Heavy Topspin – Page 15 – The Tennis Abstract blog

June 30, 1973: Exit the Captain

Two days before Wimbledon began, 21-year-old Sandy Mayer was still in New Jersey. He reached the finals of the National Collegiate tournament in Princeton, stepping up at the event where, in 1972, he had won the doubles title with Roscoe Tanner. Now he had a chance not only to repeat, but to claim the singles championship–and by so doing, secure team honors for Stanford over a strong challenge from the University of Southern California.

Mayer made it look easy. He breezed past USC’s Raúl Ramírez, 6-3, 6-1, 6-4. He also partnered Jim Delaney to the doubles crown.

Then he got on a plane.

Mayer was the 11th-ranked American, and among the boycott-weakened Wimbledon field of 1973, that made him a marginal contender. He had barely 24 hours to accustom himself to the grass, a tough transition from the en tout cas surface–an ersatz clay not unlike Har-Tru–at the NCAA’s. Fortunately, the draw did him favors. He reached the fourth round by knocking out three straight lucky losers. He lost just one set in the process.

The cakewalk ended in the round of 16, where the collegiate champion lined up against Ilie Năstase. Năstase was the 1972 runner-up, the top seed, and the odds-on favorite to take the title. He had won 53 of his last 54 matches. He was a member of the ATP, the players’ union that organized the Wimbledon walkout. But he was also a captain–nominally, anyway–in the Romanian Army. Orders from Bucharest said he would play. He played.

At his best, Năstase was one of the most gifted players the game has ever seen, a shotmaker who would dig out from impossible positions for the sheer joy of it. Fortunately for Mayer, Ilie on an off-day was decidedly ordinary.

June 30th was one of those days. Tournament organizers expected a blowout, so they put the match on the No. 2 Court. Ilie liked an audience, and the smaller venue was just one of the things working against him. He had stumbled through his first-round match, claiming kidney troubles and skipping a press conference. The ATP boycott had distracted him, as well: He said he had barely thought about tennis for two weeks, even if he did win the Queen’s Club title amid the distraction.

Against Mayer, Năstase “played like an artist whose normal flair was sadly impaired,” according to the Daily Telegraph‘s Lance Tingay. The Romanian lived off his reflexes, but the American was quicker. Mayer–trained literally from the crib by his tennis-coach father–played returns of serve on the rise and kept Năstase off balance. He kicked his own serves wide, taking advantage of the top seed’s deep return position.

Tournament organizers got a brief reprieve when the Romanian, down two sets to love, broke serve to save the third. But the fourth set was back to business. Mayer took it 6-4, breaking in the third game and never looking back.

The NCAA champ had shown signs of brilliance before. He took a set from Stan Smith at the Championships the year before, and he upset Jan Kodeš at the 1972 US Open. But this was something entirely different. Some pundits whispered that Năstase had tanked, that in solidarity with his fellow ATP members, he had lost at the first plausible opportunity. Maybe. Anything was possible where Ilie was concerned.

As for Mayer, he remained an underdog. Kodeš and Jimmy Connors became 7-2 co-favorites, and the Stanford man would take on 8th seed Jürgen Fassbender in the quarters.

He didn’t have to worry about breaking with the union: He was still an amateur. He didn’t know who would get his prize money, except that it wouldn’t be him. At a Wimbledon torn apart by rich men fighting over slices of the pie, the most shocking blow was delivered by an up-and-comer playing for a few bucks a day in expense money.

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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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Surface Speed Convergence Revisited

For more than a decade, players and pundits have complained that surface speeds are converging. To oversimplify their gripes: Everything is turning into clay. Hard courts have gotten slower, even many of the indoor ones. Grass courts, once a bastion of quick-fire attacking tennis, have slowed down as well.

I’ve attempted to confirm or refute the notion a couple of times. In 2013, I used break rate and ace rate to see whether hard and clay courts were getting closer to each other. The results said no. Many readers complained that I was using the wrong metrics: rally length is a better indicator. I agree, but rally length wasn’t widely available at the time.

