Author: jsackmann

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Separation anxiety is starting to set in…

* * *

Martina Navratilova [CZE/USA]
Born: 18 October 1956
Career: 1973-94 (doubles to 2006)
Plays: Left-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1978)
Peak Elo rating: 2,575 (1st place, 1984)
Major singles titles: 18
Total singles titles: 167
 

* * *

On Monday, it rained.

On Tuesday, it rained.

Wednesday, Thursday, you get the idea … it rained every single day of the first week of the 1985 Wimbledon Championships. It wasn’t a total washout; the singles events remained nearly on schedule. With women like Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert atop the field–they were co-number one seeds this year–the sky didn’t need to clear for long. Martina’s victories were so certain that news reports were more likely to emphasize how quickly she got off the court.

Two years earlier, Navratilova averaged just 47 minutes per round as she won her fourth Wimbledon title. Andrea Jaeger was so aware of the clock that when she lost the first set of the final to Martina in 17 minutes, she considered stalling to salvage a little bit of dignity.

In 1985, Navratilova was gunning for her sixth Wimbledon crown, her fourth in a row. No one had done that for 55 years, since Helen Wills. Martina was always the favorite on grass, her athletic serve-and-volleying game a perfect fit for the surface. But Evert was a renewed threat. While Navratilova had won 19 of their last 24 meetings, one of the losses was the French Open final a month before. Chrissie was playing so well that she had retaken the number one WTA ranking. Only the idiosyncrasies of the All-England Club kept a 1 next to the defending champion’s name in the draw.

Martina’s other problem was that her schedule was about to get very busy. To fit all the singles matches into the first week, the tournament had postponed most of the doubles. Navratilova was entered in women’s and mixed doubles, so if she reached all three finals, she’d have as many as sixteen matches to play in the second week.

Spoiler alert: She made all three finals.

Navratilova got past her long-suffering doubles partner, Pam Shriver in the quarter-finals, Pam’s 24th loss in their 27 meetings to that point. (She’d lose 17 more.) Their chemistry on the doubles court was, as always, unaffected. In the doubles round of eight, the pair straight-setted Evert and Jo Durie. It was Navratilova and Shriver’s 108th straight victory as a team, a streak going back two years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2pjerxGWDQ

On Saturday, the women’s singles final was Martina’s 11th match in six days. Evert played nearly perfectly in the first set, making only three unforced errors and taking the opener, 6-4. But Navratilova settled her nerves and resumed her world-beating grass-court form. That day–okay, that entire year–she played some of the best serve-and-volley tennis in the game’s history. Chipping returns on the grass, she could come in on Chrissie’s serve, too. She allowed only two break points in the final two sets. With a 6-3, 6-2 finish, she improved her career record against Evert to 34-32.

Fatigue finally set in for the women’s doubles final, played the same afternoon. Navratilova and Shriver fell in three sets to Kathy Jordan and Elizabeth Smylie. The doubles streak ended at 109.

But the tournament did not end on a down note for the 28-year-old Czech-American. On Sunday morning, she had still yet to start her mixed doubles quarter-final. She and Paul McNamee played nearly six hours of tennis, including a 23-21 deciding set in the semi-finals. For the title, Navratilova and McNamee beat the Australian team of Smylie and John Fitzgerald in another three-setter, capping a 99-game day.

Navratilova later admitted to her biographer, Johnette Howard, what she sometimes wondered. She was speaking more generally, but it sure fits that week at Wimbledon: “How did I ever do it?”

* * *

If it weren’t for that madcap final week, the 1985 Championships would barely register as a notable moment in Navratilova’s career. It was her sixth of nine singles trophies at Wimbledon, her 12th of 18 major titles overall. It was one of 37 career major finals in women’s doubles and one of ten mixed doubles championships.

The end result was certainly not a surprise. 1985 was the fourth season of an exceptional five-year run in which Martina lost only 14 singles matches. Total. She won 74 straight in 1984. From the end of 1982 through the 1984 US Open, she beat Evert 14 times in a row.

A reporter asked Chrissie if she thought anyone else even had a chance against Navratilova. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t.”

“You know exactly what she’s going to do,” said Arthur Ashe, “but there isn’t a thing you can do about it.”

No one had ever doubted Martina’s athleticism. She won her first tour event in 1974, when she was 17. Her big left-handed serve, combined with flashy footspeed and an acrobatic net game, got her past veterans Rosie Casals, Françoise Dürr, and Julie Heldman in succession. A few months later, she reached her first major final, upsetting Margaret Court in the Australian quarter-finals before falling short against Evonne Goolagong in the final.

The same year, Billie Jean King told the teenager just what she was capable of. “You know,” said the Old Lady, “you could be the greatest player ever.” King was still plenty competitive, but as she had when she got her first glimpse of Evert, she recognized a player with the potential to take the women’s tour to new heights.

“But,” added Billie Jean, “if you don’t work hard you are not going to make it.” That was the problem. Navratilova defected from Czechoslovakia in 1975, and everything about the move conspired against her tennis. She was on her own at 19, cut off from a once-close family. In the United States, she suddenly had everything she could dream of. There was no pressing need to fight to improve her game.

Talent was enough to earn Martina her first two Wimbledon titles, in 1978 and 1979. On her day, she was unbeatable. But then, even more than today, the tour was a year-round slog. Questionable fitness and a topsy-turvy personal life made her susceptible to human backboards like Evert and Tracy Austin.

Nancy Lieberman, the basketball star who would soon change Navratilova’s outlook, recognized what was missing. “I could see,” Lieberman said, “that Chris Evert wanted to win and Martina just wanted to play.”

* * *

The arrival of Lieberman marked a turning point for Navratilova’s career. The women met at the Amelia Island tournament in 1981. Evert beat Martina there on the clay, 6-0, 6-0, but Lieberman quickly cottoned on to her new friend’s astonishing gifts.

Seven years earlier, Billie Jean had said that the left-hander could be the best. Lieberman told Martina that she should become the greatest of all time.

The hoopster quickly became a familiar face at Navratilova matches. She took the role of a full-time fitness coach and motivator. Martina both slimmed down and gained muscle. Gym work was rare among women players of the time; competitive as Chrissie was, she hesitated to compromise her femininity. Navratilova had Lieberman’s persuasive voice in her ear, and she didn’t have a reputation as America’s princess to protect.

The same year, Martina added her first full-time coach: Renée Richards. The transgender Richards had competed as a man before undergoing surgery and making headlines on the women’s tour. Navratilova rarely shied away from controversy, and another distraction hardly registered at this point; she had recently been outed as gay by a New York newspaper. While fans and media fixated on the growing entourage of outsiders, Richards added the technical and tactical acumen that Navratilova’s game had been missing.

“I couldn’t believe how little Martina knew about playing tennis and how faulty her strokes were,” Richards told Johnette Howard. (How great an athlete was she? This is a two-time Wimbledon champion we’re talking about here!) Navratilova’s first tournament with Richards at her side ended in disappointment, as she failed to put away Austin in a three-set final at the 1981 US Open. But she had beaten Evert in the semis to get there, and she upset her rival again at the Australian a few months later.

Stronger, sturdier, and savvier, Martina was ready to ascend to a higher plane of tennis dominance.

* * *

1982: 15 titles in 18 events. Evert lost to Jaeger at Roland Garros, and Navratilova took advantage to win the French for the first time.

Commentator Mary Carillo said, “Martina went from somebody who got nervous and thought, ‘I can be up a set and a break and still lose’ to someone who thought, ‘This shouldn’t take more than forty-five minutes.'”

1983: 86-1. Martina lost early at the French, and that was it. She completed her career Grand Slam at the US Open. Across seven matches in New York, she lost only 19 games.

“I try to… uphold women’s tennis,” said Shriver, “and say that the other players aren’t that far behind, when, in fact–at least at the majors–we’re light-years behind.”

Mike Estep took over for Richards this season as Navratilova’s coach. Martina was already the most aggressive player on the circuit, and Estep encouraged her to go even bigger, attacking at every opportunity. “You’re not trying to be number one,” he told her. “Your goals are beyond that.”

1984: 74 wins in a row. Hana Mandlíková scored an upset in Oakland to start the season. Navratilova reeled off 13 straight tournaments before finally dropping another decision to Helena Suková in Australia. Oh, and she paired with Shriver to win the doubles Grand Slam.

“It’s hard playing against a man–I mean, Martina,” said Mandlíková. “She comes to the net and scares you with those big muscles. She is very big and difficult to pass.”

For the record, the “very big” Navratilova was five feet, eight inches tall. Hana was–let me check my notes here–five feet, eight inches tall. Martina was difficult to pass both with and without the scary muscles. The young Czech eventually apologized.

1985: Another 84 match wins and, for the first time, the singles final at all four majors. Chrissie had rededicated herself to catching Navratilova, and Martina still won four of six meetings.

“It’s really strange what Martina’s play has done to the women’s tour,” said Billie Jean King. “Everyone seems so paranoid to walk on the court with her.”

1986: 89-3. Three more singles finals in three majors, continuing a streak that would eventually run to 11 straight slams. The cast of characters was changing, but the 29-year-old Navratilova continued to hold sway. She won three of four meetings with Steffi Graf, four of four against Gabriela Sabatini, and two of three over Evert for good measure.

“She seems a freak of nature,” said Virginia Wade, “the perfect tennis player.”

* * *

Any one of those seasons would have earned Martina a place in tennis history. Five of them together was unthinkable.

Estep often told her, “A good attacking player will beat a good baseliner almost all the time.” Navratilova went out and proved it.

The field–led by Graf–slowly caught up, but not without revealing the depth of Martina’s transformation. In the 1970s, she had all too often played brilliant tennis and lost. By the 1990s, she couldn’t always summon the speed and the reach of her younger self, but she kept winning anyway.

She did, in fact, turn in a flawless performance to win her record-setting ninth Wimbledon title in 1990. But that was secondary. “I didn’t care if I scraped and scratched to get this,” she said after beating Zina Garrison in the final. “They don’t put an asterisk next to your name saying you won but didn’t play that well.”

No, there are no asterisks on Navratilova’s record. Not on her 43 wins over Evert. Not on her seven defeats of Monica Seles, who was a teenager as Martina persisted into her thirties. Not on her Australian Open mixed doubles title in 2003, the championship that completed her career Grand Slam in all three disciplines.

Back in 1978, the left-hander finished the year atop the WTA rankings for the first time. After a hard-fought season, though, her status was insecure. Many pundits overruled the computer and rated Evert higher. Martina didn’t care for the uncertainty. “I want to be number one in the mind of every single person on this earth,” she said.

It didn’t happen immediately. It took a complete mental and physical overhaul. But for five full years, that’s exactly what she was.

* * *

Previous: No. 4, Novak Djokovic

Next: No. 2, Steffi Graf

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I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Separation anxiety is starting to set in…

* * *

Novak Djokovic [SRB]
Born: 22 May 1987
Career: 2005-present
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2011)
Peak Elo rating: 2,470 (1st place, 2016)
Major singles titles: 21
Total singles titles: 91
 

* * *

It’s easy to forget, but Novak Djokovic’s first tennis-playing hero was Pete Sampras. The first match Novak saw on television was the 1993 Wimbledon final, Pete’s first title at the All-England Club. Sampras overcame compatriot Jim Courier in four sets in a classic battle of offense versus defense.

After working with the six-year-old Djokovic for just three days, coach Jelena Genčić pronounced him a “golden child.” It took a bit longer to convince the boy to give up his Sampras-style one-handed backhand.

Djokovic pays tribute to Pete’s legacy just as sincerely as Roger Federer does, even if Fed’s game style and records are more closely associated with the American. Novak told Sampras’s biographer, Steve Flink:

In the moments when most players would break down, [Pete] was the guy that showed the resilience and mental strength and the laser-like focus that separated him from everyone else and made him an all-time great.

We all know which moments Djokovic is talking about. Sampras was famous for his knack for erasing break points with one pinpoint serve, not to mention his prowess in tiebreaks. Courier told Flink that Pete would come alive at 4-all, that “he could summon his greatness late in a set.”

Novak has the same ability. For me, the quintessential Djokovic experience is a tight set on a hard court, a feisty underdog–let’s say David Goffin–staying even through eight games. Then, at 4-all, the Serbian finds a new level. A backhand down the line, maybe a couple of forced errors, a serve that registers a tick faster than anything he’s struck all day… in five minutes, a dead heat at 4-4 becomes a routine 6-4 set. If the man across the net is up for a battle, the second set might go the same way. Otherwise, it’s already over.

In other words, exactly the treatment Courier remembers getting from Sampras.

When we run the numbers, though, we find that the parallels only take us so far. 4-all–or any score at the business end of a set, for that matter–is not where Novak most reliably raises his game. To become the greatest player of the most demanding era of men’s tennis history, Djokovic backs himself in games that Pete ignored.

* * *

To face Djokovic is to spend a couple of hours–awkward, self-doubting hours–on the back foot. It’s even worse than that, because for all your struggles, he’s never off-balance himself.

It starts from the first point. Heaven forbid you win the toss and choose to serve. Heh.

Novak’s equivalent of Sampras’s 4-all is, improbably enough, returning to start a set, at love-all. The Match Charting Project has logged every point of 435 Djokovic matches, from his 2005 Australian Open defeat to Marat Safin through his full title run in Turin last month. The resulting dataset allows us to determine how well he performs at each game score, relative to his showing in the match as a whole.

In the typical charted match, Djokovic won about 41% of his return points. His career mark is a bit higher, at 42%, but the data is skewed slightly toward more important clashes with tougher opponents. In 751 return games at love-all, he won 44.5% of points. That’s almost exactly the same as his season-long rate in 2011–the greatest season in decades, at least until he complicated the discussion with his 2015 campaign.

I apologize if you’ve heard me say this too many times before: That difference of three percentage points may sound small, but due to the small margins in tennis, it’s enormous. Setting aside extreme players like Reilly Opelka, the entire tour wins return points at rates within about ten percentage points of each other.

In practical terms, the set-starting boost makes it that much more likely that Djokovic’s opponent begins at a disadvantage. Grabbing 41% of return points translates into breaking serve about 29% of the time, already a fearsome figure. Upping that number to 44.5% means breaking 36% of the time. Commentators don’t talk about break percentage much, so the visceral impact of that number isn’t what it should be. Nobody breaks at 36%.

Well, except Novak in 2011. And Rafael Nadal in a couple of his best seasons. That’s what the tour has had to face in the first game against Djokovic for more than 15 years.

