Margaret Courts Record Explained
Margaret Court's 24 major singles titles explained: the amateur-era breakdown, the 1970 calendar Grand Slam, and the arena naming debate set out.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished History18 min read
- Born
- Margaret Smith, 16 July 1942, Albury, New South Wales
- Major singles titles
- 24, the most by any player
- Split by era
- 13 won under amateur rules, 11 in open competition
- Australian titles
- 11 of the 24, including seven in a row from 1960 to 1966
- Total major titles
- 64 across singles, doubles and mixed doubles
- Calendar Grand Slam
- 1970, the second woman to do it and the first in the open era
- Career singles record
- 1,177 wins against 106 losses, a win rate above 91 per cent
- Arena named
- 2003, when Melbourne Park's Show Court One became Margaret Court Arena
Margaret Court won 24 major singles titles, which is more than any player in the history of tennis, male or female. She also won 19 women's doubles majors and 21 mixed doubles majors, for a career total of 64, a number that is not merely a record but a considerable distance clear of everybody else. Those are the facts the argument starts from, and the argument is unusually noisy for a set of numbers that nobody disputes.
The noise has two separate sources, and they get tangled together constantly. The first is a question about the record itself: thirteen of the 24 were won before tennis opened to professionals in 1968, and eleven of the 24 were won at an Australian Championships that in that period was the least competitive of the four majors. The second is about Margaret Court the person, and about the arena at Melbourne Park that carries her name, following public statements she has made since becoming a Pentecostal minister. Those are different conversations. This page keeps them separate and handles both.
What follows is the record laid out in full, with the era breakdown made explicit, the strongest version of the case against the number and the strongest version of the case for it, and then a factual account of the naming debate: what was said, when, by whom, and what the responsible bodies did about it.
The 24 titles, in full
| Year | Australian | French | Wimbledon | US |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | Won | |||
| 1961 | Won | |||
| 1962 | Won | Won | Won | |
| 1963 | Won | Won | ||
| 1964 | Won | Won | ||
| 1965 | Won | Won | Won | |
| 1966 | Won | |||
| 1969 | Won | Won | Won | |
| 1970 | Won | Won | Won | Won |
| 1971 | Won | |||
| 1973 | Won | Won | Won |
Eleven Australian, five French, three Wimbledon, five US. She reached 29 major singles finals in all and lost five of them: the 1963 US, the 1964 Wimbledon, the 1965 French, the 1968 Australian and the 1971 Wimbledon, the last of those to Evonne Goolagong.
Two features of that table are worth pulling out immediately. The first is the vertical line of Australian titles from 1960 to 1966, seven in a row. The second is 1970, the only complete row, which is the calendar Grand Slam.
The amateur era, and what it means here
Open tennis began in 1968. Before that, the four major championships were amateur-only events, and any player who signed a professional contract was ineligible to enter them. On the men's side this had a dramatic effect, because a well-developed professional tour existed and the best men repeatedly left the amateur game for it. Rod Laver is the standard illustration, barred from all four majors for five consecutive years while at his peak.
The women's game had almost no equivalent professional tour before 1968. There was nowhere much for a leading female player to defect to, so the amateur draw at a women's major in the 1960s was, in practice, close to the best available field. That is the strongest single point in defence of Court's amateur titles and it is often left out.
What the amateur era did do to the women's game was make it expensive to compete. Players received expenses, not prize money. Travelling to a tournament on the other side of the world required either family money, a national association willing to fund it, or a sponsor. The consequence was that the geography of a draw depended heavily on how easy the tournament was to reach.
- Won under amateur rules, 1960-196613
- Won in open competition, 1969-197311
Titles dated against the start of open tennis in 1968. The thirteen amateur titles were won in fields from which professionals were excluded by rule, though the women's professional tour of that period was very small.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Won under amateur rules, 1960-1966 | 13 |
| Won in open competition, 1969-1973 | 11 |
Why the Australian titles are argued about
This is the part of the record that carries the real weight of the criticism, and the criticism is largely accurate.
The Australian Championships in the 1960s was the smallest of the four majors by every measure that matters. It was played in January, immediately after Christmas, at the end of a journey that from Europe or North America took the better part of two days by air and cost more than most amateur players could recover in expenses. The tournament moved between cities. It offered no prize money. It sat in the calendar at a point when the northern hemisphere season had barely finished.
The result was a women's draw that was frequently 32 players or fewer, sometimes considerably fewer, and that consisted mostly or entirely of Australians. Byes were common. It was possible to reach a final in three matches. In several of Court's eleven Australian titles she did not face a leading overseas player at any stage.
