Author: jsackmann

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.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. It’s like an advent calendar, only I keep the chocolate.

* * *

John McEnroe [USA]
Born: 16 February 1959
Career: 1977-92
Plays: Left-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1980)
Peak Elo rating: 2,442 (1st place, 1985)
Major singles titles: 7
Total singles titles: 77
 

* * *

After the initial tennis boom of the 1970s subsided, Americans slid into the more sedate pastime of psychoanalyzing John McEnroe. Jimmy Connors and Ilie Năstase were easy enough to understand. To varying degrees, they were crude, showboating clowns with hair-trigger tempers.

McEnroe was something different.

The slim, pasty left-hander hardly looked like a world-class athlete, but he was undeniably gifted. He qualified and reached the semi-final at Wimbledon on his first try, in 1977. Just as quickly, he alienated stiff-upper-lip Brits along with tennis traditionalists worldwide. No mistake escaped his notice. He permitted himself no margin for error, and he treated others the same way. He never stopped to think before giving line judges–and chair umpires, and referees, and photographers, and reporters, and the occasional spectator–an often-profane piece of his mind.

London tabloids dubbed him “SuperBrat” and “McNasty.” The public leaned toward disapproval, but they didn’t dare look away.

Ion Țiriac, the coach and manager who handled Năstase, Guillermo Vilas, and Boris Becker, explained his appeal a decade later: “Half come to see him win. Half come to see him lose. Half come to see what happens.”

Everyone had a theory. McEnroe was spoiled. He was a typical New Yorker. He was standard-issue Irish. He didn’t care enough about tennis. He cared too much about winning. He got so bored that he manufactured controversy. He was the master gamesman. His outbursts were completely beyond his control.

Arthur Ashe knew the youngster as both opponent and Davis Cup captain. He took a stab at it: “He’s not that hard to understand. He’s just like any other twenty-three-year-old millionaire college dropout.”

Richard Evans took the opposite tack. Evans, a British journalist, ultimately wrote not one but two McEnroe biographies. The subtitle of the first, A Rage For Perfection, gives you an idea of how he assessed the champion in 1982. Eight years later, Evans came to this conclusion:

McEnroe is, above all, a complicated man–complicated to a degree far in excess of the public’s comprehension of just how complicated a human being can be.

Dear me. I’ll defer to Evans on that one.

Fortunately, McEnroe’s exploits between the white lines weren’t quite so inscrutable. He did things with a tennis racket that other men could barely imagine. His emotional instability was tied up with a belief–an expectation, even–that he could play perfect tennis. More than almost anyone before or since, he very nearly did.

* * *

It would be years before McEnroe could sustain a months-long stretch of perfection. But even in his teens, it was clear what he was capable of.

In 1978, while he lost early at Wimbledon, he reached the US Open semi-finals, where he lost to Connors. Then McEnroe went on a 38-3 tear, picking up titles in Hartford, San Francisco, Stockholm, and Wembley, then securing the Davis Cup final for the Americans.

The won-loss record made an impression, but what really woke up the tennis establishment was the way he played on his best days. The young man they called “Junior”–his father, also called John, frequently traveled with him–deferred to no one.

In Stockholm, McEnroe dealt Björn Borg his first-ever loss to a younger player. He barely broke a sweat. Borg lost 6-3, 6-4, and managed just seven points on McEnroe’s serve. The newcomer wielded an unreadable array of serves, acrobatic reach at the net, and tactical savvy beyond his years. When he wasn’t rushing the net, he neutralized Borg with easy “nothing” balls that negated the champion’s own ability to attack.

In the Davis Cup final, Junior conceded just ten games in six sets against Brits John Lloyd and Buster Mottram. “I have never played anybody, including Borg and Connors, who has been as tough and made me play so many shots,” said Lloyd. “No one has ever made me look like that much of an idiot.”

McEnroe thought he could’ve played better.

He finished the year ranked fourth on the ATP computer. Connors, whose lefty forehand erased some of the advantage of Junior’s slice serve, still had his number. Borg, no matter the result in Stockholm, held two of the four majors.

But the writing was on the wall. “Right now,” Ashe said after the Davis Cup final, “McEnroe is the best player in the world.”

* * *

A few months into the 1979 campaign, Borg was almost ready to concede as much. At the World Championship Tennis (WCT) finals in May, Junior beat Connors in straight sets, then upset Borg in four.

“I felt slow and always too late,” Borg said after the match. “When you play John you have to be absolutely on top of your game, or you lose immediately.”

Connors was no longer able to meet that standard. Jimbo won six of the first seven meetings between the two explosive Americans, but beginning with the 1979 WCT encounter, McEnroe won 19 of 27. Connors would always have it in him to deliver a memorable performance, as he did to take the 1982 Wimbledon title. But Mac was now the man.

At the US Open, Borg lost early, and McEnroe claimed his first major championship. He defeated Connors in the semis and Vitas Gerulaitis in the final, dropping only one set–to Năstase in the second round–the whole tournament.

It was his eighth tournament victory of the season, but his public image remained more bad-boy than champion. Gerulaitis summed up how the New York crowd viewed its two native sons: “Popularity-wise, I’m a notch above John, and John is a notch above Son of Sam.”

Had a couple of linesmen turned up dead, the authorities probably would have questioned McEnroe first.

Junior would take a major step toward salvaging his reputation with a heroic performance at Wimbledon the next year. At the site of his 1977 breakthrough, he met Connors again in the 1980 semi-finals. This time, the younger man won in four sets and advanced to a final-round meeting with Borg.

The result was one of the most captivating matches in tennis history. Junior was on his best behavior–he never did act out when he shared the court with the stoic Swede–but the contrast remained striking. The steady game of the champion and the electric shotmaking of the challenger had never been so evenly matched.

Borg had a chance to finish the job in the fourth set–seven match points, in fact. But it was not that the Swede failed at the critical moment, it was McEnroe who rose to the occasion. The American took the fourth set in a 34-point tiebreak so thrilling that dozens of fans back in Sweden died of heart failure.* Borg regrouped to win the match, 8-6 in the fifth, but if ever two men walked off Centre Court as co-champions, it was on that day.

* This feels like it must be apocryphal. I hope it’s apocryphal. But I tracked down a newspaper mention of the statistic as far back as 1982. So, um, be careful out there.

Johnny Mac’s home crowd still wasn’t quite persuaded to back the American. He heard his usual share of jeers as he turned the tables on Borg to win a five-set final at Flushing Meadow. He said, “I figure I’m about ten Wimbledon finals exactly like the last one away from getting those people on my side.”

* * *

McEnroe first claimed the number one ranking in March of 1980, four months before the Wimbledon final and more than a year after Ashe first proclaimed him the best in the world. He wouldn’t hold on: He’d swap places with Borg six times in a year and ultimately gain and lose the top spot on 14 separate occasions.

But in 1981, Junior left little doubt he was the king of men’s tennis. He beat Borg for both the Wimbledon and US Open titles. The 1980 Wimbledon final may have felt like a turning point, but I don’t think anyone walked away from that match believing it heralded the Swede’s almost immediate demise. In the event, McEnroe grabbed the reins, and Borg tumbled into a premature retirement.

Sports Illustrated offered a new reason for US fans to root against their champion: “McEnroe is getting so good he’s taking all the fun out of things.”

(J-Mac: “Fun? I enjoy the competition. But I was brought up to be very serious on the court, and I just can’t be what you call a crowd-pleaser.”)

Even more fun left the building in 1982, something of an off-year for the American. Ivan Lendl took Borg’s place as the top European, and he offered an even more dramatic contrast with McEnroe. His strokes were as robotic as Mac’s were natural, and he practiced more in a day than Junior did most weeks. The Czech beat McEnroe four times in four meetings, including a straight-set US Open semi-final.

Yet John, once again, proved himself capable of perfection. He won his last 24 matches of the season, running off four titles and finishing a perfect eight-for-eight Davis Cup singles campaign. Back in July, he had outlasted Mats Wilander in a record-setting six-hour duel just to reach the Davis Cup semis.

If there was anything that would earn McEnroe the adulation of fickle tennis fans, it was his undisguised passion for team play. One friend called him the best team player never to pursue a team sport. He was always available for Davis Cup, and with rare exceptions, he seemed to play even better with USA on his shirt.

Even apart from international competition, Junior was one hell of a teammate. Peter Fleming often said that the best doubles team of his era was “McEnroe and anyone.” Fleming, standing six-feet, five-inches with a serve to match, was being modest. The best team was McEnroe and Fleming. The pair won seven majors together along with dozens more titles between 1978 and 1986.

Much of the time, a doubles match for McEnroe was a lark, an ideal substitute for a boring practice session. But what fans rarely saw–and journalists even more rarely publicized–was that Mac was most dangerous on the doubles court after he had lost in singles. Unlike many of his peers and most of the superstars who followed him, he didn’t default to get an early start on the next event. He got serious.

McEnroe detractors lumped him in with everything they disliked about the modern game–money-grubbing primadonnas, you know the story. But while the volatile lefty could be a “maniac”–his word!–he didn’t share the other flaws. At Basel in 1978, he lost a tiring singles final to Vilas, injuring his elbow in the process. He took two aspirin, laid down for 20 minutes, and came back out to win the doubles title.

“The kid would have made a helluva player on the old pro tour,” said Jack Kramer, who generally reserved his praise for men no younger than Don Budge. “He’s got pride, he’s consistent, he plays hurt and he dislikes losing in front of anybody. I tell you what he is: The kid’s a throwback.”

* * *

In 1983, McEnroe pulled ahead of Lendl. In 1984, he gained the upper hand on everybody.

Junior delivered his most convincing defeat of Lendl to date in the 1983 Wimbledon semi-finals, then waltzed through the final against 91st-ranked Chris Lewis. In three sets, he lost only nine points on serve.

He went through the usual dramatics in the early rounds, throwing a racket, insulting an umpire, and prompting many of his fellow players to call for stricter enforcement against the champion. But no one could deny the quality of his play. Sports Illustrated put him on the cover–tagline, “Never Better”–and proposed that the only way Wimbledon could keep things interesting would be to create a new unisex bracket so that McEnroe could face the equally imperious women’s champ, Martina Navratilova.

In 1984, the entire tour was Chris Lewis. McEnroe posted one of the greatest seasons of all time. He went 82-3, winning Wimbledon, the US Open, and twelve more titles besides. At the All-England Club, he polished off Connors, 6-1, 6-1, 6-2. He committed only two unforced errors.

Two.

As staggering as the 82-3 mark sounds, even that doesn’t quite capture the duration of his peak form. First off, one of the three losses was a five-setter in the Roland Garros final. Any other season, and that would’ve counted as a shocking triumph for the fast-court specialist, even if the circumstances–he let the match slip away after he took the first two sets and picked a fight with a cameraman–hardly covered McEnroe in glory.

Second, he recovered from a painful finale to sustain his streak into 1985. For such a historic campaign, 1984 ended with a thud. McEnroe was kept out of the Wembley indoor event in November because he had drawn too many fines for bad behavior. (Ya think anybody would’ve beaten him there?) Then he took part in America’s embarrassing defeat to Sweden in the Davis Cup final. If Junior was typically a great man to have on the squad, he was hobbled in Gothenberg by the worst teammate of all: Connors. Neither man would’ve chosen the indoor clay surface of the tie. Jimbo lost badly, then McEnroe dropped the second rubber to Henrik Sundström–his third loss of the year. Mac and Fleming lost the doubles to Stefan Edberg and Anders Järryd to hand the Cup to the hosts.

No matter. McEnroe returned to action less than a month later, beating Järryd, Wilander, and Lendl for the Masters title. He won 22 in a row to start the season, good for a 15-month record of 104-3.

After defeating Connors in Chicago for his fifth title of 1985, McEnroe’s Elo rating–per my retrospective calculations–reached 2,442. That’s the third-highest mark of any Open era man, trailing only the very best form of Borg and Novak Djokovic.

Vic Braden analyzed John’s strokes and concluded, “[B]iomechanically he’s so perfect it looks like magic.”

McEnroe said in 1984, “I still think I can play better.”

* * *

Borg retired at the age of 26. McEnroe didn’t understand it at the time. Deprived of his greatest rival, he never quite forgave him for it.

But at the same age, similar pressures–family, celebrity, at least a touch of burnout–struck down the American. The 1984 US Open title would prove to be his last major championship. In 1985, he fell in the quarters at Wimbledon, then lost the Flushing final in straights to Lendl. He couldn’t derive the usual enjoyment from Davis Cup, since he wouldn’t sign a code of conduct that sponsors forced on the squad after the shambolic performance in Gothenburg.

At the Australian Open, McEnroe spent more energy arguing than attacking the net, and after a quarter-final loss to Slobodan Živojinović, his accumulated offenses triggered a 21-day suspension. The absence turned into seven months, as he stayed home with his bride-to-be, actress Tatum O’Neal, and the couple’s young son. He took another extended break after the 1987 US Open.

With seven majors and 170 weeks at number one, Junior had little to prove. Instead, he sought a healthier relationship with the game. “I don’t want to be like I used to be any more,” he told Richard Evans. “I have to learn to enjoy myself more and if that means I cannot be number one again, I am just going to have to accept that.”

Those of us who remember watching McEnroe in his final years can attest to fact that he never quite accepted it. But he did live with it. On any given day, he could summon the wizardry that conquered Borg, Connors, and the rest. A series of battles with Boris Becker were particularly memorable, even if they usually resulted in a victory for the German.

As it turned out, McEnroe the maniac couldn’t be separated from McEnroe the genius. Some players find they can’t sustain the demands of practice and preparation needed to stay at the top. Johnny Mac never bothered with that, so the fervor of an all-time great was channeled into mental and emotional turmoil.

Tennis fans still get glimpses of that intensity. McEnroe is ever-present, as a commentator, an exhibition star, a still-valuable brand endorser. He has given more thought to his psychological makeup than anyone else has, and he rarely gives a boring interview. As a result, we get a steady stream of documentaries and profiles of the former champ that, oddly enough, tend to focus on his failings.

There were plenty of those, to be sure. But it’s impossible to watch an early-1980s McEnroe match without recognizing that he was one of the most talented men ever to play the game. You can’t look at his career record and deny that he achieved as much as all but a handful of players in the game’s history. It’s illogical to cancel out the positives just because it was so easy to imagine him winning even more.

In 2002, McEnroe brought up an old saw: “As they say in sports, the older you get, the better you used to be.” It’s true of Borg, and Connors has done even better–the older he’s gotten, the nicer he used to be. Johnny Mac breaks the mold in the other direction, making sure every new generation of fans learns what was wrong with him.

Ease up, John. You cannot be serious.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. It’s like an advent calendar, only I keep the chocolate.

* * *

Suzanne Lenglen [FRA]
Born: 24 May 1899
Died: 4 July 1938
Career: 1912-27
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1921)
Major singles titles: 8 (4 World Hard Court titles)
Total singles titles: 83
 

* * *

Now we enter the realm of myth.

Back at the beginning of the Tennis 128 project, a friend encouraged me to mix in an April Fool’s essay. I immediately thought of the famous George Plimpton prank, “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch,” published by Sports Illustrated in 1985.

Finch was a Buddhist, french horn-playing baseball pitcher who could throw a fastball 168 miles per hour. The New York Mets brought him to Spring Training, where he fretted over his destiny and the potential injuries that his fireball might cause. There was no doubt he would succeed on the diamond. No one could see his pitches, let alone hit them. Of course, Sidd Finch was nothing more than a figment of Plimpton’s imagination.

