March 31, 1973: Rosewall’s Near Miss

Jan Kodeš in 1968

In March 1973, Ken Rosewall was 36 years old. He often played like a young man, but there were two decades of top-level tennis in his legs. He bristled against the requirement that players under contract to World Championship Tennis show up for every tournament, week-in, week-out. He had won the WCT circuit finals in both 1971 and 1972, defeating his friend and rival Rod Laver each time. But in 1973, it wasn’t clear if he’d even qualify for the event.

He arrived at the event in Vancouver, British Columbia at the end of March on a meaningless winning streak: He had won the tournament in 1971 but skipped it in ’72. He also showed up cranky. The previous week, organizers in Washington DC had convinced him and Arthur Ashe to try an experiment in their semi-final match. The crowd would be allowed make as much noise as it wanted, whenever it wanted–complete with an announcer to egg them on. Ashe won the match: It didn’t hurt that the Virginia native was essentially playing in front of a home crowd. Rosewall was diplomatic but direct: “It didn’t do anything to help that particular tourney or that match.”

Rosewall–the diminutive “doomsday stroking machine”–was looking for his first title since December and his first championship on the WCT circuit since beating Laver the previous May. There were no experiments in Vancouver, and only a few hundred fans showed up early in the week, anyway. Back in the quiet, Rosewall cruised though the early rounds. He needed only 40 minutes to beat Graham Stilwell and 50 to beat Tom Okker. In the quarters, Raymond Moore was a bit tougher, but the Aussie vet still lost only six games.* Onlookers knew that Rosewall was rounding into form when his backhand lobs started landing inches inside the baseline.

* Before Rosewall played Okker, Moore was asked which opponent he’d rather face. “Sure, I’ve got a preference. I don’t want to play either of them.”

Waiting in the semi-finals was Jan Kodeš, a 27-year-old Czechoslovakian who had never beaten Rosewall in three tries. Yet the surface favored the European. The WCT circuit didn’t concern itself with consistency: Vancouver was the third in a five-tournament string in which the players changed surface every week. Here, they played indoors at the Agrodome, but on a slow court that reminded Kodeš of European clay.

Then again, Rosewall had won the French Open–twice.

This ad did not entice quite as many tennis fanatics as the tournament organizers hoped it would.

Kodeš predicted an extended baseline battle, and the contest on March 31st was exactly that. The two men broke serve 15 times, and the Czech failed to win a single service game in the second set. Yet the underdog survived a first-set tiebreak and bounced back to break in the 8th game of the third set to secure a 7-6, 2-6, 6-3 victory.

Newspapers hailed it as the match of the tournament, and it was certainly that for Kodeš. The following day, the Eastern European found himself against the crowd favorite, Seattle native Tom Gorman, who had beaten Ashe in the early going. Kodeš lost in three, and he said it felt like he was playing in Seattle–even without the authorized crowd noise of the previous week’s event.

Neither Rosewall nor Kodeš left Vancouver with the $10,000 winner’s check, but both men had proved something, if only to themselves. The aging Australian would soon resume his winning ways, and in a few months, the little-known Czechoslovakian would win the biggest title of them all.

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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.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

 

What If Jannik Sinner Made More First Serves?

Jim Courier thinks he should:

Among the current top 50, there’s actually a negative correlation between height and first-serve percentage–that is, taller guys make slightly fewer first serves, all else equal–but that doesn’t directly contradict what Courier said. There’s a whole lot that we could investigate in that couple of lines, but let’s stick with the question in the headline.

In the 52 weeks going into the current Miami event, Jannik Sinner made 57.3% of his first serves. That’s the lowest rate of the current top 50, and well below the average of 63%. When he makes his first serve, he wins 74.7% of points–slightly better than average–and on second-serve points, he wins 54.7%, which ranks 11th among the top 50. Altogether, he’s winning 66.2% of service points, again a little bit above top-50 average.