None of that is Court's doing. She entered the tournament that existed, in her own country, and beat everyone in it. But it does mean that eleven of the 24 were accumulated in conditions that no modern major remotely resembles, and anyone comparing her number to a player who won all of theirs in 128-draw open fields is not comparing like with like. The tournament only became a genuinely full-strength event much later, after it moved to Melbourne Park in 1988 and rebuilt itself around a hard court and a roof, a story told in the Kooyong to Melbourne Park guide.
The counter-argument, which is also strong
Remove the eleven Australian titles from the total entirely and Margaret Court still has thirteen major singles titles, won at Roland-Garros, Wimbledon and the US Championships against full international fields. Thirteen would place her among the top handful of women in the game's history on its own.
She also won three of the four majors in 1970 against every leading player in the world, in the third year of open tennis, and the Wimbledon final she won that year is the hardest women's final the tournament has staged by games played. Whatever is true about January in Adelaide in 1961, it is not true about Centre Court in July 1970.
The honest summary is narrow: the raw 24 flatters her, the Australian titles should be understood in context, and what remains after every deduction is still an extraordinary career. Those three things are all true simultaneously, and most public argument about the record involves insisting on one of them and refusing the other two.
What a 1960s Australian draw actually looked like
It is worth being concrete about the mechanics rather than leaving it at "the field was weak".
A women's singles event of the period commonly opened with a first round in which a substantial share of the seeded players received byes, because the entry list did not fill the draw. A player seeded first might therefore start in the second round, play a domestic opponent ranked well outside the international elite, and reach the semi-finals having faced two or three matches. Rounds were best of three sets throughout, which compresses the effect further: a strong server on grass could finish a match in forty minutes.
The travel arithmetic explains most of it. Reaching Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane or Perth from London or New York in January meant a multi-leg flight of well over thirty hours, or a sea voyage for those who still took one. There was no prize money to defray it and expenses paid by a national association were finite. Leading American and European women therefore skipped the tournament as a matter of routine, not as an occasional decision, and their absence was so normal that contemporary reporting rarely bothered to remark on it.
There is one further wrinkle specific to Australia. The championships did not sit in a fixed city, and the venue rotated between states, which meant local conditions, local grass and local entry patterns changed year to year. A tournament that cannot be relied upon to be in the same place is harder to build a season around, and that instability persisted well into the open era.
The tournament's weakness in this period is not a fact about Court. It is a fact about the Australian Championships, and it affected the men's records of the same era equally. Roy Emerson won six consecutive Australian singles titles between 1963 and 1967 in draws that had lost most of their best players to the professional tour, and his twelve-major total carries the same asterisk from the same cause.
Six in a row, 1969 to 1971
The stretch that most resembles modern dominance runs from the 1969 Australian Open to the 1971 Australian Open, during which Court won six consecutive major singles titles she entered.
It began with the Australian, French and US titles in 1969, continued through all four in 1970, and closed with the Australian in January 1971. She lost the 1971 Wimbledon final to Evonne Goolagong, which ended it, and that match is the hinge point of Australian women's tennis in the period: the defending champion and record-holder beaten in a Wimbledon final by a twenty-year-old from Barellan who had not been expected to reach it.
What makes the run notable is that it sits entirely inside the open era. Every leading professional was eligible. Billie Jean King, Rosie Casals, Nancy Richey, Ann Jones and Virginia Wade were all in the draws. Whatever qualification applies to 1961, it does not apply here.
1973, at thirty-one
Court's second-best season came after she had a child. Her son was born in 1972, a year in which she played a reduced schedule and won no major singles titles. She returned in 1973 and won three of the four: the Australian, the French and the US, missing only Wimbledon, which she did not enter.
Three majors at thirty-one, in the sixth year of open tennis, is the result that most directly answers the claim that her totals depend on the amateur structure. The players she beat that year were full-time professionals on a tour that by then had its own circuit, its own prize money and its own organisation, following the founding of the women's tour in 1970 and the establishment of the WTA in the same year as her comeback.
It also puts her among a small group of women who have won majors after becoming mothers, a group that in her era was even smaller. Evonne Goolagong Cawley joined it in 1980 at Wimbledon, and the two Australians remain the standard reference points for it in the pre-modern game.
1970: the calendar Grand Slam
The year that settles the most. Court won all four majors in the same calendar year, the second woman to do so after Maureen Connolly in 1953, and the first in the open era.
| Tournament | Opponent in final | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Australian Open | Kerry Melville | 6-1, 6-3 |
| French Open | Helga Niessen | 6-2, 6-4 |
| Wimbledon | Billie Jean King | 14-12, 11-9 |
| US Open | Rosie Casals | 6-2, 2-6, 6-1 |
The Wimbledon final is the one that gets retold. Forty-six games, no tiebreaks, played on a Centre Court grass surface that by the second week of the tournament had worn to dirt behind the baselines. King broke Court's serve repeatedly and could not close either set. Court played the match on an ankle that had been injured earlier in the fortnight, strapped heavily and, by her own later account, treated with painkilling injections.
