In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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Michael Stich [GER]Born: 18 October 1968
Career: 1989-97 (9 seasons)
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak ATP rank: 2 (22 November 1993)
Peak Elo rating: 2,203 (2nd place, 1993)
Major singles titles: 1 (1991 Wimbledon)
Total ATP singles titles: 17
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From the beginning of the Open Era in 1968 to the shift away from carpet at tour-level events in the mid-2000s, 13 different men won titles on all four surfaces–hard, clay, grass, and carpet–in a single season. Eight of them did it at least twice. The list is every bit as impressive as you’d expect: Bjorn Borg, Jimmy Connors, Rod Laver, John McEnroe, Ilie Nastase, Ken Rosewall, Pete Sampras… and Michael Stich.
Six of those names regularly feature in debates about the greatest of all time. Nastase doesn’t, but no one questions that he was one of the most dangerous players in the field for years. As for Stich: Be honest, how many guesses would it have taken before you put him on this list?
It’s not just a couple of fluke seasons, though Stich’s 1991 and 1993 campaigns tower above the rest of his career. He is one of only 13 men with three or more career titles on all four surfaces. Among his immediate contemporaries, only Sampras and Stefan Edberg pulled off the feat. Boris Becker never won a tournament on clay. Andre Agassi’s 1992 Wimbledon title was his only grass court triumph. Jim Courier won just a single minor event on carpet and reached only one final on grass.
For all the variety in his results, Stich was never known as a well-rounded player. He was tall, he had a huge serve, he was fast enough to serve and volley, and he was sure enough at the net for the strategy to work. In the 27 matches logged by Match Charting Project volunteers, his average rally length was 3.1 shots, equal to the numbers for Edberg and Becker and only a tick longer than those of John Isner and Reilly Opelka. 35% of his serves never came back, and he won 65% of his service points with either the serve or his second shot. 130 players have at least 20 matches in the MCP dataset, and only 10 of them won those quick service points more often than Stich did.
That game style couldn’t have been designed any better for grass. His signature title came at Wimbledon in 1991, when he beat Edberg and Becker in succession for his only major championship. He won 78% of career matches on turf, good for 15th in the Open Era among players with at least 50 matches. Among the stars of the 1990s, only Sampras, Becker, and Edberg rank higher, and if you remove a dead Davis Cup rubber from Stich’s tally, he jumps to 11th and overtakes Edberg.
It’s a mistake, though, to remember Stich simply for his grass-court exploits. He was largely impervious to surface, he won at every sort of venue, and he barely seemed to notice who stood across the net from him.
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Every generation has that one player who seems to stand off to the side, unwilling to tie up their entire identity with their tennis. Michael Stich was that guy, and he filled the role at a time when the zeitgeist swung the hardest in the other direction. He was a 22-year-old adult surrounded by a teeming mass of present and former teen prodigies.
Stich was only 11 months younger than Boris Becker, and–I’m still trying to wrap my head around this one–8 months older than Steffi Graf. Becker announced the arrival of a new superstar with his Wimbledon title as a 17-year-old in 1985, and Graf ascended to the top of the world rankings two years later, before winning the golden slam in 1988.
Understandably, the presence of two young mega-stars left little attention for other German prospects. Stich said, “Most of the German players, including me, never really got the respect we deserved.” He would eventually claim his share of coverage, but it would take some time.
Serve, top view
When Graf took over the #1 WTA ranking, Stich was only a month removed from his first match win at a professional event. He was tied for 760th on the ATP computer. His sole claim to fame was a German youth championship in 1986, and he wouldn’t turn pro until 1990, choosing to finish school first.
Stich’s ambivalence about the game wasn’t because the weekly grind wore him down. He knew from the start that he could live without tennis. Six weeks winning the Wimbledon title in 1991, he told a New York Times reporter, “Tennis is just a chapter in my life for a couple of years.” The Times dubbed him “The Reluctant Champion,” but reluctance isn’t exactly what came through in his comments at the time. While he didn’t want tennis to define him, he aimed to make the most of his time on court.
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Stich did just that in his first four seasons as a professional. The first taste of success didn’t take long. He won six matches to grab the Memphis title in February of 1990, upsetting third seed Andrei Chesnokov en route. It wasn’t until the end of the season, though, that he gave a hint of what was to come. He won only 15 matches in 18 tournaments between March and October before reaching the final eight at Paris Bercy, defeating Chesnokov again as well as Brad Gilbert, his first top-ten scalp.
The results were good enough for a spot in the top 40, a respectable showing for his first full season. But it barely hinted at what he’d accomplish in another six months.
He led off the 1991 season with back-to-back finals in Australia, the first two of seven title matches he’d reach on the season. He still had a hard time against the very best, losing to Ivan Lendl in Memphis and twice to Stefan Edberg, in Miami and Tokyo. But he suffered only three first-round defeats in his first 15 events, and he rode a wide-open draw to the semi-finals at Roland Garros, where he pushed eventual champion Jim Courier to four sets.
Then, the tournament of his life, just 18 months after turning pro. At Wimbledon, Stich fought through early-round five-setters against Omar Camporese and Alexander Volkov, then straight-setted Jim Courier in the quarters. In the semi-final, Stich failed to break Edberg’s serve in any of the four sets they played, but in a battle of big serves, three tie-breaks were enough to advance, 4-6, 7-6, 7-6, 7-6.
