Category: The Tennis 128

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

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Juan Martín del Potro [ARG]
Born: 23 September 1988
Career: 2006-19
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (2018)
Peak Elo rating: 2,233 (3rd place, 2009)
Major singles titles: 1
Total singles titles: 22
 

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Since February 2, 2004, when Roger Federer took over the number one ranking, the top player on the ATP computer (whether it be Fed or someone else) has won 1,165 matches against 174 losses, a win percentage of 83%. If you take out the 100-plus matches that the Big Four played against each other when one of them was number one, the top player won more than 90% of their 1,200 matches.

In this span of nearly two decades, only a dozen players have won at least four times against the world number one:

Player                 Matches  Wins   Win%  
Rafael Nadal                41    22  53.7%  
Novak Djokovic              31    14  45.2%  
Andy Murray                 41    12  29.3%  
Juan Martín del Potro       24    10  41.7%  
Roger Federer               25     8  32.0%  
Dominic Thiem               13     5  38.5%  
Stan Wawrinka               26     5  19.2%  
Alexander Zverev            11     4  36.4%  
Nikolay Davydenko           19     4  21.1%  
Tomas Berdych               34     4  11.8%  
David Ferrer                26     4  15.4%  
Daniil Medvedev              8     4  50.0%

Juan Martín del Potro is the only man outside of the Big Four to reach double digits. In fairness, two of those wins were by retirement, when Novak Djokovic quit in a 2011 Davis Cup match and Rafael Nadal surrendered at the 2018 US Open after losing two sets. Even discounting that pair of results, he snatched as many matches from number ones as Federer did, and he won at a better clip than Andy Murray’s.

And–oh yeah–these aren’t exactly cheap victories. The list includes the 2009 US Open final, when Delpo handed Federer his first defeat in Flushing for six years. He knocked out the number-one ranked Federer in two other title matches, one in the enemy territory of Basel, the other recovering from match point down to win at Indian Wells in 2018. Del Potro also scored another upset for the ages: his first-round shock of Novak Djokovic at the 2016 Olympics.

Even Delpo’s catalog of losses to number ones is impressive. He pushed both Djokovic and Nadal to five sets at Wimbledon, and when the All-England Club hosted the Olympics in 2012, del Potro went toe to toe with Federer for four and a half hours. The final score, 3-6, 7-6(5), 19-17, went in Fed’s favor, but it set a pile of records and ultimately led to a rule change that will stop Olympic matches from ever again taking so long.

You don’t have to listen to tennis commentary for long before you hear about a guy who, on a good day, can beat anybody. Often, it’s just wishful thinking that a one-sided match will turn out to be more suspenseful than expected. With del Potro, it was absolutely true. He had the weapons, the stamina, and the mental strength to beat anybody–and on the sport’s biggest stages, he did exactly that.

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I first saw Juan Martín del Potro play at the US Open in the 2006 qualifying rounds. If you spend enough time watching challenger and qualifying-level tennis, you’ll spot the occasional megastar before he makes his breakthrough. Then you can spend the next few decades telling everyone you meet about it.

Hipster brags of “I saw him when” may be boring, but del Potro never was. A month short of his 18th birthday, his serve was still mostly punchless, relying on spin and the angles he could generate from his height of six-foot-six. His on-court demeanor was laconic, verging on sleepy. But even at that stage, the effortless power was there. The man who would become known as the Tower of Tandil–after his hometown in Argentina–had plenty of weapons. His forehand was already devastating.

Delpo’s final-round qualifying opponent was the Austrian Daniel Köllerer, a mind-bogglingly inconsistent shotmaker with a temper that made John McEnroe look like Mr. Rogers. (Köllerer would be banned from pro tennis in 2011 for match-fixing. Evidence was easy to come by because everyone else on the circuit hated him so much.) “Crazy Dani” was a tricky opponent who had beaten del Potro at a Challenger ten months earlier, and they would meet against in the third round of the Open in 2009. The 17-year-old Argentine simply sat back and watched Köllerer implode. The score was 6-3, 6-2, and Delpo would never play grand slam qualifying again.

He made steady progress throughout 2007, climbing into the top 50 and ending the year as the highest-ranked teen. There were some encouraging results–a win over top-tenner Tommy Robredo in Madrid; a five-set loss to Fernando González in Australia–but he struggled to stay fit. He retired from five matches (including the near-miss against Gonzalez), and he wouldn’t be fully fit again until midway through 2008.

Delpo responded by replacing both his coach and his physio. The new man in his corner, Franco Davín, gave him a burst of confidence, and the pair would stay together for seven years. After an early exit at Wimbledon to Stan Wawrinka, del Potro put the tennis world on notice. He won his first tour-level title in Stuttgart … then another … and another … and another. All told, he won 23 straight matches, including four titles, with wins over Richard Gasquet, Mardy Fish, Andy Roddick, Tommy Haas, and Kei Nishikori.

It took an in-form Andy Murray to stop him in the US Open quarter-finals, and even that was a four-hour struggle in which Delpo hit 27 forehand winners past one of the best retrievers in the game. When Roddick lost to the youngster in Los Angeles that summer, he said that del Potro had the ability to hit hard in any direction–“a good thing for him, bad for the rest of us.” Another month, and the Argentine cracked the top ten, two weeks after his 20th birthday.

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Del Potro finished 2008 ranked 9th in the world, the only player under the age of 21 inside the top 20. He was 16 months younger than Djokovic and Murray, and it was increasingly clear that if anyone was going to break the growing stranglehold of the Big Four, it was the quiet giant from South America.

For most of 2009, Delpo solidified his status as the next guy on the list, rising to 5th on the ATP computer in April. He also learned just how difficult it would be to go farther. He lost to Federer in Australia, Nadal at Indian Wells, and Murray in Miami. Djokovic knocked him out of Rome. Federer beat him again at both Madrid and Roland Garros, the latter in five sets. del Potro upset Nadal in the Montreal semis, then lost to Murray in the final.

The US Open figured to be more of the same. Federer had won the tournament five years running, and no one outside of Fed, Nadal, and Djokovic had won a major since the Australian in 2005. Del Potro was seeded sixth, and he made easy progress, losing only two sets in his first five matches. That earned him a semi-final date with Rafa. Delpo turned in the best performance of his career to date, hitting 35 winners to Nadal’s 20, and winning 6-2, 6-2, 6-2. When he was able to hit a forehand, he won the point a remarkable 59% of the time.

Waiting in the final–of course–was Roger Federer. The two men had faced off six times. Before the French Open, Delpo hadn’t won a set. In the Australian Open quarter-finals that year, Fed obliterated him, 6-3, 6-0, 6-0. When the world number one raced to a set-and-a-break lead in just 45 minutes, history seemed to be repeating itself.

Del Potro settled down and made a match out of it. Federer served for the second set at 5-4. At 30-30, Delpo rifled a forehand down the line on his second shot–winner. Break point, Fed came in, Delpo hit a forehand passing shot down the line–winner. Del Potro reached set point in the tiebreak on his own serve. Fed sliced a deep return to the backhand, the challenger ran around it to hit an inside-out forehand–winner.

When the forehand was firing, no one–not even the Swiss maestro–could touch it. Del Potro lost the third set when his serve deserted him late in the frame. But unlike almost everyone else who came close to beating Fed in those years, Delpo came back stronger. He broke the top seed to love at 2-all in the fourth, and Fed muscled the score back to even, the Argentine took a second tiebreak. In a set where he held Federer to a mere two forehand winners, Delpo hit eleven.

Del Potro hit two more forehand winners to break for a 2-0 advantage in the decider, and he never let go. When Federer had a game point to stay in the match at 2-5, Delpo delivered yet another forehand winner down the line. Two points later, yet another big forehand forced an error, and the match went to the Tower of Tandil. A star was born, and at age 20, the sky was the limit.

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The 2009 US Open final was not del Potro’s last hurrah–far from it. I’ve already told you about his big upsets more than a half-decade later, and the small print up top reminds us that he finally climbed to number three in the rankings in 2018.

But Delpo would never again play a match as healthy as he did in 2009. Here’s the rest of his career in one graphic:

If someone asks you who Juan Martin Del Potro (Delpo) is, show them this image & let them know he is a slam champ, a 2-time Olympic medalist, Davis Cup champion, has 22 singles titles, made it to the QFs of each slam & had a CH of No.3.

Thank you @delpotrojuan. #Delpo #DelPotro pic.twitter.com/7FJpiHnv0K

— Dr Balraj Shukla | બલરાજ (@balrajshukla) February 9, 2022

A right wrist injury sidelined him for almost the entire 2010 season, and despite leading Argentina to the Davis Cup final in 2011, he needed most of that campaign just to return to form. He was winning regularly again by 2012, only to discover that Federer hadn’t lost a step. The two players met eight times that season, and Fed won the first six, including the Australian quarters, the French quarters, and the heart-breaking marathon at the Olympics. Delpo beat Djokovic for the Olympic bronze, and he turned things around against Federer with wins in Basel and in London at the Tour Finals. It looked like another deep grand slam run was still in his future.

2013 was another collection of near-misses. A final at Indian Wells (three-set loss to Nadal), a partially-lost clay-court season due to a viral infection, and a semi-final at Wimbledon (five-set loss to Djokovic). He recorded wins over each of the Big Four–just not at the right time for another major championship–and returned to the top five.

And then it was the other wrist. Between the year-end finals in 2013 and the Rio Olympics in 2016, del Potro played only 35 matches.

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Delpo had always been popular with fans. His electric game drew them in, and his soft-spoken good nature won them over. Players found him endearing, too. Some Federer supporters believe that Fed lost to him so often because their hero liked him too much. Del Potro’s post-match hugs were legendary. Jason Gay wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “If he was not your favorite player, he was your favorite player’s favorite player.”

Every successful return to the tour added to his allure. There was no way that a player could undergo so many surgeries, rehab both wrists, and still come back strong. Yet in some ways, the older, rebuilt Delpo was even better.

The left wrist injury made it harder for Delpo to hit two-handed backhands with power. He relied more on his less-effective slice, but more importantly, he shifted tactics to emphasize the monster forehand even more. When he faced Djokovic in the opening round at the 2016 Olympics, he walloped 32 forehand winners in just two sets. Barely halfway into another comeback, still ranked 141st in the world, Delpo rode his pared-down game to a Olympic semi-final win over Nadal. He pushed Murray to four sets in the final before settling for a silver medal.

Del Potro 3.0 wasn’t just about the power game–it relied on a heart as big as the man himself. As a kid, he dreamed of winning a grand slam and the Davis Cup. Argentina had never done the latter. Without a second star behind Delpo, it seemed unlikely that they would break the losing streak. He rejoined the team for the 2016 semi-finals, and barely a month after the Olympic defeat, he came back from a two-sets-to-one deficit to beat Murray.

In November, he helped his country finish the job. He beat Ivo Karlović in the second rubber, then lost in the doubles as Croatia took a two-to-one lead. With the Cup on the line, del Potro came back from another two-to-one disadvantage, this time against Marin Čilić. Federico Delbonis straight-setted Karlović, and the trophy went to Argentina.

In his career up to that point, del Potro had fallen behind two sets to one on 20 occasions. 16 times, he lost. The other four: the 2009 US Open final, a 2010 Australian Open match against James Blake, and those two critical matches of the 2016 Davis Cup.

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In Buenos Aires this February, del Potro returned to the ring one last time. The tennis world tuned in to watch for flashes of the old Delpo magic, but he lost easily to Delbonis, 6-1, 6-3. It had been 965 days since his last tour-level match, so it was understandable that he’d need more time to get back in form.

Del Potro had entered a second event in Rio de Janeiro, but he withdrew. It wasn’t really a comeback–it was a farewell.

Usually when we talk about injury-riddled careers, we focus on the what-ifs. It’s certainly tempting to speculate about what Delpo could’ve accomplished with two healthy wrists. But in his case, it’s beside the point. He is a living legend to fans and an inspiration to his peers. In his limited time on court, del Potro delivered far more than one career’s worth of memorable moments, dramatic upsets, and just flat-out eye-popping tennis.

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

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Mary Joe Fernández [USA]
Born: 19 August 1971
Career: 1985-99
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 4 (1990)
Peak Elo rating: 2,261 (5th place, 1991, 1993)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 7
 

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In 1992, Mary Joe Fernández reached 12 semi-finals. She lost the first in Sydney to Gabriela Sabatini, then got her revenge on Sabatini two weeks later at the Australian Open. She lost to Monica Seles in the final, then won another semi-final in Essen in February. Waiting in the final: another defeat at the hands of Seles.

Between March and October, she cracked the final four nine more times. The Olympics, the US Open, in Europe, in Asia, on clay, on grass, on hard–she reached the semis in 12 of the 17 events she played, and one of the early losses was due to injury at Wimbledon.

Here are her opponents in those last nine semis:

Steffi Graf
Gabriela Sabatini
Arantxa Sánchez Vicario
Lori McNeil
Steffi Graf
Monica Seles
Monica Seles
Gabriela Sabatini
Jana Novotna

There were not a lot of easy draws on the women’s tour of the early 1990s. Graf and Novotna accounted for two of her earlier-round exits, as well.

Heading into Indian Wells in March of 1993, Mary Joe had piled up $2.2 million in career prize money, despite winning only two tournaments. She had reached 37 semi-finals but only eight finals.