Courier presumably meant that Sinner’s first serve needs to be more reliable, not that he should take something off of it. In the hypothetical, then, he’ll continue to win roughly 75% of first-serve points. He’ll just have more of them.

If Sinner made 65% of his first serves instead of 57.3%, and he continued to win first and second serve points at the same rate, he’d improve his overall winning percentage on service points from 66.2% to 67.7%. That’s equivalent to increasing his hold percentage from 84.9% to 87.1%. (He’s currently holding 83.9% of the time, so he might be a bit unlucky.)

One and a half percentage points–how much does that really matter?

For starters, it would improve his position on the top-50 leaderboard from 24th to 11th. Now, he’s winning service points like Frances Tiafoe and Roberto Bautista Agut. Improved by 1.5%, he’d be in another league entirely, equal to Felix Auger-Aliassime and Taylor Fritz.

Another way of looking at it is within my framework of converting points to ranking places. As a rough rule of thumb, winning one additional point per thousand translates into a improvement of one place on the ranking table. That relationship doesn’t hold at the very top of the rankings, where players are not so tightly packed. But when I first introduced the framework in 2017, the relationship among players ranked 2nd to 10th was that–again, approximately–two points per thousand translated into one place in the rankings.

Back to Sinner. If he won 1.5% more service points, that’s a 0.75% increase overall. (We’re assuming his return game is unchanged.) Call it 0.8%, or eight points per thousand. According to the top-ten version of my rule, that’s worth four spots in the computer rankings.

Sinner is currently ranked 11th on the ATP computer, and after advancing to the Miami semi-finals yesterday, he ranks 9th on the live table. He could head back to Europe as high as 6th if he wins the title. From any one of those positions, a four-place jump would be significant.

Yet the Italian might be better even than that. My Elo ratings place him 4th, behind only Novak Djokovic, Carlos Alcaraz, and Daniil Medvedev. There’s no reliable relationship between points per thousand and ranking places at the very top of the table, but Elo hints at what an elite player Sinner already is. Tack on seven or eight more points per thousand and he might not be the number one player in the world, but he’s right there in the mix.

That is, at least as long as no one else improves even faster. Sinner isn’t alone in his 66.2% rate of service points won. Alcaraz entered Miami with exactly the same number. Sinner has more room to improve his first serve percentage than anyone else at the top of the game, but his rivals will hardly stand around and watch while he does.

March 29, 1973: The Coming Russians

Olga Morozova (left) and Marina Kroschina

Nine countries were represented in the 16-player field of the Lady Gotham Classic, but only one of those nations made news for its inclusion. Everyone wanted to get a look at 24-year-old Olga Morozova, the first-ever top-tenner from the Soviet Union. The New York draw was particularly tantalizing: Morozova would open against her 19-year-old traveling companion Marina Kroschina. Kroschina qualified for the event by beating the previous week’s surprise star, Marita Redondo.

It was hardly the first meeting between the two women. Morozova and Kroschina had already played seven times, including once just a few days earlier, for a place in the Akron final. (Morozova won, then fell victim to Chris Evert.) They had even faced off before in the New York metro area. Both women had made the trip to the 1972 US Open, and they met in the final of a small warm-up event in New Jersey. The older woman won that one, 6-2, 6-7, 7-5, and she led the overall series, six matches to one.

Neither that matchup nor the Soviet trip to Forest Hills satisfied American interest in the visitors. Morozova was good for a feature story at every stop on the USLTA circuit. In Akron, she told a reporter that she missed her engineering-student husband back in Moscow, she liked Boston, she didn’t care for New York, she wished she had more time to see the sights of Akron, and she loved Coca-Cola. “It is the real thing,” she said.

Nor was the larger stage of New York City too big for her. Just a few days earlier, gold-medal-winning gymnast Olga Korbut had wowed the gallery at Madison Square Garden. With a temporary tennis court installed, she would compete at the same venue. Alas, there was nothing Korbut-like about her performance on the day.

