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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Mats Wilander [SWE]Born: 22 August 1964
Career: 1981-96
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1988)
Peak Elo rating: 2,309 (1st place, 1983)
Major singles titles: 7
Total singles titles: 33
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Mats Wilander played some of the longest matches in tennis history. Those epics, especially the ones against Ivan Lendl, featured grueling baseline rallies that often spanned several dozen strokes or more. In the 1982 French Open final against Guillermo Vilas, a single point lasted 90 shots.
“Tennis to be respected,” said one spectator in Paris. Not necessarily enjoyed. Vitas Gerulaitis, one of Wilander’s victims that week, called him the “Ball-Wall from Sweden.”
Despite relying on a brand of tennis that Sports Illustrated once called “patty-cake,” Mats considered himself an aggressive player, even more so than the famous net-rushers of his era:
I’ve always believed that I play more aggressively than a player like Edberg or McEnroe. I think they play a tennis of chance, win or lose. I think that’s a negative attitude, which stems from the fact that you’re not good enough from the baseline. My game was built on hitting shots that prevented my opponent from hitting his best shots. To rush up to the net like that is like holding up a dartboard and giving your opponent an arrow. If he makes his shot, I won’t be able to hit the ball.
In 1982, he said, “I hate baseline rallies. Sometimes, though, I have to stay back there to win matches.”
Mats was a tactician, first and foremost. A problem solver, and one of the greatest of all time. If he needed to hit 30 shots before the court opened up for a backhand winner, he would do that. If he worried he was getting predictable, he would serve-and-volley with his opponent two points away from victory.
If a young player came along with a shot he thought he could use, like Stefan Edberg’s devastating kick serve, Wilander would copy it and put it to use in a grand slam final.
He was the master craftsman. For seven years in the 1980s, the rest of the tour was his toolbox.
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It took some time before the tennis world recognized Wilander as an individual. Seeing a teenage clay-courter from Sweden with a two-handed backhand, people couldn’t help but think of a young Björn Borg.
Borg didn’t play the 1982 French Open, because he wasn’t willing to commit to the full schedule that the tour required. More than one wag speculated that he showed up anyway, in disguise. He wasn’t hitting quite as hard, but he couldn’t help but take the title, all under the assumed name of “Mats Wilander.”
When Mats won the tournament, extending Sweden’s reign at Roland Garros to five years, it hardly helped differentiate the two. Ion Țiriac asked, “Do you have some kind of laboratory for tennis machines in Sweden? Machines you put small heads on?”
Wilander had nothing but respect for Borg, of course. They had faced each other once, the previous year in Geneva, and the older man won, 6-1, 6-1. Mats believed that the two games he won were gifts. Had he faced Björn at Roland Garros, he figured he would fare just about as well.
However, the two Swedes didn’t know each other well, and Borg wasn’t even the 17-year-old’s idol. He looked up to Ilie Năstase. “You don’t idolize someone who is like yourself,” he said. “You idolize somebody you’d like to be like.”
Both men had two-handed backhands, but that’s correlation, not causation. Mats was wielding his double-hander–and using it to beat kids much older than himself–before Borg was Borg.
Wilander also displayed a more well-rounded game, even if he didn’t always use it. He volleyed better than the teenage Borg had, possibly better than Björn ever did. He didn’t serve-and-volley against Vilas in the 1982 French final, but 18 months later, when he was still just 19 years old, he came in behind almost all of his first serves in the Australian Open final against Lendl. He won better than three of every four.
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What the two men had in common was an on-court calm that bordered on the superhuman.
It was the first thing that many observers noticed about the young Swede. Țiriac said, “Wilander’s mind is a weapon. Let’s put it this way: This is an old kid.” At the French in 1982, no one expected him to beat Lendl–Wilander himself most emphatically included. He assumed that his opponent would mount a fifth-set charge, and he started to feel the nerves. Solution? “I decided not to show it to anyone. It’s always best just to keep playing.”
Six years later, Paul Annacone said, “The biggest weapon in today’s tennis isn’t [Andre] Agassi’s forehand, it’s Mats Wilander’s brain.” Or maybe it was Brad Gilbert who said it. Or Jay Berger. Sources disagree. They probably all said it. It was obviously true.
Even here, Borg and Wilander were more different than similar. Borg achieved his imperturbable calm by controlling everything, orienting his entire life around his tennis. The younger man could never do that. He slept every chance he got, but it would never occur to him to track the hours. He wasn’t obsessive about training. On tour, he had few rivals and many drinking buddies.
Mats playing guitar in 1985
His coach, John-Anders Sjögren, called him a “life connoisseur.” It’s not a label that would fit many multi-major winners, especially in the modern era.
The contrasting approaches of Borg and Wilander brought them back to the same place: an absolute disregard for pressure. Teammate Anders Järryd said,
If I had a choice of one player in the entire history of tennis to have on my Davis Cup team, I’d choose Mats. He’s so cool in the critical moments. He’s the one you’d want next to you if your house caught fire.
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It didn’t hurt that Wilander was one of the fittest guys on tour. He told Tom Perrotta of the Wall Street Journal in 2011, “Tennis is a running game, not a hitting game–it’s not golf.”
Mats certainly wasn’t concerned about finishing matches quickly. In his first couple of seasons on tour, he never aimed for the lines. His margin of safety was enormous, he rarely missed, and rallies dragged on until the other man made a move. So what if the result was so boring that a proposal emerged to change the game? The idea was that a warning light would flash after the 30th shot. Once the light was on, the players would have five strokes to finish the point.
The 1982 Roland Garros final lasted four hours and 43 minutes. Vilas, veteran of many protracted clay-court battles, admitted that Wilander was physically stronger than he was.
