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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Mary Joe Fernández [USA]Born: 19 August 1971
Career: 1985-99
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 4 (1990)
Peak Elo rating: 2,261 (5th place, 1991, 1993)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 7
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In 1992, Mary Joe Fernández reached 12 semi-finals. She lost the first in Sydney to Gabriela Sabatini, then got her revenge on Sabatini two weeks later at the Australian Open. She lost to Monica Seles in the final, then won another semi-final in Essen in February. Waiting in the final: another defeat at the hands of Seles.
Between March and October, she cracked the final four nine more times. The Olympics, the US Open, in Europe, in Asia, on clay, on grass, on hard–she reached the semis in 12 of the 17 events she played, and one of the early losses was due to injury at Wimbledon.
Here are her opponents in those last nine semis:
Steffi Graf Gabriela Sabatini Arantxa Sánchez Vicario Lori McNeil Steffi Graf Monica Seles Monica Seles Gabriela Sabatini Jana Novotna
There were not a lot of easy draws on the women’s tour of the early 1990s. Graf and Novotna accounted for two of her earlier-round exits, as well.
Heading into Indian Wells in March of 1993, Mary Joe had piled up $2.2 million in career prize money, despite winning only two tournaments. She had reached 37 semi-finals but only eight finals.
She said then: “It’s just a matter of getting that break. Once I win one or two, it’s going to be easier. It’s mental. It’s all in the head.” She beat Helena Sukova and Amanda Coetzer to win in Indian Wells, but it didn’t get easier. As she got older, it was less often Graf, Seles, or Sabatini in the semis. Instead, she drew the likes of Mary Pierce, Lindsay Davenport, and Martina Hingis.
Fernández arrived on tour when it was at its most crowded with talent, and she was never quite able to elbow her way in. Like Zina Garrison, she was an all-time great player with the bad luck to play match after important match against foes who were even better.
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I’ll be honest: I never expected to see Mary Joe Fernández on my list of the 128 best players of the last century, let alone inside the top 90. I’m sure you’re surprised to see her here. Mary Joe is surely too busy to follow along, but on the off chance she’s counting down with us, she probably didn’t think her name would come up, either.
The remaining 87 players on the list include a few more who never won a major, but I suspect that for most of you, Fernández will be the last real head-scratcher. While I’m generally more interested in celebrating the accomplishments of the all-time greats than picking through the details of why one is ranked above another, this case calls for some explanation.
According to my historical Elo ratings, Fernández was at her best in early 1993. After winning Indian Wells, she beat Sabatini and Sánchez Vicario to reach her first French Open final, where she took Graf to a third set. Her rating after the French was 2,261, which slots her onto the all-time list between the peaks of Andrea Jaeger and Evonne Goolagong. 13 Open Era women on this list–including a few who are still to come–never achieved such a high Elo rating.
There’s no denying that she was utterly helpless against the very best. She lost all seven matches against her idol Chris Evert, eight of eight against Martina Navratilova, all 17 she played against Graf, and 15 of her 16 meetings with Seles. There was a mental component to her inability to trouble Graf or Seles, but she also just didn’t have the weapons to challenge them. Few women did.
I don’t consider doubles accomplishments in the ranking, but still: those medals are gold.
What saves Mary Joe’s reputation is how she fared against everyone else. In her main years on tour, from 1986 to 1997, she played at least three matches against 70 different opponents. Only ten of them got the better of the head-to-head. In addition to the four women I’ve already mentioned, she lost every meeting with both Martina Hingis and, for some reason, Irina Spirlea. She lost two of three against Kimiko Date, and she fell short of a .500 record against Sabatini (10-13), Sánchez Vicario (4-7), and Novotna (4-5).
That leaves 60 women, three of which fought her to a draw. The other 57–including, again, many players who earned a place on the Tennis 128–lost to her more often than they won.
Here’s another way to look at it. In her years as a full-time competitor, Fernández won 400 matches against 172 losses–almost exactly a 70% win rate. That’s roughly equivalent to the more recent marks of Simona Halep and Caroline Wozniacki. Take out her matches against Evert, Graf, Navratilova, and Seles–in other words, put her in an era without four of the ten or so best players of all time–and her winning percentage improves to 76%. That pulls her about even with the career winning percentage of Venus Williams.
Yes, I know most great players lead most of their head-to-heads. Everyone’s record looks better if you take away some of their losses. I may not be able to convince you that Mary Joe was one of the 90 best players of all time, but I hope you’ll recognize how easy it is to underrate a player whose main accomplishment is that she managed to hold her own in a uniquely difficult era.
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However you value Mary Joe Fernández’s pro career, there’s no disputing she was one of the great juniors of the modern era. When she was 14 years old, she won the 18-and-under division at the Orange Bowl. It was her fourth straight title there. She won the 12s, 14s, 16s, and 18s in consecutive years.
IMG, the sports management firm, began courting her when she was in elementary school. She won her first three matches on the pro tour when she was 13, and she claimed victory in her US Open debut a week after her 14th birthday. She made a surprise run to the quarter-finals at Roland Garros in 1986, when she was still 14. She cracked the top 20 on the WTA computer a year later.