The Serbian’s other strongest games also come relatively early in the set, especially if he finds himself in a hole. He gets a similar three-percentage point boost when returning at 2-4. He gains about two and a half points returning at 2-3. His numbers are in the same range serving and returning at 0-3, but that’s such a rare occurence that it’s tough to draw conclusions from the limited data.

For the most part, Djokovic performs at his usual level–no higher–in the games we traditional think of as clutch, like 3-all, 4-all, and so on. He even gets a little shaky at 5-all and serving at 5-6, though the effect isn’t as dramatically negative as the love-all trend in the other direction. By that point in the set, we might be seeing the effect of opponents bringing out their own big guns.

More likely than a struggle at 5-all, though, is an end to the set before things get that far. Novak has won 76% of his sets at tour level, a figure that increased to a barely comprehensible 84% in 2015. He’s just as good as Federer in tiebreaks, but he’s played less than two-thirds as many.

The only thing better than the ability to raise your game in the clutch is to avoid high-pressure situations and win anyway.

* * *

It’s tempting to read Djokovic’s early-set performance as a sign that he’s a man in a hurry. As a junior, he had very little margin for error, and he rarely had the luxury of time.

Novak trained with Genčić–also an early guide for Monica Seles and Goran Ivanišević–throughout the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999. They chose courts in areas that had been recently attacked, reasoning that the enemy would choose other targets for a little while.

At 12, he went to Germany to work with former pro Niki Pilić, who typically limited his academy to students 14 and over. Even as the youngest boy in camp, Djokovic stood out as the most diligent, the most serious about his future. He recognized that his family’s fortunes depended on him. His father, Srdjan, borrowed money from loan sharks to fund his development.

Raising a tennis star is not cheap for anyone, but neither the Federers nor the Nadals ever faced financial ruin. Novak’s family gambled it all. The situation was dicey enough that Djokovic–a devoted and vocal patriot–considered taking funding from the Lawn Tennis Association and playing for Great Britain. When he reached the quarter-finals at Roland Garros in 2006–losing to Rafa in the first of their 59 meetings–the result was as much a relief for its six-figure prize money as it was an encouragement that his game was moving in the right direction.

Even before the 19-year-old made that breakthrough, the secret was out. A famous story has Toni Nadal watching just a few minutes of the Serbian’s play at Wimbledon in 2005 before going to find his nephew. “Rafael,” he said, “we have a problem.”

The Nadals were among the first to recognize how much of a threat Djokovic posed. Soon enough, Novak would be everyone’s problem.

* * *

The key word used to describe Djokovic’s greatness is “complete.” Aside from some early, unpredictable health issues, he has never really had a weakness. His two-handed backhand has long been the best in the game, and while none of his other weapons rank quite so high, there’s no respite for an enterprising opponent. There’s nothing to expose.

More important than the strokes are Novak’s anticipation and movement. He is able to play a bruising baseline game on a fast court without giving up ground. Highlight reels tend to emphasize his gumby-like ability to stretch for groundstrokes. More often, he’s already there.

Djokovic’s anticipation is most evident on his return of serve. There are basically two ways to be a great returner. One is to play deep, get the serve back in play, then grind out return points. That–broadly speaking–is the Nadal approach. The other strategy is to step up, swing big, and hope for the best. Call that the Andre Agassi method.

Both approaches can be described in statistical terms. The stereotypical clay-court grinder gets a lot of serves back in play, but he doesn’t win an overwhelming number of those points. Swing-and-pray guys don’t get many returns back, but when they find the range, the success rate is high.

Novak comes as close as anyone to reaping the advantages of both extremes. Again we can draw on Match Charting Project data. Djokovic puts 71% of his returns in play, better than–to name just two more conservative examples–Dominic Thiem or Alexander Zverev. When he gets the ball back, Novak wins 52% of points. Of the 30 guys with the most extensive charting data, that’s second only to Agassi. And Andre landed just 63% of his returns.

Here’s a graph that shows the percentage of returns put in play (horizontal axis) and win rate when the point was prolonged (vertical axis). The nearer you are to the upper right corner, the closer you’ve come to tennis nirvana.

Djokovic and Nadal are roughly equals here. Both men have won just over 42% of career return points. The Match Charting Project data gives them lower numbers (as it does for most of the players shown here) because it is less likely to include routine, lopsided matches. Novak has a healthy edge on hard courts, while Rafa leads by a few percentage points on clay. There’s no one optimal strategy. If you can figure out a third way to win 42% of your return points, by all means do it. Feel free to send me a share of your prize money.

The point is, of the most effective returners, Novak is the one who splits the difference between staying safe and swinging big. Or, more accurately, he is able to play both ways as the situation demands. He can chip back a return and grind out a long rally against Andy Murray. He can swing away at a Stan Wawrinka bomb and flat-foot the Swiss player with a winner.

Yes, Nadal can also go for broke, and Agassi had it in him to play more conservatively. But no one has ever balanced the two return tactics so successfully.

* * *

You can see which strategy Djokovic prefers when he gets a crack at a second serve. He neutralizes second-chance deliveries so effectively that he turns them into what some commentators have called his “third serve.”

The witty tag is more than just a figure of speech. He converts defense to offense in a meaningful way. In a point between average players, the server starts with an edge, and the returner works his way to even terms as he gets more balls back in play. Around the sixth stroke of the rally, the server’s advantage is erased.

When an opponent misses his first serve against Djokovic, the edge is gone, never to return. In his career on hard courts, Novak has won 56% of second-serve return points. In the thirty-plus years that the ATP has maintained these stats, only Agassi is better. Even Andre would probably give up the top spot if we added his missing numbers from 1986-90, years for which these numbers aren’t available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xav3w-L5Wg

Djokovic’s return is so potent that he forces servers to fight their way into their own points. When I first analyzed this subject in 2013, I limited my view to a handful of elite opponents. Against Nadal, Wawrinka, and Juan Martín del Potro, Novak got the most value from his first two shots after the serve. The other men saw their results improve the longer that return points lasted. Djokovic, by contrast, essentially reset the point with one swing of the racket, then waited to see if the man across the net could fight his way back in. The majority of the time, even these big-hitting opponents weren’t able to do so.

The underlying skills that go into such an effective, aggressive return game–eyesight, anticipation, footwork–would seem to make it a young man’s game. Yet in 2022, Novak led the tour by winning 55.8% of his second-serve return points. Almost every player lands in the same ten-percentage-point range, but he outpaced the field with a 1.4-point advantage.

* * *

The end result of a complete player with a relentless return game? Winning. Lots and lots of winning.

Djokovic, as you surely know, owns 21 major titles. He has at least two at every slam. In another era, he might have been as successful at Roland Garros as he is at Melbourne Park. While he is most dangerous on a hard court, he has been the second-best clay courter on tour for more than a decade.

Most impressive to me is Novak’s ability to take on each one of the best players in the game–regardless of surface–and consistently come out on top. You might remember early last year, when Daniil Medvedev won eleven straight matches against top-tenners. Pretty good! Djokovic did that too, in 2014-15. Except that was his seventh-longest such streak. Novak owns five of the eight longest top-ten win streaks since 1985, including one in 2015-16 that reached 17 victories.

Oh, and he’s got another one going. Since losing to Nadal at the French, he’s won eight straight against the likes of Medvedev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, and Casper Ruud.

It’s so much winning sometimes that fans don’t quite know what to do with him. After Djokovic secured the Australian Open in 2008, Sports Illustrated called it “Wii tennis.” Nick Bollettieri, in a 2015 column praising every aspect of Novak’s game, described him as “the most perfect tennis machine.”

The talk of machines and videogames was an obvious contrast to the “religious experience” of watching Federer or the red-streaked guts of Nadal.

With Federer and Nadal monopolizing both headlines and fan affection, spectators missed the things that would humanize the Serbian. His history made him as much of an underdog as any champion of his era. His early-career retirements, had he communicated better, could have made him a figure of sympathy instead of derision. He has always been the most plain-spoken of the Big Three and the most likely to cut loose in public.

But by the time he overcame Roger and Rafa–emphatically–in 2011, most fans had already picked a side. Djokovic snuck off with matches that Federer should have won at the US Open, striking his most significant service return of all to save a match point in 2011. In the same 12-month span, he won seven straight decisions against Nadal–all of them finals, two of them on clay. The Maestro and the Matador were supposed to be the greatest we’d ever seen. Yet as we settled in to watch the rivalry unfold, the heroes were confronted with an even stronger foe.

The problem with rooting against Novak, though, is that you risk blinding yourself to magnificence. Ignore the “machine”–if you insist on seeing him that way–and focus on the heights his game can reach. No one has ever sustained such an astounding level on a tennis court. For fifteen years, we’ve been the ones lucky enough to see it.

* * *

Previous: No. 5, Roger Federer

Next: No. 3, Martina Navratilova

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I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. If this is your favorite player, Congrats! (or: I’m sorry.)

* * *

Roger Federer [SUI]
Born: 8 August 1981
Career: 1999-2022
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2004)
Peak Elo rating: 2,383 (1st place, 2007)
Major singles titles: 20
Total singles titles: 103
 

* * *

Was Roger Federer clutch?

The conventional wisdom, I think, says he was not. The consensus view of Federer is that he was brilliant, inspiring, one of the greatest of all time, but… maybe a little tight in the big moments.

The headline stat is that he lost 24 matches after reaching match point. The list includes some very high-profile clashes, including a 2005 Australian Open semi-final against Marat Safin, the 2006 Rome final against Rafael Nadal, and the 2018 Indian Wells final against Juan Martín del Potro. It is impossible to forget Fed’s three failures to put away Novak Djokovic, first at the US Open in 2010 and 2011, then for the 2019 Wimbledon title.

We can cut Roger a little slack for the 2011 loss–that was The Return–but in that match and others, he squandered plenty of opportunities by missing forehands of his own.

Flip the result of those three Djokovic matches, and Federer retires with at least 21 majors–probably 22 or 23–and he departs the scene with Novak stuck at 18. The Austrian coach Günter Bresnik goes so far as to call Fed an “underachiever,” suggesting he should’ve gotten to 30 grand slams.

It’s not just match points, either.

You may recall the years-long gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over Federer’s inability to convert break points. He lost to Tommy Robredo at the 2013 US Open, seizing just 2 of 16 break chances. At the time, it felt like a trend. Or maybe a disaster movie. A few months later, he converted only 1 of 10 in a loss to Lleyton Hewitt.

At moments like that, the best you could say about Roger was that he was so good, it didn’t matter that he choked away all those opportunities. You could emphasize (as I did at the time) that service returns weren’t the centerpiece of his game, so we shouldn’t have expected him to capitalize on many of his break chances, especially compared to guys like Djokovic and Nadal.

Whether the focus was on break points, match points, or something else, we were always left with a paradox. Clutch performance seems to be a key component of athletic greatness. Federer is, without question, one of the all-time greats. Could a man with a penchant for choking really fill up so many pages of the record books?

* * *

In a roundabout way, it’s an immense compliment to Federer that this narrative has taken hold. To say that a 20-major winner was an underachiever is to imply extraordinary things about his talent. He made the game look so easy that his physical capabilities seemed limitless. By that reasoning, any failure had to be chalked up to his mind.

Roger drove otherwise sensible people to near-poetry. A few lines from David Foster Wallace’s famous essay, Roger Federer as Religious Experience:

He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces.

Early in his career, Federer didn’t connect with fans the way he did later. He looked so casual, spectators weren’t sure he was giving full effort. One man who understood what was going on beneath the surface was Pete Sampras, who Roger beat in an era-defining match at Wimbledon in 2001. Sampras told Christopher Clarey, author of the recent Federer biography The Master:

It might look like Roger and I are not trying or we’re not that into it. We’re just very efficient: our movement and our games and our strokes. It’s like one swing of the racket, one forehand, one serve, and boom, it’s done, while most other players are grinding, grinding, grinding.

Fans in the 1990s sometimes struggled to recognize Pete’s effort, but no one ever doubted he was clutch. Sampras readily admitted that he coasted through some return games, saving energy for higher-leverage moments just as Jack Kramer and his followers had done for half a century. Then, at break point, or in tiebreaks, it was clear he could access another level.

Federer was, in a perverse sort of way, too good for that. He grew up playing on clay, and though he was no Djokovic on return, he had the skills to back himself on every point. In the 2009 Wimbledon final against Andy Roddick, he struggled for 30 games to earn a break in the marathon fifth set. Roddick was one of the best servers in the sport’s history, shooting bullets on the tour’s fastest surface, yet he managed to win just 3 of 15 service games to love. The deciding-set score of 16-14 is an example of tennis’s minuscule margins. But in that set, Federer won 26 return points to Roddick’s 16.

The American never did reach match point that day. He did, however, get that close against Roger at the 2006 Masters Cup in Shanghai. Roddick won the first set and took a 6-4 lead in the second-set tiebreak. After Federer erased those two chances, A-Rod earned another at 7-8 on Fed’s serve. The Swiss pulled out the breaker, 10-8, then hit three aces in the final game to secure a 6-4 third set.

In other words, Federer wasn’t the only man to become vulnerable with match point on his racket. Though Roger lost 24 of those heartbreakers, he won 22 matches after coming within one point of defeat himself.

* * *

We’re not going to settle the question of whether Roger was clutch by counting just the handful of matches when a match point was defied. Yes, Fed’s rivals managed better–Djokovic has lost only three matches from match point up while coming back from the brink 15 times–but in a career spanning more than 1,500 matches, a 48% win rate in 46 of them barely moves the needle.

So we need to take a wider view. There are more routine forms of pressure that have a bigger cumulative impact.

In at least one important way, Federer was clutch. His career tiebreak record was 466-247, good for a winning percentage of 65%. That’s the best of all time.

We’d expect someone at Roger’s level to win a comfortable majority of his breakers. While big serving does not predict tiebreak success, excellent tennis playing does, because–well, duh, of course it does. Federer was better than his average tiebreak opponent, to the extent that if he played as well in tiebreaks as he did in the rest of the relevant matches, he’d win about 60% of them.

That difference–between the expected 60% and the actual 65%–means that he won 33 tiebreaks that he “shouldn’t have.” In the 30-plus years for which we have the necessary stats, only John Isner has snuck off with more of these “unexpected” tiebreaks. A few more players–including Djokovic–have outperformed at a slightly higher rate than Federer did, but even in that category, Roger is near the top of the leaderboard.

