Category: The Tennis 128

My Tennis 128 list was largely finalized before the start of the 2022 season. I made a few adjustments as the year went along, notably bumping up Ashleigh Barty several places after her Australian Open title. Since then, though, there has been little reason to update the list. While many all-time greats are still playing, most of them–with one major exception!–are no longer at the top of the game. The young stars taking their place are still building their résumés.

The method I used to construct the ranking used each player’s peak performance, their top five years, and their overall career, all measured by Elo. It is possible for a youngster to crack the list with an extremely high peak, but because two of the three components of the algorithm rely more on longevity, it’s not easy. The formula was designed to compare entire bodies of work, so placing a mid-career Iga Swiatek or Carlos Alcaraz (or Naomi Osaka or Daniil Medvedev) was not the point. All we can do is see how a player like that would rate if their career ended today.

Swiatek, with her fourth major and her best year-end Elo rating, makes the cut. Despite a career that spans only a few seasons, Iga slots into the list just ahead of Barty, right behind Dorothy Round, at 101st overall.

Thus, the Tennis 128 grows to 129. (I’m not about to say goodbye to the great Beverly Baker Fleitz.) And for now, that’s as much as the list will expand. No other newcomers quite qualify.

On the women’s side, Aryna Sabalenka ranks about 200th, and Coco Gauff stands around #250. Two returning WTAers are also worth keeping an eye on this year. Angelique Kerber comes in around 160th, and Osaka ranks in the neighborhood of #180. It’s unlikely that any of these players will crack the 128 by the end of 2024, but especially if Gauff or Sabalenka turns in a particularly dominant season, it is possible.

The player with the best shot at becoming a 128er next year might surprise you. Alexander Zverev didn’t miss the cut by much when I first made the list, and while he hasn’t improved his position much in the meantime, he continues to inch toward inclusion. He stands at the edge of the top 140, and a single strong season could force me to make room. About 15 places behind him, in the mid-150s, is Medvedev.

The ATP’s prize youngsters, Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, both remain outside the top 200. Again, this is more a matter of their short careers than any knock on their performance thus far. Alcaraz is around 205th, while Sinner ranks another 20 places down the list. Like Sabalenka and Gauff, they’ll probably need multiple seasons to reach the Tennis 128 threshold.

For some of you, I know, the real action is at the top of the table, not the fringes. A handful of high-profile retirements and injuries meant that 2022/23 turned out to be a great time to make an all-time ranking that would remain valid for several more years. The one fly in the ointment, of course, is Novak Djokovic.

Djokovic ranked fourth (behind Rod Laver, Steffi Graf, and Martina Navratilova), and at this point in his illustrious career, there’s only so much he can do to climb higher. Today’s game is a bit weaker than it was at his peak, and Novak probably is, too: His Elo rating stands at 2,227, compared to 2,435 at the end of the 2015 season. The most substantial difference between him and Laver is peak rating: Rocket rates better than anyone else by a wide margin.

Still, Djokovic’s persistence at the top of the game alters the calculation. When I first built the ranking two years ago, his career–that is, the part of my formula apart from peak rating and best five years–ranked fourth behind Roger Federer, Bill Tilden, and Ken Rosewall. Now he’s up to second place, so close to Fed that a mere top-ten finish in 2024 would move him to the top of this category, too.

What it all adds up to is this: Move over, Martina. Djokovic is the new number three. Another season like this one, and he’ll displace Steffi, as well. The gap in peak ratings makes it unlikely he’ll ever catch Laver, but don’t tell Novak, or else he might figure out how to reach the top of this list, too.

Click here for the full Tennis 128, with links to long-form essays about each player.

* * *

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In 2022, I counted down the 128 best players of the last century. Past tense is my favorite tense.

* * *

Rod Laver [AUS]
Born: 9 August 1938
Career: 1956-79
Plays: Left-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1961)
Peak Elo rating: 2,571 (1st place, 1970)
Major singles titles: 11 (8 pro majors)
Total singles titles: 200
 

* * *

Rod Laver was a superhero. A diminutive superhero with an alter ego to match.

