Heavy Topspin – Page 13 – The Tennis Abstract blog

August 30, 1973: Think Cool

*Chris Evert catches her breath on a hot day at Forest Hills*

For the best players, an early round at a major was supposed to be easy. A light workout, a pigeon across the net, and a victory. No need to break a sweat.

On August 30th, the second day of the 1973 US Open, everybody broke a sweat.

The mercury touched 98 degrees Fahrenheit. Combined with humidity typical of the New York City summer, the heat had stars racing to get off court. 30-year-old Frenchwoman Françoise Dürr was one of those who didn’t make it. Up a set and down 3-4 in the second, she retired with heat prostration against an unknown American named Sally Greer.

“I was hotter than I have ever been before,” said Dürr. Quite a statement from someone born in Algeria.

The Australians, no strangers to demanding weather conditions, fared better. Margaret Court advanced in 40 minutes. Evonne Goolagong dropped just one game. Rod Laver lost only six. Ken Rosewall and John Newcombe–allowed to compete by the ILTF after all–progressed as well.

Sweating the most was defending champion Ilie Năstase, and not just because of the sun. The unpredictable Romanian shared the top seed with Stan Smith, and fans expected a routine second-round victory when he played 24-year-old Andrew Pattison of Rhodesia. Pattison probably didn’t hope for much more, either. His career highlight to date was a run to the final at the 1972 Canadian Open in Toronto. Playing for the championship, Năstase shut him down, 6-4, 6-3.

The Romanian came out cocky, joking around as he won the first two sets. Suddenly, though, the serve-and-volleying Rhodesian began playing like a world-beater. Năstase could no longer do anything with his serve, and Pattison was responding to Nasty’s deliveries with a new confidence. The underdog evened the match and broke for a 3-2 advantage in the fifth. With Năstase to serve at 3-5, tournament referee Mike Blanchard called the match for darkness. They’d pick up again in the morning.

The resumption took barely ten minutes. The top seed held, and he nearly broke for a tie. Serving for the match, Pattison earned a 30-love lead behind two big serves. He then fell to deuce before finishing the upset with two big serves and a forehand drop volley. It was a huge win for the Rhodesian, and a helpful one for Newcombe, whose draw would have pitted him against Năstase in the fourth round.

The Romanian was gone, but the heat lingered. Of all the contenders who survived, Goolagong seemed the least bothered by the conditions. Her advice: “Think cool.”

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This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

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August 27, 1973: The Controversial Sport

*Lee Meade, the World Team Tennis owner who triggered the latest kerfuffle*

Yep, they were going to do this again.

Two days away from the start of the 1973 US Open, the International Lawn Tennis Federation was threatening a ban. Or the possibility of a ban, or something. The ILTF’s member federations were worried about World Team Tennis and the increasing number of star players the league was hoovering up.

In response, the ILTF would leave no threat unlevied.

It had been weeks since the Team Tennis draft and the announcement that Billie Jean King and John Newcombe would take part in the league’s 1974 summer season. Minnesota Buckskins owner Lee Meade tried to capitalize on the excitement surrounding the US Open by announcing, on August 27th, his signing of Linda Tuero. Compared to King, Newk, and other WTT signees such as Rosie Casals, Tuero was small fry.

Then again, Niki Pilić wasn’t a contender either. And he brought down Wimbledon.

Linda never made it to the press conference. According to her lawyer (and former top ten player) Gene Scott, USLTA president Walter Elcock “told Linda that if she played WTT or or did anything to indicate that she played WTT, the International Lawn Tennis Federation would ban her.”

Though Scott rightly called the threat “ill-conceived and ill-timed,” it didn’t come out of nowhere. A few days earlier, the ILTF had sent a letter to the American federation with a reminder that the international body had the power to ban players who signed contracts with unsanctioned organizations that interfered with ILTF events.

The appetite for self-destruction was astonishing. The decision to ban players was in the ILTF’s hands, and a US Open official admitted that stars might be ruled out of competition “one minute before they step on the court for their first match.” Perhaps not coincidentally, King and Newcombe weren’t on the schedule for the first day of play.

Most galling of all, all the Americans could do was wait. Would the showcase event of the season be compromised by yet another ban- or boycott-riddled field? Long-time tournament director Bill Talbert didn’t know. “I wouldn’t doubt it,” he said.