What is the tennis equivalent? Perhaps a player who simply never missed a ball, one who could place any shot on a handkerchief laid within inches of the opposite baseline? A force of nature who seemed to be playing a different sport than the rest of the circuit, one who could enter tournament after tournament for years on end without losing a single match?

It would be possible–just–for a youngster to arrive out of nowhere, capable of smacking a serve harder than Sam Groth, looping a forehand with more RPMs than Rafael Nadal, and chasing down a drop shot faster than Lauren Davis. Those tools would, indeed, amount to an unthinkably perfect tennis player. But nothing really worked. It took me a couple of weeks, and a few pages full of fruitless notes, to figure out why the joke of a racket-wielding Finch would inevitably fall flat.

It wouldn’t be satire. We got our flawless champion one hundred years ago. Someone with a style that seemed to come from a future generation, with the skills to match. Someone who so comprehensively outplayed the field that hapless foes counted their triumphs in mere points. Games, if they were lucky.

Her name was Suzanne Lenglen.

* * *

Helen Jacobs saw one of the last public matches Lenglen ever played. “There seemed to be no chink in her armor,” she wrote, “no position on the court in which she was not the master.”

“When you saw her play you did not know how good she was because it looked so easy,” wrote Helen Wills Moody. “It was only from the other side of the net that you realized how really good she was. Her control and delicacy of placement will probably never be equaled.”

“She never made a mistake, in stroking or tactics,” said five-time Wimbledon champion Charlotte Cooper Sterry. “She was like a cat playing with a mouse.”

Elizabeth Ryan told a reporter in 1941: “I had the best drop shot anybody ever had. But she could not only get up to it but was so fast that often she could score a placement off of it. She had a stride a foot and a half longer than any known woman who ever ran.”

“At first, I was disappointed, as were most of those who saw her for the first time after having heard so much about her,” wrote René Lacoste. “She played with marvelous ease the simplest strokes in the world. It was only after several games that I understood what harmony was concealed by her simplicity, what wonderful mental and physical balance was hidden by the facility of her play.”

“Suzanne could beat any woman any day by any score she wanted,” said Bill Johnston. “She was by far the best woman player ever.”

* * *

It is impossible, from our 21st century vantage point, to fully grasp Lenglen’s greatness. She won her first Wimbledon in 1919, when most other women players wore whalebone corsets, and venturing to the net was almost as audacious as exposing an ankle.

Suzanne’s father, Charles, was the original overbearing tennis dad. Like Richard Williams, he noticed that tennis prowess and wealth seemed to go hand in hand. Never mind that, in the 1910s, champions earned no prize money–that would work itself out. Suzanne had a surfeit of athletic gifts–she was the French high jump champion in 1919, to name just one–and Charles channeled them into her tennis.

Charles’s key insight was that his fleet-footed daughter didn’t have to play like a stodgy middle-aged lady. The Lenglens spent part of each year in Nice, where they could watch the strong British and Continental players who gathered on the Riviera every winter. Charles ignored the ladies and studied dashing men players like Max Decugis and Tony Wilding. They played the net; they attacked.

Under her father’s careful eye, Suzanne mastered every stroke in the arsenal. When the rudiments were in place, Suzanne practiced almost exclusively with men. In 1918, the 18-year-old Lenglen beat 1911 French champion André Gobert in a casual match, 6-1, 6-1. Even though Gobert was out of form, convalescing after a wartime air crash, it was a remarkable feat for a young woman. A year later, journalist Al Laney saw her play doubles with three men. “She was the equal of the men in everything but severity,” he later wrote, “and their superior in mobility and accuracy.”

By then, other women didn’t stand a chance. Suzanne won her first adult title in 1913. She picked up her first trophy on the Riviera in 1914. She lost only to the strongest players on the circuit: Ryan, seven-time Wimbledon winner Dorothea Lambert Chambers, and French titlist Marguerite Broquedis. Her defeat at the hands of Broquedis in the Challenge Round of the 1914 French Championships was the last time she lost a completed singles match.

We’ll never know what Lenglen would’ve achieved between 1915 and 1918. The Great War wiped out tennis across Europe. But it wasn’t a complete loss. While Suzanne sometimes said she spent her time rolling bandages for the troops and hardly picked up a racket, plenty of eyewitnesses attested to daily practice sessions in Nice.

The Riviera circuit was back in full swing in 1919. I have results for 16 matches Lenglen played as she won six tournaments in France that spring. Here are the scores:

6-1 6-1
6-1 6-1
6-0 6-0
6-0 6-1
6-0 6-0
6-0 6-1
6-0 6-0
6-0 6-0
6-0 6-0
6-0 6-0
6-0 6-0
6-0 6-1
6-0 6-0
6-0 6-0
6-0 6-1
6-0 6-1

Laney wrote of Suzanne’s later years as a global celebrity: “Just to see her crush some unfortunate girl 6-0, 6-0 was an event.”

There would be a lot of events like that.

* * *

Most of Lenglen’s post-war matches were little more than exhibitions of Suzanne’s otherworldly skill. It didn’t matter. She quickly became perhaps the most famous sporting figure up to that point in history, her every move tracked by reporters and fans.

She was invariably compared to a dancer. No one had ever seen such acrobatics on a tennis court, especially from a woman. She made sure that people noticed, lunging and pirouetting when it wasn’t necessary. “[A]ll those crazy leaps she used to take were done after she hit the ball,” said Ryan. “Sure, she was a poser, a ham in the theatrical sense.”

The press treated her like a prima ballerina. They dubbed her “La belle Suzanne,” or simply, “La Divine”–the goddess. Charles, and later Suzanne herself, carefully avoided overexposure, limiting her tournament entries on the Riviera. Annual will-she-or-won’t-she chatter drove up demand and ensured that the Lenglens collected substantial under-the-table payments for her presence.

No woman’s appearance was more hotly debated. US champion Hazel Wightman said, “She was so homely–you can’t imagine a homelier face.” No one really disagreed, and cartoonists could do a particularly nasty job on her nose.

But when Suzanne came to life, no one could look away. Her charisma was such, Laney wrote, that she could “[take] the attention away from dozens of women far prettier.” Couturiers lined up to dress her. When she started wearing headbands, she kicked off a global rage.

Fans flocked to her matches in such numbers that architects had to rethink stadium design. When Lenglen first appeared at Wimbledon, the tournament made the mistake of putting her on Court 4. Admirers “trampled the shrubbery” in their quest to see her. If she so much as practiced, spectators would abandon a match in progress just to spot La Divine in the flesh.

Ironically, Suzanne’s name is now on the secondary stadium at Roland Garros. No sensible tournament director would’ve dared to schedule her for the second-biggest anything. When Wimbledon moved to Church Road in 1922, it finally had a show court worthy of Lenglen and her tribe. Fans lined up a mile deep to see her on the new Centre Court.

* * *

That first year at Church Road, Lenglen won her fourth consecutive Wimbledon singles title. She beat Molla Mallory 6-2, 6-0 in less than half an hour. One newspaper said that the Norwegian-American “played shrewdly, courageously and probably as well as she ever played.” For 26 minutes.

Most of Suzanne’s match reports go something like that. She came, she saw, she obliterated.

Three post-war matches stand out. Between them, they tell us as much about La Divine as all those double-bagel victories combined.

First, the 1919 Wimbledon Challenge Round. The Lenglens elected to skip Wimbledon in 1914, fearing that Suzanne wasn’t quite ready to handle grass courts. The next four editions were canceled, so anticipation had reached its shrubbery-trampling level by 1919. The young Frenchwoman delivered as promised, winning her first match 6-0, 6-1, and taking the all-comer’s final against Phyllis Satterthwaite with the loss of just two games.

In those days, the previous year’s champion–the “holder”–advanced directly to the final, known as the Challenge Round. The woman who advanced through the all-comer’s draw would take on the holder for the title. 40-year-old Dorothea Lambert Chambers had won Wimbledon seven times, and she waited in the 1919 Challenge Round on the strength of her 1914 title.

Lambert Chambers represented the corsetted, baselining old guard with aplomb. The “solid magnificence of her driving”–according to the London Times–was enough to keep her even with Lenglen for most of a marathon battle. Lenglen fought off a set point to win the opener, 10-8. In the second set, Suzanne approached the net a bit too recklessly and committed a few uncharacteristic double faults. Lambert Chambers took the second, 6-4.

Lenglen recovered in the third after her parents tossed a small vial of cognac and she borrowed a linesman’s chair for a brief rest. The “scientific accuracy” of the ladies continued. Lambert Chambers aimed to break down Suzanne’s strength, peppering her forehand. The Frenchwoman attacked her opponent’s backhand, always looking for an opening to move forward. The challenger’s only weakness was a bit of overexcitement. While Lambert Chambers gave her groundstrokes a margin of safety, Lenglen often saw her own drives land a few inches beyond the baseline.

The defending champion earned two match points. Suzanne saved both, the first with a lunging volley off the frame of her racket. The youngster finally pulled ahead in the 16th game, winning the final set and the championship, 10-8, 4-6, 9-7.

Not bad for Suzanne’s first-ever tournament on grass.

Any lingering doubts about Lenglen’s stature–or, let’s be honest, her divinity–were put to rest a year later. In the 1920 Challenge Round, she faced Lambert Chambers again. It wasn’t so complicated this time. Suzanne defended her title, 6-3, 6-0.

* * *

The second critical match was her one post-war loss. La Divine made her first trip to the United States in 1921, nominally to stage some exhibition matches for the benefit of French war victims.

Nothing went right. She was ill, and her trip was delayed. Her father didn’t make the trip at all. Instead of arriving in America with time play a few matches and get a feel for the different turf and balls in use across the Atlantic, she docked just a few days before the US National Championships began.

Some players would’ve been unaffected. Suzanne was not one of them. Her defining characteristic–perhaps even more than her impeccable play–was her nervous fragility. Jackie Smyth, in his biography of Jean Borotra, wrote that she was “very highly strung and lived on her nerves–and sometimes on a little drop of cognac at times of crisis.”

(As fans discovered during the 1919 Challenge Round, a sip of cognac could work wonders. In 1921, prohibition was in force: Alcohol sales were illegal in the United States. Suzanne wasn’t about to forego a daily glass of wine, much less a necessary on-court fortification. Her visit was so important that the USLTA made arrangements for the authorities to look the other way.)

Draws were not yet seeded in 1921. Lenglen pulled US top-tenner Eleanor Goss in the first round and–the worst luck of all–five-time American champion Molla Mallory in the second. Goss withdrew, possibly as part of a coordinated strategy to ratchet up the pressure on Lenglen. The Forest Hills committee scheduled the Lenglen-Mallory match as early as possible.

Molla came out swinging, and Lenglen was unusually passive. Midway through the first set, Suzanne began coughing. After Mallory won the first set, 6-2, the visitor looked even weaker. Lenglen appeared fit enough to play, just not well. Certainly not to her usual standard. She elected to retire from the match without completing a game in the second set.

It was Suzanne’s one post-war loss as an amateur. The ensuing war of words lasted far longer than the single set the two champions contested. Lenglen was seen on the East Coast social circuit, often dancing the night away as long as she remained in the country. But her health seemed to betray her whenever a match beckoned. She never did play the promised exhibitions.

The papers dubbed her “cough-and-quit.” Americans celebrated their adopted champion Mallory, who went on to win her sixth Forest Hills title. The French, for their part, commissioned a report from a friendly physician to attest to Suzanne’s infirmity.

The Forest Hills episode illustrated the one weakness of La Divine. Lambert Chambers later said that the outcome of the 1919 Challenge Round was doubly tragic. For her, it meant the end of her reign as champion. For Lenglen, it meant impossibly high standards, expectations of invincibility that no human could meet. When things occasionally did go wrong, she withdrew from tournaments–though never again, for the remainder of her amateur career, in the middle of a match.

As much as those no-shows garnered headlines, they remained few and far between. And Suzanne never forgot Molla’s abbreviated win. The next year, when she dispatched Mallory at Wimbledon in 26 minutes, I can only imagine her shots carried a little extra sting.

* * *

Suzanne, like any great performer, saved the best for last. The third defining clash of her career was more than just that, it was the Match of the Century.

Lenglen spent most of her amateur career as the undisputed queen of tennis. How could she be anything else, when she won every match she played? Women like Kitty McKane Godfree, Elizabeth Ryan, and Phyllis Satterthwaite piled up victories against the field, then struggled to win more than a game or two against Suzanne. Godfree lost to La Divine in the 1925 Wimbledon semi-finals, 6-0, 6-0. Leslie Godfree said that his wife had never played better.

Helen Wills was the one woman with the potential to knock Suzanne off her perch. The slugging Californian won the US title every year from 1923 to 1925. When Lenglen skipped the 1924 Paris Olympics, Wills waltzed to the singles gold medal.

A clash between the two was inevitable, but neither woman was in a rush. Lenglen’s withdrawals from Wimbledon and the Olympics in 1924 raised eyebrows. Wills didn’t go to Europe in 1925.

Helen made the trip to the French Riviera in 1926. Suzanne remained cagey, opting to play only doubles in some early events. At last, at the Cannes Carlton Club tournament in February, both women progressed to the final. Lenglen lost just two games in four matches to get there; Wills dropped only five.

The anticipation–even before it was clear that the ladies would face off in Cannes–was intense. Reporters from around the world descended on the Riviera. They hounded the 20-year-old Wills, who had the good sense to remain silent. It was as much a cultural and political event as a sporting one. France felt hard done by in their post-war economic slump, and to some, America was the prime bully. La belle Suzanne was the pride of their nation, the artist who would prove the country’s superiority over the upstart Americans.

When the match finally took place, the sleepy coastal resort was overrun. A half-built grandstand was mobbed. The demand for news–anything–was unceasing. Sitting in the crowd waiting for the match to begin, Tom Topping of the Associated Press dispatched messengers with updates as fast as he could write them, aiming to get the latest developments in American papers before morning editions were put to bed.

The contest did not disappoint. Lenglen took the first set, 6-3. It was evident that Wills was the harder hitter of the two, though she didn’t quite possess Suzanne’s variety. The Frenchwoman discovered that Wills was hesitant to hit her backhand down the line and that she wasn’t fast enough to chase down the best drop shots.

Still, things were tight enough to merit a sip of cognac during the interval.

Helen raced to a 3-1 lead in the second, but she gave back the break when she opted to play more conservatively. Lenglen finally broke again at 5-all, and she earned two match points on her own serve. On the first, a long rally ended when a Wills forehand was called out. Both women ran to the net to shake hands, but it was only another twist. The linesman clarified that the ball was in; a spectator had made the out call.

(How exhaustively was this match covered? We know the names of all the line umpires. The man who made the critical correction was Lord Charles Hope, one of only three linesmen who doesn’t merit a Wikipedia page. When he wasn’t officiating monumental tennis matches, Lord Hope was an amateur golf champion.)

If ever there were a moment for La Divine’s nerves to collapse entirely, it was now. She hung on, but barely. Wills won the next three points to reach 6-all. Lenglen recovered to win a ten-point game for 7-6, then allowed Wills two chances to break back, one of them by double-faulting at deuce. Finally, on her third match point, another drop shot won the day. Suzanne squeaked it out, 6-3, 8-6.

A couple of hours later, the two women faced off again in the doubles final. Armed with a stronger partner, Lenglen won again, 6-4, 8-6.

The two women never again met on a tennis court.