At five-feet, eight-inches tall, the only outward sign of his athletic prowess was an oversized left arm–“the forearm of a Dungeness crab,” according to John McPhee. He certainly wasn’t going to tell you about all the titles he’d won. He never lost the backcountry humility instilled by his family of Queensland ranchers.

When Laver wasn’t competing, he embraced distractions–the more tedious, the better. The night before a match, he’d find a western on television and re-grip a pile of rackets. He cooked his own food and ran his own errands–anything to keep busy.

Friends knew when a match was approaching. That’s when he got quiet. The bloke who appeared on court wasn’t quite the same.

“The Rocket goes into a phone booth to change,” said American player Marty Riessen.

In tennis whites–or pinks, or blues, once apparel sponsors started throwing money around in the 1970s–Laver summoned all the focus he had squirreled away before he took the court. Spectators couldn’t help but notice his eyes. Other players would acknowledge fans in the gallery, give a quick smile after a good shot. Not Rod.

One onlooker caught Rocket’s eye during the 1969 US Open final. “Nothing,” he said. “Instant shutout. Two steel beads looking out of an icebox.”

When it was over, Laver would snap back just as quickly. Always a kind word at the net, always a cordial response to well-wishers. In proper Australian fashion, he was the kind of guy with whom you could play a few sets in the afternoon, then share a few beers in the evening.

But not too many. Rocket probably had another match tomorrow. He’d rather be back at the hotel, watching a western.

* * *

There were a lot of matches, a lot of hotels, a lot of westerns. Laver played competitive tennis for more than two decades, coming of age in the years of Harry Hopman’s Australian tennis dynasty and leaving the scene when the likes of Jimmy Connors and Björn Borg had turned the game into a global media spectacle.

In fact, Rod had three careers. He won an amateur Grand Slam in 1962, then turned pro. He became the top professional in the years before Open tennis arrived. Then, with amateurs and pros reunited, he won another Grand Slam in 1969.

Laver chats with Queen Elizabeth II after winning the 1962 Wimbledon title

Alone, any one of those three careers–1956 to ’62, 1963 to ’67, and 1968 to ’79–would merit a place in the Tennis 128.

Laver’s Slams were a big deal when he accomplished them, but the hoopla, even in 1969, was nothing compared to what the media whips up these days when a player so much as comes close. When Rocket won the 1969 US Open, Sports Illustrated–often a home for lengthy feature stories on tennis stars–relegated a tournament recap to a single page.

The cover went to college football: “Ohio State Still No. 1.”

Players of his era didn’t zero in on majors the way that we do now. To them, the limitations of the slam tally were particularly obvious. Most of the greatest-of-all-time candidates–Laver, Richard González, Ken Rosewall, Jack Kramer, even Don Budge–lost years of opportunities when they went pro. González had a good case as the game’s best ever, and he had a measly two slam titles to his name.

Rocket’s eleven majors, then, are a bit beside the point. When you chop five and a half years out of the middle of a career, it can lose some luster. With the same span removed, Novak Djokovic falls from 21 majors to 13. Rafael Nadal drops from 22 to 17. Roger Federer bids adieu to a full half of his 20.

Throughout those “missing” years, all Laver did was face a tough opponent almost every day. Barnstorming across Australia, Europe, and North America, he played over 100 matches each season, a staggering number of them against Rosewall, dozens more against González. Rod was the best pro for three, possibly four years. No one in the amateur ranks was close.

It’s a bewildering thought: At his peak, the man with the two Grand Slams didn’t play any slams at all.

* * *

But really, everything about Rocket Rod Laver defies logic.

First off, the “Rocket” tag started off as a joke. Harry Hopman liked to hand out motivational nicknames. Rosewall was “Muscles” because he was so puny. Laver was slow, so he became “Rocket.”*

* A few sources say Rod was called “Rocket” after his hometown of Rockhampton. Plausible, but boring. I say we ignore it.

Let’s review. The young Laver was short, slow, and left-handed. Playing lefty wasn’t universally considered a handicap, but at the time, it was unusual. Both Rosewall and Margaret Court were naturally left-handed, and early coaches forced both to hit their serves and forehands on the right side. Rocket’s first coach, Charlie Hollis, was a particularly useful guide for a guy who just happened to be in the neighborhood, but his greatest contribution might have been simply to let Rod hit with his dominant hand.

