Author: jsackmann

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Whee!

* * *

Gabriela Sabatini [ARG]
Born: 16 May 1970
Career: 1985-96
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1989)
Peak Elo rating: 2,418 (2nd place, 1991)
Major singles titles: 1
Total singles titles: 27
 

* * *

Graf-and-Sabatini, Sabatini-and-Graf. If you heard one of those names in 1985 and early 1986, you probably heard both. Everyone agreed that Gabriela Sabatini and Steffi Graf were the future of women’s tennis. No one was quite willing to choose one over the other.

In the middle of 1985, Sabatini had just turned 15. Graf was a year older. The smart money leaned toward the Argentinian. Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, and others as far flung as Ted Tinling and Pancho Segura considered Sabatini the greater natural talent. John Feinstein of the Washington Post reported an insider consensus that “she could be the player who combines the elegance and grace of Evert with the athletic ability of Martina Navratilova.”

Gabi didn’t waste any time establishing herself on the adult tour. At Hilton Head in 1985, she beat top-tenners Zina Garrison, Pam Shriver, and Manuela Maleeva in succession before falling to Evert, 6-4, 6-0. Even in the final, she made Chrissie work for it. At the French Open, two weeks after her 15th birthday, she reached the semi-finals before falling to Evert again.

After she retired, Sabatini admitted that as a junior, she was so shy that she would lose matches on purpose to avoid giving a speech after the final. None of those nerves were visible when Gabi’s big topspin groundstrokes earned her one victory after another.

“She is not normal,” said Patricio Apey, the former Davis Cupper from Chile who served as her coach and manager at the time. “She is a Martian.”

If pressed, a few experts would favor Steffi over Gabi in those early days. Evert thought that Graf “probably wants it a little more,” and Tinling pointed to her stronger mental game. (Not everyone could be nudged in the German’s direction–Navratilova said “she does strange things out there.”) Sabatini had her blemishes, most notably a cream-puff second serve and a reputation for running out of gas late in matches.

It wasn’t until mid-1986 that Graf’s superiority became apparent. Even then, Gabi stayed on her heels longer than almost anyone. Steffi won their first eleven encounters, but Sabatini took seven of the first eight to three sets. The first time they met in a final, Gabi came within one point of a straight-set victory.

Fast-forward a decade, and the debate was long over. The two women met constantly between 1985 and 1995, and Graf won nearly three out of four. The German won 22 majors to Sabatini’s one. Sabatini’s top-line stats don’t seem to merit a place among the three dozen greatest tennis players of all time. It’s useful to review the conventional wisdom about the two prospects because it reminds us that Gabi’s timing was catastrophically bad.

No one else had to play Steffi Graf forty times.

* * *

The case for Sabatini rests on the argumentum ad propemodum. That’s Latin for “argument from almost,” an ancient rhetorical technique that I just made up. The basic idea: If A is almost as good as B, and B is outrageously good, A must be pretty darn good too.

It’s not the sort of strategy that sways the hearts and minds of the masses. But we must follow the facts where they lead us.

It’s far more satisfying to say that a player is great because she won all the majors, dominated her rivals, and inspired children far and wide. Alas, there aren’t that many all-timers who meet that standard. An awfully small number of superstars have spent the last century keeping the rest of the field under their collective thumb.

Sabatini and Graf playing doubles at the 1986 French Open

So, in a 128-player list, we have plenty of one-slam winners and a sizable helping of slamless wonders. There are stars who seized a moment when the field was weak and others who managed to puncture–however briefly–the imperiousness of one of those all-galaxy legends.

Gabi falls into the latter group. She’s the queen of the “almosts.”

Her career record against Steffi was 11-29, one of the best marks anyone managed against the German. I’ve already told you one way in which it was closer than it looked, all those three-setters in the early going. In fact, only 15 of Graf’s 29 victories came in straights.

A big part of Sabatini’s case for greatness–and the reason her peak Elo rating ranks 11th among Open-era women–is a nearly two-year span from the 1990 US Open to April 1992. Here’s how she fared against Graf during that time:

Year  Event                Round  Winner    Score        
1990  US Open              F      Sabatini  6-2 7-6(4)   
1990  Zurich               F      Graf      6-3 6-2      
1990  Worcester            F      Graf      7-6 6-3      
1990  Slims Championships  SF     Sabatini  6-4 6-4      
1991  Tokyo Pan Pacific    QF     Sabatini  4-6 6-4 7-6  
1991  Boca Raton           F      Sabatini  6-4 7-6      
1991  Key Biscayne         SF     Sabatini  0-6 7-6 6-1  
1991  Amelia Island        F      Sabatini  7-5 7-6      
1991  Wimbledon            F      Graf      6-4 3-6 8-6  
1992  Key Biscayne         SF     Sabatini  3-6 7-6 6-1  
1992  Amelia Island        F      Sabatini  6-2 1-6 6-3

That’s eight for Gabi, three for Steffi. Sabatini beat her nemesis on hard, clay, and carpet, and she came within two points of defeating her for the 1991 Wimbledon title.

Some people find it easy to play down this rivalry-within-a-rivalry. Graf had a tough 1990. She hurt her right hand, she underwent surgery to correct a sinus problem, and a paternity suit against her father kept the German tabloids in a lather for months. None of that helped her game.

On the other hand, Steffi managed just fine against everyone else. From July 1990 to the 1992 French Open semi-finals, Graf’s record was 132-13. That’s a healthy 129-5 against everyone not named Sabatini. Only three other women beat her: Navratilova, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, and Jana Novotná (three times). The German reached 20 finals and converted 16 of them. Gabi won the other four.

Monica Seles took over the number one ranking in March 1991, but she owed her position in part to Sabatini’s attack on Steffi’s point total. Monica might not have been able to do it herself, at least not so soon: Seles and Graf met twice in that span, and Graf won both times.

* * *

Debates about that eleven-match sequence can get a little circular. Did Sabatini finally make headway because Graf was injured, distracted, or otherwise slumping? Did Steffi only appear to be more fragile because Gabi had reached a new level?

Graf’s 129-5 record against everybody else suggests the latter. No one can remain as untouchable as the German had been between 1987 and 1989, in large part because of the enormous target painted on her back. But Steffi came close, especially when she faced non-Argentinian opponents.

One thing is clear: Sabatini never considered Steffi insurmountable.

She doesn’t get enough credit for her efforts to dethrone the German, partly because they were not entirely successful. When they were, Seles came along to ensure that Gabi would never reach number one herself. Another complicating factor was that, in the public eye, Sabatini was better known for her looks than her backhand. Ted Tinling, who had swooned for charismatic starlets as far back as Suzanne Lenglen, said:

There’s a great arrogance about Sabatini, and it all shows in the carriage of her head. She looks almost goddesslike. Taken together, her beauty and her arrogance form a contradiction. And I don’t think one should try to solve a contradiction in a beautiful woman. One has simply to accept her as she is.

So, right. Enough about that.

Patricio Apey guided Gabi from a temperamental 12-year-old to a top-tenner. He tried all the while to shield her from the pressures of international stardom and avoid the burnout and overuse injuries that had halted so many promising careers. He largely succeeded–perhaps too well. By 1987, Sabatini was itching for a more demanding coach to take her to the next level. She found one in Ángel Giménez, a former tour player from Spain.

Under Giménez’s guidance, Gabi developed the physique and stamina to match her already-physical baseline game. No longer could opponents count on Sabatini to exhaust her reserves with one long set. In her first twelve months with Giménez, she went 11-4 in three-set matches, 10-0 against everyone besides Steffi.

In the beginning of 1988, she finally caught up with Graf. The training paid off, as the Boca Raton final demonstrated. The match developed in a way that usually worked against the Argentinian. Steffi won the first set and served with a 3-2 edge in the second. Sabatini’s retrieving coaxed error after error, and not only did Gabi get the break back, she lost only one game the rest of the way.

The 2-6, 6-3, 6-1 victory was no fluke. The two women met again at Amelia Island a month later. Graf took a 3-0 lead in the final set, and once again Sabatini charged back for a 6-3, 4-6, 7-5 triumph. Steffi retained the ability to raise her game when it really mattered–she beat Gabi at the French, the US Open, and the Olympics later that year–but Sabatini had pierced the armor.

* * *

Sabatini’s greatest coup required another shift in strategy. By 1990, she was no longer making progress with Giménez; some observers felt that the physical training had gone too far. Sports Illustrated wrote that she was “moving like a stevedore.” Her tactics left something to be desired, and she still had a tendency to lose focus mid-match.

Carlos Kirmayr came on board in June, and Gabi traded the weight room for more roadwork. They developed a gameplan specifically for Graf, aiming to approach to the sidelines and force Steffi to hit passing shots on the run.

It’s easy to overstate how much of a change the new tactics represented. Journalists were always going on about how Sabatini was learning to serve-and-volley, or that she was approaching the net more confidently. Maybe so, but she serve-and-volleyed two dozen times against Navratilova in the 1986 Wimbledon semi-final. And with more aggressive intentions against Graf at the US Open in 1990, Sabatini came forward 40 times–but only once she had carefully prepared the way. The average rally length in those points was nearly ten shots. No one would ever confuse her with Boris Becker.

Still, tennis is a game of small margins. No matter how dire the head-to-head record, Gabi had never been far away.

Sabatini overcame an early semi-final deficit against Mary Joe Fernández to reach the 1990 US Open final. For the first time, defeating Graf proved to be a straightforward matter. Steffi’s typically authoritative forehand was unable to dictate play. Gabi even held on to more than half of her vulnerable second-serve points, and she won in straights.

Thus began Sabatini’s stunning eleven-match run against her rival. Only two other women–Navratilova and Sánchez Vicario–won eight matches against Graf in their careers. Gabi did it in 20 months.

* * *

Had she been less forgiving against the rest of the field, Sabatini could’ve seized the number one ranking. 1990 ended on a historic note, if not a successful one: After beating Graf–in straights, again–in the semi-finals at the Virginia Slims Championships, she lost a five-setter to Seles in the title match. It was the first five-set women’s match of the Open era, and both competitors were more than equal to the challenge.

When Seles gained the number one position in 1991, Sabatini was close, too. By my Elo ratings, Gabi came within 40 points of reaching Graf and the top spot in April–more than a rounding error, but still a narrow gap between her and a player who had reached some of the highest peaks in the sport’s history only a couple of years before.

From here, unfortunately, we return to the land of the almosts. Sabatini reached her sole Wimbledon final in 1991, knocking out her first six challengers in straight sets. She drew Graf in the final, of course. At 4-4 in the decider, Sabatini broke, and she twice served for the match. She came within two points of the title but no closer, conceding the championship to the German, 6-4, 3-6, 8-6.

After two more victories on the friendly hard courts of South Florida, Gabi never beat Graf again. In the 1992 Wimbledon semi-final, it was a routine 6-3, 6-3 decision for Steffi. Sabatini hung on to a place in the top five for another year, but she won only two sets in her final eight encounters with her lifelong rival.

Sabatini in the 1991 Wimbledon final

Another almost: At the 1993 French Open, Gabi took a 6-1, 5-1 lead over Fernández for a place in the semis. She failed to convert five match points and lost the match, 10-8 in the third. After that, said her then-coach Dennis Ralston, “The fire went out of her, and she hasn’t gotten it back.”

The Argentinian won only two more titles before calling it quits in 1996, at the age of 26.

Sabatini’s legacy is studded by the sort of stats people talk about when you don’t win major titles. She lasted more than 500 straight weeks in the top ten–fourth-best since the WTA began keeping rankings. She upset the world number one ten times–more than any other player who never reached the top spot herself.

Those are the kinds of laurels you’re stuck with if you had the bad luck to arrive on the tennis scene alongside Steffi. “Almost” might be the saddest word in sports, but don’t let it fool you. For Sabatini to come so close, so often, in one of the strongest eras of women’s tennis history, deserves more acclaim than she’ll ever receive.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Whee!

* * *

Boris Becker [GER]
Born: 22 November 1967
Career: 1984-99
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1991)
Peak Elo rating: 2,320 (1st place, 1989)
Major singles titles: 6
Total singles titles: 49
 

* * *

Everything Boris Becker has ever done, he has done big.

When Becker appeared at Wimbledon as a 17-year-old in 1985, he didn’t just serve warning on the field–he won the whole damn thing. In a third-round nailbiter versus Joakim Nyström, he smacked 37 aces. Against Kevin Curren in the final, he came in behind his serve 112 times, winning 84.

He stayed back once. He won that one too.

French fans took to calling Becker le grand méchant loup, the big wicked wolf. His build–six feet, two inches tall, 175 pounds–wasn’t itself overwhelming. But he carried himself with a domineering swagger long before intimidation became an explicit part of his strategy.

His serve defied description. Electric? Paralyzing? Just plain massive? Arthur Ashe said a month after Becker’s debut Wimbledon title:

There never has been a tennis prodigy this big. Becker’s like a high school junior in the NBA. He isn’t even all there yet, and he scares the hell out of guys with his power. You hate to play against somebody who’s not only good but unpredictable. The guy hits the ball harder than anyone and yet keeps it in play all day.

Boris’s stature wasn’t entirely his own doing. Reaching the pinnacle of the sport ahead of Steffi Graf, he single-handedly resuscitated German tennis. Media coverage was immediate and all-encompassing. By the middle of 1986, 98% of West Germans knew Becker’s name. Only Volkswagen scored higher.

Becker used the whole court

Even after Becker retired, his celebrity was unmatched. One marketing executive compared his fame to that of Michael Jordan in the United States. Relative to his home market, Boris may have been a bigger name.

The attention, and the pressure that accompanied it, became Boris’s dance partner. When he lost, the German media treated it as a disaster. His slumps became epic in nature. On the flip side, his self-confidence transcended tennis. To his detractors, he wasn’t just a poseur; his half-baked philosophizing made him the game’s biggest phony. Even now, he doesn’t do anything halfway. Plenty of athletes have played fast and loose with their finances; Becker got himself sent to prison for it.

But all that came later. In the the mid-1980s, Boris was the man who saved tennis.

* * *

The remarkable thing about Becker’s unseeded run to the 1985 Wimbledon title is how unsurprising it was.

At the Queen’s Club warm-up, the teenage bomber won the title with the loss of only a single set. He knocked out top-tenner Pat Cash in the quarters and made quick work of Johan Kriek in the final. Kriek predicted that the new champion would win Wimbledon, too. No one was quite sure whether he was joking.

Becker’s next match was his All-England Club opener against the veteran American Hank Pfister. Pfister won the first set, then got steamrolled the rest of the way. He called his opponent’s power “frightful.” Pfister didn’t think Becker was ready to win the whole thing. “But maybe so,” he said. “The guy’s got to win it sometime.”

