So, I got into this whole tennis player astrology sign thing, right? Not ’cause I’m some huge believer in stars telling your future or anything. Nah. It was actually because of my buddy, Jim. He’s always going on about how all great athletes are Leos or Scorpios, something about their “innate drive” or whatever. We were watching a match, and he started up again. I just got curious, you know? Like, is there anything to it for, say, USA-born tennis players?
Getting the Raw Material – Player Birthdays
First off, I had to actually find a list of USA-born tennis players and their birthdays. You’d think that’d be easy in this day and age. Wrong. It was a proper pain. I started by looking at some big sports sites, trying to scrape data, but it was all over the place. Some had birthdays, a lot didn’t. Then there’s the whole “American player” thing – some are born elsewhere and become citizens. I wanted strictly USA-born for this little experiment.
I spent a good chunk of time, probably a few evenings, just digging around. Old tournament records, tennis association archives I didn’t even know existed, fan pages that looked like they were made in the 90s. Seriously, my eyes were burning by the end of it. I had to cross-check stuff because you can’t trust just one source. Eventually, I got a decent list, maybe a few hundred players where I was pretty sure they were born in the US and I had a solid birth date.
Figuring Out the Signs
Okay, so once I had that spreadsheet of names and birthdays – which was a victory in itself – the next part was pretty straightforward. Turning a birthday into an astrological sign isn’t exactly rocket science. I just grabbed one of those standard lists you find online, you know, like Aries is March 21 to April 19, Taurus is April 20 to May 20, and so on. Then I just went down my list, player by player, and put the right sign next to their name. A bit tedious, sure, but way easier than finding the darn birthdays in the first place.
So, What Was the “Winning” Sign?
Alright, moment of truth. After all that digging and sorting, what did I find? Was Jim right? Was there one super-dominant sign for American tennis champs?
Well, to be honest, it was pretty… meh. There wasn’t any single sign that just blew all the others out of the water. Seriously. It was a real mixed bag. I mean, yeah, one or two signs might have had a few more players than some others, but it wasn’t a huge difference. Like, you’d see one sign pop up, say, 10% of the time, another at 12%, another at 7%. Nothing that made me sit up and go “Wow!” It was more of an “Oh. Okay.” kind of moment.
I even tried to look at different groups, like just the top-ranked players, or players from certain decades. Still, no massive pattern jumped out. It was all pretty spread out. Maybe one sign would nudge ahead a tiny bit in one group, then another would in a different group. Basically, it looked pretty random to me.
So, I told Jim. He just kinda shrugged and said, “Huh, weird. Maybe it’s different for European players.” Can you believe it? All that sifting through ancient internet pages, and he just moves the goalposts! But whatever, it was an interesting little project, I guess. Mostly proved to myself that finding concrete answers in stuff like this is a long shot. Or maybe I just didn’t have enough players in my list. Who knows? I’m not doing it for European players, that’s for sure. My free time is worth more than that!