It remains the longest women's singles final in Wimbledon history measured in games, and it is the match most often produced as the answer to anyone who suggests the 24 was assembled against soft opposition. King won 12 major singles titles herself and was the most consequential figure in the professional organisation of women's tennis. She did not lose easy matches.
1963: Wimbledon, and a mixed doubles Slam
Two other results deserve their own note.
In 1963 Court became the first Australian woman to win the Wimbledon singles title. Australia had produced male champions in numbers through the 1950s and 1960s but no woman had taken the singles at Wimbledon before, and in a country where the tennis conversation was dominated by the Davis Cup and by Rod Laver Arena's eventual namesake, the win landed heavily.
In the same year she and Ken Fletcher won all four mixed doubles majors, a mixed doubles Grand Slam. It is one of a very small number of times the feat has been achieved by any pairing.
Court is also the only player to have completed a boxed set twice: winning the singles, women's doubles and mixed doubles at all four majors, once under amateur rules and again in the open era. That statistic captures something the singles number does not, which is how completely she played the whole sport rather than one discipline of it.
- Mixed doubles32.8%
- Singles37.5%
- Women's doubles29.7%
Career major titles across the three disciplines. The total is the highest recorded by any player, and no other player has reached 60.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Mixed doubles | 21 |
| Singles | 24 |
| Women's doubles | 19 |
The rest of the career
Court's published career totals run to around 192 singles titles and a match record of 1,177 wins against 106 losses, a win rate above 91 per cent. As with every player whose career straddles 1968, those figures aggregate events of very different standing, from major championships down to small invitation tournaments, and they should not be set beside a modern WTA title count as though the two were measuring the same thing.
Her playing style was built on physical advantages that were unusual for the women's game at the time. She was tall, strong through the shoulders, and trained with weights and running programmes at a point when few female players did any conditioning work at all. She served hard, she volleyed, and she came forward relentlessly. On the grass that made up most of the majors in the 1960s, that combination was close to unanswerable.
She also stopped and restarted. Court retired briefly in 1966, married Barry Court in 1967, and returned in 1968. She had her first child in 1972 and won three majors the following year at the age of thirty-one, which is the second-best season of her career and is frequently forgotten because 1970 sits next to it.
- 24Major singles titles
- 64Major titles in all disciplines
- 29Major singles finals reached
- 192Career singles titles
- 91.7Career singles win rate
Career figures as published by the WTA, the International Tennis Hall of Fame and tournament records. Title and match totals aggregate amateur, open-era and invitation events.
The forty majors nobody counts
Public argument about Court's record fixates on the 24 and ignores the other 40, which is a mistake if the question is how good she was rather than how the singles ledger reads.
Nineteen women's doubles majors and 21 mixed doubles majors is not a by-product of a long career. It is a second full career, played at the highest level, in a discipline that in the 1960s and early 1970s carried real prestige and full entry from the leading players rather than being treated as an optional extra. Court partnered a long list of the best players of the period, and in mixed doubles she and Ken Fletcher assembled one of the strongest partnerships the event has had.
The mixed doubles record is the most extreme part of the whole ledger. Twenty-one titles from 25 finals is a strike rate that no player in any discipline approaches, and it reflects a specific set of skills: a hard serve, a return that could be hit past a net-rushing man, and a willingness to take the ball at the net in a format where the physical mismatch is normally exploited against the woman. Opponents who tried to play through her found out quickly that it did not work.
The relevance to the singles debate is straightforward. A player who wins 64 major titles across three disciplines over fifteen years, in fields that included every leading woman of two generations, has not compiled a record from soft draws in January. The doubles totals were accumulated at Wimbledon, Roland-Garros and Forest Hills as much as at home.
The Riggs match
On 13 May 1973 Court played an exhibition against Bobby Riggs, a 55-year-old former Wimbledon and US champion who had built a public persona around claiming that a woman could not beat him. She lost 6-2, 6-1 in under an hour. Because of the date, it was quickly labelled the Mother's Day Massacre.
Riggs did not try to out-hit her. He lobbed, sliced, dropped the ball short and moved her forward and back, and Court, who had prepared for it as an exhibition rather than a contest, had no answer. The match had consequences well beyond her own record. It hardened the argument Riggs was making, and it directly prompted Billie Jean King to accept his challenge later that year. King beat Riggs in straight sets in September in front of a stadium crowd of more than 30,000 and a television audience estimated in the tens of millions, and that match is the one that entered the culture.