We can’t directly translate those bonus breakers into wins and losses. The Swiss would’ve pulled out some of the matches even after losing a tiebreak set, and stealing a single tiebreak still leaves open the possibility of defeat. But if we’re talking about performance under pressure, we can’t ignore tiebreaks just because they didn’t involve a match point. Federer may well have added a couple dozen victories to his career total purely on the basis of his better-than-expected tiebreak prowess.

The same sort of logic is required to quantify a player’s performance on break point, both serving to save them and returning to convert them.

Facing break point, Federer won about 3% more often than he did at other moments against the same opponents. Most tour regulars manage to raise their game at that juncture, but not quite by that much. While Nadal and Djokovic outscore him on this measure, many of his strongest peers–including Hewitt, Andy Murray, and David Ferrer–do not. At the very least, his performance facing break point is not a strike against him.

Even attempting to convert break points, Roger was better than his reputation. He was about 1% less effective returning on break point than at other scores. Over more than 10,000 career break chances, that’s just a few points each year that he should have won but didn’t. It’s easy to point to dreadful performances like the loss to Robredo, and 2013 was one of a couple of abysmal seasons. In the big picture, though, Federer turned break points into breaks about as often as you’d expect from a returner of his caliber.

* * *

Break points and tiebreaks are better tools than anecdotes and match points. But they are still limited. Bill Tilden told us a century ago that the most important points are 30-15 and 15-30, and those, to take just one example, don’t show up in any of the numbers I’ve cited so far.

My best attempt at an all-encompassing clutch stat is something I call Balanced Leverage Ratio, or BLR. It’s possible to quantify the leverage–the importance–of every point, from love-all in the first game to 6-all in the deciding set tiebreak. It’s possible to win a match despite losing more than half of the points, as long as you win enough of the higher-leverage ones.

To calculate BLR, we find the average leverage value of the points a player won, then do the same with the points he lost. BLR is the ratio between the two, adjusted slightly to balance serve and return performance. If a player performs equally well regardless of the impact of the moment, BLR is 1.0. If he excels when the pressure ramps ups–essentially the definition of clutch–BLR is greater than 1. If he crumbles when the points matter more, BLR is less than 1.

It’s possible to calculate BLR only when we have the point-by-point sequence of an entire match. We’re lacking that for much of Federer’s early career, and even when the data is “out there”–as it is for most professional matches of the last several years–it isn’t yet wrangled into a form for easy data analysis. Still, I have a collection of this data for tens of thousands of matches, including over 400 of Roger’s, mostly from the 2010s.

Conveniently, the dataset also has about 400 matches each for Nadal, Djokovic, and Murray.

If you’re scrolling down just a paragraph or two at a time, take a moment and predict how you think BLR rates the four men.

Here is how they stack up, measured by the ratio between the importance of points they won and points they lost:

Player     BLR  
Federer   1.08  
Nadal     1.07  
Murray    1.06  
Djokovic  1.05

This stat, broad as its purview is, doesn’t prove that Roger was the clutchiest of them all. The margins are too small, and for most definitions of clutch, we’re not that concerned about how stars perform in routine matches–the majority of the material fed into this particular calculation. Still, like the tiebreak and break point numbers, BLR bolsters the case that, at the very least, Federer wasn’t not clutch.

The man played over 235,000 tour-level points. We can surely look past a few dozen lapses on match point.

* * *

If you’re unconvinced by all this, there’s an easy way out.

Who cares if Federer was clutch?

I find it fascinating that Fed fans, loyal as they are, have largely conceded the greatest-of-all-time debate to his rivals. A few points remain in Roger’s favor, like his record eight Wimbledon titles and 103 tour-level titles, a mark that trails only the somewhat padded tally of Jimmy Connors. But Djokovic and Nadal have pulled ahead in the grand slam race, and Federer finished his career with losing head-to-head records against both.

So the case for the Swiss, such as it is, rests on the sort of fuzzy arguments that use words like “transcendent.” I get it. I’ve spent much of this year reading about life-changing moments where a young fan saw Tilden, or Don Budge, or Lew Hoad, or Sampras and concluded that tennis could not possibly be played any better. Federer probably had that effect on more people–myself among them–than anyone else in history.

Poll today’s ATP and WTA locker rooms and ask everyone for his or her first idol. Rafa, Novak, and Serena have their fan clubs, to be sure. But Roger wins by a landslide.

For years, the otherworldly skills that so influenced a generation of players rendered clutch irrelevant. Federer won his first seven major finals without going to a fifth set. The 2005 Australian defeat to Safin was the only match point loss of his first decade on tour with any lingering impact on his legacy. In 2005, he won 81 of his 85 matches. 62 were straight-set victories. Who needs clutch when you’re playing like that?

One of the odder Federer statistics is his record in so-called “lottery” matches. 36 times in his career, Roger lost a match despite winning more than half of the points played. These things tend to even out, but not for him. When he was outpointed, he won only 11 matches, two of them by retirement.

With small samples like 47 lottery matches or the 46 reversals from match point up or down, it’s tough to separate skill from luck. The big picture says Federer was just fine under pressure. A few painful memories, especially against Djokovic, suggest he could be fragile, particularly when the moment was heightened in ways that statistics might not be able to capture.

Federer got his share of luck in his two decades on tour. He could have used a little more. Most often, though, his margin of safety was substantial enough that it didn’t matter.

When Roger won the 2009 French Open to complete his career grand slam, Andre Agassi was there to present the trophy. “A lot of people say it’s better to be lucky than good,” the American quipped. “I’d rather be Roger than lucky.”

* * *

Previous: No. 6, Serena Williams

Next: No. 4, Novak Djokovic

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I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. If this is your favorite player, Congrats! (or: I’m sorry.)

* * *

Serena Williams [USA]
Born: 26 September 1981
Career: 1998-2022
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2002)
Peak Elo rating: 2,507 (1st place, 2003)
Major singles titles: 23
Total singles titles: 73
 

* * *

I wasn’t paying much attention to tennis in 2002 and 2003, so I’ve learned about the first Serena Slam from a distance. Only as I was researching this essay did I discover what might be the greatest post-match interview answer ever given.

Serena Williams went to Melbourne in 2003 holding three of the four grand slam titles. She missed the 2002 Australian due to injury, so a traditional, calendar-year Grand Slam was never in play. Still, if she won the tournament in 2003, she’d possess all four at the same time. Traditionalists might asterisk it, but the American’s version–she dubbed it the Serena Slam–was essentially the same as the four-in-one-year feats of Margaret Court and Steffi Graf.

Accordingly, the pressure was high. She almost didn’t make it. Blisters on her right foot didn’t help. In the semi-finals, Kim Clijsters took a 5-1 lead in the third set.

“I knew that if I held, broke, held, and then broke again, it would be 5-all,” Serena said after the match.

If there’s been a more outrageous line in a tennis press conference in the last 20 years, I’d love to hear it.

There’s self-belief, and there’s whatever Serena Williams has.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, she did hold for 2-5. She broke for 3-5, saving two match points in the process. She held for 4-5, then broke again to tie the third set. By the end, Clijsters was little more than a spectator. Williams broke her one last time, at love, to finish the job, 4-6, 3-6, 7-5.

Then, for the fourth straight major, Serena defeated her sister, Venus, in the final. Their encounters were psychologically demanding and rarely brought out the best of either one. But this was one of the better matches between the two. Serena took down Venus in three sets with the same tenacity she displayed against Clijsters. The Serena Slam was hers.

At least Venus didn’t go home empty-handed. The sisters won the women’s doubles title, dropping only one set in the tournament. It was already their sixth slam championship as a team. Paola Suárez, one of the losing finalists, said, “Next year I hope Venus and Serena don’t play, so we can win the tournament.”

Williams didn’t linger. The day after she secured her fourth consecutive slam crown, she hopped a plane back to the States. She made it to her seat at the Super Bowl in time for kickoff.

* * *

Serena defended her title at Wimbledon that summer, winning another three-setter with Venus. “There’s still a lot of drama to come,” she said after the match.

Drama, yes. Major titles, too.

Yet for all the twists in the intervening decades, nearly everything we think of as distinctive about Serena Williams was present in January 2003. She won matches with a big serve and deadly groundstrokes. She outfought everybody, including her own sister. She was preternaturally self-assured. All this while saving more than a few brain cycles for off-court pursuits.

Hard to believe, then, that her game had fallen into place in little more than twelve months. Williams won her first major at the 1999 US Open, outracing her sister to the milestone by beating the top two seeds, Lindsay Davenport and Martina Hingis, in succession. She was only 17 years old.

The confidence was already there. “I fear no one,” Serena said after defeating Davenport. “I only fear God.”

But her results stagnated. She didn’t reach another major final for two years. She picked up a handful of significant victories–a title at Manhattan Beach in 2000, victories at Indian Wells and Toronto in 2001–but with a flurry of early exits and a limited playing schedule, her ranking fell to 10th in the world in late 2001.

She was “a nobody,” in her own assessment. At the same time, her fate was on her own racket. She took the credit for her victories; when she lost, she knew she could’ve played better. She dropped one match to Amélie Mauresmo in 2003. “There was nothing in particular she did,” Serena said. “When I lose a match, it’s usually because of how I played.”

By then, she wasn’t losing very often. Only five women beat her in 2002, one of them by retirement. She won eight titles and took over the number one ranking after Wimbledon.

Davenport thought that Williams’s serve was the best in the history of the game. “When she’s on, it’s scary,” said doubles specialist Lisa Raymond. “No player hits the ball like she does.”

* * *

It all started with that serve. Check that–it all began with the toss.

Serena’s toss was a moment of calm before the deluge, a precise, effortless motion that opponents found impossible to read. The only way to have a chance against a 120 mile-per-hour delivery is to correctly infer where it’s headed. Williams didn’t even give you that.

For a century, sportswriters have said of innovative women tennis stars that they “play like a man.” Helen Wills rallied from the baseline as well as men did; Alice Marble attacked the net like a man, Maria Bueno serve-and-volleyed like a man, and so on. Serena ended that line of thinking. With her serve, she effectively erased the last difference between the men’s and women’s games.

By the late 1990s, the WTA tour was crawling with muscular, big hitters. But many of them, like Jennifer Capriati, still treated their serve as a means to an end. Williams showed her peers that the first strike could be–should be, must be–a weapon in its own right.

In 2015, Serena won her 19th major with a straight-set victory over Maria Sharapova. She hit 18 aces–one out of every four service points. In the men’s final, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray played twice as long, yet combined for only 19.

In each of her last five farewell-tour matches this summer, in Toronto, Cincinnati, and New York, Williams ended more than one-tenth of her service points with an ace. A 10% rate is standard for her–she averaged 15% in 2015–but even as the circuit has evolved to follow her example, it remains well above tour average. Elena Rybakina, the Wimbledon champion who led the category this season, fell just short of the 10% mark.

Most devastating of all, Serena was always able to deploy her most powerful weapon when it mattered. Facing break point, the typical WTA regular plays it a bit safer, hitting aces only 3% of the time. The American changed nothing. She ends 10% of those critical points with an untouchable serve. Opponents could be forgiven if it felt like more.

* * *

We could say as much about nearly every other shot in the Williams arsenal. She was swinging away at service returns twenty years ago, long before the conventional wisdom caught on to the discovery that the second strike could be nearly as devastating as the first.

Opponents raved about the forehand even before she was a grand slam champion. Sandrine Testud rated Serena’s forehand above Steffi Graf’s in 1999. Williams’s open-stance backhand, though it exposed her sometimes half-hearted footwork, could be just as blistering.

Then there was her defense. It’s easy to forget about Serena’s retrieving skills; she could go games at a stretch without needing them. But when Vera Zvonareva finished second at Wimbledon in 2010, she pointed that way to explain the champion’s dominance. “You take more risks,” she said, “because you know she’s such a great mover and can play great defense.”

Serena will never take her place in the counter-puncher Hall of Fame next to admirers Simona Halep and Caroline Wozniacki. She didn’t always look good when lunging for a last-ditch, rally-saving save. Williams might not appreciate the comparison, but this is the quality she most strikingly shared with Sharapova. If footspeed or flexibility let her down, she’d keep the point alive by sheer force of will.

“There are things you can’t explain,” said Serena’s coach Patrick Mouratoglou. “It’s her character; she refuses to lose and finds solutions that are incredible.”

Or as the player herself said in 2010: “If I lose, I’m going out hard.”

This is where it gets hard to capture the 23-time major winner on paper. Stock phrases like “never-say-die” and “heart-on-her-sleeve” don’t even start to cover it. No one has ever so visibly, viscerally cared. At its best, Serena’s passion gave us exploits like her in-the-bag-all-along comeback against Clijsters in 2003. At the other extreme, we saw her go toe to toe with umpires as she tried to impose her will with something other than bludgeoning groundstrokes.

The two sides of full-bore Serena couldn’t be separated. Probably no one in the history of the sport dug deeper. Some of what came out was regrettable. But a player with more conventional limits might have called it quits after six majors, or thirteen, or even twenty-three.

“I definitely didn’t see myself playing tennis at my age,” she said in 2014, eight years and 240 matches ago.

Tennis was never her only passion, but the game gave her an outlet for something she couldn’t release in any other way.

* * *

In late 1997, Serena’s career nearly ended before it began. She fell off her skateboard onto the sidewalk, jamming her left wrist. For weeks, the wrist ached every time she struck a two-handed backhand.

She made the best of it. When it hurts to hit a backhand, what better compromise than to run around it and build up an even more potent forehand? While she would’ve developed the tactic soon enough, it helped make the difference just 16 months later, when she upset Steffi Graf at Indian Wells.

That isn’t to say that the teenage Serena was a genius of injury management. After her spill, she didn’t even take the day off. She went out for a regular practice. On clay. In the rain.

Venus remembered her younger sister, as always, refusing to quit. “Just let me hit one more ball,” said the girl who winced with every backhand.

For twenty-five years, good things tended to happen when Serena decided to hit just one more ball. When they didn’t, well, she had the selective memory of a champion.

“When I lose, I don’t feel as good about myself,” she said after she defeated Angelique Kerber for her seventh Wimbledon crown. “But then I have to remind myself: You are Serena Williams.”

* * *

Previous: No. 7, Bill Tilden

Next: No. 5, Roger Federer

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I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. If this is your favorite player, Congrats! (or: I’m sorry.)

* * *

Bill Tilden [USA]
Born: 10 February 1893
Died: 5 June 1953
Career: 1912-46
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1920)
Major singles titles: 10 (1 World Hard Court title; 3 pro majors)
Total singles titles: 156
 

* * *

Bill Tilden reversed the usual progression of a prominent tennis figure. First, he coached. As he helped youngsters learn the game, he worked out an overarching theory of how tennis should be played. Then–and only then–did he become a national champion.

