Grand Slam Grandes Trivia Quiz

With an apt name such as "Court", you have the best chances in tennis, right? It's however her married name and she won 13 of her 24 singles titles as Margaret Smith before her 1966 (temporary) retirement from tennis and her 1967 marriage.

When the open era came around in 1968 - allowing tennis professionals to compete in major tournaments and make a living - Margaret Court returned to the sport and managed to win the "pure" calendar year Grand Slam in 1970 along with many more titles. 11 of her 24 major victories came in her native Australia, three in Wimbledon and five each in France and the US.

In addition to her world record 21 single Grand Slam wins, she also won 21 times in mixed doubles (including the 1963 and 1965 Grand Slam) and 19 times in women's doubles, making her by far the most successful woman to ever have graced the four majors' center courts.

After ending her tennis career in 1977, she later became a minister for the Pentecostalian church, a function she performed well into her 80s.

The younger of the two American Williams sisters, Serena has been the more successful of the pair by far, winning 23 Grand Slam singles titles compared to Venus' seven.

Seven of her wins were achieved in Australia, seven in France, six in Wimbledon and only three at the US Open. She is the only player except Steffi Graf to have completed a singles career Golden Slam by winning the gold medal at the 2012 London Olympics. While she never managed a calendar year Grand Slam, she has twice won all four majors in a row (just across new year's), an achievement now sometines referred to as a Serena Slam.

The Williams sisters also played a highly successful doubles career together, pretty much to the exclusion of any other partnerships. Together, they won 14 Grand Slam tournaments (including another "Serena slam" in 2009/10). Serena also won Wimbledon and the US Open in mixed doubles, once each, both with Max Mirnyi.

Serena Williams has been number one in the WTA rankings for a total of 319 weeks - just over six years.

Stefanie (Steffi) Graf, born in 1969 in Mannheim, Germany, holds the distinction of being the first, and, as of 2025, only tennis player, male or female, to have won a Golden Slam - all four Grand Slam tournaments and the Olympic singles gold medal in one calendar year.

Her incredible win count is by a large part due to her being an extremely versatile player who handled fast and slow courts equally well, also making her the only player of either gender to have won each of the four major tournaments at least four times up to 2025. Her titles came over a total of 12 years, beginning with a 1987 US Open victory and ending at the same place in 1999.

Graf has held the top slot of the WTA rankings for over seven years total (377 weeks) and 186 weeks consecutively, both of which constitute world records still unbeaten by 2025 (the latter equalled by Serena Williams). She was almost exclusively a singles player, having only won one major doubles title and none in mixed.

She married US tennis star André Agassi in 2001. They have two children, neither of which decided to play tennis professionally.

The reason you may not have heard of the fourth-placed player on this list much is that Americal player Helen Wills was active long before many of the others: Born in 1905 in California, she achieved her victories 1923 to 1938, winning Wimbledon eight times, the US Open seven times and the French Open three times as well as the tennis gold medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics - one of the few sports women were allowed to compete in (although this would mostly change with the 1928 games when women were admitted to athletics and gymnastics).

She also has an impressive list of doubles victories: nine in women's and three in mixed competitions at Grand Slam events.

In a premonition of the famous "battle of the sexes" match of Billie Jean King, Wills played an exhibition match against a top ten ranked male US tennis champion in 1933 and won that match. She was ranked the world's leading female tennis player for eight years and was so dominant that she did not concede a single set in high level play from 1927 to 1933. She never traveled to Australia to play, so we will not know just how many wins she could have added to her total had she done so.

Tied at 18 wins, I had to make a difficult choice between two equally outstanding players who were also nemeses of each other: Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. The former's career stats are however even more impressive:

She has far more doubles victories - 41 to be exact (10 thereof in mixed, all others in the womens' competition) while Chris Evert had only three, two of them achieved together with Navratilova. She also has been WTA number one for 332 weeks (roughly six and a half years) and altogether won a whopping 167 high level singles tournaments.

In terms of Grand Slam singles wins, Navratilova was clearly favoring the grass of Wimbledon, where she triumphed a record nine times, compared to winning the US Open four times, the Australian Open thrice and the French Open twice. In contrast, Evert favored the slower clay and hard courts, winning the French Open seven and the US Open six times, with just three Wimbledon and two Australian victories.

This split effectively denied both of these outstanding players a chance at a calendar year singles Grand Slam, but Navratilova managed to win one in doubles in 1984, playing all four tournaments with Pam Shriver. She also has a Serena slam to her name (1984/85). Neither of Navratilova and Evert had a chance at Olympic gold as tennis was not on the roster during their best times. Evert played in 1988, losing in round 3, while Navratilova played the doubles in 2004 (at age 47!) and managed to reach the quarterfinals.