The New York Daily News summed up the state of the game: It was the “controversial sport of tennis.” Dissension was no longer occasional: It was endemic. For all of the so-called “peace agreements” of the last twelve months, major conflict still loomed. The Forest Hills faithful could only hope it would leave the Open unscathed.

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August 25, 1973: See and Be Seen

*Bobby Riggs as Little Red Riding Hustler*

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

And Bobby Riggs stole the show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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August 24, 1973: The Lightest Brigade

*Chris Evert (left) and Virginia Wade ahead of the 1973 Wightman Cup*

The Wightman Cup was a relic of a bygone era, a two-country competition that placed the United States and the United Kingdom atop an international pedestal. It awarded no prize money, and when the Open era first dawned, it excluded professionals outright.

Yet in 1973, the Wightman Cup celebrated a triumphant 50th anniversary. Its founder, 86-year-old Hall of Fame trailblazer Hazel Wightman, attended the matches and collected plaudits from around the world. Queen Elizabeth II named her a Commander of the British Empire.

Interest in the matches was as high as ever. Many tennis fans in Boston had yet to see 18-year-old Chris Evert in person, so they packed the grandstand at the Longwood Cricket Club. Two years earlier, Chrissie had been the youngest competitor in Wightman Cup history. This year, the record would be broken by her younger sister Jeanne.

The only concern was the lack of a strong challenge for the hosts. The visiting Brits would be led by captain Virginia Wade. The rest of the squad was barely known in England, let alone abroad. Boston Globe columnist Bud Collins dubbed the anonymous group of Lindsay Beaven, Veronica Burton, Lesley Charles, and Glynis Coles “the Phantom Fillies,” and in a sharper dig, “the Lightest Brigade.”

Much rested, then, on Wade’s performance. The best-of-seven series opened on August 24th with the marquee match: Ginny versus Chrissie. Evert had won their Wightman Cup encounters each of the previous two years, but Wade was riding a two-match winning streak against the youngster. At a Dallas tournament in March, the Brit had held on for a 9-7, third-set victory.

With Mrs. Wighty looking on, Evert was unforgiving. Wade played well, but it wasn’t enough. “Whatever Virginia did sensationally,” wrote Collins, “Chris countered superlatively.” The veteran broke back for 3-all in the first set, but Evert reeled off five straight games to take the set and build a lead in the second. In 64 minutes, it was over: 6-4, 6-2, to the Americans.

The first match was a representative preview of the rest. Wade continued to stand up for the colors, defeating Patti Hogan in her second singles and contributing to a straight-set doubles victory with Coles. Alas, the rest of the Lightest Brigade proved the truth in Collins’s jibe. None of the other Brits won a set in singles. The series concluded when even 15-year-old Jeanne Evert got on the board, partnering Hogan to a 6-3, 4-6, 8-6 victory in the final doubles.

Anachronism that it was, the Wightman Cup continued to engage fans on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans could watch their best prospects debut on a big stage, and Brits could cheer for the occasional upset that kept the series interesting. The 16-nation Federation Cup made more sense, and the weekly smattering of pro events were better suited to the era. But the Wightman Cup retained a certain cachet, and in the tennis world of 1973, that still counted for something.

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August 23, 1973: One Perfect Truth

*Stan Smith, Ilie Năstase, and Tom Okker*

Major tournament committees never had an easy job. Given a pile of national and regional rankings–sometimes many months out of date–and another pile of entry forms, they had to decide who could play their event. Then, with the field in place, they had to decide on the seedings.

It was an art, not a science. Rankings were published just once a year. Beyond the first ten, few lists compared players across national borders. In both ranking lists and entry decisions, there were biases, both acknowledged and obscured. Players complained of a “star system,” in which famous names were given priority over superior players. Insiders, especially members at clubs where tournaments were held, had an edge. Young players benefited from well-connected coaches.

So it had been for half a century. Tournament entries hadn’t always been an issue: There was usually enough room in the bracket for everyone. In the early days, draws were arranged at random. It took a run of disastrous bad luck for officials to decide to keep top players away from each other. At the US National Championships in 1921, the paths of the two best men players–Big Bill Tilden and Little Bill Johnston–intersected in the fourth round. The women’s draw was even worse: Visiting sensation Suzanne Lenglen drew home favorite Molla Mallory in the second round. It is no exaggeration to say that the latter quirk of fate–and Suzanne’s loss by retirement–altered the course of tennis history.

Within six months, USLTA tournament draws were seeded.

