Ahead of the 2023 Wimbledon, we have analyzed 3686 individual winners of all the major tennis tournaments (Wimbledon, US Open, French Open, Australian Open) since the late 19th century across singles and doubles to find out what names have won the most tournaments.
To see all of the 587 names and their occurrence, you can have a look at the table below.
MOST COMMON NAMES OF MAJOR TENNIS TOURNAMENTS WINNERS
According to the results of the analysis of 587 individual names across all major tournaments since 1877, players named “John” have won the most trophies - 14, to be specific.
“Robert” and “William” are in second and third place, with 10 and 7 players winning trophies, respectively.
When looking at female names, “Margaret” and “Mary” tie for the first place with 7 Margarets and 7 Marys winning trophies each, followed by “Helen” (6 players won trophies) and “Elena”, “Dorothy” and “Suzanne” tied for third place (4 players won trophies).
OPEN ERA: MOST COMMON NAMES OF GRAND SLAM WINNERS
If only the Open Era is considered (since 1968), “John” is still the most common name of a grand slam winner - 7 individual Johns have won at least one of the grand slam tournaments since 1968.
“Elena” and “Mary” tie for second place in the Open Era of grand slams - 4 individual Elenas and 4 Marys have won at least one of the grand slam tournaments since 1968.
17 names in the Open Era tie for third place (3 individual winners each name).
WIMBLEDON
When looking only at the winners, “John” is the most common name of a Wimbledon winner - 8 individual Johns have won Wimbledon since 1877.
“Frank” is the second most common name of a Wimbledon winner - 5 individual Franks have won Wimbledon since 1877.
“Herbert”,”Ken”,”Max” and “Pat” tie for third place with 4 individual winners per name .
Amongst women, “Helen” and “Elena” tie for first place - 3 Helens and 3 Elenas have won Wimbledon since 1877
If only the Open Era of Wimbledon is considered (since 1968), “John” is still the most common name of a Wimbledon winner - 5 individual Johns have won Wimbledon since 1968.
“Elena” is the second most common name of a Wimbledon winner - 3 individual Elenas have won Wimbledon since 1968.
12 names in the Open Era of Wimbledon tie for third place (2 individual winners each name).
METHODOLOGY
- All of the tournaments included in the analysis: French Championship, French Open, Australasian Championship, Australian Open, Wimbledon Championship Amateur Era, Wimbledon Championship Open Era, U.S. National Championship, US Open
- If a winner has won multiple titles, they would still only count as 1 while calculating for the individual winning names - e.g, Martina Navratilova has won countless titles across all of the different tournaments, but in our research, she would only count as 1 Martina
- Diacritics were taken into account when distinguishing between the names
- The names that they players used during their tennis careers were only taken into consideration
- The list of winners was sourced from the official pages of the tournaments & their respective wikipedia pages
- The players whose name for not known (for example they only used the first initial of their name) were omitted from the analysis
- Span of the analysis: 1877 - June 2023