Perhaps Olga’s homesickness explained her let-down on March 29th at the Lady Gotham. Kroschina, the 1971 Wimbledon girls’ champion, took advantage of the slow, high-bouncing surface at the Garden to negate her friend’s serve-and-volley game, winning 6-4, 4-6, 6-4.

Embed from Getty Images

Morozova on a happier day, at Wimbledon in 1974

Both women were disappointed that the draw had paired them up so early. A tournament official told the New York Times that it was an “oversight.” More likely–I hope–it was just bad luck. Morozova was the third seed, Kroschina was a qualifier; there was a one-in-twelve chance that a random draw would generate an all-Soviet first-rounder. At least they couldn’t complain about lost prize money. Every penny they earned went back to their federation.

Kroschina never lived up to her promise. When she wasn’t traveling for tennis, she went to school to become a sportswriter, and she ultimately spent more of her life as a journalist than she did as a competitive athlete. Morozova, on the other hand, showed the way for later generations of Russian tennis standouts. She reached the final at both Roland Garros and Wimbledon in 1974, and partnering Evert in Paris, she won the Soviet Union’s first grand slam title.

Olga was optimistic about US-Soviet relations: “I think in the future our two countries will become very good friends. I hope.” The USSR didn’t last long enough to realize her forecast. But her goals for Russian tennis were overwhelmingly satisfied. A half-century later, all-Russian first-round meetings are no longer news. Morozova’s countrywomen are so numerous on tour that it wouldn’t even occur to them to complain.

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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.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

 

Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts: 1973 Redux

Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs

Few seasons in tennis have been as pivotal, with effects as far-reaching, as 1973.

You already know about the Battle of the Sexes. Billie Jean King transcended the circus staged by her opponent and the media to make a resounding statement for her gender, avenge Margaret Court, and–never forget–play some great tennis. No single match has ever been so central to the culture as a whole.

The same season saw the structure of the modern professional game start to fall into place. We tend to think of the sport’s history fitting neatly into two buckets: before and after 1968. Yet the first several years of the Open era were anything but neat. Competing tours bid for players, once-powerful national federations threatened to exclude stars from majors, and the Davis Cup–until recently the absolute pinnacle of the sport–was a shell of its former self as contract pros were forbidden to take part.

Things got so contentious that a joke arose around this time: You couldn’t put on a tennis tournament without someone filing a lawsuit.

Many of the issues converged at Wimbledon in 1973. The International Lawn Tennis Federation banned Yugoslavian Niki Pilić from the tournament for allegedly refusing to play a Davis Cup tie. The nascent Association of Tennis Professionals went to bat for Pilić and threatened to boycott the Championships. Wimbledon never took the challenge seriously and didn’t negotiate in good faith. In the end, more than 80 players–including defending champion Stan Smith and most of the best men in the world–sat out the prestigious event.

Pilić (right) with journalist Mladen Delić

The situation was back to normal at Forest Hills a couple months later for the US Open–but what was normal? The ATP had a seat at the table, and players–men and women alike–had more power with every month that passed. The 1973 US Open was the first major with equal prize money, a milestone that–had the Battle of the Sexes not eclipsed it a month later–would stand as one of the most significant achievements of Billie Jean King’s career.

For all the off-court distractions, the level of tennis in 1973 was a connoisseur’s dream. Veteran Aussies Rod Laver and Margaret Court often dominated their respective tours, Court doing so with a child in tow. King, when she was healthy, was as good as ever. Smith played some of the best tennis of his career. At the same time, a new generation nipped at their heels. Lovebirds Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors cleaned up on the lower-status USLTA circuits. Björn Borg, Martina Navratilova, and Guillermo Vilas made their initial statements on tour as well, signs that the future of tennis would be a whole lot more global than its past.

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2023 marks the 50th anniversary of that memorable season. This year, I’ll write a series of short essays about 1973, each one marking a notable event from that day. I started with March 22, when Evert and Navratilova faced off for the very first time.

We’ll cover the battles, the boycotts, and the breakouts, as well as any other random thing that catches my eye. You can expect a couple of these vignettes every week until December, when the first-ever truly open Davis Cup reached its conclusion.