She said then: “It’s just a matter of getting that break. Once I win one or two, it’s going to be easier. It’s mental. It’s all in the head.” She beat Helena Sukova and Amanda Coetzer to win in Indian Wells, but it didn’t get easier. As she got older, it was less often Graf, Seles, or Sabatini in the semis. Instead, she drew the likes of Mary Pierce, Lindsay Davenport, and Martina Hingis.

Fernández arrived on tour when it was at its most crowded with talent, and she was never quite able to elbow her way in. Like Zina Garrison, she was an all-time great player with the bad luck to play match after important match against foes who were even better.

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I’ll be honest: I never expected to see Mary Joe Fernández on my list of the 128 best players of the last century, let alone inside the top 90. I’m sure you’re surprised to see her here. Mary Joe is surely too busy to follow along, but on the off chance she’s counting down with us, she probably didn’t think her name would come up, either.

The remaining 87 players on the list include a few more who never won a major, but I suspect that for most of you, Fernández will be the last real head-scratcher. While I’m generally more interested in celebrating the accomplishments of the all-time greats than picking through the details of why one is ranked above another, this case calls for some explanation.

According to my historical Elo ratings, Fernández was at her best in early 1993. After winning Indian Wells, she beat Sabatini and Sánchez Vicario to reach her first French Open final, where she took Graf to a third set. Her rating after the French was 2,261, which slots her onto the all-time list between the peaks of Andrea Jaeger and Evonne Goolagong. 13 Open Era women on this list–including a few who are still to come–never achieved such a high Elo rating.

There’s no denying that she was utterly helpless against the very best. She lost all seven matches against her idol Chris Evert, eight of eight against Martina Navratilova, all 17 she played against Graf, and 15 of her 16 meetings with Seles. There was a mental component to her inability to trouble Graf or Seles, but she also just didn’t have the weapons to challenge them. Few women did.

I don’t consider doubles accomplishments in the ranking, but still: those medals are gold.

What saves Mary Joe’s reputation is how she fared against everyone else. In her main years on tour, from 1986 to 1997, she played at least three matches against 70 different opponents. Only ten of them got the better of the head-to-head. In addition to the four women I’ve already mentioned, she lost every meeting with both Martina Hingis and, for some reason, Irina Spirlea. She lost two of three against Kimiko Date, and she fell short of a .500 record against Sabatini (10-13), Sánchez Vicario (4-7), and Novotna (4-5).

That leaves 60 women, three of which fought her to a draw. The other 57–including, again, many players who earned a place on the Tennis 128–lost to her more often than they won.

Here’s another way to look at it. In her years as a full-time competitor, Fernández won 400 matches against 172 losses–almost exactly a 70% win rate. That’s roughly equivalent to the more recent marks of Simona Halep and Caroline Wozniacki. Take out her matches against Evert, Graf, Navratilova, and Seles–in other words, put her in an era without four of the ten or so best players of all time–and her winning percentage improves to 76%. That pulls her about even with the career winning percentage of Venus Williams.

Yes, I know most great players lead most of their head-to-heads. Everyone’s record looks better if you take away some of their losses. I may not be able to convince you that Mary Joe was one of the 90 best players of all time, but I hope you’ll recognize how easy it is to underrate a player whose main accomplishment is that she managed to hold her own in a uniquely difficult era.

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However you value Mary Joe Fernández’s pro career, there’s no disputing she was one of the great juniors of the modern era. When she was 14 years old, she won the 18-and-under division at the Orange Bowl. It was her fourth straight title there. She won the 12s, 14s, 16s, and 18s in consecutive years.

IMG, the sports management firm, began courting her when she was in elementary school. She won her first three matches on the pro tour when she was 13, and she claimed victory in her US Open debut a week after her 14th birthday. She made a surprise run to the quarter-finals at Roland Garros in 1986, when she was still 14. She cracked the top 20 on the WTA computer a year later.

For nearly every milestone Fernández hit, she was the second youngest in history to do so. Only Kathy Rinaldi, an equally precocious 14-year-old a few years earlier, had outdone her. The precedents on most people’s minds, though, were the more successful teen queens Tracy Austin and Andrea Jaeger. Austin and Jaeger had scaled the highest peaks of the sport before they were old enough to legally drink, but injuries and burnout quickly knocked them both off tour.

Mary Joe at Wimbledon in 1991

That wasn’t going to happen to Mary Joe. For one thing, she wanted to go to college–an aspiration that was delayed when she opted to turn pro at age 14. She still finished high school, an unusual credential in the single-minded teenage ranks of the tour. The WTA had introduced limitations on the number of matches that players as young as Fernández could play, and unlike some of her peers, she didn’t bristle at the restrictions.

Plus, she was mature beyond her years. Her early coaches couldn’t say enough good things about her. When she was 14, one of them told Sports Illustrated:

She has a mind like a steel trap. She is the most mentally tough person in the history of tennis. People talk about how great her strokes are. It’s true, but it’s her head that makes her great.

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There was no point in leaving a talent like Fernández in the juniors, and she proved herself equal to the challenge of the adult circuit. But she also quickly discovered her limitations.

Twice in early 1986, Mary Joe faced Steffi Graf. Graf was two years older, and she was already on the brink of dominating the tour. Fernández failed to last an hour on court on either occasion. On her first trip to Wimbledon, she opened against Chris Evert. The match was highly touted, as Fernández had just broken out at the French. But the result was predictable: Evert lost only five games. They met again at the US Open with the same result.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBBP3JW2SYM

One knock against the youngster is that her vaunted mind worked against her. In his 1993 book Ladies of the Court, Michael Mewshaw wrote:

[T]here were those who suspected that she was too sweet to break through to the top. Or else too intelligent. Tennis, it was said, was a game where you had to be smart enough to do it and dumb enough to think it mattered.

Harold Solomon, a one-time Roland Garros finalist who coached Fernández in the early 1990s, concurred:

She’s a very sincere, genuine type of person. She’s not on an ego trip at all–sometimes to her detriment. Sometimes there’s not enough animal on the court. It’s my job to try to bring that out.

But in Solomon’s view, it was more than just the mental game. Because Mary Joe hadn’t adopted the typical dawn-to-dusk training regimen as a teen, her technique left plenty of room for improvement. Only in late 1991 did she learn to hit a one-handed backhand volley. The same year, she started doing simple strength workouts. Before that, she couldn’t manage a single push-up.

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Fernández had plenty of success before teaming with Solomon. In 1990, she reached the Australian Open final (where she fell to Graf), and she won the Filderstadt title in October to reach a career-best ranking of fourth in the world. But it took a new coach–and his triple goal of technical improvement, physical fitness, and aggressiveness–to take another step forward.

At the 1993 French Open, she played the most memorable match of her career, a quarter-final against Sabatini that tested her will to win like never before. The third seed from Argentina had won eight of their last ten encounters, and she quickly built up a 6-1, 5-1 lead at Roland Garros. Sabatini double-faulted on her first match point, and Fernández saved four more before taking the second set in a tiebreak. Mary Joe made her coach proud–“I figured I should just hit it as hard as I could and see what would happen”–and pulled out the decider by a score of 10-8, needing five match points of her own.

She’ll never forget the three-and-a-half-hour battle for a place in the final four, but Fernández remembers the semi-final itself as “one of the best matches I ever played.” Against Sánchez Vicario–who had beaten her in six of seven meetings–she continued on the attack. She won more than half of her return points and won easily, 6-2, 6-2.

The reward: another major final against Steffi Graf. Fernández rode her semi-final form into the title match, taking the first set, only the second set she had won against the German in ten meetings. She nudged out to a 2-0 lead in the decider, then broke again for 4-3 on a Graf double fault. Graf broke back, and finally, Fernández’s jitters were too much. Steffi won, 4-6, 6-2, 6-4.

Coach Solomon had Mary Joe on a three-year plan to win a grand slam, and the run in Paris cut the schedule in half. But immediately after Fernández discovered her best tennis, her body betrayed her. A shoulder injury, among other accumulated woes, limited her to only 12 matches for the rest of the season. Among them: a 6-0, 6-1 embarrassment at Wimbledon at the hands of Zina Garrison.

Still only 22 years old, she he was able to come back, winning Indian Wells and reaching two major quarter-finals in 1995 alone. But as the field got more crowded with young talent from around the world–a trend she had spotted three years earlier, at a time when journalists were bemoaning the top-heavy nature of the women’s game–Fernández found it increasingly difficult to keep up. Mary Joe settled for doubles glory instead. She and Gigi Fernández won gold at the 1996 Atlanta games, equaling their result from Barcelona in 1992.

Solomon’s three-year plan never came to fruition, and as a singles player, Mary Joe Fernández finished her career with three major runner-up trophies and a handful of tour-level titles. It wasn’t quite what her junior exploits foretold, and it isn’t the typical resume of an all-time great. She wasn’t too intelligent to reach the top, nor was she too nice–smart and friendly as she may be. She was simply born at the wrong time.

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

* * *

Michael Chang [USA]
Born: 22 February 1972
Career: 1988-2003
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1996)
Peak Elo rating: 2,186 (2nd place, 1994, 1996-7)
Major singles titles: 1
Total singles titles: 34
 

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When John McEnroe made his first trip to Roland Garros in 1977, his wise-cracking idol, Vitas Gerulaitis, told him what to expect. “You’re going to play some guy from Europe that you’ve never heard of, and you’re going to get your ass kicked.” Vitas was wrong–McEnroe never did lose to an anonymous European at the French–but such was the general fate of Americans on the French clay.

When McEnroe made his debut, no player from the United States had won the French title since Tony Trabert in 1955. Americans went nearly twenty years without even putting a man in the final. Gerulaitis was runner-up in 1980, and Johnny Mac came one set short four years later. In 1988, McEnroe reached the fourth round before losing (again) to three-time champion Ivan Lendl. En route, he routined a 16-year-old American wild card named Michael Chang, 6-0, 6-3, 6-1.

By the end of the 1988 Roland Garros fortnight, there were hints that things would start to change for the Americans. In just his second appearance at the tournament, Andre Agassi reached the semi-finals, where he pushed eventual champion Mats Wilander to five sets. Insiders knew that another young American, Agassi’s former roommate Jim Courier, was right behind him. Courier would upset Agassi and make his own mark at the event a year later.

Agassi and Courier would both go on to win French Open titles. But the man who ended the drought was Chang. When he returned to Roland Garros in 1989, he was 17 years old, stood only five-feet-eight-inches tall, and weighed 135 pounds. He had played only five clay-court events on tour, four of them on the ersatz Har-Tru surface used in the States. 20 months younger than Agassi, 18 months younger than Courier, and six months the junior of Pete Sampras, he jumped the queue to become the first slam winner of the quartet and kick off a memorable decade for American men.

Chang would go on to win 32 more titles and rise to number two in the rankings seven years later. But the 1989 French Open would be Chang’s only major championship. It was so unexpected, such a unique achievement, that it tends to overshadow the rest of an excellent career. That’s okay–it really was one of the transcendent moments of modern tennis.

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Chang and Sampras grew up together, facing each other a dozen times in Southern California junior tournaments. Chang usually won, and when Franz Lidz profiled him for Sports Illustrated in 1988, Pete was referred to as “Michael’s sometime doubles partner.” The pair spent some time before the 1989 French Open training with Jose Higueras, a Spaniard who won all but one of his 16 tour-level titles on clay.

Avoiding Vitas’s curse, the 15th-seeded Chang cruised through the first three rounds on his second attempt at Roland Garros. He beat the Belgian Eduardo Masso and Francisco Roig, from Spain, with a straight-set drubbing of Sampras in between. His reward for living up to his top-16 seeding was a fourth-round test against Ivan Lendl, the number one player in the world. To Chang at the time, Lendl was “the most feared opponent on the tour.”

In the half-year before the French, the two men had met twice. The first time, at an exhibition in Des Moines, Lendl dismantled the youngster. He then spent the limo ride back to hotel explaining to Chang why he lost: “You know, with your game the way it is now, you have nothing that can really hurt me.”

The second time was also an exhibition, this time on green clay in Atlanta. Chang had taken Lendl’s words to heart. Just a few months of added strength and aggressiveness, and Michael took the match, 7-5 in the third. It didn’t count, but it planted a seed in the teenager’s mind. Lendl came into the French as the reigning Australian Open, with five titles in his last seven events. But Chang knew he had a chance.

Chang at Wimbledon in 1990

The top seed won the first two sets, 6-4, 6-4. But it was hardly one-way traffic. When Lendl served for the first set, Chang broke him after a 20-stroke rally–a length that barely registered after 40- and 51-stroke points earlier in the set. Chang broke again early in the second before Lendl charged back to take the two-set advantage.

It’s hard to imagine the mindset that allowed the 17-year-old to approach the third set with the belief that he could still win the match. Mark Kratzmann, an Australian player who lost a five-setter to Chang at Wimbledon in 1990, said, “If you have him in a losing position, he’s going to change. A lot of players are scared to change; he’s not. Then he almost forces you to decide whether to stay with your tactics or adjust to his. He makes you think, and a lot of guys can’t handle that.”

Another brainy tennis player concurred. Arthur Ashe told the Los Angeles Times, “He is easily the smartest young player I have ever seen. He has an intuitive sense that I can only compare to a chess prodigy at age 9. You see him do things on the court that you would expect to see from someone who’s been on the tour for years.”