Early forecasts were not rosy. Rod’s father Roy thought his older son, Trevor, had a nicer game and a better chance to play competitively. “Rodney was the freak of the family,” Roy said, “the only left-hander.”

Fortunately for Rodney–not to mention generations of fans–Harry Hopman was always on the lookout for a certain kind of young man. Above a certain baseline level of skill and potential, he wanted to see a calm disposition, a fierce competitive streak, and an enormous capacity for training. Measured by that scale, Laver was the greatest prospect of all time. Other teens griped about the Hopman workload; Laver ate it up.

The hat of a champion, at the 1962 Australian

While Muscles Rosewall never really grew into his nickname, Rocket Laver most certainly did. John McPhee, writing in 1970, called him “the fastest of all tennis players. He moves through more square yards per second than anyone else, covering ground like a sonic boom.”

Rod also developed a game to overcome the disadvantage of his size. Hollis preached spin, spin, and more spin, commanding the young Laver so relentlessly to hit over the ball that his arm would ache for days after each lesson. The most common adjective used to describe Rod’s game over the years was “wristy.” No one else relied so much on that part of their racket arm.

“Short blokes can’t hit flat balls,” Hollis told him. “Big men don’t need spin, but the little runts like you do.”

Every serve had spin on it as well. It had to. “Even today,” he said in 1971, “if I serve as hard as I can it won’t stay in without topspin. I can’t see the baseline except through the net.” Somehow, even surrounded by lanky cannonballers like González, Arthur Ashe, and Stan Smith, Laver was often credited with the best serve in the game.

“I have found my size to be more an asset than a weakness,” Rocket once said. He served like a rhino and moved like a gazelle, so it was hard to argue.

* * *

Phase one of the Laver story kicked into gear in 1959, when he reached all three finals at Wimbledon. His personal success surprised some pundits, but it was typical that an up-and-coming Australian would reach the final. Ashley Cooper had broken through in 1958, then turned pro. Rod’s only top-class opponent en route to the singles final was American youngster Barry MacKay, who pushed him to five sets.

The 20-year-old Laver fell short against Alex Olmedo in the singles final. With countryman Bob Mark, he fell short in the doubles, as well. His first Wimbledon title came in the mixed, with Darlene Hard. Hard was only two and a half years older than Rocket, but she clearly saw him as the junior partner. “Okay,” she said to open their partnership. “I’ll serve first and take the overheads.”

In 1960, Rod picked up the Australian title with a defeat of countryman Neale Fraser. Fraser won rematches for the titles at Wimbledon and Forest Hills. Some spectators at this point considered Laver a “dullish, uninteresting fellow to watch.”

Either the detractors weren’t paying attention, or the lefty’s tennis would get a whole lot more exciting in a short span of time.

Laver beat American Chuck McKinley in just 53 minutes for the 1961 Wimbledon crown. While he fell to Roy Emerson in the Australian and US finals, he picked up a total of 15 tournament victories that year. One of them came at the German Championships, where he outlasted a series of opponents with considerably more experience on European clay. That, as much as anything else, was a hint of his breadth of skill and the greater things to come.

It all came together in 1962. Rocket won the Grand Slam and another 18 titles besides. The three grass-court majors were easy pickings; he knocked out Emerson in two of them and yet another Australian, Martin Mulligan, in a 52-minute Wimbledon final. Roland Garros was the tough one. He needed three five-setters in the last three rounds to get through. In the final, Emerson led two sets to love, 3-0 in the third set.

Rocket would never lose his flair for the dramatic. John Underwood wrote in 1971:

[W]hen Laver is behind, he appears to be–he is–more dangerous; when he is forced into the extremes of the court, into the corners, he has an astonishing faculty for drawing back and ripping through his best shots. There is a suspicion around that he is only at his best when he is behind and has to rally. He seems always to be making it back from 15-40, or two sets to love.

Down 0-3 to Emmo, Laver reeled off six straight games and finished the day with a 6-2 final set. That season, though, opportunities for such comebacks were rare. He was the unanimous number one amateur, and Aussie tennis fixture Sir Norman Brookes considered him the best player in the world–professional or amateur–even before Rod secured the final leg of his Grand Slam.