There were winners and losers in 1973, as there always are. Thanks in large part to the revolutions that came to a head that year, the losers got a better deal than ever before. Bobby Riggs often lamented the result of his match against Billie Jean. “But, hey, a happy ending,” said the inveterate hustler. “I cried all the way to the bank.”

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Keep up with this project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which will show an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

You can also subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:

 

March 27, 1973: The Ilie and Jimbo Show

Ilie Năstase in 1973

On March 25, Ilie Năstase and Jimmy Connors faced off for the Equity Funding International title at Georgetown University. It was their third official meeting of the season. Counting exhibition matches, though, the number might have already reached double digits.

Duties discharged on the USLTA indoor circuit with the completion of the Georgetown event, Connors and Năstase made their way to Springfield, Massachusetts, where they played the first-ever tennis at the local Civic Center. The exhibition was set up as a mini-tournament. Connors won a pro set against veteran standout Clark Graebner, and Nastase defeated the 18-year-old amateur Vitas Gerulaitis.

The evening of March 27 concluded with a “final”–a standard set between Jimbo and the flashy Romanian for the title. They split twelve games and equally shared the first eight points of the tiebreak. Playing according to James Van Alen’s preferred “sudden death” rules, Connors double-faulted at 4-4 and handed Nastase the match.

The result didn’t really matter, just as it hadn’t mattered a week before in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, and it hadn’t mattered in Dallas a week before that. The Jimmy-Ilie exhibitions were always suspiciously close–8-6 in the third, 9-8 or 7-6 in a one-setter. The pair was in such demand not because of their rivalry, but because they always put on a show. They were reliably entertaining even when the stakes were higher. Early in the Georgetown final, Năstase missed a shot. Connors hollered, “Even a guy as great as you can’t make it all the time.” Ilie retorted, “If you stay around a while, I’ll teach you something.” The Romanian ultimately won the match in five.

Columnist Gerry Finn wrote of Năstase, “At one moment he’s a charmer, the next he’s a cad.” He was the biggest box-office draw in the game. Graebner said simply, “Tennis needs more Ilie Năstases.” Jimbo was studying hard for the role.

The USLTA indoor circuit was sometimes derided as a “Mickey Mouse” tour, as most of the game’s stars–Rod Laver, Stan Smith, Arthur Ashe, and others–played for the rival World Championship Tennis group. But the USLTA slate had its own perks. Players weren’t required to show up every week–an important provision for men who liked to pad their bank accounts with extracurricular activities as often as Connors and Năstase did. USLTA events were a bit more fun, too, largely because Ilie set the tone.

What appealed most to Connors was the level of play. He and his Romanian buddy could breeze through the early rounds every week. Jimmy racked up seven titles and over $36,000 in prize money in just three months. “I thought it’d be better for me to ease into it and get a little confidence,” said the 20-year-old rising star. “It’s worked out real well for me.”

Coached by Pancho Segura and urged on by Richard González, Jimbo would soon raise his sights. Once, in those early years, he told González that you can’t win them all. Gorgo’s response said all you needed to know about the veteran warrior–not to mention the man that Connors would become.

“Why not?”

* * *

This is the fourth installment in what I fear will be an ongoing series about 1973, perhaps the most consequential season in modern tennis history. Check back throughout the year for the latest news from, uh, fifty years ago.

March 25, 1973: Stan Smith Surges

Stan Smith at the 1973 Peachtree Corners Invitational Tennis Classic

By 1973, Stan Smith didn’t have much left to prove. He won the 1971 US Open, then took the Wimbledon crown in 1972. For five years running, he had been a key part of the USA’s champion Davis Cup team, staring down the hostile Romanians in Bucharest to cap his 1972 campaign.

