Heavy Topspin – Page 16 – The Tennis Abstract blog

July 11, 1973: Libber Versus Lobber

*Bobby Riggs hopping the net a little more gingerly than he once did*

Bobby Riggs wanted another day in the spotlight, a sequel to his Mother’s Day dismantling of Margaret Court. Billie Jean King just wanted him to shut up.

There was only one way to settle this.

On July 11th, just three days after Billie Jean secured the mixed doubles leg of her Wimbledon triple, the reigning champion and the 55-year-old hustler made it official. They would duke it out on court, after the US Open and–of course–on national television.

Two weeks earlier Riggs had proposed a $100,000, winner-take-all prize pot. He got that, plus an additional guarantee of another $100,000 for each competitor. Jerry Perenchio, the producer handling the event, aimed even higher. He suggested that the match could earn $400,000 by filling an arena. His opening salvo to television networks was $750,000, the price of a John Wayne special.

Perenchio wasn’t just blowing smoke. In 1971, he had helmed the richest sporting event in history, the Ali-Frazier “Fight of the Century.” “I’m more excited about this,” he said, “than I was about the fight.”

Billie Jean proved at this initial press conference that she was better equipped than Court to beat the hustler king at his own game. She knew how Riggs had defeated Margaret, and there was no question of the stakes. Court still pretended her loss was just another exhibition. King understood that the pride of womankind was on the line. No pressure.

Well, pressure is a privilege, as a famous woman once said.

Nobody talked a better game than Bobby, but somehow Billie Jean scored the last word. Riggs teased her about hitting three straight double faults at Wimbledon–something the control artist claimed he had never done. (He may have been right: Legend had it that he once went six months without double-faulting. On the other hand, the main source of Riggs stories was the ever-running mouth of the man himself.)

“How many did I serve against Chris?” King retorted, referring to her comprehensive victory over Chris Evert in the Wimbledon final.

“None,” said Riggs. “You played a helluva game.”

“I’ll let you hustle off the court,” said Billie Jean. “I’ll hustle on the court.”

The most famous women’s libber in sports would finally take a crack at the first 55-year-old man to become a celebrity by lobbing female tennis players. The sport would never be the same.

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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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July 7, 1973: The Triple

*Billie Jean King with her newest hardware*

After twelve days of sunshine, the rain finally arrived. The women’s singles final, scheduled for its traditional Saturday, was pushed to Sunday, alongside the men’s championship match. It wasn’t exactly the equal treatment that Billie Jean King had in mind when she hinted at a boycott before the event began, but it invited its share of direct comparisons.

The women’s showdown, on July 7th, would feature greats of the present and future, King and the teenage Chris Evert. The men’s title came down to two Eastern Europeans, Jan Kodeš and Alex Metreveli. Both were excellent players; Kodeš had won the French Open twice in the last four years. But they were clearly beneficiaries of the 80-player ATP boycott. At this “Women’s Wimbledon,” the American ladies could claim responsibility for yet another packed house.

Billie Jean had no problem getting herself psyched up for the match. In early 1972, Evert destroyed the Old Lady on a clay court in Fort Lauderdale, allowing King just one game. While they had played three times since then, the memory was still enough to motivate the veteran.

For a little while, King was on track to return the favor. She took the first set 6-0. Evert looked lost. “It was the loveliest, meanest set of tennis I’d ever seen,” wrote Grace Lichtenstein. “From the first point, she carved up Chris’s game like a Benihana chef slicing up meat on a hibachi table.”

The 18-year-old found her way back into the match, winning ten straight points as part of a push from 0-2 to 5-4 in the second set. But King wasn’t going to let this one slip away. “When I thought I was getting into it in the second set,” said Chrissie, “well, Billie Jean just served and volleyed even better. She didn’t make a mistake all afternoon.”

The final score was 6-0, 7-5 to King, in a little more than an hour. It was her fifth Wimbledon title, and she already had her eye on Suzanne Lenglen’s mark of six.

Before she could look too far ahead, though, she had two other campaigns to see out. With Rosie Casals, King polished off another title, winning the semi-finals and finals in the women’s doubles. She also teamed with Owen Davidson to take a mixed doubles quarter-final. (Their victims: Kodeš and the girls’ runner-up, Martina Navratilova.)

No one could blame Billie Jean when she skipped the traditional Wimbledon ball. She had spent five hours on court, with at least one more match to play the following day. The rest was somehow sufficient: She and Davidson came back to secure two more victories on Monday. The Old Lady had won everything there was to win, the “triple,” a feat she had also accomplished at Wimbledon in 1967.