In 2016, I looked at rally length for grand slam finals and found some evidence of surface speed convergence. The phenomenon was much clearer in men’s tennis than women’s, a hint that it wasn’t all about the surface, but that tactics had changed and that the mix of players in slam finals skewed the data.

Now, the Match Charting Project contains shot-by-shot logs of more than 12,000 matches. We can always dream of more and better data, but we’re well past the point where we can take a more detailed look at how rally length has changed over the years on different surfaces.

Forecasting rally length

Start with a simple model to forecast rally length for a single match. You don’t need much, just the average rally length for each player, plus the surface. Men who typically play short points have more influence on rally length than those who play long ones. (This is worthy of a blog post of its own–maybe another day.) Call the average rally length of the shorter-point guy X and the average rally length of the longer-point guy Y.

Using data from the last seven-plus seasons, you can predict the rally length of a hard court match as follows:

X + (0.7 * Y) – 2.6

The numbers change a bit depending on gender and time span, but the general idea is always the same. The short-point player usually has about half-again as much influence on rally length than his or her opponent.

For men since 2016, we can get the clay court rally length by adding 0.16 to the result above. For grass courts, subtract 0.45 instead.

For example, take a hypothetical matchup between Carlos Alcaraz and Alexander Bublik. In charted matches, Alcaraz’s average rally length is 4.0 and Bublik’s is 3.2. The formula above predicts the following number of shots per point:

Hard: 3.39
Clay: 3.55
Grass: 2.94

The error bars on the surface adjustments are fairly wide, for all sorts of reasons. Courts are not identical just because their surfaces are given the same names. Other factors, like balls, influence how a match goes on a given day. Players adapt differently to changing surfaces. The usual dose of randomness adds even more variance to rally-length numbers.

Changing coefficients

These surface adjustments aren’t very big. A difference of 0.16 shots per point is barely noticeable, unless you’re keeping score. Given the variation within each surface, it means that rallies would be longer on some hard courts than some clay courts, even for the same pair of players.

That brings us back to the issue of surface speed convergence. 0.16 shots per point is my best attempt at quantifying the difference between hard courts and clay courts now–or, more precisely, for men between 2016 and the present. If surfaces have indeed converged, we would find a more substantial gap in older data.

That’s exactly what we see. I ran the same analysis for three other time periods: 1959-95, 1996-2005, and 2006-2015. The following graph shows the rally-length gap between surfaces for each of the four spans:

For example, in the years up to 1995, a pair of players who averaged 4 shots per point on a hard court would be expected to last 5 shots per point (4 + 1) on clay. They’d tally just 3.25 shots per point (4 – 0.75) on grass.

By the years around the turn of the century, the gap between hard courts and grass courts had narrowed to its present level. But the difference between hard and clay continued to shrink. The current level of 0.16 additional shots per point is only about one-sixth as much as the equivalent in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The graph implies that hard courts are constant over time. That’s just an artifact of how I set up this analysis, and it may not be true. It could be that clay courts have been more consistent, something that my earlier analysis suggested and that many insiders seem to believe. In that case, rather than a downward-sloping clay line and an upward-sloping grass line, the graph would show two upward-sloping lines reflecting longer rallies on non-clay surfaces.

Women, too

The women’s game has evolved somewhat differently than the men’s has, but the trends are broadly similar. Here is the same graph for women’s rally lengths across surfaces:

For the last two decades, there has been essentially no difference in point length between hard courts and clay courts. A gap remains between hard and grass, though like in the men’s game, it is trending slightly downwards.

Why the convergence?

The obvious culprit here is the literal one: the surface. Depending on who you ask, tournament directors have chosen to slow down hard and grass surfaces because fans prefer longer rallies, because the monster servers of the turn of the century were boring, because slow surfaces favored the Big Four, or because they like seeing players puke on court after five hours of grueling tennis.

That’s probably part of it.