* * *

The Match of the Century was the beginning of the end for Suzanne. She didn’t play another singles match on the Riviera. In April she went to Rome, where she won a title without the loss of a single game. In Paris, she won her sixth French championship. She dropped only four games in five matches.

At Wimbledon, though, it all came apart. She was nervous, she was ill, she was peeved that the French federation insisted she play with a countrywoman instead of her usual sidekick Elizabeth Ryan. Due to a scheduling mix-up, Lenglen didn’t appear on court when expected, and she gave the impression that she snubbed the Queen. She withdrew after two rounds, and she would never play an amateur match again.

Instead, Suzanne accepted an offer to turn pro. American promoter C.C. Pyle didn’t know anything about tennis, but he knew how to sell a superstar. Pyle signed up a troupe of standout players, including Vinnie Richards, to tour North America. Facing Lenglen would be Mary Browne, the former national champion who Suzanne discarded in the French final a few months earlier.

La Divine’s return to the States was a sensation. Opening night in New York City was a gala event, with everyone from politicians to Broadway stars to Bill Tilden in attendance. Lenglen allowed the challenger just three games, an indication of what was to come.

Like the professional tours that would follow for the next four decades, it was considerably different from what Suzanne was used to. They made 25 appearances in two months. Pyle had promised Lenglen that she’d never be asked to play on consecutive nights. That lasted about seven weeks, until it was suddenly crucial to perform in Wichita the night after an exhibition in Kansas City. By December, Suzanne was sufficiently worn out to walk away from a match in Portland, Oregon after winning the first set, 11-9.

She ultimately played about 40 professional singles matches, collected a sizeable sum for her efforts, and faded–as much as a divinity could–into obscurity.

* * *

So, uh, 14th?

I get it. It’s unimaginable to consider Suzanne Lenglen the 14th greatest anything. Detractors might call her ugly, they might call her a showboat, they might even call her a quitter. But it never would’ve occured to her worst enemy to call her number fourteen.

It’s like calling Albert Einstein history’s 14th best physicist. Maybe it’s true. I have no idea. But it sure doesn’t sound right.

The Tennis 128 lives by the algorithm, and alas, we die by the algorithm. Suzanne’s competition was generally weak, and her career was short. None of this is her fault, but the fact remains that she rarely proved herself against top-level competition.

I did make some allowances. Elo will never capture the dominance of a player who wins literally every match. After she went 179-0, the formula could give us a lower bound of her abilities, but no more. I devised a method a few years ago to estimate Elo ratings for this sort of undefeated stretch. At the time, I was thinking about Rafael Nadal on clay. Lenglen’s case is similar. This alternative approach gives her a rating around 2,500 in 1923–one of the highest peaks of all time, if not quite on par with the very best of the Open era. She was in the neighborhood of 2,400 for much of the 1920s. Still, an algorithm’s output is only as good as its input, and Suzanne was hardly challenged for much of her reign. There was no Evert to her Navratilova.

The legend, however, never dimmed. It still hasn’t, even if fewer aficionados stop to give her a thought. After La Divine’s professional debut, Ring Lardner wrote, “It is obvious to everyone, even the experts, that Miss Wills would never beat Miss Lenglen if they were ever to meet in years to come.”

Phyllis Satterthwaite once noticed that Suzanne, unlike most of her victims, never looked like she was exerting herself. Her whole body was as relaxed as her arm, and she avoided “that dreaded ‘tennis face'” that revealed the strain of competition.

How did she make it all look so easy? “I try to hit the ball with all my force,” she said, “and send it where my opponent is not.”

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. It’s like an advent calendar, only I keep the chocolate.

* * *

Ken Rosewall [AUS]
Born: 2 November 1934
Career: 1950-80
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1961)
Major singles titles: 8 (15 pro majors)
Total singles titles: 147
 

* * *

Ken Rosewall was always defined by his backhand. For much of his career, you’d hear experts proclaim it was the best shot off that wing since Don Budge. By the 1970s, fans started to whisper the unthinkable–maybe Rosewall’s was even better.

Not all backhands serve the same purpose. Rosewall, a 142-pounder standing a mere five-feet, seven-inches tall, lacked the physical tools to deliver the sledgehammer that came naturally to Budge. The Aussie’s famous one-hander wasn’t a notably heavy ball; he even struck it with a bit of underspin.

No, Rosewall’s backhand wouldn’t knock you down. Despite spending three decades holding his own against heavyweights like Lew Hoad, Richard González, and John Newcombe, he didn’t have a single offensive weapon that could compare with the body blows those men took for granted. His serve was a merely functional delivery, and his forehand paled next to those of his hard-hitting peers. If he was beating you–and he probably was–the backhand was the obvious explanation.

Rod Laver knew his game as well as anyone. The two undersized Australians faced off at least 164 times. “His backhand was readable,” Laver wrote, “but it was always so deep and accurate that unless you got to it and returned it solidly you were in trouble.” Fred Stolle, for his part, didn’t point to any particular weapon. He considered Rosewall’s strongest weapon to be his focus. “The pressure was on you every second,” Stolle said, “because you knew that when you hit a bad shot he would make you pay without fail.”

The more you hear what rivals said about the Rosewall game, the less the backhand–uncannily precise as it was–seems like the determining factor in his greatness. González thought that Ken’s forehand, taken on the rise, was similarly effective. Stolle said he would trade any one of his shots for the Rosewall forehand.

Rosewall’s serve was his apparent weakness. But like his backhand, it was unerringly accurate. During one critical match in 1971, he earned a few cheap points when his serves took bad bounces off a small patch of uneven court surface. He insisted he wasn’t aiming for it–after all, the target was barely the size of a salad plate. Friends and journalists were still skeptical. The important thing isn’t whether he was or wasn’t picking up those freebies on purpose, it’s that his rivals believed that he could.

Once he put the serve exactly where he wanted it, Rosewall’s game was defined by his feet. He seemed to play every rally as if it were a match point, and his impeccable footwork put him in position for every shot–backhand, forehand, volley, or smash. For René Lacoste in 1968, that was enough to make him the greatest of all time, “a complete athlete who combines intelligence with dexterity.”

Antagonists couldn’t believe that the pint-sized Australian could keep up the pressure for five sets. Yet he sustained his level for 25 years.

* * *

Rosewall emerged on the Sydney tennis scene as a pre-teen, already playing largely the same game he’d employ for decades. It won him matches when he was still in grammar school–a good thing, since it didn’t give anyone a chance to doubt whether the runty counterpuncher had what it took to become a champion.

He and Hoad were both born in November 1934. They became known as the “Tennis Twins” when they joined forces to lead the Australian Davis Cup squad and take on the world at the majors. But first, Lew had to pull even with his sporting sibling. The first several times they met as juniors, Rosewall beat him 6-0, including an exhibition match in front of the visiting American Jack Kramer. Even then, Kramer marveled at the intensity the youngsters mustered for a match with nothing on the line but pride.

By the time Ken came to the attention of Davis Cup captain Harry Hopman, Kramer’s “Big Game” revolution was underway. Frank Sedgman was playing first-strike tennis and inspiring the next generation of Aussies to do the same. Hoad–and Ashley Cooper, and Mal Anderson, and Neale Fraser, and Roy Emerson, and Laver–would follow suit. Rosewall was a rare exception in an increasingly serve-and-volley-dominated game.

Fortunately, Hopman was a talent scout and disciplinarian more than a tactician. He wanted hard workers with a burning desire to win. He didn’t care whether they played the way Kramer did. Hopman dubbed the young man “Muscles.” It was a joke: Rosewall didn’t have any.

The slender teenager made up for his size with textbook-perfect strokes. His father, Robert, earned extra money by renting out three clay courts behind the family grocery. He began teaching Ken to play at age three, patiently practicing one stroke at a time. Like the coaches of Margaret Court and Maureen Connolly, he made a right-handed tennis player out of a natural left-hander. The decision put a low ceiling on the Rosewall serve, but it made possible the famous backhand.

By the time Hopman got ahold of Ken, the flawless baseline game was in place. At one point, Robert took his son to a professional coach to fill in the gaps of his own teaching. The coach demurred–there was nothing he could add to what the boy already knew.

* * *

It is difficult to grasp the entirety of Rosewall’s accomplishments because the list is so long and varied. Roughly speaking, we can divide his career into three parts: amateur (1950-56), professional (1957-67), and the Open era (1968-80).

He made his first trip abroad in 1952, as a 17-year-old. From 1953 to 1956, he contended for major titles–winning four and reaching another four finals–and led the Australian Davis Cup side to three championships.

Ken’s early training on clay courts paid off. In 1953, he was the first Australian champion at Roland Garros since Jack Crawford two decades earlier. He had a heartbreaking near-miss at Wimbledon to Jaroslav Drobný in 1954, then came up short at the Championships again in 1956. That year belonged to Hoad. The larger of the tennis twins finally gained control of his overpowering game, and he won the first three majors of the season.

Rosewall’s feet were almost always in the right place. (With Hoad, at Wimbledon in 1954.)

Hoad came within one match of the Grand Slam. His opponent for the Forest Hills title was Rosewall. Hoad won the first set and took a 2-0 lead in the second. From there, it was all Muscles. The challenger bounced back to win six straight games. Bill Talbert, the US Davis Cup captain, hailed Ken’s “needle-threading accuracy and remarkable court acumen,” describing him as “the master—a crafty tailor sewing a garment of defeat for his victim.”

Indeed, another of Ken’s nicknames in those days was the “Little Master.”

Even before the higher standards of the professional game forced Rosewall to eke every last bit of potential out of his serve, onlookers were often surprised just how effective his delivery was. Talbert noted after the 1955 Davis Cup Challenge Round that Muscles “served brilliantly”–giving Vic Seixas nothing to attack in the first rubber. In the final set of the 1956 Forest Hills final against Hoad, Rosewall surrendered only three service points.

According to Dinny Pails, the 1947 Australian champion who would later face Rosewall as a pro, “He doesn’t win matches with his serve, but he doesn’t lose any, either.” Not overwhelming praise, but for a man with deadly aim from the backcourt, it was enough.

* * *

The second phase of the Little Master’s career was an eleven-year run in the professional game. Rosewall signed with Kramer at the end of 1956. Two weeks after he made it official, he faced Richard González for the first time, taking him to five sets in Melbourne.

Ken’s career from 1957 to 1967 were dominated by his rivalries with González and Rod Laver. For the first few years that Muscles played for money, Gorgo was the only man who could consistently beat him. Laver took over that role in 1964, but only after losing 38 of 51 meetings with his countryman in 1963.

Keep in mind, Rocket Rod was four years younger. By the time the two men began their professional duels, Rosewall was 28, with more than a decade of competitive tennis in his legs.

It’s also important to remember that conditions on the pro circuit were tilted in favor of big servers like Gorgo, Laver, and well, just about every professional except Ken. Most matches in North America were played on fast canvas courts, indoors. Tournaments in Europe were often held in the amateur offseason, indoors on equally speedy wood.

When the professionals gathered on clay, the Little Master was particularly tough to beat. The French Pro–one of the unofficial majors of the pay-for-play circuit–was held at Roland Garros until 1962. That edition marked Rosewall’s third straight title at the event, his fourth overall. Remarkably, he’d go on to win another four straight championships despite the venue shifting to indoor wood courts at Stade Pierre de Coubertin.

Our records of this era are incomplete, especially apart from the major rivalries. But it’s clear that Rosewall held sway over everyone not named Laver or González. (And we shouldn’t take that caveat too far. He beat Gorgo 87 times, Rocket 75.) No one else managed a winning record against Ken in this eleven-year span. Against the rest of the pack–predominantly skilled, veteran operators who merited a spot in the world’s top ten at some point in their careers–Rosewall played another 700 matches. He won more than three-quarters of them.

As he dismantled one serve-and-volleyer after another, Ken picked up yet another nickname. He was the “Doomsday Stroking Machine.”

* * *

The final phase of Rosewall’s career began when the amateur era ended.

Anyone who doubted that the professional game had monopolized the world’s best players was quickly set straight. At the first Open tournament in April 1968, at Bournemouth, Muscles beat Laver for the title. A month later, the same two men played for the first Open major title. The result was the same. Fifteen years after his first triumph at Roland Garros, Rosewall added his second.

Other than the majors and a few other mixed events, Ken’s competition didn’t change much that first year. He was part of George MacCall’s National Tennis League (NTL), where he faced the likes of Laver, González, and Emerson, week in, week out. Laver won five of their seven meetings, but he was the only man on the circuit with a clear edge over the Little Master. One journalist ranked 34-year-old Rosewall as the year-end number two. Another placed him third, behind Arthur Ashe. The one time Rosewall and Ashe faced off, at the Pacific Southwest in September, the Australian lost just five games.

In 1969, Rosewall reached another French final. But like the rest of the field, he sat back and watched as Laver won the Grand Slam. No one would have been surprised if Rosewall had gracefully faded away.

Instead, Muscles played better than ever. He had always regretted his near-misses at Wimbledon. Contractual issues kept him out of the 1970 Australian and French Opens, so the Championships were his first major of the season. Fourteen years after his last appearance in the final, he defeated Tony Roche in the quarters and British hope Roger Taylor in the semis.

John Newcombe, a big-serving Aussie ten years Rosewall’s junior, waited in the final. Newk was yet another big server looking to hit through the veteran, and like González, he had the raw power to do it. Muscles was the sentimental favorite, but when he fell behind, 1-3, 0-30 in the fourth set, it seemed to be over. Somehow, Ken saved the game with four straight points. He ran the streak to 12, and won 20 of 23 points to take the fourth set. Alas, Newk was too strong in the fifth, and Rosewall went home with his third Wimbledon runner-up trophy.

The veteran got his revenge at Forest Hills. In the quarter-finals he knocked out the promising young American Stan Smith. Walter Bingham wrote for Sports Illustrated that Smith “looked like a dinosaur trying to stalk a mongoose.” Rosewall drew Newk again in the semi-finals. This time, no heroics were needed. Muscles committed only seven errors in three sets. World Tennis wrote, “There were moments when one felt one had never seen anyone, anywhere, play better.”

Rosewall sealed the US Open title by beating Roche in a four-set final. He lost only two sets the whole way, prompting Bingham to quip that Muscles was playing twice as well as he did to win the title in 1956, when he lost four. The Doomsday Machine didn’t need to do anything special, as he explained to a reporter afterwards. “I played my regular game,” Ken said. “I hit a few serves and a few volleys.” Wealth and fame had not made the man any more voluble.

* * *

At age 36, Rosewall was, in the eyes of many pundits, the top player in the world. (Bud Collins ranked him behind Newcombe; my Elo ratings place him behind Laver.)

In 1971, he added another major title by defeating Ashe for his first Australian title of the Open era. He fell to Newk again at Wimbledon but redeemed himself at the World Championship Tennis (WCT) finals in November. The tournament was essentially the year-end championship for the top pros, and Rosewall knocked out Newk, Tom Okker, and Laver for the crown. A month after that, he defended his Australian title for his eighth career major title.

Despite all the slam finals, the signature match of the Little Master’s late career took place at an upstart event, in Dallas. The WCT shifted its schedule between 1971 and 1972, so Rosewall’s 1971 championship was only good for six months. The 1972 WCT finals came up in May. The cast of characters was nearly the same. The title match, once again, would be contested between Rosewall and Laver.

Steve Flink has called it one of the three greatest matches of the Open era, right up there with the Borg-McEnroe Wimbledon final of 1980 and the Federer-Nadal meeting at Wimbledon in 2008. It was no secret at the time: 21.7 million viewers tuned in for live coverage on NBC, the largest television audience for a tennis match to that point, and still the second largest behind the 1973 Battle of the Sexes. The winner received $50,000 (about $350,000 in today’s dollars) and a Lincoln Continental.

