spots as the WTA computer does these days. While Althea was comfortably on top, Knode was never considered to be better than 5th.
About 240 events worth of results–that’s about 2,600 matches–from this season are now on Tennis Abstract, and you can jump in via the 1957 season page. There’s a week-by-week calendar, year-end rankings, stats breakdowns for the top players, the most common head-to-heads, and country-by-country comparisons. All of this is now available for 11 pre-Open Era seasons.
The raw data has been added to my GitHub repo, and I offer another hearty round of thanks to the contributors at tennisforum’s Blast From the Past forum, who did the heavy lifting of typing out so many of these results from contemporary newspapers and annuals.
I’ve added another historical season to the Tennis Abstract database, so we can now see thousands of results per year for a full decade before the beginning of the Open Era. 1958 might be the most interesting year of the bunch.
1958 was the final full season as an amateur for Althea Gibson, and it was an awfully good one. She won her last 33 matches, including the Wimbledon and US Open titles. She turned 31 in August, and her performance in her age-30 campaign will forever leave us wondering what kind of career numbers she could have posted had she continued to play amateur tennis. Her lifetime totals are also clipped by the institutional racism that prevented her from competing on the world stage until well into her 20s.
Two of Gibson’s three losses in 1958 came at the hands of Janet Hopps Adkisson, herself an excellent player, one who just missed a top-ten year-end Elo finish in both 1957 and 1958. Hopps spent the years 1954-56 at Seattle University, where she played on the men’s tennis team (there was no alternative for women) and won 70% of her matches. When the ITA Women’s Collegiate Tennis Hall of Fame honored her in 1999, she quipped, “I never played in [an official] women’s match. I should be in the men’s hall of fame.”
Compared to later years, 1958 looks noticeably fractured. Gibson played almost four-fifths of her matches on grass, while British up-and-comer Shirley Bloomer Brasher played 47 of her 66 contests on clay, and American vet Beverly Baker Fleitz fought 23 of her 35 bouts on hard courts.
The only top player to tie it all together was Brazilian teen Maria Bueno, who played at least 102 matches in a year when no other notable player reached 70. Bueno started the year in Florida, played the Caribbean circuit (beating Hopps in five of seven meetings, all by early April), then shifted operations to Europe where she won Rome and reached the semis at Roland Garros. She followed the tour across the channel, losing a grass-court final in Manchester to Gibson, beating Angela Mortimer for the title match the following week in Bristol, and falling in the Wimbledon final eight. Then back to Europe, after which she competed at Forest Hills and other US events before finishing the year at home in Brazil.
Bueno’s eleven-month marathon left her in 7th place in the year-end Elo rankings, but not for long: She would reach the top spot by the end of the following year. Like Mortimer, who held the number one position in early 1956 and would win it back in mid-1959, Bueno would have to wait until Gibson left the scene.
Again, I invite you to dig in to the 200+ events and 2,500+ matches from 1958 on Tennis Abstract. The season page provides an easy introduction.
I’ve added the raw data from 1958, along with all other historical seasons I’ve added, to my GitHub repo. My work rests heavily on the shoulders of the contributors to tennisforum.com’s Blast From the Past section, who have painstakingly recovered all of these results from newspapers and annuals, organizing and double-checking the often-messy records along the way. As always, a big round of thanks to them.
Aryna Sabalenka has won 3 titles and 14 matches in a row. Let’s dig into the data and see if we can identify any improvements that would account for her success.
For the Match Charting Project, I’ve logged every shot of each of the Belarussian’s tour-level matches. (There are a few exceptions where I haven’t found video.) We’ll look at hard-court matches only today. With that constraint, we have 140 Sabalenka matches, dating back to early 2017 (including the current streak), and another 1,121 women’s tour-level contests over the same time period for reference.
Big serving?
Aryna always brings a powerful serve, but it remains a work in progress, at least tactically. The key metric for pure serve dominance is unreturned serves–quite simply, serves that don’t come back. While some are aces, they don’t have to be, and the distinction doesn’t really matter.
This first graph has a lot going on, but as I’ll use the same basic template for several more figures, it’s worth taking a moment to understand what we’re looking at. The two dotted lines show tour average rates of unreturned serves (the lower average is for all players; the higher one is for match winners), the thin jagged line shows Sabalenka’s rate of unreturned serves for each individual match, and the thicker red line shows her five-match rolling average.