* * *

With nothing to lose, Chang ramped up the aggression. He still didn’t have many weapons that would hurt Lendl, but he had learned how to use the few that he wielded. He broke serve at 3-all in the third with two inside-out forehands. He took Lendl’s serve again in the final game of the set, planting a few doubts in the mind of the top seed.

After Chang broke for 4-2 in the fourth, the cracks started to show. Lendl complained about the conditions, he whined about line calls, and after he accused chair umpire Richard Ings of cheating him “every time,” he lost the seventh game of the set on a point penalty. Chang earned set point with a bruising, 39-shot rally, then evened the score on another Lendl unforced error.

It was already the match of the tournament. The fifth set would make it one of the matches of the decade. Chang began cramping, and he nearly retired after three games. Barely able to move, he stuck it out, moonballing to buy time, attempting high-risk shots whenever the slightest opportunity presented itself. For all his experience, the veteran couldn’t adjust. “Lendl choked,” said 1955 champion Tony Trabert, at the match as a commentator for Australian television. “Michael, to his credit, worked him around pretty good.”

Chang broke in the seventh game to take a 4-3 lead, and at 15-30, he sensed a turning point where he could win or lose the match. The idea struck him to try an underhand serve: “I never thought twice about it. I just did it. … I had never planned to serve underhand. I had never hit an underhand serve in my life before that moment.” It worked; Lendl reluctantly followed his return to the net, and Chang passed him. The crisis passed.

The American had one more trick up his sleeve. With Lendl serving at 3-5, 15-30, Chang hit down-the-line backhand winner on the point’s 26th shot to reach match point. When Lendl missed his first serve, Chang crept up to a foot behind the service line, a tactic he’d occasionally used to rattle opponents in junior tournaments. Lendl responded just like a jittery teen. He missed his second serve, handing the match to Chang.

Years later, a journalist would ask Chang to name his favorite character from the Bible. He chose David, the Israelite who took down the giant Goliath in single combat. No explanation was necessary.

* * *

At five-foot-eight, Chang naturally identified with underdogs, and underdogs idolized him in turn. His upset of Lendl inspired another 17-year-old, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, to her own unlikely feats. Reaching the final as the 7th seed, the Spaniard upset Steffi Graf in a marathon final, handing Graf her first loss at a major since 1987.

Chang followed Arantxa’s progress, but his main focus was on another David-versus-Goliath struggle much further afield. For weeks, Chinese pro-democracy protesters had amassed at Tiananmen Square. Chang and his parents–his father was born in China, and his mother was the child of Chinese diplomats–spent the tournament glued to CNN as the tensions rose. The day before the Lendl match, the government sent in the army. The result was a massacre of at least several hundred, and probably several thousand people.

Some studies suggest that athletes perform at a higher level when they compete for something greater than themselves. Chang certainly had that motivation. He later said, “What it was really about, was an opportunity to bring a smile upon Chinese people’s faces around the world when there wasn’t a whole lot to smile about.”

The giant-slayer gave Chinese and American fans plenty more to smile about. He knocked out Ronald Agenor–“the Haitian sensation”–in the quarters, even after Agenor saved a critical point by using Chang’s service-line return position against him. Then he won another four-set grindfest against Andrei Chesnokov.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOWWL6WvegU

Waiting in the final was the third seed, Stefan Edberg. The Swede had years of experience to his advantage, not to mention three major titles. But Chang had his own reasons to be confident: The two had met just three months earlier, at Indian Wells. The American won that match easily, 6-3, 6-2.

This one wasn’t as easy, but the result was the same. It ran to five sets, and Chang fought off 19 of 25 break points. He held his own against Edberg’s world-class serve-and-volley game, limiting the Swede to only 58% of points when he came in behind his first serve. When they reached a fifth set, no one would’ve blamed Chang for running out of gas–the cumulative emotional toll on him was enormous, and the cramps had attacked him again after the semi-finals. But it was Edberg who faded, and the American won, 6-1, 3-6, 4-6, 6-4, 6-2.

* * *

The French Open title was the pinnacle of Chang’s career. He’d never again win a major championship, despite reaching three more finals in the mid-1990s. Agassi, Courier, and Sampras would all overtake him, each one claiming multiple slams of their own and spending time at the top of the ranking list. Sponsors and agents would never again fight for Chang’s affections like they did in the wake of his Roland Garros triumph.

Chang felt something pop in his hip during a December 1989 practice session. He ended up spending a month on crutches, and he struggled to string wins together when he returned to the tour. His ranking, which had peaked at 5th in his breakthrough season, fell to 14th before the French, then it dropped to 24th after he lost to Agassi in the Roland Garros quarters. Despite the ups and downs, he was hardly a spent force: He beat Agassi and Sampras back-to-back to win the Canadian Open, then came back from two sets down to beat Horst Skoff in the September Davis Cup semi-finals.

Chang in 2003

It would take two more years before he could re-establish himself at the top. Before the 1991 season, he instituted a new coaching arrangement with his brother Carl. Together, they focused on developing bigger weapons so that Michael’s game wouldn’t rely entirely on his retrieving skills and tennis smarts. After a racket change in 1994, the serve that averaged 77 miles per hour during the 1989 French Open would sometimes reach 120.

Chang returned to the top ten in March of 1992, and he stayed there for six years. He barely mentions that span in his autobiography, except to say they were the best years of his career. He spent most of 1997 ranked number two in the world, and he came within one match of reaching the top spot. Patrick Rafter dashed those hopes in the US Open semi-finals, and Chang won only three of ten matches for the rest of the season. Injuries struck again in early 1998, and his time among the elites was effectively over.

* * *

From his teenage triumph to his later years as a top-five stalwart, Chang always puzzled both journalists and his peers. John Feinstein called him “as serious-minded and as colorless as Agassi was goofy and colorful.” Reporters didn’t know how to process his outspoken Christianity, and his confidence that God was on his side alienated fellow players.

Agassi found Chang’s faith particularly irritating:

Every time he beats someone, he points to the sky. He thanks God–credits God–for the win, which offends me. That God should take sides in a tennis match, that God should side against me, that God should be in Chang’s box, feels ludicrous and insulting. I beat Chang and savor every blasphemous stroke.

French crowds also bristled at the openly religious star, whistling at the player who they otherwise would’ve enthusiastically embraced. Over time, Chang became a bit more circumspect about his faith, though he never hid it.

What his contemporaries found most baffling was the degree to which Chang was a thinker. Arthur Ashe compared him to a chess prodigy, but Chang’s search for tactical advantages was sometimes more prosaic. McEnroe told Feinstein about the first time he faced the young player:

We tossed the coin and he won, so it was his choice–serve or receive. He just stood there, thinking. I mean, the match was indoors. Finally, after thirty seconds I said, “Is there a time limit on this or what?”

Tennis, for Chang, was all about preparation. He responded to Ivan Lendl’s dissection of his game in a matter of months. His father and brother obsessively watched match video to give Michael an edge against upcoming opponents. He executed under pressure as well as anyone–he won 27 of 30 deciding third sets in one mid-1990s span–a reflection of the fact that he always had another game plan to turn to.

Off-court, he liked to unwind on a fishing boat. He wrote in his autobiography:

I found fishing, in some ways, to be similar to tennis. Preparation and technique were important, as well as planning how you were going to beat that fish. That meant you had to choose the right hook, position the boat just so, pick the right lure–plastic worms, spinnerbaits, crankbaits, or surface plugs–or choose the correct live bait, such as night crawlers, crayfish, mealworms, or water dogs.

Not many players would see that all that slow-paced planning had much of anything to do with tennis. It’s certainly tough to reconcile a love of bass fishing with the way Chang would step inside the baseline to smack an inside-out forehand. But no David ever won the battle by playing Goliath’s game.

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

* * *

Caroline Wozniacki [DEN]
Born: 11 July 1990
Career: 2006-20
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2010)
Peak Elo rating: 2,251 (1st place, 2010)
Major singles titles: 1
Total singles titles: 30
 

* * *

At the 2015 Australian Open, Caroline Wozniacki told a reporter at the Australian Open, “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.” It was a healthy attitude for her to have: She hadn’t reached the quarter-finals in Melbourne for three years, and her place in the top ten was precarious. She also knew what she was talking about. Two months earlier, she had completed the New York City Marathon in three hours and 26 minutes.

Obvious as it is, the marathon serves as a metaphor for Wozniacki’s career at every scale. In a single match, she could outrun anyone–even for 2 hours and 49 minutes against a fellow warrior like Simona Halep, as in the 2018 Australian Open final. She played a busy schedule when her body allowed it, topping 80 matches per year from 2009 to 2011, and playing 82 again in 2017.

It’s at the full-career level that Caro’s persistence truly comes into focus. Her failure to convert match points in the semi-finals of the 2011 Australian Open hung heavy over her reputation for years, and she felt it as much as anyone. She entered 27 more majors before she finally shook off the “slamless” tag. In between, she suffered 16 first-week exits and fell to players outside the top ten 23 times.

No one would’ve blamed her for an early retirement. She struggled with injuries in 2015 and 2016, and she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis before the 2018 US Open. Plenty of WTA greats have called it quits in their late 20s or earlier, and Caro’s early-career exploits had made her a fan favorite and a decamillionare many times over.

Yet when she put the injuries behind her in late 2016, she started to look like the Wozniacki of old. Rebuilding a ranking that had fallen as low as #74, she picked up titles in Tokyo (over 18-year-old wild card Naomi Osaka) and Hong Kong to finish the 2016 season in the top 20. In 2017, she reached eight finals, defending her Tokyo title and beating Venus Williams for her first year-end championship.

When she finally won her first major the following year, it was a triumph of perseverance fitting for a distance runner.

* * *

In a roundabout way, my entire Tennis 128 project started with Caroline Wozniacki. Her career encapsulates the difficulty of comparing different types of achievements, and I’ve spent countless hours in the last few years trying to crack the code of how to do so.

I ran a Twitter poll back in January of 2020, when Wozniacki announced her imminent retirement. The question: Where did Caro rank among women in the Open Era? Voters were all over the place, with some weighing heavily her 71 weeks at number one, while others considered her to be outside the greatest-of-all-time conversation entirely. My first stab at a GOAT metric, the Greatness Quotient, ranked her 19th among women since 1977. As I’ve improved my methodology, she’s lost a few places, but she still merits a position on the list ahead of many multi-slam winners.

Only nine women in the Open Era have occupied the top spot for longer. She reached the number one ranking in 2010 at age 20, and despite a short spell in second place in early 2011, she finished 2011 as number one as well. She turned in a respectable performance with the coveted ranking, going 73-23 with five titles and a near-miss at the 2010 year-end WTA Championships.

But the most important number in most greatest-of-all-time debates remains the grand slam count. For most of her career, Wozniacki was stuck at zero. In five grand slams as the top seed, she got close only once, when she came within a single point of defeating Li Na in the 2011 Australian Open semi-finals. She limped out of the US Open semis against Serena Williams the same year. The rest of her span at number one at majors consisted of one exit apiece in the quarter-finals, fourth round, and third round. It wasn’t bad, exactly, but with women like Serena and Kim Clijsters swatting her off the court at will, fans reasonably wondered if the ranking formula had it right.

Adding to the confusion was that Wozniacki just didn’t look like a number one. She chased, she counterpunched, she moonballed … she wore down opponents until they finally beat themselves. Even when it worked, it often wasn’t particularly eye-catching. And when it didn’t work, you wondered how she ever won at all.

Whatever the optics, Caro’s defensive game got the job done. She could certainly keep up with anyone. Even against Serena Williams, who beat her in 10 of 11 meetings, she forced a third set five times. In 2010 and 2011, she won just short of 80% of her matches, including 16 of 24 against the top ten.

It just didn’t work at slams.

* * *

When Wozniacki rose to number one, fans had gotten plenty of practice adjusting to the idea of a slamless number one. Jelena Janković held the position for 18 weeks in 2008-09, and Dinara Safina claimed it for half of 2009. Both women were plausible contenders when they ascended to the throne. Janković had reached two slam semis, and she made the final at her first major after attaining (and quickly losing) the number one ranking. Safina was coming off the 2009 Australian Open final, and she was runner-up again as the top seed at the French.

Janković and Safina also looked like number ones, at least at their best. Janković sported a flashy, aggressive baseline game. The six-foot-one-inch Safina had the power to hit opponents off the court. Neither player ever picked up a major, but both unquestionably had the weapons to do so.

Caro was different. She had reached the 2009 US Open final, where she lost to Clijsters, but by the time she grabbed the top spot from Serena, her last four slam showings consisted of a semi-final, a quarter-final, and two fourth-round exits. She departed Wimbledon after a 6-2, 6-0 drubbing at the hands of Petra Kvitová, and only one of her vanquishers–#8 Vera Zvonareva–ranked inside the top 16.

Skepticism was understandable, especially when Wozniacki only modestly improved on her grand slam performance in her time as number one. Critics weren’t shy about picking apart her game style. When she retook the top spot in February 2011 with a decisive 6-1, 6-3 victory over Svetlana Kuznetsova in Dubai, Caro was ready with an answer:

[W]ell, if I don’t have a weapon, then what do the others have? Since I’m No. 1, I must do something right. I think they’re not actually criticizing me. I think the other players should be offended.

It’s true that many people weren’t attacking Wozniacki herself–though plenty did. The ranking system itself was a frequent target. It rewarded players who slogged it out week after week, winning small tournaments and turning in respectable results at majors. A different system, one that gave greater weight to slam performances, would’ve kept Serena at the top, despite her limited schedule.

