Golden set

In tennis, a golden set is a set which is won without losing a single point. This means scoring the 24 minimum points required to win the set 6-0, without conceding any points.

In professional tennis, this has occurred twice in the main draw of top-level events. It has also happened a number of times in the pre-tournament qualifiers of the lowest-level events. Bill Scanlon had a golden second set in his win over Marcos Hocevar at the 1983 Delray Beach WCT event. Yaroslava Shvedova had a golden first set in her win over Sara Errani at the 2012 Wimbledon Championships. Steffi Graf came close to achieving the feat in the finals of the 1989 Virginia Slims of Washington tournament, winning the first five games to love against Zina Garrison, before winning the match 6-1, 7-5. At the 2023 Western & Southern Open, Taylor Fritz won the first five games to love in his round of sixteen match before his opponent, Dusan Lajovic, retired.

A golden match is when a player does not lose a single point in the entire match. There are five documented cases of this at low-level events. Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman did so in the 1910 Washington State Championships, defeating a Miss Huiskamp (first name unknown). Later it happened twice in France in the qualifiers of lowest-level professional events, two of them in the span of two months, both against the same 55-year-old man, Tomas Fabian. A golden match occurred in the qualifiers of an ITF Men's World Tennis Tour event in Doha in 2019, where Krittin Koaykul beat Artem Bahmet. Bahmet was a professional sports bettor who had entered the tournament without having played tennis before; his associate bet against him and won roughly €3,000.