By the semi-finals, the secret was out. Curren won the first semi, then crossed his fingers that fifth-seed Anders Jarryd would emerge as his opponent for the title. Sorry, Kev. The Swede won the first set and forced a second-set breaker. After that, it was all Becker.

Boris was a breath of fresh air in what would otherwise have been a dud of a Championships. Second-seed Ivan Lendl lost to Henri Leconte in the fourth, and both John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors went out limply to Curren. Becker was new, he was exciting, he was loose, and he dominated. Curren said of his conqueror in the final, “He played like it was the first round.”

The young champion made it all look easy. “Boris never thinks about it; he just plays,” Leconte said. “I see his plan. He just hit ball, make winner, win, say thank you and go bye-bye.”

It was almost that simple. He won 25 more matches in 1985 and cracked the top five of the computer rankings by October. He lost to Lendl three times, though it wouldn’t take long before he drew even with the Czech, too. Most important, he won seven singles matches and a pair of doubles rubbers to get West Germany within a whisker of the Davis Cup. He defeated Mats Wilander and Stefan Edberg in the final round, but it would take three more years for the Germans to clear the final hurdle.

* * *

Impressed by the foresight of Kriek, Pfister, and the rest? Let me tell you about Ion Țiriac.

If you’ve been reading this series from the beginning, you know that I never pass up an opportunity to talk about Țiriac. There is simply no one like him. The Romanian was an Olympic ice-hockey player turned national tennis champ. He cobbled together a solid career on the circuit in the 1960s and 1970s by coupling an impeccable work ethic with relentless mind games. He called himself “the greatest player who couldn’t play.”

Țiriac–Count Dracula, the Brașov Bulldozer, Doom Doom to Becker’s Boom Boom–became one of the sport’s canniest tacticians and talent-spotters. He shepherded Ilie Năstase to the top, then guided the careers of Manuel Orantes, Adriano Panatta, Guillermo Vilas, and Leconte. He made himself a behind-the-scenes force in men’s tennis. His unlikely background and unsettling mien only added to his aura. John McPhee wrote, “Țiriac has the air of a man who is about to close a deal in a back room behind a back room.”

Țiriac (left) and Becker. Ion is almost smiling!

Becker reached the final of the US Open boys’ competition in 1984. Țiriac was on hand, of course. So was every other super-agent and wannabe fixer in the sport. But most of them weren’t there for Boris. They were watching to see if a young Australian named Mark Kratzmann would pick up his third junior major. Kratzmann won in straights, and Mark McCormack of IMG signed him.

Țiriac got Boris. This was no consolation prize. The relationship was already in place. The Romanian had been to Leimen, the small town where Becker grew up. He had met the parents. He had charmed–oh yes, the Bulldozer can charm–the whole clan.

“He said exactly what is going to happen,” Becker said of Țiriac. “And it has.”

Becker’s air of intimidation can be traced directly to his manager. Arthur Ashe described Țiriac’s method with promising youngsters:

He always builds on their strengths. He makes them believe that they are the best in the world in at least one aspect of the game and to use that as a force, as intimidation. It was Nastase’s speed, Vilas’s stamina–he convinced Guillermo that nobody could stay out there with him all day–and Becker’s power. Listen to him build his guy up sometime.”

Dracula made it sound obvious: “I tell Boris the game so easy when one is strongest guy in it.”

* * *

For a little while, it remained that easy. In March 1986, Becker picked up his first win in five tries against Lendl, on carpet in Chicago. He brushed aside Lendl again at Wimbledon in a performance so assured it was almost boring. Boris defended his title and lost only two sets in the process.

Lendl was one of the few men on tour who could handle the Becker offense. At their first meeting in 1985, he camped out 20 feet behind the baseline to return serve. But even that wasn’t always enough, especially on grass. “He always has more power than me,” said Lendl a few years later. “He stays back and stays back, and all of a sudden he takes that big swing.”

“If Becker’s playing great,” said Andre Agassi, “sorry, you have no chance.”

Boris finished 1986 ranked second in the world behind Lendl. His star could hardly shine any brighter, and his image was squeaky clean. That was a bonus of the relationship with Țiriac. The Romanian’s shadowy reputation made it easy for the press to pin the negative stuff on him. Astronomical appearance fees? Charging for interviews? Yep, must be Țiriac.

The honeymoon between the German and his fans ended at Wimbledon in 1987. Boris beat Edberg for the seventh time in a row for the Indian Wells title and blasted his way past Connors for the crown at Queen’s Club. But the two-time defending champion fell in the second round of the Championships to 70th-ranked Australian Peter Doohan.

The German media was brutal. With two major titles before his 19th birthday, Becker had set an impossibly high standard. Even though he would reach each of the next four Wimbledon finals, he would never meet the expectations that stemmed from his early success.

On the other hand, the loss humanized him. A few years later, Curry Kirkpatrick of Sports Illustrated built an entire Becker profile around the idea that he was the most gracious loser in the game. He quoted Boris:

On that day I lose, I just realize the other guy was better. I go on. I’ll get him next time. I think one of my strengths is I never get caught up in the hype of how good I am supposed to be. I know I have to work hard to be as good as some others.

Even more impressive, it wasn’t just talk. He complimented opponents after their victories, he showed concern for injured foes, he even stuck around to play doubles after early-round singles losses. The locker room was plenty intimidated by Becker’s power, but the German earned the respect of his peers. Next to the joyless Lendl, the colorless Edberg, or the bratty McEnroe, Becker was the man that everyone wanted to represent the sport.

* * *

While Becker didn’t lose much, he never became an unbeatable force like Lendl or McEnroe at their peak. His run in 1988 and 1989 was as close at it got.

Doohan forgotten, Boris returned to form on the English grass in 1988. He beat Edberg for the Queen’s title then lost to the Swede in the Wimbledon final. He won four of the five tournaments he played the rest of the way–the exception, alas, was a second-round exit at the US Open–and finished the season by straight-setting Edberg to lead West Germany to its first-ever Davis Cup crown.

1989 was even better. He returned to the number two spot in the rankings with a final-round showing in Monte Carlo, and he even came within a set of reaching the championship match at Roland Garros. He beat Lendl and Edberg in succession for his third Wimbledon crown, then outlasted Agassi in a Davis Cup five-setter in Munich.

To this point, nearly all of Becker’s career highlights came on grass or fast indoor carpet. Finally, he broke through in New York, taking his first US Open crown by overpowering Lendl once more. For Boris, it meant he was “a real tennis player”–one who could win on a wider range of surfaces.

Baseline Becker at the 1989 US Open

Becker wouldn’t reach the number one ranking until early 1991, when he scored yet another big win over Lendl for his first Australian Open title. But with the Wimbledon and US Open trophies in his pocket at the end of 1989–plus a successful Davis Cup defense–he had every right to claim he was the best player in the world.

* * *

The German star had just turned 22 years old when he beat Edberg and Wilander for a second Davis Cup title. He was already rich and famous to an absurd degree. It’s easy to imagine an alternate history in which Becker dominates the tour for another five years and piles up a dozen major championships.

The reality was more pedestrian. In the 1990s, Boris had to settle for two Australian titles and another three runner-up finishes at the All-England Club. The 1991 Wimbledon final was particularly galling, as he lost it to Michael Stich, a countryman he considered far inferior to himself.

Becker’s confidence was part of the problem. He was never particularly coachable, and he got worse over time. Günter Bresnik, who joined Becker’s team in the early 1990s, learned that Boris would try something only if he thought it was his own idea. Another man who attempted to tame the beast, Nick Bollettieri, summed it up: “He knew a lot; what he didn’t know, he thought he knew; and he would intimidate people into thinking that he knew it.”

For a year or two, that was good enough. Over a longer span of time, the tour caught up. Becker won three of his first four meetings with Pete Sampras, another player who traded on a big serve and a will of iron. But Pete, like many of the youngsters who weren’t around for Boris’s rise to the top, wasn’t intimidated by the older man. From 1992 on, Sampras won 11 of their 15 encounters, including all three of their clashes at Wimbledon.

Equally frustrating was the German’s futility against Agassi. Becker won their first three matches, and for a time, he was one of the few peers Andre really respected. The relationship soured as the stakes rose. More relevant to their on-court results, Agassi found a gaping hole in Becker’s tactical armor. The German would stick his tongue out a bit before each serve. Andre worked out that Boris’s tongue pointed the direction he planned to serve. He took advantage sparingly, so Becker wouldn’t notice–so sparingly that it’s tough to prove from the record that Agassi even gained an advantage. But the bottom line is clear enough. From 1990 on, the two men faced off 11 times, and Boris won just once.

In one way, Becker’s inability to stay on top of the competition reduces his status as an all-time great. Six slams is nothing compared to what he could have achieved.

On the other hand, it doesn’t matter a whit. Boris will always be the 17-year-old diving in the Wimbledon grass, the golden boy who represented everything that was possible on a tennis court. Twice as many majors wouldn’t have made him meaningfully richer or more famous. He was a giant before he ever heard the names Sampras or Agassi. Even from the inside of HM Prison Huntercombe in Oxfordshire, he remains larger than life today.

* * *

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Justine Henin [BEL]
Born: 1 June 1982
Career: 1999-2011
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2003)
Peak Elo rating: 2,437 (1st place, 2007-08)
Major singles titles: 7
Total singles titles: 43
 

* * *

It didn’t all start with a raised hand, but a raised hand would set off a half-decade of controversy.

Justine Henin trailed Serena Williams 4-2, 30-0 in the final set of the 2003 French Open semi-finals. Serena was the defending champion and number one seed. Henin was ranked fourth at the time; she had won their last meeting, at Charleston several weeks earlier. The Belgian’s main advantage was a raucous, partisan crowd that backed the sort-of local hero in the way that only the French masses can.

At 15-0, Henin missed a forehand long. It was close enough that plenty of spectators disagreed, and umpire Stefan Fransson checked the mark. He confirmed it was out to a smattering of boos and whistles.

When Williams hit her first serve at 30-0, Henin had her hand up, asking her opponent to wait. Fair enough: the crowd wasn’t finished voicing its collective opinion. Serena saw the gesture, missed the serve, then appealed to Fransson for another first serve. He hadn’t seen Henin’s hand, so he looked over at the Belgian for confirmation. Henin didn’t say anything either way. Fransson had no choice but to leave Serena with one serve.

Henin won that point, then the next one, then the two after that. She held serve to tie up the decider at 4-all. The Belgian broke for 6-5 in a ten-point game. With a crafty lob and a pair of big serves, Henin sealed the victory, 6-2, 4-6, 7-5.

Serena broke down in tears after the match. “It wasn’t the turning point of the match,” she said. “I should have still won the game. But to start lying and fabricating is not fair.”

Henin’s reply? “I wasn’t ready to play the point. The chair umpire is there to deal with these kind of situations. I just tried to stay focused on myself and tried to forget all the other things.”

She wasn’t entirely wrong. It is the umpire’s job. But the unwritten rules of tennis assume a reasonable level of sportsmanship. On a scale of 1 to 10, let’s say the acceptable minimum standard is a 3. Justine’s silence on court and buck-passing after the fact rated a 1. Maybe 1.5 if you’re feeling generous.

She continued, “It’s very important to concentrate on the positive things from the match and try to forget this kind of incident.”

It was important for her, yes. She had another match to play, a final against compatriot Kim Clijsters, which she would win for her first major championship.

Henin was able to put the kerfuffle behind her. But her reputation would never recover. In the coming years, she’d add plenty of fuel to the fire. No one would question her grit; even her strongest detractors would gasp at her one-handed backhand. It just seemed that her will to win led her to cross the line.

In some sports, bending the rules to the point of dishonesty is celebrated. Tennis is not one of those sports.

* * *

On a good day, the Belgian was the most thrilling player in the women’s game, a five-foot, five-inch attacker who Martina Navratilova dubbed the “female Federer.” John McEnroe thought her one-hander was the best in the game–men’s or women’s.

Then there were the other days. Her backhand was flashy then, too, but when she offended an opponent, no one talked about her groundstrokes. The 2003 French Open semi-final was hardly Henin’s last offense. Let’s go through the litany.

The Henin backhand in 2002

At the 2003 Acura Classic in San Diego, she lost the first set of the final to Clijsters, 6-3. She then took a five-minute medical time out to change a bandage on her foot. Henin won the next two sets, 6-2, 6-3.

“It’s not the first time she has done this,” said Clijsters. “I think she has probably had to do it in every one of our matches. It’s a sign that she is not at her best and so she has to resort to other means to get out of scrapes.”

Again: completely within the rules. I’m not sure anyone would even notice a five-minute break between sets in 2022. Yet Clijsters was hardly known for complaining about her opponents or making excuses for losses. This particular verbal volley would come up again and again.

The Belgians tried to downplay the nastier side of their personal rivalry. They did not always succeed.

Next up: The 2004 Australian Open final, again with Clijsters. Facing break point at 3-4 in the third, Kim hit a forehand volley that appeared to clip the line. Henin immediately gestured that it was out, and when the line judge didn’t make a call, chair umpire Sandra de Jenken overruled. That gave the break to Justine, and like Serena in Paris, Clijsters crumbled. Five points later, Henin had the title.

This one’s a little more ambiguous. It’s not clear that de Jenken’s overrule was a direct result of Henin’s gesture. It’s annoying when players make their own calls, but it’s not unusual. Without Hawkeye, or at least a much better camera angle, it’s tough to judge.

* * *

Henin missed much of the 2004 season to a virus, and her comeback in 2005 was slowed by a knee injury. Once healthy, she reeled off 24 straight victories on clay, including her second straight Roland Garros title. A hamstring injury slowed her down the rest of the way.

She qualified for the year-end Tour Championships but didn’t play. Pete Bodo spoke for the anti-Justine crowd:

I see this latest development as part of an ongoing saga–that is, Justine doing exactly as she pleases, regardless of all other considerations, and furiously playing the “woe is me” card for all it’s worth. … [T]he greatest danger in down time is that of a player falling irretrievably into the bottomless pit of self.

In case you hadn’t worked out his opinion by then, he called Henin a “demented dwarf.”

That may have been going too far, especially when discussing a player’s decision to rest a recent injury. But Bodo was just getting warmed up. At the 2006 Australian Open, Henin would commit what he called “the most significant and flagrant act of poor sportsmanship I’ve witnessed in nearly 30 years of covering pro tennis.”

This transgression: She retired from the Australian Open final, giving Amélie Mauresmo an abbreviated 6-1, 2-0 victory.

If you weren’t following tennis at the time, it’s hard to grasp the degree to which the tennis world viscerally disapproved. Pam Shriver said Henin’s reputation was “tarnished forever.” Bud Collins–once a sympathetic voice who dubbed Henin “the Little Backhand That Could”–wrote that the retirement left “a bad taste and a blot on the game.”