That isn’t to say that Tilden couldn’t manage more than one thing at a time. Throughout the 1920s, Tilden dominated American tennis like no player before or since. He competed, he wrote, he organized tournaments, he mentored, he squabbled with the national federation–in the phrase of the day, Tilden was tennis.

Many of those things came naturally to the lanky six-footer who came to be known as Big Bill. Oddly enough, his tennis game did not.

In 1926, the New Yorker profiled Tilden’s dogged quest to become as big a star on stage as he was on court. “I have been told I’m pretty bad as an actor, but once I was a pretty bad tennis player, too,” he said. “It required twenty-one years for me to win a championship.”

Big Bill was exaggerating, but only just. Growing up in Philadelphia, he chased fads, swinging from the baseline one year, rushing the net another. His older brother, Herbert, was considered a better prospect. At the University of Pennsylvania, Bill was so far down the ladder of the school tennis team that he rarely played.

He was, however, fascinated by the game. He started giving clinics to younger players, where he realized that he often lacked answers to basic questions about grips, spin, and shot selection. There were few professional coaches in those days, and technique was still evolving into its modern form. It wasn’t a matter of looking up the answers and reporting back to the kids at the next lesson. He had to work out the solutions himself.

So that’s what he did. Inevitably, his own play improved, and he began thinking in terms of a complete game–in theory and in practice. Tilden had little else to do. He didn’t care much for school, and when he was 22, both Herbert and his father died. Tennis served as both an outlet and a necessary distraction.

“He suddenly determined to be a good tennis player,” said one of Bill’s first protégés, Carl Fischer. “Make no mistake, though, that but for this incredible determination, you never would have heard of Bill Tilden. Nobody ever worked so hard at anything as he did at tennis.”

* * *

By 1918, Tilden’s efforts paid off. He reached the final of the US National Championships, where he lost to defending champion Robert Lindley Murray. He matched the feat the following year. Bill Johnston, an undersized Californian with a devastating forehand, stopped him in his second attempt at the title.

The two-time finalist was 26 years old. He was increasingly well-known in tennis circles, not just for his play–he partnered Vinnie Richards to win the national doubles title in 1918–but for his writing as well.

Everything Tilden worked out as a coach finally came together in a unified theory of the game. He published an essay for American Lawn Tennis in March 1919 called “Variety Is Essential for Tennis.” Much of it now reads as clichéd, even stodgy, but only because coaches and commentators have been echoing the same lines for the hundred years since.

The whole secret of tennis success outside of actual stroke perfection (which any one can learn in time), is to always keep mentally alert. “Use the bean” at all times and under all conditions. When you guess wrong, you will look a fool and get called “bonehead”; but never mind, for you gain more than you lose, even if no recognition is taken of it.

Big Bill’s judgment was that most players didn’t think any further ahead than the execution of a single stroke. They didn’t consider the purpose of their shot, or how it might affect the man across the net. Tilden was probably the first advocate of playing to an opponent’s strength. Not only did it threaten to break down a foe’s game entirely, it acknowledged that most players knew how to cover their weaknesses.

In articles like this, along with books such as The Art of Lawn Tennis and Match Play and the Spin of the Ball, the American champion recorded one timeless adage after another. Most points end in errors, so a savvy tactician keeps the ball in play and lets his opponent make mistakes. The crucial point of the game is 15-30 or 30-15. The key juncture in the set is the seventh game, which is still sometimes known as the “Tilden game.”

Above all: Practice is serious business. “My idea of intensive practice,” Tilden wrote in Match Play, “is to pick out one stroke and hammer away at that shot until it is completely mastered.”

When it comes to practice, preparation, diet, equipment, all that stuff, it’s usually reasonable to assume that players have gotten more dedicated, more precise in the last hundred years. Tilden with a new stroke is the exception. Today’s stars talk about training blocks: a few weeks carved out of the tournament schedule. Well, after losing the 1919 final to Johnston, Big Bill decided he needed a better backhand. He moved to Rhode Island, took over one of the country’s few existing indoor courts, and drilled that goddamn backhand for six months.

* * *

The irony of it is, Tilden’s backhand wasn’t that bad. We don’t have authoritative records for much of his career, but one source gives him a 65-4 record for 1919. Bill called his backhand “a shining mark at which anyone could plug away with impunity,” but few of his opponents seemed to realize it. Like most players of his day, he relied on a slice on that wing. It was not an easy weakness to exploit, if indeed it was a weakness at all.

The shot let him down only against Johnston–“Little Bill” next to his taller rival. The New York Times that year called Johnston’s forehand “unquestionably the greatest single tennis shot in the world.” Think of it like Nadal versus Federer. Tilden’s backhand was the 1919 equivalent of Fed’s one-hander, inadequate to handle Rafa’s topspin.

To extend the analogy, Tilden went away for half a year, then came back as Novak Djokovic.

Al Laney, a sportswriter who long preferred Johnston to Tilden, described the improvement after seeing Big Bill dispose of the pint-sized Californian for the 1924 title:

The acquisition of this flat backhand had changed everything. It was the shot that made it impossible to keep Tilden on the defensive for long or break down that defense. It was the one stroke that put him above the class of his contemporaries, and there is some ground for believing it the finest single stroke ever developed in tennis. Tilden was to remain invincible so long as this stroke remained as it was that day at Forest Hills.

Invincible is indeed the word for it. At his first Wimbledon, in 1920, the Philadelphian won eight matches to snatch the title from defending champion Gerald Patterson. Back in the States, he beat Johnston to grab his own national title. At the end of the year, he led the American team that journeyed to New Zealand and reclaimed the Davis Cup. He wouldn’t lose another singles match at a major, or in Davis Cup play, for six years.

* * *

For much of that span, tournament tennis couldn’t entirely hold Tilden’s interest. He coached as much as he could in his hometown. At his alma mater, the Germantown Academy, he took on responsibilities with the drama club, too. He began acting in amateur productions, and he ultimately poured his effort (and not insubstantial sums of money) into staging shows on Broadway.

Big Bill also took his writing seriously. On official forms, he set down his occupation as “newspaperman.” In 1924, and again later in the decade, the USLTA cracked down on amateur players receiving payment for ghostwritten articles. By the standards of the amateur tennis police, it was not an outrageous stance to take. Most stars had little connection to the printed word beyond a byline and a check. But editors leapt to Tilden’s defense, insisting that the work appearing under his name was his own. It would be worth just as much money, they claimed, even if he were not the best tennis player in the world.

(This last point was a bit of a stretch, but it was true that Tilden worked as a journalist before achieving any sporting renown.)

For a variety of reasons, Big Bill skipped Wimbledon every year from 1922 to 1926. First, the USLTA wouldn’t pay his expenses. Then, he was rehabbing a finger injury. Then, another fight with the federation over his amateur status–one that kept him out of the 1924 Olympics, too. Davis Cup was the most important of all, and as long as the Americans kept winning, each year’s Challenge Round was held Stateside.

Anyway, Tilden had too much to do at home. His celebrity grew with every national title. He enjoyed–and came to expect–the accoutrements that came with stardom. Some of the spats with the USLTA weren’t about whether his expenses would be paid; they turned on the level of luxury he demanded. He had always been opinionated, and he grew less patient with those who challenged him.

He had more in common with a temperamental maestro than a standout athlete. Tilden was a natural showman who would often string along lesser opponents to give the crowd a more entertaining match. He became friendly with a number of movie stars, including Charlie Chaplin, and he thought of his performances in those terms. “The player owes as much to the gallery,” he said, “as the actor owes the audience.”

It’s no wonder that Bill and Suzanne Lenglen despised each other. Neither could stand it when so much attention was paid to someone else.

“Tilden was more of an artist than nine-tenths of the artists I know,” wrote one columnist. “It is the beauty of the game that Tilden loves; it is the chase always, rather than the quarry.”

* * *

When Big Bill won his sixth consecutive national title in 1925, he was 32 years old. For the first time since he surpassed Johnston, he had something to chase. While he stayed home, a group of young Frenchmen began to monopolize the great European titles. Jean Borotra won Wimbledon in 1924, and René Lacoste took both Wimbledon and the French in 1925. Henri Cochet, the most talented of the trio, won his own national title in 1926.

The three men, plus stalwart doubles player Toto Brugnon, aimed to snag the Davis Cup for France. The so-called Four Musketeers first reached the Challenge Round in 1925, where Tilden won five-setters against Borotra and Lacoste. France fell short again in 1926, but this time Lacoste upset Big Bill in the final rubber.

The Musketeers made their strongest statement on the same 1926 trip, at Forest Hills. All four men reached the quarter-finals, and three of them defeated Americans to reach the semis. One of the victims was Tilden, who lost to Cochet, 8-6 in the fifth.

The French finally succeeded in 1927. Lacoste, the brains of the French operation, knew it would take a team effort to topple Tilden. The challengers didn’t expect Cochet to beat Big Bill on the first day–and he didn’t. They didn’t count on defeating Tilden and Frank Hunter in the doubles–and they didn’t. But after Borotra and Brugnon spent five sets running Tilden ragged, the 34-year-old American was ripe for the picking. Lacoste, perhaps the one man on earth who had studied tennis strokes as comprehensively as the American champion, beat Big Bill in four. Cochet brushed aside an over-the-hill Johnston to secure the Cup for France.

The Musketeers held on to the trophy for six years, and the Americans didn’t get it back for more than decade. (By then, Tilden was a professional, and he was coaching another nation’s squad.) But the story doesn’t end there.

A year later, Tilden led his side through the preliminary rounds to take on the French at their new stadium in Paris. The surface favored the hosts, the crowds went only one way, and Big Bill was another year older. Yet in the opening rubber, he beat Lacoste in five sets.

“Two years ago I knew at last how to beat him,” said the Frenchman. “Now, on my own court, he beats me. I never knew how the ball would come off the racket, he concealed it so. I had to wait to see how much it was spinning, and sometimes it didn’t spin at all.”

Big Bill continued to exact his revenge. At Wimbledon in 1930, he beat Borotra in a semi-final that effectively determined the champion. And while Cochet was the only man to maintain a winning record against him as an amateur, Tilden dominated their meetings as professionals.

Lacoste concluded in 1928, “Is he not the greatest player of them all?”

* * *

For decades, the only acceptable answer to that question was Yes.

Fred Perry: “My personal opinion is, when you start talking about great players, you talk of Tilden. And then, about two weeks later, you start talking about the others.”

Bobby Riggs: “I would rank Tilden alone. He is B.C. The others are A.D. You don’t rank him. In the Tilden era who was there? Only Tilden.”

Big Bill finally tired of his fights with the USLTA and turned professional after the 1930 season. He immediately became the best player among that group, winning his first tour against Karel Koželuh, 50 matches to 17. My Elo ratings place him as the top pro from 1931 to 1933. He even rates as the strongest player–amateur or professional–in 1933, when he was 40 years old.

The man who dethroned him was Ellsworth Vines, a big-hitting American 18 years his junior. Even then, Tilden won 9 of their first 20 encounters.

Almost a decade later, Big Bill could still challenge the best players in the world. Approaching his 50th birthday, he remained one of the sport’s most famous figures, and tours were restructured to keep his name on the marquee.

A 1941 tour pitted Tilden against 1938 Grand Slam winner Don Budge. Budge usually remembered their 54-match series as one-way traffic, and he was right as far as that went. Our best records suggest that Big Bill won just seven times.

But wait, said Budge’s friend and doubles partner Gene Mako. “You’re the greatest player in the world, maybe the greatest ever, and you can’t beat a forty-eight-year-old every time? It’s unbelievable. If you ask me for amazing sports stories, I tell you Tilden in his late forties, early fifties.”

In 1943, the veteran crushed the reigning US champion, 22-year-old Ted Schroeder, in an exhibition match. Even after the war, he could outplay Riggs–then the top pro–for a set or two at a time.

The man who once wrote that “tennis is played with the mind” spent three decades proving his point.

* * *

Tilden’s story, as you probably know, has an unhappy ending.

In 1946, he was convicted after a traffic cop caught him having sex with a 14-year-old boy. He served several months in prison, and the rules of his parole made it difficult for him to teach. He was caught again in 1949 and sentenced to another prison term. Four years later, he died, shunned by many of his former friends.

We don’t know when Tilden realized he was gay. We have only the barest hints of what he thought about it. Over the course of his time in the spotlight, he became slightly more open. On some pro tours, he traveled with a personal ball boy–invariably a handsome, teenage blond. Fellow players learned to look the other way. Budge, for one, later claimed he was disgusted by the way Big Bill leered at young men.

Somehow, though, Tilden managed to keep his love interests separate from his protégés. He was always on the lookout for young tennis talent, and he would go to great lengths to develop it. He often took a student or two with him as he toured the country each summer, partnering an inexperienced charge in doubles draws. Yet those young men, every one of them, always denied any improprieties.

Frank Deford, who published a biography of the champion in 1976, saw Tilden as trying to recreate a father-son relationship he never fully experienced. John Olliff, a British player and journalist, believed Big Bill had a “hero complex” and preferred to surround himself with acolytes.

There’s probably some truth in both theories. Underlying it all, Tilden was simply lonely. He was a gay man in a macho sport. He towered so high above the competition that, for years, he had no competition at all.

Big Bill had his own explanation for the time he spent helping young players. “Wish I’d had someone to give me a few pointers,” he told the New Yorker in 1926. “My way would have been easier. I have always had to go it alone.”

* * *

Previous: No. 8, Rafael Nadal

Next: No. 6, Serena Williams

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I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. If this is your favorite player, Congrats! (or: I’m sorry.)

* * *

Rafael Nadal [ESP]
Born: 3 June 1986
Career: 2003-present
Plays: Left-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2008)
Peak Elo rating: 2,370 (1st place, 2009)
Major singles titles: 22
Total singles titles: 92
 

* * *

Break point on the Rafael Nadal serve is where dreams go to die.

You’ve worked so hard. Nadal’s serve is not the best in the game, but when you put it back in play, you’ve got a new set of problems to deal with. It’s the depth, the power, the topspin. Maybe you returned well for a few minutes; maybe you caught Rafa in a rare lapse. You reach break point.