In 1973, the system underwent a change almost as significant as the adoption of seeding. On August 23rd, the new men’s players’ union, the ATP, released its first set of rankings.

There was no bias in the ATP’s calculation, aside from the tendencies of an imperfect algorithm. Players were given points for their performance at each tournament, then assigned an overall total based on their average over the past year.

The ATP’s list didn’t immediately rise to the top of the heap. The same week, the US Open announced its seeding lists, based on

the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association rankings, Commercial Union Grand Prix points, World Championship Tennis records, and–for the first time–a statistical approach consisting of a new computerized ranking system developed by the Association of Tennis Professionals.

Information overload, perhaps. Committee members couldn’t decide between Ilie Năstase and Stan Smith, so they awarded the two men co-No. 1 seeds. (The ATP ranked them first and third, respectively.) The committee also acknowledged surface preferences, something that the single-number ATP formula ignored. Dirtballer Manuel Orantes ranked second on the new computer, but he was seeded eighth on the grass at Forest Hills.

Quibbles about the ranking formula are as old as the system itself. The approach of averaging tournament results, in particular, incentivized players to stick to their best surface and skip smaller events; it was possible for someone to sit out a week and see his ranking go up!

The important thing, though, was that the imperfections were the same for everyone. An algorithm could be tweaked; a small group of entrenched bureaucrats could not. Bill Scanlon, then a 16-year-old beginning to gain attention as a promising junior in Texas, later called the ATP rankings “the one perfect truth.” They weren’t perfect, but that wasn’t the point. The formula provided objective targets free of favoritism.

The biggest winners were the deserving players on the fringes. Nastase and Smith would’ve been seeded anywhere regardless of the system. Most people could agree on the top ten, give or take a name or two. But what about an American teen who grew up playing in public parks, as Bobby Riggs had done in the 1930s? Or the rising number of challengers from Eastern Bloc nations without a long history on the international scene? Outsiders could now be judged more on their performance, less on their reputation and connections.

The players, in short, had gained even more control over the game. Within a few years, most tournament committees had given up on the job of determining entries and seeds themselves. Most fans probably didn’t notice the difference. But the rise of computer rankings set the stage for a more meritocratic, more inclusive sport.

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August 20, 1973: Friendly Territory

*Marty Riessen in the 1973 Davis Cup semi-finals*

Davis Cup semi-finals were supposed to be drama-packed clashes of titans. When the United States hosted Romania for a place in the 1973 Cup final, there were titans present, but 6,000 fans waited in vain for the drama.

Stan Smith and Ilie Năstase had already faced off in three late-round Davis Cup ties, not to mention a Wimbledon final. The 1972 Davis Cup final had been one for the ages, with Smith and company venturing into hostile territory in Bucharest. Confronting watered-down clay, biased officials, gun-toting “translators,” and the imposing duo of Năstase and Ion Țiriac, the Americans somehow pulled out a victory.

The United States had spent their entire victorious 1972 campaign on the road, thwarting the hopes of local fans in Jamaica, Mexico, Chile, and Spain before defying the locals in Bucharest. Now they could reap the rewards.

This time, the Romanians trekked to the Round Hill Country Club in Alamo, California, just outside of San Francisco. Canadian referee Fred Bolton would treat both sides fairly. Țiriac, split from Năstase and easing into retirement, was missing. And the matches would be played on cement–a surface that Țiriac’s replacement, Toma Ovici, had encountered only twice before.

Opening day offered few surprises. Smith destroyed Ovici, a result so universally anticipated that the Romanian said that he was proud to have won nine games. Năstase had an equally easy time of it against American veteran Marty Riessen. Riessen mounted a challenge in the second set, but the result was lopsided: Năstase never lost his serve, and he broke five times.

The sellout crowd could do little apart from fidget and engage in idle speculation. Năstase had recently made the news for cursing out an umpire in Cincinnati, but he behaved himself here. When he mildly protested a line call, fans began to ride him–anything to break up the monotony of another lopsided match.

The American faithful also wondered if Riessen was a good choice. He certainly didn’t threaten the Romanian star. The 31-year-old hadn’t played Davis Cup since 1967, ruled out of the competition by his status as a contract pro. Bringing him back meant booting Tom Gorman, a younger player who had won four Cup rubbers in the last two years. Captain Dennis Ralston said he was opting for experience. There was little else to separate the two. When the ATP released its first-ever rankings list later that month, Riessen and Gorman were placed 14th and 15th, respectively. My retrospective Elo ratings have them at 1,967 and 1,964–a virtual tie.