For nearly every milestone Fernández hit, she was the second youngest in history to do so. Only Kathy Rinaldi, an equally precocious 14-year-old a few years earlier, had outdone her. The precedents on most people’s minds, though, were the more successful teen queens Tracy Austin and Andrea Jaeger. Austin and Jaeger had scaled the highest peaks of the sport before they were old enough to legally drink, but injuries and burnout quickly knocked them both off tour.
Mary Joe at Wimbledon in 1991
That wasn’t going to happen to Mary Joe. For one thing, she wanted to go to college–an aspiration that was delayed when she opted to turn pro at age 14. She still finished high school, an unusual credential in the single-minded teenage ranks of the tour. The WTA had introduced limitations on the number of matches that players as young as Fernández could play, and unlike some of her peers, she didn’t bristle at the restrictions.
Plus, she was mature beyond her years. Her early coaches couldn’t say enough good things about her. When she was 14, one of them told Sports Illustrated:
She has a mind like a steel trap. She is the most mentally tough person in the history of tennis. People talk about how great her strokes are. It’s true, but it’s her head that makes her great.
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There was no point in leaving a talent like Fernández in the juniors, and she proved herself equal to the challenge of the adult circuit. But she also quickly discovered her limitations.
Twice in early 1986, Mary Joe faced Steffi Graf. Graf was two years older, and she was already on the brink of dominating the tour. Fernández failed to last an hour on court on either occasion. On her first trip to Wimbledon, she opened against Chris Evert. The match was highly touted, as Fernández had just broken out at the French. But the result was predictable: Evert lost only five games. They met again at the US Open with the same result.
One knock against the youngster is that her vaunted mind worked against her. In his 1993 book Ladies of the Court, Michael Mewshaw wrote:
[T]here were those who suspected that she was too sweet to break through to the top. Or else too intelligent. Tennis, it was said, was a game where you had to be smart enough to do it and dumb enough to think it mattered.
Harold Solomon, a one-time Roland Garros finalist who coached Fernández in the early 1990s, concurred:
She’s a very sincere, genuine type of person. She’s not on an ego trip at all–sometimes to her detriment. Sometimes there’s not enough animal on the court. It’s my job to try to bring that out.
But in Solomon’s view, it was more than just the mental game. Because Mary Joe hadn’t adopted the typical dawn-to-dusk training regimen as a teen, her technique left plenty of room for improvement. Only in late 1991 did she learn to hit a one-handed backhand volley. The same year, she started doing simple strength workouts. Before that, she couldn’t manage a single push-up.
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Fernández had plenty of success before teaming with Solomon. In 1990, she reached the Australian Open final (where she fell to Graf), and she won the Filderstadt title in October to reach a career-best ranking of fourth in the world. But it took a new coach–and his triple goal of technical improvement, physical fitness, and aggressiveness–to take another step forward.
At the 1993 French Open, she played the most memorable match of her career, a quarter-final against Sabatini that tested her will to win like never before. The third seed from Argentina had won eight of their last ten encounters, and she quickly built up a 6-1, 5-1 lead at Roland Garros. Sabatini double-faulted on her first match point, and Fernández saved four more before taking the second set in a tiebreak. Mary Joe made her coach proud–“I figured I should just hit it as hard as I could and see what would happen”–and pulled out the decider by a score of 10-8, needing five match points of her own.
She’ll never forget the three-and-a-half-hour battle for a place in the final four, but Fernández remembers the semi-final itself as “one of the best matches I ever played.” Against Sánchez Vicario–who had beaten her in six of seven meetings–she continued on the attack. She won more than half of her return points and won easily, 6-2, 6-2.
The reward: another major final against Steffi Graf. Fernández rode her semi-final form into the title match, taking the first set, only the second set she had won against the German in ten meetings. She nudged out to a 2-0 lead in the decider, then broke again for 4-3 on a Graf double fault. Graf broke back, and finally, Fernández’s jitters were too much. Steffi won, 4-6, 6-2, 6-4.
Coach Solomon had Mary Joe on a three-year plan to win a grand slam, and the run in Paris cut the schedule in half. But immediately after Fernández discovered her best tennis, her body betrayed her. A shoulder injury, among other accumulated woes, limited her to only 12 matches for the rest of the season. Among them: a 6-0, 6-1 embarrassment at Wimbledon at the hands of Zina Garrison.
Still only 22 years old, she he was able to come back, winning Indian Wells and reaching two major quarter-finals in 1995 alone. But as the field got more crowded with young talent from around the world–a trend she had spotted three years earlier, at a time when journalists were bemoaning the top-heavy nature of the women’s game–Fernández found it increasingly difficult to keep up. Mary Joe settled for doubles glory instead. She and Gigi Fernández won gold at the 1996 Atlanta games, equaling their result from Barcelona in 1992.
Solomon’s three-year plan never came to fruition, and as a singles player, Mary Joe Fernández finished her career with three major runner-up trophies and a handful of tour-level titles. It wasn’t quite what her junior exploits foretold, and it isn’t the typical resume of an all-time great. She wasn’t too intelligent to reach the top, nor was she too nice–smart and friendly as she may be. She was simply born at the wrong time.