By that point, it was an open secret he’d be switching sides. The pro circuit needed a star, and there was nothing else left for Laver to prove. Plus, who could turn down a $110,000 guarantee?

Emerson wasn’t complaining. He joked after losing in New York: “It will be nice playing someone else in these finals.”

* * *

1963 appeared to prove Sir Norman wrong. After leading Australia to its fourth consecutive Davis Cup victory in December, Laver got his first taste of professional tennis. Facing Rosewall and Lew Hoad, he floundered.

He lost 19 of his first 21 matches against the two men. He began a punishing tour by taking just 8 of 40 decisions from Ken.

Much has been made of Laver’s tough transition. The easiest way to illustrate how the amateur and pro ranks compared in the 1950s and 1960s is to say, simply, “Even Laver struggled when he went pro.” And he did. And the overarching point is valid. Jack Kramer and later promoters signed the best players in the amateur game, so it stands to reason the pro circuit featured stronger competition.

At the same time, the transition was as much to blame as the level of play. Rod told the New Yorker in early 1963:

Competitively, the professional game is entirely different. In amateur tennis, you can take it easy during the early part of the week and conserve yourself for your top matches on Friday and Saturday. Here, every match is tough… You must raise your whole game and maintain that level.

Everybody knew it, too. No rookie professional since Kramer in the late 1940s had succeeded immediately. Rosewall said that his game improved 25 to 30 percent in his first three years as a pro. Adrian Quist, the former Australian champion turned columnist, predicted from the get-go that Laver would “settle down, and he could be the best of the lot.”

It didn’t take long for the newcomer to sort things out. 1963 was the last season in which Rosewall would get the better of their head-to-head record. Richard González returned to the circuit in 1964, and Laver took 5 of 12 decisions from him that year. The Australian soon reversed that record, too. Rocket particularly established himself at the “pro slam” events. They weren’t as prestigious as their amateur equivalents, but they did draw strong fields. Between 1964 and 1967, he reached the final of all 12 pro slams, winning 8.

The key to pro success was a big serve, both to keep points short and to take advantage of frequent indoor venues. Rosewall, for all the beauty of his groundstrokes, was always looking for an opening to come in. Rod didn’t need to look. Despite his height, his serve was the finest on the circuit, good enough to follow to the net every time. Only González was even in the conversation.

At the close of 1964, pundits had reason to pick either Rosewall or Laver as their pro number one. From 1965 on, there was no longer anything to debate. That applied to the amateurs as well. Emerson held sway among the traditionalists, and there was no doubt whose game had improved more since the two Aussies last met in 1962.

* * *

The transition from an amateur-pro divide to Open tennis in 1968 was no problem for Laver. It was, however, a bit rocky for the game itself. It took more than a decade for the modern tour calendar to emerge. In the meantime, stars like Rod played a schedule not entirely unlike their earlier pro circuit, just with the majors tacked back on.

Laver, Rosewall and the rest continued to sign six-figure contracts with promoters. In exchange, they agreed to participate in specific events–a lot of them. The result was that the best players followed each other around the globe, facing off constantly.

In the six years between 1968 and 1973, Rocket spent a staggering amount of time battling the strongest players in the game. He met his ten most frequent opponents a total of 205 times: 34 matches per season. (He won 154 of them.) He played Rosewall 32 times, Emerson 26, Fred Stolle 23, Tom Okker 22, and Tony Roche 20. He won his first 18 meetings with Arthur Ashe.

This, more than anything else, explains how we can say that Laver was the greatest player ever. For the first time in tennis history, all the top players duked it out. Many otherwise unremarkable tour stops had all-stars on every single line of the draw. At one middling event in 1969–right after Wimbledon, no less–Laver came out on top of an 16-player field by beating Okker, Rosewall, and John Newcombe in succession.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AavCEVctpF0

You can see how the majors posed little problem for Rocket in those years. Top-notch facilities, early-round cakewalks, days off between matches–for Rod and Muscles, this was tennis on easy mode.

Laver lost the first Open major to Rosewall, at the French in 1968. At Wimbledon, he picked up where he left off in 1962, straight-setting Ashe and Roche for his third career title there.