Henin’s defense: “My energy was very low and my stomach painful.”

That was a tough pill to swallow for a worldwide audience that had watched the Belgian gut out a 32-shot rally–and win it!–four points before walking away.

I’m repeating myself, I know, but once again, Henin was fully within her rights. There’s no law that says that an injured player–however minor the malady–needs to stay on court because of the gravity of the moment, the size of the crowd, or the match point celebration her opponent deserves. But Justine was apparently the only person in the tennis world unaware of the unwritten rule. You just don’t do that kind of thing in a major final.

Henin paid a high price for this one. Five months later, she met Mauresmo again in the Wimbledon final. Maybe the Frenchwoman would’ve beaten her anyway, but the Melbourne retirement certainly gave her an extra bit of motivation.

Wimbledon was the one major title that Henin never won.

* * *

You get the idea. There were another half-dozen minor incidents that reached the press, surely far more that never went beyond locker-room gossip.

At the 2006 US Open, Henin faced Jelena Janković in the semi-finals. She lost the first set and doubled over in pain when she was down a break in the second. From there, Jankovic won–let me check my notes here–zero games. Apparently Justine was okay.

A few years later, Serena Williams apologized to Janković for a mid-match misunderstanding. “I’m not Justine,” she said.

It’s a shame that the tales of rule-bending and poor sportsmanship play such a big role in the Henin legacy. Many all-time greats have seen their accomplishments overshadowed by off-court nonsense simply because of a media narrative run amok. But in the Belgian’s case, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that her determination led her to go too far.

For a rival of Williams and Maria Sharapova, competitors whose will to win could be overwhelming, that’s really saying something.

Henin’s justifications, at least as much as her actions, were what really rubbed some people the wrong way. Pete Bodo paraphrased her mantra: “I have to think about myself right now.” About the controversial line call in the 2004 Australian final: “I needed to take a game.” She didn’t express any sympathy for Mauresmo when she denied her opponent a proper victory in Australia. In all the transcripts and press clippings I’ve canvassed for this profile, I haven’t come across a single sign of sympathy for any of her other victims, either.

Henin propelled herself to the top by seeing herself as the downtrodden one, and for her, that explained everything. In response to the accusation that she faked injury in the 2003 San Diego final, she said, “I think some players don’t like the fact that a player of my stature–less imposing than theirs–is strong and capable of tirelessly running around the court.”

* * *

Her retirement was as puzzling as some of her remarks. Ahead of the 2008 French Open, Henin said goodbye, leaving the game behind when she held the number one ranking and skipping her chance to win Roland Garros for the fifth time.

This time, no one could blame her. She had racked up seven major titles and 117 weeks at the top of the ranking table. Sharapova understood: “If I’m 25 and I’d won [seven] Grand Slams, I’d call it quits too.”

The retirement didn’t stick. Some combination of seeing Clijsters make a triumphant return to the tour and watching Roger Federer win the French to secure his career Grand Slam convinced Justine to give it another go. If Federer did it, maybe she could win Wimbledon and complete her own set.

Henin said of her first time around, to the dropped jaws of the entire tennis world, “Maybe I didn’t fight enough.”

The woman who re-joined the tour in 2010 was mellower, more reflective. “Justine Zen-in,” ventured Jon Wertheim. Her game was as potent as ever. She nearly upset Clijsters in her first tournament back, then beat Elena Dementieva in a nearly three-hour second-rounder at the Australian Open. She reached the final there, where Serena Williams finally stopped her.

Her Wimbledon dream didn’t pan out. She drew Clijsters again in the fourth round, then injured her elbow after winning the first set. There was no faking this time. Henin fractured a ligament and sat out the rest of the season, effectively ending her comeback. She played her last event at the Australian the following year.

Back in 2007, when Justine won her third straight French Open, an interviewer asked her to suggest a nickname. “Queen of Clay is good,” she said. In the sense that she would’ve happily fought her way to the top with violence and palace intrigue–sure, it fits. A benevolent monarch she was not.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Ellsworth Vines [USA]
Born: 28 September 1911
Died: 17 March 1994
Career: 1929-39
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1932)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 36
 

* * *

Ellsworth Vines sounds like a character out of a John Steinbeck novel. He looked like one, too. Standing six-feet, two-inches tall, he weighed barely 150 pounds. He didn’t walk, he ambled.

The word that came to everyone’s mind was “whipcord.” Vines didn’t give the impression that he was trying particularly hard. But his Continental-grip serve, propelled by a vicious snap of the wrist, resulted in–whip!–one of the most devastating deliveries of his era. Or any era.

When Elly made his first trip to Wimbledon, in 1932, he lost only two sets en route to the final. Facing British hope Henry “Bunny” Austin for the championship, the 20-year-old Californian crushed overheads so hard they bounced into the royal box. At match point, he struck his 30th ace of the day. The ball flew by so fast that Austin wasn’t sure whether it passed him to the right or the left. The 6-0 final set lasted all of ten minutes.

A London newspaper tagged it, “Murder on the Centre Court.” One Davis Cupper called the Vines game “terrifying.”

A Cleveland sportswriter saw Vines face Bill Tilden in 1934. He described the serve:

Vines just seemed to stretch, lazily it seemed, and toss the ball over his head. Back went that racket, a long, lean arm gripping it at the very end of the handle, up and over–and suddenly a spurt of white hit the court at Tilden’s feet.

In 1935, a Philadelphian, Dr. J.F. Strawinski, measured Elly’s serve with a device of his own design. It clocked in at 130 miles per hour–and that was a mere average of his ten fastest deliveries. Another apparatus said 122 mph. The exact number doesn’t matter. Vines, with a wooden racket and stricter foot fault rules, was cracking serves that would outpace many of today’s stars.

Oh, and his second-serve kicker was one of the best in the business. His peers rated it second only to that of Gottfried von Cramm.

The proof was in the results. In 1939, Elly still felt lingering effects of a shoulder injury, and his interest in tennis was waning. His serve was still virtually unplayable. In a 39-match series against Don Budge–some of them on clay–he averaged more than two aces per service game.

Vines was not the only monster server of his era; he wasn’t even the only one from Southern California. Johnny Doeg, just a few years older, hit nearly as hard, and he was left-handed. He rode his first-strike game to a Forest Hills title in 1930. Les Stoefen was a premier doubles player who joined some of Elly’s pro tours. Dr. Strawinski measured Stoefen’s serve at 131 mph.

There were two main differences between Vines and his fellow Californians. He possessed “a flat forehand that had to be seen to be believed,” wrote Jack Kramer in 1979. “It was without question the hardest forehand in the history of the game.”

Elly’s other advantage was an all-around athleticism that allowed him to steadily add to his arsenal. He played semi-pro baseball as a teen, went to college on a basketball scholarship, and joined the professional golf tour when he hung up his tennis racket. For a decade, he shored up one weakness after another, maintaining his position as the best player in the world until Budge dethroned him.

* * *

Vines packed more ups and downs into his short tennis career than most people could manage in a lifetime. His days as an amateur spanned barely more than four years.

Raised in Pasadena, he was a nondescript junior player until coach Mercer Beasley spotted him at age 14. Beasley took the spin out of Elly’s forehand and taught him the flat stroke that would barely skim the net. The youngster made his first trip East in 1930, when he was 18. He scored a few big wins, including upsets of Frank Shields and Frank Hunter for the New York Metropolitan Grass Court title.

Allison Danzig later wrote, “Vines at the peak of his form could probably have beaten any player who ever lived.” Praise like that usually carries an unspoken implication. When he wasn’t playing well, he was vulnerable. That was especially true in 1930.

The week after his Metro title, Elly repeated his victories over Shields and Hunter, then suffered a shock of a loss against soft-balling Sidney Wood, 6-2, 6-2, 6-0. The defeat both pierced his confidence and offered other players a game plan. He won only a couple more matches before returning to California.

“I guess I’m just a false alarm,” he said.

His next fifty-seven opponents would beg to differ.

Back in Los Angeles, Vines won five straight to take the title at the Pacific Southwest. He outlasted the reigning Wimbledon finalist Wilmer Allison and made quick work of George Lyttleton Rogers, the Irishman who had beaten him a month earlier at Forest Hills. When he went on the road again in 1931, his winning ways continued. He dropped only two decisions in his first 52 matches. The rest of the circuit quickly learned that soft-balling Elly no longer did the trick.

* * *

The Vines who returned to Seabright in 1931 was a different player. A year after the disastrous loss to Wood, he put on a display of both physical and mental fortitude, coming back from a two-set deficit against fellow fireballer Johnny Doeg.

Punditry was as hard then as it is today. Danzig, writing in the New York Times, marvelled at the 19-year-old’s maturity:

His lasting qualities, in spite of his thin frame, are to be attributed largely to his relaxed style of play. Vines has learned what it would pay many other young players to learn, that tournament tennis is too strenuous a game for any one who does not conserve his energies…. [He] appears to be out for an afternoon’s leisurely practice until the ball is put in play and even then he is not to be hurried.

John Tunis, the correspondent for the New Yorker, came to the opposite conclusion:

The boy has the strokes and the game of a great player, but he has yet to learn the lesson of how to conserve himself, how to reach the end and the important part of the season at the peak of his game. In view of his physical condition I very much doubt whether Vines has the stamina to carry him through the long grind of the Singles at Forest Hills.

“Four months of tennis on end,” Tunis wrote. “Think of it!”

An excess of tennis would soon prove Elly’s (temporary) undoing, but in 1931, Danzig was the better forecaster. Vines was fresh enough at Forest Hills to win six matches, including a five-set semi-final against Fred Perry–one of his four victories against the Brit that year. He defeated George Lott in the final to cement his place as the new number one American.

* * *

Vines limited his tournament play in 1932, but he was just as busy spearheading the United States team’s effort to regain the Davis Cup. Just to reach the Challenge Round and take on France for the title, the Americans needed to progress through four rounds. Elly went undefeated, knocking off Jack Crawford and Harry Hopman of Australia, then von Cramm and Daniel Prenn of Germany.

In between, he made his first visit to the All-England Club and waltzed through the Wimbledon draw. Elly lost seven games in the quarter-finals against hard-hitting Spaniard Enrique Maier, six in the semi-finals to Crawford, and six in the championship match, the 30-ace display against Bunny Austin.

All that could stop him was the combined efforts of France. The groundskeepers at Stade Roland Garros watered down the courts so that the Americans would have to cope with an even slower surface. The US had defeated Germany at the same venue, but von Cramm and Prenn didn’t have the crowd–or the linesmen–on their side.

Elly might have had a chance against the aging Jean Borotra in the opening rubber, even on such an unfriendly surface. But the battle was marked by a series of suspiciously Gallic line calls. Borotra played a tactically savvy match, keeping the Vines serve in play and conserving his resources for an all-out net attack in the fourth set. Henri Cochet made it two-nothing for the hosts with a four-set win over Wilmer Allison.

The American doubles team eked out a victory on day two, but Borotra sealed the championship by defeating Allison. From our vantage point ninety years later, it’s tough to know just how egregious the French officials were. Suffice it to say that on match point in the fifth set, Allison hit an unreturnable serve, and Borotra jogged to the net to congratulate him on the victory. Then the line judge called it out, and Borotra came back to win the decider, 7-5.

The only consolation for Vines was the dead fifth rubber. Both sides took the final match seriously, and with the Cup secure, the linesmen may have handled their duties more scrupulously. The American beat Cochet in five. On paper, Cochet was one of the few men with a game that could’ve troubled the Californian; his quickness and return of serve had the potential to blunt Elly’s weapons. But Vines won all three of their amateur encounters.

The two men next met for the 1932 US Championship at Forest Hills. This time, Vines needed only three sets. Cochet did plenty of running, but just as often, he didn’t bother. Danzig wrote, “It would have been as useless as to chase rainbows.”

Vines beat Cochet again at Wimbledon the next year. The Frenchman gave a capsule review: “Never saw anything like it.”

* * *

Vines turned 21 years old a few weeks after claiming his second Forest Hills title. He had played an enormous amount of tennis in two years, and he was about to play even more. Instead of going back to USC for the fall semester, he headed to Australia as part of a five-month tour.

A break would’ve been a better choice. Elly won just one of the three tournaments he played Down Under, losing in the quarter-finals of the Australian Championships to the unfamiliar double-handed backhand of Viv McGrath. He wasn’t thinking about a Grand Slam–the term wouldn’t even be coined until later that year–but it was an feeble start to the season nonetheless.

As the world’s leading amateur, he was already a prime target for pro tennis promoters. Bill Tilden was the reigning champ among the professionals, and though Big Bill was 40 years old, no one on that side of the divide could consistently challenge him. Vines could.

Before Elly went to Europe for Wimbledon and a crack at the 1933 Davis Cup, he reached a verbal agreement with Tilden to turn pro after the season. The trip was a failure. Vines lost a gripping Wimbledon final to Jack Crawford and dropped both singles rubbers in a Davis Cup tie against Great Britain. Even back home, he failed to pick up a single title on the East Coast swing. He lost in the fourth round at Forest Hills to Bryan “Bitsy” Grant, whose nickname signified both his stature and his usual chance of victory against an in-form Vines.

Some pundits assumed that Vines was stale, “over-tennised” after more than a year of non-stop competition. Tilden offered another explanation. The amateur association knew well that Vines had been approached to turn pro. He told the press he might consider it. So association officials pestered him throughout the European trip, concerned if he was thinking about it, if he had negotiated, if he had made a deal, and on and on. The mental strain left him unfit for top-flight tennis.

Whatever the reason, 1933 was a flop. To his credit, Tilden held up his end of the verbal bargain and gave Elly a lucrative deal that his recent results didn’t merit. Big Bill banked on his belief that Vines’s huge talent would allow him to turn it around.

* * *

Vines not only recovered, he became the best professional player of the 1930s. He defeated Tilden in 1934, then cleaned up against a mix of second-raters (including George Lott and Les Stoefen) in 1935 and 1936. He held off Fred Perry in 1937 and 1938, then made a respectable showing against Don Budge in 1939.

Professional records are not official and they remain incomplete to varying degrees. But we have more than enough to get the general idea. Here are Elly’s won-loss records for the matches I can document:

Year   Wins  Loss  Win%  
1934     50    19   72%  
1935     71    17   81%  
1936     90    13   87%  
1937     34    33   51%  
1938     53    38   58%  
1939     38    42   48%  
Total   336   162   67%

With the exception of 1936, these are not eye-popping numbers by tennis standards. But there were no gimmes in pro tennis. No early-round warm-ups. The vast majority of these matches were against the next-best player in the professional ranks. The day after a tough match against Perry, he got to face Perry again. And again, for months on end.