In 1987, Wilander and Lendl dragged out the US Open final for four hours and 47 minutes–and that one didn’t even make it to a fifth set.
Mats may have liked his chances even better had he come along a couple of decades sooner, before the widespread adoption of the tiebreak. The marathon match in Flushing required two of them. Without breakers, Wilander would’ve smashed every match-length record on the books.
In July 1982, he played what was then the longest Davis Cup singles match in history. On an indoor carpet court in St. Louis, he went toe-to-toe with John McEnroe–then the number one player in the world–for six hours and 32 minutes. He dropped the first two sets, but nearly completed the comeback in the deciding fifth rubber. Final score: 9-7, 6-2, 15-17, 3-6, 8-6.
McEnroe didn’t play again for a month. Wilander went straight to the airport, hopped a plane back to Sweden, and won a tournament in Båstad the very next week.
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The game that made Mats a teenage champion wasn’t going to work forever. In fact, he started to discover holes in his approach just one year later, when he lost the 1983 Roland Garros final to Yannick Noah.
Most opponents did their best to avoid the Wilander backhand. Noah, by contrast, went after it, feeding him shallow, low balls on that wing. Players with slice backhands wouldn’t have had a problem with the tactic. A two-handed slugger was left with few options.
Solution: Learn to hit a one-handed slice backhand.
Wilander’s strategy was simple. He copied the best slice he knew, the one hit by Australian doubles specialist Peter McNamara. In the Noah match, he hit only a dozen slices. Six months later in the Australian final against Lendl, he hit 34. The next time he competed for the French Open title, in 1985, he hit 57. It hardly increased his screen time on highlight reels, but he subtly forced opponents to play to his strengths.
The slice backhand often set up a more aggressive two-hander
Lendl presented a different set of problems. Not only was he one of the few men who could win a long baseline battle against the Swede, he was also committed to self-improvement. The Lendl that Wilander faced in 1986 was far superior to the one he beat as a 17-year-old.
Solution: Beat Lendl at his own game.
A fellow player, Matt Doyle, convinced Mats that a proper regimen of strength training would add power to his serve, his forehand, even his best-in-class double-handed backhand. Working out with Doyle–essentially, training like Lendl–would mean a new level of dedication for the Swede. But if he was ever going to dislodge Lendl from the top of the ranking list, it was clear what he needed to do.
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Half-hearted commitment might have held Wilander back more than any physical deficiency.
He was never a tennis machine, no matter what critics of his style liked to say. He found it especially hard to get motivated for smaller tournaments. In 1988, he explained to journalist Franz Lidz that he easily gave 100 percent in every match at a grand slam. At the year-end Masters, 99 percent. Anywhere else, it was 70 or 80 percent.
The number one ranking didn’t drive him the way it motivated the likes of McEnroe and Lendl. Winning a Davis Cup championship for Sweden did, at least until he achieved that goal by beating the Americans in 1984. After that, he wondered, “What more could people ask of me? And when I started to think like that, the pressure went away.”
What good is it to be preternaturally cool under pressure, if there’s no pressure?
Taking aim at Lendl and the number one ranking gave Wilander a renewed push. In 1987, Lendl was still too strong. The pair met three times, and Mats won only a pair of sets–one each in the marathon Roland Garros and US Open finals. Despite seeing some of the improvements that Doyle had promised, like more punch on the serve, he finished the year where he started, ranked third behind Lendl and Boris Becker.
The payoff came in 1988. He beat Pat Cash for the Australian championship, 8-6 in the fifth. At the French, he straight-setted Henri Leconte for his third title there. He finally came face to face with Lendl at the US Open, where they played for both the title and the number one ranking.
A younger Wilander wouldn’t have had a chance. The 24-year-old edition, armed with a bigger serve, a more confident net game, and an ever-improving slice backhand, had just enough to outlast Lendl. The match ran to five sets, and at four hours and 54 minutes, it set a new record for the longest grand slam final. (Novak Djoković and Rafael Nadal added an hour to the mark in 2012.)
Wilander came to the net over 100 times, and he hit an astonishing 395 slice backhands. By now, the slice wasn’t just a stopgap, it was a weapon in its own right. Typically a defensive stroke, players tend to win far fewer than half the points they play when they use it. Against Lendl that day, Mats won 58% of points when he hit a slice.
The Swede won the match, 6-4, 4-6, 6-3, 5-7, 6-4, improving his record in grand slam fifth sets to an unbelievable 13-1. After eight years on tour and seven major singles titles, he finally ascended to the number one ranking.
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What happened next was, in retrospect, entirely in character.
Wilander won a small tournament in Palermo, then managed just two victories in six matches over the rest of the season. In the Davis Cup final that December, the newly-minted number one gave away a two-set advantage to lose to Carl-Uwe Steeb, a German ranked 74th in the world.
As far back as 1983, Mats had seen it coming. “In the future,” he said then, “if there is too much pressure, too much publicity, maybe I won’t want to be number one.”
Once he overtook Lendl, he didn’t have anything left to prove. He told Sports Illustrated, “John [McEnroe] and Jimmy [Connors] felt a responsibility to reaffirm their ranking every week. It was different for me…. I’ve just been Number One. What am I supposed to do, show them I can be Number One again?”
Credit: Corinne Dubreuil / Eurosport
There was no risk of that. Mats lost the top spot after a second-round exit at the 1989 Australian Open. He didn’t win a title for the entire season–the first time since 1981–and he finished the year outside the top ten.
He liked tennis, but the “life connoisseur” had other interests and new challenges. He played guitar and started a band. He stayed home with his wife and young daughter. He would always be the problem solver capable of puzzling out how to beat every new tactic that cropped up on tour. Now he had other problems to solve.