Her five-match rolling average has been above 30% for the entire win streak. It’s not an unprecedented level for her, though–she sustained similarly high levels at various points over the last three years. (We should also be a bit cautious ascribing serve effectiveness to a player when the Ostrava, Linz, and Abu Dhabi courts might have been faster than average.) Consistently powerful serving has certainly helped Sabalenka’s cause, but it probably isn’t the whole story.
We might gain from breaking down Aryna’s serve effectiveness into first and second serves. First, let’s look at something else:
Serve plus one
There are two ways we could look at “serve plus one” effectiveness, and we’ll do both. First, let’s count Sabalenka’s opportunities to hit a second shot behind her serve, and see what percentage she puts away. (As with aces and other unreturned serves, the “winner” concept is a distraction: I’m counting second-shot winners together with shots that force errors. If you end the point, it doesn’t matter much whether your opponent touches the ball.)
The second figure shows us that, on hard courts, when women are faced with a second shot behind their serve, they finish the point about 20% of the time. Sabalenka’s career average is 28%. She far exceeded that over a string of four matches to finish Ostrava and start Linz, maxing out at 42% against Jennifer Brady in the Ostrava semi-final. Since then, her rate returned to roughly her (impressive) career average.
This measure is something of a “key to the match” for Sabalenka. When she converts at least 30% of second-shot opportunities behind her serve, she wins 91% of her matches. When she doesn’t, she wins 62%. Of course, 62% is nothing to be ashamed of, and the dip visible in early 2020 coincides with her Doha title, the one time in her career that the five-match rolling average fell below 20%.
Serve plus serve plus one
These first two measures are related, of course. A big server should post good numbers in both. But a great “pure” serving day might mean a worse-looking serve-plus-one day, because fewer weak returns are coming back at all. The reverse holds as well: A strong server might not hit as many unreturned serves as usual because her opponent is managing to just barely put them back in play–easy sitters for second shots.
To identify the combined benefits of good serving and efficient serve-plus-one’ing, we simply count how often Sabalenka wins service points in two shots or less.
We’ve already seen the two components of this, so there are no surprises here. The typical player wins about 40% of her service points this way, and Aryna has historically averaged 46% on hard courts. This number looks as good for her recent winning streak as we’d expect. But as with the previous graph, it suggests weakness during her 2020 Doha title, so the predictive power here is limited.
First and second serves
The combined metric of unreturned serves plus second-shot putaways gives us a good snapshot of when the offensive game is working. Let’s break down the previous graph into first- and second-serve specific numbers:
These track the overall numbers. Aryna has generally been good lately on both first and second serves, but with neither one has she been more successful or consistent than in previous hot streaks. Second serves are particularly hard to rate because the per-match sample size is so small–fewer than 30 second serve points per player per match, and some of those end up as double faults.
Before moving on to the return game, let’s look at one more indicator of service-point success:
Longer points on serve
As I said at the outset, Sabalenka has always been a good server. While her current momentum might owe a bit to fewer mental lapses on serve, it would be logical to look elsewhere for an explanation, simply because there was more room to improve in other areas.
We’ve seen how her serve and second shot rate. What about serve points that go deeper? This metric considers all points where the returner’s second shot comes back, and then counts how often the server goes on to win the point.
The average hard-court WTA match winner claims almost exactly half of her service points when the rally reaches five shots. Over her career, Sabalenka has won 48%, worse than the typical match winner but better than the overall tour average.
Aryna has done better lately. To cherry-pick a starting point, she has won 51% of these points in her last 24 matches, dating back to the Doha second round. Her average over the first five matches in Abu Dhabi was 55%, the best she has managed since her breakout run in late 2018, when she pushed Naomi Osaka to three sets at the US Open and hoisted the Wuhan trophy a few weeks later.
Return winners
We’ll walk through the dimensions of her return performance in a similar manner, starting with return winners (and point-ending non-winners), then on to “return-plus-one” putaways, followed by the combination of the two.
First, return winners. I use the number of point-ending return winners divided by in-play serves–that is, excluding double faults.
Veronika Kudermetova had a rough day last Wednesday, so Sabalenka’s current five-match rolling average is as high as it’s been since early 2018. Apart from that last-minute burst of return dominance, her recent return winner rates look a bit like the serve stats: consistently solid, if not spectacular.