Vines might have been even better than the numbers indicate. The 1937 duel with Perry was so close that it raised eyebrows. A tight series generated press interest and helped the gate, so professional tennis always had to dispel suspicions that the matches were fixed. They usually weren’t, and anyone who witnessed the battles in person could attest to it.

But Jack Kramer, who would later star in and promote his own tours, heard a different story:

[Promoter] Jack Harris … always told me that Elly carried Fred to make things look close, and sell more tickets. But whenever I’ve asked Elly to admit that, he’d change the subject.

Kramer seems to have believed it. For his 1979 book The Game, he imagined an alternate timeline in which the amateur and professional camps had never been divided, then made a list of his “open” Wimbledon and Forest Hills champions from 1931 to 1967. In reality, Vines won three majors. Kramer’s version gave him eleven.

* * *

Elly continued to develop as a pro. He adapted to indoor tennis to beat Tilden, and he worked out a steadier baseline game–including a bit of topspin on his famously flat forehand–to stay ahead of Perry.

Kramer is the best source for Vines’s own description of his game:

Elly told me that it was his strategy to play it safe off his weaker side, the backhand. He would just attempt to hit it deep; he would not go for placements with it. Then with his hard forehand drive, he would try and send the opponent from side to side. First he would hit crosscourt, then down the line, then crosscourt again. I asked him then: “What would you do if he got that shot back too?”

“Well, I would know that I was really up against a helluva player.”

Don Budge was a helluva player. He was one of the few opponents who could return the Vines serve with a proper groundstroke, not just a chip or a block. Budge’s youth and his ground game, combined with Elly’s shoulder problems, put the writing on the wall. Vines won 17 of 39 meetings on the pair’s American tour, but Budge took 15 of the next 20.

Vines had seen Tilden hang on past his prime, and he didn’t want to do the same. He couldn’t keep up with the new champion, and he was spending more and more time on the golf course. Aside from the occasional exhibition, he put tennis behind him, and he became a professional golfer in 1942.

While his golf game was never as strong as his tennis, it was enough to make him one of the greatest American two-sport athletes of all time. He reached the semi-finals of the PGA Championships in 1951 and twice finished among the top ten money winners on tour.

If nothing else, Ellsworth Vines could hit the living daylights out of a golf ball.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Pauline Betz [USA]
Born: 6 August 1919
Died: 31 May 2011
Career: 1938-51
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1946)
Peak Elo rating: 2,226 (1st place, 1947)
Major singles titles: 5
Total singles titles: 70
 

* * *

United States tennis emerged from World War II in remarkably good shape. The best men players, a strong contingent led by the big serve-and-volleyer Jack Kramer, were generally able to maintain their competitive form in the military. Some leading women lost practice time to wartime jobs, but their tournament schedule was largely unaffected by the conflict.

At the head of the women’s game was Pauline Betz. She didn’t have some of the world-class weapons of her primary rivals, like the kick serve of Louise Brough or Doris Hart’s cannonball. She made up for it with mental strength; if you were paying attention, you could watch as she set aside her own emotional reactions to the inevitable bad breaks. The tenacious Californian possessed a strong all-around game, and the contrast between Pauline and her bigger-hitting peers kept things interesting.

Betz was immensely likeable, both on court and off. She was a jokester on friendly terms with her fellow players, the so-called “Betz Club” of Brough, Hart, and Margaret Osborne. She hadn’t been particularly favored by Perry Jones and the tennis establishment in Southern California, so she climbed the ladder on her own. As a result, she had a wealth of self-deprecating stories about her early days on tour, like the time she arrived late for a tournament and slept on the beach to save one night’s motel bill.

The international circuit resumed in 1946, and Pauline led the American charge in Europe. The US team swept the out-of-practice Brits in the Wightman Cup, and Betz won Wimbledon without dropping a set. She came within a point of adding the French–played after Wimbledon that year–before conceding that championship to Osborne. Back home, she regained the Forest Hills crown that she had monopolized between 1942 and 1944.

The 27-year-old Californian was the undisputed number one, the best amateur player since Alice Marble. American tennis couldn’t have asked for a better headliner.

So, in April 1947, the amateur police of the United States Lawn Tennis Association reached for a gun and shot themselves in the collective foot. They suspended Betz for the wholly invented offense of “negotiating to turn professional.” She hadn’t signed a contract; she hadn’t collected a single dollar for a professional engagement. But she was off the 1947 Wightman Cup team, forbidden to enter Wimbledon. If she wished, she could try to set the record straight later in the year.

This was hardly the worst injustice of post-war tennis. Althea Gibson was stuck playing segregated tournaments in 1947, waiting for the USLTA to relax the color barrier. Still, Betz’s suspension is* aggravating both for its unfairness and its utter lack of benefit to anyone except the bureaucrats who wanted to flex their muscles. Pauline lost her chance to defend at Wimbledon, the USLTA sacrificed one of their most appealing gate attractions, and fans lost the opportunity to see the top player in the woman’s game.

* Yes, “is.” Present tense. Ridiculous as it may sound, the whole saga still burns me up, 75 years later.

Betz called the Association’s move “a low blow,” but she handled it as well as she would a howler of a line call at break point. While she would have liked another crack at Wimbledon, she wrote, “I didn’t think that any future grandchildren would care whether grandma had won the US championship four or five times.” And she did want to turn pro. She had spent the 1946-47 offseason fruitlessly talking to promoters, and she had okayed the innocent-seeming letter-writing campaign that the USLTA seized on to suspend her.

Ultimately, Pauline made the best of a bad situation. I’ll come back to her professional career in a bit. Still, her status on all-time lists like these was forever compromised. The combination of the war and the USLTA’s idiocy limited her, the best player of the 1940s, to only ten major tournaments in her entire career. She won five of them and made the final of three others. Had she remained amateur, she would have been a perennial favorite everywhere she played, at least until Maureen Connolly came along in the early 1950s.

We’re left to judge her game, in large part, by the rave reviews of her peers. There’s ample evidence of her sparkplug personality, too. Her 1949 autobiography, Wings on My Tennis Shoes, is a 200-page string of wisecracks. Bobby Riggs is surely the most famous gambler in the Tennis Hall of Fame, and Betz was the one woman who could keep up with him, whether the game was mixed doubles or gin rummy.

* * *

When Time magazine put Betz on its cover in 1946, it cited experts who lamented, “if Pauline only had the strokes.”

It’s true, her forehand was decidedly mediocre, especially before supercoach Eleanor Tennant helped her simplify it ahead of the 1946 season. Her smash was even worse–just ask her! “[E]very doubles partner upon whom I have bestowed my weak overhead has assured me that I should stick to singles.”

Liabilities acknowledged, Pauline’s list of assets runs much longer. Her backhand was carefully modeled after that of Don Budge. Time said it was more powerful than Suzanne Lenglen’s. The same writer compared her to Helen Jacobs in tactical savvy. Praise doesn’t come much higher.

Tennant likened her killer instinct to that of a stevedore. I didn’t realize that dockworkers were known for their killer instinct, but it sounds like you wouldn’t want to face one on a tennis court.

Most of all, Betz could run. Jack Kramer called her “easily the best athlete of any woman I saw play the game.” Late in life, an interviewer asked her if Steffi Graf was the fastest player of all time. No, said Pauline: “I was faster!”

If you’re thinking this sounds like the profile of a brilliant clay courter, you’d be right. Pauline grew up playing on cement courts in Southern California; for years in her teens, her regular practice partner was another future Wimbledon champ, Budge Patty. Her initial exposure to clay came on a self-funded adventure to Florida in 1939, when she was 19. She debuted on dirt at the Florida State Championships in Orlando. By her own account, she fell down eleven times in a single match. She still won the tournament, and two weeks later, she won another.

Then again, she developed a bit of a reputation for hitting the dirt. At Wimbledon in 1946, she found herself suddenly horizontal. Upright again and newly grass-stained, she cracked, “And they say it takes three weeks to get laundry done in England.”

“She would never give up on a ball,” said Helen Dillon, a college teammate and occasional (unsuccessful) opponent. “She’d fall flat on her face to get to a shot. And she’d always get it.”

We can’t say exactly how much better Betz played on clay than other surfaces, because the existing records don’t indicate surface for some of the tournaments she entered. But the numbers we do have make the point well enough. She won 84% of known matches of grass and 83% on hard courts. In 159 outings on dirt, she won a whopping 92%.

* * *

By 1941, Pauline was already close to the level she’d sustain for the remainder of the war. She won eleven titles that season and reached her first Forest Hills final. According to my historical Elo ratings, she took over the number one ranking in August, though she lost it when Sarah Palfrey Cooke beat her for the US championship.

Palfrey Cooke stepped aside to have a child, and Betz proved herself superior to everyone else left in the field. In her short amateur career, she beat Brough 16 of 20 times, Osborne 18 of 26, and Doris Hart a whopping 19 of 21. Even Palfrey Cooke, who Pauline would call a “thorn in her side,” only defeated her five times in a dozen tries between 1941 and 1945.

Alas, one of those five upsets was another Forest Hills final, when Palfrey Cooke came back in 1945. Sarah didn’t have the big game of Brough or Hart, but she was the one woman on the circuit who could outsmart and out-steady Betz. Her anticipation was second to none, and her return of serve was even better.

Palfrey Cooke is indirectly responsible for Pauline’s expulsion from the amateur ranks. Sarah’s husband Elwood, a Wimbledon singles finalist in 1939, turned pro after the war. He wasn’t good enough to hold his own with the likes of Riggs, Budge, and Kramer, but he thought that he could find lucrative opportunities for the two strongest women in the amateur game–Sarah and Pauline.

Elwood wrote to clubs around the country to gauge interest in a Betz-Palfrey Cooke tour. One of those letters got back to USLTA headquarters, and you already know the rest of the story: Pauline was immediately suspended for “negotiating to turn professional.”

The judgment was particularly galling because the purported offense was something that men did all the time. Negotiations between promoters and top amateurs were only nominally secret. When Don Budge turned pro, the USLTA gave him a celebratory send-off. Kramer got the same treatment. Held to the same standards that the association applied to Betz, those men would have been banned from their final tournaments.

Palfrey Cooke didn’t care much about the suspension, since she had given up the amateur game. The stakes were higher for Pauline, so it was lucky that Elwood was indeed able to put together a financial success of a tour. The ladies booked twenty-plus dates around the United States and another dozen in Europe. Playing some nights for a fixed fee and others for a percentage of the gate, they finally converted their tennis prowess into a respectable income.

On court, though, there was little hope of turning the rivalry into a going concern. While Sarah’s smarts kept things interesting, it was clear that Betz was the superior player. She won 27 of 34 completed matches–another three were either tied or abandoned.

Meanwhile, Brough, Osborne, and Pat Todd took the titles at Forest Hills, Wimbledon, and Roland Garros, respectively. Depending on the source, Brough or Osborne was the number one player for the season. Betz was better than all of them.

* * *

By the late 1940s, men’s professional tennis was thriving. Budge and Riggs continued to draw crowds who remembered their pre-war exploits. Kramer won Wimbledon and Forest Hills in 1947, then signed a contract to take on Riggs to determine the true world number one. Two years later, Richard “Pancho” González joined the pro ranks and eventually became the man to beat for a decade.

Women’s professional tennis was much more touch-and-go. Back in the late 1920s, Suzanne Lenglen was the drawing card that launched the pro game. But the other great player of the era, Helen Wills, had no interest in playing for money. Helen Jacobs might have signed up, but financial success hinged on a compelling storyline. A great rivalry like Lenglen-Wills or Wills-Jacobs would’ve done the trick. No other plausible pairs came along.

Alice Marble turned pro and barnstormed through 61 stops with the British Wightman Cup player Mary Hardwick in 1941. She won 58 of them. Her celebrity was sufficient to draw crowds, but her pro matches would always be more like exhibitions than any real contest of skill. The Betz-Palfrey Cooke series wasn’t much better.

So after those few dozen dates in 1947, there weren’t any clear moves for Pauline Betz to make. She continued to play exhibitions with Sarah, and they added a “clinic”–a comedy show, really–to their act. A tour with Marble was mooted but never materialized. None of the remaining women on the amateur circuit were likely to draw crowds. Even if the players had been interested, Betz-Brough or Betz-Hart probably would have become just as predictable as Marble-Hardwick.

She got married, she wrote a book, and she played the occasional exhibition. That was pretty much the extent of her options.

* * *

Then came Gussie Moran.

Moran, another in the long line of strong players from Southern California, was four years younger than Betz. She had held her own with Brough as a junior but failed to develop into a superstar, in part because she didn’t care quite enough to make it happen. No one ever compared her to a stevedore.

Still, she beat Doris Hart and reached the semi-finals at Forest Hills in 1948. That was good enough to merit a trip to Wimbledon in 1949. She fell in the third round at the All-England Club, but you wouldn’t know it by her press cuttings. She debuted a pair of lace underwear that flashed every time she ran for a shot. Her eye-grabbing garment didn’t violate the letter of Wimbledon’s all-white rule, but it very, very emphatically flouted its spirit.

Suddenly, “Gorgeous Gussie” was the biggest name in women’s tennis. Her on-court results stagnated, in large part because she couldn’t handle the attention. Wherever she played, photographers would line up to capture just the right angle. The word “panties” appeared more often on American sports pages in 1949 than any year before or since.*

* I made up this stat. I stand by it anyway.

Fast-forward one year, and there was no obvious hook for a men’s pro tour. Bobby Riggs, defeated by Kramer, chose to step away from competition and become a promoter. González wasn’t yet at Kramer’s level, so a rematch of their 1949-50 duel wouldn’t draw the crowds. No man in the amateur game was ready to make the move.

The biggest name in tennis was Gussie. Riggs gave the lace-underwear queen a giant financial guarantee to headline the tour, then signed up Betz as her opponent. Kramer and the entertaining Pancho Segura would make up the other half of each night’s card.

The pro troupe in 1950. L to R: Betz, Kramer, Moran, Segura

The tour was a disaster. Moran remained ambivalent about the spotlight. She did well enough with the press, but she was no exhibitionist. The crowds came to see lace underwear, and she didn’t deliver. Pauline proved to be the flashy one, wearing silver lamé shorts that would’ve gotten her kicked out of Wimbledon, not to mention any respectable restaurant on the Eastern seaboard.

Worst of all, Gussie just wasn’t that good. Pitting the best player in the game against the sexiest one was a dreadful way to keep fans checking the sports pages for the updated won-loss record. Pauline won the first nine matches. Moran didn’t get as close as 6-4 until the fourth stop of the tour.

One-way traffic was terrible for the gate. Riggs and Kramer pleaded with Betz to take it easy. They might have made more money if Pauline got hurt and had to be replaced. She was barely fazed by the USLTA’s ham-handedness, but when urged to play less than her best, she broke down and cried.