I would offer a complementary story. Racket technology and the related development of return skill essentially killed serve-and-volley tennis. Slower surfaces would have aided that process, but they weren’t necessary. In the 1980s, a top player like Ivan Lendl or Mats Wilander would use entirely different tactics depending on the surface, grinding on clay while serve-and-volleying indoors and on grass. Now, a Djokovic-Alcaraz match is roughly the same beast no matter the venue. If Alcaraz serve-and-volleyed on every point, Novak would have a far easier time competing on return points than the opponents of Lendl and Wilander ever did.

My best guess is that rally lengths have converged because of some combination of the two. I believe that conditions (surfaces, balls, etc) are the lesser of the two factors. But I don’t know how we could use the data we have to prove it either way.

In the end, it doesn’t particularly matter why. Much more than in my previous studies, we have enough rally-length data to see how players cope with different surfaces. The evidence is strong that, for whatever reason, hard-court tennis, clay-court tennis, and grass-court tennis are increasingly similar, a trend that began at least 25 to 30 years ago and shows no sign of reversing. Whether or not surfaces have converged, tactics have definitely done so.

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June 28, 1973: Borgasm

Bud Collins helpfully explained the sudden phenomenon that was Björn Borg at Wimbledon. If Ilie Năstase was Mick Jagger–the charismatic bad boy who could work a crowd into frenzy–Borg was Donny Osmond, a modest teen idol for the Tiger Beat generation. The Swede’s luxurious blond hair proved to have more appeal than the dozens of big-name players who skipped the event as part of the ATP boycott.

Strange, but true. Despite the absence of Laver, Rosewall, Ashe, Smith, Newcombe and the rest, Wimbledon was the hottest ticket in town. On June 28th, when Borg played his third-round match against 24-year-old West German Karl Meiler, the tournament sold 27,000 tickets, many of them to teenage girls who crammed the standing areas and deafened their fellow fans.

Björn’s doubles match was scheduled later that day for an outer court. For fear of a stampede, organizers moved it to a bigger venue. Borg himself was given full-time police protection.

“It is embarrassing, and tiring,” said the 17-year-old. “I try to put their noise out of the way, and just play. It can break your concentration. I don’t like that. But they are nice. It helps to know they want me to win.”

Borg didn’t need much help with motivation. In his first round match against Indian Davis Cup player Premjit Lall, he sealed victory on the eighth opportunity, the 38th point of a tiebreak. The 20-18 shootout set a new record for the longest tiebreak in top-level tennis and gave Borg the win, 6-3, 6-4, 9-8(18).

Opponents were baffled by his style of play. They assumed he couldn’t possibly sustain it. Then he did. Collins described his game as a “western grip forehand that shouldn’t hold up on fast grass, but does; two-handed loopy backhand that seems vulnerable and isn’t; a serve that flashes unexpectedly with power…. He’s deceptive, canny, sneaky, content to keep the ball in play until suddenly bashes a startling drive through an opening.”

Coach Lennart Bergelin described him as a “fighter,” a characteristic that the young man would need when Meiler pushed him to a fifth set. The West German broke for a 2-1 advantage in the decider. Borg struck back immediately, securing the fourth game with a half-volley lob that left Meiler splayed on the grass.

Aficionados were captivated by the new talent, but they were vastly outnumbered by shrieking schoolgirls. Borg was just one year removed from the Wimbledon junior title, and he already transcended the game. Collins, always ready with a quip, didn’t disappoint. He captured the cultural moment with a single word: Borgasm.

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June 26, 1973: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wade?

Wimbledon was nothing if not predictable: Immaculate lawns, surging crowds, and the struggles of Virginia Wade.

“She goes on to court burdened with the weight of every national hope,” wrote David Gray in the Guardian. “She has played eleven times at Wimbledon and she has reached the quarter-finals only twice…. [U]p to now she has either disappointed and slumped against less talented and less fancied opponents or else she has lost to her old enemy, Billie Jean King.”

If the tournament ever needed Ginny to pull through, this was the year. The 1973 Championships were marred by a boycott of more than half the men’s field. This would be a “Women’s Wimbledon” in which the ladies would carry more of the burden than usual.

In her first outing of the fortnight, on June 26th, Wade didn’t exactly silence the doubters. She took on 16-year-old Australian Dianne Fromholtz, a lefty who had emerged as one of the game’s top prospects. The youngster had already won four minor titles in England and put together a 12-match winning streak on grass. She arrived on Centre Court and acted like she belonged there.

