ABSTRACT
The All England Croquet Club was founded in the Summer of 1868. Lawn tennis was first played at The Club in 1875, when one lawn was set aside for this purpose. In 1877 The Club was retitled The All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club and the first tennis championship was held in July of that year. Twenty-two players entered the event which consisted of men’s singles only. Spencer Gore became the first champion and won the Silver Challenge Cup and twelve guineas, no small sum (about £800 in today’s value), but rather less than the £655000 that the 2006 champion Roger Federer received. In 1884 the women’s singles event was held for the first time. Thirteen players entered this competition and Maud Watson became the first women’s champion receiving twenty guineas and a silver flower basket. (William Renshaw, the 1884 men’s singles champion received thirty guineas.) In 1922 The Championships moved from Worple Road to its current location at Church Road; see Riddle (1988) and Little (1995) for some historical details. For more than a century The Championships at Wimbledon have been the most important event on the tennis calendar. Currently both the men’s singles and the women’s singles events are restricted to 128 players. Because of television broadcasts, tennis has become a sport which is viewed by
millions all over the world. Many have ideas about tennis. In particular, most commentators hold strong ideas about, for example, the advantage of serving first in a set, the advantage of serving with new balls, and the special ability of top players to
perform well at the “big” points. In this chapter we shall investigate the truth (more often the falsity) of a number of such hypotheses. In Section 13.2 we discuss the data and some selection issues. Our data are ob-
tained from Wimbledon singles’ matches over a period of four years, 1992-1995. Further data at this level of detail were not available to us. In Section 13.3 we discuss three popular myths concerning the service and show that all three are false. The first two myths were earlier discussed in Magnus and Klaassen (1999c), and the third in Magnus and Klaassen (1999a). Section 13.4 discusses the notion of “winning mood” (dependence, in statistical parlance) by considering the final set and breaks. The two myths about the final set were analyzed in Magnus and Klaassen (1999b); the two myths about breaks are new results. Section 13.5 concerns “big points” (that is, identical distribution for the statistician); these results are also new. We shall see that almost all hypotheses are rejected, but not all. It is not true that
serving with new balls or starting to serve in a new set are advantages. Also, the seventh game is not especially important. But, it is true that big points exist and that real champions perform their best at such points.