This being Pauline Betz, she quickly put herself back together. “I wasn’t about to let them cancel the tour,” she told an interviewer in 2005. “So let’s just say Gussie Moran got better all of a sudden, and the tour continued. I studied economics in college.” Gussie ultimately won 14 of 74 decisions. Riggs lost money, but the ladies did okay.

* * *

After the Betz-Moran tour, no promoter would touch women’s professional tennis. Pauline went back to family life, and she had five children within a decade.

We’re left only with a few glimpses of what might have been. Maureen Connolly, winner of nine majors between 1951 and 1954, had the star power to draw crowds. Had she stayed healthy, she probably would’ve gone pro. Betz, 15 years her elder, was the only plausible opponent for a Connolly tour.

Later in the decade, the US Professional Championships–the biggest pay-for-play tournament on the calendar–added a women’s competition. Pauline entered whenever she could, and she was undefeated until 1960. In 1956, she won two matches against Doris Hart when Doris was the reigning Forest Hills champion. She lost to Althea Gibson in three sets in May 1960, then reversed the result at an exhibition three months later. Even at age 41, no one could definitively claim to be her superior.

Betz–now Pauline Betz Addie, married to sportswriter Bob Addie–settled into a quieter life of coaching. Even in her seventies, she held her own in a regular doubles game with college players. Donald Dell, a US Davis Cup captain and a one-time student of Pauline’s, called her “one of the sport’s forgotten jewels.”

Forgotten, alas, yes. Though I’d like to keep the emphasis on jewel.

Dell said, “I defy you to find anyone who didn’t like Pauline.” Stan Hart, an author who spent a year in the early 1980s tracking down former champions, wrote, “If you didn’t like Pauline Betz Addie, there had to be something wrong with you.”

She was a rare tennis great who managed to mix down-to-earth charm with unflappable confidence. She told Time back in 1946, “If I were a second-rater, I’d quit.” There was never any risk of that.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Maria Sharapova [RUS]
Born: 19 April 1987
Career: 2003-19
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2005)
Peak Elo rating: 2,327 (2nd place, 2008; she ranked 1st in 2009 with a lower rating)
Major singles titles: 5
Total singles titles: 36
 

* * *

For me, it all comes down to the left-handed forehand. Maria Sharapova played right-handed, of course, but she was a natural lefty. When she chased down a ball and didn’t have time to smack a two-handed backhand, out went the left hand for an improvised, last-ditch effort.

Sharapova probably hit more wrong-handed shots than any all-time great who wasn’t actually ambidextrous. Usually, her lefty stabs were hail marys, desperate attempts to reset the point. But they weren’t only that. She hit left-handed passing shots, left-handed volleys, even a few lefty overheads. She hit them–and won points!–against Henin, Halep, Hantuchová, and the occasional opponent whose name didn’t start with H.

They did not look good. While you can find plenty of unlikely highlights on Youtube, her percentage chance of winning a point once she took her right hand off the racket must have been in the single digits. Probably not high single digits. When a lefty shot succeeded, it was often because her opponent got distracted by the crowd’s reaction and missed an easy putaway.

Point is, Sharapova owes no part of her fame, fortune, or substantial trophy haul to her left-handed arsenal.

Still, it’s impossible to imagine her giving up on the balls she couldn’t reach with the double-hander. Most of the world came to know her as a photogenic blonde, a millionaire spokeswoman for luxury products, a teen queen who inspired one misplaced Anna Kournikova comparison after another. But Maria was a competitor first, a competitor second, and a competitor third. Everything else came after that.

Sharapova didn’t win because of the left-handed forehand. But they didn’t call her the Iron Maiden for nothing. Her steely resolve was unshakeable, from her first full season at age 16 through her injury-riddled later years on tour. The commitment to chasing down the most hopeless balls was inseparable from the bludgeoning strokes and pure grit that more directly fueled the Russian’s long run at the top of the game.

* * *

It wouldn’t have taken much for Sharapova to end up as a left-handed tennis player. As an eleven-year-old at Nick Bollettieri’s academy, she and father Yuri sought out Rick Macci, another coach known for shepherding promising youngsters to the pros.

Macci found Maria’s forehand in a dire state. It was cramped and awkward; she could barely keep a rally going off that wing. Her backhand, supported by her dominant left hand, was a vastly superior shot–“already timed and synchronized,” as the coach put it.

Then he saw her hit a left-handed forehand. It was “one of the best I’ve ever seen. Knife through butter, smooth as silk.” For a promising junior to change dominant hands at age eleven was unheard of, but Yuri was willing to take the plunge. He recognized that junior results were meaningless. He wanted Maria to be great at 18, not 12. If the right-handed forehand was going to hold her back, now was the time to fix it.

The Sharapovas prepared to move to Macci’s academy and develop a left-handed game. But IMG, the management company that bankrolled Maria’s training at Bollettieri, used a combinations of lures (more resources!) and threats (no wild cards!) to keep her. As a lefty, Maria’s backhand wouldn’t be as strong, so Bollettieri kept her playing from the right side. IMG hired groundstroke technician Robert Lansdorp to repair her forehand.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter much which side Sharapova landed on. Her forehand was never flawless, but it was effective. Her smoother backhand won her points, as well. While she might have gotten more mileage out of a left-handed serve–just imagine Sharapova’s ground game combined with, say, the serve of Petra Kvitová–her right-handed deliveries were plenty powerful.

Strange as it is to say, the specifics of Maria’s stroke equipment always took second place to her perseverance. “Her mind was just unbelievable,” said Bollettieri. “It was never in her mind to be a failure.”

* * *

Sharapova didn’t have much time to contemplate anything other than superstardom. She made a surprise run to the Wimbledon fourth round at age 16, in 2003. A year later, she won the whole thing.

It wasn’t just the victory. It was the way she won. Maria beat fifth-seed Lindsay Davenport in the semi-finals, bouncing back from a lost first set and wrenching the momentum away from the American in a second-set tiebreak. How bold was she? Of the seven points she won in that tiebreak, she hit winners on six of them. “I had control of the match,” said Davenport, “and she took it from me.”

Two-time defending champion Serena Williams never got close to a tiebreak. Sharapova beat her in the final, 6-1, 6-4, such a convincing defeat that it felt like a changing of the guard. S.L. Price wrote in Sports Illustrated:

Over 73 minutes Sharapova stripped away Williams’s armor, the hauteur that has marked her in her prime, and the resulting sights and sounds were almost unimaginable: Williams slipping at the key moment of an epic rally and bouncing on her rear end; Williams, too startled to handle a laserlike Sharapova return, emitting a loud moan…. Then there was Williams, never before at a loss for answers, meeting the press after the match and saying, “I just didn’t… I don’t know what happened.”

Serena gave the new champion the highest praise of the day: “She’s kind of like me: She doesn’t back off.” Martina Hingis called her “fearless.”

To the coaches and agents who had watched her grow up, Sharapova might have matured ahead of schedule, but the title was no surprise. They had known they had a future champion on their hands the moment they saw her. Now came the rewards: Celebrity, endorsements, and an apparently clear path to number one.

* * *

In some ways, Sharapova fulfilled all of her early promise and then some. She finished 2004 with a victory at the year-end WTA Tour Championships, beating an injured Serena Williams for the title. She didn’t reach another major final in 2005, but her cumulative effort–three semis and one quarter at the slams–combined with three smaller tournament wins to give her the number one ranking in August.

Sponsors were delighted to learn that Maria’s Slavic good looks came paired with flawless English and preternatural poise. They made her a multi-millionaire before she won her second major. Ahead of the 2006 US Open, she starred in a Nike ad campaign that managed to both trade on her appearance and capture her competitive fire in just 60 seconds.

By breathing new life into the women’s game, though, Sharapova woke up the sleeping giant that was Serena. The two women played a rematch of the Wimbledon final at the 2005 Australian Open. The Russian won the first set and served for the match at 5-4 in the second. She sent two serves into the net on break point and Williams seized the set. In the decider, Sharapova broke in the seventh game and served for it again. This time she squandered three match points and missed another three chances to break the Serena serve at 6-all. The American took the match, 2-6, 7-5, 8-6.

The head-to-head now stood at two matches apiece. No one would’ve predicted it in January 2005, but in 18 more meetings–including three slam finals and an Olympic gold medal match–Maria would never win another.

In Williams, Sharapova met her equal, and more. Maria hit hard; Serena hit harder. The Russian served big; the American possessed the biggest first-strike weapon in the game. Everyone raved about Sharapova’s determination, but when Williams’s mind was on tennis, her own will to win was breathtaking. Put her under enough pressure, and Serena would even hit her own awkward left-handed forehand.

Fortunately for Maria, her nemesis left a few titles for the rest of the field.

At the 2006 US Open, Sharapova returned to the grand slam winner’s circle. She did it so conclusively that it was a wonder her second major was so long in coming. In seven matches, the field took only one set against her, and that came in a semi-final against Amélie Mauresmo. Maria won that match, 6-0, 4-6, 6-0. She was just as imperious in the final, defeating Justine Henin, 6-4, 6-4.

* * *

The Russian was only 19, but a few things were already clear. First, she’d never be the most popular player in the locker room. She was haughty, and as charming as she could be with sponsors, she didn’t seem to care about having friends on tour.

Second, she wasn’t about to stop grunting. No magazine feature was complete without an attempted transcription (was it EEEEEHHHHH UHHHhhhh!!!! or RHHEEE-AAAHHHH!?) and reporters occasionally stirred the pot by collecting catty remarks from other players. Sharapova’s response was always the same. She just told people to watch the match.

Third, the Kournikova comparisons would linger, no matter how nonsensical. Sure, Maria won about as many sets from Serena as Anna K would have. And yes, her endorsement income far surpassed anything her on-court performance seemed to merit. But a full decade into her pro career, she still faced questions about her priorities. “It’s not a show for me,” she said in 2012, apparently to a reporter who had never seen her battle through a three-setter. “It’s my career. And I take it very seriously.”

The “it” that Sharapova took so seriously became more than just hitting the gym and fine-tuning her technique. She developed bursitis in her serving shoulder in 2007, both slowing down her serve and making it more erratic. The flowing motion that defined her teen years would never return, even if she learned a new delivery that reached the same speeds as the old one.

Her shoulder allowed her a glittering run at the 2008 Australian Open, where she won her third major. She opened the season with 25 wins against a single loss, picking up three titles before she tore her rotator cuff. That meant surgery, and she wouldn’t be the same until 2011.

* * *

Sharapova had never been the most naturally talented player. She wasn’t the fastest woman on tour, and her footwork was more serviceable than sparkling. Her shoulder problems turned her serve into a patchwork, and with every year that went by, her game relied a little bit less on gifts, a bit more on guts.

“No matter how many punches I took,” she said in 2012, “I’ve always gotten back up.” Not quite the image that Tiffany & Co. paid her for, but accurate nonetheless.

It’s fitting, then, that Sharapova’s second act featured one of the sport’s least likely breakthroughs on clay. She once called herself a “cow on ice” as she struggled with her footing on the dirt. Nobody ever mistook her for Francesca Schiavone out there, but in time, the European clay-court swing became her most rewarding time of the year.

Here’s a stat that amazes me. Split her career into the pre-injury years (2001-08) and an equal span a decade later (2011-18). Check out her records on hard courts and clay courts:

Surface       2001-08       2011-18  
Hard     187-44 (81%)  149-47 (76%)  
Clay      48-14 (77%)   93-16 (85%)

While Maria’s rebuilt serve cost her some matches on hard courts, her results on clay improved by an even wider margin.

At tour level, Sharapova won 11 of the 13 clay-court finals she reached, including two at Roland Garros and a half-dozen against top-ten players. The only woman who ever beat her for a title on clay was Serena Williams. Serena was also the only player who won clay-court matches at a better clip than she did in the 2010s.

By the time the Russian reached the 2012 French Open final, the “cow on ice” tag was little more than a good-natured jab. Sharapova beat Victoria Azarenka for the Stuttgart title and saved a match point to overcome Li Na for the championship in Rome. Serena lost early in Paris, so Maria had her way with the field. She lost only one set en route to the Roland Garros crown, and she allowed Sara Errani only five games in the title match.

On clay, give me determination (and monster groundstrokes) over footwork every time. “She is so completely involved in winning,” said Mauresmo. “Mental strength is her strength.”

* * *

The 2012 French Open title put Sharapova back at the top of the WTA ranking table. She held the number one position for a total of only 21 weeks between 2005 and 2012, but she seized the prime ranking place five separate times.

She remained in the top five for three more seasons, claiming another French Open in 2014 and winning 80% of the matches she contested in that time frame. My Elo ratings are even more positive about her play. By that formula, she finished the 2013, 2014, and 2015 campaigns ranked second–to Serena, of course.

You probably know–and almost definitely have an opinion about–what knocked Sharapova out of the game in 2016. After testing positive for meldonium, sometimes used a performance-enhancer, she was banned from competition for two years. After the usual two-step of denials and appeals, the ban was reduced to 15 months.

Maria’s media presence had always transcended the game, and by the time she came back, her tennis seemed like an afterthought. Except for Sharapova, it never worked that way. Put her on court, in front of a crowd, and she’d work just as hard as she did 15 years earlier, playing her first Wimbledon.

Simona Halep–and, ahem, all of her most enthusiastic fans–can attest to that. Sharapova’s fifth tournament back from the drug suspension was the US Open. As an unseeded player, she landed a first-round encounter with Halep, the second seed. The match wasn’t pretty. Sharapova’s rust was still visible, and she dragged Halep down to her level. After nearly three hours, not to mention 86 unforced errors from the pair, Maria advanced in three sets.

Sharapova reached the fourth round of the event, a good indicator of what she was capable of in her thirties. She would pick off the occasional top-tenner, but with the exception of a minor event in Tianjin in 2017, she would never again dominate her way through an entire draw. Her career came full circle at the 2019 US Open, when she once again drew a top seed. This time it was Serena Williams. The American won easily, 6-1, 6-1.

The comeback fizzled out, but it introduced a new generation to Sharapova’s stubbornness. In a 2018 interview, Nick Bollettieri continued to praise his former pupil. In February of that year, the Russian remained outside the top 40, but Bollettieri said, “Never bet against Maria Sharapova.” No one took that advice better than Maria herself.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Fred Perry [GBR]
Born: 18 May 1909
Died: 2 February 1995
Career: 1929-47
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1934)
Major singles titles: 8
Total singles titles: 62
 

* * *

Fred Perry fell one leg short of the Grand Slam in 1934. He beat Jack Crawford at the Australian and Wimbledon, and he outlasted Wilmer Allison at Forest Hills. The missing link was the French. While he would pick up that title the next year, an ankle injury ended his 1934 run in Paris at the quarter-final stage.

