Indeed, I understand that the point system was something monitored by the Pro's themselves - the newspapers followed that. With that in mind I feel the points you made next are really the most important.
I have never meant to imply it should be rejected completely. I think it should be considered strongly for sure, Rosewall and Laver both aimed to top the points tally that year so clearly it has a lot of weight. I believe there's been similar discussions on this with regards to 1960, Gonzalez won the tour then finished his year. With that in mind obviously both Ken and Rod aimed to peak at those events.
And the Australian tournaments counted for points as well? Or are you simply listing all tournament victories?
Didn't McCauley in his book credit Laver with more tournament victories than Rosewall?
In terms of pure numbers of tournament victories Rosewall was clearly ahead when he decided to end his year as you point out. Though the question of how those individual tournaments are weighed is more pressing to me. The importance of the tour at the time was never in doubt for me really.
Obviously it counts for something having all the top players in the draw, but considering Rosewall's h2h with Laver that year not many of his tournament victories could have happened going through Laver anyway. So I don't hold this against Laver to a very great degree - winning in Rosewall's absence. In most systems all tennis events count, Rosewall not competing for the entire year shouldn't be held against him and is good context but Laver should still get some credit for those wins.
I do think Rosewall would have probably played on to clinch the top spot but he also liked his family time. My position is that even though Rosewall won the tour, Laver winning 2 of the 3 most important titles goes a long way to mitigating that. Add in some of the other factors as tiebreakers and I have Laver a head. Though if their tournament tallies were equal it is now by a slim margin.
Ah Gonzalez was retiring then. Interesting. I find 1960 one of the more difficult years to rank because of Gonzalez' massive lack of play. I do give him the nod because his win on the tour was so decisive. I do think there are fundamental differences between the h2h tours and the system in 1964. What we had in 1960 is almost an alien concept now for determining a #1 player. Where as in 1964 there's a crude version of what we have now, I do think if Pro Majors were the premier events then with proper weighting there's a real chance Laver should have topped the points chart.
But the context you have provided is very valuable.
The question for me is why should any tournament not carry points? And beyond that why was every tournament weighted the same. Obviously another point of contention has been the value of the Pro Majors - particularly Wembley has been called the Wimbledon of the Pro Tour. If we are to buy into the prestige of these events it's a hard pill to shallow that Laver winning the majority in 1964 counts for naught, especially when he was very close or superior in other metrics. The lack of proper weighting devalues the tour.
I have no issues with accepting Rosewall as the winner of the tour under the conventions of the time, I also think it's reasonable to add context to Laver's run at the end of the year. However the question I have is was the tour really a good reflection of who was the best player in 1964.
NatF, a fine post, just the kind that I think makes for a better debate. Let me try and answer your questions, and just bear with me if I get verbose, which is definitely a weakness of mine. But some of the issues are semi-technical and do require getting into the details.
Yes in my Nov. 1 count I was including all tournaments played since Jan. 1, without reference to whether they gave out ranking points or anything else.
McCauley counted all titles, too, in his introduction to his ’64 chapter: he gave 11 titles each to Rosewall and Laver. In the results section in the back of his book, there are only 10 wins for Rosewall in conventional tournaments, which is why the Trofeo Facis series has been suggested as Rosewall’s 11th title.
It’s possible that McCauley just miscounted when he specified 11, but I tend to think not in this case. With Rod and Ken so close in total titles, and McCauley counting these titles as part of his discussion of who ended up as #1 for the year, I doubt that McCauley would have made anything less than a careful count.
Anyway that’s only a matter of 1 title and it’s not a decisive issue. The point you made about the pro majors getting fewer points than they should have gotten is imo the strongest argument in your post; and that issue has been raised by others, namely on the Wikipedia page for world #1’s by year. Laver has a 2-1 edge in the majors, and if the majors had been given more points Laver would have closed some of the gap – but only some of it.