The champion had once said, “We’ve got to get women’s tennis off the women’s pages and into the sports pages.” Mission accomplished, at least this fortnight. Newspaper editors around the world could lead with either King or Kodeš. Nearly all of them broke with tradition to focus on Billie Jean.

Madame Superstar, as couturier Teddy Tinling called her, was finally ready for a rest. She had played six matches and 139 games on Centre Court in two days. “I’m gonna sleep twenty hours a day for six days,” she told Lichtenstein. “Zonkereno!”

She already knew what her next challenge would be. It wasn’t official yet, but it had to be done. She was ready.

“Bring on Bobby Riggs.”

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July 4, 1973: An American Day

The Wimbledon crowd had no trouble picking sides in the 1973 women’s semi-finals. Australian veteran Margaret Court was a three-time champion, including her dramatic 14-12, 11-9 defeat of Billie Jean King for the title three years earlier. She got the nod, both analytically and sentimentally, over 18-year-old American Chris Evert in the first match.

The second semi was an even easier call. If the Brits couldn’t have a local product in the final, they’d happily settle for Evonne Goolagong. The young Australian was a crowd favorite everywhere she went, and she had taken Wimbledon by surprise with her title in 1971. The London public wasn’t so positive about Billie Jean, the defending champion. Americans were widely thought to be responsible for the ATP boycott of the event, and King’s role with the new Women’s Tennis Association made her seem even guilty as well, if only by the flimsiest logic.

“I am tired of being portrayed as a villain,” Billie Jean told the press earlier that week. “We just wanted to form an association, and we have.” Still, emotions ran high, and the American wouldn’t get much love from the gallery.

On July 4th, both Evert and King silenced the crowd. Chrissie finished the job that she left undone at Roland Garros. No one gave her much of a chance against Court on grass: The last time the two women met on turf, Evert won just three games. But she seized an early lead, taking the first set, 6-1, with a dazzling array of lobs over her six-foot-tall opponent.

Margaret chose her spots more carefully in the second and evened the score with a 6-1 frame of her own. But on this day, she couldn’t overcome her reputation as a choker. By the third game of the decider, wrote Fred Tupper in the New York Times, “you could almost hear Margaret’s nerves twanging.” The former champion piled up nine double faults. There was none of the drama of the Paris final: Evert took the final set, 6-1.

In the second semi-final, King didn’t execute much better than Court had. “Her volleying was off-key,” Bud Collins wrote of Billie Jean, “her serving mediocre.” Not a good combination for a serve-and-volleyer.

Her mental game proved considerably stronger. The Old Lady could still befuddle an opponent. “Billie Jean has you in a tizzy,” said Goolagong. “I worried so much about where she was I took my mind off what I was doing.” The Aussie was right to worry: King was usually at the net, coming in behind every serve and many of her returns as well.

With an erratic King and the always unpredictable Goolagong, the match was topsy-turvy. Billie Jean won the first set, closing out the final five games with the loss of just six points. She reached match point at 5-4 in the second, but Evonne passed the attacking American for a winner. Goolagong rode her momentum to a break of serve and two more games, and the two ladies headed to a decider.

Finally, King earned another match point at 3-5 on the Australian’s serve. Goolagong chose this moment to play her most glittering tennis of the day, keeping herself alive with a nifty half-volley, an untouchable drop, and a series of shots that kicked up the sideline chalk. Billie Jean needed seven match points before Goolagong finally missed a backhand volley.

It wasn’t the outcome that the viewing public would have chosen, but it set up one heck of a final. Evert had proved she could compete with the elites on grass; no longer was she the novice who had won just five games against King at Forest Hills in 1971. Billie Jean had an injury-marred season to salvage, and she’d take aim at her fifth Wimbledon title.

This was a women’s Wimbledon, something that had been clear from the moment that the ATP boycott devastated the men’s field. So far, the ladies had exceeded expectations.

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July 3, 1973: Justice Done

*Roger Taylor in the 1973 Wimbledon quarter-finals*

With matchups like these, who needed the ATP? The 1973 Wimbledon quarter-finals pitted 31-year-old Yorkshireman Roger Taylor against the tournament’s 17-year-old sensation, Björn Borg of Sweden.

It was a study in contrasts. Taylor, a left-hander, was a veteran with an attacking serve-and-volley game. Borg was more comfortable at the baseline, where he astonished spectators with both his topspin and his go-for-broke approach whenever the opportunity for a groundstroke winner arose. Taylor had the backing of a nation; Borg the support of legions of screaming teens.