Fromholtz opened play with an ace and remained on top with a barrage of forehand winners. The pressure was all on Wade, who responded with enough unforced errors to allow her opponent to cruise to a one-set advantage, 6-3.

“I wish they would not sigh every time I miss an easy shot,” Virginia said of the home crowd.

Experience, eventually, told. Fromholtz felt the weight of her half-accomplishment, and Wade zeroed in on her backhand. The veteran took control of the net, discovering that her opponent had no lob to speak of. Wade rebounded with a 6-2 second set and was even better in the third. She won the last 14 points of the match to seal it, 6-1.

Still, it was hardly an inspiring start for the sixth seed, especially on a day when her “old enemy,” Billie Jean, advanced with the loss of just two games.

At least Wade fared better than another British heroine, 1961 finalist Christine (Truman) Janes. Janes also drew a left-handed 16-year-old, Martina Navratilova. Janes had learned her name only two days earlier, yet the Czech won in straight sets. “Now that I have played her,” said the Brit, “I am not surprised that she beat me. I think that she is good enough to push most of the players here.”

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Back in New York, Bobby Riggs was playing exhibition matches with his pal, 62-year-old baseball legend Hank Greenberg. At a resort in the Catskills, the geriatric pair defeated a couple of younger opponents. Bobby did the math and made sure the crowd knew the exact age gap.

Riggs continued to aim for bigger prizes. “After I beat Margaret Court, she said there were seven women, including herself, who could beat me,” Bobby said. “I want all seven of them.”

“Right now I’m on my way to scout the women at Wimbledon. My goal is a match with the Wimbledon champion for $100,000, winner take all.”

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June 23, 1973: Bracket Challenge

*South Africa’s Bernard Mitton, who lost in the first round of qualifying but got into Wimbledon anyway*

What do you do when 80-some players pull out of your 128-man draw? It wasn’t exactly an option to skip Wimbledon or proceed with a compressed field, just because an upstart players’ union full of money-grubbing Americans wanted to make a point.

Referee Mike Gibson began by sending out a few invitations. 30-year-old New Yorker Herb Fitzgibbon was semi-retired, working as a stockbroker. Perhaps because he had beaten Niki Pilić at the Championships in 1968, Fitzgibbon got a wire telling him he didn’t need to qualify. He left his desk and headed to London.

When the withdrawals started rolling in, the qualifying tournament was underway. It quickly became clear that the 128-strong group of aspirants didn’t need to be whittled down as much as usual. The third qualifying round was never played: There would be 32 qualifiers instead of the traditional 16.

So many ATP members took their names out of the running that soon, every man who had reached the second round of qualifying was in. Even that wasn’t enough, especially when some of the lucky losers decided to back the boycott. Sherwood Stewart was one such prominent case. Stewart’s doubles partner Dick Dell was another. Dell’s older brother, Donald, was one of the ATP’s founders. As soon as Bob Maud found out he got a second-chance entry into the main draw, union representatives tracked him down and convinced him to stay out.

Ultimately, there were 49 lucky losers in the men’s draw, some of whom had failed to win a single qualifying match. That left former British Davis Cupper Paul Hutchins with a painful what-if to contemplate. Like Fitzgibbon, he was semi-retired with a day job. He entered the qualifying event, but on the first day of play, he was busy at work. He figured he didn’t have much of a chance anyway, so he called in to scratch. A few days later, he learned that had he simply shown up and lost, he could have gotten a place in the main draw.

Hutchins might have made way for Californian Dick Bohrnstedt, the luckiest loser of all. A successful qualifier in 1972, Bohrnstedt wasn’t in the draw for the 1973 preliminaries because his entry got lost. He made it in as an alternate only to lose to Australian John Bartlett in his opening match. He was given a main-draw spot anyway.

British pundits put on a brave face. “I dare say the normal excitement and tension will be far from lacking,” wrote the estimable Lance Tingay. “[A]fter all, the competitors who came in from the qualifying rounds are far from poor players.”