Still, Caro’s achievement was more than a statistical quirk. According to my Elo ratings–a very different algorithm from the one that powers the WTA computer–she reached the top of the table at the end of 2009. Elo credits her with 35 weeks at number one–fewer than the official count, but still a tally that indicates she was no fluke. She was never the most feared player in the game, but she was probably the best on tour for about two-thirds of a season.

* * *

For her entire career, Wozniacki got the same unsolicited advice from commentators, journalists, and fans. She was so passive; couldn’t she attack more? Even a little bit?

She took defensive tennis to a new level. The Match Charting Project has logged every shot of more than one hundred of her matches. By Rally Aggression Score–a metric that quantifies how frequently a player ends points, either for good or bad–Wozniacki ranks among top four most passive players in the dataset:

Player                   RallyAgg  
Sara Sorribes Tormo          -135  
Sara Errani                   -96  
Arantxa Sanchez Vicario       -92  
Caroline Wozniacki            -88  
Monica Niculescu              -86  
Agnieszka Radwanska           -86  
Gabriela Sabatini             -83  
Chris Evert                   -78  
Alize Cornet                  -76  
Yulia Putintseva              -75

The three players who score as more passive than Caro are clay-court specialists, while Wozniacki was more comfortable on hard courts. It’s a game style that is rapidly dying. The most passive player among more recent standouts is Elina Svitolina, who rates at -49, while Simona Halep’s career average is -34. Halep is closer to the average rating of zero than she is to Wozniacki’s level of passivity.

Despite the conventional wisdom, Wozniacki’s defensiveness was a feature, not a bug. When she finally won her first major, a three-hour slugfest at the 2018 Australian Open, she hit 24 winners and 24 unforced errors to Halep’s 38 and 45. Aggression score: -109. In the final of the 2017 year-end championships, she hit 19 winners and 7 unforced errors to Venus Williams’s 31 and 39. Aggression score: -160.

Sometimes, Wozniacki’s unwillingness to change things up bordered on trolling. She was known for hitting her first serves in a specific pattern: wide on the first point of the game, down the middle on the next two, and wide on the fourth point. She followed that sequence more than 80% of the time, and in some matches, she never deviated from it at all.

Such predictability sounds like a recipe for disaster. Had she come along a decade later, facing hyper-aggressive returners like Jelena Ostapenko and Aryna Sabalenka, it might have been her downfall. (Ostapenko beat her all four times they played.) Most of the time, though, it didn’t seem to matter any more than her indifferent forehand. At 4-all in the third set of the 2018 Aussie final, she stuck with the plan, going wide-middle-middle-wide against Halep. The two serves down the middle weren’t even that close to the line. Even after double-faulting at 40-15, she got her hold.

* * *

When the 2018 season began, three years after she ran the New York City marathon, Wozniacki still appeared to be treating the majors like a distance race of their own. She had reached the second week of only two of her previous eleven slam entries, and she lost easily to Angelique Kerber in her one appearance in a semi-final.

Serena Williams missed the 2018 Australian Open due to injury, leaving the draw wide open. Sportsbooks set the odds with a whopping six co-favorites: Wozniacki, Halep, Kerber, Svitolina, Karolína Plíšková, and Garbiñe Muguruza.

Caro was the second seed, but the pressure was off. When she faced two match points against 119th-ranked Jana Fett in the second round, she escaped the sort of trap that had bedeviled her so often at slams. The draw opened up, and she reached the final without facing an opponent ranked in the top 20. The championship was decided in a hot, humid battle of attrition against Halep, a defender every bit as determined as she was. Caro was predictable, passive, and just a little bit better. She took the title, 7-6(2), 3-6, 6-4.

Exactly six years after she lost the number one ranking to Victoria Azarenka in 2012, she got it back. No woman has ever reclaimed the top spot after such a long span. This time, there were no questions about whether she deserved it. For the slam-winning, top-ranked Caroline Wozniacki, it had always been a marathon–one in which she got to decide when she crossed the finish line.

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

* * *

Ann Jones [GBR]
Born: 17 October 1938
Career: 1956-71
Plays: Left-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1967)
Peak Elo rating: 2,288 (2nd place, 1960)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 130
 

* * *

Ann Jones played a lot of tennis. That sounds like a banal observation, and I suppose it is. Still, for a woman who wasn’t fully committed to the sport until her early 20s, and who mostly hung up her racket when her first child was born at age 33, the sheer volume of competition she put herself through is remarkable.

My records credit her with 1,067 singles wins (including a few from juniors) and over 1,300 total matches played. That may actually be an undercount, since we haven’t yet catalogued the early rounds of every amateur-era event. Most sources give Jones 113 singles titles. My records list 130, counting all of her local tournaments and the small pro events she played in 1968-69.

Those four-digit tallies aren’t all-time records, but they aren’t far off. Martina Navratilova and Virginia Wade both played over 1,600 matches, and Chris Evert topped 1,400. Among Jones’s direct contemporaries, only Billie Jean King is in the same league, with her career total (by my unofficial count) of 1,369 matches. There aren’t many women in tennis history who have played 1,000 singles matches, let alone amassed that many wins.

Jones’s work ethic was second to none, and she rarely let an opportunity pass if more tennis could be played. Throughout her 1971 memoir, A Game To Love, she refers to long absences from the circuit, or she explains a poor performance as the result of rustiness. Cross-referenced with her career records, those breaks were rarely longer than a month or two. With winter events in South Africa and the Caribbean and indoor championships in Europe, a woman who wanted to keep herself match-fit could play a schedule even more punishing than today’s WTA calendar.

By the time Jones won her signature Wimbledon title in 1969, she had been criss-crossing the globe for a decade, racking up titles on all surfaces, usually ranking among the top five players in the world.

Not bad for a second career!

* * *

Before Ann Jones became Britain’s best tennis player, she was Ann Haydon, one of Britain’s top table tennis players. She came from a table tennis family, and she competed at elite-level events around the world throughout her teens. At the 1957 World Championships in Stockholm, when Haydon was 18, she reached the finals in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles.

Haydon receives a table tennis medal in Stockholm

At first, lawn tennis was just something to do in the summer. Table tennis was a winter pursuit, and plenty of women played both sports. Teenage Ann tried to play lawn tennis the way she did the smaller-scale game, by keeping herself in points until she could end them with a big forehand. She eventually developed a somewhat more well-rounded game, and she won the Wimbledon girls’ title in 1956.

Promising as she was with the bigger racket, it took a few more years before Haydon left table tennis behind. She split her time between the two pursuits until 1959, when table tennis politics and rule changes made the game less appealing. She had reached the quarter-finals at Wimbledon and the semis at Forest Hills that year, so there was little doubt she could compete at the highest level of both sports.

Her first winter without table tennis was a success. She began on the European indoor circuit, reaching finals in Cologne, Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Paris, and winning two of the three title matches she played against Angela Mortimer. From there, she headed to Florida and the Caribbean, where she held her own against two of the best players in the world, Maria Bueno and Darlene Hard. She beat Hard four times in the sunshine, and won one of three matches with Bueno. She would beat both of them later that year to win the Pacific Southwest in Los Angeles.

The 18-year-old Haydon wouldn’t slow down until November. She played 30 singles events, winning 15 and splitting the title with Hard in a 16th when the final couldn’t be held. She swung the racket in 13 different countries, from Brazil to Finland, and picked up multiple titles on all four major surfaces. In 10 months, she won over 100 matches.

* * *

Even after such an astonishing full-season debut, questions remained. Lance Tingay placed Haydon sixth in his year-end rankings, behind (among others) fellow Brit Christine Truman.

Experts had a hard time imagining how Haydon’s left-handed baseline game would overcome the power and serve-and-volleying prowess of the likes of Bueno, Hard, and Truman, especially at Wimbledon. Haydon already had a reputation as a grinder: In the 1960 Sutton final, she took two hours to beat Shirley Brasher, 6-2, 6-2. One of the rallies reached 120 shots.

She summed up her own early-career limitations in her memoir a decade later:

My main weakness was that I did not possess one really outstanding stroke with which to dictate the pace of a match. … I had no power game with which to hit back and relied instead on my steadiness and a willingness to work hard. This paid dividends on clay but was insufficient on grass.

Or as Virginia Wade put it:

Though Ann reached the semifinals of Wimbledon each year, her game was like a cake without the final layer of icing. … Mine had too much icing and not enough cake.

Fortunately for Haydon, icing wasn’t always necessary. She won her first major title at Roland Garros in 1961, advancing past the young Margaret Smith (later Court) in the quarters and 1958 champion Zsuzsa Körmöczy in the semis. Her opponent in the final, the Mexican Yola Ramírez, struggled with both the occasion and the inclement weather, and Haydon ran away with it, 6-2, 6-1.

The newly-minted French champion had a hard time sustaining her form. She lost twice to Smith on grass, then took an early exit at Wimbledon in the fourth round to Renee Schuurman. Haydon beat Mortimer to reach the Forest Hills final, but failed to put up much of a fight against Hard. It was another 30-tournament season, and by Wimbledon the following year, she was “emotionally exhausted.” Still, the pair of major finals meant that she ended her 1961 campaign as the consensus third-best player in the world.

* * *

By September of 1962, Haydon had played another 87 matches, including two major semi-finals and a 25-match winning streak in the winter that spanned South Africa, Norway, France, and Britain.

Finally, she took a break, prompted by her marriage to Philip “Pip” Jones. Gossips clucked, as Jones was 31 years her elder. The relationship proved beneficial for both Ann and her tennis career, as Pip encouraged her to continue whenever she wavered in her commitment to the game. He even traveled full-time with the professional troupe his wife joined for 1968 and 1969.

At first, Mrs. Jones shifted her priorities, writing later that, “For the next two or three years, I was essentially a housewife who played tennis when it didn’t involve too much inconvenience.” Of course, this is Ann Haydon Jones we’re talking about, so tennis was sufficiently convenient to the tune of 99 matches in 1963 and another 95 in 1964.

Still, savvy observers recognized Ann’s wavering commitment, even as she reached another Roland Garros final in 1963. In 1964, Maureen Connolly coached the British Wightman Cup team, and she told Jones that she “should either give it my all or not bother to compete.” The two women became friends, and Connolly helped her develop the more aggressive game that she sorely needed.

Jones got another boost after the 1966 season, when she again reached the French final. A businessman named Ernest Butten, better known for his support of British golfers, arranged for her to spend the offseason doing serious physical training for the first time. She developed her right side for better balance, and strengthened her neck to counteract the effects of a long-lingering injury.

Nearly 900 matches into her lawn tennis career, Jones was finally ready to turn a corner.

* * *

At the 1967 Kent Championships in Beckenham, Ann drew Billie Jean King in the semi-finals. King had beaten her 11 of 16 times, including 8 of their last 10 meetings. Jones struggled with the the American’s topspin, and Billie Jean was particularly skilled at exposing the Brit’s weak backhand.

There was nothing to lose in trying something new:

Tired of baseline duels, I was determined to go to the net, so I chipped and rushed in on everything. These tactics paid off handsomely against [quarter-final opponent] Kerry [Melville] and I decided to employ them for my semi-final with Billie Jean. For the first time for ages, I beat her on grass.

Jones defeated King in three sets, and went on to win the tournament in another three-setter against Virginia Wade. She followed up the success at Wimbledon, where she reached her first final. With the pressure on, in front of a packed Centre Court crowd, Billie Jean was in her element, and Jones lost in straights.

Connolly had showed her how to use better judgment when coming in behind approach shots. Later in 1967, they shifted focus to the serve, lowering her toss and adjusting her foot position to make it easier to follow serves to the net.

Ann (left) had 50,000 reasons to be smiling in this picture

Jones faced Billie Jean once again in the Forest Hills final that year, and while the result was the same, the score was closer, with Ann matching her opponent up to 9-9 in the first set. Both women joined George MacCall’s four-woman professional group in 1968, so Jones had constant opportunities to test herself against the American. They played an epic three-setter at a Wembley pro event in May, then went another three sets in the Wimbledon semi-final. Billie Jean usually came out on top–she won 38 of their 49 career meetings–but the gap was narrowing.

* * *

The professional game agreed with Ann Jones. Years of table tennis had prepared her for pro-style scheduling, when most matches were held in the evening. In 1969, the first full season for the women of MacCall’s troupe, Jones would pile up another 100-plus matches, and the workload wouldn’t faze her at all.

She lost a tight French Open final to Margaret Court, so when she drew the top-seeded Court again in the Wimbledon semi-finals, she didn’t expect to win. She surprised herself by pushing Margaret to a 12-10 first set, then shifted the momentum by winning a marathon game to open the second set. She won the second, 6-3, playing what Jones called “the best tennis of my whole career.” Court cramped and faded, and the Brit pressed home her advantage to reach the Wimbledon final once again.

Billie Jean King was waiting, but this time, Jones was prepared for the occasion. She ignored the mountains of telegrams and focused on the challenge ahead. In three sets, she beat Billie Jean at her own game. Connolly had taught her that she should be coming in behind three-quarters of her first serves and half of her seconds. On the day, she advanced behind 85% of firsts and 58% of seconds. The Wimbledon crown was hers, 3-6, 6-3, 6-2.

Jones would continue playing for another two years, until she was pregnant with her daughter. But she didn’t defend her Wimbledon title, opting for a chair in the commentary booth instead. With three singles majors, six runner-up finishes, and another five doubles majors to her name, she had nothing left to prove. The 1957 table tennis runner-up could finally retire on top.