Then, 1969, the second Grand Slam. You have to feel for Roche, another left-hander from Down Under who played the best tennis of his career that year. Roche even beat Laver five times between January and May, just never when it mattered. At the Australian, Rocket came out on top of a 7-5, 22-20, 9-11, 1-6, 6-3 semi-final, and Roche snatched the first set of the title match at the US Open.

Roche, at least, had company. At the Australian, Laver beat Emerson, Stolle, and Andres Gimeno. At the French: Stan Smith, Gimeno, Okker, and Rosewall. Wimbledon: Smith, Cliff Drysdale, Ashe, Newcombe. Forest Hills: Dennis Ralston, Emerson, Ashe. After those easy early rounds, every one of the four slams featured four opponents who either made the Tennis 128 or rank among the first couple dozen names who missed.

* * *

There was never any mystery about why Laver won so much. He served big, he volleyed well, his groundstrokes were solid, he was fast, he could improvise, he was mentally solid… all that before he fell behind and got even better.

González told John McPhee that Rocket’s weakness was the “bouncing overhead”–a smash struck after letting the ball bounce. Presumably Gorgo was joking.

Central to Laver’s strategy was a willingness to go for winners when no one else would. Dick Crealy, an Australian who took him to five sets at the 1969 French, said, “[Y]ou make your best shot and he’ll knock it for a winner and do it with contempt.” Tom Gorman added, “Laver plays so well off other people’s power that it gets discouraging.”

Rosewall might have possessed the sturdiest mind of any of Rod’s rivals, but even he found that an impossible winner off the Laver racket could “boggle the concentration.”

That was the idea.

Rocket explained in 1971:

If I’m in trouble, I attack. It’s my game. If I have the choice—play this ball back, just dump it back or try to hit it out—I go for the winner. Why just lob it back? You’re liable to miss either way…. After a while, it can become a psychological thing. Run one down at 15-40 and make it, and you are only a point from being even. If you have hit a winner under pressure like that when the other guy thinks you wouldn’t dare, you have got something else going.

Perhaps this was another lesson from the pro circuit. Against such a towering cast of rivals, no one could win every night. You certainly couldn’t beat Rosewall by playing it safe. Laver’s superpower–though he rarely needed it–was this ability to turn desperation into a weapon.

All of the great Australians understood that, beneath it all, it was just a game. On the ropes, Laver didn’t feel like a superhero. But he never conceded an inch. What the hell, he told himself. “They can’t shoot you if you lose.”

* * *

Previous: No. 2, Steffi Graf

Next: Podcast Episode 116: Tennis 128 Wrap-Up

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

* * *

Steffi Graf [GER]
Born: 14 June 1969
Career: 1984-99
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1987)
Peak Elo rating: 2,601 (1st place, 1990)
Major singles titles: 22
Total singles titles: 107
 

* * *

13 points.

No one expected 13th seed Natasha Zvereva to actually beat Steffi Graf. At the 1988 French Open, Graf was the world number one and the defending champion. She hadn’t lost to anyone other than Martina Navratilova or Gabriela Sabatini in more than two years. Sabatini pushed her to a second-set tiebreak in the semifinals, but the German’s first five opponents managed a grand total of eleven games.

Zvereva, in the other half of the draw, was the surprise of the tournament. She upset Navratilova in the fourth round, then backed up the victory with a routine quarter-final defeat of sixth-seed Helena Suková. She was only 17 years old; maybe she had a few more tricks up her sleeve? In the final, perhaps she could make things interesting and keep Steffi on court for more than an hour.

Or not. In her first service game, Zvereva reached 40-30. Graf ran around a wide serve to launch her trademark inside-out forehand, erasing the game point. That was as close as the Belarusian would get. Graf won 6-0, 6-0. Official match time was 34 minutes, which charitably included two minutes of rain delay. The German allowed Zvereva just 13 points, three of them in that one early game.

As usual, the defining shot of the day was the one that earned Steffi her nickname, Fräulein Forehand. Graf hit 9 forehand winners in the compressed space of a mere 61 points. Another 11 forehands forced errors off the Zvereva racket. In the memorable words of Rex Bellamy, the challenger “was reduced to lolloping, lunging helplessness and public shame.”