Some of them, anyway. 18-year-old South African Bernard Mitton was another loser in first-round qualifying. He took advantage of his good fortune–and a draw packed with journeymen–to reach the second week of the main draw. He wasn’t even the only lucky loser in the fourth round.

The real hope for the men’s tournament rested with the few stars who chose to play. ATP member Ilie Năstase defied the boycott on the orders of his national federation. When defending champion Stan Smith withdrew, Năstase became the top seed and an overwhelming favorite to win the title. Non-union youngsters Jimmy Connors and Björn Borg were moved onto the seeding list, at 5th and 6th, respectively.

The home fans would follow another ATPer, Britain’s own Roger Taylor. While union members debated whether Taylor would be shunned or merely held at arm’s length for breaking the boycott, the left-hander came within a whisker of winning the title at Queen’s Club. On June 23rd, he lost to Năstase, 9-8, 6-3, in a match with only one break of serve. Taylor would be the third seed at the All-England Club. In Tingay’s opinion, “there never was a better chance of a British men’s winner for 35 years.”

With two days left before the Championships kicked off, the press contingent had plenty of work to do. When they weren’t writing columns lambasting Jack Kramer for destroying the game, they had dozens of new names and faces to learn. This would not be a typical Wimbledon.

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June 22, 1973: A Team Sport

*Billie Jean King in 1975 with New York Sets owner Sol Berg*

“The condition of man,” wrote Thomas Hobbes, “is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.”

Ah, so Hobbes was a tennis fan.

In 1972, the International Lawn Tennis Federation finally made its peace with World Championship Tennis, the deep-pocketed tournament circuit based in the United States. As soon as that agreement was reached, a new antagonist entered the scene in the form of the Association of Tennis Professionals, the players’ union that was now threatening the sport with a boycott at the biggest event of them all, Wimbledon.

In April 1973, the USLTA came to terms with the rival Virginia Slims circuit. Same story: The truce led to the formation of the Women’s Tennis Association.

The 1973 tennis calendar was a fragile thing. Promoters world-wide–and especially in the States–competed to attract the biggest stars of the game, often in pursuit of television contracts. Some of the upstarts were sanctioned; others didn’t care. There were more would-be tournaments and exhibitions than there were weeks to hold them or marquee names to play them.

And then it got worse. On June 22, 1973, Jerry Saperstein–best known as the former owner of basketball’s barnstorming Harlem Globetrotters–announced the formation of the World Team Tennis League. The 16-team circuit would begin play in May 1974.

The plan was audacious beyond belief. Modern fans know World Team Tennis as a laid-back series of summer exhibitions, a sideshow that rarely takes a top player away from any sanctioned tournament worth entering. Saperstein and his associates were thinking bigger. Teams would play forty-four matches between May and July.

In the understatement of the year, the promoter acknowledged that a few other tennis events took place during those months: “Obviously there will be conflicts, but we’ll do anything within reason to accommodate the existing tournaments.” In practice, that meant two weeks off for Wimbledon, and the rest of the existing slate could fend for itself.

The big question was whether the players would buy in. The league would need around 100 athletes, and Saperstein expected the number one man and the number one woman to sign up. (He didn’t name names, perhaps diplomatically, because both titles were up for grabs.) WTT staffers headed to London to talk up the venture. Tabling boycott-related matters, ATP leaders discussed how they should approach the new venture. Stan Smith, one of the league’s top targets, was skeptical.

Most negative of all, however, were the Brits. To many on the island, the Wimbledon boycott wasn’t the fault of an imperious power structure, or even the ATP. They blamed the Americans–or, more specifically, American money. Jack Kramer had lured the world’s best into his professional ranks for decades. Lamar Hunt signed big checks that kept stars jetting around the States for months at a time. And now, a consortium of US team owners (okay, well, John Bassett was ready to put a team in Toronto) were taking aim at the British summer season and perhaps even Wimbledon itself.

“‘Team Tennis’,” wrote David Talbot of the Birmingham Post, “will be a travesty of lawn tennis.”