But there was one thing Smith’s feats had in common: Rod Laver hadn’t been there. The Rocket skipped the 1971 US Open, and he was kept out of Wimbledon the following year when the Championships banned contract professionals. Contract pros were also excluded from Davis Cup, so the Australian team couldn’t use Laver, Ken Rosewall, John Newcombe, or Tony Roche–a foursome that would’ve made the Aussies overwhelming favorites under different rules.

In 1973, Smith himself was a 26-year-old contract pro, playing for the World Championship Tennis circuit alongside Rod. Davis Cup would finally be open to everyone, as well. Before the season began, Laver held a 5-2 advantage in the head-to-head, including wins in all three of their meetings at majors. Rocket padded his total with a victory in the Toronto semi-finals in February, then another for the Hilton Head title in March.

For more than a decade, Laver had been the man to beat. At age 34, he still was.

Both men played well to reach the Atlanta final. Each was pushed to three sets in the quarters but recovered for a dominant semi-final performance. Smith blasted past his frequent nemesis, Cliff Richey, 6-3, 6-2, and Laver, the event’s top seed, turned in one of his strongest showings of the year to shut down Cliff Drysdale, 6-2, 6-1.

Opponents lobbed the 6’4″ Smith at their peril.

The final promised to be a fitting conclusion to exciting week of tennis. The tournament announced a seven-day attendance of 47,524, a record for a WCT event. Among the crowd on Sunday was Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter and his wife. It was a far cry from the old days of barnstorming pros when Laver, Rosewall, and Richard González would stop in Atlanta for a night, lucky if they drew 3,000 fans.

Laver won many of his matches before the first ball was struck. “There’s always the danger of being psyched out by playing Rod,” said Smith after the match. “I mean you think the guy is so good and you don’t know what you have to do to beat him.”

On the other hand, Stan wasn’t the sort of player to be psyched out. Fellow players considered him confident to the point of arrogance. He also had a knack for ignoring anything that might get in his way, a particularly useful skill when he took on the eminently distracting Ilie Năstase for the 1972 Wimbledon and Davis Cup titles.

In the end, the mental game might have been beside the point. Standing six-feet, four-inches tall, Smith owned one of the biggest serves on the circuit. On this day, it was even deadlier than usual. He won 37 of 44 service points. Only once did Laver manage more than one return point in a game. The Rocket didn’t attack as much as usual behind his own serve, and Smith took the match, 6-3, 6-4.

The American was proud but realistic. Holding his $10,000 winner’s check, he said of his opponent, “He’s still the best.”

Rocket wasn’t one to argue. A little while later, he came back out on court with his old friend Roy Emerson and won the doubles.

* * *

This is the third installment in what I fear will be an ongoing series about 1973, perhaps the most consequential season in modern tennis history. Check back throughout the year for the latest news from, uh, fifty years ago.

March 24, 1973: Plimpton Falls Short

George Plimpton in 1977

We’re lucky that it was a bit of a slow news day for tennis on March 24, 1973. A few newspapers had room for this:

PHILADELPHIA–The local team of James L. Van Alen 2d and Jimmy Dunn won the United States amateur-professional handicap court tennis doubles championship today by defeating George Plimpton and Eddie Noll of New York, 6-5, 6-5, 3-6, 6-4, at the Racquet Club.

Yes, that Jimmy Van Alen. And yes–oh yes!–that George Plimpton.

Van Alen was, depending on your perspective, somewhere between a gadfly and a visionary. He invented the tiebreak and spent more than a decade badgering the rest of the US tennis establishment. Even when his brainchild became standard, he wasn’t satisfied. His ideal was a nine-point breaker: first to five, sudden death. As the first-to-seven, win-by-two variation gained popularity, he got steadily crankier about it.

Details aside, the man loved tiebreaks. He proposed that once a set reached 6-all, a special red flag would be flown above the stadium to indicate that a tiebreak was underway. He convinced the officials at the US Open to go for it, and when he attended other events, he brought along a spare flag of his own.