The man who benefited from Perry’s injury was Giorgio de Stefani, an ambidextrous Italian who had finished second at the French to Henri Cochet in 1932. In a newspaper column later that year, Perry described the Italian as a “perfect tennis gentleman,” one who rushed to help him up and spared him too much strain on the ankle while closing out the match.

Fifty years later, Perry would tell a different story. He wrote in his memoir that he promised de Stefani an “honorable victory”–that is, he wouldn’t default–but that he asked the Italian not to run him around any more than necessary. De Stefani spoke three languages fluently, but he didn’t get the message. He sent the gimpy Perry scampering along the baseline before polishing off the fourth set and the match, 6-2, 1-6, 9-7, 6-2.

The British champion wasn’t the sort to quickly forget a slight. After the match, he said, “Right, Giorgio, next time we play it’s going to be 6-0, 6-0, 6-0.”

The rematch occurred at the 1935 Australian Championships–ironically, just a month after Perry’s newspaper portrait of the Italian appeared Down Under. They met in the quarter-finals, and Perry delivered as promised. He won 17 consecutive games, fell to 15-40 in the 18th, then recovered to complete the whitewash.

Fred Perry was that good, and he was that confident. It wasn’t the only time he correctly predicted a score, either. Tennis lore is full of tales of the Brit’s bold forecasts. One story has him calling a 6-2, 6-4, 6-4 victory ahead of time–in a Wimbledon final!

Perry made a career out of doing things that just weren’t done. Players–especially British Davis Cuppers–didn’t announce the scores of their matches ahead of time. They didn’t shout “Nuts!” after missing shots–in those days, even that was considered mildly unsportsmanlike. Would-be champions weren’t supposed to come from working-class stock, and they certainly weren’t to act like they did.

The clubbable men behind the scenes at Wimbledon and the British Lawn Tennis Association could never quite hide their disdain of the son of a Labour MP. But fans were a lot more welcoming. After all, Perry did a lot of other things that set him apart. He won Wimbledon three years running. He brought the Davis Cup back to the Isles for the first time since 1912, and he helped keep it there for four years.

If it weren’t for Andy Murray, we’d still be bringing up Fred’s name every time a home hope set foot on the Wimbledon turf. The British waited a long time for a player of Perry’s caliber, and once he left the arena, they had to wait even longer for the next one.

* * *

Though Perry was often certain of victory, he was also well-attuned to the vicissitudes of high-level tennis. He told Time magazine in 1934, “In the tennis world, there are about five blokes who are as good as each other. In order to win, a bloke needs a bit of luck.”

The other blokes might have raised an eyebrow at that. Aside from de Stefani, no one but Perry had found much luck that year.

Maybe he did get some breaks, but in the Brit’s view, they were only his due. He explained to the New York Times when he arrived for Forest Hills that year:

It’s always a bit of luck that helps you win, and that’s just what has been happening to me this year. I’m not playing any better than in 1930 and 1931. Then I was losing titles in the fifth set. Now I’m winning them in the fifth.

Wait a second. Perry was an untested stripling in 1930, a 21-year-old table-tennis world champion who had only recently given his full attention to the lawn version of the game. Was this gentlemanly modesty or astonishing confidence?

With the Englishman, it was usually the latter. Still, the young Fred was awfully good. He reached the final at a 1931 clay court tournament at Queen’s Club and lost a 7-5 fifth set to Bunny Austin. He played the cannonball-serving American Ellsworth Vines four times in the United States that year. Twice he lost in five, including in a semi-final at Forest Hills. The one straight-set decision went to Vines in the final of the Pacific Coast Championships, 6-3, 21-19, 6-0. Third set notwithstanding, it was understandable if Perry remembered that one as a marathon that could’ve broken either way.

* * *

Citizens of the tennis world had their eyes on Perry by the end of 1931. In fact, many of them had lost to him personally as the British Davis Cup team romped through six rounds against Monaco, Belgium, South Africa, Japan, Czechoslovakia, and the United States. Perry went undefeated in the first five of those ties, then beat Sidney Wood and watched as Austin played the hero against the Americans.

In the Challenge Round against France, the remaining three-quarters of the Four Musketeers were too strong. Nonetheless, Perry was the story of the conclusive tie. He won a fast-paced, five-set rubber over Jean Borotra and gave Cochet a battle in the decisive match before conceding, 6-4, 1-6, 9-7, 6-3.

The tie at Stade Roland Garros gave a glimpse of both Perry’s present and his future. Borotra, the quickest man in the game, was the player who journalists would most often use as a comparison for the young Brit. Cochet, on the other hand, was Fred’s own model.

Perry’s table tennis background provided the basis of his lawn tennis game. He had only one grip, an extreme Continental that he also used to chop firewood. His table-honed reflexes allowed him to take almost every ball on the rise, especially on his forehand side. It was the Cochet game, writ larger. “[B]ecause I was bigger, stronger, and faster,” Perry wrote. “I hit the ball harder. [I was able] to carry his methods a stage further than Cochet himself.”

When Fred complained to the Times about the days when luck didn’t go his way, he might have been thinking more of his indifferent 1932 season. The British Davis Cup campaign ended three stages earlier than the year before, when the squad faced Germany in Berlin. Perry trounced Gottfried von Cramm but lost the deciding rubber to Daniel Prenn, 7-5 in the fifth.

Bad luck comes in many forms. Perry held match point on Prenn’s serve at 5-2 in the deciding set. The German hit a serve that Perry slapped back for a winner… or so he thought. But no, the baseline judge had called a foot fault on the home player. Prenn played a better point off his second serve, and the Brit never did win his sixth game.

“How could I have lost five games in a row after having had match point?” asked Perry in his autobiography. “Well, to this day, I still don’t know.”

* * *

Perry wouldn’t have many more such puzzlers in his amateur career. Once his game caught up to his bluster, opponents could only sit back and watch.

Wimbledon player liaison Ted Tinling observed that Fred “was the first Englishman to see tennis as a battle rather than a game.” In retirement, Perry was even more direct: “In any one-on-one sport–take boxing–you go into it expecting to beat the hell out of the other fellow.”

The first victim of peak Perry was, well, everyone who dared to play for the 1933 Davis Cup. In seven rounds, the number one Brit lost only singles rubber–to the pesky de Stefani–and two doubles matches. He took revenge on Cochet on the first day of the Challenge Round, then sealed Britain’s victory with a deciding rubber defeat of the young Frenchman André Merlin.

Cochet sketched the rising star in just a few words: “ruthless, full of confidence, insolent, a rough fighter.”

The French had held the Cup for six years; before that, the United States held it for seven. Neither one would get it back until after Perry turned pro and left the Davis Cup behind.

Confidence begat confidence. In early 1934, a reporter asked “Fearless Fred” how he rated the Americans’ chances. He replied, “Oh, they have a nice doubles team, you know, but really!”

The last domino fell at Forest Hills in 1933. Perry exited early at Wimbledon, a blemish quickly forgotten in the excitement of the Davis Cup. Meanwhile, Gentleman Jack Crawford found himself holding the titles of Australia, France, and Great Britain, raising the question of whether he could complete the newly-named Grand Slam. While the indolent Australian showed signs of fatigue, he progressed easily to the final at the United States Championships, as well. Perry awaited on the other side of the draw.

Crawford took a two-sets-to-one lead in a hard-fought title match. Allison Danzig wrote for the Times:

Even when the Australian was in the plenitude of his powers, however, it was all he could do to hold his swift-moving and sharp-hitting opponent on even terms…. So much depth did Perry have on his shots, so everlastingly was he making the chalk fly on the corners, that the Australian was desperately pressed to keep the ball in play with his more tempered and less daring strokes.

Perry summarized the match more succinctly. When the players returned from the customary ten-minute intermission to play the fourth set, he “went mad.” The Brit won the last two sets, 6-0, 6-1, in less than 30 minutes.

* * *

The match in New York was a coronation. Crawford, great as his season was, didn’t have the makings of a reigning king. Vines, the 1932 Wimbledon champion who nearly defended his title, went pro. Perry kept getting better, and there was no one on the amateur horizon to challenge him.

The British number one would play twelve major tournaments between the 1933 US Championships and the end of 1936. He won eight of them.

The 1934 Australian and Wimbledon championships solidified Perry’s domination of Crawford. The two men contested both finals, and the Englishman didn’t lose a set. At Wimbledon, Perry ran off 12 consecutive games. “If I live to be 100,” he said, “I’ll never play so well again.”

The professional game beckoned. Vines and Bill Tilden were earning movie-star salaries after abandoning the amateur game, and Perry was the next logical target. Fred had no family wealth and no profession except for lending his byline to newspaper columns. His father had bankrolled his career in the early going, and the British LTA had picked up the tab since–though the organization that collected the gate receipts for the Davis Cup Challenge Round was hardly running a charity.

Reporters badgered Perry about his plans. Throughout 1934, he said he had no intention of going pro. The pay-for-play game was an increasingly acceptable option in the United States, but for a Brit, it would mean complete rejection from acceptable tennis society.

What the champion didn’t say is that he had never found English tennis society terribly welcoming. An LTA official once let slip to Fred’s father that they didn’t think of the young man as “one of us.” After his 1934 Wimbledon victory, Perry overheard a club member, Brame Hillyard, tell Crawford that the better man didn’t win that day.

In retrospect, it’s remarkable that Perry stuck it out on the amateur circuit for as long as he did.

* * *

The British number one defended his Forest Hills title in 1934, proving he could win when he was not as his best. Helen Jacobs, women’s victor at the same event, was impressed by Perry’s five-set defeat of Wilmer Allison: “Every characteristic of his temperament, though occasionally annoying to his friends, manifests the assurance of a champion.”

Perry opened the 1935 season on a down note, losing the Australian final to Crawford. Promoters in the United States pushed him to join the pro circuit, and it’s possible that their persistence–including late-night phone calls that were more appropriate for time zones Stateside than in Oz–left Fred ill-prepared to defend his crown.

The early loss didn’t slow him down for long. He won the French to complete his set of titles at all four majors, then defended his Wimbledon title. At both events, he defeated Crawford in the semis and von Cramm in the final.

The German Baron was another “better man” in the eyes of snobbier All-England Club members, but he beat Perry only once in six tries. As Allison said, “von Cramm certainly has the better strokes, but it’s the final score that counts.”

By 1936, it was only a matter of time before the newly-married champion signed a professional contract. He reached the Roland Garros final, obliterated von Cramm for his third straight Wimbledon crown, and edged out Don Budge for the championship of the United States.

Perry was already effectively playing for money in his last major as an amateur. He had agreed to terms with the promoter (and former Davis Cup player) Frank Hunter, including a bonus if he won Forest Hills. Hunter and friends amused themselves during the final by brandishing the larger contract when Perry was winning, the smaller one when he was losing. Two rain delays and nearly three hours of paper-waving later, the Englishman won his eighth and final slam, 2-6, 6-2, 8-6, 1-6, 10-8.

* * *

Perry was only 27 years old when he turned pro. While Budge would’ve made his next Wimbledon campaign considerably more competitive, Fred’s major count probably would have reached double digits.

Instead, he played Ellsworth Vines. Over and over again.

Vines was the reigning pro champion, Perry the challenger. They made a good pair, as the American’s enormous serve and bruising groundstrokes tested Perry’s lightning reflexes and aggressive return game. Fans turned out in droves, and while Vines won 32 of their 61 meetings, the Brit’s efforts in 1937 netted him $91,000–a cool $1.8 million in today’s dollars.

The American won the series in 1938, as well, picking up 49 victories in 84 tries. Perry jokingly characterized American tennis as “B.F. and B.I.–Brute Force and Bloody Ignorance.” But on the fast indoor surfaces that made up much of the pro game, he didn’t have an answer for the more one-dimensional Vines game.

The downside of professional tennis was that it used up amateur champions as fast as Hollywood churned through leading ladies. Even in 1938, the Vines-Perry rivalry didn’t interest the press or the public as much as it had the year before. Budge joined the pro ranks in 1939, and after winning a series against Vines, he took 28 of 36 matches against Perry. The British champion would remain a dangerous competitor in professional tournaments, but when World War II began, Perry’s days as a marquee name were over.

When Wimbledon returned in 1946, the lean years had begun. British fans had waited a decade for a home-grown men’s champion. Their suffering was just beginning. When Perry wrote his autobiography in 1984, it had been nearly half a century. Fred, of course, had an opinion:

There hasn’t been a British Wimbledon men’s champion since me in 1936, and a lot of people keep wondering when we will produce another one. Well, it’s not a matter of producing anybody, to begin with. It’s a case of somebody, somewhere, who wants to succeed badly enough and is determined and bloody-minded enough to make sure he does.

In case that wasn’t clear enough, he added, “Bloody-mindedness was one of my specialities.” He never met Andy Murray, but he might as well have been talking about the man who finally ended the 77-year wait.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Andre Agassi [USA]
Born: 29 April 1970
Career: 1987-2006
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1995)
Peak Elo rating: 2,282 (1st place, 1995)
Major singles titles: 8
Total singles titles: 60
 

* * *

Two images of Andre Agassi will persist for as long as people care about tennis.

One is the denim-shorted, spiky-haired enfant terrible of the late 1980s, the ball-basher who flogged Canon cameras and proclaimed that Image is Everything.

The other is the open face and bald head of the thirty-something who became the most beloved player in America by the time of his retirement in 2006. That’s the portrait on the cover of his memoir and the look that no one who watched the US Open in 2005 or 2006 will soon forget.

The two personas barely share a resemblance. It’s impossible to review Agassi’s career without marveling at his constant reinvention. In two decades, he went from teen idol to teen burnout, savior of American tennis to wasted talent, tennis-hater to comeback kid, jokester to elder statesman.

His game was less schizophrenic, but it changed plenty as well. He arrived on tour with a forehand that could split a two-by-four, one that had to be that good to hide his backhand. In time, his pinpoint backhand became the signature weapon. The mindless slugging of his early days gave way to tactical prowess of the Brad Gilbert school. He traded a fast-food diet and a casual approach to training for the teachings of strength coach Gil Reyes. He was the fittest man on the circuit after most of his peers had retired.

How did the outrageously talented kid from Las Vegas go from hair model to role model? While one match–the 1999 French Open final–is often referred to as the key turning point, the American’s saga was more roller coaster than right-turn-at-Paris. As much as his eight major titles, the winding road is what makes the Andre Agassi story so distinctive.

* * *

Tennis has always had a complicated relationship with its bad boys. Players have always been expected to behave in a manner as constrained as their all-white attire. But as the pro game went global and minted a growing number of millionaires, it became obvious that rebelliousness sold as many tickets as it did newspapers. Some pundits were ready to appoint foul-mouthed prankster Ilie Năstase as the sport’s savior almost as soon as the Open era began. Every time Năstase, Jimmy Connors, or John McEnroe dented the boundaries of proper decorum, the game’s television ratings crept still higher.