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

* * *

Gottfried von Cramm [GER]
Born: 7 July 1909
Died: 8 November 1976
Career: 1929-55
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1937)
Peak Elo rating: 2,105 (1st place, 1935)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 75
 

* * *

Some sports stories never get old. For me, every single tale of the sportsmanship of Gottfried von Cramm is worth repeating.

Nowadays, if a tennis player commits the most modest act of kindness on court–say, he suggests that his opponent challenge a close call–Twitter explodes with praise and the tournament rushes to post a clip on YouTube of the historic moment. Nobel Peace Prize nominations are filed forthwith.

Gottfried Cramm–he dropped the aristocratic von as well as his title of “Baron” for most introductions–did that sort of thing every day before breakfast.

The first time Don Budge met Cramm, it was 1935, and both men had both just won their Wimbledon quarter-final matches. They were slated to meet in the semis. Cramm took the 20-year-old Budge aside, and explained that in his match against Bunny Austin, he had been “a very bad sport.” A close call went against Austin, and Budge agreed that the linesman made a mistake. To put things right, Budge tanked the next point.

That’s how Bill Tilden did things. Even though Tilden’s brand of theatrics went beyond what most players would dare, a generation of American players followed his lead. They thought it was the sportsmanlike way of responding to such unfairness. But no, Cramm explained: “You made yourself an official, which you are not, and in improperly assuming this duty so that you could correct things your way, you managed to embarrass that poor linesman in front of eighteen thousand people.”

In Cramm’s view, proper treatment of everyone–including linesman, who were often of a middling standard, at best–came first, ahead even of fairness on court.

Once, when a linesman called Cramm for a foot fault, the German apologized.

(Once, when a linesman called Jim Courier for a foot fault, the American said, “F— you.”)

In the 1935 Davis Cup Interzone Final, Cramm played what one of his opponents, the American Wilmer Allison, called “the greatest one-man doubles match.” Daniel Prenn, until recently Cramm’s equal, had been barred from the German national team due to Nazi racial policies. (Prenn was Jewish.) Instead, doubles duty with the Baron fell to the much weaker Kai Lund.

Gottfried’s play that day was so dazzling that the German team came within a point of victory. After Lund missed an easy volley on the fifth match point, he hit a winner to earn a sixth. But Cramm told the umpire what no one else in the stadium had noticed–the ball grazed his racket before Lund made his shot. The Germans conceded the point. They lost the match and, with it, any hope of winning the tie.

The Davis Cup meant a great deal to the Nazis. A federation official traveling with the team criticized the star player, accusing him of failing the German people. Cramm responded:

Tennis is a gentleman’s game, and that’s the way I’ve played it ever since I picked up my first racket. Do you think that I would sleep tonight knowing that the ball had touched my racket without my saying so? Never, because I would be violating every principle I think this game stands for. On the contrary, I don’t think I’m letting the German people down. I think I’m doing them credit.

* * *

Cramm’s personality and aristocratic bearing were so compelling that, even eight decades later, it’s easy to forget that he was one hell of a tennis player.

The German packed a lot of tennis into a very short span of time. Unfortunately, his time at the top overlapped that of Don Budge and Fred Perry. Budge once said, “Gottfried was the unluckiest good player I’ve ever known.”

Cramm won his first title in Germany in 1929, just after his 20th birthday. He made his major debut at Roland Garros and Wimbedon in 1931, and played his first Davis Cup rubbers in 1932. By 1937, he was on sufficiently thin ice with the Nazis that the German federation didn’t enter him in singles at the French, where he was the defending champion. The following March, he was jailed for a homosexual affair.

In little more than half a decade, the Baron won the French Championships twice, beating Jack Crawford in 1934 and Perry in 1936. He played 14 majors in total before World War II, and reached the final in 7 of them. Every loss was at the hands of Perry or Budge, and he was injured in a taxi accident on the way to one of the clashes with Perry. He tacked on another three major doubles championships, not to mention a whopping 65 match wins for Germany’s Davis Cup team.

After his arrest and imprisonment 1938, Cramm’s career was effectively over. Wimbledon wouldn’t grant a place in its 1939 draw to a man convicted of morals charges, and the black mark on his record prevented him from getting a US visa. The character of his Nazi accusers counted for nothing.

Yet the German clearly had more championship-quality tennis in his racket. At Queen’s Club in 1939, he beat the strong American player Elwood Cooke in the quarter-finals. In the semis, as sportswriter Al Laney put it, “He simply smothered Bobby Riggs,” winning the first 11 games in a row. Cramm had to sit out Wimbledon, and a few weeks later Riggs beat Cooke for the title there.

Gottfried wasn’t allowed to return to Wimbledon until 1951, when he was 41 years old. He was no longer a factor on the world tennis stage, but his post-war performance suggests just what he might have accomplished had the Nazis never come to power. Between 1946 and 1954, playing mostly in Germany, he tacked on 27 titles to his career record. Unlucky, indeed.

* * *

Cramm’s best shot was, very possibly, his American Twist-style second serve. Marshall Jon Fisher’s excellent book, A Terrible Splendor, centers on the great 1937 Davis Cup match between Budge and Cramm. Fisher describes the kicker:

Von Cramm has a famous second serve, maybe even better than his first. He likes to toss the ball a bit to his left, almost behind him, and arch his back as he swings to create a rounded motion, catching the ball from left to right as well as back to forward, creating enormous topspin. … On clay it has a particularly ferocious high bounce, since spin has more effect on clay, but even on the grass he is able to win points outright with his second serve.

The second serve was particularly deadly in one of Cramm’s most memorable matches. In the 1936 Davis Cup Interzone Final–the round that determined which nation would take on the defending champion for the trophy–Cramm edged out the Australian Adrian Quist by the narrowest of margins, 4-6, 6-4, 4-6, 6-4, 11-9. The German saved five match points, and he needed nine of his own. It was a gusty day, and it was a wind-aided Cramm kicker that finally settled the contest.

The Cramm service motion

Cramm’s serve wasn’t the only American influence in his game. Bill Tilden first visited the von Cramm estate in 1928, and he spent a great deal of time with the young player. He particularly focused on Gottfried’s backhand, replacing a defensive slice with a topspin stroke like his own. Tilden would remain in Cramm’s corner throughout his career, even coaching the German Davis Cup team when they took on the Americans in 1937.

Few men could teach tennis like Tilden could. Al Laney wrote of the Baron’s new-and-improved shot, “[F]ew players ever had a stroke to compare with his ‘flat’ backhand, with which he occasionally blinds the gallery.” Harry Hopman said, “Gottfried was the most fluent and best looking stroke maker I have seen in my fifty years of international tennis.”

* * *

While I’m reeling off the superlatives, how about this one from British Davis Cupper John Olliff: “He could raise his game a little above what you and I always thought was perfect. For short spasms he could make Budge look like a qualifier.”

One of those bursts of brilliance was particularly well-timed. Budge and Cramm faced off in what was long considered to be the greatest match of all time. In 1937, Germany and the United States met in the Davis Cup Interzone Final. The winner would advance to the Challenge Round against Great Britain to decide the winner of the Cup. Both Germany and the US would be favored against the Brits, so the Interzone tie was effectively the final. Budge and Cramm met in the decisive fifth rubber.

Just a few weeks earlier, the American had trounced the Baron in the Wimbledon final, 6-3, 6-4, 6-2. Budge was fast becoming the best player in the world: He would win six majors in succession, including all four in 1938. Cramm was gracious (as usual) in defeat: “‘I was quite satisfied with my form today. But what can one do against such perfect tennis?”

One way to beat Budge was to partner with Helen Wills Moody (left)

Cramm must have been even more satisfied with his form in the Davis Cup match. He won two close sets, 8-6 and 7-5, to take a commanding lead over the Wimbledon champion. The level remained astonishingly high, and after Budge took the third set, Tilden told a reporter it was the greatest Davis Cup match he had ever seen.

Budge grabbed an early lead in the fourth, and Cramm let the set go to save energy for the fifth. The German raced out to 4-1 in the decider, and Budge held on only by adopting the risky strategy of taking Cramm’s high-bouncing second serves on the rise. The American drew even, and with a burst of spectacular shotmaking, Budge sealed the match, 8-6 in the fifth.

For the remainder of his life, US Davis Cup captain Walter Pate told anyone who would listen that it was the greatest match ever played.

* * *

In the tennis world of the 1930s, the stakes didn’t get any higher than the Davis Cup. The Americans, as expected, swept aside the British defenders and reclaimed the Cup for the first time since 1926. The Nazis were well aware of the trophy’s status, and Cramm’s inability to secure the Davis Cup for Germany contributed to his downfall.

Tilden suggested that Gottfried take a break after the Davis Cup, but the Baron kept playing. He headed to the United States, where he won the US national doubles title but lost to Budge in a five-set final at Forest Hills. He kept moving west, playing at the Pacific Southwest in Los Angeles before sailing–with Budge–to Australia.

Budge and Cramm (right) after the 1937 US final

He told Tilden that he was playing for his life. He knew that the Gestapo had enough evidence to arrest him. A few powerful tennis fans and admirers, such as Hermann Göring, couldn’t protect him forever. Perhaps a US national title would’ve made the difference, but he seemed to sabotage his own efforts. He increasingly spoke out against the regime, at one point calling Hitler a “housepainter,” and his tennis suffered from the strain. He beat Budge in a couple of exhibitions, but in the semi-finals at the Australian Championships, he lost to the 19-year-old John Bromwich.

You already know how the Baron’s time at the top ended. He went home, heard the Gestapo knock on the door, and spent several months in jail. When he returned to the tennis circuit, he was often unwelcome. When the war began, his morals conviction overrode his aristocratic status, so he fought as a conscript on the Eastern front. He was eventually discharged from the military, possibly because of suspicions he was working to undermine the regime.

Somehow, he came through the conflict sufficiently unscathed that he inspired the same kind of awe in a new generation of post-war tennis players. 1951 Wimbledon champion Dick Savitt played Cramm in Egypt, and said, “He dressed so well that I hated to walk out on the court with him.”

Don Budge spent much of his own long life singing the Baron’s praises. At the 1937 Wimbledon ball, the newly-minted champion said:

I do appreciate this chance you give me to pay a tribute to a great-hearted gentleman. For when it comes my turn to lose, I hope I may lose with half the gallantry, half the graciousness, and with something of the fine spirit of sportsmanship shown by Baron Gottfried von Cramm.

Budge would say the same for another six decades. I told you: Some stories never get old.

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

* * *

Simona Halep [ROU]
Born: 27 September 1991
Career: 2010-present
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2017)
Peak Elo rating: 2,178 (1st place, 2015)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 23
 

* * *

Here’s a fun stat to kick us off. In my summaries of Match Charting Project data, I group points into four categories: 1-3 shots, 4-6 shots, 7-9 shots and 10+ shots. 133 women have at least 20 charted matches in the dataset, which covers every active player of note as well as most all-time greats back to Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert.

Only five women have won at least 52% of points in all four of the rally-length categories:

Ashleigh Barty
Steffi Graf
Simona Halep
Justine Henin
Iga Swiatek

Serena Williams is below 52% (though still above 50%) in the two longest types of rallies. Evert won less than half of 1-to-3’s, and Navratilova won only 40% of 7-to-9’s. (At least in charted matches, which in their cases are skewed toward finals against each other.)

Our five players don’t have a lot in common, except that they are–by definition–exceptional all-around competitors. Barty and Graf were elite servers whose baseline games were sometimes underrated because their serves were so good. Henin was great at everything. Halep and Swiatek are top-drawer baseliners who have gotten the most out of their serves.

In 2014, Louisa Thomas wrote of Simona at Grantland, “She is a defensive aggressor, an aggressive defender. She is becoming unclassifiable.” At that stage in her career, she wasn’t yet winning so many of the 1-to-3’s. Her serve, and the game she would construct around it, were works in progress. Even then, the “clay-court grinder” tag didn’t quite suffice. Halep’s career has been a remarkable story of steady improvement, and she is even more difficult to classify now than she was eight years ago.

* * *

When Simona Halep first tried her hand at the adult tour, the “clay-court grinder” label was a best-case scenario. She won the French Open girls’ title in 2008 and ascended to number one in the junior rankings, but she was hardly a slam-dunk prospect. A WTA staffer who profiled the 18-year-old in August of 2010 sounded more excited about Alexandra Dulgheru than Halep.

It’s easy to see why the pundits were slow to anoint Simona a future star. In 2012, the 20-year-old was a circuit veteran, but one who struggled to win half her matches. Her third tour-level final came on the dirt at Brussels that year, after she upset both Jelena Janković and Dominika Cibulková. She put up a good fight in the title match against Agnieszka Radwańska, but Aga finished her off with a bagel.

Her serve was simply not good enough. She won fewer than 53% of her serve points that year, a tick down from the 54% marks she posted in 2010 and 2011. Radwańska won nearly two-thirds of Halep’s own first serve points in the Brussels final. At Linz later in the year, Victoria Azarenka used Simona’s deliveries as batting practice, winning 66% of return points.

After parts of three years on tour, Halep had won fewer than half of her main-draw matches, and even on clay, she barely broke even. She was only five-feet, six-inches tall, so there was little reason to expect she would develop a bigger game. She finished the 2012 season ranked 47th on the WTA computer, good enough to rank fourth best among 21-and-unders. But it took a hefty bit of wishcasting to see her following in the footsteps of Petra Kvitová and Caroline Wozniacki, top-tenners who were only one year older.

