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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Jana Novotná [CZE]Born: 2 October 1968
Died: 19 November 2017
Career: 1987-99
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1997)
Peak Elo rating: 2,295 (2nd place, 1998)
Major singles titles: 1
Total singles titles: 24
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In making this list, I’ve picked up a couple of tricks for identifying all-time greats who have been unfairly neglected. These aren’t things I actively sought out, just trends that have emerged as we go through the list.
First, many of the best doubles players in history were stronger singles competitors than we give them credit for. A few names that come to mind are Rosie Casals, Tony Roche, and Pam Shriver. The skills that make singles and doubles champions aren’t that different from each other, and that was even more true before the increased specialization of the last couple of decades.
Second, if a player is better known for losses than wins, history has probably done them a disservice. We remember David Ferrer for his valiant, failed attempts to dislodge Rafael Nadal. Vitas Gerulaitis is the guy who needed 17 tries to beat Jimmy Connors. What the capsule summaries miss is the sustained excellence required to earn one’s way onto the biggest stages.
Jana Novotná emphatically ticks both boxes. With Helena Suková, she won five major doubles titles before her 23rd birthday. The Czech duo came within one match of completing the Grand Slam in 1990. In 1998, Novotná three-peated again, playing three slams with Martina Hingis and winning the lot.
And of course, if you know one thing about Novotná, it is that she gave away the Wimbledon title in 1993. Upon her untimely death from ovarian cancer five years ago, the New York Times obituary began with her losing the final. The headline called her a “Czech Champion,” but the lede had her crying on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent.
Her name has become a byword for choking in tennis. When I wrote about Serena Williams’s collapse to Karolína Plíšková at the Australian Open a few years ago, I managed to get through a draft without mentioning Jana’s name. By the final edit, she was in. Apparently it’s not optional.
Had Novotná lost in the quarter-finals that year, we would remember her more for the Wimbledon title she did win, in 1998. Had Steffi Graf made quick work of the title match, Jana would be just one more of the excellent players who weren’t quite up to the Steffi standard. Instead, she got so close–4-1, deciding set, game point–and then looked terrible as the biggest match of her career slipped away.
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Novotná’s member page at the International Tennis Hall of Fame website makes a gallant effort to focus on the positive. There’s no mention of the 1993 Wimbledon final until the fourth paragraph, about halfway through the biography.
Alas, if you’re reading that page, you probably know what happened. The attempt, well-intentioned as it is, feels a bit like an ashen journalist pointing and yelling, “Don’t look! Don’t look at the double-faulting server!”
Jana insisted that she didn’t choke–she was playing her usual high-risk game. It takes a very charitable eye, however, to watch the replay and agree.
Graf pulled out a squeaker of a first set, 8-6 in the tiebreak. Novotná came out more aggressive in the second and capitalized on Steffi’s errors to quickly force a decider, 6-1. She kept the momentum going, breaking Graf twice to reach 4-1 in the third.
A textbook serve-and-volley point gave Jana game point for 5-1. Then it all came apart. She double faulted, missing her second serve by a mile. Two unforced errors at net gave the game to Graf. Steffi still wasn’t playing well: Novotná generated two break points in the next game but couldn’t convert. At 4-3, she double faulted three more times. After a hold to love for the German, Jana made three unforced errors and won only a single point in her final service game.
She told the Independent later that year, “That’s the way I play. It had worked in the semi- finals and quarter-finals. OK, I gave her a chance with the second serve and the easy volley. But I’ve looked at the tape of the final and I would play it like that again.”
A lot rests on what Jana meant when she said like that. She had a reputation for double faulting more than the typical player, since she often came in behind her second serve and opted for a more aggressive delivery. Serve-and-volleyers accept that while they’ll get passed and they’ll miss the occasional easy volley, the percentages are on their side.
Rushing the net, like Jana did, was a high-risk endeavor
Still, they are percentages. My win probability model says that Novotná had a 95.6% chance of victory from her most favorable point in the third set. The average odds of winning from match point are 97%, and Serena’s position before her 2019 tumble came in at 98.9%. Give any player–let alone a make-or-break netrusher like Jana–two dozen leads like the one she held against Graf, and she’s bound to blow one of them.
Unfortunately, the one she blew was on Centre Court, title on the line, with the whole world watching.
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Before the fateful Wimbledon, Novotná was known as a good-but-not-great singles player. She had reached the final at the 1991 Australian, where she upset Graf and took a set from Monica Seles. She was a top-tenner, but just barely.
Afterwards, her ranking didn’t matter. Her reputation as a choker was set. Sue Barker said, “[S]he does rather have that label now, and she’ll have to work twice as hard to lose it.”
Twice as hard. If only it were so easy.
Jana might have been deluding herself about having played out the Wimbledon final the right way. Still, her attitude was the right one for a quick recovery.
When the tour returned to Europe for the indoor season in September, she reached the final in Leipzig (losing to Graf quickly this time) and picked up a title in Brighton. Quarter-finals in Australia and Miami got her into the top five on the WTA computer for the first time, and in the fall of 1994, she ran off a 16-match win streak indoors, including titles in Leipzig, Brighton, and Essen.* She joined forces with Arantxa Sánchez Vicario to win the doubles at the 1994 US Open and the 1995 Australian.