The next day, the doubles continued to follow the script. Smith and Erik van Dillen straight-setted Năstase and newcomer Ionel Sânteiu. The speedy Sânteiu was better than the hosts expected. But he, like Ovici, was unaccustomed to playing on cement, and he had partnered Nastase only twice before.

On August 20th, the Romanians would make one last push to defy the chalk. If Ovici could upset Riessen, a fifth-rubber showdown between Smith and Năstase would determine which side faced Australia or Czechoslovakia (okay, Australia) in December for the championship.

While Riessen wasn’t a unanimous choice, he was more than adequate to finish the job. His big serve was more appropriate for the cement than Ovici’s clay-tuned game, and he turned up the pressure from the start. The veteran won 16 of the first 18 points of the match, as well as the opening point in 19 of the first 24 games. The Romanian fought out a triple-deuce game to sneak off with the second set, but Riessen always seemed to have the matter in hand. He secured the victory for the Americans, 6-1, 4-6, 6-1, 7-5.

The fans, finally, had something to get excited about. Yes, they could celebrate, but more importantly, Smith and Năstase would finally line up in singles. In the 1970s, as long as the schedule allowed, dead rubbers were played. They even counted for Grand Prix points. Năstase had won the lucrative 1972 Grand Prix and was slogging out a punishing 1973 schedule in an effort to defend the crown. Even though Romania’s Cup campaign was done, Nasty had good reason to take this one seriously.

For the fourth time in their long rivalry, the two stars went five sets. Năstase broke at 6-5 to take the first. From there, Smith’s serve allowed the American to take control. The surface, once again, worked in the home team’s favor. Big Stan claimed the Grand Prix points, 5-7, 6-2, 6-3, 4-6, 6-3.

The 1973 final would be held in Cleveland, once again on a surface chosen to suit the home team. All the Americans could do now was wait: Australia and Czechoslovakia wouldn’t settle the other semi-final until November. With Rod Laver, John Newcombe, and Ken Rosewall suiting up for the Aussies, Smith and the gang would take any edge they could get.

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August 19, 1973: Sometimes on Sunday

Reverend Bob Hetherington had a busy week. Top seeded at the 1973 National Public Parks tournament in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the 32-year-old left-hander found himself running around both on and off the court. After advancing to the second round on Monday, he flew home to Buffalo to officiate a funeral. He raced back to Pittsburgh on Tuesday, only to discover that his second-rounder was delayed by rain.

What would he do, local reporters asked, if he made it to Sunday’s final? Some athletes of a religious bent would never play on Sunday. “The Rev”–as he was known in Buffalo tennis circles–wasn’t so devout as that. He’d find a substitute for the morning service and chalk it up as a vacation day.

Hetherington had reached the final of the Public Parks event in 1971, so it wasn’t just idle speculation. He had been a well-regarded junior, earning invitations to play the US National Championships at Forest Hills in 1960 and 1961. The Reverend kept up his game through the years, winning local events in both Pittsburgh and Buffalo. Tennis wasn’t even his best sport: He was nationally ranked in squash rackets, with multiple victories to his credit over all-time great Hashim Khan.

The Public Parks event was well-suited to a man of Hetherington’s skill level and full-time employment. For 47 years, the tournament had invited qualifiers from regional playoffs to compete for national titles. It attracted many strong players over the years, especially Midwesterners who couldn’t quite cut the mustard among elite competition. Even when many of the world’s best tennis players remained amateurs, there was demand for lower-stakes events that showcased the abilities of outstanding recreational players.

Hetherington had maintained that level for more than a decade, and he possessed the easy confidence of a veteran. In the third round, a Washington, D.C. law student named Pierce Kelly pushed him to 10-all in the deciding set before he finally pulled away.

“Never in doubt,” laughed the Reverend.

“You don’t defeat a clergyman in tennis,” wrote Jeff Samuels in the Pittsburgh Press. “He’s got too many forces on his side.”

He would need all the help he could get. As he advanced through the bracket, Hetherington lined up a replacement pastor for Sunday’s service. Then, at the last minute, he learned that his sub couldn’t make it, either. After winning Saturday’s semi-final, he once again dashed home.

On August 19th, the Reverend began his day by delivering a sermon to his Episcopalian flock in Buffalo. Another run to the airport, another short hop to Pittsburgh, and he arrived only an hour late for the final. This was the Public Parks tournament, not Wimbledon, and no one was about to default a man of the cloth on Sunday.