It would be different, that much was certain. Several prospective owners were also involved in the upstart World Hockey Association, and the league would target a demographic that was less country club, more hockey fan. On court, WTT squads would play no-ad games, change sides only after each set, and allow mid-match substitutions.

Would it work? Saperstein, whose New York franchise would play at Madison Square Garden, admitted, “This is like rolling craps–we’ll lose money the first year.” Profitable or not, World Team Tennis would offer a challenge to the tennis establishment that would make the Wimbledon boycott seem like a mere bump in the road.

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June 20, 1973: United, Mostly

*British star Roger Taylor, who would come under immense pressure to compete at Wimbledon despite his membership in the ATP*

A disappointment for the top men and a disaster for Wimbledon, it smelled like opportunity to Billie Jean King. Five days away from the start of the Championships, a British High Court ruled against Niki Pilić, rejecting his request for an injunction against the All-England Club that would allow him to play. There was vanishingly little hope that the ATP would abandon its boycott of the tournament. Dozens of players–including defending champion Stan Smith and 1971 titlist John Newcombe–had already withdrawn.

Wimbledon released its seeding lists. Out of 16 men, only Czechoslovakian Jan Kodeš was not an ATP member. The event got a bit of a reprieve when second seed Ilie Năstase also said he would play, apparently because the Romanian federation ordered him to do so. As David Gray wrote for the Guardian in a front-page story, it was shaping up to be an “Iron Curtain Wimbledon.”

Many women were sympathetic; a few were even prepared to join the ATP’s boycott. Billie Jean, though, was hunting bigger game. “We are in a great bargaining position,” she said, thinking about the appeal of Margaret Court, Chris Evert, Evonne Goolagong, and herself at a sold-out showpiece tournament bereft of its leading men.

Wimbledon planned to pay out the equivalent of $70,500 in prize money to the men and $50,500 to the women. By the standard of tennis distributions in 1973, the imbalance wasn’t egregious. But King targeted full equality, even when her fellow players thought it impossible.

“As for the girls wanting more money,” said tour regular Patti Hogan, “aside from the fact that it can’t be done, there’s no way we could justify this to the public.”

Others didn’t even care. Goolagong said, “I’d be happy to play at Wimbledon even if there was no money.” Evert, who had yet to adopt Billie Jean’s way of thinking, had similar priorities. “I’ve come over here to play tennis,” said the 18-year-old, “and that’s all I’m interested in.”

Once again, King was forced to play the long game. Without a united front that could take on Wimbledon organizers, she sought to create one. On June 20th, she held a meeting at London’s Gloucester Hotel for more than the 60 of her fellow players. By the end of the evening, she had convinced her peers that they needed a players’ union of their own. The Women’s Tennis Association was born. There would be no women’s boycott at the All-England Club, but the new organization would make its presence felt before the summer was through.

In the meantime, Niki Pilić flew home to Yugoslavia. He knew that the battle wasn’t really about him anymore. But this was still Wimbledon, where Pilić had reached the semi-final in 1967. If a compromise did emerge, he was ready to fly back at a moment’s notice.

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June 16, 1973: An American Sweep

Less than two weeks from Wimbledon, and the warm-ups were in full swing. The field divided into two combined men’s and women’s events: one in Nottingham, the other in Beckenham.

The 1973 Nottingham ladies’ draw boded well for the big event. Billie Jean King lived up to her top seed, sweeping the tournament without the loss of a set. In the final on June 16th, she defeated in-form home hope Virginia Wade, who had drubbed Chris Evert the day before.

King had watched Margaret Court dominate the circuit while she sat out with a stomach injury. Now she was riding a three-tournament, eleven-match win streak. She was well-rested, too. “I am feeling fitter at this stage,” she said, “than for quite a few Wimbledons past.”

The men’s action in Nottingham provided the surprises. Brit Roger Taylor, one of the best players present, lost in the first round. Mark Cox, another top Englishman, fell in the quarters. Jimmy Connors suffered the same fate as his love interest Chrissie, departed in the semis. Jimbo’s conqueror was another American, the oft-forgotten Erik van Dillen.