Laver was the pre-match favorite, having won their three meetings on the WCT circuit that year. But, he later wrote, “when your opponent is Ken Rosewall, all bets are off.”

The favorite took the first set, 6-4, but Muscles bounced back with another of his irresistible streaks to win the second, 6-0.* Rosewall took the third, then Laver forced a decider with a fourth-set tiebreak.

* “Getting beaten to love simply never happened to Rocket Laver,” Rod later wrote. Indeed, it was only the third bagel he suffered in the Open era, a span of over 450 matches. Rosewall also dealt him the first of the three, at Bournemouth in 1968.

The 37-year-old and his 33-year-old challenger were both on their last legs as the match entered its fourth hour. The 7,800-strong crowd cheered every rally. Rosewall took an early break lead; Laver fought back. Muscles reached match point at 6-5; Rodney saved it with an ace. Another breaker would determine the 1972 WCT champion.

Laver edged ahead, reaching 5-4 on his own serve. For what must have felt like the millionth time, the game’s greatest counterpuncher reversed the usual tennis logic. Sports Illustrated wrote, “Rosewall called up all his strength to jump on both of Laver’s first serves so fast the Rocket must have felt he was in a boomerang gallery.” Laver couldn’t manage the same on Ken’s final serve, and the match–“a blood-curdling, nerve-racking epic”–went to Muscles.

* * *

In 1974, Rosewall still believed he could win Wimbledon. “It takes luck and stamina,” he told Bud Collins. “But yes, I always think one year I’ll be champion. I believe in miracles.”

He had missed two chances. In 1972, WCT players were banned from competing. In 1973, 81 members of the newly-formed Association of Tennis Players (ATP) boycotted the event. It’s most common to speculate that Newcombe–winner in 1970 and 1971–would’ve picked up another title or two, or that 1972 champion Stan Smith could have defended his crown. But you have to believe Rosewall would’ve been in the mix.

As if to drive home the point, the Little Master returned in 1974 with a defeat of Newk in the quarters and Smith in the semis. But for the fourth time, 20 years after the loss to Jaroslav Drobný, Rosewall fell short in the final. This time Ken’s conqueror was 21-year-old Jimmy Connors, another all-court player with a backhand in the same league as Rosewall’s.

Ken repeated his feat at the US Open, knocking out Newcombe one more time. And again, he ran into Connors, who allowed him just two games in three soul-destroying sets. Couldn’t Jimbo have taken it easy on the old man? The brash new champion managed to to defend his ruthlessness with an uncharacteristically respectful response. “I’ve seen people pity Ken Rosewall and then see him win 6-3 in the fifth,” said Connors.

Muscles hung on in the top ten until 1976, 24 years after his first appearance on that list. He continued to enter tour events until 1980. At age 45, he won his first-round match at all three tournaments he played.

The feet slowed down, but Ken’s backhand never did. In their book The Golden Era, Laver and Larry Writer tell a story from Rosewall’s 1978 Australian Open match against Sherwood Stewart:

[T]hey engaged in a cross-court backhand duel, each backhand faster and lower than the last till the ball was barely clearing the net. Then without warning, Ken changed tack and drove down the line, leaving Sherwood, who was expecting another cross-court backhand, in a tangled mess on the court, laughing his head off. He cried out to Ken, “I’ve seen it but I don’t believe it! How much do you charge for lessons?”

Only then, with Muscles in semi-retirement, was the pressure finally off. Opponents could laugh at Rosewall’s exploits. But they had waited a long time to relax. Newcombe, for one, spent most of his career frustrated by the Doomsday Stroking Machine. When he lost to Ken at the 1974 US Open, it was the second consecutive major where first- or second-seeded Newk crashed out to the sharp-shooting 39-year-old.

He could only gripe to a reporter: “I wish he’d get old.”

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. It’s like an advent calendar, only I keep the chocolate.

* * *

Venus Williams [USA]
Born: 17 June 1980
Career: 1994-present
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2002)
Peak Elo rating: 2,454 (1st place, 2002)
Major singles titles: 7
Total singles titles: 49
 

* * *

One thing I’ve learned in the last few weeks is that Venus Williams is underrated. For almost all of the last ten additions I’ve revealed on this list, someone has piped up to question whether Venus really belongs ahead of… Court? Sampras? Connolly? Budge?

Let me answer with a hypothetical. Don Budge had a brother named Lloyd. Lloyd was six years older, a solid local player who later became a teaching pro and even wrote two books about the game. He helped get Don started, though it wasn’t long before the younger Budge was clearly the brother to watch.

Now, imagine that instead of six years older, Lloyd was fifteen months younger. And that Lloyd turned out to be, very possibly, the greatest player in the history of the men’s game. Hold Don Budge’s own abilities constant–how many majors would he have won then?

I don’t know the answer to that question, beyond “fewer than he actually did.” We do know that Venus Williams, faced with the gift and the challenge of a even greater younger sibling, won seven slams, five at Wimbledon alone. She accomplished that even though Serena won her first major, at the 1999 US Open, before Venus picked up one of her own.

In addition to Venus’s major titles, she reached nine more finals, seven of which she lost to her sister. At three other slams, she lost to Serena before the final, then watched her sibling go on to win the whole thing.

And it’s not just Serena. Even beyond the outrageously athletic, hyper-competitive sisters from Compton, the women’s field around the turn of the 21st century was unusually strong. Measured by Elo rating, Venus figured in three of the five strongest matches of the last one hundred years.* The top-ranked of all was the all-Williams final at the 2003 Australian Open. The sister-act championship match at the 2002 US Open ranks fourth, while Venus’s semi-final against Martina Hingis at the 2001 Australian comes in fifth.

* Each match is scored according to the pre-match Elo rating of the weaker of the two competitors. It’s a measure of the level of competition, nothing to do with how the match turned out.

Of the top 25 strongest matches by this metric, eight featured Venus. She won three. Only Hingis and Steffi Graf appear on the list more frequently.

The elder Williams said in 2017, after losing one last major final to her sister, “People relate to the champion. They also relate to the person who didn’t win because we all have those moments in our life.” Venus’s long run as the second-best player in her family makes her a bit easier to identify with. But it sometimes misled us into forgetting her status among the all-time greats.

* * *

Venus had a short window before Serena reached her all-galaxy peak in 2002.

In 1999, she lost to Hingis at the US Open, then watched Serena bring home the first of the family’s major trophies. She lost to her sister for the first time a few weeks later at the Grand Slam Cup in Munich. Sagging motivation and tendinitis in both wrists kept her off the courts for months, well into 2000.

When she came back, though, her big-serve-and-backhand combination was unstoppable. She secured her first slam title at Wimbledon, knocking out top seed Hingis in the quarters, Serena in a psychologically taxing semi-final, and Lindsay Davenport in a comparably straightforward final.

Venus ran her winning streak to 35 matches. She won four straight tournaments in the United States, beating Davenport twice–including the US Open final–Monica Seles twice, and Hingis in the Flushing semis. Hingis was one of only a half-dozen women to push her to three sets during the streak. After the US Open came the Sydney Olympics. Venus was equally strong in both hemispheres. She dispatched Seles and Elena Dementieva for a singles gold medal and added the first of three career doubles golds with Serena.

Because she only played a partial season, Venus ended the year on the WTA computer ranked third, the same place she finished in 1999. Hingis, with her steadier performance and pile of titles, stood atop the table with more than 6,000 points, 1,000 ahead of Davenport and more than 2,000 beyond Williams. But it was tough to argue with Sports Illustrated that Venus stood “alone as the best player in women’s tennis.”

2001 was nearly as good. Venus defended her titles at both Wimbledon and the US Open. The crowd at the All-England Club got behind the undersized Justine Henin in the final, but by then, Williams was accustomed to indifferent crowds. Henin took the second set, but Venus delivered a 6-0 third-set spanking to cap her title run. In New York, she didn’t drop a single set, overpowering Kim Clijsters, Jennifer Capriati, and Serena in succession.

Once again, Williams turned in a nearly perfect season that the computer couldn’t quite understand. Her 46-5 won-loss record emphasized her dominance when she chose to compete, even if she was careful not to overplay. While she rose to second place in the rankings after taking the Miami title in April, she fell back to third in July, and she once again ended her season in that unsatisfying position.

My historical Elo ratings give a better indication of where Venus stood relative to the pack. By awarding points based on quality of opponents, the formula is well-suited to capture the degree to which she–and soon, her sister–conquered the field.

A Venus backhand in 2001. “She’s all arms and legs,” said Anna Kournikova. “She was always a step faster than me.”

According to Elo, Venus first achieved the number one ranking in September 2000, just before the Olympics. It was crowded at the top; she held on for just four weeks. She regained the position in April 2001, holding on this time for 57 of the next 59 weeks. She even added four more weeks in August 2002, when her sister was in the middle of her “Serena Slam” of four consecutive major titles.

The official record book will tell you that Venus was the best player in the world for a mere eleven weeks. That puts her at 25th on the all-time list, between Ana Ivanović and Karolína Plíšková. Elo does a better job capturing her reign at the apex of the game. Venus held the top Elo spot for 65 weeks, an impressive figure even without considering what Serena had to accomplish to seize the prime ranking position for herself.

* * *

The prominence of the Williams sisters for the first few years of the century is difficult to overstate. They were the story in tennis. Everyone from Arthur Ashe to John McEnroe had predicted that the next generation of American stars would come from the inner city. Straight outta Compton, here they were.

On the other hand, it was trickier to get to know Venus or Serena as an individual. You could search the papers for a sentence starting with “she,” but aside from match descriptions, it was always “they.”

The two women were so unlike anyone else in the sport that treating them as a single unit came naturally. They learned to play outside of the traditional academy-and-junior-tournaments curriculum, aside from a spell early on at Rick Macci’s camp in Florida. They were astonishingly self-assured, and they seemed content to operate as a traveling family unit, rarely mixing with the rest of the tour.

They were both big, strong, and powerful, too. That in itself wasn’t unique. “Big babe” tennis was nearly a decade old, and Davenport was taller than either Williams sister. But it still set them apart. And, of course, their size wasn’t the only physical attribute that stood out.

“I’m tall, I’m black: Everything’s different about me,” Venus said during the 1997 US Open. “Just face the facts.”

When pressed to compare the sisters, analysts would point out that Venus had the bigger first serve, perhaps the better backhand. She moved better, especially when it came down to raw speed–she was undefeated as a pre-teen track star. Serena had the edge on the second serve and the forehand, two areas that stuck out as the older sister’s weak spots.

Davenport thought that on court, Serena was “meaner.” Venus would develop into the brainier, quieter one of the two. Both women resisted the pull of a full-time tournament schedule and often spurned the six-figure exhibition offers that came their way. Due to both different priorities and worse luck with injuries, Venus took longer absences.

But in 2002, Venus entered enough events to amass 71 match results–62 of them victories. She won seven tournaments, including final-round victories over Henin (three of them!), Davenport, Clijsters, and Jelena Dokic. She was typically untouchable in the run-up to the US Open, grabbing 19 matches in a row between the Wimbledon and US Open finals.

She might have been playing the best tennis of her career. Elo believes that the peak came in September 2002. She cleared a rating of 2,450, one of only six women to do so in the Open era. Unfortunately, Serena was even better. The US Open was the third straight major at which the younger Williams defeated her sister for the title. They’d make it four a few months later in Australia.

At Wimbledon in 2003, Venus would reach yet another slam final, an achievement that S.L. Price described as “as close to heroic as tennis gets.” She aggravated a stomach injury in the third game of her semi-final with Clijsters. Her pain was evident every time she served. Serena, who helped calm her down during a rain delay, said after the match, “She’s tougher than I ever thought she was.” Venus pulled through in three sets.

Serena awaited in the final, their fifth meeting in the span of six majors. This one went three sets, too, but like their last four championship-round battles, the younger woman took the crown.

* * *

The next all-Williams meeting was much longer in coming. While Venus was recovering from her abdominal injury, her sister Yetunde was murdered. Both Venus and Serena struggled to regain their bearings on tour, and father Richard–who, as always, refused to read from the standard tennis-dad script–encouraged Venus to retire.

Sports Illustrated concurred that the sisters could say goodbye to the sport, “heads held high.” But even as she broadened her off-court interests and muddled through a forgettable 2004 campaign, Venus stuck with it.

The first half of 2005 wasn’t much better, at least compared to the lofty heights of her form just a few years earlier. But at Wimbledon, as the 14th seed, she came back to life on her most favorable surface. Venus defeated Mary Pierce and Maria Sharapova to reach the final, then gutted out a nearly three-hour final against Davenport. She saved a match point before triumphing, 9-7 in the third set.

No woman seeded so low had ever won a Wimbledon title–for the time being, anyway. Williams missed most of the 2006 season with a wrist injury. By the time she was back at the All-England Club in 2007, her ranking had fallen out of the top 30. The Wimbledon seeding formula bumped her up to the almost-as-anonymous position of 23rd. She nearly lost in both the first and third rounds, but once she got her bearings, the old Venus was in evidence. She straight-setted Sharapova, Ivanović, Svetlana Kuznetsova, and Marion Bartoli in succession to claim her fourth Wimbledon title–double Serena’s count at the tournament up to that point.

The 2007 title was particularly satisfying. Venus’s successes–as well as her struggles and absences–had turned her into a clubhouse leader. The player that rivals had once disparaged as aloof turned out to be warm, ready to help.

She became the public face of the campaign to force Wimbledon into offering equal prize money for women when she wrote a letter to the London Times in 2006. Like Alice Marble’s 1950 missive in support of Althea Gibson, it was the critical final push to force an old-fashioned organization to catch up with the times. British Prime Minster Tony Blair was one of many public figures to support the cause.

Roger Federer earned £700,000 for his 2007 men’s singles title. For the first time, the women’s champion received the same amount. It was only fitting that Venus Williams was the name on the check.

* * *

Venus added her fifth Wimbledon title in 2008, beating Serena in a major final for the first time in seven years. The sisters met in the same round the following year, and the result was reversed.

By June 2010, the elder Williams had climbed all the way back to second place in the WTA rankings. Once again, the sisters held the top two spots. Venus blinked first, losing in the Wimbledon quarter-finals. Still, she closed her age-30 season ranked fifth in the world, her best year-end finish since 2002.

She wouldn’t return to a major final until 2017. She was diagnosed in 2011 with Sjögren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease that left her unsure from one day to the next if she’d be able to compete. Her career highlights became fewer and further between, but what they lost in frequency they gained in historical stature.

In 2012, Venus and Serena won both the Wimbledon doubles title and the Olympic gold. (Two years earlier, they reached the number one doubles ranking. If I had Elo ratings for women’s doubles, this is where I’d tell you that they’d actually been the top team for a decade.) She returned to the singles top ten in 2015. She won another Wimbledon doubles crown with Serena in 2016, and at the Olympics that year, she teamed with Rajeev Ram to win a mixed doubles silver. The only other tennis player with five Olympic medals is Kitty McKane Godfree, who collected her last hardware in 1924.

Then, in 2017, Venus was suddenly the best 37-year-old in women’s tennis since Martina Navratilova. She reached the Australian Open final, where she met Serena for the 27th time. Williams also came within one victory of the crown at Wimbledon–her ninth final at the Championships–where she fell to Garbiñe Muguruza. Muguruza was 13 years younger than the runner-up, and Venus’s victim in the third round, Naomi Osaka, was born one month after the veteran’s first grand slam final in 1997.