Simona had four more months of frustrating grinding to go before everything changed.

* * *

2013 began as 2012 ended. Halep won about half of her matches, rarely stringing two victories together, and losing lopsided contests against the players she would need to draw even with. She lost 6-3, 6-1 to Radwańska in Auckland, then dropped back-to-back matches to Sloane Stephens–who was higher ranked despite being 18 months younger–at Hobart and the Australian Open.

Simona hobbled into Rome after two early-round losses on clay. Her ranking down to 64th in the world, she breezed through the qualifying draw, then battered her way past a roster of experienced WTA stars. She started with a 6-1, 6-1 dismantling of Svetlana Kuznetsova, then won a three-setter against 4th-seeded Radwańska–her first win against the Polish star in four tries. Halep overcame Roberta Vinci in front of the Italian’s home crowd, and then came back from another one-set deficit to beat Jelena Janković in the quarter-finals.

The breakthrough week didn’t translate into success at the majors–she would lose to Carla Suárez Navarro in the Roland Garros first round and Li Na in the second at Wimbledon–but Halep kept the momentum going everywhere else. After the French Open, she won back-to-back titles at Nuremberg and ‘s-Hertogenbosch–the latter on grass.

By the end of the year, she had added titles in Budapest, New Haven (with wins against Wozniacki and Kvitová), and Moscow. She finished the season with an undefeated run at the Tournament of Champions in Sofia, where she beat Ana Ivanović and Samantha Stosur.

In the six months between Rome and Sofia, Halep went from a clay-court specialist on the margins of the tour to a rising star just outside the top ten. She leapfrogged Stephens to finish the year as the highest-ranked player younger than 23. The Radwańska win seemed to have cleared a mental block. After the first time they played–when Aga won, 6-1, 6-2–Halep thought, “I cannot beat her ever.” She proved herself wrong, and she went on to beat nearly everyone else as well.

* * *

Simona wouldn’t hire her first big-name coach until 2014, when she teamed up with Wim Fissette. The 2013 breakthrough came with the Romanian coach Adrian Marcu. Halep credited her step forward to a more relaxed attitude on court, the sort of platitude that we often hear–and players might even believe–but tells us nothing.

Halep’s stats improved across the board, including five-percentage-point jumps from 2012 in both serve and return points won. With data from the Match Charting Project, we can see that she became considerably more aggressive in rallies in her fourth season on tour. The Aggression Score metric quantifies how often players hit point-ending shots (for good or bad), and scales the result to a number between about 100 (very aggressive) and -100 (very passive).

In the handful of charted matches from 2012, Halep’s Aggression Score in rallies was -57. Wozniacki and Radwańska were often more passive than that, but few other successful players are. In 2013, Simona’s Aggression Score in rallies increased to -22. That’s still below average, but it represents far more risk-taking than the 2012 mark.

Once forgettable, now (occasionally) fearsome:
The Halep serve in 2022

With Fissette, Halep began to work on her serve in earnest. Her first-strike numbers would improve, but as far as rally aggression is concerned, she never advanced beyond the appetite for risk that she showed in 2013. Her Aggression Score stayed roughly the same (-24) in 2014, and has steadily headed back downward since. In 2015, it dropped to -36; in 2017 it fell to -47; and in 2019 it returned to the starting point of -57.

It turned out that Simona could win with a more passive style, but only once her serve improved. The degree to which the five-foot, six-inch Romanian developed that part of her game is one of the more remarkable parts of her story.

* * *

About a year ago, a friend pointed out that Maria Sakkari was doing something very special. Every season from 2016 to 2021, she improved her first-serve winning percentage. Over the whole span, she gained more than ten percentage points, from 58.6%–worse than 86% of WTA players–to 69.9%–better than 93%. She didn’t quite maintain that level throughout the 2021 season, but she still improved on her 2020 campaign, and her 2022 numbers so far are even better.

Few players have done anything remotely similar to Sakkari’s recent run. You will not be surprised to learn that Simona Halep is one of them.

Simona didn’t take steady, incremental steps like Sakkari did. In 2012, she won 56.4% of first serve points, a number so low that it is barely sustainable for a tour-level player. Two years later, with the help of Wim Fissette, she won over 66.4% of first serve points, a rate better than three quarters of her peers. Only nine other players in the last decade-plus have done anything like that:

Player       Weak   1st%  %ile  Strong   1st%  %ile  
K Bertens    2015  59.5%    18    2019  71.9%    97  
M Sakkari    2016  58.6%    13    2021  69.9%    93  
D Kasatkina  2017  59.0%    15    2021  66.4%    78  
S Halep      2012  56.4%     3    2014  66.4%    78  
Y Shvedova   2011  59.4%    17    2016  66.1%    75  
A Cornet     2011  58.9%    14    2020  66.1%    75  
M Linette    2016  59.9%    21    2020  65.8%    73  
Y Wickmayer  2012  60.0%    22    2017  65.8%    72  
A Sasnovich  2016  58.4%    11    2018  65.1%    67  
S Stephens   2011  59.7%    19    2015  65.0%    66

The “%ile” columns show how each first-serve winning percentage stacks up against the WTA tour as a whole. Halep’s 66.4% in 2014 isn’t as good as a couple other of these remarkable late developers, but her starting point was far worse than any of them. And of this elite group, only Aliaksandra Sasnovich bettered her numbers so quickly.

Halep didn’t quite maintain that 66% first-serve winning percentage, but the numbers she posted in 2015 and beyond were much closer to her career high than her previous lows. She never fell below 62.7% for a full season, and her rate has exceeded 65% since 2020. She may have even reached a new level this year, at age 30. In 19 matches in 2022, her first-serve percentage sits at a career best of 68.4%, a number that ranks her between much taller sluggers such as Aryna Sabalenka and Clara Tauson.

* * *

The knock on Halep has always been that she couldn’t close. She reached her first major final at the 2014 French Open, but lost a heartbreaker to Maria Sharapova. She reached the same stage in 2017, where she was the heavy favorite against Jeļena Ostapenko. She won the first set, but collapsed at 3-all in the decider. Her third major final was another three-set loss, this one at the 2018 Australian Open to Wozniacki.

Another strike against her reputation: In 2017, she lost multiple matches–including the 2017 Roland Garros final–when she had the chance to secure the number one ranking. She finally cleared the hurdle in October and held on the top spot for a total of 64 weeks, but it’s hard not to think of the opportunities she missed to amass an even more impressive record.

You might remember the 2018 Wimbledon third-rounder against Hsieh Su-Wei, when Halep lost from match point up. Six times, she was two points away from the win. Or perhaps her loss to Kiki Bertens in the 2018 Cincinnati final comes to mind, another instance when she was one point from victory. Or maybe you just think of the embarrassing on-court coaching visits when she simply berated herself (“I’m ridiculous bad”) before listlessly seeing out a loss.

It’s certainly true that Simona could’ve used a mental coach earlier in her career. An interviewer in 2010 asked her to describe herself in one word, and she went with “nervous.” Even when she finally hired a sports psychologist, her coach at the time, Darren Cahill, suspected she wasn’t committed to the process. A different mindset would’ve done wonders, and it probably would’ve nudged her quite a bit higher on the all-time list.

Still, it’s possible to take this line of criticism too far. Halep lost her first three major finals, but then she became the only player to lose so many and still go on to win one. Halep missed several chances to become number one … and then she did it, and she played well while she held the position. She’s lost a few matches she should’ve won, but the Hsieh and Bertens matches are two of only three times since her breakthrough that she failed to win when she held match point.

* * *

Once she convinced herself she deserved major titles and the spot at the top of the rankings, Halep was able to turn in one of the most impressive performances of the last decade.

At Wimbledon in 2019–on Simona’s weakest surface–the draw opened up for everyone. Second seed Naomi Osaka lost in the first round, and top seed Ashleigh Barty lost in the fourth round. Halep beat Victoria Azarenka and teen sensation Coco Gauff early on, and she cruised to the semi-final without facing a seeded player. She made quick work of Elina Svitolina in the semis to earn a date with Serena Williams in the final.

This time, the pressure was off. Serena was the one with history on the line, as she targeted her 24th major title. The two women had played ten times before, and Williams had won nine. The one time that Halep beat her, at the 2014 WTA Finals in Singapore, Serena bounced back to get her revenge only four days later.

No one expected Halep to win. Simona has never been shy about expressing her admiration for her opponent that day, and one suspects that she would’ve been fine to see Serena make history instead.

Instead, the Romanian played the match of her life. Williams never had a chance to get settled, and Halep refused to let her into the match. Simona recorded 14 winners against only 3 unforced errors, and she saved the one break point she faced. It was over, 6-2, 6-2, in only 56 minutes, the most lopsided major final loss in Serena’s long career.

* * *

Halep struggled for the rest of 2019, but she came back strong in 2020 and remained effective even after the six-month break for Covid-19. She recovered to number two in the rankings, and she stayed in the top three until an injury finally knocked her out of the top ten in the middle of last year.

Now age 30, Simona can only go as far as her health will allow her. Her Wikipedia page uses some form of the word “injury” 28 times, and she has missed a handful of tournaments after a thigh tear last month. The odds are against a return to the very top, but she’s preparing for her comeback with Patrick Mouratoglou, Serena’s former coach. After a strong start to 2022 in Australia, she clearly believes she has more great tennis ahead of her.

She remains unclassifiable. Her serve has developed into a weapon as her baseline game has drifted back toward more cautious counterpunching. The New Yorker called her “no one’s idea of a grass court player,” and she hoisted a Wimbledon trophy. Known as something of a choker, she has ascended to the highest peaks of the sport.

Just ten years ago, most people in the tennis world didn’t think Halep would amount to much. But careers don’t have to make sense. “Aggressive baseliner,” “defensive aggressor,” or “aggressive defender,” Simona has helped define an era in which few women have been able to stay close to the top for as long as she has.

* * *

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

* * *

Kitty McKane Godfree [GBR]
Born: 7 May 1896
Died: 19 June 1993
Career: 1919-34
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1923)
Peak Elo rating: 2,173 (2nd place, 1922)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 43
 

* * *

In 1919, the 23-year-old Kitty McKane played her first Wimbledon. She was only a couple months into her tournament tennis career, and she had picked up the sport less than a year before. Still, her first competitive results were so strong that she was invited to make her debut at Worple Road.

She proved herself worthy, winning three straight-set matches to reach the quarterfinals. In the round of eight, she drew Suzanne Lenglen. The Frenchwoman calmly dispatched the newcomer, 6-0, 6-1.

Even for a more experienced player, this would be nothing to be ashamed of. At tournaments in France that Spring, Lenglen had won 16 straight matches, dropping a total of nine games. She won three of her Wimbledon matches that year by the same score by which she beat McKane, and she secured the championship with a 6-1, 6-1 dismantling of Phyllis Satterthwaite.

Years later, Kitty McKane Godfree (she became Mrs. Godfree in early 1926) would point out that she won both of her Wimbledon titles in years when Lenglen withdrew. She told her biographer, Geoffrey Green, that Suzanne “was too good for me and for everybody else as well.”

It’s true–Kitty probably wouldn’t have won the championship in 1924 had Lenglen not withdrawn before their semi-final meeting. Yet she was far more than just another pebble that the Frenchwomen kicked aside in the years that she ruled the tennis world. McKane not only challenged her as few others did, she even sought out the opportunity to do so.

* * *

When she heard that Lenglen had entered the 1922 World Hard Court Championships in Brussels*, McKane made sure to be there. The pair hadn’t met since the lopsided encounter three years earlier. Kitty may have felt she missed an opportunity at the 1920 Olympics, when she withdrew from her singles semi-final against countrywoman Dorothy Holman in order to save her energy for the doubles. Holman advanced to the final against Suzanne, where she lost 6-3, 6-0.

* Back then, “hard court” meant clay.

In the Brussels semi-final in 1922, McKane very nearly toppled the queen. She reached set point the first set at 5-4 before losing 10-8. She even recovered well enough to earn a 2-1 edge in the second before Lenglen ran away with the last five games.

It was the beginning of a 14-month span in which Kitty kept hammering away at the best player in the game, even if she never won a set. Here are the results of their five meetings in 1922 and 1923:

Year  Event      Round  Score     
1922  Brussels   SF     10-8 6-2  
1922  Wimbledon  R32    6-1 7-5   
1923  Menton     F      6-2 7-5   
1923  Paris      F      6-3 6-3   
1923  Wimbledon  F      6-2 6-2

If I showed you those scores out of context, you probably wouldn’t be all that impressed. But against peak Suzanne, they represent one triumph after another.

Kitty with husband Leslie Godfree in 1928

Before the Brussels semi-final, Lenglen had played seven matches in 1922. She hadn’t lost a single game. In her entire season, she lost only five sets by scores closer than 6-2: two of them to McKane, two to Elizabeth Ryan, and one to Irene Peacock*.

* Poor Irene Peacock: The best tennis of her life earned her a 6-4 6-1 defeat in the Wimbledon semi-finals. One competitive set, and then, goodnight, Irene.

Suzanne was even more dominant in 1923. She played 65 singles matches and won them all. 37 of them were double bagels, and another 10 involved the loss of only one game. McKane’s 6-2, 7-5 loss in the Menton final was the closest anyone got to her that year. Lenglen lost six or more games only six times–once each to Ryan, Satterthwaite, and Germaine Golding, and thrice to McKane.