Return plus one
How about when the serve return doesn’t finish the job? This “return plus one” metric counts opportunities when the server puts her second shot in play and measures how often the returner hits a winner or forces an error with her own second shot. The sample sizes are a getting a bit small here (each player has 43 such opportunities in an average hard-court match), so the per-match rates are rather spiky:
The small single-match samples, combined with the relationship between return-plus-one and return winners–almost interchangeable ways to respond successfully to a mediocre serve–render conclusions a bit tough to come by. Sabalenka was average by this measure in Ostrava, great in Linz, and all over the place in Abu Dhabi.
Short return points won
Will things be clearer when we combine both methods of quickly winning a return point?
Aside from a weak return performance against Elena Rybakina in Abu Dhabi, Sabalenka has been comfortably above average in this metric in every match since she faced Victoria Azarenka in the Ostrava final.
Like “serve plus one,” this is a good indicator of overall success for the Belarussian. If we use this metric to split her 140 charted hard-court matches in half, the dividing line is 27.5% of return points won with a return winner or a return-plus-one putaway. Above that mark, she has won 62 matches, or 88.6%. Below it, she has won only 41, or 58.6%. She was above the line in nearly all of her matches in Linz and Abu Dhabi, and she sat at 25% or higher in every round of her 2020 Doha triumph, clearing 30% in three of five matches there.
First and second serve returns
Has she been particularly devastating against first or second serves? Let’s see:
Few women feast on second serves the way Sabalenka does, and she’s been particularly relentless of late. The typical tour player wins about 30% of second-serve return points with a first- or second-shot putaway, and over her last 15 matches, Aryna has won 41% that way. 41% is a respectable total percentage of return points won against many servers, and Sablaenka would be winning that many even if she refused to hit more than two shots per rally.
Granted, Sabalenka doesn’t hit that many fifth or sixth shots. How does she fare when her return points extend that far?
Long return points
You’ll be glad to know that the code for this final* graph didn’t throw any divide-by-zero errors–Aryna has played at least one “long” return point in each of her hard-court matches. This metric tallies up all return points in which the server puts her third shot in play, then calculates how often the returner won the point.
** Yes! It’ll be over soon!
This is another spiky mess, with an average of only 20 points per match. Still, if we’re looking for a category in which Sabalenka is newly excelling–not just thriving as usual–this could be our smoking gun.
Tour average for match winners on this stat is 46.7%. The server has an advantage by definition, because she has just put the ball back in play. The Belarussian’s career mark is 44.4%, only a bit better than the overall average. Yet in her last 15 matches, she has won 48.0% of these long return points, her best 15-match span since early in her career, when she faced a weaker mix of opponents.
I don’t want to overemphasize this: When there are only 20 points of this type per match, an improvement of 3.6 percentage points translates to a gain of less than one point per match. That doesn’t explain the magnitude of Sabalenka’s recent gains. But it does indicate that she is shoring up one of her few weaknesses, and in combination with her solid play on long serve points, it suggests that she no longer needs to rely on a one-two punch, even if her one-two punch is as dizzying as anyone’s.
Don’t make me say consistency
Tennis matches are decided by a handful of points: While Sabalenka has been dominant lately, she lost more points than she won against Coco Gauff in the Ostrava opening round. As such, improvements always look minor when we try to quantify them, if we can quantify them at all.
I’ve pointed out some areas where Sabalenka may be improving, others where a good statistical showing usually coincides with a W, and still others where an excellent performance doesn’t seem to matter much. All of these categories have one thing in common: She is putting up stellar numbers right now.
Remember, in the twelve graphs above (yes, twelve, sheesh), the dotted yellow lines indicate the average performance of match winners. In every single one of the categories, Aryna’s five-match rolling average is above that line. Every single one! In most cases, it has been above the line for some time.
It doesn’t take any statistical savvy to see that if a player is better than the average match winner in every category, she’ll be awfully tough to beat. The rest of the Australian Open field can only cross their fingers that Sabalenka’s current form won’t survive two weeks of quarantine.
Another season, another 2,300 matches on the Tennis Abstract site. The latest addition is the 1959 women’s tennis season, which you can dig into here.
Althea Gibson more or less retired from the amateur circuit after a dominant 1958 season. She did a bit of acting, some lounge singing, and returned to the courts only long enough to win the Chicago Pan-American Games in August. That left the field open for three other women to spend some time at number one–according to Elo, anyway.