Welcome to the club, Natasha.

1988 was Graf’s Golden Slam year. In the course of her 72 victories, she dealt out 29 bagels, plus 45 more sets by the score of 6-1. Her other three slam-final victims–Navratilova, Sabatini, and Chris Evert–each suffered one of those breadsticks on the sport’s biggest stages. Martina had won as many matches in a season, but even she hadn’t traipsed over the field so emphatically.

Top-20 player Helen Kelesi avoided meeting Graf in 1988, but she lost 6-1, 6-1 early the following year. “It was scary out there,” said Kelesi. “I was just trying to hit the ball back, and I couldn’t even do that.”

Susan Sloane, one of the pebbles in the German’s path at Roland Garros, was similarly flummoxed. “It’s no fun playing Steffi.” she said. “She has no weaknesses, none. Right now I’m playing the best I’ve ever played, and she beats me oh and one.”

The 1988 French Open final was the most lopsided major championship match of the modern era. For Graf, it barely stood out as a good day.

* * *

The forehand was the highlight-reel shot, the centerpiece of that unbreakable game. Yet Navratilova didn’t even consider it to be Graff’s premier strength. After losing the 1988 Wimbledon final, Martina said,

Steffi’s speed–her incredible spring–is her biggest weapon. She’s so quick off the mark. If she doesn’t get to the ball, she can’t nail that big forehand.

It was easy for fans to ignore her quickness because she ended points so rapidly. But opponents couldn’t miss it. She was impossible to beat from the baseline. Anything she could run down–in other words, just about everything–would come back with interest.

“Every time I hit what I think is a winner she hits it back harder,” said Arantxa Sánchez Vicario. That was after a 6-1, 6-0, 47-minute drubbing in 1990. On clay.

The only solution, aside from hoping for injury or waiting three years for a bad day, was to attack. Relentlessly. That worked–sort of–for Navratilova, who won 9 of 18 meetings. It was also the game plan of Lori McNeil, a younger serve-and-volleyer who scored multiple upsets against Graf, including in the 1994 Wimbledon first round.

Back in 1987, when Graf had yet to cement her dominance, she beat another net-rusher, Pam Shriver, in the US Open quarterfinals. The scoreline was a routine 6-4, 6-3, but Pam–who would always be a bit of a Steffi skeptic–came off the court with renewed confidence. “The puzzle is solved,” she proclaimed. Shriver gave some advice to McNeil, who would meet Graf in the semis.

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

The strategy: Non-stop pressure, force her to hit endless passing shots, pull her wide on the forehand side so she can’t unleash the inside-out howitzer. Problem was, the only woman alive who could do that was Martina, and even she couldn’t do it all the time. Feverish and flu-ridden, Steffi beat McNeil in three.

Navratilova did manage to win the 1987 Flushing final, stopping the youngster for the second straight slam. It was the last match Graf lost all year. She wouldn’t fall short again at a major until 1989.

Her first tournament back in Europe that fall came at the Citizen Cup in Hamburg, where she lost barely three games per match as she glided through the draw. Her victim in the final, Isabel Cueto, had first seen Steffi play when she was eight years old. “My parents and I couldn’t believe it,” she told a reporter in 1989. “They knew I would need some more lessons.”

* * *

Marvelous as the footwork-and-a-forehand combination was, the skill that took Graf from impressive to imperious was her mind. In early 1985, she was a 15-year-old outside of the top 20, generally ranked second behind Sabatini as a super-prospect. But both Evert and long-time circuit insider Ted Tinling tossed in the caveat that Steffi was stronger between the ears.

A few years later, Chrissie would go one step further. The Evert-Navratilova rivalry had often been characterized as brains-versus-brawn, Chrissie’s steel will against Martina’s outlandish athleticism. “Steffi has both,” Evert said.

That was the real secret behind all those 6-0, 6-1 victories. She never lost focus, never let up. Even at 19, her standards went far beyond what it took to win every match and complete the game’s only Golden Slam.

“I want to reach absolute perfection,” she once said. “And I think I can reach it.”