Five years later, the elder Williams is still an active player on tour. She contested her 90th grand slam at Wimbledon in 2021–that’s one record that even Serena can’t match–and she entered the US Open this year. It’s hard to imagine yet another return to title-winning form, but I’m not sure I could bring myself to bet against her if she turned up healthy at Wimbledon next year.

At this point, though, the results no longer matter. Venus is a symbol as much as a contender. She had the guts to say, all the way back in 1994, “I think I can change the game.” For nearly three decades, she has set a compelling example for aspiring athletes of all backgrounds. She has fought for often-apathetic colleagues, and she has transcended physical limitations that would send other women into retirement. 14-year-old Venus proved herself right, even if she had no way of knowing what awaited her.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Beware of GOATs.

* * *

Richard González [USA]
Born: 9 May 1928
Died: 3 July 1995
Career: 1947-74
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1948)
Major singles titles: 2 (12 pro majors)
Total singles titles: 111
 

* * *

One 1959 Sports Illustrated article managed, within the space of a few hundred words, to compare the professional tennis tour to no fewer than three other sports. The format was like heavyweight boxing. The standard of play was equal to a demand that golfers finish below par. And pro champion Richard “Pancho” González was the tennis equivalent of a wrestling “heavy”–the villain. He was the big guy, the dark-skinned one, the hard-hitter with a disposition that the word “surly” didn’t quite cover.

Myron McNamara, in charge of publicity for the pro tour that season, said, “Ponch acts like he thinks he’s defending the world’s heavyweight championship instead of the world’s tennis championship.”

You don’t have dig very deep into the González biography to understand why. After winning the US Championships as an amateur in 1948 and 1949, he turned pro at age 21. In a one-on-one series with reigning champion Jack Kramer, he lost 22 of the first 26 matches. The full tour went to Big Jake, 94 to 29.

Kramer later wrote that his opponent “got better as the tour proceeded, and by the end he was a much tougher competitor, and possibly even the second-best player in the world.” But a second-place ranking meant there was no place for him on the following year’s tour. Pro tennis really did work something like prizefighting. If a challenger couldn’t take down the champion, he might as well stay home.

After losing to Kramer, González accepted his fate. He bought the pro shop at his childhood courts in Los Angeles. He played occasional tournaments, but he mostly watched as other men–Frank Sedgman, Pancho Segura–took on Jake for the big money.

So when he landed a place on the tour in 1954, González acted like he was fighting for the world’s heavyweight championship because, well, that’s exactly what he was doing.

González was armed with effortless power and a competitive zeal that even he couldn’t quite understand. But that doesn’t mean it was easy to stay on top. When Lew Hoad turned pro in 1957, Kramer groomed the Australian specifically to topple the champion. González had to rebuild his backhand to stay ahead of the challenger. Jack March, the organizer of the professional tournament in Cleveland, changed the rules altogether. He limited players to one serve and switched to ping-pong scoring in an attempt to spice things up and level the field. A few years later, Kramer tried a “three-bounce” variation that forbade either player from coming to the net until three balls had been played from the baseline.

Even though González wasn’t the sole target of the rule changes, he spent nearly a decade with a bullseye painted on his back. It didn’t matter. One serve, two serves; one bounce, three bounces; tours, round robins, knock-out tournaments; against Sedgman, Hoad, Ken Rosewall, Tony Trabert, even Rod Laver–the tall Californian was equal to anything pro tennis could throw at him.

Kramer was there for the duration, first as the champion, then as a promoter. The men were business partners, antagonists, sometimes even friends. “No two people without a marriage license should ever get along so miserably,” wrote one columnist. However complicated their relationship, though, game recognized game.

“At 5-all in the fifth,” Kramer wrote, “there is no man in the history of tennis that I would bet on against him.”

* * *

Kramer rarely called his rival and star attraction “Pancho.” He opted for another, more personalized nickname, “Gorgo.”

After González’s surprise victory at Forest Hills in 1948, his motivation sagged. His results went in the same direction. He lost to Herbie Flam at Palm Springs in his first event of 1949. At River Oaks in Texas, he lost in the quarters to Sam Match. At the Southern California Championships, Ted Schroeder blew him off the court, 6-1, 6-0, 6-2.

There were so many holes in his game that people started to call him the “cheese champion.” Frank Parker ran with the joke and dubbed him “Gorgonzales”–after Gorgonzola cheese. That being a mouthful, it became “Gorgo.” González could be touchy about slights, perceived and otherwise, but this one didn’t bother him.

“Pancho,” however, did. At least sometimes. “Pancho” is traditionally a diminutive of “Francisco”–that’s how Francisco Segura became the “Little Pancho” to González’s big one. In 1940s California, however, it was also a blanket term for Mexican-Americans, maybe because Pancho Villa was the Mexican that white people knew best. “Pancho” was rarely uttered as an intentional racial slur. But the unthinking nickname was one of many small reminders that–in the eyes of the speaker, anyway–Mexican-Americans didn’t quite belong.

In 1957, González told a reporter he didn’t mind the name. (His family, did, though. Once when a friend came calling, his mother said, “I have no child named Pancho.”) Maybe he was feeling generous that day, or he became more sensitive later on. Born Ricardo Alonso, he anglicized his given name to Richard. He sometimes went by Dick. Friends called him Gorgo. Like all Gonzálezes, he was sometimes Gonzo. You can’t say the man didn’t give you options.

There’s the last name, too. Gorgo was known for most of his career as “Pancho Gonzales”–ending with an “s.” As Kramer understood it, his wife discovered that “González” was the spelling associated with upper-class Spaniards, and she encouraged him to change it. An alternate version is that his father, Manuel, after walking 900 miles from Chihuahua to settle in the United States, changed his name from González to Gonzales to make it easier for northerners to spell.

Schroeder once said, “He was a very prideful man, not proud, prideful. When you understood that, you understood him.” The words have shifted in meaning over the years, but I think Schroed meant that his friend was (extremely) self-assured, but not arrogant. González never forgot his treatment as a second-class citizen in his early life. Those memories and his undeniable, first-class athletic gifts could come together in an explosive mix.

I can understand if you prefer to call the man “Pancho Gonzales.” It was effectively his stage name for more than two decades. But I’m not going to do that. We can’t undo the insults, but we can at least try to spell his name right.

* * *

I try to steer clear of descriptions of the great players that focus on natural gifts. Thinking in those terms tends to obscure the immense amount of hard work required to convert raw talent to world-class tennis skill. In Gorgo’s case, though, there’s no getting around it.

González never had a coach. His mother gave him a cheap racket, hoping it would distract him from more dangerous pastimes. He learned to play on the neighborhood courts at Exposition Park. A friend named Chuck Pate gave him a few tips when he was doing something wrong, but that’s as far as it went.

“Even as a kid,” Pate said, “he had a bigger serve than the other kids. It just grew up with him.”

By the time he reached his full height of six-foot-three, he had a bigger serve than the other adults, too.

When Kramer was 15, he hung around the Los Angeles Tennis Club, picking the brain of Ellsworth Vines and playing practice sets with everyone from Bill Tilden to Bobby Riggs. At the same age, Richard had given up on school. Perry Jones, the man in charge of amateur tennis in Southern California, called González “the most natural athlete I have seen in 33 years at the Los Angeles Tennis Club.” But the dropout didn’t meet Jones’s standards for a young tennis hopeful, so he was banned from tournaments.

As a result, Gorgo didn’t get any high-quality match experience until he was 19 years old. He was discharged from the Navy in 1947. There was no more school for him to skip, so Jones couldn’t block him from tournaments on those grounds. The newcomer entered several events that first year, winning no titles but losing only to strong players such as Kramer, Schroeder, Segura, and Parker.

Unlike Kramer, he wasn’t playing carefully worked-out percentage tennis. He didn’t need to. He served big, and his movement–the most natural gift of all–was flawless. Trabert despised González but couldn’t deny the grace that earned Gorgo so many victories:

The way he can move that 6-foot-3-inch frame of his around the court is almost unbelievable…. Pancho’s reflexes and reactions are God-given talents. He can be moving in one direction and in the split second it takes him to see that the ball is hit to his weak side, he’s able to throw his physical mechanism in reverse and get to the ball in time to reach it with his racket.

Jenny Hoad, wife of Lew, said of her husband’s rival, “I don’t think he ever moved in an unattractive way.”

* * *

These days, we’d see such a package of talent and dream about the double-digit majors the man would ultimately pile up. We’d acknowledge the gaps in his game–shoddy conditioning and indifferent groundstrokes, in this case–and figure he’d sort those out in time.

Commentators on the amateur game barely had the time to think in those terms. González won the 1948 national title at Forest Hills, then after several months as the “cheese champion,” he defended his title against Schroeder. Schroed was the favorite, especially in the eyes of Kramer and Riggs, who aimed to sign him up as the next challenger for the pro tour. But Schroeder didn’t really want to go on a year-long barnstorming tour, and his loss to Gorgo deflated his value. Barely a year after bursting onto the national scene, González stepped into the breach and turned pro.

He wasn’t ready, as we’ve seen. But he was paying attention. Kramer noticed him improve throughout that first tour. And somehow–still without any coaching to speak of–he converted himself into the best player in the world in the three years that followed.

Kramer considered him to be one of just three guys–along with Rosewall and Segura–who got better after they turned pro. Segura said as late as 1957, “He can still improve a lot, but I can’t. I’m already doing my best.” Many players who rise on the top on raw talent never plug the gaps. Unaided, González did.

He played little competitive tennis from 1951 to 1953. In two trips to Europe, he won a handful of pro titles, including the 1952 London Pro where he beat Kramer in the final. Most pros never made more than a handful of lengthy tours; after losing to the champion, they’d find a nine-to-five and limit themselves to occasional tournament appearances. But Gorgo wasn’t the office-job sort.

“When I find out they’re lining up a pro tennis tour,” he said in 1955, “I know I’m the guy that has to play in it.”

* * *

Kramer retired after a successful series against Sedgman in 1953. His body was breaking down, and he was ready to shift to the management side of the tour. Without a reigning champion, and with no superstar ready to make the transition from the amateur game, he had to change the formula.

The result was a four-man tour featuring Sedgman, Segura, 38-year-old Don Budge, and González. Gorgo won 30 of 51 matches against Segura and defeated Sedgman by the same margin. (Budge was no longer a factor, and he left the tour early.) Between his performance on the road and two major tournament victories, he was clearly the top man on the circuit.

Fans, then and now, have struggled to follow and understand the pro game in the years before the Open era. Bud Collins called it “the nearly secret pro tour.”* Speaking in the context of González’s legacy, Andre Agassi acknowledged, “The history of tennis is pretty complex.”

* Kramer and his promotional staff would’ve been mortified. Or maybe just outraged. Nearly secret? Despite lacking the cachet of Wimbledon or Forest Hills, news from the pro tours was in the papers constantly. Whenever an editor had a column inch to spare, he was sure to find a Kramer press release ready to fill it.

But like the amateur game with its European clay circuit, British grass-court swing, and North American summer, the pro season had a rhythm. Most years, the major tour began in December, usually at Madison Square Garden in New York. It extended for one hundred nights or more, first criss-crossing North America then heading further afield. The professional “majors” followed in summer. While they could usually boast the full roster of stars, they were not as crucial in determining the pecking order as the marathon barnstorming tour that started the year.

With that in mind, let’s review Gorgo’s performance in his peak:

1954: Four-man tour. Defeated Sedgman and Segura.

1955: No traditional US tour. González went 35-11 to win a multi-player series in Australia against Sedgman and Segura. He was also undefeated in tournament play, including the one-serve, ping-pong-scored US Pro.

1956: The champion took on Tony Trabert, winner of three amateur slams in 1955. González won, 74-27.

1957: This year’s challenger was Ken Rosewall. González took 50 of 76 matches. “My timing?” Rosewall said to a reporter, after one of those losses. “I had no time for timing.”

1958: Fresh off a landslide victory at Wimbledon in 1957, Lew Hoad received a record $125,000 guarantee to go pro. Even after Kramer and Segura coached the challenger to prepare him for the showcase tour, González defeated him, 51-36.

1959: Without a viable new challenger, the tour returned to the four-man format. González won only 13 of 28 matches against Hoad, but his record against Ashley Cooper and Mal Anderson ensured that he kept his title.

1960: Another four-man tour. González allowed Rosewall just five victories in 25 tries. The newest addition to the troupe, 1959 Wimbledon champ Alex Olmedo, fared even worse.

1961: Gorgo won a several-player series, then took 21 of 28 matches against runner-up Andres Gimeno to retain his crown.

González, now 33 years old, took most of the next two years off. Still, he couldn’t stay away. Between 1964 and 1967, he won 4 of 13 meetings with Rosewall and 12 of 33 against Rod Laver, who was ten years his junior.

* * *

Life on the pro tour embittered the champion. The initial series against Kramer taught him just how little room there was at the top. When he took over as champion, he griped about money. Kramer believed that amateur champions like Trabert and Hoad were the draw, so González, as the veteran pro, was paid less than some of the men he beat.

When he won his first national championship, Life magazine described him as “happy-go-lucky.” A decade later, he was barely on speaking terms with many of his opponents. On a bad day, he’d bark at linesmen, photographers, even an overenthusiastic fan in the grandstand. He avoided the press and rarely signed autographs. While the rest of the troupe banded together to make the best of a lonely existence, González drove by himself from one tour stop to the next.

Yet by the time Open tennis arrived, Gorgo’s stature was such that it didn’t matter. The old man–he turned 40 in 1968–was an enormous draw. More remarkably, he could still compete with the best players in the game. He not only qualified for a 1968 year-end event featuring the top eight pros in the game, he reached the final.

Even his opponents could appreciate the legend in their midst. Denmark’s Torben Ulrich lost to him in five sets at the 1969 US Open. “Pancho gives great happiness,” he said. “It is good to watch the master.”

González had turned in his most memorable performance two months earlier, at Wimbledon. He drew another big server, 24-year-old Puerto Rican Charlie Pasarell, in the first round. The two men traded holds for a whopping 45 games before Pasarell secured the first set, 24-22. In the fading light, González hounded the referee to suspend the match. Play continued anyway, and he tanked the second set. He went home for the night in a two-set hole.

Gorgo had lost the crowd with his carping. But when the players returned the next day, he knew he could outhit the youngster. He secured the third set in another marathon, 16-14, then took the fourth, 6-3. Pasarell ultimately earned seven match points, but González fought them off, one with a stunning drop volley.* After more than five hours, the veteran pulled out the fifth set, 11-9, in what was then the longest match in grand slam history.

* The champion loved that shot: “It may have looked great to the crowd, but it was bread and butter to me.” I can’t help but think of Miles Davis on his final tour. “Aw, man,” said Miles as the applause finally died down. “I do that every night.”

Even away from the one-on-one, pro tour format where he fought like a heavyweight champion, González had a way of turning tennis into a duel to the death.

16-year-old Vijay Amritraj, years away from his own pro success, skipped meals to buy a ticket and watch González play that day. “He lived up to my dreams,” Amritraj said. “I still don’t see anybody who devoured the sport as he did.”

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Beware of GOATs.

* * *

Margaret Court [AUS]
Born: 16 July 1942
Career: 1959-77
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1962)
Peak Elo rating: 2,389 (1st place, 1971)
Major singles titles: 24
Total singles titles: 187
 

* * *

One knock on Margaret Court, during her playing days, was that she was dull. Journalist Grace Lichtenstein mentioned to a tour official that Margaret was one of the few players who didn’t talk to herself on court. “What,” he responded, “could she possibly think of to say?”

