Tennis great Steffi Graf of West Germany won the U.S. Open women's final in 1988, earning her the first women's Grand Slam title since 1970.

When Steffi Graf retired from the world of professional tennis in August of 1999, she held more Grand Slam championships, 22, than any woman except Margaret Smith Court, who held 24. Graf was also the first to claim a Grand Slam title since Court's 1970 victory, when Graf won the U.S. Open championship on this day in 1988. To earn the Grand Slam title, Graf had to win all four major Grand Slam championships in the same year. She did so in 1988 by defeating Chris Everett in the Australian Open, Martina Navratilova at Wimbledon and in the French Open and Gabriela Sabatini in the U.S. Open. Graf is considered by many to be the greatest women's tennis player of all time, winning 902 matches, earning 107 tournament titles and earning a Women's Tennis Association-record $21.8 million in prize money over her 17-year career. Graf was ranked number 1 for a record 377 weeks, including 186 in a row. In one of the most amazing winning streaks in tennis history, she won the Grand Slam title, the Olympic gold medal and an amazing 96 percent of her matches in one year (1988).

Illuminations
In Bouncing Tennis Balls (6–8), students develop skills in collecting and recording data using the real-world situation of a bouncing tennis ball. The activity requires students to use the data collected to formulate the relationship between the dependent and independent variables in their experiment.

Science NetLinks
Many factors contribute to success in tennis, among them reaction time and practice. In Reaction Time 1: How Fast Are You? (3–5) and Reaction Time 2: Zap! (3–5), students test their own reaction time and explore the effects of practice and visual and auditory responsiveness on their reaction time.

The Science Update Sports Rankings (6–12) discusses a proposed new mathematical system for determining sports rankings, particularly in college sports.

ReadWriteThink
In A Race with Grace: Sports Poetry in Motion (3–5), students explore the grace and beauty of motion in a variety of sports. Examining examples from their own experiences and from popular media, students learn about the aesthetic elements of athletics.