Billie Jean King is probably most well-known for her 1973 "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match where she defeated former male world number one player Bobby Riggs three sets to nil (6-4, 6-3 and 6-3), thus avenging the defeat suffered by Margaret Court a few months before.

However, her triumphes on the professional tennis circuit are at least as impressive: Between 1966 and 1975, she won Wimbledon six times, the US Open four times and the other two Grand Slam tournaments once each. She also has 16 womens' doubles wins and 11 mixed doubles wins to her name.

In 1976, King captained the American Federation Cup team to victory while playing several singles matches herself, her fourth of seven wins as a player and first of four as a captain (taking that role again in 1996, 1999 and 2000). In 2020, this event was renamed Billie Jean King cup in honor of her achievements towards the international recognition of women's tennis.

At nine wins, I also had a difficult choice to make, but my choice fell on Monica Seles because of "what if". What if that fateful April 30, 1993, had not happened and she had not been subjected to a devastating knife attack by a mentally disturbed Steffi Graf fan that, while only taking some weeks to heal, left her mentally unable to ever conjure her best tennis again.

Up to that time, she had already amassed eight Grand Slam titles, narrowly missing the 1992 Grand Slam with three wins and a runner-up placement in Wimbledon and captured the number one WTA ranking off Graf.

Seles was born in Yugoslavia and represented that country in sports up to the time of the attack, winning the Australian Open four times, French Open three times and US Open twice. After the stabbing, she became a US citizen and thus won her final Grand Slam title for the US with a fifth Australian Open triumph in 1995, her last major victory, although she managed to conquer a bronze medal at the 2000 Olympics.

The other player at nine Grand Slam victories is Maureen Connolly, who played for the United States in the early 1950s, winning the calendar Grand Slam for 1953, making her the first female to do so (and, along with Court and Graf, just one of three to have done this by 2025).

Sharing in 8 victories are two players from the early 20th century:

Suzanne Lenglen from France won Wimbledon six times and the French Open also six times, but only two of those count as Grand Slam victories, because the tournament was only opened to non-French players beginning in 1925, thus the earlier incarnations were closer to a national championship. She also won the 1920 Olympic gold medal. (By the way, tennis was one of the very first sports that let women compete for Olympic honors - there was a female competition as early as 1900). She also won eight womens' doubles titles and five mixed doubles events and reached the number one world rank in 1921.

Molla Mallory hailed from Norway but later played for the United States. All eight of her wins were at the US Open, from 1915 to 1922 with the sole exception of 1919, plus 1926. She also won two womens' doubles and three mixed doubles at this event. If it had not been for World War I, during which Wimbledon was not held, she might have been even more successful.

Five female players have reached seven Grand Slam victories. Besides Venus Williams, the other relatively recent one is Belgian Justine Henin.

Six women hold six Grand Slam titles - five of them prior to 1960 and the sixth being Iga ?wi?tek from Poland who was still active with possibly many years ahead as of 2025, so if you have just played this quiz in a later year, she might have way more!

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1980 (as Martina Hingisová), Hingis emigrated to Switzerland at age 7, along with her father. She won her first junior Grand Slam title in 1993 and joined the WTA at the earliest possible age of 14 a year later, debuting at the Zurich Open.

She won her first Grand Slam title in 1996, as the doubles partner of Helena Suková and her first singles title at age 16 in Australia 1997, a title she defended twice in 1998 and 1999. She also won Wimbledon and the US Open in 1997, but narrowly missed out on the annual (and, as it turns out, career) Grand Slam by losing the finals of 1997's French Open.

While she managed to gain the number one world ranking multiple times and held it for a total of four years, she never again won a Grand Slam singles title after 1999, but added 13 doubles and seven mixed titles to her record, the last coming at the 2017 US Open with Chan Yung-jan.

Out of the many players with four Grand Slam victories, I have chosen American Shirley Fry to fill the final slot in this quiz, because she is the only one of them who has won all four tournaments: She won the French Open in 1951, Wimbledon and the US Open in 1956 and the Australian Open in 1957, the only time she played that tournament and also her final competitive outing. In addition, she has twelve women's doubles wins on record along with a single mixed doubles win in Wimbledon 1956.

In 1956, she reached the top position in the world rankings which she held until her early 1957 retirement.

The more well-known Open era four-time winners include Czechoslovakian Hana Mandlikova (who won her titles in the 1980s), Spaniard Arantxa Sánchez Vicario (mostly active in the 1990s) and Belgian Kim Clijsters (who won from 2005 to 2011).