If Hetherington was exhausted by his outrageous commute, there was no sign of it. He made quick work of his opponent, a 19-year-old University of San Diego student named Russell Watts. The Reverend won the championship, 6-3, 6-2. He stayed on court to win the doubles title with buddy Charlie Garfinkel by nearly the same score, 6-2 6-3.

Victory complete, Garfinkel joked, “I guess it’s back to oblivion for me.”

The Rev would step away from the national scene, as well, but he was hardly taking a break. The next weekend, he led the field at the Kronman Memorial tournament in Buffalo. The final was scheduled for 1 P.M. on Sunday–perfect for a player who had a few things to take care of in the morning.

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August 18, 1973: The ATA at MIT

In the six years since big-time tennis went “Open,” the line between professionals and amateurs had blurred. No longer were pros relegated to one-night stands in high school gymnasiums; no longer was amateurism a byword for athletic integrity.

Civic groups were, to varying degrees, caught in the middle. The American Tennis Association, an organization for Black players that dated back to 1916, had come of age in the amateur era. It offered playing opportunities for middle-class Blacks who were excluded from the country clubs that dominated American tennis. The ATA also provided a training ground for stars. Althea Gibson first proved her mettle at ATA events. A decade later, Arthur Ashe did the same.

One man hoped that the 1973 ATA Championships would offer a similar springboard. On August 18th, Art Carrington, a 26-year-old from New Jersey, won his first title at the national event. Carrington worked with Sid Llewellyn, the flashy Jamaican who had once coached Gibson, and he had given up his job as a schoolteacher in May to focus solely on tennis.

The ATA tournament, held at the MIT courts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a confidence-builder for Carrington, especially after he squandered eleven match points in the previous year’s final. But it was unclear how much the result meant. Amateurs made up most of the field. The runner-up, Doug Sykes, was a 30-year-old tax attorney from San Francisco.

Llewellyn was optimistic about his student’s chances among the pros. “Oh, he’ll make it, all right,” said the coach. “If they don’t break his spirit, he’ll make it.” Gibson and Ashe had opened the door for Black players, but no one had yet followed them. Breaking into the sport wasn’t cheap, and the establishment still had ways of throwing obstacles in the path of aspiring Black players. Carrington preferred not to talk about that. He focused on just one thing: Playing a little better when a big opportunity finally came along.

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The women’s competition revealed even more contrasts in the ATA’s ranks. The runner-up was Jean Burnett, a 33-year-old housewife from New Jersey who had taken up the game because her husband wanted a hitting partner.

The champion, though, was a teaching pro and occasional circuit player named Mimi Kanarek. Kanarek, who had grown up in Nicaragua with Polish parents, wasn’t even Black. The ATA had always welcomed all comers, especially those who didn’t fit in at tennis’s traditional upper-crust venues.

Kanarek made her first appearance at an ATA event back in 1960, when she won a title in Hampton, Virginia. At the time, she was a secretary and translator in Brooklyn, a latecomer to tennis. She steadily climbed the ranks in New York-area tennis, rising as high as the number two ranking in the USLTA’s Eastern region. She won a regional title in 1967 and began running a tennis club in Manhattan.

In 1965, Kanarek’s career took the oddest twist of all: She played a match as part of an art installation conceived by the painter Robert Rauschenberg:

The game pitted the tennis pro Mimi Kanarek against Frank Stella, already one of America’s most radical and celebrated painters. Surrounded by some 1,200 viewers on bleachers, the two strode into the drill hall of the 69th Regiment Armory in New York and faced off across the net. Each time one of them hit the ball, a miniature radio transmitter inside the racket broadcast a loud “bong” and sent a signal extinguishing one of the hall’s 48 overhead lights.

By 1973, she was the assistant pro at a club in Hastings-on-Hudson. Ironically, the one-time outsider now counted New York City mayor John Lindsay among her clients. Now 40 years old, she found that feeding balls to students didn’t help her game: She had never had the “killer instinct,” and she got out of the habit of trying to put balls away.

Kanarek, like Carrington, found herself in the awkward middle ground between amateur and pro. She could beat most amateurs but few professionals. With her ATA trophy in hand, she headed back to New York, where she entered the qualifying draw for the US Open. One second-round loss later, it was back to the club. She had a full slate of lessons ahead of her.

