I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Beware of GOATs.
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Ivan Lendl [TCH/USA]Born: 7 March 1960
Career: 1978-94
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1983)
Peak Elo rating: 2,402 (1st place, 1986)
Major singles titles: 8
Total singles titles: 94
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At Roland Garros in 1981, Ivan Lendl reached his first major final. The achievement was not entirely a surprise. He was seeded fifth, and it was already his seventh final of the season. In January, he had played for the title at the season-ending Masters event.
At the same time, the hard-hitting Czechoslovak was gaining a reputation as, well, not a big-match player. In eight previous majors, he had reached only a single quarter-final. At the 1980 US Open, he lost that match to John McEnroe.
No one faulted Lendl for finishing second at the 1981 French. His final-round opponent, Björn Borg, had lost only one match in Paris since 1973. Lendl matched the reigning champion through four grinding, topspinning sets before wilting in the fifth, 6-1, 4-6, 6-2, 3-6, 6-1.
Expectations were higher when he reached his second slam final. Lendl opened 1982 by winning the January Masters. At the circuit’s signature indoor event, he spanked McEnroe in the semis and outlasted Vitas Gerulaitis in a five-set final for the ages. At the US Open, he scored another semi-final victory over McEnroe but fell short in the final against Jimmy Connors.
While the Czech was still only 22 years old, the pessimists had plenty to go on. Lendl had no equal indoors, where the conditions were at their most predictable. He went 41-0 on carpet in 1982 alone, winning nine titles on the surface. But he underwhelmed when faced with fresh air, wind, and stadiums full of partisans. As the second seed and favorite at the French that year, he went out in the fourth round to the then-unknown 17-year-old Mats Wilander.
Third major final: 1983 US Open. Connors again, another four-set defeat.
Fourth major final: 1983 Australian Open, Wilander. He won only nine games.
When Lendl turned 24 years old in March 1984, he was the number one player in the world. He had racked up 31 tour-level titles, including back-to-back Masters championships. In the eyes of the tennis world, though, the number that defined him was his victory count in grand slam finals: zero.
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Lendl’s mailbox did not overflow with notes of support or sympathy. A few years later, with the grand slam monkey off his back, Sports Illustrated put him on its cover. Headline: “The Champion No One Cares About.”
Time magazine called him a “chilly, self-centered, condescending, mean-spirited, arrogant man with a nice forehand.”
For many fans, Lendl’s defining trait was his nationality. There weren’t many Eastern Europeans at the top of the game. Americans, in particular, still thought in Cold War terms. One tour veteran often yelled, “You Communist son of a bitch” between points.
Some Soviet-bloc stars managed to transcend the stereotypes. Martina Navratilova defected and embraced her new home in the West. She never became a popular darling like Chris Evert, but neither was she defined by her homeland.
Lendl, on the other hand, fit the preconceived notion of a grim, mechanical Eastern European to a tee. The official adjective for the Czech was “dour.” (Other acceptable options: drab, dull, and doleful.) He rarely smiled, on court or off. He never uttered a full sentence when a fragment would do. His game could be equally bland. He won points with a big serve and a bigger forehand, rarely venturing forward or departing from a clear plan. He lacked both the artistic gifts of McEnroe and the go-for-broke charisma of Connors.
This 1982 trophy ceremony (with McEnroe) might have planted the seed that it was time to start lifting weights
The outsider treatment from sportswriters and galleries triggered a vicious cycle. Lendl’s early standoffishness could be attributed to natural introversion and unfamiliarity with life on tour. By the time he might have opened up, though, the narrative was set.
Anyway, “Ivan the Terrible” wasn’t out there to make friends. After dropping a 40-minute, 6-2, 6-0 hammer on Hans Gildemeister in 1982, he said, “I don’t like to lose points, much less games.” If McEnroe-style arguments would help win matches despite alienating fans, he’d do it. He stalled so much between points that he’s responsible for the rule-book time limit–as well as the first attempt to shorten it.
Lendl was particularly uninterested in winning the affections of netrushers. Come in behind a playable shot to his right side, and he might reward you with the “Fuck you forehand”–a bullet aimed straight for your head.
Underneath the forbidding exterior, there was a pleasant-enough character, one with a sly, if off-kilter sense of humor. But by the time Lendl lost his fourth major final, only a handful of confidants ever saw that side of him.
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Oddly enough, Lendl’s first slam title finally came in what would turn out to be his worst season of the decade. At the 1984 French Open, he straight-setted Wilander in the semis, then came back from a two-set deficit to topple McEnroe in the final.
After 15 titles in 1982 and eight in 1983, Roland Garros was one of only three he picked up in 1984. McEnroe’s career year played a large role. The two men met seven times in nine months, and the Paris final was the Czech’s only victory. Even on Lendl’s beloved carpet, McEnroe won eight of nine sets. Lendl reached his third straight US Open final, but McEnroe was even better at home than Connors had been in the title matches of the previous two years.
Up to this point in his career, Lendl had kept one foot in both East and West. He played Davis Cup for his native country, even as he paid only nominal taxes to its government. When he wasn’t on the road, he often crashed with his friend Wojtek Fibak in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was no life for a control freak who played his best tennis when everything around him was wholly predictable.
From our vantage point in 2022, it’s hard to imagine just how much Lendl’s finickiness caused him to stand out from the pack. We’ve grown accustomed to Rafael Nadal and his water bottles, personal racket stringers, and the general assumption that winning depends on doing everything in precisely the right way.