Odds are, you’ve come this far by winning some points in the deuce court. Left-handers are, on average, better on the ad side. The opportunity to slice a wide serve to a righty’s backhand gives them about a three-percentage-point boost, a substantial difference next to the usual small margins in tennis. Nadal is no different. While he wins more service points in both courts than the average lefty, the three-point gap remains the same.

Now, at 30-40, or ad-out–you don’t think you got to 15-40 against Rafa, do you?–the pressure should be on him. He’s the one who scuffled himself into this position. He’s the one facing the loss of a service game. A big swing or two, and you could grab the break.

But no. The pressure is on you.

Nadal is going to hit that lefty slice to your backhand. (Actually, he goes to the wide corner with the first serve only about two-thirds of the time. You still have to lean in that direction.) He’s a tick more conservative facing break point, so he’ll probably land his first serve. You’ll be pulled off the court (or wrong-footed, if he goes down the tee), so you’ll start the rally at a disadvantage. Against a man who might be the greatest baseliner in the history of the game.

So you probably lose the point. You’ll be lucky to get another chance. Rafa holds almost half the games in which he faces a break point.

Oh, and if you somehow make that big swing and convert your opportunity? It won’t mean much if you can’t back it up. Fair warning: Nadal breaks serve in about one-third of his return games. If you’re trying to consolidate your edge at Roland Garros, you probably don’t even want to know your chances. Opponents there manage to hold barely half of their service games against him.

It’s not complicated, it’s just impossibly daunting. As Rafa explained in 2005, after winning his first of eleven titles in Monte Carlo: “I don’t miss a lot of balls.”

* * *

Most tour players serve better when facing a break point. Unlike tiebreak jitters, which give the edge to the returner, break point pressure adds up to a edge for the server. Most men land a few more first serves, make fewer errors, and save break points at a slightly higher rate than they win lower-pressure points against the same opponents.

The King of Clay just does it better than almost everyone else.

For a dramatic example, look no further than the 2007 French Open final. Roger Federer earned 17 break points, ten of them in the first set alone. Nadal denied each one of those first ten, as well as six of the seven that followed. Federer, overeager to convert, whacked seven unforced errors on those 17 points. Perhaps most telling of all, Rafa gradually shut down the opportunities altogether. After Roger went missed 15 of 16 chances in the first two sets, he generated just one more opening in the two sets that followed.

The Spaniard did it again a year later. In the 2008 Wimbledon clash that has come to define the Roger-Rafa rivalry, Federer earned 13 break chances. Nadal allowed him to convert just one, in the second set. (On break point, Rafa not only served down the tee, he approached to Fed’s forehand. Gotta say he deserved that one.) No matter: Nadal managed to break twice in the same set. A few hours later, he broke again for the 6-4, 6-4, 6-7, 6-7, 9-7 victory that no tennis fan will ever forget.

Rafa wasn’t always that good facing break point, against Federer or anyone else. When we crunch the numbers, though, we find that he has spent most of his career at the top of the leaderboard for this arcane but crucial statistic.

I went through every tour-level match since 2003 and compared each player’s performance on break points to his results on other service points. If he won 70% of non-break point serves, for example, a naive forecast would suggest that he saved 70% of the break points he faced. In fact, the average player upped their game enough to win between 71% and 72% of those points.

For 6,400 break points faced, Nadal has maintained double that advantage. In a match where he wins 70% of service points, he doesn’t edge up to 72% under pressure, he jumps to 74%. In his most clutch seasons by this measure, he is almost twice as good as that. He has been remarkably consistent, as well. His edge when facing break point has exceeded tour average for 18 of his 20 tour-level seasons.

Another way to put it: Rafa has saved approximately 233 break points simply by playing better in those moments than he does the rest of the time. That’s about six months’ worth of hard-earned break points, erased. No 21st-century player has saved more. The only man who comes close is another Spanish lefty, Feliciano López, with 218. Nadal’s only contemporaries* who improve their game by a larger percentage margin are López and John Isner.

* Incidentally, the turn-of-the-century player who saved the most break points by raising his game was Nadal’s current coach, Carlos Moyá.

Asked to explain what was going through his head during the 2008 Wimbledon final, Rafa said, “[I] just focus in every point.” Some points a bit more than others, apparently.

* * *

So: about 6,400 break points faced, more than 4,200 of them saved. Over 11,000 career break points generated, about 5,000 converted. Pick a category, just about any category, and the numbers boggle the mind. Especially when clay courts are involved.

No player ever justified a nickname like Rafa has proven ownership of “The King of Clay.” There was dirtballing royalty before Nadal came along–when Rafa first picked up a racket, Björn Borg’s French Open records looked like they would stand forever. In 2004, if you said “King of Clay,” people would think you were talking about Guillermo Coria. Now, with 14 Roland Garros titles and counting, Nadal will remain the sovereign of the surface for however long humans play tennis.

Coria was still a prime contender when he lost to Nadal at the 2005 Monte Carlo Masters. Three weeks later, the two men met in the Rome final, as well. Coria pushed the 18-year-old to 6-all in a fifth-set tiebreak but still came up short. When they met again at Monte Carlo in 2006, the balance of power had shifted for good. Rafa crushed the Argentinian, 6-2, 6-1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcu5HBLqjKA

The Spaniard’s Monte Carlo run in 2005 kicked off a clay-court winning streak that would last more than three years. Nadal won 81 straight matches–including three Monte Carlos, three Barcelonas, three Italians, and two French Opens, not to mention five defeats of the world number one–before Federer finally got the better of him at the 2007 German Open. Of course, he bounced back to win the French. Nadal lost only a single decision on clay in 2008, as well.

You will not be surprised to learn that 81 matches is the longest single-surface win streak in Open era men’s tennis. Rafa also holds the record for most consecutive sets won on a single surface. That mark stands at 50, and the most frequent set score of the bunch was 6-1.

Here’s the truly impressive thing about the two unbeaten runs: The set streak began more than ten years after the match streak ended.

Nadal’s longevity is where we hit the really incomprehensible numbers. He recently recorded his 900th consecutive week in the top ten. He’s up to nearly 600 weeks in the top two. He has more clay-court match wins–474–than any other player in the last four decades, yet his losses are so rare that the Wikipedia page summarizing his career statistics lists them all.

* * *

None of this should minimize Rafa’s exploits on other surfaces, or the fact that he has modified his game to beat the best players in the world on hard and grass courts. Even before he beefed up his serve and adopted more aggressive tactics, he could deprive Federer of hard-court titles that, in those early days, felt like his birthright.

Nadal’s adaptability is probably his most underrated quality. He won a doubles gold medal on hard courts, for crying out loud. Entering doubles events only occasionally, he has racked up eleven career titles. My Elo ratings suggest that he has ranked among the best doubles players on tour throughout his career. On the singles court, he wins three-quarters of his net points.

Still, it will always come back to the clay. In tennis, especially in the modern era, everybody loses sometimes. The exceptions to that rule are so rare that we can usually just ignore them. But not with Rafa. His record at Roland Garros–or Monte Carlo, or Barcelona–is nearly perfect.

This presents a problem for rating systems. When you win 81 clay-court matches in a row, or 14 French Opens in 18 tries, you aren’t promoted to some higher level with a more appropriate level of competition. There’s nowhere else to go. There’s nothing to do but keep winning.

But what if there were a way to crank up the difficulty level, like a chess app that can always play just a little bit smarter? Five years ago, I tried to simulate that within the framework of tennis Elo ratings. Instead of looking at a player’s rating after a long winning streak, I asked a different question. How good would a hypothetical player have to be in order to win so much in such a short span? They sound like similar questions, but there is a subtle difference. The first version establishes the minimum level a player would need to attain to accomplish a particular feat. The alternative approach tries to determine how good he would need to be to make such an outcome likely.

And let’s face it, few things in tennis have ever seemed more likely than Rafa winning another French Open title.

I won’t go through all the details here–you can read my earlier article if you’re interested. In May 2018, Nadal’s records at Monte Carlo and Roland Garros rated as the best single-tournament performances of the Open era, ahead of nominally comparable exploits like Borg at the French and Federer at Wimbledon, Halle, or Basel.

You probably aren’t surprised that Nadal tops the list. I wasn’t, either. But the exact numbers are staggering. Rafa’s peak Elo–in the traditional calculation–is 2,370. That’s good for sixth of all time. The highest peak of the Open era is Borg’s, at 2,473.

Nadal’s performance in his first 14 Monte Carlos rated more than one hundred points above Borg’s peak, at 2,595. His French Open record up to that point (excluding his injury withdrawal in 2016) works out to exactly the same figure.

Run the same numbers now, and Nadal’s 14 titles in Paris continue to merit a rating just shy of 2,600. You have to go back to Suzanne Lenglen to find anything like it, and even setting aside the million reasons you can’t compare the two, Lenglen sustained her level for less than half as long.

In a world where all tennis was played on clay, Rafa would be the best of all time. Heck, even at 50%, the extra time on dirt would’ve been enough to close the gap. He certainly deserved a few chances to play–and, presumably, dominate–a year-end Tour Finals on his preferred surface.

As it is, he’ll have to settle for his undisputed position as the King of Clay. In the last 20 years, the Big Three have raised the standard for what it takes to rank as an all-time great. Nadal, even more than his famous rivals, has set records that will never be broken.

* * *

Previous: No. 9, Chris Evert

Next: No. 7, Bill Tilden

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I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Hope I didn’t forget anybody…

* * *

Chris Evert [USA]
Born: 21 December 1954
Career: 1970-89
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1975)
Peak Elo rating: 2,451 (1st place, 1976)
Major singles titles: 18
Total singles titles: 157
 

* * *

Chris Evert always had a game plan. More than perhaps any player before or since, she stuck with it.

In the 1986 French Open final, she met Martina Navratilova for the 69th time. Navratilova had taken the upper hand in the rivalry, winning 19 of 21 meetings in a span of three-and-a-half years. At least Evert still had an edge on clay. She was the defending champion in Paris. Navratilova had won the French title in 1984, but that was the outlier. Neither woman would ever forget a 1981 match on Florida dirt that Chrissie won 6-0, 6-0.

The trick was to pin Martina to the baseline and force her to hit backhands. It was no secret: Navratilova’s one-hander had improved enormously, but it was still her more fragile side. No one could expose a weakness like Evert. She would spend all day searching for cracks in her opponent’s backhand, if that’s what it took.

“Chris played points like a siege war during the Middle Ages,” said long-time tour player Julie Heldman.

That day in Paris, Evert slowly battered her rival into submission. On one point, she hit 15 consecutive shots to the Navratilova backhand. Over the entire match, she hit 77% of her forehands cross-court. Not simply in the general direction of Martina’s left-handed backhand–into the corner to force a backhand reply.

Chrissie so nullified Navratilova’s game that the final winner tally was in her favor. Evert, the conservative baseliner, hit 31 winners. Martina, the frenetic serve-and-volleyer, managed only 29.

The 31-year-old American won the match, 2-6, 6-3, 6-3. With it, she secured her 18th and final career major title.

Evert played three more years after that. Even in her declining years, only a handful of women survived the siege. She reached eight semi-finals in her final eleven majors. In her last seven matches as a pro, she defeated three members of the Tennis 128: Conchita Martínez, Jana Novotná, and a young Monica Seles. Nearly two decades after she first rocked Forest Hills as a 16-year-old sensation, the game plan still worked.

* * *

Evert’s legacy will forever be tied up with Navratilova. The two women are roughly the same age, and they towered over the first 15 years of the WTA tour like no other duo. They played each other 80 times, 14 of them in major finals.

Chrissie does well by the comparison. Martina is unquestionably one of the very best of all time, and they roughly split their record-setting number of encounters. Both women collected 18 major singles titles. The netrushing lefty posted more than her share of winning streaks and near-undefeated seasons, but it was Chris who went nearly six years without a loss on clay, a stretch of 125 matches.

Viewing Evert through the prism of the rivalry, though, misses the point. Martina was an outstanding player by 1975, the year she defected from Czechoslovakia. The two women met eleven times that year, five of them in finals. But Navratilova didn’t draw even with the American until the summer of 1978, and it took another year for her to pull ahead.

Chrissie reigned over a crowded field. Between 1971 and 1979, she also grappled with Billie Jean King, Margaret Court, Evonne Goolagong, and–at the end of that span–a young Tracy Austin. She struggled against Nancy Richey, a veteran baseliner who did everything the youngster did, only a bit better.

Evert held off those rivals, and in the process, she came to define the sport. She arrived at the 1971 US Open as an unknown in pigtails, a 16-year-old clay-courter getting her first taste of the big time. She saved six match points in the second round to upset Mary Ann Eisel, then advanced to the semis on the back of wins against Françoise Dürr and Lesley Hunt. Billie Jean stopped her there, but it took an inspired performance and all the veteran wiles King had accumulated in more than a decade on the circuit.

The fans fell in love immediately. She was “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Cinderella in Sneakers.” Fellow players weren’t so sure. Chrissie seemed standoffish, and she had a bad habit of beating her elders.

One star had no doubts at all. Billie Jean knew that she couldn’t lose to the newcomer–it would make her entire fledgling Virginia Slims tour look bad. But she also recognized that the unsmiling girl from Florida held the future in the palm of her hand. “That kid is our next superstar!” King said. “She’s the one! She is it!”

* * *

The Evert game was based on rock-solid groundstrokes, including a two-handed backhand that launched a million imitations.

Chrissie wasn’t the first player on tour with a double-hander; Peaches Bartkowicz and Australian standout Jan Lehane O’Neill got there first. But Evert was the woman who proved it could be a devastating weapon, more than just a stopgap for little girls who weren’t strong enough to hold the racket with one hand. It didn’t hurt that Björn Borg and Jimmy Connors came along at the same time to drive the message home.

Evert’s groundstrokes, in turn, were based on unshakeable fundamentals. Chris’s father Jimmy was a national-level competitor turned coach. He began teaching Chrissie when she was six years old. He believed in the basics: feet set, racket back, follow through. There was more to it than that, but when things went off course, he always went back to square one.

You can see the legacy of Jimmy Evert in any match video or highlight reel from Chrissie’s career. She’s always in position. She’s always ready. We often hear players talk about the game slowing down for them; with Evert, you can watch as she plays a more relaxed brand of tennis than the woman on the other side of the net. Only Navratilova could consistently rush her, and that was far in the future.

The result of that impeccable preparation is that Chris could do whatever she wanted with the ball. Herbert Warren Wind wrote in a 1986 profile:

She reminds one of a frontiersman sighting down the barrel of his rifle at a distant object when she fastens her eye on the approaching ball for what seems like several full seconds before hitting it in the center of her racquet and drilling it back over the net.