A Van Alen “Sudden Death” flag flying above Forest Hills in 1971

In 1973, Van Alen was 70 years old. He was far past his prime as a lawn tennis player, and he had never been a particularly great one. (He did win a match at the 1931 US National Championships.) His pastime of choice was court tennis, the ancient sport on which lawn tennis was based. Court tennis is a more strategic game that relies less on power. Van Alen won national singles and doubles titles in his niche pursuit.

Van Alen’s prestige gave him another advantage. This was an “amateur-professional” doubles championship–that is, one of each. Van Alen the amateur chose to team up with Jimmy Dunn, the head pro at the Philadelphia host club. It always helps to choose the right partner: It was Dunn’s tenth title at this event.

* * *

Van Alen was not, however, the most interesting man on the court that day. Few characters could compete with George Plimpton in that category.

Plimpton was a journalist and occasional actor. By 1973, he was 46 years old and a minor celebrity. Despite a patrician background that could be traced back to the Mayflower, Plimpton got closer to the action than any sportswriter before him. He pitched to major-league all-stars, traded punches with Sugar Ray Robinson, and manned the net for hockey’s Boston Bruins.

He achieved his fame through dalliances in football and golf, yet when he wasn’t on assignment, tennis was his sport of choice. The writer was known as an excellent lawn tennis player, and he occasionally turned up in pro-am exhibitions. When he got married in 1968, the New York Times went with the standard line for a racket-wielder: “Plimpton Drops Singles for Doubles.” A decade later, he played alongside Vitas Gerulaitis as a headliner at a Rockefeller Center benefit match–on ice.

A 1971 New Yorker cartoon

Among his many stunts, he once faced off against Richard González at the Los Angeles Tennis Club. Gorgo wasn’t one to show mercy on an amateur, and the fact Plimpton was a journalist probably didn’t help either. González destroyed him.

Like Van Alen, Plimpton found a home in the small world of court tennis. He had competed at national events since at least 1961. He merged his profession and his passion in 1971 when he edited Pierre’s Book, the instructional guide written by French court tennis great Pierre Etchebaster.

Despite an advantage of more than two decades, Plimpton doesn’t seem to have been Van Alen’s equal at the royal game. In that 1973 championship match, his pro partner, Eddie Noll, had to handle three-quarters of his team’s shots.

Unfortunately for us, Plimpton never wrote much about the sport he pursued so avidly. He covered lawn tennis just once for Sports Illustrated, the publication that backed him on some of his wilder adventures. For that 1967 story, he was drawn to a series of unusual matches at Southampton and Newport–early-round tilts that refused to end, extending to 32-30, 48-46, and 49-47. Naturally, he checked in with the tournament director at the Newport Casino, Jimmy Van Alen.

“That’s nonsense out there,” said the inventor of the tiebreak. “Just nonsense.”

* * *

This is the second installment in what I fear will be an ongoing series about 1973, perhaps the most consequential season in modern tennis history. Check back throughout the year for the latest news from, uh, fifty years ago.

March 22, 1973: Evert-Navratilova I

Chris Evert, en route to a first round victory at the 1973 Akron Open

It was a big day for underdogs. The Akron Beacon Journal ran with the headline, “Is Marita Next Superstar?”

Not a typo.

The story of the first round was 17-year-old Californian Marita Redondo, who came through qualifying at the Akron Open to earn a meeting with Evonne Goolagong. Goolagong had reached the final round at four of the previous five majors, and onlookers thought Redondo looked “awed” by the superstar she now faced. The Filipino-American teenager later admitted she was nervous–but she got over it. She beat Goolagong, 6-3, 7-5.

With the benefit of hindsight, the press corps would have focused a bit more on Martina, not Marita. 16-year-old Martina Navratilova was playing just her fourth tournament in the States, and her opening match was her first encounter with Chris Evert. Evert was only two years older, yet she had already reached the final four at both Wimbledon and the US Open.

They pair would go on to play 80 times, three-quarters of them in finals. Akron provided a modest stage for the women to begin what would become one of the greatest rivalries in sporting history.

At least the cameramen were well deployed for the match:

The Beacon Journal suggested that Martina was adding a ballet step to her game.