Angela Mortimer was the first to unseat Gibson, holding the top spot for 18 weeks on the strength of her perfect 15-0 record in finals this season. Maria Bueno took over for a week in November, losing her position to Beverly Baker Fleitz for two weeks, then reclaiming the honor, which she would hold well into 1960. For Baker Fleitz, who was ambidextrous and played with two forehands (!), it was a fitting sendoff into retirement after an outstanding decade of top-level tennis.
As usual, the raw data is available in my GitHub repo. Another round of thanks are due to the contributors at the Blast From the Past forum, who did much of the heavy lifting you see here.
Our dive into the history of women’s tennis keeps getting deeper. Tennis Abstract now includes hundreds of events and thousands of matches from the 1960 season, which you can browse here.
1960 was the year of the first major title for Margaret Court, when the 17-year-old proved that, if nothing else, she was a glutton for punishment. But she didn’t travel abroad, which made her a non-factor for the rest of the season. With Althea Gibson out of the picture on the pro tour*, the field was open for stars such as Maria Bueno, Darlene Hard, and the largely forgotten Zsuzsa Kormoczy. Bueno won Wimbledon and narrowly lost to Hard in the finals at Forest Hills, spending most of the year at number one in the Elo rankings.
* I’m collecting pro results when I come across them, but the return so far is sparse. Most professional women’s matches were one-offs, akin to today’s exhibitions, and were generally played among a very small group of competitors.
For sheer endurance, the 1960 crown should go to Ann Jones. She played over 120 matches, won 106 of them, and took home 15 titles. (15.5, actually, as she reached the Montego Bay final, which was rained out.) Yet according to Elo, those eye-popping numbers weren’t quite enough to overtake Bueno. Amateur era tennis is full of tricky comparisons like this, with one elite player opting for a shorter schedule against top-flight competition, and another choosing to play almost every week, which out of necessity included weaker regional tournaments. Jones might be the best exemplar of the second category. I now have records of her playing over 1,300 career matches, and that figure is almost certainly missing some early-round tilts.
In 1960, Bueno played exactly half as many matches (evenly splitting her eight meetings with the Brit), yet narrowly edged Jones in the year-end Elo race, 2240 to 2237. The Brazilian held the number one position all year except for four weeks in May and June. That was to Kormoczy, who played an even more selective schedule. But while the 36-year-old Hungarian stayed home for most of the year, she reeled off a 19-match win streak on the Riviera circuit, capped by a win over Jones in the Rome final.
You can take your own look at the 1960 women’s season here. The linked page includes a full calendar of events, year-end Elo rankings, season stats, head-to-heads, and country comparisons.
The raw data, along with that of every season from 1961 to the present, is available in my GitHub repo. I’ve also recently added thousands of matches from second-tier events and qualifying in the early Open Era. This project owes a huge debt to the contributors at tennisforum.com’s Blast From the Past, who have been moving tennis data from dusty annuals and newspaper archives to the internet for the last decade.
Tennis Abstract now includes extensive results from the 1961 women’s season. Margaret Court won her second major at January’s Australian Championships, but it wasn’t until the end of 1961 that she claimed the top spot in the Elo rankings. In her first tour abroad, she racked up six titles in Europe but failed to reach a major final away from home.
Thus, this was the last year for some time in which everything was truly up for grabs. Court, Ann Jones, Angela Mortimer, and Darlene Hard each won a major, and Jones was the only player to reach two slam finals. The top Elo-rated player for much of the season was someone else entirely: Maria Bueno. The Brazilian had a glittering spring, beating Jones twice and Hard three times on the Caribbean circuit, then knocking out Court en route to the Turin title. Unfortunately, she contracted hepatitis during the French Open and wouldn’t return to competition for nearly a year.
You can dig into the rankings, stats, tournaments, and more than 2,500 match results via the 1961 season page.
Adding 1961 results to my database entailed more than just recording a bunch of meetings between Hard and Yola Ramirez, though there were eight of those. I added about 250 players who did not appear in a match in 1962 or later. A few of them are quite famous, such as Angela Buxton. Others flew further under the radar, at least for their top-tier tennis exploits:
It’s becoming a familiar refrain at this point, but that doesn’t make it any less genuine: This ongoing project relies heavily on the work of the contributors to Blast From the Past at tennisforum.com, to whom I am very grateful.
If you want to learn more about this project, you can listen to the podcast interview I recorded with Carl this week, or browse the recent blog archives for my announcements regarding several more seasons. And stay tuned: there will be more.