When van Dillen’s name came up, it was usually to do with his doubles prowess. Just 22 years old, he was already the veteran of two Davis Cup campaigns. He and partner Stan Smith lost a close match to the Romanians in the 1971 final. The next year, the American pair went 5-0. They saved their strongest performance of all for the hostile crowd in Bucharest, where they demolished Ilie Năstase and Ion Țiriac, 6-2, 6-0, 6-3. Many observers thought van Dillen was the best player on the court that day.

No one questioned van Dillen’s talent. He had been winning tournaments since he played 12-and-unders. The problem was consistency. One day he could outclass Smith and Năstase, or drop a 6-1, 6-0 wrecking ball on Arthur Ashe, as he did in February 1973. Then he would fail to put two good sets together for a month.

In Nottingham, van Dillen upset both Cliff Drysdale and Dick Stockton to reach the semi-finals. At that stage he encountered a “surprisingly quiet” Connors. Jimbo took the second set but the underdog retook the ascendancy with a comfortable three-set win. Van Dillen’s final opponent was another player with a two-handed backhand, the South African Frew McMillan. The American struggled with McMillan’s double-hander in the first set, but when it started going astray, van Dillen capitalized with his best game. The score: 3-6, 6-1, 6-1.

Naturally, he won the doubles, too.

Then he headed to Queen’s Club. He was entered in qualifying.

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Down in Beckenham, two men tested the limits of a single tiebreak set. Wimbledon and other British tournaments adopted the first-to-seven tiebreak for the first time in 1973. Of course, they had to do things a little differently. Instead of holding the shootout at six games apiece, they would wait until eight-all. And the deciding set would be played the old-fashioned way, even if it took all week.

Soviet standout Alex Metreveli took the Beckenham title 6-3, 9-8(9). That’s a second set consisting of 16 games plus another 20 points. The challenger who pushed Metreveli to such extremes was gaining a reputation for turning routine victories into dogfights. The runner-up in question: Björn Borg. A week after his 17th birthday, playing just his third career grass tournament, the Swede made it clear he was more than just a dirtballer.

In the semis, Borg had dismissed the Australian Owen Davidson, a veteran with two grass-court titles in the last month. Davidson was suitably impressed. He said, “I cannot remember ever playing a better 17-year-old.”

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Borg, Metreveli, and van Dillen would be three dark horses to watch at Wimbledon–if there were a men’s tournament worth the name. Players and federations had made no progress toward resolving the status of Niki Pilić, the Yugoslavian player banned by his national body, sanctioned by the ILTF, and now heartily backed by the players’ union. Nearly 100 players were ready to boycott.

On June 16th, Pilic and Arthur Ashe headed out to the All-England Club, hoping to get some practice in. They didn’t make it past the door. “I turned them off,” said the club secretary, “because this is a private club and they are not members.”

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June 13, 1973: A Heldman Special

By 1973, Julie Heldman had put together a fine career. The 27-year-old had never challenged for a place at the very top of the women’s tennis hierarchy, but she had amassed a couple dozen tournament victories, semi-final showings at Roland Garros and Forest Hills, and victories over most of the leading players in the game. Hampered by knee problems that year, she was reduced to a bit part on the Virginia Slims tour. She still recorded upsets of Kerry Melville and Nancy Richey.

Heldman was already laying the groundwork for a second career. After an early exit at Hilton Head, she shared the commentary booth with Bud Collins and called the Richey-Rosie Casals final for NBC. She had been immersed in tennis since birth. Her father, Julius, was a strong player with several match wins at Forest Hills. Her mother, Gladys, took up the game late and with a passion. She ran the magazine World Tennis–teenage Julie and her sister Carrie were frequent bylines–and put together the groundbreaking Virginia Slims women’s tour in 1971.

None of that helped Julie on June 13th, 1973. She was in the third round of the Green Shield Kent Championships in Beckenham, a traditional grass-court warmup for Wimbledon. Her opponent, South African Linky Boshoff, was only 16 years old. Heldman was having a tough time putting away the first set. As if a sore knee wasn’t enough, now she had the yips, barely able to toss the ball to serve.