It wasn’t easy, targeting such a level, day-in, day-out. Czechoslovakian Pavel Slozil, a former ATP tour player, often said that he worked harder as Steffi’s coach than he ever had in his playing days. Her mother, Heidi, implored her to smile more on court. Graf was too single-minded for that. “What do you want me to do, Mother,” she answered, “smile or win?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aJHVqDOmjM

Only occasionally did Graf recognize the outrageousness of what she was doing. Early in 1989 at the Virginia Slims of Washington, she won the first 20 points of the final against Zina Garrison. Suddenly, she wasn’t sure how to handle such a situation: Play it safe and go for the golden set, or keep swinging away? Her befuddlement let Zina back into the match, but Steffi was the only one who would’ve been disappointed by the eventual 6-1, 7-5 outcome.

At other moments, the pressure seemed to just disappear. Graf sometimes had to stifle a giggle fit on court, as at one tournament in Florida when she was surprised to hear a spectator cheer her on in German. She never abandoned her game face for long, though. It was tough to tell whether Steffi was feeling any nerves herself. But as she rushed from one point to the next, alternating forehand bombs with skidding backhand slices, the pressure on the other woman never went away.

* * *

For more than a decade, Graf’s fortitude would be tested. She was unusually injury prone, even clumsy, stuck rehabbing anything from a broken thumb to a bone splinter in her foot. She missed one Australian Open with rubella. It eventually became a running joke. “Every time I played Steffi Graf,” said Shriver, “there was always something wrong with her.”

Lindsay Davenport learned early on that if Graf was healthy enough to play, she was healthy enough to win–usually in about 45 minutes. “She always goes out and plays just fine,” Davenport said at the 1997 Australian. “I don’t want to know what’s bothering her now.”

At other junctures, though, everyone knew what was bothering her, and it did affect her play. In 1990, German tabloids exploded with the story of her father’s affair with a Playboy model. Steffi had always been shy, uncomfortable with the level of attention her sporting prowess brought her. Now, she felt like she was taking on multiple opponents at the same time: Challengers gunning for her on court, insatiable gossip rags off of it.

It’s always tough to know how much weight to assign to off-court troubles. For one thing, Graf didn’t exactly struggle in 1990: She won ten titles and lost only five matches. Her semi-final loss at Wimbledon to Garrison is easy to link to the scandal: Media scrutiny was never higher than it was at Wimbledon, and the result was a particularly surprising one. But the two losses after that came against an ever-stronger Sabatini. Gabi had always played Graf tougher than the head-to-head record revealed, and the Argentinian’s focus in those days was, quite simply, to figure out how to beat the world number one.

The other two 1990 upsets came at the hands of the first younger player capable of pushing Steffi around. Monica Seles had two double-fisted strokes, each one nearly as fearsome as the German’s forehand. While she came to net even less than Graf did, she managed to implement a version of the Navratilova/Shriver/McNeil game plan from the baseline. Facing the rest of the field, Seles scored as many 40-minute drubbings as her elder did. Her all-out power was the first weapon that Steffi couldn’t reliably blunt.

Graf said it wasn’t just Seles who beat her in Berlin and for the French Open title in Paris: “I also lost the two finals against the German press.” Maybe so, but it would soon become clear that Monica could manage on her own.

* * *

The most entertaining thing about reviewing the careers of the all-time greats is how much their peaks contort our expectations. The way some people talk, the span from 1990 to 1992 were lost years for Steffi.

A three-year-long unfocused, injury-riddled disaster in which she–let me see here–won three majors, reached three more slam finals, picked up 22 other titles, and never fell below number two in the rankings. Seles so convincingly relegated her to also-ran status that Monica won… um, two of their five meetings between 1991 and 1993.

This is important, because Graf’s legacy–almost as much as Seles’s own–is tied up with the April 1993 attack that halted Monica’s career. Not only was the assailant an unhinged German fan, Steffi was the primary beneficiary of her rival’s absence. Graf won 10 of her 22 major titles between 1993 and 1996, a stretch in which a healthy Seles would’ve challenged for every one of them.

