Where the Height Confusion Comes From
Lindsay Davenport is listed at 5 feet 11 inches, or roughly 180 centimeters, according to the WTA and ITF official records. That number appears in most biographical databases. But if you dig into tournament draw sheets from the mid-1990s and cross-reference them with media guide photos, the number isn't as clean as it looks. Different publications had different standards. Some listed her at 5'10". Others at 5'11". A few ATP/WTA media kits from the early tour years had her at 180 cm, which converts to about 5'11", but the rounding makes the original measurement slightly ambiguous. The practical problem I ran into was trying to settle this for a statistics project on serving aces versus player height. I pulled match data from 1997 to 2003 and noticed the WTA profile page for Davenport showed 180 cm, but the US Open media guide from 1998 listed her as 5'10.5". That half-inch difference matters when you're building a regression model that correlates height with first-serve percentage. I couldn't just pick one number without understanding where each came from. Here is how I resolved it. I went to the original source documents: the Grand Slam event media guides, the WTA yearbook statistical supplements, and the ITF tournament entries. These three bodies don't always agree. The Grand Slams have historically been the most inconsistent with height reporting because they allowed players to self-report in some years and measured them in others. The WTA standardized reporting around 1995 but still had edge cases where a player's height was updated mid-season after a measurement correction. The ITF entries are usually the most reliable for any given year because they were tied to eligibility verification for junior and senior events.
My workaround was to take the median value across all three sources for each year and then weight the most recent verified measurement more heavily. For Davenport, that median landed squarely at 5'11" or 180 cm. The half-inch discrepancy from the 1998 US Open guide fell within the normal measurement variance for that era. Tennis officials sometimes measured shoes-on during pre-tournament check-ins, which adds about half an inch to a barefoot reading. That explains the gap. The counter-intuitive part most people miss is that height lists in tennis are not static. Players' listed heights change over their careers, sometimes by an inch or more, because the governing bodies changed how they collected the data. Davenport's height didn't actually change. The measurement protocol did. In the early 1990s, many tour officials estimated heights visually during player introductions. By the late 1990s, they started using actual stadiometers at tournament hospitality tents. That shift alone accounts for most of the inconsistency you see in historical records. There is another edge case worth mentioning. Some databases convert imperial to metric and round incorrectly. A listing of 5'11" converts to 180.34 cm. Some systems round that to 180 cm, which is fine. But others will show 5'11" and 178 cm in the same record, which is a conversion error. I found this in at least two major sports databases. It is easy to miss if you are not doing a side-by-side comparison.
If you are working with Davenport's height data for any analysis, the most reliable single figure is 180 cm or 5'11". That is what the WTA, the ITF, and the majority of Grand Slam official entry forms converge on. The remaining noise comes from outdated self-reporting, shoe-on measurement practices, and sloppy unit conversions in secondary databases. When you see a conflicting number, check the source date and whether it came from an official entry form or a third-party aggregator. The official form will almost always be the more accurate value. For anyone building a dataset that includes player height across multiple decades, I recommend pulling directly from the WTA and ITF archived media guides rather than relying on wiki-style sources. The conversion errors and rounding inconsistencies in those aggregator sites add up quickly when you are working with hundreds of players. It adds maybe twenty minutes to your data gathering process, but it saves you from cleaning up bad entries later.
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