That level of micro-management is one of the many things that modern tennis owes to Lendl. The booming inside-out forehand–and a match strategy built around it–might be a more attractive foundation for the man’s legacy. But I suspect the long-range effects of Ivan-the-control-freak are even greater. In 1984, Lendl bought his own place in Greenwich. Every year thereafter, he famously hired the same crew that laid down the US Open courts to resurface his own. He could practice on identical courts–often with a young guest like Pete Sampras–without opening the gate at the end of his driveway.
Once the Czech transplant started down the path of precision training, he discovered just how much he could optimize. He not only hired a stringer, he requested rackets strung at two distinct tensions, one of which he used only when he started to get nervous. He got a full physical workup from Navratilova’s doctor and learned that he’d last longer on court with a low-carb diet. Like Martina, he had embraced the excess of the Western diet; unlike her, he somehow survived years on tour before realizing it slowed him down.
None of this made Lendl more likeable. But his new lifestyle kept him calm. He had always practiced as much as anyone; now nothing impeded his focus.
Ion Țiriac, then coaching Boris Becker, said of Ivan, “Deep down he is still very nervous because his talent is from work, not from God.” Maybe, but in Lendl’s mind the only solution was to work even harder. Now he could.
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Lendl’s run from 1985 to 1987 is one of the most impressive three-year stretches of the Open era. He won eleven titles in 1985, ten in 1986, and eight in 1987, all while holding off the likes of Wilander and even younger prospects in Becker and Stefan Edberg. He won more than 90% of his matches in all three seasons.
Most importantly, five of the championships came at grand slams. He won the US Open for the first time in 1985 after three runner-up finishes, straight-setting McEnroe. Working with Tony Roche to improve his net game, he showed more variety than ever. The most devastating addition to his game wasn’t at the net, though. It was a new baseline weapon. After years of making his money with a down-the-line forehand, he was suddenly going cross-court for winners, too. He struck 21 cross-court forehands against McEnroe. 19 of them earned him the point.
In 1986, Lendl won both the French and the US Open, losing exactly one set at each event. One of his lapses came in the Paris quarter-finals, where Andrés Gómez eked out a first-set tiebreak. Ivan returned the favor in the second and ran out the match, 6-0, 6-0. He was even better at the year-end Masters event on carpet, where he beat five top-tenners–Gómez, Noah, Edberg, Wilander, and Becker–without the loss of a single set.
Capping the remarkable span, Lendl defended both his French and US titles in 1987. He held off a newly-focused Wilander in the two finals, each one a four-set marathon. The championship match in New York lasted four hours and 43 minutes–an astounding effort as the Czech transplant was recovering from the flu.
The only major that ultimately eluded him was Wimbledon. His deliberate game wasn’t well-suited to the speed or low bounces of the turf, despite his work with Roche and increasingly thorough preparation for the grass-court major toward the end of his career. He reached back-to-back finals in 1986 and 1987, where he lost straight-set decisions to Becker and Pat Cash.
At the Australian Open in December 1985, Lendl lost in the semi-finals to Edberg, 9-7 in the fifth. He didn’t care for the grass there, either–he declared that the old tournament venue at Kooyong “should be paved over.” He got his wish, at least figuratively, when the Australian switched to hard courts in 1988. That allowed him a bit more control, and after losing to Cash in the first hard-court edition, he won titles Down Under in both 1989 and 1990.
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If we were talking about anyone other than Ivan Lendl, this would all make for one heck of an underdog story. The man lost four major finals… then went on to win eight. He fell short three years in a row at Flushing Meadow alone… then bounced back to win the next three.
Long before he began to reach major finals, Lendl overcame significant hurdles. He had two accomplished tennis players as parents–mother Olga was a long-time Czechoslovak number two–but he grew up in what was, at the time, a relative tennis backwater. When he was ready to compete at an international level, the federation controlled his schedule and often called him back home for meaningless club matches.
He had the benefit of size, as a height of six-feet, two-inches was still noticeably above tour average. But as Țiriac said, his physical gifts didn’t go much further than that. It’s easy to overstate this particular disadvantage–he was a greater natural athlete than 99% of us–but it took an enormous amount of work just to pull even with the likes of McEnroe and Connors. The two Americans rose to the top despite rarely practicing more than an hour a day.
The Lendl serve in 1986
Despite those initial losses and a nonexistent grand slam tally at age 24, Lendl rode sheer stubbornness to 19 finals and eight major championships. While both numbers have lost a bit of their magic in the intervening years, they were staggering achievements in the days before the Big Three. Only Borg won more slam titles in the first two-plus decades of the Open era. When Ivan reached his 19th title match, he was the first man–pro or amateur–to do so.
Yet no one will ever make a movie about the rail-thin young Czech who overcame the odds. His aloofness was part of the problem–he never showed enough of himself to attract a legion of admirers, even as fans eventually grew to appreciate his game.
The real obstacle, though, is that it has always been impossible to see Lendl as the struggling challenger. He beat Borg–twice!–and Guillermo Vilas–on clay! twice!–in 1980, just his second full season on tour. He upset McEnroe in seven of their first nine meetings, including six straight when the American was number one in the world. Even when a grand slam title seemed like an impossible dream, he turned the indoor circuit into his personal demesne.
So Ivan Lendl, underdog? Hardly. One man who lost to him in 1982 summed up the experience: “He makes you want to go home.”
The underdog was the guy on the other side of the net.