Episode 86 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast features Jeff and co-host Carl Bialik, of the Thirty Love podcast, discussing the new Netflix doc Guillermo Vilas: Settling the Score.
The Argentine star was a multi-slam winner in the 1970s, yet he never reached the top of the official ATP ranking list. The film covers journalist Eduardo Puppos’s quest to prove that Vilas deserved to be #1. Over the course of the episode, we ponder the importance of the top ranking, the vagaries of the ATP ranking algorithm, how Elo rates Vilas’s peak years, and the ATP’s response to Vilas’s case for the top spot. We didn’t love the documentary, but the issues it raises are fun to debate.
Fans of the TA podcast will also want to check out Dangerous Exponents, the new Covid-19 podcast that Carl Bialik and I are doing. Episode 3 will be available later today.
Thanks for listening!
(Note: this week’s episode is about 48 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)
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