On July 3rd, the match proved as scintillating as promised. Taylor crashed his way to a 6-1 first set before the young Swede found his bearings. Borg, however, had already played two five-setters (not to mention a 20-18 tiebreak) and wouldn’t go quietly. He swung away against the Brit’s second serves, forcing Taylor to take more chances. The left-hander ultimately tallied 20 double faults.

Borg rode his high-risk backcourt tactics to a two-sets-to-one advantage. But his energy ebbed, and Taylor grabbed the fourth set with a break to love in the sixth game. The Swede swung so hard at one ball that he shattered his racket.

For a few minutes, it appeared that the contest would end in a whimper. The Brit raced out to a 5-1 lead in the fifth and earned two match points at 15-40 on Borg’s serve. Björn saved them both–with a smash winner and an ace–and suddenly it was Taylor who looked tired. Borg held serve and took control, tying the score at 5-all. Only then did the Yorkshireman find another gear, and he broke for 6-5.

Taylor reached match point again at 40-15 on his own serve. He squandered the first with a double fault. His next serve was an apparent ace, an untouchable wide delivery that failed to draw a call from either line judge or chair umpire. But Borg protested, and Taylor agreed: One point away from a Wimbledon semi-final, and the third seed called a fault against himself.

“I did not want to win on a ball which was three inches out,” Taylor said after the match.

“This was too good a match,” wrote David Gray in the Guardian, “to be ended by an umpire’s mistake.”

Borg responded with a backhand winner to tie the game at deuce. Taylor struck a service winner for a fifth match point, and sealed the victory when the Swede missed a backhand. The final score was 6-1, 6-8, 3-6, 6-3, 7-5.

More than one British journalist reached the same conclusion: Justice was done. Yes, Taylor had done the right thing when he refused to accept the match-winning ace. But it was more than that. The veteran had defied the boycott and given home fans their greatest chance of a native champion since World War II. Whatever his ATP colleagues would say about it, Taylor’s participation in the tournament was, to so many of his countrymen, nothing less than an act of bravery.

Borg, for his part, could find consolation in the teenyboppers who streamed on court after the final point was played. Unlike Taylor, he would have many more chances to win Wimbledon. “Yesterday he was good; very very good,” wrote David Talbot of the sensational Swede. “One day he will be great.”

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Is It Ever Better To Be Unseeded?

As draw-probability takes go, this one is pretty spicy:

it’s better to be unseeded than 25-32.

25-32 guarantees 1-8 opponent in the third round.
— Ricky Dimon (@Dimonator) June 20, 2023

Satisfyingly counterintuitive if true. Is it?

A few reasons for skepticism: As an unseeded player, you could get a top-eight seeded opponent in the first round. Or the second. Or, after upsetting a lower seed–you are almost guaranteed to get one in the first or second round–you could still end up with a top-eight seed in the third round. Going into the draw unseeded is hardly protection against a top-eight opponent.

I could theorize further, but why not just delve into the numbers?

The men’s draw

Let’s look at a few examples from the draw. The 25th seed is Nicolas Jarry, who was drawn to face Carlos Alcaraz in the third round (ouch!). His grass-court Elo (gElo)–the number I use to generate forecasts–is 1698.5. The closest unseeded player to him on the gElo list is Adrian Mannarino, who has a rating of 1700.8. In Elo terms, a difference of 2.3 points is basically just a rounding error.

If Ricky’s theory is correct, on the morning of the draw, it was better to be Mannarino than Jarry. Except–oops!–Mannarino was drawn to face third-seed Daniil Medvedev in the second round.

How does all that good and bad luck shake out in the forecast? Jarry has a 7.5% chance of reaching the round of 16, 2.6% for the quarters, and 1.0% for the semis. Mannarino has 6.3% for R16, 3.2% for the quarters, and 1.1% for the semis. Those are awfully close, just like the near-identical gElo ratings would imply. The luck mostly washed out.

(If you look at my forecast after the tournament begins, the numbers will no longer be the same. That’s partly because every result has an effect on many other probabilities, and partly because the gElo ratings will slightly change when I add this week’s results from Eastbourne and Mallorca, which are not yet in the system.)

What about 26th seed Denis Shapovalov? Shapo has a gElo of 1675.1, roughly equal to unseeded Ugo Humbert’s 1676.1. Would it be better to be Ugo?

Shapovalov got lucky: His top-eight counterpart in the draw is Casper Ruud, a not-grass specialist who is barely rated higher than the Canadian. Shapo’s odds of going further than Ruud into the round of 16 are 25.3%. He has a 10.5% chance of making the quarters and a 3.4% shot at the semis.