* She once said, “I could win three straight tournaments, and people would still say, ‘Yes, she’s playing well. But remember the Wimbledon final when she choked?'” Fact check: True.
One might even say that she had been working twice as hard. With her coach, countrywoman and former grand slam champion Hana Mandlíková, she developed an increasingly well-rounded game and slowly discovered what it took to become a top player.
Sometimes, that meant gutting out matches that should’ve come more easily. The 1994 Leipzig championship required two come-from-behind victories, each decided at 7-5 in the third. At Melbourne Park in 1995, she battled into the fourth round with a 9-7, third-set win over Lisa Raymond. Whether she should’ve let those matches get so close is beside the point. She repeatedly worked her way into situations where chokers choke, and she didn’t.
And then she did. At the 1995 French Open, less than two years after the Wimbledon debacle, Novotná wasted six match points in a third-round loss to Chanda Rubin. Three of them came at 5-0 in the deciding set. Any hope the 26-year-old had of ditching the choke-artist label was gone for good.
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Even with another indisputable disaster on her résumé, the Czech star kept bouncing back. While she might have been “too smart for her own good,” as Franz Lidz wrote in Sports Illustrated, she had no problem marshaling the selective memory that separates champions from the rest. She was able to forget the collapses, even if no one else could.
Her ranking fell as low as 14th in early 1996, but she quickly turned it around. She won the trophy in Madrid in May, picking up her first title on clay since in seven years. The fall indoor season was once again her best stage, where she won three straight tournaments, beating Martina Hingis and Jennifer Capriati twice each.
Novotná finished the season at a career-best ranking of number three, and in another six months, she edged into second place. At long last, she returned to the Wimbledon final, where an abdominal injury–combined with the pitiless Hingis–ended her title hopes in another three-setter. The Duchess of Kent reminded her that the third time could be the charm.
Stories about Jana’s runner-up finish in 1997 invariably mentioned her first near-miss at Wimbledon. But anyone who was paying attention could tell that the fragile, too-smart, pick-your-choke-narrative Novotná was a thing of the past.
Medal winners in the 1996 Olympics singles event. L to R: Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, Lindsay Davenport, and Novotná. Jana would win doubles majors with both of her fellow medalists.
The 1997 campaign continually tested her mettle. 28 of her 68 singles matches went to a third set. She won 19 of them, and her 9 losses included the injury-marred Wimbledon final. Even the most uncharitable observer could call only one of the defeats a choke job: a US Open quarter-final loss to her doubles partner, Lindsay Davenport. No one could blame her for that one. Gusty winds made for conditions so extreme that both players were laughing at points throughout the 84-minute deciding set.
Novotná’s final three-set victory of the season, over Mary Pierce, sealed a title at the year-end championships, the most important non-major event of the year. She was a 29-year-old surrounded by teens, but she was playing the best tennis of her career.
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1998 was Jana’s 13th Wimbledon. Since the famous final in 1993, she had never failed to reach the quarters. She was stopped only by the best: Graf, Hingis, or Navratilova.
Finally, Novotná peaked at the perfect time, against the right opponents. In the quarter-final, Venus Williams was the one who crumbled, losing focus when line calls went against her. Jana played even better in the semi, avenging her 1997 defeat to Hingis. She rarely dared to serve-and-volley against the sharpshooting 17-year-old, but she came to net 65 times in two sets, finishing the job in her favor 29 times. Novotná won, 6-4, 6-4.
Jana even received something even rarer than a victory over the testy Swiss–she heard comments from Hingis that might be interpreted as praise. “[S]ometimes it seems like the older the better.” (Hingis’s generous spirit wouldn’t last. After winning three doubles majors with Novotná, Martina ditched her partner, saying she was “too old and slow.”)
With Graf upset early and Hingis out, that left the unlikely figure of Nathalie Tauziat standing between Jana and Wimbledon glory. Tauziat, another veteran serve-and-volleyer, was playing her first grand slam final, despite being a year older than Novotná. It showed. Both women were cautious, and errors piled up in the early going.
The Czech didn’t silence her nerves entirely, but she came through when it counted. After breaking at 3-all in the first set, she held serve comfortably to run out the frame. While a slew of unforced errors prevented her from serving out the match at 5-4 in the second, she commanded the ensuing tiebreak, landing her first serves and keeping the pressure on Tauziat’s delivery. She completed the victory, 6-4, 7-6(2).
The Duchess was right: the third time was a charm. Novotná, appropriately enough, capped the victory with yet another doubles triumph. She won her fourth Wimbledon doubles title in eight finals, her 11th major championship in the discipline. She’d tack on another at the US Open two months later.
Back in 1993, Jana had posed a rhetorical question: “How many chokers get to the Wimbledon finals?” Five years later, she might ask, “How many chokers get to the Wimbledon final three times–and win one of them?” To Novotná, the answer was clear. “It comes down to this: You have to depend on yourself, you have to know who you are, how good you are,” she also said.
There is a difference between winning a title and falling five points short. But Novotná, unlike so many pundits and fans, recognized that the gap between the two was slim. She believed in herself at a time when the world knew her only as the one who fell apart when the stakes were highest. She never shook the choke-artist label, and apparently she never will. But she persisted until she won the title that had so narrowly eluded her, securing a place among the greats of the game.