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Men’s Doubles Results

This is part of a series of reference posts that lay out what historical data is available at TennisAbstract.com. I recently did a similar post about pre-Open era men’s singles data. I’ll try to keep this post updated as the site expands.

Amateur-era doubles data–even doubles results from early in the Open era–is thin on the ground. I’m trying, slowly, to change that.

The TennisAbstract.com site now contains over 1,300 men’s doubles results from 1957 to 1967, the last eleven years of the amateur era. That includes:

Grand slam finals
All Davis Cup doubles rubbers
Doubles matches from professional tournaments and barnstorming stops. This varies enormously from year to year, in part because the pro tours sometimes played doubles every night, and sometimes they rarely did. At the extremes, I have 83 pro doubles matches from 1958 and only one from 1961. Reporting of these matches was extremely inconsistent at the time.
Doubles finals from all amateur tournaments where at least one member of the Tennis 128 competed–assuming I could find it. This amounts to roughly 60 finals per year, spanning most of the circuit’s most notable events.

Note my focus on finals. Eventually, I may expand on that, especially for grand slams. But collecting doubles results is extremely slow going, and contemporary coverage was much spottier than for singles. There’s nothing quite so disheartening as trying to add a match to the database when the losing side is listed only as “Smith/Smith.” Or worse: “Smith/partner.”

On any player page, you can find doubles results–assuming the player has some–by scrolling down, or by clicking here:

Here’s what you’ll see, at least if you’re on Rod Laver’s page:

*Rocket was pretty good at doubles, too*.

This “notable” table is limited to 20 matches. For most players, that’s all I have at this point. If I have more, the “notable” table lists a combination of slam finals and the most recent matches.

If there is an “All results” link above the table–as there is for Laver–that means I have more than 20 matches, and you can click through to get the full list. Here, for instance, is Gordon Forbes:

*By the time he retired, the man had a lot to write about.*

Eventually, these pages will be filterable, like the singles results. For now, it’s just a reverse-chronological list.

Next up, I hope to add men’s doubles from the 1968 season, as well as a few more seasons from the beginning of the Open era. Then I’ll go back to 1956 and add more amateur-era seasons.

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August 16, 1973: Stretched Thin

*Newspaper ad for the 1973 Jersey Shore Tennis Classic*

Billie Jean King just couldn’t stay away. After losing the Nashville final to Margaret Court, she told Margaret that she would sit out the next two weeks. A couple days later, there she was, prepping for another tournament, another first-round match.

King was the face of the Virginia Slims tour, now more than ever. She was both the reigning Wimbledon champ and the next woman to challenge 55-year-old Bobby Riggs. What was she going to do, stay home and do interviews? She could leave that to Bobby, and after all, the press would come to her.

Fatigued or not, Billie Jean breezed through the start of a new week, disposing of French veteran Françoise Dürr in her opening match. Dürr could be dangerous on clay–the pair had gone three sets on dirt in Nashville–but indoors at the Allaire Racquet Club in Wall Township, New Jersey, King had the edge. She lost just five games.

But on August 16th, warming up for her second-rounder against Joy Schwikert, King slipped as she chased down a ball. The verdict: a strained ligament. She was out of the tournament.

“It’s a shame for the tournament and the spectators that Billie Jean and Kerry [Melville] are out,” said Court. Melville had taken a spill, as well. Margaret didn’t seem to mind too much on her own account: She had won 11 of 14 Slims trophies in 1973, and King’s exit made it a near-certainty she’d pick up a 12th.

Kerry Harris, who reached the quarter-finals by outlasting sixth-seeded Val Ziegenfuss, took a different view. “It’s always great seeing new people getting opportunities,” she said, “and that’s what happening here.”

Most fans didn’t care about the Jersey Shore Classic. But King’s injury didn’t bode well for the September 20th Battle of the Sexes match, an event that loomed even larger than the upcoming US Open. Millions of dollars were now riding–indirectly, anyway–on Billie Jean’s knee.

As if King didn’t already know how much was at stake, another story ran the morning after her injury. Ticket prices were set for the Riggs match. The best seats at the Houston Astrodome would cost a cool $100–the equivalent of $700 today. Penny-pinchers could get in for six bucks, but from the upper tier of a 40,000-seat stadium, they might wonder why they hadn’t stayed home and watched the match on TV.

Billie Jean left the worrying to the promoters. She wasn’t one to rest and recuperate one minute more than necessary. There was a tournament next week in Newport, and Madame Superstar planned to be there.

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