Heather McKay
Susan Devoy
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Heather McKay leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Heather McKay at #2 and Susan Devoy at #7.
The case for Heather McKay
The most complete domination in the history of any racket sport. McKay lost exactly two competitive matches in her entire career, both in 1962, and was never beaten again — a run of roughly nineteen unbeaten years. She won sixteen consecutive British Opens from 1962 to 1977, when the British Open was the sport's world championship in all but name, and then won the first two Women's World Opens in 1976 and 1979, giving her eighteen major titles. She also won the Australian championship fourteen times. Her superiority was so absolute that contemporaries struggled to describe her weaknesses, and when she retired she switched codes and won the women's world racquetball championship as well. The standard argument against her is field depth: women's squash in the 1960s was smaller and less professional than the men's game. The standard answer is that she never lost to anyone, for two decades, in any of it.
The case for Susan Devoy
The player who held the women's game together between Heather McKay and the Australians, and one of the shortest, most concentrated great careers in the sport. Devoy won eight British Opens between 1984 and 1992, seven of them consecutively, and four World Opens in 1985, 1987, 1990 and 1992 — twelve majors in barely a decade. She was world number one for almost the entire stretch from 1984 to her retirement, which came at 28, immediately after winning both the British Open and the World Open in the same year, a departure at the absolute summit that is almost unheard of in professional sport. Her game was aggressive by the standards of the period, built on early volleying and a willingness to attack the front court rather than grind. She was later made a Dame and served as New Zealand's Race Relations Commissioner, and remains the country's most successful racket-sport athlete.