On set point, Julie snuck in what the Daily Telegraph called a “Heldman ‘special’,” an underarm serve with heavy spin. Boshoff, flustered, couldn’t get it back.

The umpire, Pat Smyth, asked Boshoff, “Are you happy with that service?”

Heldman piped up, “It’s too bad if she’s not. Am I supposed to warn her when I’m about to hit a drop shot?”

Smyth acknowledged that the serve was within the rules. Afterward, he explained, “I just wanted to add a little courtesy to the match.”

Julie hit two more underarm serves that day, and she trotted out the tactic occasionally throughout a successful grass-court season. She even deployed it once on match point. Life could be hard as a career woman on a tour full of teenagers. Occasionally, Heldman was able to get her revenge.

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Speaking of cagey veterans: Everyone was still talking about Bobby Riggs–even Chris Evert was asked about a possible match after her French Open final. Of course Bobby was going to try to cash in.

On June 13th, a businessman and avid amateur player named Alvin Bunis announced the 1973 “Grand Masters” tour, to begin in July. Riggs would be joined by several other former greats–including Jaroslav Drobný, Frank Parker, Pancho Segura, and Vic Seixas–in a series of weekend tournaments worth $250,000.

59-year-old Gardnar Mulloy, a 1948 Wimbledon semi-finalist who had been winning age-group titles for decades, would be the oldest of the group. One pressman asked Mulloy why he signed up for the tour.

“Money.”

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Are Conditions Slower? Faster? Weirder?

Many players didn’t like the conditions at Roland Garros this year. The clay, apparently, was slower and heavily watered, at least on some courts. The balls were heavier than usual, especially when they had been in play for a little while and the clay began to stick to them.

Maybe the courts really did play differently. We could compare ace rate, rally length, or a few other metrics to see whether the French played slower this year.

I’m interested in a broader question. Were the conditions weirder? To put it another way, were they outside the normal range of variation on tour? We could be talking about anything that impacts play, including surface, balls, weather, you name it.

This is surprisingly easy to test. The weirder the conditions, the more unpredictable the results should be. If you don’t get the connection, think about really strange conditions, like playing in mud, or in the dark, or with rackets that have broken strings. In those situations, the factors that determine the winner of a match are so different than usual that they will probably seem random. At the very least, there will be more upsets. Holding a top ranking in “normal” tennis doesn’t mean as much in “dark” tennis or “broken string” tennis. While unusually heavy balls don’t rank up there with my hypotheticals, the idea is the same: The more you deviate from typical conditions, the less predictable the results.

We measure predictability by taking the Brier score of my Elo-based pre-match forecasts. Elo isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good, and the algorithm allows us to compare seasons and tournaments against each other. Brier score tells us the calibration of a group of predictions: Were they correct? Did they have the right level of confidence? The lower the score, the better the forecast. Or put another way, for our purposes today: The lower the score, the more predictable the outcomes.

Conclusion: This year’s French wasn’t that weird. Here are the Brier scores for men’s and women’s completed main draw matches, along with several other measures for context:

Tourney(s)     Men  Women  
2023 RG      0.177  0.193  
2022 RG      0.174  0.189  
2021 RG      0.177  0.194  
2020 RG      0.200  0.230  
2000-23 RG   0.169  0.184  
00-23 Slams  0.171  0.182  
Min RG       0.133  0.152  
Max RG       0.214  0.230

(“Min RG” and “Max RG” show the lowest and highest tournament Brier scores for each gender at the French since 2000.)

Again, lower = more predictable. For both men and women, the 2023 French was no more upset-ridden than the 2021 edition, and it ran considerably closer to script than the zany Covid tournament in autumn 2020. The results this year were a bit more unpredictable than the typical major since 2000. But the metrics tell us that the outcomes were closer to the average than to the extremes.

However unusual the conditions at Roland Garros felt to the players, the weirdness didn’t cause the results to be any more random than usual. While adjustments were surely necessary, most players were able to make them, and to similar degrees. The best players–based on their demonstrated clay-court prowess–tended to win, about as often as they always do at the French.