Tennis
Five real newspaper headlines about tennis, printed between 1926 and 2002, with their dates removed. Read each one and guess the year it was published. No multiple choice and no trivia questions, just the headline as it was printed.
Headlines publishes a new five-headline history quiz every day, and every round here is drawn from that archive.
Headline one
The Daily Telegraph
1926
French tennis star Suzanne Lenglen, who had dominated women's tennis through the early 1920s, turned professional in 1926 by signing with American promoter C.C. Pyle. She had already caused a scandal at Wimbledon that year by keeping Queen Mary waiting. Her move broke new ground in professional women's sport.
Headline two
The Daily Telegraph
1934
Fred Perry became the first British man to win Wimbledon since Arthur Gore in 1909, defeating Jack Crawford of Australia in four sets. Perry went on to win Wimbledon three consecutive times from 1934 to 1936, and also held all four Grand Slam titles simultaneously. His dominance of world tennis in the mid-1930s made him Britain's greatest sporting hero of the era.
Headline three
Los Angeles Times
1973
Billie Jean King defeated 55-year-old former Wimbledon champion Bobby Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 in the Houston Astrodome on 20 September 1973, in a match billed as the 'Battle of the Sexes'. Riggs had boasted that women's tennis was inferior and that he could beat any female player; King's victory became a landmark moment for women's sport and feminism. An estimated 90 million people watched worldwide.
Headline four
The Times
1988
Steffi Graf achieved an unprecedented feat in 1988, winning the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and US Open — and then adding Olympic gold in Seoul. No tennis player before or since has won all four Grand Slam titles plus an Olympic gold medal in the same calendar year. The achievement was immediately dubbed the 'Golden Slam'.
Headline five
The New York Times
2002
Pete Sampras defeated Andre Agassi in the 2002 US Open final to claim his 14th Grand Slam title, a new all-time record. It proved to be Sampras's final professional match, making it one of the most celebrated farewell performances in tennis history. He retired the following year without ever officially announcing his retirement.
Answer the five above to see your score.
Scoring works as it does in the daily game. Each headline is worth up to 100 points, and you lose two points for every year you are out. Being a decade wrong still earns you 80. A perfect round is 500.
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