Navratilova lost, 7-6, 6-3, but it was probably the best she had played thus far as a pro. After Evert seized an early break, Martina got it back, and the Czechoslovakian even came within two points of the first set, serving at 6-5, 30-love. A decade later, on an indoor surface like this one, the match would have been over. But in 1973, Chrissie was as cool under pressure as ever, snatching four points in a row from the Navratilova serve to force a tiebreak, then winning the first-to-five breaker, 5-1.

Keeping Evert close was all that most of her peers on the USLTA circuit could manage. Chrissie had just lost a nail-biter to Virginia Wade two weeks earlier in Dallas, but Akron would kick off a run of five tournament victories in a row before Margaret Court finally stopped her at Roland Garros.

Meanwhile, Marita Redondo would have to settle for a handful of trophies on what was left of the amateur circuit. While she would compete into the early 1980s, the Goolagong upset remained her most prominent victory.

* * *

This is the first installment in what I fear will be an ongoing series about 1973, perhaps the most consequential season in modern tennis history. Check back throughout the year for the latest news from, uh, fifty years ago.

Erasing Love-40 Three Times In a Row

During last week’s marathon fourth-rounder at Indian Wells, Daniil Medvedev tucked an unusual feat inside his 6-7, 7-6, 7-5 defeat of Alexander Zverev. Starting with the 12th game of the first set, he recovered from a 0-40 deficit in three consecutive service games.

Voo de Mar noticed:

Peter asked me if this had ever happened before, so here we are. The short answer is: I’m not sure (at least at ATP tour level), because I don’t have the point-by-point sequence for every match. However, I have the sequence for enough matches to confirm that it’s extremely rare.

Theory first

Just falling behind 0-40 is unusual. ATP-level servers win about 65% of points, so a basic model would predict that 0-40 happens in 4.3% of service games. It’s actually more frequent than that–about 5.4%–partly because the tour does not consist of identical servers, and partly because there’s probably some streakiness involved.

Back to theory: “Erasing” a 0-40 deficit means winning three service points after losing the first three. The odds of that particularly six-point sequence–again, assuming the server wins 65% of points–is 1.2%.

The historical record agrees exactly. Across 18,000 tour-level matches from 2010s, I found that the server falls to 0-40 and recovers to deuce exactly 1.2% of the time.

Three in a row is a different story entirely. If there’s a 1% probability of something occurring once, there’s a 0.0001%–literally, one in a million–chance that it will happen three times in a row. On the other hand, there are a lot of matches and a lot of service games. Using some rough assumptions for the number of games in a match and the number of matches per season, my ballpark estimate is that we should see a rarity like this about once in every 10-12 ATP seasons.

The data

Like I said, I don’t have the point-by-point sequence for every match. But I do have it for over 18,000 ATP matches between 2011 and early 2019. (Much of that data, plus equivalent data for women’s tennis, is here.) In that dataset, there was only one instance when a player apparently erased a 0-40 deficit three times in a row: 2011 Kuala Lumpur, where Mischa Zverev managed it against Philipp Petzschner.

Except… I’m not so sure. In 2011, betting sites were just starting to collect and publish point-by-point data, and some of it was approximate. For this particular match, there is a suspicious number of streaks, a sign that the data wasn’t reported precisely. For instance, in all three of the 0-40 rescues, Zverev purportedly won the next five points in a row. It’s possible, but we have to leave a question mark next to this one.

We can, however, broaden the search. 6,800 ATP qualifying matches? No one managed three 0-40 recoveries in a row. 28,000 Challenger matches? Now we’re talking–I found five occasions when a player saved three consecutive 0-40 deficits. The most recent was at the 2016 Tallahassee Challenger, where Donald Young accomplished it in a losing effort against Frances Tiafoe. He won the first two of the games, but in the third, serving to stay in the match, he fought back to deuce only to double fault on match point.