Humbert was not so lucky. Like Jarry, he’s in Alcaraz’s section. He has a mere 3.5% shot at the fourth round, 1.1% for the quarters, and 0.4% for the finals. The way the cookie crumbled on draw day, it was much better to be Shapo than Ugo.

One more. Dan Evans is the 27th seed, with a gElo of 1693.1. The closest unseeded player in the draw is Sebastian Ofner, gElo-rated 1688.5. Evans lines up for a third-rounder with 8th-seed Jannik Sinner, who is much better than Ruud despite the number next to his name. Despite a tricky first-rounder with Quentin Halys and Sinner looming in the third, Evans’s chances of making the fourth round are 14.5%, along with 6.8% for the quarters and 3.2% for the semis.

By unseeded standards, Ofner got lucky. He drew almost-seeded Jiri Lehecka to open, but the seeds in his section are #18 Francisco Cerundolo and #16 Tommy Paul. With the benefit of that good fortune, his chances of lasting to the second week are 16.0%, with a 4.1% shot at the quarters and a 1.3% chance of a semi-final berth. By the numbers, I’d take Evans’s position over Ofner’s, though it’s pretty close.

So: three anecdotal comparisons, one saying it is definitely better to be the seed, one saying it’s marginally better, one saying it’s about even.

There’s one obvious counter-example. Tomas Martin Etcheverry, seeded 29th, landed in Novak Djokovic’s section. He has a mere 0.8% chance at the fourth round, 0.2% for the quarters, and everything else rounds down to zero. His own rating is part of the problem: He has little experience on grass.

The closest unseeded player in the draw to Etcheverry’s 1585.5 gElo is Daniel Altmaier at 1587.8. Altmaier ended up in the Sinner/Evans section, with an unseeded first-round opponent. His chances of reaching the fourth round are 4.8%, with a 1.5 chance of the quarter-finals.

So we can say one thing for sure: If you know you’ll be drawn to face Djokovic early, you might want to not do that.

The general solution

These are all anecdotes, and the forecasts are entirely dependent on this year’s actual Wimbledon draw. That doesn’t answer the question in any comprehensive way.

We can get closer to a general solution by running two simulations. First, forecast the 2023 Wimbledon field, with the actual seeds, without considering how the draw actually played out. So Etcheverry might have landed in Ruud’s section, or Mannarino might have drawn Djokovic in the first round.

Next, forecast the 2023 Wimbledon field, but instead of keeping the actual seeds, assign the 25th to 32nd seeds to the next eight players in the rankings. Instead of the 25th seed belonging to Jarry, we give it to Lehecka, and Jarry is unseeded, and so on.

By keeping the players constant and varying the seeds, we can see the effect of the seedings on 16 players: the actual seeds 25-32, and the “next eight” who just missed.

Here are the chances of those 16 men reaching the fourth round in the two scenarios, seeded and unseeded:

Player                       R16 Seed  R16 Un  
Nicolas Jarry                   15.3%   13.1%  
Denis Shapovalov                12.8%   11.0%  
Daniel Evans                    15.0%   12.8%  
Tallon Griekspoor               30.5%   28.1%  
Tomas Martin Etcheverry          6.1%    4.9%  
Nick Kyrgios                    20.6%   18.3%  
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina     12.8%   11.0%  
Ben Shelton                      4.4%    3.5%  
Jiri Lehecka                     9.7%    8.0%  
Matteo Berrettini               33.5%   30.9%  
Ugo Humbert                     13.2%   11.4%  
Andy Murray                     31.9%   29.4%  
Lorenzo Sonego                  19.8%   17.5%  
Miomir Kecmanovic                8.1%    6.5%  
Botic van de Zandschulp         14.0%   11.9%  
Adrian Mannarino                15.7%   13.6%

On average, these players have a 16.5% chance of lasting to the second week if they have a seed, 14.5% otherwise.

The same thing holds if we care more about other achievements, like reaching the third round, the quarter-finals, or the semis:

            R32    R16    QF    SF  
Seeded    40.5%  16.5%  8.4%  3.8%  
Unseeded  28.7%  14.5%  6.9%  3.1%

It’s better to be seeded.

Going wide

This isn’t a truly general solution, because it is based solely on the 2023 Wimbledon men’s field. You might think of this group of players as top-heavy, which would make it more valuable to avoid the top seeds. But while Djokovic and Alcaraz are well ahead of the pack, the top eight as a whole is not overwhelming dominant–just think of Ruud on grass.

We could construct a variety of other draws with different mixes of ability levels. You could imagine a field in which the top eight players were all outstanding and the rest were not. An extreme example like that might change the results. We’ll save that for another day. In the meantime, players: Keep chasing those seeds.

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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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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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