How Many Slams? Trivia Quiz

Answer: One

Sue Barker was an English player, but her only Grand Slam title came at the French Open in 1976. Her best result in her home tournament, Wimbledon, was the 1977 semi-finals, the same point she reached at the Australian Open in both 1975 and 1977 (the December one - that was the year they moved the tournament from January to December, to there were two 1977 titles).

At the US Open her best result was making the fourth round in 1976. By the time of her retirement in 1984, she had won 23 singles titles and 12 doubles titles, with a highest ranking of 3rd in singles, reached in March of 1977.

Answer: One

Czech player Jana Novotna was better known as a doubles player - she held the #1 ranking for a total of 67 weeks and won all four Grand Slam women's doubles titles - but she was also #2 in singles for a while in 1997, and won the Wimbledon singles title in 1998. She was a finalist at the Australian Open in 1991, and a semi-finalist twice each at the French Open (1990, losing to Stefi Graf, and 1996) and the US Open (1994, her ninth consecutive loss to Stefi Graf, and 1998).

At the time of her Wimbledon victory, she was the oldest woman to gain a first-time Grand Slam title, at 29 years and 9 months. This was later eclipsed in 2010 when Francesca Schiavone won the French Open at the age of 29 years and 11 months.

Answer: Two

You don't have to be a tennis historian to have heard of Suzanne Lenglen (1899-1938), you just have to note that one of the show courts at the French Open is named after her. And the French have a lot of which they can be proud: her career singles record of 332 wins, 7 losses led her to 83 titles, including six at Wimbledon (1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1925 - the streak was broken in 1924 when she had to withdraw due to injury) and two in Paris (1925, 1926). In 1926 she retired form amateur tennis and joined a professional circuit in the US.

She is widely considered the greatest player from the amateur era - a valuation supported by her dominance in doubles as well as singles; she and her favourite partner, Elizabeth Ryan, were undefeated, and won the Wimbledon doubles titles in the same years as she won the singles.

Answer: Two

In 2003, there was a week when Belgian Kim Clijsters was ranked #1 in both singles and doubles. That was one of the three years when she won the end-of-year Tour Finals tournament, the others being 2002 and 2010. Her Grand Slam success, however, came later. She won the US Open three times, in 2005, 2009 and 2010, and the Australian Open once, in 2011. Her best result at the French Open was as a losing finalist in 2001 and 2003, while she never progressed past the semi-finals at Wimbledon, reaching that stage in 2003 and 2006.

After retiring at the end of the 2007 season, and having a daughter in 2008, she returned to competition in 2009. This second phase of her career was always planned to be limited in scope - she retired after the 2012 season when her daughter was ready to start school. In 2020 she made another comeback, but both injury and COVID made things difficult, and she retired for the third time in 2022.

Answer: Two

The older of the Williams sisters was the first to win a Grand Slam tournament, doing so in 2000 when she beat Lindsay Davenport in both the Wimbledon and US finals. the following year she defeated Justine Henin at Wimbledon, and her sister in New York. She repeated success at Wimbledon in 2005, 2007 and 2008, but never made it past the finals at the other two Grand slams. In 2002 she was a losing finalist at the French Open, while she attained the same level in Australia in both 2003 and 2017, losing to her sister in their ninth Grand Slam finals match.

Speaking of Serena, the two of them made a formidable doubles team, winning 14 major doubles titles, including all four Grand Slams. Their win in Paris in 2010 gave them a non-calendar-year grand slam in doubles - holding all four titles at the same time, although not completed in the same calendar year. They won Olympic gold medals in doubles in 2000 (when Venus also won the singles gold), 2008 and 2012 (when Serena won the singles event).

Answer: Three

Evonne Goolagong (the name she used before her marriage in 1975 to Roger Cawley) played in 18 Grand Slam singles finals, winning 7 and losing 11. Her four consecutive finals losses at the US Open (1973-1976) was the closest she came to winning that title.