* * *

There’s plenty more to Kitty McKane Godfree than some respectable showings against Lenglen. She won five medals in the six events she entered at the 1920 and 1924 Olympics. The only medal she missed was in the 1924 mixed doubles event, when she and partner Brian Gilbert withdrew from the bronze match. No one equaled her total tennis medal tally until Venus Williams won her fifth in 2016.

The medal count is just the beginning of her list of doubles achievements. She traveled to the United States to play Wightman Cup in odd-numbered years, and the Brits stayed on to play the US National Championships. In 1923, 1925, and 1927, McKane won either women’s doubles or mixed doubles at Forest Hills. Twice in her career, she beat Lenglen on the doubles court, nearly as rare a feat as a singles upset.

Most impressive was Kitty’s overall athleticism, which allowed her to shine regardless of the sport. Her family bicycled to Berlin when she was nine years old, and she earned national recognition as a child for her ice skating prowess. She was a standout lacrosse player at school, and had World War I not intervened, she and her sister Margaret probably would’ve been selected for international lacrosse matches.

McKane had no signature shot, but her all-around skills made her good at everything. Dan Maskell wrote, “Mrs. Godfree was one of the first British players to develop an all-court game, completing a deep ground stroke approach shot with a finishing volley.” There were great volleyers, like Elizabeth Ryan, but few players who could compete both at the net and from the baseline.

A. Wallis Myers sketched his early impressions of the star:

I remember seeing her first play in 1919 at Chiswick Park–a pretty, merry volleyer, with a long vaulting stride, a natural hitter if there ever was one. She did not wear, and has never worn, the solemn mien of some players of her sex, and doubtless it has been this air of joyous abandon, index of an unaffected nature, which has made her so popular with crowds wherever she has played.

All this, and with minimal coaching. Lenglen had an overbearing father who helped develop her game, but McKane did not:

I was never coached. What ability I may have had was natural and instinctive. In any case there was little or no coaching in my day and I imagine none at all before the first war in the days when women served underarm.

The only advice–not coaching–I got was from uncles and cousins when I first picked up a racket at the age, I suppose of ten. “Use your right hand” they used to urge. “Tennis is played with the right hand.”

Kitty was naturally left-handed.

She played badminton right-handed as well. Indoor tennis was rare, so many tennis players of the era kept fit during the winter on the badminton court. No one crossed over as effectively as McKane did. She won the All England Championships (the unofficial badminton world championships of the day) four times in singles, twice in doubles with sister Margaret, and twice in mixed doubles. In 1924, she won all three events, just four months before claiming her first Wimbledon title.

* * *

Lenglen was the prime obstacle standing in the way of McKane and major singles championships. The other stumbling block was the powerful American, Helen Wills.

Suzanne won Wimbledon every year from 1919 to 1923, then again in 1925. Wills was six years younger than Lenglen (and nine years younger than Kitty), so her arrival was well-timed to dominate the game after the Frenchwoman went professional in 1926. The American was particularly deadly at Wimbledon, where she finished her career with a 54-1 record. She won the tournament eight times between 1927 and 1938.

Her one loss was to Kitty McKane.

When the pair met in the 1924 Wimbledon final, Wills was not yet the unstoppable force that she would become. But she had already ascended to the top ranks of the game. In 1923, she won 26 of 28 matches, including two wins against McKane. The victories carry a bit of an asterisk, as the first battle was in the inaugural Wightman Cup, when the Brits had little time to find their land legs and prepare for the unfamiliar conditions. But after another week passed and Kitty advanced to the quarter-finals of the US National Championships, Helen beat her again, this time in a 2-6, 6-2, 7-5 nail-biter.

When Wills arrived in England in 1924, the situation was reversed and conditions favored McKane. Helen lost both of her Wightman Cup matches, including a routine 6-2, 6-2 defeat to Kitty. But like McKane had at Forest Hills the year before, Wills quickly adjusted. Wimbledon followed immediately after the Wightman Cup, and Helen blitzed through five rounds, reaching the final with the loss of only 11 games.

Kitty acknowledged that it took some luck for her to become champion. Lenglen eliminated two of the best players in the draw–Hazel Wightman and Elizabeth Ryan–before withdrawing from the semi-final. As usual, she had a legitimate illness to justify her exit, but the timing came suspiciously after a weak performance. In this case, the cause of Suzanne’s nerves was a narrow three-set win over Ryan in the quarter-finals.

Even with good fortune on her side, McKane barely won her title. She said in retrospect, “I had a reputation for being a strong finisher. But equally true was the fact I was a weak starter.” In the final, she almost waited too long to turn the tables.

Wills won the first set 6-4, despite dropping 12 points in a row. In her newspaper column, Lenglen described it as “an exciting spectacle but not great lawn tennis.” Helen rode her momentum to a 4-1 advantage in the second, and what A. Wallis Myers called the “palpitating conflict for the sixth game” ran to five deuces and three game points for the American. Kitty saved them all, then sent the score careening in the other direction. She won the second set, 6-4, and sealed the title with another 6-4 score in the decider.

The British crowd was thrilled by their new champion, but journalists could hardly wait to appoint Wills as the inheritor to Lenglen’s throne. Two days after the final, the New York Times wrote:

[Wills] is a better stroke maker than her conqueror, Miss McKane, and probably hits harder than any other woman player at Wimbledon. … The experts find it difficult to decide exactly what gave the British woman the victory, some attributing it to her speedier footwork and others to Miss Wills’s occasional lapses from her best.

Helen would go on to justify even the most outlandish forecasts of her future greatness, but in the summer of 1924, she wasn’t quite good enough to get past Kitty McKane.

* * *

Most onlookers in 1924 would’ve predicted that Wills’s first Wimbledon title would come before McKane’s second. Helen was undefeated for the rest of the season, picking up Olympic gold as well as her second title at Forest Hills.

But in 1926, the draw once again opened up for Kitty. Now married to Davis Cupper Leslie Godfree, she watched as an appendectomy sidelined Wills and a spat with tournament organizers sent Lenglen packing. Her toughest match came in the third round against Elizabeth Ryan, who she beat after dropping a 6-1 first set. She reeled off 11 games in a row to eliminate Diddie Vlasto in the semis, and she secured the title by winning the last five games of a three-set final against Lili de Alvarez.

As if that wasn’t enough, she and Leslie won the mixed doubles. Their title is best remembered as the only one by a married couple, but it was no mere historical curiosity. It was certainly no walk in the park for the newlyweds. In the two final rounds, they beat two strong American teams: first Ryan and Vinnie Richards, then Mary Browne and Howard Kinsey.

For the perennial number two, the pair of Wimbledon trophies represented a final hurrah. She won four titles in five tournaments in the remainder of 1926, then lost to Wills and Ryan in an abbreviated 1927 schedule. She started a family and never returned full-time to the circuit.

Yet she still had one more great performance for her British fans. A key part of the 1924 and 1925 Wightman Cup-winning teams, she was drafted to play doubles again in 1930. In the deciding rubber of the seven-match series, Kitty paired Phoebe Holcroft Watson to upset a truly imposing duo, Helen Wills (now Wills Moody) and Helen Jacobs. With the Cup on the line, the Brits pulled out the victory, 7-5, 1-6, 6-4.

Kitty (right) with Pam Shriver in 1986

The Americans would retake the Wightman Cup in 1931 and hold on to it until 1958. Kitty’s Wimbledon titles wouldn’t loom quite so historically large, as Dorothy Round picked up two singles wins for the Brits in the 1930s.

Still, Kitty McKane Godfree herself wouldn’t soon be forgotten. She lived to the great age of 96, and she continued to play–occasionally with Jean Borotra–into her nineties. When the Wimbledon centenary arrived in 1986, she was drafted to present the trophy to that year’s women’s singles champion, Martina Navratilova. Navratilova was more like a Lenglen or a Wills than a McKane, but then again, Martina’s coaches let her play left-handed.

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

* * *

Vitas Gerulaitis [USA]
Born: 26 July 1954
Died: 17 September 1994
Career: 1973-85
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (1978)
Peak Elo rating: 2,201 (3rd place, 1978)
Major singles titles: 1
Total singles titles: 26
 

* * *

Tennis was alive in 1979. The men’s game had the big three of Björn Borg, Jimmy Connors, and 20-year-old John McEnroe. All three had compelling personalities, they delivered one dramatic match after another, and they–at least the Americans–gave every impression of hating each other. The media–and not just the sports media–ate it up.

The women’s game had Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, and its own wunderkind, 16-year-old Tracy Austin. The tour featured great rivalries, movie-star good looks, and just enough cattiness to keep the sport in the tabloids. Recreational tennis was booming, and the sport was drawing on talent from more and more corners of the globe.

And then there was Vitas Gerulaitis. Sometimes ranked fourth behind the big three, he won the Australian Open in December of 1977 and reached a career-high #3 on the ATP computer before McEnroe arrived in 1978. His game was plenty good enough that his sex appeal, easygoing lifestyle, and undeniable charisma made him a global icon.

At the end of 1979, the 25-year-old New Yorker shared the cover of People magazine with CHiPs actor Erik Estrada and Bee Gees frontman Barry Gibb. Gerulaitis and his flowing blonde mane was one of the “10 sexiest bachelors in the world.” I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t quote at length:

Lipstick has been spotted more than once on the collar of Vitas Gerulaitis’ tennis whites. “Well, I’m a pretty sociable guy and I don’t get lonely too often,” shrugs the world’s fifth-ranked tennis player and the game’s No. 1 ladies’ man. His tastes run to actresses and models. “It doesn’t hurt for a girl to be pretty,” he says of his entourage. “But after a match I don’t want someone to sit there and talk about my backhand. I want to discuss the Pope’s visit or something.” …

Known around the circuit as “the Lithuanian Lion,” Vitas denies his own sex appeal. “Rod Stewart,” he says admiringly, “is the only sexy guy in the world.”

The list hasn’t aged well–Gerulaitis slots in between Prince Andrew and O.J. Simpson–but there’s no denying that Vitas’s celebrity far transcended the aficionados who appreciated his footwork and his forehand.

* * *

It is tempting to ignore Gerulaitis’s on-court career entirely and simply reel off his best lines. Perennial runner-ups tend to give the best press conferences, and the self-deprecating New Yorker was no exception.

You probably know his most famous quip: “And let that be a lesson to you all. Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row.” The man who failed to improve on a 16-0 head-to-head was Jimmy Connors, and the occasion was the January 1980 Masters tournament in New York. Vitas won two of his three round-robin matches–one of them a three-set comeback over John McEnroe–and he knocked out Connors in the semi-final in straight sets.

The sequel is rarely told: Gerulaitis really did figure him out. He beat Connors in their next three meetings, including the Roland Garros semi-finals five months later.

The irony in Vitas’s remark is that he did lose 17 times in a row to one player–Björn Borg. It wasn’t for lack of trying. “Every time I play Borg I come out with some thirty ideas that should get me victory,” he said. “And each time Björn breaks each one of the thirty to pieces, like a clay-pigeon shooter.”

Gerulaitis never gave up hope, even after Borg’s stunning early retirement. “If I have to invite him over to my house when I’m 95 and get him out of a wheelchair, I’m going to beat the guy,” Vitas said. “If someone asks me how long I’m going to play tennis…until I beat Borg.” It didn’t take that long–Gerulaitis beat his long-time tormentor in a handful of early-1980s exhibitions.

The Lithuanian Lion can be forgiven for his exasperation. Perhaps his greatest single-match performance was one that he lost, to Borg in the semi-finals of Wimbledon in 1977, 6-4, 3-6, 6-3, 3-6, 8-6. Gerulaitis was up a break in the fifth set before it slipped away. He won 176 points to Borg’s 177.

Yet the next day, Vitas offered to help his vanquisher prepare for the final, and they became fast friends. Borg would prepare for the US Open at Gerulaitis’s house, and when the Swede got married, Vitas threw him a four-day bachelor party. McEnroe wrote in his 2002 autobiography, “Borg and Gerulaitis had, shall we say, perfected the art of enjoying the fruits of tennis.”

* * *

Indeed, another of Vitas’s one-liners captures the lifestyle that inspired People magazine: “If I did as well on the court as I do off the court, I’d be No. 1 by now.” He partied with Andy Warhol at Studio 54, and when he bowed to the Royal Box before that 1977 Wimbledon semi-final, Warhol spotted a cocaine cutter on his gold chain.

Gerulaitis’s relentless pursuit of off-court pleasure makes it easy to conclude that he was a dilettante, lacking the work ethic to become the very best. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Tony Palafox, one of his coaches at the Port Washington Tennis Academy, said, “He might be on the court for 10 hours a day. It didn’t matter how long it took; he would practice something until he had it right.” He was a perfect sparring partner for Borg, perhaps the only man on tour who took practice time more seriously.

His attitude was crucial. He only stood a chance when he was in top physical condition. Vitas was fast, and he needed to be. In the 1977 Wimbledon epic against Borg, he rode his trademark “bunny steps” to the net 216 times, including behind almost every second serve.

His father, a Lithuanian immigrant who became the first head coach at the USTA National Tennis Center, identified one flaw in his son’s game: a second serve he called a “baby serve.” In eight matches charted for the Match Charting Project–admittedly a sample biased toward the toughest opponents, given the limited film that has survived from Gerulaitis’s playing career–Vitas won 71% of first serve points and only 45% of second serves.