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

We’ll never know, of course, how those years would have turned out. Seles might have improved and won a Grand Slam of her own; she might have swerved off course under the weight of celebrity. My point is only that Graf, in a slump, held her own against the best player the early 1990s threw at her. Steffi didn’t lose more than six matches in a season between 1993 and 1997, so it’s hard to imagine her crumbling under more of Monica’s pressure.

“I’m playing such good tennis, and I would like to prove it,” she said in 1994. “If Monica were around, I’d have someone to prove it against.”

After winning the 1995 French Open, a tournament overshadowed in part by the news that Seles would soon return to the circuit, Steffi added: “The most fun you get is when you have tough matches and you’re pushed to your limits. She was one of the players who did that to me…. I’ve missed her.”

In Seles’s absence, Arantxa became the primary challenger. Graf and Sánchez Vicario contested six major finals between 1994 and 1996. Two of them–both Graf victories–stand out among the best matches of the Open era.

Steffi played the 1995 Wimbledon final on anti-inflammatories to manage the pain of a bone spur in her back. She nearly withdrew from the tournament a few days before the fortnight began, and she did pull out of the doubles. Arantxa took the first set, then Graf charged back with a 6-1 second and an early break in the third. But the Spaniard turned it into a battle of attrition, decided only after Graf won a 32-point, 20-minute game to break for 6-5. Despite a list of injuries longer than her travel itinerary, she secured her sixth Wimbledon title and improved to 32-0 on the season.

In 1996, the two women went even longer, crossing the three-hour mark in the French Open final. This time Arantxa made the comeback, recovering from a 4-1 deficit in the second-set tiebreak and forcing one error after another to reach a third set. Toe to toe with the best retriever in the game on a surface built for grinding, Graf proved that her stamina–though rarely tested–was another world-class asset. Steffi pulled out the match, 10-8 in the third.

* * *

The Roland Garros title was her 19th major championship, then good for the Open era record. But Graf was never one to dwell on her place in history. “The match overwhelmed the record,” she said.

That one line, more than anything else, captures what Fräulein Forehand brought to the court. She aimed for perfection on every point, and frighteningly often, she reached it. For it all to matter, she needed a foil whose game could approach the same heights.

Sabatini had her moments. Sánchez Vicario always threatened a grueling afternoon. Peak Seles was the problem Graf never had enough chances to solve, the one who might have forced Steffi to raise her game to an even more staggering level.

In Graf’s mind, her one true equal was Navratilova. As the German rose through the ranks, Martina and Chrissie were still one and two, and Steffi’s first three major finals–and another three within two years–pitted her against the aggressive left-hander.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcz22bpN9gE

Navratilova called Graf “the best all-around player of all-time, regardless of the surface.” Steffi returned the compliment in 1999: “[Martina] is the uncontested number one. She has left a mark on the sport like no one else.”

At Wimbledon in 1993, Steffi expected to meet Navratilova in the final, but the veteran was ousted by Jana Novotná in the semis. “I’m disappointed she’s not there,” she said. After taking advantage of Novotná’s collapse for the title, Graf wanted to keep playing. She sent a note to Martina asking for a private match behind closed doors. My kingdom for a mobile phone: Navratilova was out golfing.

Graf was still thinking about it a year later, when journalist Sally Jenkins asked for her idea of a perfect tennis match. Wimbledon, Centre Court, Navratilova, she said. No fans. They wouldn’t even keep score: “It is just for us.”

“I’d do it in a second,” Martina replied. “We’d play the tennis of our lives.”

 

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

On Monday, it rained.

On Tuesday, it rained.

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

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

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

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

Spoiler alert: She made all three finals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Previous: No. 4, Novak Djokovic

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Previous: No. 5, Roger Federer

Next: No. 3, Martina Navratilova

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

* * *

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

* * *

Was Roger Federer clutch?

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

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

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

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

It’s not just match points, either.

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Player     BLR  
Federer   1.08  
Nadal     1.07  
Murray    1.06  
Djokovic  1.05

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

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

* * *

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

Who cares if Federer was clutch?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Previous: No. 6, Serena Williams

Next: No. 4, Novak Djokovic

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

Drama, yes. Major titles, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Previous: No. 7, Bill Tilden

Next: No. 5, Roger Federer

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

But no. The pressure is on you.

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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