There were 17 tournaments that were always regarded as forming the championship tour (or “points tour” if you like). If we take those and apply the point system that was described by Buchholz (7 points to the winner, 4 to the runner-up, 3 for third place, 2 for fourth, and 1 for each quarterfinalist), Rosewall finished the year with a 78-66 edge over Laver, a 12-point gap.
We could give the winner of each major 19 points instead of 7, a twelve-point increase. But the runner-up also has to get more points in this scenario; so Rosewall as runner-up at Wembley would get, let’s say 12 points, instead of the 4 he actually got. So even increasing the pro majors from 7 points to 19 points in the winner’s column (which I think is too much of an increase for the pro majors), Laver only makes up 4 points, in the original 12-point gap; he’s still 8 points behind.
If we imagine all matches for the entire year included in a point system, Laver can make up the gap. Now we’d be adding 4-man tournaments and all the one-night stands played throughout the year.
As you said, in a system today all tennis events would count. But my biggest issue with making this modern-day criticism is that if there were matches or events back in ’64 (or any year) which did not give out ranking points, then they were less important to the players of that time, for that reason. We can say, today, that those matches should have been assigned weight; and we could try to assign them some weight retroactively; but if they didn’t carry that weight back then, it means that they were less important to the players, back then. A player could, in fact, skip those events/matches, without hurting his ranking – which is why I think this issue of Rosewall ending his season on October 31 is important.
In fact Rosewall, Hoad, Sedgman and Ayala all ended their season on Oct. 31, leaving only half the troupe still active: Laver, Buchholz, Gimeno and Olmedo. Those four men went to North Africa but it appears that Olmedo then went home, leaving only Rod, Butch and Andres playing the final weeks in France. Those three men stuck it out till the bitter end, I think very likely for the money. And Rod, unlike everyone else, was still a bachelor with absolutely no attachments (I have a funny news clipping about that), so it was no problem for him to go on playing as long as he wanted.
(But I want to note, he may have been carrying a slight injury during that last month of play, in November. The BLT article I posted above, from January ’65, said that he was coming back from a back injury. And if he was playing injured in November, I wonder if that was a factor in the two-day stand in Saudi Arabia that I found recently. He lost both of his matches there, and I thought for him to lose on both days seemed a little un-Laver like.)
Like you said, Rosewall not playing in November shouldn’t be held against him and Laver playing in November should get some credit for what he did.
But this is a bit of dilemma. One player ends up at the top of the points system (however it may have been constituted), winning precisely enough of the matches/events that offered points for him to end up at the top of the system. His troupe-mates tell him, “You can go home, you’ve clinched the tour regardless of anything else that happens this year; you’re world champion and that’s what we’re going to call you until next year when we try to take your title away.” The #2 player goes on to play further tennis in November, and we give him credit for it: but if this credit means that we now don’t call Rosewall world champion anymore, well then we are “holding it against him” for not playing in November.
For me the fairest solution is to give them co-number one’s. I know you don’t go for co-number one’s on principle, but I’ve seen them used by historians I respect, and not just Bobby, but also for example Ray Bowers, in his great studies of the Budge/Vines/Perry years.
But if you choose not to use co-number one’s and you go with Laver as sole number one for ’64, of course I have no problem with that.
One thing I’d like to find out -- and I’ll post it if I find it – is what that Challenge Match on October 31 was all about, and what was the exact situation with the point standings as of that moment. All I have is the bare data of the South Africa tour (dates, scores, win/losses), with a few brief newspaper reports; but what I’m looking for is a South African newspaper with in-depth coverage. That’s the likeliest place to find out what the situation was when Rosewall decided to call it a season on Oct. 31. Was he safe because the November events didn’t offer ranking points? (I don’t think they did but that’s never been confirmed.) Or did they offer ranking points, but Rosewall was too far ahead for Laver to catch him? Did the Challenge Match on Oct. 31 offer any ranking points? Etc.