Before we go any further, let me venture a few guesses: You have an opinion about Margaret Court, it is not positive, and it is not because she is dull.

People change, and not always for the better.

Try to put all that off to the side for the moment. It’s more than Court is likely to do herself: As a Pentecostal minister, she rarely gives an interview that doesn’t dig her a deeper hole regarding her anti-gay views. But the Tennis 128 project is about identifying the greatest players of all time, not the most progressive, likeable, or politically savvy ones.

Even if we ignore her views on social issues, I’ll bet you still have some strong views about her legacy as a player. If you don’t–and kudos to you for that–you’ve surely heard her name over the last few years as Serena Williams repeatedly fell short of matching Court’s all-time record.

The tennis world is obsessed with grand slam counts, so experts have bent over backwards to explain why Serena’s 23 is better than, or at least qualitatively different from, Margaret’s 24. There are plenty of solid arguments in the American player’s favor, and we’ll get to some of them shortly.

Court in 2005, reminding Serena that she has 17 more slams to go

The downside to this “debate” is that Court has approximately zero defenders. There are good reasons for that, too, and I’m not about to take Margaret’s side. After all, she is 18th on my list and Serena ranks higher. But one-sided pile-ons tend to push the conventional wisdom too far to an extreme. Every time someone says that Court won her eleven Australian titles against a bunch of kangaroos, the world gets a little dumber.

If anything, the question of Court’s 24 versus Williams’s 23 should make it clear that grand slam tallies are not everything. The numbers themselves disguise a multitude of detail: Many of Court’s Australian titles were indeed cakewalks compared to their 21st-century equivalents. On the other hand, the focus on majors obscures the hundreds of other events that each player entered. Margaret, for her sake, won 163 singles titles away from the big four.

It’s okay to have a black-and-white view of the person Court has become. But to understand her place in tennis history, we need to embrace some shades of gray.

* * *

Court’s all-time record 24 major singles titles includes, as I’ve said, eleven in Australia. The Australian Championships of the amateur era were the extreme junior partner of the grand slam foursome. The field usually consisted of about 32 women, most or all of them from the host country.

Here are Margaret’s final-round opponents from her eleven slams Down Under:

• 1960, Jan Lehane
• 1961, Lehane
• 1962, Lehane
• 1963, Lehane
• 1964, Lesley Turner
• 1965, Maria Bueno
• 1966, Nancy Richey (walkover)
• 1969, Billie Jean King
• 1970, Kerry Melville
• 1971, Evonne Goolagong
• 1973, Goolagong

Note the absence of kangaroos. Lehane and Turner are the lesser-known names that stand out here. Both would be remembered as better players if they hadn’t suffered the ill fortune of spending their entire careers in Court’s shadow. Turner, who ranks around 200th of all time by the Tennis 128 algorithm, beat Margaret for the 1962 French title. Lehane wasn’t as strong, but she did reach the quarter-finals in half of her 14 major entries away from Australia.

The 1960 title, in particular, was about more than just Lehane. Margaret beat Bueno–the reigning Wimbledon and Forest Hills champion–in the quarters and defending champ Mary Carter Reitano in the semis.

The list of vanquished opponents doesn’t prove anything, but it does illustrate that most of these titles weren’t just handed to the best Australian. The fields were small–Margaret even got a first-round bye and needed only four victories in 1964–but I’m not sure it mattered. At the majors with larger draws, early upsets of top players were exceedingly rare. An extra round or two would’ve just given her something to do for an hour.

Last year, I analyzed every women’s grand slam back to 1960, weighting each title by the quality of the opponents the eventual champion had to face. By my measure, Aussie titles in the 1960s were about 40% easier to win than the other majors. They came closer to even in the 1970s. Adjust each individual title, and Court’s eleven shrinks to eight. Serena loses one, too–draw difficulty continues to vary, though to a more modest degree–so our revised slam count is Serena 22, Margaret 21.

You might find the process opaque or the results unsatisfactory; adjusting slam titles doesn’t give us any more of a runaway leader than the raw tallies did. The exact numbers don’t matter. The point is that relative to their eras, Serena’s major titles were more difficult to win–barely–than Margaret’s were. Demote the Pentecostal preacher if you’d like, but a fair assessment knocks her down only from “greatest of all time” to “one of the greatest of all time.”

* * *

That’s probably more than you ever wanted to read about 24-versus-23, so we’ll move on.

Inspired by Rod Laver’s 1969 Grand Slam, Court resolved to give her all to a similar effort in 1970. An ankle injury at Roland Garros nearly ended the dream before it began. She needed increasing doses of painkillers to hobble through Wimbledon, barely surviving a two-and-a-half-hour classic against Billie Jean in the final. Her doctor told her not to play Forest Hills at all. No way: Risking a permanent limp, she secured all four titles.

Somehow, the experts were underwhelmed. Herbert Warren Wind wrote in the New Yorker after Court secured the fourth leg of her Slam:

[P]eople in and around the game have always expected even more of Margaret Court than she has produced, because probably no woman has ever been so well equipped physically to play tennis. A big-boned, smoothly coordinated, attractive girl who stands five feet nine and weighs around a hundred and fifty pounds, she could pass for a sister of either Frank Sedgman or John Newcombe, those ruggedly handsome specimens of Australian manhood.

Margaret was considered a choke artist, an odd reputation for someone who would go on to win more than 1,100 matches. Wind echoed the conventional wisdom of the day that she “lost a number of matches (some of them to rather ordinary players) by suffering… strange attacks of nervousness.” It’s challenging to square that assessment with the historical record, since she didn’t come up short that often, especially against “ordinary players.”

The record does reveal days when Court took the scenic route to victory. When the nerves struck, “she would hit forehand after forehand yards out of court and serve streams of double faults.” Eventually, usually, she would regain her bearings and finish things off.

Australian analyst Paul Meltzer offered a compelling theory to explain why Court’s lapses manifested themselves the way that they did: She was a natural lefty. Like Maureen Connolly, she was told at an early age that ladies played tennis right-handed. Forced ambidextrousness could lead to a marvelous backhand, but it also meant that the serve and forehand would always be manufactured strokes. No amount of practice could stop them from breaking down under pressure.

Few opponents, though, could generate that pressure. Kerry Melville told Sports Illustrated in Court’s Grand Slam season:

I’ve tried every way to beat her, and the thing that works best is to throw everything into the first few games, try to stay with her, to win early. Put her under pressure like that and she gets rattled. You can beat her. But let her win a couple of games right off and it’s almost hopeless.

Melville played Margaret 27 times between 1963 and 1976. She rattled out just three victories.

* * *

The most compelling reason to give Court credit for her eleven Australian titles is that she won just about everything else. No matter how tough the draws, it’s hard to imagine her falling short. In seven of the eleven seasons she won Down Under, she also picked up at least one more major. In 1960, she didn’t have the means to travel abroad. In 1966, she took a break from the game and skipped Forest Hills. In 1971, she reached the Wimbledon final before realizing she was pregnant.

The fourth one-slam campaign was 1961, Margaret’s first time abroad. Still playing under her maiden name of Margaret Smith, the 19-year-old was part of only the fifth-ever Australian women’s team to make the trip to Europe. Harry Hopman had kept the Aussie men on top for a decade; it fell to his wife, Nell, to attempt the same with the nation’s women.*

* Before Nell Hopman became the disciplinarian chaperone of the Australian squad, she served a similar role for Maureen Connolly after Connolly split with her coach Eleanor Tennant. When Doris Hart, Mo’s planned doubles partner, had to pull out of the 1954 French Championships, 45-year-old Hopman stepped into the breach. They won the title. Nell played mixed, too, with Neale Fraser. She wasn’t quite so successful with Maureen on the other side of the net; they lost to Connolly and Lew Hoad in the quarters.

Margaret won six of the ten tournaments she entered on that initial trip, picking up four titles on French clay and two on English grass. By the time she arrived at Wimbledon, she had so thoroughly established herself that the seeding committee placed her second. Only the previous year’s finalist, Sandra Reynolds, stood higher. The smart money went for the young Australian.

Smith wasn’t quite ready to reach the top. She drew British hope Christine Truman in the quarter-finals. A topsy-turvy match of uneven quality laid the groundwork for Margaret’s later reputation as a choker. She won the first set, then lost the second after double-faulting twice to lose her serve at 3-4. In the decider, she earned match points at both 6-5 and 7-6, but fluffed a volley and missed a forehand wide. Truman scored the upset, 3-6, 6-3, 9-7.

A chance for revenge arrived in short order: Smith won an equally protracted quarter-final at Forest Hills to beat Truman there. But in the semis, the Australian ran into top seed Darlene Hard. Margaret started the match nervous and gave up her attacking game after missing several volleys early on. Hard solved the Smith serve, and the women traded seven consecutive breaks in the third set. Darlene proved to be the more tactically sound player, sending the challenger home, 6-4, 4-6, 6-3.

Pundits usually applauded Margaret more for her strength than her savvy. But aside from the occasional attacks of nerves, Smith rarely made the same mistake twice. After the loss at Wimbledon, she won eleven straight meetings with Truman. Hard followed her back to Australia for the 1961-62 season Down Under, and Margaret beat her four times, a streak she would extend to eight.

When Smith returned to Wimbledon in 1962, she was the unquestioned favorite and top seed. This time, she was ambushed in her first match by the hyperactive young American Billie Jean Moffitt, still four years away from her marriage to Larry King. Margaret learned from that one too. It would be four years and ten matches before she’d allow Billie Jean another set.

* * *

Every woman on the circuit quickly discovered that Margaret was as imposing as she looked. And she certainly looked imposing.

Later in her career, fellow players called her “The Arm”–possibly a Rosie Casals coinage. Casals told Grace Lichtenstein, “[W]hen Margaret came to the net all you saw was that big right one reaching in every direction as if it were infinitely stretchable elastic.”

A biomechanics lab tested Court and discovered that her arms were indeed three inches longer than the typical woman’s. Combine that reach with the assurance of a natural left-hander hitting a backhand volley, and there was nowhere to go.

Casals didn’t have any answers. Court beat her in 32 of 36 meetings, including 25 in a row between 1968 and 1973.

Virginia Wade was equally helpless. Wade compared Court to “a bull mastiff in the same cage with a white mouse.” The mix of big serves, blinding speed, and smothering net coverage simply rendered the other player irrelevant.

In a 1969 US Open semi-final, Wade held three set points on the Australian’s serve. “She came up with a series of points,” said Virginia, “that totally ignored my presence on the other side of the net.” From 4-5, 0-40, Margaret not only ran out the set, she finished the entire match in a flash, 7-5, 6-0.

Court and Wade met 31 times between 1965 and 1977, 20 of them in finals. Virginia, like Casals, managed only four victories.

* * *

When Court discovered she was pregnant in 1971, she could have easily left competitive tennis behind. She was 29 years old, she had won the 1970 Grand Slam, and she had won more major titles than anyone in the sport’s history.

When she returned–after a layoff of barely twelve months–even she couldn’t quite explain why. She denied it was about the money, though she piled up hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes.

Whatever her reasons, her comeback was as astounding as the career that preceded it. Few women in the amateur era had competed at all after giving birth. Court, who had learned early on the benefits of weight training and roadwork from mentor Frank Sedgman, barely even needed to recover. Her son, Danny, arrived in March, and she played her first competitive matches–eight pounds lighter than before the pregnancy–in July.

Between October 1972 and the US Open in 1973, Margaret played 125 tournament matches. She lost only four–each one in three sets. With Danny and husband Barry in tow, she collected 24 titles in that span, including three-quarters of the 1973 Grand Slam. The season was marred by her embarrassing loss to Bobby Riggs in the Mother’s Day Massacre, and her performance was overshadowed by King’s victory in the second Battle of the Sexes match in September.

Still, by any measuring stick other than Riggs, Court was the best player in the game. More than a decade had passed since she first asserted a claim to that position.

As Billie Jean campaigned for equal prize money and other players such as Casals proclaimed their feminist credentials even more loudly, Margaret preferred to stand aside. The irony, then and now, is that judging by her life in those years, she was the most modern of them all. When she burned out in 1966, she left the circuit and opened a dress shop in Perth. After she got married, she went back on tour with her husband–whose career stood on hold–serving as a de facto assistant. She took a one-year maternity leave, then came back better than ever.

A friend of mine once joked that Court had a lot in common with Serena Williams. Both women took breaks from tennis to pursue careers in fashion, and both won titles as mothers.

Margaret Court is a tough woman to hold up as a hero. Even before she began speaking out on social issues, she wasn’t much of an ally to the ideological movement that lifted women’s tennis from an amateur-era sideshow to an equal partner in an ever-richer global sport.

Yet in just about every other way, she was the pioneer of her era. She led the first generation of great Australian women players. She cross-trained daily, lifting weights nearly two decades before Martina Navratilova took up the habit. She balanced family with Grand Slam titles when many of her peers juggled cigarettes and eight-tracks.

Fifteen years after her first major title, sportswriters still thought Margaret was boring. Whatever your final judgment of the person, you have to admit that her story was anything but.

* * *

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I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Beware of GOATs.

* * *

Maureen Connolly [USA]
Born: 17 September 1934
Died: 21 June 1969
Career: 1948-54
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1952)
Peak Elo rating: 2,348 (1st place, 1954)
Major singles titles: 9
Total singles titles: 46
 

* * *

By 1951, San Diego knew it had something special on its hands. Maureen Connolly, a five-foot, four-inch sparkplug with murderous groundstrokes, was climbing the tennis ladder at record speed. Only 16 years old, she had already won the national junior championship two years running.

Connolly’s first coach, Wilbur Folsom, thought in terms of a five-year plan. He figured that Maureen needed one more year of seasoning on the Eastern circuit. In 1950, she had picked up a minor title in Pennsylvania but fallen short at the season’s premier events. Grass-court tennis took some getting used to for youngsters trained on California cement. Opponents such as Doris Hart and Pat Todd had a several-year head start.

One man was more optimistic. Nelson Fisher, a sportswriter for the San Diego Union, had followed every step of Connolly’s progress. He couldn’t help but notice that in 1951, she simply stopped losing. When she secured the title at the Southern California Championships in May, it was her fifth consecutive trophy on the adult circuit.

At Palm Springs in February, she dethroned top seed Helen Perez, who had beaten her twice the previous year. At Pebble Beach in April, she upset another top seed, Nancy Chaffee. The two women met again for the title at both Ojai and the Southern California event–only now, Maureen was the favorite. The 21-year-old Chaffee, once a junior standout herself, had spun the rivalry into something of a feud. But the controversy didn’t have much in the way of legs. The younger player always won, and their final meeting in 1951 was the last time Chaffee took so much as a set.

Fisher had seen enough. Sure, Hart was a perennial favorite, and three-time Wimbledon champion Louise Brough ranked up there with her. But the local youngster brought even greater names to mind. Her groundstrokes recalled those of 19-time major champion Helen Wills Moody.

The sportswriter made his prediction. Folsom could stick to his five-year plan, but Fisher decided that 1951 was Connolly’s year.

Maureen continued to be flummoxed by veterans such as Hart and Todd on the East Coast grass, losing at Manchester and Maidstone. Those were just warm-ups, though. At Forest Hills, she handled the turf like an old hand. The 16-year-old progressed to the final without the loss of a set. She defeated Althea Gibson in the round of 16 and Hart in the semis. After falling to 0-4 in the first set against Doris, she found the range and won 11 of the next 12 games.