She picked a spot, and she rarely missed. Against a netrusher, she painted the lines. One journalist wrote in 1975, “It seems that Evert’s ground strokes land only within a two-foot-wide strip on either side of the court.” Facing a fellow baseliner, she nudged her opponent out of position, an inch at a time if necessary.

Evert’s precision was so ingrained that she didn’t understand it when other players couldn’t do the same. No one wanted to practice with her–they were “petrified,” to use Billie Jean’s word. She would ask a sparring partner to feed her balls in some particular spot. When the human inevitably proved inferior to a ball machine, Chrissie would just glare.

No one could glare like Chris Evert.

* * *

When the public got to know Chrissie a little better, the love affair cooled. The other thing Jimmy Evert taught his daughter was to keep her emotions in check. She didn’t throw tantrums or even berate herself aloud. A bad line call elicited a raised eyebrow, at most.

Chris’s imperturbability kept fans at a distance. It also led to a new set of nicknames: “Little Miss Poker Face,” “Ice Maiden,” and “Little Miss Metronome.”

If you haven’t noticed already, there’s more than a passing resemblance between Evert and the player right behind her on my list, Helen Wills. A half-century earlier, Wills was the original Poker Face; others called her the Ice Queen. Opponents said that facing her was like playing a machine. Both women set fashion trends and graced the covers of national magazines.

Evert, like her predecessor, was as strong between the ears as she was in the right arm. “Concentrating was just something I always had,” Chrissie told biographer Johnette Howard. “On every point.”

Virginia Wade faced Evert more often than anyone else save Navratilova. She won just 6 of 46 meetings. “Her mind is what made her great,” said Wade.

Fans can learn to admire a strong mind, but they only fall in love when an idol shows a glimpse of underlying humanity, some sign of weakness. Starting in 1973, there wasn’t much of that. Evert won ten titles as a 19-year-old and handed Margaret Court her only defeat that year at a major. From 1974 to 1978, she was even better. She won at least 93% of her matches in each of those five campaigns, including two French Opens, two Wimbledons, and four straight US Opens.

Evert, understandably, got sick of having the crowd against her for every match. Abroad, fans backed their own. At home, well, Americans love an underdog. Between 1972 and 1980, she played 24 finals against Evonne Goolagong, whose unpredictability charmed the fans that Evert left cold.

While it wasn’t ideal, Chrissie could always play for herself. In 1976, perhaps her best season of all, Sports Illustrated asked her what appealed to her so much about tennis. “The winning,” she said. “I always liked the winning.”

* * *

Evert never stopped the winning. She picked up at least one grand slam singles title every year from 1974 to 1986, an unbelievable 13 straight seasons. But the victories did slow down a bit.

Ted Tinling, the dress designer who spent six decades around women’s tennis, said in 1981, “A woman champion is hard-pressed to survive more than six years.” He even pointed to Wills as an example of a superstar who faded. Chrissie would charge through that barrier, but in the late 1970s, right around that six-year mark, she hit some bumps.

Struggling after a loss to Wade at Wimbledon in 1977, Evert took a four-month sabbatical before rejoining the tour in March 1978. She took another break in early 1980, dealing with both a new crop of contenders and the challenge of mixing a full-time tennis career with her recent marriage to British player John Lloyd.

The main problem, on court, was Tracy Austin. Evert faced her teenage clone five times in 1979 and beat her only once. One of those losses ended the 125-match clay court winning streak. Another prevented her from picking up her fifth straight US Open title. Austin’s steadiness tested even Chrissie’s patience. One reporter claimed that the two women slogged through 28 strokes per point for an entire match. I’m pretty sure that’s wrong, but the Match Charting Project has documented that the average rally length of the 1979 US Open final exceeded nine shots. That’s long enough to make most people question their career choices.

At the same time, Navratilova was getting better. Martina lost weight, put the stress of defection and statelessness behind her, and developed an increasingly sturdy backhand. Evert lost the Wimbledon final to the lefty in both 1978 and 1979.

Early in her career, Evert often said that she imagined herself playing for only a few years before settling down and having a family. The more titles she won, the murkier that timetable became. But when Chris left the tour in 1980, it wasn’t entirely clear she’d be coming back.

* * *

We know now that Evert’s career was only half over. Not only did she return, she lost only three matches between May and November. She won the 1980 French Open–her fourth–and beat Austin en route to a US Open crown as well.

She didn’t lose on clay all year. Her 125-match win streak between 1973 and 1979 is the headline number, but even more impressive to me is what came next. After losing to Austin at the 1979 Italian, Chrissie won another 64 in a row.

Austin got hurt, and her career was essentially finished. Andrea Jaeger briefly arose as a challenger–she beat Chris at Roland Garros in 1982–but her body didn’t hold up, either. A new crop of starlets was only a few years away, but in the meantime, it was the Chrissie and Martina show. In 1984, Navratilova went 78-2. Evert’s more modest mark of 75-8 was deceptive: six of her eight losses were to Martina.

Chris eventually got her rival back in her sights. She regained the number one position on the WTA computer in mid-1985, though my Elo ratings insist that Martina never gave up the prime spot between 1982 and early 1987. Evert picked up her last two French Open titles against Navratilova in 1985 and 1986 and added four more victories against the lefty in the two years after that. When Chrissie retired in mid-1989, she remained among the top four on the official ranking list.

Gradually, through bumpy years on and off the court–not to mention an unfathomable ten runner-up finishes to Navratilova at majors–the tennis world learned to look past the ice. Fellow players had long known that the champion had a wicked sense of humor. That side of her finally–if only occasionally–popped out in public.

Most of all, after nearly two decades in the spotlight, Evert’s strongest qualities were recognized for what they had always been. Emotionlessness sounds bad, if you put it like that. Call it implacability, and you start to understand how she won so many matches, for so many years.

There’s another near-synonym for the quality that her father drummed into her: dignity. Ted Tinling called Chris “the most gracious world champion I’ve ever seen.”

In 1976, named Sportswoman of the Year by Sports Illustrated, Evert admitted her game wasn’t yet perfect. But: “Mentally I don’t think I could get much tougher. I’d just crack.” While she might not have ever gotten any tougher, the nerves of steel kept her going for twelve more years. There were a couple of ripples, but she never did crack.

* * *

Previous: No. 10, Helen Wills

Next: No. 8, Rafael Nadal

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I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Hope I didn’t forget anybody…

* * *

Helen Wills [USA]
Born: 6 October 1905
Died: 1 January 1998
Career: 1920-38
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1927)
Major singles titles: 19
Total singles titles: 56
 

* * *

When Helen Wills lost the Match of the Century to Suzanne Lenglen in February 1926, she was not the best player in the world. Her supporters had clamored for a Wills-Lenglen showdown for years, back to 1924, when Helen traveled to Europe for Wimbledon and the Olympics. Lenglen pulled out of both events, leading some fans to believe that the French champion was afraid of her American challenger.

There was plenty for fear in Wills’s game. Even in 1924, when Helen was 18 years old, she probably hit harder than any other woman alive. While it’s possible that Molla Mallory had a stronger forehand, Wills wielded weapons on both wings. Helen finished runner-up in her first Wimbledon, to Kitty McKane, but she won the Olympic gold with ease. She dropped only sixteen games in four matches, including a routine defeat of Mallory.

When Lenglen and Wills finally met at Cannes, the veteran triumphed. Suzanne was steadier, and she was much the better mover. Helen’s edge in power, on its own, wasn’t enough. Years later, Lenglen said that no opponent could hurry her enough to miss into the net–“except Helen Wills a little.” The 6-3, 8-6 result revealed that Suzanne was the superior competitor, even as the gap between the two was shrinking.

Wills, for her part, was ready for another crack at the champion right away. “I am sorry Miss Lenglen has gone off to Italy,” she let slip to a reporter. “Don’t you feel she should have given me a return match here?”

The two women never played each other again. Wills withdrew from both Roland Garros and Wimbledon with appendicitis, and Lenglen turned professional later that year.

We’ll never know how the Frenchwoman would have handled the steadily improving Helen. Suzanne desperately wanted a chance to prove she remained the best, but Wills had no desire to turn pro, despite offers that reportedly reached $100,000–about $1.6 million in today’s dollars. The American amateur tennis authorities jealously guarded their turf; they weren’t about to sanction a match against a professional.

Wills had her weaknesses, some of which she never overcame. We’ll get to those in a minute. But there’s no doubt she became a better player than the version that lost to Lenglen. One of her practice partners said she was “50% better” in 1928 than she had been the year before.

Without Lenglen, the ever-stronger American had no competition. She won 16 of the 17 majors she entered between 1927 and the end of her career. She won 180 matches in a row in the first six years of that span, going much of the streak without dropping a set. She grabbed the number one ranking the moment Suzanne departed, and she never let go.

* * *

Superficially, the keys to the Wills game were her groundstrokes, particularly her forehand. Opponent weren’t accustomed to the pace, and few of them could keep up.

Anna Harper was the runner-up for the 1930 US national title, and she lost all five of her career meetings to her fellow Californian. “Those shots of hers, coming one after another after another without relief,” she said, “well, after a game or two when you found out how hard this was going to be, she either broke your confidence or she broke your arm.”

In 1927, the New Yorker described the Wills forehand as “plain ruination, so utterly drastic as to reduce her opponent’s assignment to the mere task of signalling hits and misses.”

Helen herself had no problem with pace. Like Lenglen, she preferred to practice with men. She prepared for her 1924 European trip by sparring with some of the best, including two-time national champion Bill Johnston. They peppered her with the hardest shots they could muster. She usually got them back, and she occasionally won practice sets, as well.

Only one woman in the 1920s could withstand the onslaught: Spanish star Lilí de Álvarez. Their 1927 Wimbledon final was a non-stop fireworks display. Bill Tilden thought he’d never seen women hit the ball so hard. Álvarez reached 4-all in the second set, when the contenders gutted out a 40-stroke rally. Both women doubled over, leaning on their rackets for support. Only Wills recovered. Álvarez didn’t win another point.

Most women never dreamed of making it to 4-all. Lenglen didn’t hit as hard, and she would sometimes toy with opponents to give the crowd a better show. Wills was all business. At the 1927 Wimbledon warm-up in Beckenham, she beat the South African Billie Tapscott in 18 minutes. She then disposed of Mallory in 23.

At a North American tournament the same year, she needed only 34 minutes to win the final against Helen Jacobs. It helped that she won the first 20 points in a row. I ran across one match report of a landslide that Wills polished off in 14 minutes.

John Tunis called Wills “a mechanical marvel reducing her adversaries to sawdust in as short a time as possible, asking no quarter and giving none.”

“To play Helen Wills,” wrote Jacobs, “was to play a machine.”

* * *

Jacobs knew that mechanics weren’t the whole story. In her chapter-length review of Wills’s career, she used the word “concentration” five times:

Helen Wills fought on the court much as Gene Tunney fought in the ring–with implacable concentration and undeniable skill, but without the color or imagination of a Dempsey or a Lenglen.

Her mantra on court was “every stroke, every stroke, every stroke.” After a bit of sociability early in her career, she rarely spoke to opponents. She smiled even less often.

“When she steps on a tennis court,” said her childhood coach William “Pop” Fuller, “all but the game ceases to exist.”

Ed Sullivan (yes, that Ed Sullivan) gave her a nickname in 1922: “Little Poker Face.”* It was later expanded to “Little Miss Poker Face.” She also gained another, less charitable moniker: “The Ice Queen.” Wills didn’t object. “I considered it a compliment because composure is the greatest asset you can have in sports,” she said in 1952. “If I hadn’t naturally possessed such intense concentration I would have tried to cultivate it.”

* The coinage is sometimes credited to Grantland Rice. I think Sullivan got there first. But Rice made all the same observations. 16-year-old Helen was “intensely serious, unemotional, stoical–not only for a girl of her age, but for a human being of any age.”

On the rare occasions that the forehand failed her, Wills’s concentration saw her through. In the 1930 Wightman Cup, she fell behind 5-0 to Phoebe Watson and came within two points of losing the set. She finally switched up her tactics, broke the Brit’s momentum, and won the match, 7-5, 6-1.

Many sportswriters pointed to the match as evidence that Helen was beatable. The players came to the opposite conclusion. No matter what you did, or how well you were playing, the Ice Queen had the answer.

* * *

Wills hadn’t always been so resilient. Her weakness, especially as a young player, was her movement. Danzig described the teenage Helen as a “statuesque, slow-moving base-liner.” He didn’t mean she looked like a statue–the point was that she moved like one.

It wasn’t usually a problem. Women’s tennis was almost entirely played from the baseline. Wills came forward twice in the 1924 Olympic final and was passed both times. Still, she won 6-2, 6-2.

One of the few women who could expose Helen’s subpar mobility was veteran doubles champion Elizabeth Ryan. Ryan’s game was built around chops–sliced balls that served as the perfect disguise for drop shots. In 1925, Wills arrived at the Forest Hills warmup in Seabright on an undefeated streak that stretched back more than a year. The 33-year-old Ryan took advantage of a soggy grass court and chopped her way to a 6-3, 6-3 upset.

In 1926, Helen came to Seabright on another winning streak, this one dating back to her loss to Lenglen in February. Ryan beat her again, this time allowing the national champion five games instead of six.

Little Miss Poker Face made some progress: Danzig called her a “pulsating antagonist of mobility” in 1927. But the real problem for Wills’s opponents was that she didn’t give them an opportunity to mix things up, whether that meant forcing Helen to cover the forecourt or attacking the net themselves.

Al Laney found Helen most interesting when she was not in top form. She could control a match despite barely moving from the middle of the baseline. “One often wondered why the silly girl did not make Miss Wills run,” he wrote, “until one realized that the silly girl had more than she could do merely knocking the ball down the center.”

* * *

One class of opponents could force her out of position and sometimes even defeat the queen: men.

This is the part of the Helen Wills story I find most compelling. It’s irrelevant to her status among the greats of women’s tennis. But a half-century before the Battle of the Sexes, Helen was practicing against men, playing exhibitions against them, and sometimes winning.

Lenglen had played practice matches with men in front of spectators as a teenager, but she increasingly shied away from the practice as she got older. She had an aura to protect. When a professional promoter suggested she play doubles on court with three men, she violently objected.

In the fall of 1926, Wills entered the men’s doubles tournament at her home club in Berkeley. She and Ward Dawson reached the final and served for the match before losing narrowly to Bud Chandler and Tom Stow.* The newspapers blamed the loss on Dawson.