His opponent in the final was the German golden boy, Boris Becker. Becker had already won five major singles titles, and he was playing his sixth Wimbledon final. But as usual, Stich was unfazed. Before stepping on court, he told Mark Lewis, his coach, “There’s no way I’m going to lose this match.” Whether due to Stich’s confidence or plain bad luck, Becker had an off day, and the outcome was never really in doubt. Stich won in straight sets, earning 16 break points and converting four of them.
Stich cleaned up against second-tier competition the rest of the way, winning clay, hard court, and carpet titles in Stuttgart, Schenectady, and Vienna, respectively. Despite the upsets of Edberg and Becker at the All-England Club, he still struggled against the best, losing to Lendl in the US Open quarters, Andre Agassi in the Davis Cup semi-final, and failing to win a match in the Tour Finals round robin.
1992 brought a bit of a sophomore slump. He lost in the quarters in Australia, fell to wild card Henri Leconte in the third round at Roland Garros, and dropped another major quarter-final to Pete Sampras at Wimbledon. Brad Gilbert stopped him in the second round in New York.
The early exits meant he had few opportunities to test himself against the best, playing only six matches against the top ten outside of the mid-season World Team Cup and the post-season Grand Slam Cup. The Grand Slam Cup, though, reminded fans what he was capable of. In front of friendly crowds in Munich, Stich won one tiebreak after another against Edberg, Sampras, and Richard Krajicek, then blitzed Michael Chang in the final.
Celebrating a gold medal
Stich also posted his best doubles results that season. He partnered John McEnroe to win his only major doubles title, needing five hours to defeat Jim Grabb and Richey Reneberg in a Wimbledon final that ran to 19-17 in the fifth set. A month later, now on clay, he paired with Becker to win Olympic gold in Barcelona.
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Thumbnail biographies will always focus on Michael Stich’s surprise 1991 Wimbledon title and the season that surrounded it. But his 1993 campaign–perhaps triggered by that run at the Grand Slam Cup–was in many ways even better.
Stich’s 1993 season will never be remembered as a historically great one because, for the second straight year, he failed to make a serious run at the majors. After a semi-final showing in Melbourne, he lost to Goran Prpic in the fourth round at the French, Becker in the Wimbledon quarters (where he failed to convert any of nine break points), and Henrik Holm in the first round at the US Open.
He was a whole lot better in the remaining 44 weeks of the year. He beat Krajicek to win the Stuttgart Indoor title in February. In Hamburg, he won his hometown tournament on clay, finally toppling Ivan Lendl after six losses against him. He kicked off his grass court season with a Queen’s Club title, straight-setting Becker en route. He beat Stefan Edberg five times, one of the victories securing the title on carpet at the Swiss Indoors in Basel.
Stich finished the campaign with the most impressive run of his career. He went undefeated at the Tour Finals, beating Chang, Courier, Andrei Medvedev, and Goran Ivanišević before upsetting Sampras in the final. Two weeks later, he won three rubbers to seal the Davis Cup for Germany. It was an appropriate finish to outstanding year of international play. Stich played both singles and doubles in all four of Germany’s ties, going undefeated in doubles with Patrik Kühnen and losing only a dead singles rubber to Petr Korda.
The German would sustain a similar level into 1994, though his results were not quite as spectacular. Injuries crept in and he was forced to play fewer events, but the two-shot attack would win him six more titles from 1994 to 1996, and he reached major finals at both the French and the US Open. He returned to the final four at Wimbledon in 1997, concluding his career with a five-set loss to Cedric Pioline.
Just as he predicted back in 1991, Stich didn’t stick around for a long career. He retired before his 29th birthday with, apparently, no regrets.
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Stich’s one-dimensional attacking game made his glittering career possible at the same time that it limited his potential. Only in 1995 did he break serve more than 25% of the time, and his career average (from 1991, when stats become available) is a mere 23.4%. Pete Sampras, the best player of his era and one who used a similar style, stayed at 26% or above from 1992-95, and peaked above 29%. Pete’s return game wasn’t his strength, either, but his results on serve were far superior to Stich’s, and he still needed to win more than a quarter of return games to post his best seasons.
Still, the German’s serve was strong enough that, on a good day, he could hold serve seemingly at will. Worst case scenario, he could push each set to tiebreaks, as in the 1991 Wimbledon semi-final against Edberg. And from there, it was anybody’s game. Stich faced 69 different opponents three or more times at tour-level. With the sole exception of Andre Agassi, he beat all of them at least once. He retired with winning records against Sampras, Edberg, Courier, and Ivanišević. He beat Becker 4 times in 12 tries, and and apart from Agassi, the only player who really dominated him was Ivan Lendl.
He peaked at #2 in the ATP rankings, and my Elo ratings come to the same assessment. The official tables gave him three year-end finishes in the top ten, while Elo gives him five. Either way, it’s a short, spiky peak. It’s hard not to wonder what might have been if the German federation had recognized Stich’s capabilities earlier, or if Stich himself had felt compelled to fight his way back from injury in 1997.
But Stich didn’t look back. After retirement, he didn’t pick up his racket for five years. He remains far less of a familiar face than his one-time rival Becker, but there’s no denying his place in tennis history. When he caught his coach looking concerned about a tricky opponent, he’d say not to worry: “just a big kick serve to the backhand, easy volley, game over.” It really was that simple, and on a good day, it worked against anybody.