Fisher couldn’t rely on wire reports for this one. He ponied up the airfare himself and flew to New York for the final. “I’ve got to see her win with my own eyes,” he said.

He witnessed a championship match that heralded a new era in women’s tennis. In the semis, Connolly had pinned the normally attacking Hart to the backcourt. Shirley Fry, her opponent in the final, was a more natural defender. She took up her position well behind the baseline, better to handle Maureen’s drives once they had lost a bit of pace.

It was “strictly a battle of attrition,” according to the New York Times. “Both girls might as well have left the volley at home.” Connolly, with her net-skimming backhands, took the first set, 6-3. When the Californian lost some of her control, Fry seized the second, 6-1. The lapse, however, was temporary.

Maureen “could play five games missing the baseline by one inch,” Fry said, “but [she would] keep going for the lines and eventually find her range again.” With the crowd behind her, the 16-year-old took the final set, 6-4. The United States had its youngest champion since May Sutton in 1904.

Even Nelson Fisher, watching his city’s darling become a national heroine, had no idea how many records the San Diego teenager would set.

* * *

In the wake of Connolly’s breakthrough, the New Yorker captured the two sides of the appealing new champion. On the one hand, she looked like “a pretty, animated doll.” She gained the cutesy nickname “Little Mo,” a tag that emphasized both her petite stature and the weaponry that made her the equal of “Big Mo”–the USS Missouri, a Navy battleship.

There was nothing cute about the way she won tennis matches. “To judge from the exhibition of nerve control she put on after dropping the second set in the final,” the magazine continued, “she ought to remain a champion for a good many years.”

Little Mo was rarely spotted off-court without a smile on her face. Between the white lines, though, she was barely recognizable. Her focus was legendary. “You could set off dynamite in the next court and I wouldn’t notice,” she once said.*

* A construction crew across the street set off some dynamite as I was writing this. I noticed.

She learned her determination from the best. After Folsom taught her the rudiments of the game, Connolly passed into the care of Eleanor “Teach” Tennant. Tennant had guided the careers of Alice Marble and Bobby Riggs, and she proposed to do the same with Maureen.

Connolly and Tennant in 1952

Tennant was known for taking full control of her students’ lives, but she was remarkably flexible about their style of play. Marble had ridden a big-serving net attack to the top of the women’s game. Riggs was a brainy junkballer. Teach helped Little Mo become a better version of herself, “developing the dainty little baseliner into a hard-driving attacker,” in the words of Time magazine.

The veteran coach was less flexible about mental preparation. She took the notion of a killer instinct almost literally. She wanted her charges to be fueled by pure hatred. “You have to be mean to be a champion,” Tennant said. Before one big match against Hart, Teach concocted a story about Doris trash-talking Connolly behind her back. It was entirely invented, but it did the trick.

Even more than Marble had, Maureen internalized the Tennant approach. “This was no passing dislike, but a blazing, virulent, powerful and consuming hate,” she said. “I believed I could not win without hatred. And win I must because I was afraid to lose.”

* * *

Losing was never much of a problem. Connolly won her first adult title at age 13, at the tail end of a summer trip through the Northwest. In 1950, she scored victories over leading Californians Beverly Baker and Helen Perez.

After securing the national title in 1951, she hardly ever lost again. She went home to Southern California and picked up the title at the Pacific Southwest. In 1952, she reigned over the field. She won thirteen titles, including a championship in her debut at Wimbledon and a second straight victory at Forest Hills. Over the entire season, she lost just two matches, one apiece to Hart and Brough.

The Connolly attack was relentless. Her forehand was the best on the circuit. Her backhand was even better. She was a natural left-hander, but Folsom had demanded she play right-handed. As a result, there was no weak side of her baseline game.

Maureen’s foes settled on a plan to stop her. It just didn’t work very often. She could handle pace, and she would end all but the strongest forays to the net with a precise passing shot. Occasionally, though, she would lose her timing for a few games. The solution was to softball her from the back of the court, to make her play until she started missing.

The woman who came closest to executing this style of off-speed upset was Susan Partridge, a journeywoman Brit who played Mo in the fourth round at Wimbledon. Connolly was coping with a sore shoulder and reeling from a quarrel with Tennant that would end their relationship. Partridge, who had pushed the champion to 6-4, 7-5 at a match in the States two years before, hit one moonball after another down the middle of the court. It was all Maureen could do to advance, 6-3, 5-7, 7-5.

But even junkballing would trip up Connolly only on an off-day. Mo was known as “Twinkle Toes” for the constant motion of her feet. One of Tennant’s first tasks was to fix the young woman’s “atrocious footwork.” Maureen was sent to tap-dancing class, and her feet barely stopped moving for the next five years. She got herself in position for every ball–fast or slow–and usually sent it back within a few inches of the baseline.

A few days after the close call against Partridge, Little Mo drew Shirley Fry in the Wimbledon semis. Fry knew the book on Connolly, and she was as patient as anyone on the circuit. But the young American regained her focus and dispatched Shirley, 6-4, 6-3.

* * *

Little Mo was even better in 1953. She became the first woman to win a Grand Slam, dropping only one set en route to the four major titles. (The woman who pushed her to a decider was, once again, the pesky Partridge.) As in 1952, she allowed just two defeats to mar her season. Against twelve tournament wins, she lost once to Hart and once to Fry. After Doris beat her at the Italian, Connolly exacted her revenge in both the French and Wimbledon finals.

Hart felt that the 1953 Wimbledon final was her own peak: the best match she ever played. It just wasn’t good enough for Connolly, who beat her, 8-6, 7-5.

Shirley got the same treatment. Two weeks after Fry beat Connolly at the Pacific Southwest, they met again at the Pacific Coast Championships in Berkeley. Mo won the first set at love. The youngster beat her twice in a month.

“No one can duel with her at the baseline,” Shirley said. “Go up to the net against her? Ridiculous.”

The only remaining weakness in the Connolly game was her serve. At five-feet, four-inches tall, there was only so much she could do. And with so many other weapons in her arsenal, it didn’t really matter. Still, she hooked up with Les Stoefen, a towering former doubles champion, to give her opening salvos a bit more punch.

After losing a match to Beverly Baker in early 1954, Mo ascended to another level entirely. She won her next 41 matches, dropping only a single set at an exhibition-style team event in Germany. The streak included title defenses at Roland Garros and Wimbledon. Brough, in the Wimbledon final, was the only woman at either event to reach 5-all. At the US Clay Court Championships in July, Maureen stomped Karol Fageros in the semi-finals, 6-0, 6-0, then allowed Hart only four games in the final.

“She was so quick, accurate and competitive,” said Doris. “I know I never played anybody as good. You might be ahead 40-0, but she made you feel like it was 0-40.”

In 1978, Hart added, “There’s no doubt in my mind that Mo was the greatest player who ever lived.”

* * *

The 1954 US Clay final was the last competitive match Connolly ever played. Still only 19 years old, she suffered a nasty fall when a cement truck spooked the horse she was riding. Her right leg was severely injured. She recovered well enough to play a casual game and work as a coach, but no more than that.

At the time of the accident, Little Mo had won nine major singles titles–every one she entered since her initial triumph at Forest Hills in 1951. She ended her career with almost twice as many tournament victories (46) as match losses (27), even counting her first venture onto the circuit as a 13-year-old.

It is impossible not to speculate what might have been. Connolly intended to enter the US Championships in 1954, then defend her title at Wimbledon the following year. If there’s ever an instance in which we can say an absent player would have won a title, it’s this one. Hart won at Forest Hills in 1954 and 1955; Brough won the first Mo-less Wimbledon. Maureen had established her dominance over both of them.

After that, the plan was to turn professional. Some of the details emerged when Connolly sued the company that owned the offending cement truck. After all, it would’ve been difficult to assert a loss of income for an amateur tennis player, no matter how exceptional.

Maureen would’ve taken on the reigning champion, Pauline Betz, as part of the tour promoted by Jack Kramer. This is where history might really have taken a different turn. After the lopsided Betz-Gussie Moran tour in the early 1950s, there was virtually no women’s professional tennis. Little Mo had the celebrity cachet to draw crowds, and Betz might have been able to keep things competitive. Had a women’s pro tour proved financially viable, Connolly or Betz might have gone on to face Althea Gibson. Instead, Gibson’s pro career consisted of opening for the Harlem Globetrotters against an opponent chosen more for her face than her forehand.

We can only dream. Connolly was just two months older than Ken Rosewall, who turned pro in 1956 and was still contesting major finals in the 1970s.

On the other hand, Little Mo would have quickly exhausted the challenges in front of her. Arguably, she didn’t have anything left to accomplish when she was forced to quit at 19. It is unlikely she would have hung on as a part-time player. However easy her victories looked, her grim game face disguised a strenuous effort.

Connolly occasionally coached the British Wightman Cup team in the 1960s, and her influence was particularly valuable to 1969 Wimbledon champ Ann Jones. Jones struggled to remain motivated during long stretches away from home. “If you want to play tennis, play tennis,” Maureen told her. “If you want to go home and have kids, do that. But make up your mind and do one or the other and put your heart into it.”

The coach’s words carried extra weight because she had so clearly lived them. As a teenage champion, Connolly wasn’t forced to choose between tennis and family life. But unlike so many athletic prodigies, her focus never wavered. She could have coasted after winning the 1951 national title. She certainly could have rested on her laurels after securing the 1953 Grand Slam.

A careening cement truck may have deprived Little Mo of another half-dozen–or more–major titles. But her place in history doesn’t depend on mere what-ifs. Even at age 19, it was clear that she had the game of an all-timer and the mind of a champion.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Beware of GOATs.

* * *

Ivan Lendl [TCH/USA]
Born: 7 March 1960
Career: 1978-94
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1983)
Peak Elo rating: 2,402 (1st place, 1986)
Major singles titles: 8
Total singles titles: 94
 

* * *

At Roland Garros in 1981, Ivan Lendl reached his first major final. The achievement was not entirely a surprise. He was seeded fifth, and it was already his seventh final of the season. In January, he had played for the title at the season-ending Masters event.

At the same time, the hard-hitting Czechoslovak was gaining a reputation as, well, not a big-match player. In eight previous majors, he had reached only a single quarter-final. At the 1980 US Open, he lost that match to John McEnroe.

No one faulted Lendl for finishing second at the 1981 French. His final-round opponent, Björn Borg, had lost only one match in Paris since 1973. Lendl matched the reigning champion through four grinding, topspinning sets before wilting in the fifth, 6-1, 4-6, 6-2, 3-6, 6-1.

Expectations were higher when he reached his second slam final. Lendl opened 1982 by winning the January Masters. At the circuit’s signature indoor event, he spanked McEnroe in the semis and outlasted Vitas Gerulaitis in a five-set final for the ages. At the US Open, he scored another semi-final victory over McEnroe but fell short in the final against Jimmy Connors.

While the Czech was still only 22 years old, the pessimists had plenty to go on. Lendl had no equal indoors, where the conditions were at their most predictable. He went 41-0 on carpet in 1982 alone, winning nine titles on the surface. But he underwhelmed when faced with fresh air, wind, and stadiums full of partisans. As the second seed and favorite at the French that year, he went out in the fourth round to the then-unknown 17-year-old Mats Wilander.

Third major final: 1983 US Open. Connors again, another four-set defeat.

Fourth major final: 1983 Australian Open, Wilander. He won only nine games.

When Lendl turned 24 years old in March 1984, he was the number one player in the world. He had racked up 31 tour-level titles, including back-to-back Masters championships. In the eyes of the tennis world, though, the number that defined him was his victory count in grand slam finals: zero.

* * *

Lendl’s mailbox did not overflow with notes of support or sympathy. A few years later, with the grand slam monkey off his back, Sports Illustrated put him on its cover. Headline: “The Champion No One Cares About.”

Time magazine called him a “chilly, self-centered, condescending, mean-spirited, arrogant man with a nice forehand.”

For many fans, Lendl’s defining trait was his nationality. There weren’t many Eastern Europeans at the top of the game. Americans, in particular, still thought in Cold War terms. One tour veteran often yelled, “You Communist son of a bitch” between points.

Some Soviet-bloc stars managed to transcend the stereotypes. Martina Navratilova defected and embraced her new home in the West. She never became a popular darling like Chris Evert, but neither was she defined by her homeland.

Lendl, on the other hand, fit the preconceived notion of a grim, mechanical Eastern European to a tee. The official adjective for the Czech was “dour.” (Other acceptable options: drab, dull, and doleful.) He rarely smiled, on court or off. He never uttered a full sentence when a fragment would do. His game could be equally bland. He won points with a big serve and a bigger forehand, rarely venturing forward or departing from a clear plan. He lacked both the artistic gifts of McEnroe and the go-for-broke charisma of Connors.

This 1982 trophy ceremony (with McEnroe) might have planted the seed that it was time to start lifting weights

The outsider treatment from sportswriters and galleries triggered a vicious cycle. Lendl’s early standoffishness could be attributed to natural introversion and unfamiliarity with life on tour. By the time he might have opened up, though, the narrative was set.

Anyway, “Ivan the Terrible” wasn’t out there to make friends. After dropping a 40-minute, 6-2, 6-0 hammer on Hans Gildemeister in 1982, he said, “I don’t like to lose points, much less games.” If McEnroe-style arguments would help win matches despite alienating fans, he’d do it. He stalled so much between points that he’s responsible for the rule-book time limit–as well as the first attempt to shorten it.

Lendl was particularly uninterested in winning the affections of netrushers. Come in behind a playable shot to his right side, and he might reward you with the “Fuck you forehand”–a bullet aimed straight for your head.

Underneath the forbidding exterior, there was a pleasant-enough character, one with a sly, if off-kilter sense of humor. But by the time Lendl lost his fourth major final, only a handful of confidants ever saw that side of him.

* * *

Oddly enough, Lendl’s first slam title finally came in what would turn out to be his worst season of the decade. At the 1984 French Open, he straight-setted Wilander in the semis, then came back from a two-set deficit to topple McEnroe in the final.

After 15 titles in 1982 and eight in 1983, Roland Garros was one of only three he picked up in 1984. McEnroe’s career year played a large role. The two men met seven times in nine months, and the Paris final was the Czech’s only victory. Even on Lendl’s beloved carpet, McEnroe won eight of nine sets. Lendl reached his third straight US Open final, but McEnroe was even better at home than Connors had been in the title matches of the previous two years.

Up to this point in his career, Lendl had kept one foot in both East and West. He played Davis Cup for his native country, even as he paid only nominal taxes to its government. When he wasn’t on the road, he often crashed with his friend Wojtek Fibak in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was no life for a control freak who played his best tennis when everything around him was wholly predictable.

From our vantage point in 2022, it’s hard to imagine just how much Lendl’s finickiness caused him to stand out from the pack. We’ve grown accustomed to Rafael Nadal and his water bottles, personal racket stringers, and the general assumption that winning depends on doing everything in precisely the right way.

That level of micro-management is one of the many things that modern tennis owes to Lendl. The booming inside-out forehand–and a match strategy built around it–might be a more attractive foundation for the man’s legacy. But I suspect the long-range effects of Ivan-the-control-freak are even greater. In 1984, Lendl bought his own place in Greenwich. Every year thereafter, he famously hired the same crew that laid down the US Open courts to resurface his own. He could practice on identical courts–often with a young guest like Pete Sampras–without opening the gate at the end of his driveway.