* A future mentor and coach, respectively, of Don Budge.

One anonymous contemporary told Helen’s biographer, Larry Engelmann, that “the only men Helen Wills ever beat in a tennis match were real gentlemen.”

Phil Neer, an NCAA champion and frequent exhibition partner, insisted he played at full strength against Helen. Sometimes he won; often he lost.

The most tantalizing results are those from a pair of practice matches between Wills and Fritz Mercur in 1929. Mercur was good enough to have beaten Bill Tilden the year before. The first time they played, Helen won two sets. After word got around, they played again, and presumably the reputational stakes were a bit higher for Fritz this time. He took two sets from Wills. They played a third, in which Mercur wasn’t allowed to come to net. Helen won that one.

* * *

Wills was able to play those matches against men thanks to a no-nonsense attitude that couldn’t have differed more from Lenglen’s. She wasn’t worried about losing the public’s affection just because an exhibition match went sideways.

That isn’t to say Helen wasn’t famous. At first, she gained from Suzanne’s global reputation: Wills was the home-grown contender for the world crown, the Girl From the Golden West. Her simplicity and her shyness worked in her favor. Stories comparing the two wrote themselves: Lenglen was a leading member of the demi-monde; Helen was in bed every night by ten.

When Suzanne left the scene and Wills won at Wimbledon–and then again, and again–Helen was promoted even further. She became the American Girl.

The public marveled at her beauty. Female athletes were usually–at least in the conventional view–women who didn’t have what it took for other pursuits. The educated, classically beautiful Wills busted the stereotype. Her picture appeared in every newspaper, and sportswriters pointed out that she was even more striking in person. Her workaday tennis visor sparked a fashion trend. Artists from Alexander Calder to Diego Rivera found her an inspiration.

“All the males of America from six to sixty,” wrote one editorialist in 1927, “are a little in love with her.”

The American Girl was compelling enough that no one minded her ruthless domination of the game. After Ryan beat her in 1926, she dropped a decision to Mallory the following week. And that was it. She didn’t lose again for seven years.

* * *

Seven undefeated years. Even that doesn’t quite cover it. She lost a set in her opening match at the All-England Club in 1927. She didn’t lose another until the Wimbledon final in 1933.

Queen Helen took the “triple crown”–titles at the French, Wimbledon, and Forest Hills–in both 1928 and 1929. Had she been coaxed to play in Australia, she surely would’ve won there as well.

She had no rivals. There was only Helen Jacobs, the number two American. It was almost as good a story as Wills and Lenglen: The two women grew up on the same street and went to the same schools. But the results between Helen I and Helen II fell flat. When Wills–she became Mrs. Frederick Moody in 1929–won the 1932 Wimbledon title, 6-3, 6-1, she improved her career record against her townswoman to 9-0.

Only age and injury slowed her down. Dorothy Round gave Mrs. Moody her hardest fight in years at Wimbledon in 1933, successfully moving her around as women had so long tried and failed to do. Back in the States, she skipped the Wightman Cup with leg pain. She retired from the US national final with back troubles.

The 1933 Forest Hills title match was an enormous controversy at the time. You can still rile up your neighborhood tennis historian if you pick the wrong side. Wills Moody quit down 0-3 in the third set, showing no sign of physical illness. Did she do it just to deprive Jacobs of a proper victory? The Helens didn’t like each other, though the diplomatic Jacobs called it “incompatibility,” not a “feud.”

* I go into more detail in my Jacobs essay. It was a feud, at least in one direction.

Whatever was going through the Ice Queen’s head that day, her dominance of Helen II was over. Two astonishing winning streaks–180 matches, 45 at Forest Hills–were at an end.

* * *

Helen Wills Moody had always played down tennis’s role in her life. She skipped major events to attend classes, or just because she wearied of the travel. She would tell friends she went an entire winter without picking up a racket.

In reality, she maintained a rigorous practice schedule. She kept to a simple, steady diet. She didn’t go to parties until after she retired. She might not have smiled much, but she loved the game, and her position at the pinnacle of the sport was important to her.

She missed the entire 1934 season as she recovered from the injuries that compromised her play the previous year. In 1935, she went to England and lost in Beckenham to the British left-hander, Kay Stammers.

“She is not as great as she once was,” wrote the New York Times. “She is not as quick getting to the ball and shows signs of tiring more easily.”

Helen’s groundstrokes, however, remained fearsome. Her mind was as strong as ever. She held off a match point to defeat Jacobs in the Wimbledon final for her seventh singles title at the Championships.

Wills came back once more in 1938. (She divorced in 1937 and reverted to her maiden name.) The field finally believed she was beatable. Alice Marble even went so far as to say that the Ice Queen was no longer the best player in the world, though she didn’t specify who replaced her. Mary Hardwick and Hilde Sperling both scored upsets in the weeks before Wimbledon.

But once again, the American Girl proved equal to everything Wimbledon could throw at her. Sperling pushed her to 12-10, 6-4 in the semis, and she met Jacobs in the final. It was another hard-fought battle, but only for eight games. Jacobs hurt her ankle, and Wills ran out a 6-4, 6-0 victory.

She left the gallery at the All-England Club with a familiar impression: the eight-time champion holding the winner’s trophy. But for me, the emblematic image of Wills’s career came seven years earlier, in 1931. She coasted to her seventh and last US national title with a 34-minute defeat of British star Eileen Bennett Whittingstall. Helen won 6-4, 6-1.

Near the end of the match, a courtside spectator noticed two drops of sweat on her forehead. Little Miss Poker Face could’ve worked harder; occasionally she did. But on a day like that, against yet another inferior opponent–why bother?

* * *

Previous: No. 11, Monica Seles

Next: No. 9, Chris Evert

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I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Hope I didn’t forget anybody…

* * *

Monica Seles [YUG/USA]
Born: 2 December 1973
Career: 1989-2003
Plays: Left-handed (two-handed forehand and backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1991)
Peak Elo rating: 2,563 (1st place, 1993)
Major singles titles: 9
Total singles titles: 53
 

* * *

You know the story. You also know it’s where I have to start.

By the time Monica Seles turned 19 years old, she had cemented her status as the best player in the world. She won the 1993 Australian Open, her seventh title of the last eight majors she entered. At the 1992 season-ending Virginia Slims Championships, she straight-setted Martina Navratilova in the final.

“At her best,” said Martina, “she’s as good as anybody I’ve played in twenty years.”

Three tournaments into her 1993 season, Seles was laid low by a viral infection. She missed two months, spending much of that time in bed. She returned to the tour at the Citizen Cup in Hamburg. She showed little sign of any lingering illness, smiling and cruising through the early rounds as usual.

Then, during a changeover in her quarter-final against Magdalena Maleeva, Seles was attacked by a knife-wielding fan. The physical wounds proved to be minor; the mental toll was enormous. The attacker was an unstable Steffi Graf supporter who wanted the German to return to the top of the rankings. By terrorizing Monica into isolation, he got his wish.

Seles didn’t return to the tour for 27 months. She had her share of success when she did, reaching the final of the 1995 US Open and picking up the Australian title–her ninth career slam–in 1996. But she was never fully the same. Struggling with her weight, coping with injuries, haunted by the nightmare in Hamburg, she was unable to recapture the single-minded fearlessness that defined her teen years.

Along with Maureen Connolly, another all-timer whose career was stunted at 19, Seles is one of the game’s great what-ifs. We can only imagine how long she would’ve remained number one, how many slams she would’ve amassed.

But because Monica went to play eight post-comeback seasons, many fans think of her career as just a missed opportunity. Let me be absolutely clear about this: She’s the eleventh greatest tennis player of the last hundred years entirely because of what she did accomplish on court. There’s no adjustment for her time on the sidelines, however much she might deserve it.

Even before the attack, much of Seles’s press coverage centered on things other than her knack for blasting winners past helpless opponents. When reporters weren’t mocking the teen-inflected English she picked up as her third language, they wrote at great length about her grunt. Maybe the media would’ve moved on even without a brutal assault to change the narrative; we’ll never know.

Monica said later, “I don’t wish to be remembered as the ‘grunter’ or ‘giggler’ or even as the girl who got stabbed.” Those wishes will always be denied her, but we could at least do her the service of putting the spotlight back on the early 1990s, when she played some of the greatest tennis the world had ever seen.

* * *

Seles defied comparison. If you insisted on explaining her in terms of her contemporaries on the WTA tour, you’d fail.

Her on-court grittiness was pure Jimmy Connors. Her regular-person physique evoked the unexpected athletic exploits of John McEnroe. Her hit-or-miss attempts at glamour and mystery made her the sport’s equivalent of Madonna.

The devastating double-handed groundstrokes were entirely original. You could point to Pancho Segura’s two-handed forehand bludgeon, but even Segura paired his primary weapon with a standard one-handed backhand. Monica didn’t change her grip at all. That was an unorthodox choice for a reason: It gave her less reach. She had to run that much more. The overall effect was that of a hyperactive squirrel occasionally stopping to hurl a grenade.

A typically unrestrained Seles forehand, at Wimbledon in 1990

Seles had her detractors. Many fans were put off by her grunting. Graf was an established champion with a substantial following; anyone who came along to dethrone her was bound to face an uphill battle to win the public’s affection. The tennis world is always clamoring for fresh new stars, but it has a tendency to harshly judge teenagers who don’t fit a narrow vision of how an up-and-comer ought to look and act.

One of the few tennis lifers who understood Monica from the get-go was Ted Tinling. The bald, six-foot, four-inch Tinling had been the unlikely face of women’s tennis for decades, most notably as a dress designer to the stars.

Tinling got his start in the 1920s as a teenager on the French Riviera, where he became Suzanne Lenglen’s personal umpire. He spent the rest of his life looking for–and trying to help bring about–an icon to equal La belle Suzanne. Three days before his death, he wrote to journalist John Feinstein:

She’s Doris Day. My God, she’s a normal person, the first one we’ve had in years. We’ve had the awkwardness of [Margaret] Court; the bitchiness of Billie Jean; the brown sugar of Chrissie; the butchness of Martina and the manic shyness of Graf. Now we shall have Seles and she will be wonderful.

On another occasion, he said simply, “Monica is the one.”

* * *

Many of Seles’s opponents did not find her wonderful. At Wimbledon in 1990, she beat 98th-ranked Ann Henricksson, 6-1, 6-0, in 39 minutes.

“I think I can play a lot better,” said Seles. “What I would like to do is beat everybody in 30 minutes. Then I would be satisfied, I think.”

Her confidence was well-deserved. Henricksson marked Monica’s 36th straight victory, a streak that spanned seven tournaments, five countries, and three surfaces. She won the first 26 matches of the streak without dropping a single set. She dropped a bagel on Conchita Martínez. On clay. Twice.

Playing for the title in Rome, Seles beat Navratilova, 6-1, 6-1. “It was like being run over by a truck,” said Martina.

The streak included a title at Roland Garros, making Seles the youngest major champion since Lottie Dod in 1887. After she upset Graf in the final, the deposed champion said, “Seles isn’t a nightmare yet. I hope she isn’t going to become one.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYhZ5MO8TRI

But she was already in Steffi’s head. After Monica beat her in Berlin, Graf could be seen on the French Open practice courts tinkering with a two-handed backhand. In the Roland Garros final, Graf took a 5-0 lead in the first set tiebreak, then earned four set points at 6-2. Seles won the next six points to steal the set. It was tough to say what best exemplified the new state of affairs: Steffi’s double fault on her fourth set point, or Monica’s down-the-line winner on her first.

When she wasn’t giggling through a post-match interview, Seles made it easy to forget just how young she was. She won the 1990 French Open six months after her 16th birthday. In less than two years, she had sprouted up five inches. Suddenly the racket felt lighter and the net looked lower.

Monica finished her season with a victory at the Virginia Slims Championships. The final was best-of-five, and she and Gabriela Sabatini went the distance. Sabatini led two sets to one when Seles ratcheted her game to an unimaginable level. Monica hit 28 winners against only six unforced errors in the final two sets to roar back to victory.

Sabatini hadn’t faced her in more than two years, since before the growth spurt. “I was surprised at the way she hit the ball,” the veteran said. “She hits the ball very, very hard.”

* * *

In 1991, Seles won ten tournaments, including three of the four majors. (She skipped Wimbledon with shin splints.) She lost only six matches, all of them finals. Her prize money haul reached $2.45 million, a single-season record.

In March, she grabbed the number one ranking from Graf. Except for four weeks in August and September, she wouldn’t give it back for two years. Her Elo rating at the end of the season–2,459–was the third-highest mark in women’s tennis history to that point, behind only the peaks of Navratilova and Graf.

Graf had held the top spot on the WTA computer for a record 186 consecutive weeks, largely on the strength of a single shot that earned her the nickname Fräulein Forehand. Seles’s ground game was better.

“It’s Steffi’s forehand off both sides,” said Chris Evert. Players debated which side was weaker, then tried exploiting one or the other. Then they lost.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0Eg53SElME

“About the only things Seles didn’t win,” according to Sports Illustrated, “were many hearts or minds.” Monica had gone incommunicado for weeks when she missed Wimbledon, then returned to action only to play an exhibition. She still grunted, and a typical teenage identity crisis left plenty to criticize. For months, it seemed as though she showed up for every match with a new haircut.

Veteran players, on the other hand, saw what Seles was doing right. Pam Shriver and Zina Garrison noticed that she was everything a tour could expect its leading light to be. “She’s not only outgoing, she’s approachable,” said Shriver. “Seles is exactly what we’ve been missing on the tour,” Garrison added.

And thanks to her few encounters with Tinling, Monica maintained a particularly un-teen-like interest in the game’s history. She read the complete works of Billie Jean King, and she spoke often of Lenglen as an inspiration.

A decade later, scribes would attribute Seles’s popularity to her resilience. Her struggles–the stabbing, her father’s death in 1998, her weight–made her unusually relatable for an elite athlete. But Tinling was right: Even as a sometimes kooky teen, she was a normal person. The public would have come around soon, even without the kick-start of tragedy.

* * *

1992: Another 70 match wins, another three majors. Ho-hum.

Seles won her third straight French Open, the first time a woman took three straight since Hilde Sperling did it in the 1930s. This one wasn’t easy: Graf pushed her to 6-2, 3-6, 10-8 and saved five match points.

All those 6-1, 6-0 victories made it easy to forget Monica’s resolve when things got tight. Journalist Christopher Clarey once said, “The two greatest competitors I’ve ever seen in any sport: Michael Jordan and Monica Seles.”