In Australian she made the finals seven years in a row, (1971-1977), winning three consecutive titles in 1974-1977. In 1977 she also won the women's double, playing with Margaret Court. She won the French Open in 1971. Her Wimbledon victories in 1971 and 1980 make bookends to her career.

The later win made her the first mother to win the event since Dorothea Lambert Chambers in 1914.

Answer: Three

When Monica Seles won the French open at the age of 16, she was representing her native Yugoslavia; when she won her final Grand Slam title, the 1996 Australian Open, she was representing the USA. Along the way she won the French Open two more times (1991, 1992), the US Open twice (1991, 1992) and the Australian Open another three times (1991, 1992, 1993). Her best result at Wimbledon was as a losing finalist in 1992.

You will notice that all of these titles appear in a close time span except for the fourth victory in Australia. This is because of the famous incident when a deranged Steffi Graf fan stabbed her as she was sitting down between sets in a tournament in Hamburg on 30 April 1993, hoping to keep her out of the game so Steffi could regain the #1 ranking (which did eventuate). While she was only hospitalised for a few weeks, she took two years to recover psychologically, and only returned to competition in 1995, by which time she had become an U.S. citizen. Her game never recovered its early spectacular form.

Answer: Three

The Swiss Miss, as commentators dubbed her (despite the fact that she was born in Czechoslovakia, and became a naturalised Swiss citizen at the age of 7), set a series of "youngest ever" records during the 1990s, including becoming the youngest ever Grand Slam champion when she won the 1996 Wimbledon women's doubles title at the age of 15 years and 9 months. Her first singles Grand Slam titles came the following year, when she won the Australian Open, Wimbledon and the US Open. She was runner-up at the French Open. In March of 1997 she became the youngest ever #1 woman tennis player, a position she was to hold for the next 80 weeks. During that stretch, she became the first woman to be ranked #1 in both singles and doubles.

In 1998 she won a Grand Slam in doubles, with Mirjana Lucic as her partner in Australia, and Jana Novotna for the other three titles. She has also won all four Grand Slam mixed doubles titles, but not in the same year. Her career was interrupted several times by injury, the reason for her first retirement, in 2003. She returned to the game in 2005, and experienced more success in doubles and mixed doubles than in singles until her final retirement in 2017.

Answer: Four

Not only has Serena Williams won all four Grand Slam events, she managed what she termed a Serena-slam - holding all four titles at the same time, just not completed within a single year. This happened twice, in 2002-3 and 2014-5. In 2015 she won a Surface Slam, winning the major titles on all three surfaces - hard court (Australian Open, which she also won in 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2017), clay (French Open, which she also won in 2002 and 2013) and grass (Wimbledon, which she also won in 2002, 2003, 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2016). Her final victory at the US Open came in the previous year, when she won it for the sixth time.

Unlike her sister, who continued to play mixed doubles at the Grand Slam events for most of her career, Serena only did so in the early years of her career. She won the event in 1998 at Wimbledon and the US Open, having previously been a finalist at the French Open, and was again a finalist at the Australian Open in 1999.

Answer: Four

Saving the best for last (I know, that's debatable, but hear me out), Steffi Graf was the first player (male or female) to complete a Golden Slam - she won all four Grand Slam events in 1988, along with an Olympic gold medal that year. She's also the first to have won all four Grand Slam events at least four times. She was ranked as the #1 player for 377 weeks (186 of them consecutively), and finished the year as the top player eight times. The 1990s was the Steffi Graf decade, albeit "helped out" by the stabbing of Monica Seles in 1993 (which sidelined Monica for two years). Her last few years on the tour were beset with injuries, leading to her retirement in 1999 at the age of 30. Since then she has been involved in some exhibition matches, including a 2008 one-set match against Martina Navratilova, which she won in a tie-break.

In 2009 she was part of a set of exhibition matches staged to celebrate the newly-installed roof over Centre court at Wimbledon. In the singles, she lost to Kim Clijsters. In the mixed doubles, she and her husband Andre Agassi went down to Tim Henman and Kim Clijsters.