I found another five cases out of over 33,000 Futures-level matches. The most recent, a 2017 match between Altug Celikbilek and Francesco Vilardo, was notable because Celikbilek recovered from 0-40 in the 6th, 8th, and 10th games–and in the 7th game, Vilardo did as well!

It’s important to keep in mind that servers do not win as many points at the lower levels of men’s tennis. (Streakiness might also generate more 0-40 scores as well.) In my 2011-2019 data, servers fell to love-40 5.4% of the time at the ATP main draw level, 5.8% in ATP qualifying, 6.4% at Challengers, and 7.7% at Futures. However, that doesn’t end up generating many more recoveries, since servers are more likely to lose those games before evening the score.

If we dump all of these results together, we get 10 occasions (or 11, if you count the Petzschner match) when a player recovered from 0-40 three times in a row, out of approximately 86,400 total matches. That rate suggests that we should see a feat like Medvedev’s once every three or four years on tour. That’s more frequent than my initial calculation, but still quite rare.

Aryna Sabalenka at One Hundred Percent

Aryna Sabalenka played her first match at Indian Wells on Friday, handily beating Evgeniya Rodina. Sabalenka won the first set 6-1, then took a 3-0 lead in the second. Commentator Mikey Perera noted that Sabalenka’s win probability had reached 100%, though he (correctly!) expressed skepticism with the number.

Win probability has steadily crept in to tennis broadcasts. Often we’re shown pre-match percentages along with the change up to the current moment in the match. The silliness of a 100% mid-match win probability has a pedestrian explanation: The numbers are usually given as integers. For most fans, there’s no important difference between 55.7% and 58%, but in extreme cases, another significant digit would come in handy.

So, was the broadcast algorithm correct?

My Elo-based pre-match forecast set Sabalenka’s chances at 94.8%. To get mid-match predictions, we need more granular stats. Sabalenka has won 65.5% of serve points and 46.7% of return points this year (including the Rodina match), and if we nudge the RPW up to 47%, those components predict a 94.7% chance of a Sabalenka victory–virtually equivalent to the Elo forecast.

Plug those numbers into my win probability model with Rodina serving at 1-6, 0-3, and Sabalenka’s chances of victory are 99.7%. Round to the nearest integer, and sure enough, you get a 100% chance of victory. It might have felt that way for Rodina.

In fact, Sabalenka crossed the “100%” (99.5%) threshold in the previous game. She cleared 99.5% at 2-0, 15-0, slipped back under the line when she fell to deuce, then reclaimed it each of the two times she gained ad-in.

So far, I’ve used a relatively simple model to forecast the remainder of the match. (And it’s certainly sufficient for these purposes.) But if we were putting money on the outcome–especially if the first ten games of the match had gone in a less predictable direction–we’d want to do something more sophisticated. I’ve assumed that from 6-1, 3-0, Sabalenka would play the way we could have predicted before the match. In this case, that’s a sound assumption. But a better method would take into account the results of the match itself up to that point.

Through ten games, Sabalenka was playing better than the initial forecast of 66.5% on serve and 47% on return. Her success rate on serve was a bit worse, at 64.4%, but she was destroying any service advantage of Rodina’s, winning nearly 55% of those points. Had we known before the match that she would play that way, our pre-match forecast would have given Sabalenka a whopping 99.4% chance of victory.

Using that pre-match forecast, our prediction at 6-1, 3-0 would have been an overwhelming 99.97% for the favorite.

As the match progressed, then, we gained more and more information that the in-match performance–whether due to the conditions, the players’ fitness or mood on the day, the matchup, or any number of other factors–would be even more lopsided. Had we taken everything into account at 6-1, 3-0, we would have calculated some mix of 99.7% (based on pre-match numbers) and 99.97% (based on in-match performance). The degree to which we should weight each of those numbers is the tough part. Determining the correct weights is a complicated questions; suffice it to say that the correct answer is somewhere in between the two.

The broadcast algorithm jumped the gun with its 100% win probability, though only a bit. No matter how lopsided a match, anything can happen–but it probably won’t.