By his late 20s, the partying and drug use–not to mention a decade of opponents jumping on the second serve–had begun to slow him down. Yet at the Masters event in January of 1982, he pushed Ivan Lendl to a fifth set in the final round. Lendl was so frustrated by his inability to put the match away that, in the deciding set, he drilled a forehand right back at the head of the hard-charging Gerulaitis. It knocked him over, and Lendl won the match. But as usual, Vitas got the final word. “I have nothing in my head to really damage anyway.”

* * *

Oddly, fans in New York took some time before they warmed to the Lithuanian Lion. Gerulaitis and McEnroe reached the 1979 US Open final after McEnroe beat Connors and Vitas defeated Roscoe Tanner. (Tanner had eliminated Borg in the quarters.) It’s hard to imagine the media circus that would ensue if a pair of New Yorkers faced off in the US Open final today. But at the time, Gerulaitis said, “They hate us. Popularity-wise, I’m a notch above John, and John is a notch above Son of Sam.”

Fans in the Big Apple would come around. Still, Vitas’s reputation played better abroad. If he hadn’t played alongside McEnroe and Ilie Năstase, he’d be remembered more for his on-court theatrics. He never hesitated to get in an umpire’s face, even if the confrontations didn’t have the sometimes vile undertones of Năstase’s or the sheer intensity of McEnroe’s.

Gerulaitis was particularly popular in Italy, where he graced billboards advertising a racket called the Wilson Stiff Model. (Yes, really.) This despite the fact that when he lost the first set to top seed Adriano Panatta at the 1977 Italian Championships, he said, “These people are animals. Rome is the asshole of the universe.” He came back to beat Panatta in the third, and he went on to win the title.

He scored a second Italian title in even more impressive fashion two years later. At the same tournament where Tracy Austin ended Chris Evert’s six-year winning streak on clay, Vitas bounced back from a first-set bagel to defeat countryman Eddie Dibbs in the semi-final. Waiting in the title match was Guillermo Vilas, the best clay court player of the era behind Borg.

The Vilas match was possibly Gerulaitis’s greatest victory. It certainly represented everything he was capable of on court. The final lasted five hours and nine minutes, a record for the tournament. The total of 57 games set a new mark as well. Vilas won two tiebreaks to a take a two-sets-to-one lead, but the American came back to win, 6-7, 7-6, 6-7, 6-4, 6-2. Gerulaitis said after the match, “I changed strategy about four times during the match and played just about every way I know how to.” To beat Vilas on European clay, that’s what it took.

Even after retirement, Gerulaitis had one more Roman triumph up his sleeve. In 1994, he filled in for the vacationing Tim Gullikson and coached Pete Sampras to the Italian Open title, Pete’s best clay-court result.

* * *

Regardless of how the crowd felt about Gerulaitis in Flushing, Vitas was enormously well-liked around the game. As a teen at the Port Washington Tennis Academy, he was idolized by McEnroe and Mary Carillo. He was one of the few men who could claim to be friends with McEnroe, Borg, and Jimmy Connors. Vitas’s coach, Fred Stolle, said, “Maybe he was too nice to be the top guy, but that’s what he chose. He couldn’t be any other way.”

Vitas’s celebrity ensured a steady stream of hangers-on, but the friendships were something else entirely. Tracy Austin said, “People gravitated to him because he was so likable, so unselfish, so giving.” Another player of the era, Rick Meyer, compared Gerulaitis’s charisma to that of Bill Clinton. Vitas was the same with everyone, including kids he worked with at charity clinics. He would tell them, “We’re gonna go through this a few times together, and maybe it’ll help us both get it right.”

Gerulaitis hung on in the top ten throughout his twenties, retaking the fifth spot on the ranking list as late as 1983. But his lifestyle took its toll. His last season with a winning record was 1984, when he turned 30, and he was in and out of rehab for much of the mid-1980s.

Vitas’s story doesn’t exactly have a happy ending. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1994, when he was only 40 years old. He may or may not have kicked his drug habit (opinions differ), but he had recovered to the extent that he worked as a color commentator for the USA Network. He was good at it. McEnroe wrote, “Vitas was head and shoulders above almost any of the tennis broadcasters out there.”*

* J-Mac continued, “…which wasn’t saying a lot, since I felt (and still largely feel) that most of them stank: Virtually without exception, they were arrogant, dry, pompous, or just plain boring–take your pick.” Oh, John.

Gerulaitis the commentator gives you a pretty good idea of what he was like on court. He could hardly keep his energy in check–this is not a man who was about to pause an explanation just because the next point was underway. He had plenty of opinions, but he was never imperious about them.

Above all, Vitas was good on television because he was so enormously likeable. It’s quite a trick, wielding such a compelling personality that being one of the hundred best tennis players of the century is a mere footnote.

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

* * *

Elena Dementieva [RUS]
Born: 15 October 1981
Career: 1998-2010
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 3 (2009)
Peak Elo rating: 2,168 (2nd place, 2010)
Major singles titles: 0
Total singles titles: 16
 

* * *

How important is an Olympic gold medal?

Tennis struggles with that question. It hasn’t always been an Olympic sport, and we have our own long-standing pinnacles that players target. You can find players anywhere on a wide continuum of positions between “The Olympics are everything!” to “Eh, I’ll play Atlanta instead.”

Elena Dementieva was firmly on the pro-Olympics side of that question, even before she won the singles gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Games. After overcoming Dinara Safina in the final, she made it clear:

I can’t even compare a grand slam to the Olympic Games, it’s just so much bigger. This is what I was waiting for. This is what I was working for. This is the biggest moment in my career, my life.

It’s not really possible to make an analytical case that the Olympics should be placed on the same level as the majors. The draw is smaller, and some top players usually skip it. (The Beijing field was missing Lindsay Davenport, Ana Ivanovic, and Maria Sharapova, and world number one Justine Henin had retired in May.) The event disrupts the established tennis calendar, so some of the stars who turn up aren’t as prepared as they would be for Wimbledon or the US Open.

But Dementieva is far from alone in valuing an Olympic gold so highly. If we do sometimes underrate the event, hyper-motivated competitors like her are the reason why. Winning a grand slam isn’t a significant achievement just because you need to win seven matches, or because someone with a British royal title might be in attendance. They matter because all the players agree that they matter.

Some tour players are willing to give the Games a miss, and most of the rest don’t care enough to skip events to aid their Olympic preparation, as Dementieva did. Still, enough competitors value an medal so highly that they treat it like a slam–Serena Williams certainly cares about medals, and Elena beat her in the quarters. Dementieva never got her major, but of all the great players who just missed, she might be the one who regrets it the least.

* * *

There. I did it. Nothing about the serve. I’ve been an admirer of Dementieva’s since 1999, when I saw the 17-year-old Russian on the outer courts at the US Open. I was also a teenager at the time, so it’s just possible that I was drawn to the statuesque blonde for reasons other than her devastating, rock-solid groundstrokes.

Whatever the initial appeal, I suffered first-hand through the decade of Elena’s near-misses and serving woes, so it doesn’t seem right to talk about the serve right out of the gate. She put together a great career–the 96th-best of the last century!–in spite of her limitations, and there are plenty of other things to talk about.

But… it always comes back to the serve.

Dementieva pulled a ligament in her right shoulder in late 2000, and she developed a sidearm slice serve to compensate. While the shoulder eventually recovered, the serve remained unorthodox, inconsistent, and an enormous liability. She knew it–how could she not?–so it was an even bigger problem in important matches. In her first major final, at the 2004 French Open, she double-faulted on 10 of her 45 service points.

By the time she retired in 2010, Elena had improved her serve, hitting harder and struggling less when it counted. That last year, she won 47.1% of her second serve points, a bit above tour average. It was a long, hard road to get there. Here are her year-by-year second-serve winning percentages:

2004: 39.0%
2005: 38.7%
2006: 40.6%
2007: 42.9%
2008: 45.3%
2009: 46.4%
2010: 47.1%

* (WTA stats are spotty before about 2006, so the ’04 and ’05 numbers are based on only some of her matches. There are some individual matches missing from the 2006-10 totals as well.)

39% is so, so bad. No player in today’s WTA top 50 is below 40%, and only two women are below 42%. There are no mitigating factors, either. Dementieva didn’t make an unusual number of first serves–her career average was 61%, and she landed just 58% in 2004–and the numbers were worse on high-leverage points.

Somehow, the rest of Dementieva’s game was so good that in 2004, she reached two slam finals. She also finished the season in the top eight for the second year in a row. Pam Shriver said, “With that serve, it’s a miracle she’s in the Top 10.” What’s that, Pam? “A miracle!”

* * *

The reason the Russian remained competitive was her groundstrokes. Ed McGrogan wrote in 2008 that both forehand and backhand were “things of beauty … undeniably some of the best in the women’s game.” Her open-stance forehand was a weapon capable of firing in any direction, and she had superb control over her backhand.

As Dementieva’s serve evolved from a softball of a slice to a more tactical spinner, some onlookers even tried on the idea that it became fearsome in its own right. Writing in 2005, coach Jim McLellan explained how “her side spin serve has become deceptively strong.”

The contact is still low and out to the right, and there are still the double faults but her unique side spin creates problems for the girls on tour. In the deuce court it curves wide and stays low, driving the receiver well into the alley, but equally forcing them to play the ball from below the level of the net…. Elena’s serve arrives at a speed, with a direction, and considerably lower contact point than all the others.

It worked against some opponents, anyway. McLennan was talking about the US Open quarter-final that year against Lindsay Davenport, which she won in a third-set tiebreak. The following summer, Elena beat Maria Sharapova and Jelena Jankovic back-to-back to win in Los Angeles. She was side-arming serves by the third set of the final, and Jankovic admitted it kept her off-balance:

You don’t know what’s coming up, a slow serve or a fast serve. Sometimes she changes. Sometimes for the second serve, she hits like a first. Normally with the players, they hit a big serve and a little kick serve, and she hits all kinds.

Other observers sought to invent new ways of describing Dementieva’s inexplicable effectiveness. Multiple writers seem to have independently coined the phrase “return of return of serve”–essentially a serve-plus-one for bad servers. In theory, Elena’s court sense was so good that she could anticipate where the returner would bludgeon her serve, and she’d do her own damage on the second shot. It’s a clever concept, but the Match Charting Project has logged every shot from 35 of her matches, and it turns out she was only a bit better than average when it came to ending points with her second stroke.

* * *

The explanation for Dementieva’s persistence at or near the top of the game was much more simple. She was the best returner in the game for much of her career. She didn’t get the benefit of a powerful serve, but she simultaneously neutralized everyone else’s.

In 2005, Elena won a measly 51.5% of her service points … and 50.7% of her return points. Even Simona Halep, the best returner of the post-Dementieva era, never topped 50.3%, and only posted one season above the 50% mark.* The Russian won more than half the points she played on return for three consecutive years, and her career mark is above 49%.

* Halep currently sits right at 50% in 2022. If she returns from injury in time to play many clay-court events, watch out.

Those numbers are averages, so her best days were truly eye-popping. I have stats for 320 of her tour-level matches, and in 73 of them, she won a higher rate of return points than serve points. In 35 of them, she won at least 60% of her return points, including dissections of Victoria Azarenka, Lindsay Davenport, Li Na, and Dinara Safina. She won 57% on her return in the 2007 Moscow final against Serena Williams.

Dementieva didn’t hit a lot of return winners–in fact, she hit fewer of them than almost anyone else on tour. But she set herself up well for the remainder of the point. The return of serve was the shot best-suited to her occasional mental fragility: She didn’t have enough time to think about it.

A 2006 profile in ESPN: The Magazine suggests what could’ve been possible if Elena had figured out how to switch off her brain on the serve, as well:

Before Wimbledon in June 2005, Dementieva spent a week in Holland working with Richard Krajicek, once regarded as the most fluid server in the men’s game. He put three balls in her hand and had her serve them rapid-fire. Nearly every time, the third serve-the one she had the least time to think about-flew fastest and landed with the best topspin bounce. Krajicek is convinced Dementieva’s faulting problem has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I believe with Elena, it is not mechanical,” he says. “It is psychological.”

A brief conversation with Dementieva would lead most people to the same conclusion. “I hate my serve,” she said. “I don’t know how to serve.”

* * *

Fittingly, Elena’s greatest triumphs came not when her serve magically worked, but when she outgutted opponents who were struggling just as much.

That was the story of the 2008 Olympic final, when Dinara Safina’s serve abandoned her, as well. With the stadium still half-empty, the two Russians lost the first four service games, and things barely got better from there. The match saw 31 break points in its 30 games, and holds of serve were only slightly more common than breaks.

For once in her career, all Dementieva had to do was to be the steadier competitor. She managed it. She double-faulted only three times out of 100-plus serve points, and only once in the deciding set. Safina, on the other hand, hit 17 doubles, four of them when facing break point. On her first match point, Elena landed a modest first serve and sealed her gold-medal performance with a forehand winner.

The post-match interview was one of the few of her career with no questions about the serve–what was wrong with it, how she worked around it, or what she planned to do about it. Her famous liability didn’t win her the gold medal, but it didn’t cost her the victory, either. It’s tough to think of Elena Dementieva without dwelling on the serve and what-could-have-been, but I’ll always try to remember the glorious game that emerged when the serve got out of the way.