The suspension of the tennis season has given tennis fans time for a number of side projects. In this post, I share the story of my side endeavour to make a central database of the results of all Grand Slams singles matches ever played. Thanks to Wikipedia and weeks of data wrangling, I can now share the first analysis on this blog that includes the entire history at the Majors: an analysis of the longest matches of all time.

With so much time these days to walk down tennis memory lane, I thought it would be fun to rank the wildest runs at the Grand Slams. In this post, I show how we can use the total gain in player ratings over an event to identify surprising individual results at the majors from the 1990s to the present.

There is no time in tennis history that compares to what tennis (or the world, for that matter) is going through right now. The World Wars were the only other time where multiple Majors were suspended for an extended period of time. In this post we look at the slam winners in the 10 years before and after World War I and II and consider what history might tell us about the difficulty of coming back from the public health war against COVID-19.

Yesterday, I described one strategy for using round, game margin, and total games to automatically rank interesting matches. After using this approach to rank the Top 30 men’s matches, in this post I do the same for the women for all Grand Slam matches from 1997 to the present.

With the tours and most nations now on lockdown, many of us are feeling bereft of matches to watch. If you have been looking for great classic matches to watch and wondered where to start, I’ve got you covered! Using an ‘interest’ score that attempts to combine match length, competitiveness and quality, I’ve ranked the 30 most interesting men’s matches from 1990 to the present.