By the mid-1980s, Jimbo and J-Mac were fading. Arthur Ashe predicted in 1985 that “the bottom is going to fall out at the top of American men’s professional tennis” in two of three years.

Point is, fans and journalists alike were prepared to be understanding when Agassi and his hair–“like Cyndi Lauper’s after a fettuccine fight,” in Curry Kirkpatrick’s memorable phrase–arrived on tour. Apart from the shock at first glance, the kid didn’t seem that bad. Some watchers thought he was a throwback, a relaxed, playful competitor who would applaud his opponent’s best shots.

I’m sorry.

Agassi’s talent was undeniable. At Stratton Mountain in 1987, the 17-year-old upset top-tenner Pat Cash and took a set from then-number one Ivan Lendl. He won the event a year later, one of six titles he bagged in his first full season on the circuit. Jimmy Arias, himself known for a howitzer of a forehand, said, “Andre hits the ball harder than anyone else by far.”

His ability to take the ball on the rise was even more astonishing. One fellow player called his hand-eye coordination “disgusting.”

One of the earliest objections to the flashy youngster was also the most time-worn. He was a bruising baseliner who gave only the flimsiest lip service to an all-court game. Ion Țiriac, then coaching Boris Becker, said of the American, “If a player hits as hard as he can all the time, matches will turn into shooting contests and the beauty of the game will disappear. His is a limited game that has nothing to do with finesse.”

“Agassi could revolutionize the game,” said Țiriac. “But I hope he doesn’t.”

* * *

With the victories came more than the usual teenage dose of overconfidence. In a 1988 Davis Cup match against Martin Jaite in Buenos Aires, Agassi fell 0-40 down in a Jaite service game. As a stunt, he caught Jaite’s next serve out of the air. He thought it was harmless fun; Jaite, his teammates, and–especially–the Argentinian crowd disagreed.

Andre apologized, and in the days before ubiquitous PR training, he might have even meant it. But the infractions started to pile up. At the WCT Finals in Dallas the following March, he retired from a match against McEnroe despite showing no signs of injury. His handlers kept him out of Wimbledon, saying it was just another tournament. When he clapped for his opponents’ winners, the men across the net increasingly saw it as mockery.

Worse, his results suffered. It was harder to forgive the antics when his peers began to surpass him. In 1989, he lost a third-round battle of Nick Bollettieri products to Jim Courier at the French. Michael Chang–a year younger than Agassi–won the tournament. In a Davis Cup tie against West Germany, he dropped both of his singles rubbers. While one was a thrilling five-setter with Becker, the other was a faceplant against Carl-Uwe Steeb.

Strangely enough, the reinvention of Andre Agassi had already begun. The teenager turned to religion, carrying a Bible with him on the road and watching his once-unchristian mouth. Jim Loehr, a sports psychologist working for the USTA, considered Agassi’s sudden shift in behavior to be unprecedented.

The born-again slugger didn’t win over the locker room, though. When he quit halfway through a Davis Cup dead rubber against Australia, Darren Cahill said, “Andre is a great player, but what comes out of his mouth is of little significance. I wouldn’t want him on [our] team.”

Ivan Lendl also remained skeptical. “I’m sad anyone can cherish Agassi,” said the man who beat the young American in their first six meetings. “The kids see him as a rebel with his earring, hair and no-shave look.”

* * *

Agassi turned 22 without a major title to his name. Chang, Courier, and Sampras got there first, sometimes at Andre’s expense. He reached three slam finals between the 1990 and 1991 French Opens, but his style-before-substance reputation made it easy to believe he was a flake who might turn out to be incapable of crossing the final hurdle.

Still, those who looked for a transformation could always find one. Sports Illustrated profiled him in May 1992, and Sally Jenkins found that his “demeanor, once that of a loud and terrible child, has softened into a gauzy uncertainty.” She continued: “He has matured into a rather gentlemanly, thoughtful guy, a polite door opener and a check grabber who has awakened to at least some of the excesses in his life.”

Agassi recognized that his incentives were all wrong. “Most people have to work really hard and win some big matches, and then they get money and popularity. For me it has been the reverse of everybody else.” He was the highest-paid endorser in tennis, picking up $300,000 appearance fees, back when that was real money. He earned $20 million from his racket sponsor alone.

His ranking fell out of the top ten at the start of 1992, and he did little to save it. A semi-final showing at Roland Garros was encouraging, but Courier stopped him again.

Agassi was no longer the savior of American tennis, and some pundits were ready to write him off entirely. Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald wrote, “If Agassi ever wins Wimbledon, I’ll eat my T-shirt. Not only has he no chance to win, but if he doesn’t pull himself together soon, he could be out of tennis in two or three years.”

What’s a good wine to pair with T-shirt? Agassi had only played Wimbledon twice before, losing a quarter-final to David Wheaton the year before. In 1992, he lucked into a manageable draw. He drew Becker in the quarters, a tough opponent but one he respected and brought the best out of him. Agassi won in five. He ended the surprise run of 33-year-old John McEnroe in the semis, then took the title with a five-set final over Goran Ivanišević.

McEnroe raved about his passing shots and Ivanišević spoke a few kind words at the net. The newly-minted Wimbledon champ and his hair were still staples of television commercials, but his conversion into a more substantial player–and human being–seemed complete.

* * *

Or not. Agassi finally got the better of Lendl in Toronto, but he only recorded one more top ten win for the rest of the 1992 season. Courier beat him again at the US Open.

1993 was a return to the same old story. Bronchitis kept him out of the Australian Open and wrist tendinitis forced him to skip the French. He fell out of the top ten again before Wimbledon, and despite a quarter-final showing–“If anyone can go on no practice, it’s me”–he didn’t come close to defending his title.

Things were so dire that his coach, Bollettieri, fired him.

Upon reaching rock bottom, what is a man to do, except reinvent himself? Agassi returned to the tour in 1994 with a healthy diet, a sleek new physique, and a fresh attitude. Courier asked, “Which attitude is this? Is this the new attitude, or is this the new attitude?”

Whatever it was, it was new. Sort of. Ranked outside the top 30, the freshly-fit Agassi reached the final in Miami, upsetting Stefan Edberg before losing to Sampras. He flailed through a mediocre season before putting things together at the US Open. In New York, he won a five-setter against Chang, bulldozed Thomas Muster, and defeated Michael Stich in the final.

Agassi and McEnroe at the 1994 US Open

Brad Gilbert, Agassi’s new coach and the mastermind of his new tactical soundness, was so confident that he predicted Andre would win the Australian Open, too.

He did, claiming his single victory over Sampras in a major final. After knocking off Pete again in the 1995 Miami final a few months later, he took over the number one spot in the rankings. The top spot was his almost until the end of the year, as he put together 26 consecutive wins on North American hard courts. The streak ended only when Sampras beat him in the US Open final.

* * *

At the time, the title match in New York seemed like a mere hiccup in a career-best season for a man now considered an “earnest champion.” He had lost to Pete before. Andre had more natural talent, but he brought out the best in his steadier rival.

Instead of a blip, the US Open loss started a downward spiral. Agassi took his formerly inconsistent ways to a new level in 1996. He defended his title in Miami, then lost in the second round at the French and the first at Wimbledon. He won the gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics, backed it up with a title in Cincinnati, then got himself defaulted by swearing at the umpire in Indianapolis. He finished the year with four losses and barely hung on to a place in the top ten.

1997 was even worse. His ranking fell outside the top 100. On the North American hard courts he had always dominated, he dropped decisions to the likes of Scott Draper, Justin Gimelstob, and Javier Sánchez. He began using crystal meth and failed a drug test.

Agassi in 1997, bereft of both hair and form

All the transformations and reinventions that got Agassi through his first decade on tour apparently didn’t stick. He still earned $14 million a year in endorsements, proving that Image–even a tarnished one–really was Everything.

Agassi turned 28 in 1998. He would later speculate that all the ups and downs, the years where tennis wasn’t his top priority, left him with more in the tank than the typical player his age. When he finally decided to rededicate himself to the game, he fully bought into the program of his longtime strength coach Gil Reyes. He might have half-assed the first ten years of his career, but this time, the former McDonald’s junkie would come back fit, fast, and focused like never before.

* * *

None of it would’ve mattered if he didn’t win. And he nearly didn’t. At the French Open in 1999, he found himself in the final despite dropping at least one set in four of six matches en route. He came within two points of a second-round loss to Arnaud Clement. Small wonder, since a shoulder injury knocked him out of Düsseldorf the week before and nearly kept him out of Roland Garros as well.

Playing for the championship, he could only watch while 100th-ranked Andrei Medvedev red-lined for two sets to take a 6-1, 6-2 lead. Agassi finally got a read on the Ukrainian’s serve, and he tightened up his errant backhand. After losing every single one of Medvedev’s first serve points in the second set, he won more than 40% of his return points the rest of the way.

“For me not to win today would have been devastating,” he said after the match. He might not have collapsed the way he did after the 1995 US Open, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which Medvedev holds on and Agassi’s celebrated second career never gets going.

Instead, the American was a hero. The French title gave him a career Grand Slam. He was only the fifth man ever to achieve the feat and just the second–after Jimmy Connors–to win a major on three surfaces.

Agassi’s second decade in the game would be even better than his first. The 1999 French was his fourth major title. He would win four more by 2003. At the 2000 Australian Open, he scored a particularly satisfying triumph over Sampras in the semi-finals. A scintillating fourth-set tiebreak shifted the momentum against his long-time rival, and the championship match against Yevgeny Kafelnikov was straightforward in comparison.

The new (new, new new) Agassi would be instantly recognizable to a fan of today’s veteran superstars. In addition to his ever-present natural gifts, he won with a combination of fitness and savvy. He rarely set a foot wrong (or put that foot in his mouth) anymore, serving as an ambassador for the game. He had the persona and performance of the late-model Big Four before there was a Big Four.

Agassi and Federer in 2001

When he finally gave way to age and a new generation, he did so with the grace he had come to be known for. The 2005 US Open final pitted the 35-year-old Agassi against the new king, Roger Federer. Andre gave the youngster a scare and thrilled the New York crowd, but ultimately there would be no suprises. Federer won in four.

After the match, Agassi’s three-year-old son, Jaden, asked who he played.

Dad replied, “Some guy with long hair.”

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Kim Clijsters [BEL]
Born: 8 June 1983
Career: 1999-2012
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2003)
Peak Elo rating: 2,403 (1st place, 2004)
Major singles titles: 4
Total singles titles: 41
 

* * *

Pop quiz! I’m sure you remember that at the 2009 US Open, when Serena Williams foot-faulted, threatened a line judge, and lost her semi-final on a point penalty, the woman on the other side of the net was Kim Clijsters. Now the question: Was that the second set or the third set?

Had you asked me when the match wasn’t fresh in memory, and I might have gotten it wrong. I suspect some of you would too. It was a tense battle, and the famous call came at a particularly nervy moment. The climactic set was indeed close–Serena was serving to stay in it at 5-6 when everything went sideways–but it was the second set. We’ll never know what would have happened if Williams hadn’t foot-faulted, if the infraction hadn’t been called, or if she had kept her calm. Regardless, Clijsters had comprehensively outplayed her up to that point.

The Belgian was taking part in just her third event in two and a half years, and she had her daughter Jade in tow. Venus Williams gave her trouble in the fourth round–that match went three, by the unlikely score of 6-0, 0-6, 6-4–but Venus’s sister did not. Clijsters won 55% of the total points she played against Serena, including more than 45% of those on Serena’s own serve.

The unranked underdog used her trademark blend of defense and offense to frustrate Williams. Before the semi-final, their head-to-head record tilted heavily toward the American, 7-1, but Clijsters had usually managed to keep things competitive. Her sole win came on a huge stage, in the final of the 2002 Tour Championships. Four of their other matches went to three sets, including the 2003 Australian Open semi-final, when the Belgian couldn’t convert a 5-1 lead in the third set.

Clijsters was clearly not overawed by the powerful American. While Serena accumulated her usual share of aces and forehand winners, Kim directed the majority of her groundstrokes to the Williams backhand. Serena couldn’t hit through the challenger on that wing, striking 123 backhands and managing just one winner. Two backhand unforced errors set the stage for the foot fault and point penalty that ended the match.

“I was the one dominating the points,” said Clijsters.

Final score: 6-4, 7-5. The aftermath of Serena’s explosion monopolized the headlines, so the Belgian ended up as a footnote to her own triumph. But Kim got the last laugh, even earning a few headlines of her own. She straight-setted Caroline Wozniacki in the final to cap one of the most unlikely, remarkable comeback stories in the sport’s history.

* * *

Another trivia question. Apart from Clijsters herself, there have been 27 number ones in the history of the WTA ranking system. She faced 19 of them, from Steffi Graf and Monica Seles to Simona Halep and Garbiñe Muguruza. Setting aside the five that she faced only once, how many of the remaining 14 number ones finished their careers with a winning record against her?

You know the answer isn’t zero, because I already told you that Serena dominated their head-to-head. But there are no others. Jennifer Capriati split six meetings. No one else–not Venus, not Maria Sharapova, not Lindsay Davenport, not Victoria Azarenka–even forced a draw.

Clijsters and Henin after the 2010 Brisbane final, which Kim won in a third-set tiebreak

Most notably, Clijsters faced off with her countrywoman, Justine Henin, 23 times at tour level. Kim won 13. It’s something of a hollow triumph, since Henin won more than half of their finals, including all three of their clashes with major championships on the line. Still, Clijsters beat her rival on every surface, in a French Open semifinal, at home in Antwerp; point is, no one owned the Belgian on court. No one, not even Serena, could get too comfortable.

One more bit of trivia: Who are the only three women in the 2000s to reach the semi-finals in at least half of their grand slam appearances?

I can’t let things get too easy–Kim didn’t quite crack this list. The three are Serena, Capriati, and Henin. All of them just barely reached the 50% threshold. Clijsters comes in fourth. Here is the top ten:

Player             2000s Slams  SFs  SF%  
Serena Williams             74   39  53%  
Jennifer Capriati           19   10  53%  
Justine Henin               33   17  52%  
Kim Clijsters               34   16  47%  
Lindsay Davenport           25   11  44%  
Martina Hingis              17    7  41%  
Maria Sharapova             58   20  34%  
Iga Świątek                 15    4  27%  
Venus Williams              80   20  25%  
Elena Dementieva            43    9  21%

Fifty-fifty was the name of Kim’s game at majors. She made the final four about half the time she entered. (In her career, it’s 16 semis in 36 tournaments, since she played two more in 1999.) Out of 16 semi-finals, she reached eight finals. In eight finals, she came out on top four times.