Once the Czech transplant started down the path of precision training, he discovered just how much he could optimize. He not only hired a stringer, he requested rackets strung at two distinct tensions, one of which he used only when he started to get nervous. He got a full physical workup from Navratilova’s doctor and learned that he’d last longer on court with a low-carb diet. Like Martina, he had embraced the excess of the Western diet; unlike her, he somehow survived years on tour before realizing it slowed him down.

None of this made Lendl more likeable. But his new lifestyle kept him calm. He had always practiced as much as anyone; now nothing impeded his focus.

Ion Țiriac, then coaching Boris Becker, said of Ivan, “Deep down he is still very nervous because his talent is from work, not from God.” Maybe, but in Lendl’s mind the only solution was to work even harder. Now he could.

* * *

Lendl’s run from 1985 to 1987 is one of the most impressive three-year stretches of the Open era. He won eleven titles in 1985, ten in 1986, and eight in 1987, all while holding off the likes of Wilander and even younger prospects in Becker and Stefan Edberg. He won more than 90% of his matches in all three seasons.

Most importantly, five of the championships came at grand slams. He won the US Open for the first time in 1985 after three runner-up finishes, straight-setting McEnroe. Working with Tony Roche to improve his net game, he showed more variety than ever. The most devastating addition to his game wasn’t at the net, though. It was a new baseline weapon. After years of making his money with a down-the-line forehand, he was suddenly going cross-court for winners, too. He struck 21 cross-court forehands against McEnroe. 19 of them earned him the point.

In 1986, Lendl won both the French and the US Open, losing exactly one set at each event. One of his lapses came in the Paris quarter-finals, where Andrés Gómez eked out a first-set tiebreak. Ivan returned the favor in the second and ran out the match, 6-0, 6-0. He was even better at the year-end Masters event on carpet, where he beat five top-tenners–Gómez, Noah, Edberg, Wilander, and Becker–without the loss of a single set.

Capping the remarkable span, Lendl defended both his French and US titles in 1987. He held off a newly-focused Wilander in the two finals, each one a four-set marathon. The championship match in New York lasted four hours and 43 minutes–an astounding effort as the Czech transplant was recovering from the flu.

The only major that ultimately eluded him was Wimbledon. His deliberate game wasn’t well-suited to the speed or low bounces of the turf, despite his work with Roche and increasingly thorough preparation for the grass-court major toward the end of his career. He reached back-to-back finals in 1986 and 1987, where he lost straight-set decisions to Becker and Pat Cash.

At the Australian Open in December 1985, Lendl lost in the semi-finals to Edberg, 9-7 in the fifth. He didn’t care for the grass there, either–he declared that the old tournament venue at Kooyong “should be paved over.” He got his wish, at least figuratively, when the Australian switched to hard courts in 1988. That allowed him a bit more control, and after losing to Cash in the first hard-court edition, he won titles Down Under in both 1989 and 1990.

* * *

If we were talking about anyone other than Ivan Lendl, this would all make for one heck of an underdog story. The man lost four major finals… then went on to win eight. He fell short three years in a row at Flushing Meadow alone… then bounced back to win the next three.

Long before he began to reach major finals, Lendl overcame significant hurdles. He had two accomplished tennis players as parents–mother Olga was a long-time Czechoslovak number two–but he grew up in what was, at the time, a relative tennis backwater. When he was ready to compete at an international level, the federation controlled his schedule and often called him back home for meaningless club matches.

He had the benefit of size, as a height of six-feet, two-inches was still noticeably above tour average. But as Țiriac said, his physical gifts didn’t go much further than that. It’s easy to overstate this particular disadvantage–he was a greater natural athlete than 99% of us–but it took an enormous amount of work just to pull even with the likes of McEnroe and Connors. The two Americans rose to the top despite rarely practicing more than an hour a day.

The Lendl serve in 1986

Despite those initial losses and a nonexistent grand slam tally at age 24, Lendl rode sheer stubbornness to 19 finals and eight major championships. While both numbers have lost a bit of their magic in the intervening years, they were staggering achievements in the days before the Big Three. Only Borg won more slam titles in the first two-plus decades of the Open era. When Ivan reached his 19th title match, he was the first man–pro or amateur–to do so.

Yet no one will ever make a movie about the rail-thin young Czech who overcame the odds. His aloofness was part of the problem–he never showed enough of himself to attract a legion of admirers, even as fans eventually grew to appreciate his game.

The real obstacle, though, is that it has always been impossible to see Lendl as the struggling challenger. He beat Borg–twice!–and Guillermo Vilas–on clay! twice!–in 1980, just his second full season on tour. He upset McEnroe in seven of their first nine meetings, including six straight when the American was number one in the world. Even when a grand slam title seemed like an impossible dream, he turned the indoor circuit into his personal demesne.

So Ivan Lendl, underdog? Hardly. One man who lost to him in 1982 summed up the experience: “He makes you want to go home.”

The underdog was the guy on the other side of the net.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Beware of GOATs.

* * *

Pete Sampras [USA]
Born: 12 August 1971
Career: 1988-2002
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1993)
Peak Elo rating: 2,319 (1st place, 1994)
Major singles titles: 14
Total singles titles: 64
 

* * *

Pete Sampras played over 500 tiebreaks in his career. His record over 15 years at tour level was 328-194, a 62.8% winning percentage.

Sounds pretty good, right? I don’t expect you to know exactly how 62.8% rates among the game’s best. It’s one of the many tennis stats that sounds like it might be great, but it might also be the sort of thing that strong players do as a matter of course.

In fact, 62.8% rates fifth among all players in the Open era. Only Roger Federer, Arthur Ashe, Novak Djokovic, and, puzzlingly, Andrés Gómez did better. Now that we know Pete scores in the top five, we can pretend that it was obvious all along. One of the biggest serves of his (or any) era, plus imperturbability under pressure–what more could you need?

Forgive me as we dive straight into the weeds here. Tiebreak success isn’t as simple as it sounds. Yes, Pete and Fed (and the others) were great at the end of sets, but they were great the rest of the time, too. The win-loss percentage simply confirms that they were very good at tennis, not that they raised their games at 6-all.

A decade ago*, I introduced a stat called Tiebreaks Over Expectations (TBOE) to address the less obvious aspect of tiebreak success. We can take a player’s serve and return performance over an entire match and calculate the odds that he would win a tiebreak. Do that for all of his tiebreaks over an entire season, or a full career, and you can figure out how that won-loss percentage compares to his overall performance.

* Yikes.

What may surprise you is that most players converge on a TBOE of zero. Conventional wisdom says that big servers have an edge in tiebreaks. Nope. Apart from the self-evident fact that better players tend to win more breakers, it’s a coin flip. The only minor exception is that men who contest lots of tiebreaks–big servers or not–do a tiny bit better. Experience may count for something, but the effect is barely enough to register.

A few specific players manage to break the mold. When we rank ATPers of the last thirty years by TBOE, Sampras edges up to third place. John Isner leads the list by a wide margin: He plays tiebreaks constantly and ups his level when he gets there. Federer comes next.

Had Sampras played as well at 6-all as he did in the first twelve games of the set, his career record in shootouts would’ve been 299-223, a respectable but hardly newsworthy rate of 57.3%. Instead, he outperformed expectations by 29 tiebreaks. That might be luck, tactical soundness, or ice-cold water where the blood is supposed to go. Even if we can’t pin down the details, it’s clear that he was doing something right.

* * *

Pete got smarter throughout the 1990s. Tim Gullikson and, later, Paul Annacone taught him to use his range of weapons to play percentage tennis. While he never became as single-minded as, say, Jack Kramer in pursuit of that goal, it was clear that he learned to outthink his opponents, not just outsmoke them.

Sampras didn’t have much to say about tiebreaks in his 2008 memoir, A Champion’s Mind. He recognized that luck often dictated the outcome of such close sets, especially on fast courts. If he holds any secrets (besides “don’t choke!”) he isn’t telling.

Opponents learned that Pete was at his strongest at the tail end of a set. Mats Wilander told Steve Flink that Sampras “had a lot of guts in big time moments.” Wilander also noticed that Pete made sure his opponent would be off-balance when the crucial moment arrived. Over the course of a set, he would alternately push hard, relax, keep points short, force you into a rally–anything to prevent the man across the net from getting into a rhythm. For a player like the Swede, that was deadly.

The Sampras serve in 1991

Pete knew better than anyone that a match could hinge on just a few turning points. “To me,” he wrote, “a match with a lot of service breaks is as unsatisfying as a match with none, because a great match is only supposed to have a handful of decisive moments.” He aimed to be ready for those opportunities.

For Sampras, that’s the difference between an all-time great and the rest. He noted in his memoir that more “one-slam wonders” have broken through at Roland Garros than at Wimbledon. Men like Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg, and himself often squeaked through by the smallest of margins, but the narrow scorelines were deceiving.

Jim Courier, who lost to Pete 16 times in 20 meetings, could only nod in agreement. “You wonder what the heck just happened because you thought you had been outplaying him,” Courier told Flink. “That is what playing Pete felt like because he could summon his greatness late in a set. He just had that knack.”

* * *

Far be it from me to question the wisdom of Sampras, Courier, and the rest, but I find these sorts of explanations unsatisfying. The closer we get to the top end of the Tennis 128, the more we see champions described in nebulous terms. They were intimidating, mentally overpowering, cool under pressure. Maybe it’s true, but they must have been doing something, too.

Back into the weeds we go.

The Match Charting Project has logged 163 Sampras matches, which include 116 of his career tiebreaks. It’s a not a random sample; for our purposes, it’s even better. We’ve recorded every point from the most prominent matches–grand slam and Masters finals and semi-finals, head-to-heads with Andre Agassi, and so on. The dataset offers us a fairly complete look at how Pete played when the outcome really mattered.

Compared to his performance in the twelve games leading up to each tiebreak, Sampras did everything better in the breaker. He put 1% more first serves in. He won 1.3% more of his service points. 1.3% more of his serves didn’t come back. He even won return points at a better clip, though by the minuscule margin of 0.4%.

Small as these numbers are, keep in mind that they represent improvements on already strong statistics. Pete amassed them when his opponents cranked their own games up as far as they could go. Consider also that they dispel a common notion that may be true of more one-dimensional big servers. Sampras may have taken it easy on some unimportant return points early in sets. But his tiebreak magic derived more from upping his game on serve than return.

What’s more, a 1% improvement on serve is massive compared to the performance of the average tour player. The Match Charting Project doesn’t have a wide base of 1990s matches from which to infer tour averages, but we can assume that this part of the game didn’t change much in two decades. Using charts from the 2010s, I found that in the typical tiebreak, returners win 6.5% more points than they had in the twelve preceding games. Virtually every contemporary player of note sees their serve numbers decline in breakers.

Not Pete. He recognized that the luck of the tiebreak could go against him, but he also knew that luck favors the elite server playing the smartest percentages.

To see Sampras’s steeliness under pressure, look no further than the fifth-set buster against Alex Corretja in the 1996 US Open quarter-finals. At 6-7, Pete saved match point with a forehand volley winner. After missing his first serve at 7-all, he went big with his second, caught the Spaniard leaning the wrong way, and scored an ace. Corretja–who, incidentally, retired with a 51% career tiebreak winning percentage–double-faulted to end the match.

They didn’t call him Pistol Pete for nothing.

* * *

The irony of all this tiebreak talk is that Sampras’s career results hardly rely on a pile of clutch breakers.

Of the 14 major finals that he won, perhaps two can be scored as direct results of his tiebreak prowess. Pete beat Courier in 1993 for his first Wimbledon title, 7-6, 7-6, 3-6, 6-3. His second Wimbledon crown also involved two shootouts. In 1994, he blasted past Goran Ivanišević 7-6, 7-6, 6-0.

In two later Wimbledon finals, the luck of the tiebreak evened out. Sampras and Ivanišević played a five-setter to determine the 1998 championship, each winning a breaker in the first two sets. The title match in 2000, against Pat Rafter, started the same way. The Australian–owner of a pedestrian 54% career tiebreak mark–took the first set in a 12-10 shootout only to see Pete win the next one.

For Pete’s opponents, the threat of the tiebreak was more daunting than the event itself.

Courier won 9 of the 17 breakers the two men contested. But more often, he didn’t make it that far. Pete “wouldn’t be bothered by not playing well in your service games,” he said, “because he would just keep holding serve.”

It was a walk in the park for Sampras, while the pressure kept building on the man trying to break him. Pete likened grass-court tennis to “an old-fashioned Western gunfight,” and he was rarely the one to blink first. Whether it was his own ability to raise his game or the pressure he put on opponents, he converted break points more often than he won other return points, just as he exceeded expectations in tiebreaks. His outstanding performance in breakers may have made only a modest impact on his career records, but it indicates how he was able to play his best tennis at just the right times.

* * *

All these numbers have a way of making the man sound colorless, and that was indeed the knock on Sampras for much of his career. He was shy, and he wasn’t equipped to handle the pressure or media attention when he won the 1990 US Open at age 19.

His tennis could be electrifying–especially if you liked your points short–but even as he matured, he left the tabloid headlines for Agassi.

Over the years, though, it became clear that his desire to compete was every bit the equal of more demonstrative Americans like Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe. In the 1996 match against Corretja, he became so dehydrated that he vomited between points of the fifth-set tiebreak. Tournament officials hooked him up to an IV after the match, and McEnroe told Pete’s girlfriend, “I don’t have that much guts.”

It wasn’t just one marathon match. By the time he outlasted Corretja, Sampras had gutted out nearly two years of his career. At the 1995 Australian Open, his coach and close friend Tim Gullikson collapsed from a seizure, the latest in a months-long string of health scares. He was soon diagnosed with brain cancer. Pete defeated Courier in the quarter-finals of that tournament with tears in his eyes. Gullikson battled the disease for another 16 months before succumbing. He was never far from Pete’s thoughts.

It was particularly difficult for Sampras to push aside his concern for his ailing coach when he played Davis Cup. The American side was led by Tim’s twin brother Tom. Pete’s exploits at the 1995 Davis Cup final made clear what he was capable of when his will to win was fully engaged.

The tie was held in Moscow, where the Russians laid down a glacially slow court designed to flummox the visiting Americans–the clay-phobic world number one in particular. Initially, the team planned to use Agassi and Courier in the singles. But when Andre pulled up lame, Sampras was forced into action on his weakest surface.

After a marathon five-setter against Andrei Chesnokov, Pete collapsed on the court from cramps–but he won. Leigh Montville wrote for Sports Illustrated that it “looked as if he might not play again for a long while.”

Yet the next day, he was back on court for the doubles. Yevgeny Kafelnikov was so dismissive of Sampras’s skills in the tandem game that he said the Americans had given the match away. “I guess they don’t know Pete,” Captain Gullikson said. “I would take him on my side for one-on-one tennis, two-on-two, three-on-three, any surface. I would take him for golf.”

Kafelnikov played six sets against Pete–three in doubles, and three in singles–and didn’t win a single one. On a surface chosen in large part to thwart him, Sampras won three rubbers to secure the 1995 Davis Cup for the Americans.

The higher the stakes, the more reliable Pistol Pete became. His typical attack was vicious enough to quickly dispatch most of his peers. When it wasn’t enough, Sampras was the one who could find another level.

When that wasn’t enough, it came down to sheer desire, a willingness to put his body on the line. Most opponents never learned how deep Pete was willing to dig. Push him to the brink, though, and they discovered that there was no limit to the amount of pressure he could handle. Sampras didn’t win every close match he ever played, but he never gave one away.