After tennis
Court retired from competitive tennis in 1977. She moved to Perth, and in 1991 she was ordained as a Pentecostal minister. She founded Margaret Court Ministries and the Victory Life Centre, a church in Perth that also runs community and charity programmes including a food service. She has led that ministry for more than three decades and it, rather than tennis, has been her principal occupation for most of her adult life.
Her honours include the MBE in 1967, appointment as an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2007, and appointment as a Companion of the Order of Australia, the highest grade, in the 2021 Australia Day list. She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1979.
The arena, and the naming debate
Melbourne Park's Show Court One was renamed Margaret Court Arena in 2003. It seats around 7,500, gained a retractable roof in a redevelopment completed in January 2015, and is one of three covered show courts used by the Australian Open, alongside Rod Laver Arena and John Cain Arena. The venue is owned by the State of Victoria through the Melbourne and Olympic Parks Trust and is used by Tennis Australia during the tournament.
What follows is a factual account of the naming debate. It sets out dated statements and outcomes and does not assess the merits of the views involved.
The statements. Court has spoken publicly on matters of sexuality and gender from the pulpit and in the media on a number of occasions. Comments she made in 2012 opposing same-sex marriage drew the first significant round of criticism. In 2017, during Australia's national debate ahead of the postal survey on marriage equality, she wrote a widely reported letter stating that she would avoid flying with Qantas because of the airline's support for marriage equality, and gave subsequent radio interviews in which she made further comments about same-sex marriage, about transgender people in sport, and about LGBTQ issues in schools. She has restated versions of those positions since.
The calls to rename. Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King, both multiple major champions and both openly gay, publicly called for the arena to be renamed. Navratilova proposed that it be named instead for Evonne Goolagong Cawley. Several then-active players said they would prefer not to play on a court carrying the name. During the 2020 Australian Open, Navratilova and John McEnroe displayed a banner at the venue calling for the change, and Tennis Australia issued a statement saying the protest had breached its rules on the use of the site.
The institutional positions. Tennis Australia has said publicly that it recognises Court's on-court achievements while stating that it does not share her personal views, and has pointed out that the arena is owned by the State of Victoria and that any renaming would be a matter for the state government rather than for the tournament. The Victorian government has not changed the name. Melbourne and Olympic Parks has not changed the name.
Where it stands. The arena is still called Margaret Court Arena. At the 2020 Australian Open, Tennis Australia marked the 50th anniversary of the 1970 calendar Grand Slam with an on-court presentation to Court during the tournament, having said in advance that it would recognise the anniversary while not endorsing her views. Court's appointment as a Companion of the Order of Australia in January 2021 was publicly criticised by some state premiers, politicians and former players and defended by others, and proceeded as announced.
Where the record sits now
Serena Williams retired in 2022 with 23 major singles titles, one short. She reached four major finals after winning her 23rd, at Wimbledon in 2018 and 2019 and the US Open in 2018 and 2019, and lost all four. Steffi Graf, who won 22 and completed a calendar Grand Slam in 1988 that also included Olympic gold, is third.
| Player | Major singles titles | Era |
|---|---|---|
| Margaret Court | 24 | 13 amateur, 11 open |
| Serena Williams | 23 | All open |
| Steffi Graf | 22 | All open |
| Helen Wills | 19 | All amateur |
| Chris Evert | 18 | All open |
| Martina Navratilova | 18 | All open |
The table makes the comparison problem visible without needing an argument about it. Court and Helen Wills both have totals shaped by an amateur structure that no longer exists. Williams, Graf, Evert and Navratilova won everything in open competition against professional fields, and each of them played a version of the Australian Open that top players actually entered.
There is no neutral way to reconcile those columns, which is why the debate persists. It is a genuine measurement problem rather than a manufactured one.
How to read the number
If a single sentence is needed: Margaret Court holds the record for major singles titles with 24, of which thirteen were won under amateur rules and eleven at an Australian Championships that in that era attracted a small and largely domestic field, and she also won a calendar Grand Slam in 1970 in full open competition, three Wimbledons, five US titles and a career total of 64 majors across all disciplines that nobody else has come close to.
Every clause in that sentence is load-bearing. Dropping the qualifications produces a claim that overstates the record. Leading with only the qualifications produces a claim that understates one of the two or three most complete careers the sport has produced. The Australian tennis of the era that made both Court and Laver possible is covered in the Australian tennis history guide, and the rest of the section is indexed on the Australia hub.