* * *

It’s important to remember the gritty details of the Clijsters résumé, because the Belgian herself isn’t going to advertise them. She’s so thoroughly adored around the game–and has been, more or less since the moment she appeared on the circuit–that you’re more likely to hear about her eight WTA Sportsmanship Awards than her positive records against more ruthless competitors.

More outwardly ruthless, I should say.

Kim has never objected to the misplaced focus on her personality. “I’d rather be known as a nice player,” she said in 2003, “someone who’s good for the sport.” Mission accomplished: No recent star has a sweeter reputation, and Sharapova owns a friggin’ candy company.

The Belgian’s kindness stood out on a tour that had become known for selfishness and catty backbiting. With characters like Martina Hingis setting the standard, Clijsters might as well have applied for sainthood.

Clijsters stretches for a forehand at Indian Wells in 2002. Her mother was a gymnast, and few players could match her flexibility.

Problem was, those standoffish, overprivileged brats piled up an awful lot of titles. Kim first attained the number one ranking in August 2003, eight months after her collapse against Serena at the Australian Open. She was the first player to reach the top spot without holding any of the four major titles. The stories wrote themselves. Nice gals didn’t finish last, but they didn’t have what it took to be champions, either.

Most “nice” players are indeed destined to fall short. Clijsters, however, didn’t fit the mold. She was kind, she kept the game in perspective, she put family first. Yet when injuries put her determination to the test, she responded like the single-minded champion she’d soon prove herself to be.

* * *

Clijsters opened 2004 as a 20-year-old former number one, having lost her position on the ranking table to Henin. An ankle injury at the Hopman Cup derailed her Australian Open prep, though it didn’t slow her down much. She reached the Melbourne finals with six straight-set wins before losing to her countrywoman in the final. She bounced back with titles in Paris and Antwerp the following month.

Then the real injury struck. She tore a left wrist tendon and was forced to withdraw from Indian Wells. The wrist required surgery, and she missed almost a full year of tournament play.

Clijsters had to adjust her backhand to accommodate the wrist, but the new stroke was just as powerful as the old one. She rejoined the tour in February 2005 and quickly served a reminder that her kindness did not apply inside the white lines.

At just her second tournament back, Kim won Indian Wells. She dropped only two sets en route, beating Elena Dementieva and Davenport for the title. Next up was Miami, where she completed the Sunshine Double. This time she didn’t lose any sets at all. In the last four matches there, she beat four of the top six players on the WTA computer, administering a 6-1, 6-0 punishment of Amélie Mauresmo and defeating Sharapova in the final.

She was still nice, but Jon Wertheim, for one, thought she had “developed an edge” in her time off. “You realize that one injury can end your career tomorrow, so you should just enjoy playing,” Clijsters told the press in Miami. “But you also realize that tennis is important to you, so you want to do everything possible to win.”

The Belgian was–dare I say it–ruthless the rest of the way. She lost early at Roland Garros and Wimbledon to Davenport. Elsewhere, she was well-nigh unbeatable. She entered the US Open on a ten-match win streak and her confidence level was correspondingly high. To the doubters, she said, “I know I haven’t won a Grand Slam. But, you know, I’ve won a lot of other things.”

Two weeks later, that monkey was off her back. Clijsters recovered from a set and a break down to Venus Williams in the quarters, and she held off a spirited comeback from Sharapova in the semis. A no-nonsense, 6-3, 6-1 victory over Mary Pierce in the final secured the US Open title.

* * *

Clijsters had an uncanny ability to focus on court while limiting her tennis career to a compartment of her broader plans. Only a few months into her comeback, before winning the US Open, she announced her plan to retire after the 2007 season.

She didn’t even make it that long. More injuries piled up at the start of the 2006 campaign, and a hip injury limited her to only five tournaments in 2007. Despite reaching four major semi-finals in her last four tries, she kept her word. She got out, got married, and got pregnant.

Clijsters’s record up to that point was built to be underrated. Yes, she had her major, but she had lost more finals than she won, and the title match against Pierce was hardly replay fodder for ESPN. When S.L. Price summed up the 2009 US Open for Sports Illustrated, he sketched Kim’s pre-tournament reputation: “a sweet, fragile talent who’d won one Grand Slam title (after losing three finals).”

You can see why she was tempted to come back. She didn’t have anything to prove, but it wouldn’t hurt to make sure.

When Clijsters returned to the tour in 2009, Sybille Bammer was the only mother in the top 100. A handful of women had tried to come back and balance pro tennis with motherhood, but most of their attempts fizzled out quickly. No woman had won a major after giving birth since Evonne Goolagong, back in 1980.

It took the Belgian only one shot, at the 2009 US Open, to add her name to that list. A year later, she’d do Goolagong one better and defend her title. Four months after that, she’d win the Australian Open as well. Fans would always think of Kim as the nice one, and now she was a standard bearer for mothers in elite sports.

Beyond the feel-good story, it was impossible–finally–to ignore what Clijsters did on court on its own terms. Roger Federer described Serena’s foot fault as one example of “[h]ow crazy tennis goes sometimes.” Still, he hastened to add, “I don’t think it should take away from what Kim has achieved. That’s the story here.”

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Stefan Edberg [SWE]
Born: 19 January 1966
Career: 1983-96
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1990)
Peak Elo rating: 2,239 (1st place, 1990)
Major singles titles: 6
Total singles titles: 41
 

* * *

No one ever knew quite what to make of Stefan Edberg. When he burst out on the international scene by winning the 1985 Australian Open at the age of 19, he was called a machine, a robot. He was unfailingly polite, as he always would be. But he didn’t give the press much to go on.

“Stefan doesn’t say much, even for a Swede,” according to his more voluble countryman, Mats Wilander.

He didn’t smile much, either. That was what many fans noticed when he upset world number one Ivan Lendl in the Melbourne semi-finals. Lendl’s stolid on-court demeanor was old hat. But they expected more personality from a teenager, especially after witnessing Boris Becker’s jubilant victory at Wimbledon earlier that year.

He could also verge on the heartless. Edberg said in 1986, “For sure, I’m disappointed, but there is always a tournament next week.” That was after losing in the third round at Wimbledon. Ho hum. The following year at the Championships, he beat Stefan Eriksson, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0.

Personality or no, the Swede’s serve-and-volley game steadily gained admirers. He did all the talking he needed to do with his racket. Fellow player Horst Skoff said, “Stefan has the grace of a ballet dancer.”

Edberg at Wimbledon in 1987

Alison Muscatine wrote in the Washington Post: “There is nothing more beautiful or more breathtaking than Stefan Edberg’s tennis game when he is on. Every stroke is poetic, every movement lyrical.”

By 1991, Edberg was number one in the world. He remained a closed book, but journalists chronicling the Hollywood life of Andre Agassi were coming to appreciate that. After the US Open, Sports Illustrated summed him up as “a quiet, tough and admirably swell fellow.” A year later, he defended his title in New York with a series of dramatic victories, even showing the occasional flash of emotion on court. It was unanimous: Stefan was definitely human.

Edberg was an introvert, certainly. He liked things organized. He was easily overshadowed by Becker’s flashiness or the late-career showmanship of Jimmy Connors. No matter. For him, the object was to win tennis matches with a minimum of fuss–no more, no less.

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“I play tennis the simple way,” Edberg told the journalist Franz Lidz in 1991. “Don’t wait for the other guy to make mistakes–just outplay him and finish the point off yourself. Try not to make tennis too difficult: It’s difficult enough. Don’t complicate it: Just hit the ball where the opponent is not.”

Ah, so that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all these years.

Tennis was so simple for Edberg that he was sometimes accused of lacking a brain entirely. Two months after his 18th birthday, he picked up his first tour title with a straight-set victory over Wilander in Milan. The veteran never got a good read on the newcomer’s serve, and he admired Stefan’s second-serve kicker so much that he tried to add it to his own game. After the match, he delivered a whopper of a backhanded compliment:

When I was coming up, Björn Borg told me I could become one of the best players in the world because I used my mind when I play. With his serve, Edberg can play without thinking.

Edberg might not have possessed a tennis brain equal to Wilander’s. Few players did. Still, he was hardly just taking his whacks and hoping for the best.

The young Swede recognized that charging the net was a gamble. He knew that some of his serves would come back too hard. Some passing shots would find the line. But he also learned that he could stack the deck in his favor.

It’s a misleading platitude that tennis is like chess; for one thing, serve-and-volleyers rarely need to think more than one or two moves ahead. Edberg liked the metaphor anyway, and he thought about his own game in those terms. No less an expert than Russian chess great–and tennis fan–Anatoly Karpov concurred. “I play positional chess,” said Karpov. “He plays positional tennis.”

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Even in the 1980s, Edberg’s particular brand of serve-and-volley tennis was something of a throwback. While his serve–especially the high-bouncing second serve–was strong, it was far short of the devastating deliveries wielded by Becker and, later, Pete Sampras.

The few players today who come in behind their serves tend to be the men with the biggest first-strike weapons. The move forward functions as a kind of final sweep. If, somehow, the ball comes back, it’s an easy putaway. That trend was already in evidence by the midway point of Edberg’s career. Men like Goran Ivanišević, Michael Stich, and even Becker could expect that most of their trips to the net would be purely ceremonial.

Edberg serving in 1989

The Swede was different. Like the stars of earlier eras whose serves were limited by primitive equipment and strict foot-fault rules, he used the serve to set up a first, or even second volley. It’s the tactic that he encouraged in Roger Federer, and one that we occasionally see now from Carlos Alcaraz.

We can look at the data compiled by the Match Charting Project to get a sense of how Edberg differed from the best of his serve-and-volleying peers.* In the matches logged by the project, 71% of his serves came back. That’s a solid service performance, but returners had a much harder time against Becker (65%) and Sampras (62%).

* These figures are not official, because the Match Charting Project hasn’t logged anywhere close to every match from this era. In addition, the sample is not random. We’re more likely to have high-profile matches–finals, semi-finals, meetings between elite players–than others, so each man’s true career averages are probably more impressive than the numbers I give here. That said, the biases in the dataset should be roughly the same for all three men, and the stats are based on many thousands of points for each player. We’ve charted 159 Edberg matches, 107 of Becker’s, and 163 involving Sampras.

As soon as Edberg struck his second shot, his numbers edged into elite territory. He won 46% of his total service points with his first or second strike. Becker was only marginally better (47%), and Sampras’s advantage (at 52%) was much smaller than his lead in the unreturned serve category.

When we look specifically at the serves that came back, the gap almost disappears. Edberg won the point 51% of the time that the returner put the ball in play. Becker managed 50%, and Sampras narrowly led the trio at 52%. Opponents may have felt they had a better chance against the Edberg serve, but their optimism was only fleeting.

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It was unfair to suggest that Stefan played without thinking. But there was a grain of truth there. The game did come extremely easily to him. By his early teens, he had developed the signature service motion that later became part of the logo for the Australian Open.

He was also a quick study. His first coach, Percy Rosberg, saw him knife one backhand volley after another and suggested that Stefan trade in his double-handed backhand for a one-hander more akin to his graceful stroke at the net. It was a gamble for an established junior star–he had already won the European Junior Championships–but it barely slowed his progress.

(The advice also makes Rosberg one of the more underrated gurus in modern tennis. A decade earlier, he told a young Borg to ignore the skeptics and stick with his own two-handed backhand.)

Rosberg didn’t like the life of a traveling coach, so Edberg began a career-long relationship with former British Davis Cupper Tony Pickard. Taking over after Stefan’s standout 1984 campaign, Pickard saw only two things missing from the 18-year-old’s game. He needed to improve his body language on court. And to extract the most out of his serve-and-volley strategy, he needed to get faster.

Edberg’s tendency to get down on himself contributed to the generally morose atmosphere in that 1985 Australian Open semi-final with Lendl. Pickard was convinced that the sulking not only gave too much information to opponents, it also directly affected the play of his young charge. In those first few years, the result was to make Edberg seem even more robotic. If he didn’t reveal any negative emotions during matches, he didn’t show any emotion at all.

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The second Pickard project is what inspired all those ballet metaphors. Footspeed isn’t the only ingredient in a successful serve-and-volley attack, but it sure helps.

The difference between Edberg’s service and (for instance) Becker’s more powerful deliveries gave the Swede a tiny bit of extra time to assume a threatening position at the net. As he got faster, opponents couldn’t return the ball and track his location simultaneously. They could only assume he was close, and they were usually right.

By 1991, Edberg had won four majors, and Pickard considered his task accomplished. “Now Stefan moves like a gazelle,” he told Sports Illustrated. “Sometimes he seems to be floating. It’s almost mystical.” Veteran sportswriters had it easy when Roger Federer came along. They could describe the young Fed with the same fawning phrases they had used for Edberg a decade earlier.

The Swede won the US Open that year with a near-perfect performance in the final against Jim Courier. In 1992, he defended the title–barely. It took three straight five-setters, including one of the monumental encounters in tournament history, a semi-final against Michael Chang. Chang was one of the few men on tour with the timing–not to mention the chutzpah–to take Edberg’s serve on the rise, so matches with the American were never easy. In this one, the Swede rushed the net 258 times in 404 points. After five and a half hours, Edberg advanced, 6-7, 7-5, 7-6, 5-7, 6-4.

The final was a cakewalk by comparison. Edberg was exhausted, but so was his opponent, Pete Sampras. Sampras was sick, too. This one took only four sets, and at age 26, Edberg had his sixth major title.

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Early in his career, Stefan once practiced with Jimmy Connors. Connors was famous for his short, intense sessions. He told the Swede that it was only worth playing if you could give 100%. To reach that level in matches, you needed to practice that way, too.

Edberg later said it was the best advice he ever received. He certainly took it seriously. Injuries crept in–Percy Rosberg had predicted back injuries the moment he saw young Stefan’s kick serve–and when the champion couldn’t maintain a high level of form, he didn’t drag things out. He played a competent full season in 1996 and called it quits.

Even in retirement, he keeps Jimbo’s advice in mind. Edberg has taken part in his share of senior events, but he prefers not to play too many. He’s not that interested in competing when he’s not at his best, and he knows the physical demands of reaching that level. Instead, he took up squash, quickly becoming one of the best players in Sweden.

Edberg (right) with Federer at Wimbledon in 2014

And, of course, the graceful netrusher spent two years coaching Roger Federer.

Mats Wilander remains one of Edberg’s most frequent on-court foes. In a broadcast interview, Wilander asked Federer, “What have you told him about his forehand? It’s become a fatal weapon now. I have no chance anymore, that used to be his weak side.”

“You’re right,” Federer joked. “I didn’t call up Stefan to ask him to be my new coach. Stefan called me because he wanted to start working on his forehand in his old age. He said he was willing to pay anything for my advice. So, we work on it daily, and he travels with me wherever I play.”

We all laughed. But during his playing career, Edberg rarely let such a prime opportunity get away. Are you sure you’d put it past him?