Another year, another installment of the dominance of Margaret Court. I’ve added almost 3,000 matches across more than 200 events from the 1962 women’s tennis season, a year when Court went an unbelievable 80-2. She won three of the four majors, but one of the losses came in the first round of Wimbledon against Billie Jean King. In both that match and her other loss a few weeks earlier, in Manchester to Carole Graebner, she still took a set.
The further we go back in time, the less familiar the list of top players becomes. For those of us raised on Open Era records, Court and King are known quantities, but what about Leslie (Turner) Bowrey, Angela Mortimer, and Sandra Reynolds, all of whom finished 1962 in the Elo top five?
I’ll leave it to you to explore. Here’s the season page, which offers a snapshot (ok, maybe a bit more than a snapshot) of the goings-on in 1962 women’s tennis.
As usual, the raw data is on my GitHub, and I tip my hat to the enormous efforts of the Blast From the Past contributors at tennisforum.com, who took the first step in moving so many of these results from the analog to the digital world.
Episode 89 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast reverses roles, with Carl Bialik, of the Thirty Love podcast, interviewing Jeff about his recent efforts to add pre-Open Era women’s tennis data to Tennis Abstract.
High-level tennis did not begin in 1968 with the introduction of Open tennis, but official statistical records often give the mistaken impression that it did. We talk about the existing state of the data, the players whose reputations rest heavily on pre-Open Era accomplishments, and the value of simply getting historical records into an accessible format. We also cover two very different #1s, Althea Gibson and Margaret Court, and dip into what people get right and wrong in the Serena-vs-Court debate.
Also, a reminder: In a couple of weeks we’ll be talking about our first book club pick, A Handful of Summers by Gordon Forbes. Let us know if you have thoughts about the book, questions for us to discuss on the show, or suggestions for future book club selections.
Another week, another enormous tranche of new women’s tennis data on Tennis Abstract. Today I present an extensive view of the 1963 season, including about 250 events and almost 3,000 matches. The season page is here, so jump in whenever you’d like.
This is the fifth amateur-era season I’ve added. I hesitate to use the word “complete,” because there is no clear line separating “tour level” from the rest, and for many of the tournaments I have only partial results. Even for the top players, some early-round matches may be lost to history. But as an in-depth view of the era, we continue to break new ground. For comparison, there were about 3,100 WTA tour-level matches in 2019, and we now have almost the same number of results from 1963.
I’ve made a few more improvements to the season pages, which are now available from 1963 to 1986:
The Elo rankings table now includes columns for “iElo” — ratings specific to carpet (and wood and tiles and whatever artificial surfaces that organizers put on the floor of their indoor facilities). The “i” stands for “indoor,” although iElo does not include indoor hard or clay results. Those were rare at the time, and are included with the hard- and clay-specific ratings.
The list of number-one ranked players now shows how long each woman held the top spot–including in other seasons. For 1963, the “list” is rather boring, as it consists solely of Margaret Court, but it does show that Court owned the number one position from the end of 1961 through to her first layoff in 1967. The exact numbers and start/end dates are very much subject to change as I add more data, correct errors, and improve the Elo algorithm, but all told, I have Court at #1 for a total of 536 weeks.
The quest continues, and there are now another 3,200 matches in the women’s tennis database at Tennis Abstract. If you’d rather dive in to the data than read my ramblings about it, click here for the 1964 season page.
(If you’d like to read more of my ramblings, here are my intros to 1965, 1966, and 1967 data.)
The further back we go, we more we confirm the dominance of Margaret Court in the decade before the Open Era. In 1964, she won two majors, reached the final of a third, posted a year-end Elo just shy of 2500, and went undefeated over 44 matches on clay courts. Just about the only stats she didn’t dominate were three-set numbers, because she almost always won in straights.
Of course, there’s a lot more to 1964 than one Australian star. Importing these thousands of match results meant adding 360 new players to the database, including some important contributors whose career ended this season. Here are a few:
The women’s season pages are now available for every year from 1964 up to 1978. You can navigate between seasons using the links in the upper-left corner of every page. I’ll further integrate the season pages into the rest of the site soon.
Finally: Another round of thanks are due to the contributors at tennisforum.com, who searched out newspapers and annuals, then typed up all these results. The same group is responsible for the Blast Encyclopedia of Female Tennis Players, an essential source for biographical data, especially married names.