The one blot on Seles’s 1992 season was the Wimbledon final, where she managed only three games against Steffi. The fracas over her grunting reached a new level: One London tabloid set up a “gruntometer” at her matches. In the semi-finals, Navratilova complained to the umpire, “She sounds like a stuck pig!”

Monica, like nearly all grunters before and since, didn’t do it on purpose. “I hate it,” she said. “I can’t help it.” After decades of petty, often sexist blather, we now know that grunting helps players hit harder. These days, more players grunt on every ball, and few of them would ever think to apologize for it.

But Seles reached her limit. She tried to stop on the sport’s biggest stage. “Without grunting,” wrote Curry Kirkpatrick, “she had no bounce, no pace on her shots. Without grunting, she was Rapunzel without the hair, Streisand without the nose.”

Seles and Graf met only one more time before Seles was attacked. In their final-round rematch at the 1993 Australian Open, Monica re-engaged her vocal cords and won in three.

* * *

When Seles returned to the tour after 27 months away, she immediately gave a glimpse of what the tour had missed. At her first tournament back, in Toronto, she lost only 14 games in five matches.

When she won the Australian Open a few months later, her fellow champion Boris Becker said, “What she’s achieving right now is one of the amazing comebacks of all time.” She’d reach four major finals and another four semis in her second act. She remained in the top ten almost continuously until 2003.

More impressive than anything she achieved on court, she overcame the demons of that day in Hamburg. There was more than a little reclusiveness in the Seles family DNA. Her grandfather, Jakab, was tormented as a conscientious objector during World War I. Her father never forgot watching countrymen deported during the second continental conflagration. In Florida, the family chose to live at the end of a dead-end road in a gated community. Seles made hardly any public appearances in the two years after Hamburg.

Yet Monica, finally, went a different way. “As an athlete you have a choice to be as open or closed as you want,” she said in 2009. “I made a choice to be open.”

It is tempting to speculate just what Seles would have accomplished had her career gone on uninterrupted. She could have won 15 majors, perhaps 20, maybe even a record-setting 25. In that scenario, it’s hard to imagine her failing to win Wimbledon–the one trophy, she said in 1991, “missing from my collection.”

The hypothetical I find more thought-provoking is this: Ten majors or thirty, how long would it have taken before Seles became a truly beloved number one? Every year, more fans recognized in her what Ted Tinling saw so readily. At least we got a sort of answer to that question. Post-comeback, her popularity soared even as she struggled to remain in the top five.

We certainly can’t reach any conclusions by making comparisons with other players. Monica was one of a kind. Tinling had to wait sixty years for another Lenglen. We’d be lucky to get another Seles so soon.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Hope I didn’t forget anybody…

* * *

Björn Borg [SWE]
Born: 6 June 1956
Career: 1972-81
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1977)
Peak Elo rating: 2,473 (1st place, 1980)
Major singles titles: 11
Total singles titles: 66
 

* * *

The tennis boom of the 1970s had many origins. Open tennis revitalized the sport, pitting amateur stars like Arthur Ashe against living legends such as Rod Laver and Richard González. Television discovered tennis in a big way, putting high-profile matches in prime time slots. Billie Jean King made the sport as popular among women as it was among men.

Also: Björn Borg was really, ridiculously good looking.

Tennis has always had its leading men. Even before the freewheeling 1960s, those men rarely had to look far to find adoring female fans. Borg took things to a new level. When his blue eyes and long blond hair touched down at Wimbledon, it was the athletic equivalent of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Before he was the Viking God, he was the Teen Angel.

Within a few years, the Swede transcended tennis entirely. “He was bigger than the game,” said Ashe. “He was like Elvis or Liz Taylor or somebody.”

Ironically, the ultimate celebrity product of the Open era–a man who could win Wimbledon every year while still earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money–still found a way to butt heads with the establishment. The World Championship Tennis (WCT) circuit, like the modern-day ATP, tried to prevent its stars from playing lucrative exhibitions that conflicted with its own events. Borg, as much as any other player in those superagent-driven years, chased the money, lawsuits be damned. In 1976, he sprinkled his season with a whopping 28 exhibition matches.

While Borg was never going to last into his thirties, his differences with the powers that be hastened his departure from the game. “Every tournament I was playing in 1981,” he later said, “I didn’t care.” He still considered taking on a limited schedule in 1982. But a new rule stipulated that he needed to commit to at least ten events. Unwilling to cave, the reigning French Open champion was forced into the odd course of playing qualifying rounds at his home tournament in Monte Carlo.

That was his last sanctioned event of the season. Instead of Roland Garros and Wimbledon, the Swede played more than 30 exhibition matches around the globe in 1982. The results didn’t matter–Vitas Gerulaitis finally beat him, something the American had rarely managed even in practice–but he was no longer playing for glory.

Back in 1974, Laver got his first good look at the intensity that Borg brought to every point of every match that the 17-year-old played. “If you play this hard,” warned the Rocket, “your mind will be drained, you’ll burn out in seven years.”

Laver was right. But oh, what a seven years it was!

* * *

Sweden didn’t need Björn Borg to put it on the international tennis map. Sven Davidson won the French Championships in 1957, and a group led by the stylish Jan-Erik Lundqvist went deep in the European Davis Cup competition throughout the early 1960s. The country even had a “Little Wimbledon” in the resort town of Båstad.

Nonetheless, it would always seem that Borg had come out of nowhere. His two-handed backhand didn’t owe a thing to Davidson or Lundqvist. His first coach, Percy Rosberg, was skeptical of a game built on topspin.

“Snow will stick to the ball up there,” Rosberg would say as he chased down yet another looping forehand.

The young man hit hard, and Rosberg wasn’t the only one who spotted something fearsome in his eyes. He would practice until he was ordered off the court. It never occurred to him to balance tennis with other pursuits; he ignored his schoolwork until his athletic schedule finally demanded that he drop out entirely.

Borg with coach, manager, and Davis Cup captain Lennart Bergelin after securing the 1975 Davis Cup for Sweden

In 1972, the 15-year-old played his first Davis Cup rubber, defeating Onny Parun of New Zealand in five sets. A year later, he made the final at Monte Carlo and reached the quarter-finals at boycott-weakened Wimbledon, where he took Roger Taylor to five sets. In Stockholm that November, he beat both Ilie Năstase and Jimmy Connors to reach another final. American Tom Gorman needed a third-set tiebreak to finally stop him.

Borg signed with the WCT circuit in 1974. In four months, he won two titles, beat Laver and Ashe, and reached the title match of the WCT Finals in May. British player Mark Cox, one of his many victims, summarized the early Borg game:

[I]t’s very difficult to get on him because he keeps coming at you, putting on the pressure, and you can’t get any rhythm. Of course, he still doesn’t think; he is smacking, smacking the ball always. He plays with a total lack of inhibition, strictly on talent and inspiration, and it’s enough.

The Swede didn’t need to be a tactical genius to win matches. Still, Cox was not the last opponent to underestimate Borg’s savvy. Some men had a sense of when it was time to switch to Plan B. Björn’s Plan A was so strong that he needed only to recognize he ought to stick with it. In the 1974 French Open final, he dropped the first two sets to Spanish veteran Manuel Orantes. Other tyros would have changed things up–or simply accepted their fate. Borg noticed that Orantes looked exhausted, and stuck with the game that put him the 0-2 hole. He won the remaining three sets, 6-0, 6-1, 6-1.

* * *

Borg didn’t need much in the way of tactics to win on clay. His topspin overwhelmed everyone except for Guillermo Vilas, and in a long match, Vilas wasn’t strong enough to hang with the hyper-fit champion.

Only one man, Adriano Panatta, would ever beat Björn at Roland Garros. Borg ultimately picked up six French titles, one of his many records that would appear untouchable until Rafael Nadal knocked them down. In 1978 and 1980, Borg didn’t lose a single set in Paris. In those fourteen matches, only the big-serving Roscoe Tanner even took him to a tiebreak.

After losing to Connors at the 1976 US Open, the Swede won 99 consecutive completed matches on clay. He didn’t lose again on dirt for nearly four years.

On grass, the game seemed almost as simple. It just took Borg a bit more time to learn it. He showed up for Wimbledon in 1976 with a new and improved attacking game. “I volley big and tough now,” he said. He didn’t lose a set at the All-England Club that year. He destroyed Vilas in the quarters, out-blasted Tanner in the semis, and brushed past Năstase in the final. Against the Romanian, he came in behind every one of his first serves. He won more than 70% of them.

“They should send Borg away to another planet,” said Năstase. “We play tennis. He plays something else.”

Borg never mastered the Wimbledon grass to the degree he conquered clay. But that’s a bit like saying Rembrandt painted better than he drew. Björn didn’t lose another match at the Championships until 1981, when John McEnroe beat him in the final.

In the interim, he played a stunning pair of five-setters to win the 1977 title. Before outlasting Connors in the final, he was pushed to 8-6 in the fifth by Gerulaitis in the semis. Commentator Dan Maskell considered the semi-final to be the best match he’d seen in fifty years at Wimbledon. That judgment lasted all of three years, until Borg came out on top of another epic.

In the 1980 final, McEnroe saved seven match points and won a fourth-set tiebreak, 18-16, that stands alone as the sport’s greatest ever. The Swede withstood the American at his explosive best, holding off still more break points for a fifth-set advantage. After three hours and 53 minutes, he took another 8-6 deciding set, his fifth consecutive Wimbledon title, and his third straight French-Wimbledon double.

* * *

You might have noticed a thread running through these highlights. When Borg wasn’t plowing through the field, dropping a handful of games per match, he played his share of fifth sets. Even though there’s some selection bias in the ones I’ve mentioned, he was stunning at the end of marathon matches.

The Swedish ironman won five-set finals to secure the 1974 French title, as well as Wimbledon in 1977, 1979, and 1980. He endured another against Ivan Lendl to win at Roland Garros in 1981, then went five to hold off Connors in the Wimbledon semis. And that was the year he didn’t care.

All told, Borg won 26 of his 32 career five-set matches. He somehow arrived on tour with the mental equipment to go the distance: He won 11 of his first 12, all before his 19th birthday. Losing two in a row didn’t faze him, either. He bounced back to beat his idol, Laver, in a crucial match at the 1975 WCT finals. He reeled off another 12 in a row*–a streak that spanned more than four years–before McEnroe finally stopped him in the 1980 US Open final.

* One contemporary report claims that he won 13 straight five-setters. It’s possible I’m missing one.

The US Open was the only tournament where Borg dropped more than one fifth set. Giant-killer Vijay Amritraj ousted him in 1974, and McEnroe beat him for the title in 1980. The Swede never did win the title in Flushing. When he lost to Amritraj, he could blame the surface–the Open was still held on grass. From 1978, he could once again point to the conditions: speedy new DecoTurf hard courts.

But for three years in between, the US Open was played on clay. Ersatz Har-Tru dirt, yes, but Björn had won plenty on that, too. Instead of cleaning up, he lost to Connors in 1975 and 1976, then exited with an injury in 1977. By 1980, when Borg finally won a high-profile event at Madison Square Garden, his struggles in the Big Apple had long looked like a jinx.

It’s important to keep some perspective here. The Swede did reach four finals in six years. For the man who won 11 of the 18 majors he entered outside the United States, though, it is a conspicuous oh-fer. Some of the blame goes to Connors and McEnroe, who played great tennis at their home event. Also, by September each year, Borg had usually picked up an injury or two. Borg and McEnroe had entered the 1980 edition with so many health complaints that Connors described the final as “two gimps battling it out.”

Björn’s main problem with the US Open, I suspect, was the same thing that had handicapped nervy players in New York for decades. It has always been the in-your-face slam, the event where it’s impossible to hide from the press, the crowds, the big city. Borg, the prime idol of them all, knew how to hide in Europe. Before Wimbledon each year, he went through a carefully choreographed fortnight of preparation, rarely stepping out of his hotel room for anything other than a practice session. In New York, he couldn’t control his surroundings to the same extent.

He would have figured it out eventually, just as his finicky rival Lendl did. But as he would increasingly ask himself: Why bother?

* * *

It’s no wonder that by 1981, Borg didn’t care. His near-decade of top-level tennis was as intense as anything a player had ever sustained for such a long period of time. The pre-Open era pros might have worked harder for a year or two at a time, but aside from Laver, González, and Ken Rosewall, they remained at the top for only a short time.

By the standards of the all-time greats, the Swede’s career was indeed short. Bill Tilden played competitively for his entire life. Most of the handful of champions who piled up more slams than Borg did–the Big Three, Navratilova, Serena, and so on–spent twice as long on tour.

But we need to keep “short” in perspective. Borg was both a global heartthrob and a single athletic focal point in his native Sweden. Every move he made was tracked, speculated upon, and blown wildly out of proportion by tabloids all across Europe.

When Borg first announced his retirement, he had been on tour for about nine years. The Beatles–perhaps a better measuring stick than any mere sporting idol–lasted only eight.

Though Björn faded from view–sort of, as he attempted various comebacks and played a steady stream of exhibitions–his playing style did not. When he was a teenager, his two-handed backhand was barely more than a novelty. A decade later, he, Connors, and Chris Evert had made it the standard option for baseliners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmOqrbSlGKs

Borg arrived on tour as one of the fittest guys around, the player willing to practice more than anyone else. By the time he quit, Vilas was suffering through even more brutal sessions, and Lendl was organizing his life around tennis with a single-mindedness that surpassed the Swede’s.

That level of intensity, on and off the court, would eventually come to define men’s tennis. As late as the Pete Sampras era, top players would talk about coasting on some points to save energy for others. You don’t hear that much anymore. No one presaged the first-ball-to-last-ball pressure of Rafael Nadal–or David Ferrer for that matter–more than Borg.

In 1983, Vitas Gerulaitis lamented the increasing homogeneity of the tour. “In five years tennis is going to be very boring,” he told journalist Michael Mewshaw. “We’ll have a draw with 128 Borgs.”

I’m not sure what Vitas would think of the game in 2022. There is certainly less variety than there was back when he was challenging the original Big Three of Borg, McEnroe, and Connors. The preferred tactics these days are absolutely more Björn than Johnny Mac. The standard of play–especially among the rank and file–has risen enormously as well. Even the men who skimp on topspin or cling to a one-handed backhand have, in their match preparation and their on-court demeanor, become more like the Swede.

A draw of 128 Borgs? We’re not quite there yet, but Björn, more than any player of his era, offered a glimpse of the future.