Who is GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) Tennis Player?
Tennis-week magazine did a thorough and interesting analysis to find out who the greatest of them all is. The basic approach is…. not only the grand-slams, but all other factors such as titles, wins, percentages are considered for the calculation. It’s a long read, but its worth the time.
Here is the final list:
1. Laver – 126
2. Tilden, Borg – 118
4. Federer – 110
5. Gonzalez – 104
6. Rosewall – 100
7. Budge – 98
8. Connors, Lendl – 84
10. Sampras – 81
11. McEnroe – 79
12. Vines – 76
13. Kramer – 75
14. Perry – 72
Full table at,
http://www.sportsmediainc.com/tennisweek/index.cfm?func=showarticle&newsid=17412
Full article at,
http://www.sportsmediainc.net/tennisweek/index.cfm?func=showarticle&newsid=17405
Categories: Roger Federer, tennis
I believe Laver is the most overrated great player of all time. Gonzalez would probably have defeated him on the barnstorming tour Laver wisely turned down after turning pro, despite Gonzalez, who had beaten on long head-to-head tours all his other challengers save Kramer who annihilated the pro-neophyte Pancho, being by then (Pancho, that is) long in the tooth. Admittedly Gonzalez was better on the indoor carpet than on other surfaces, but still…talk about dominance in a tennis era! That’s Pancho (and, earlier, Tilden). Meanwhile, Hoad beat Laver 13-0 in Australia on a head-to-head tour after Laver turned pro; Hoad was already ailing physically and had lost, though competitively, to Gonzalez on an earlier, much longer tour. My recollection is that Gonzalez, even though Laver didn’t play a tour against him, has the won-lost edge in the matches he played against Laver in tournaments and exhibitions. Well, one might argue, so what? Didn’t Laver, fresh from the shamateurs, have to learn the more focussed and efficient pro game, and couldn’t he have improved in his pro years? The main point here, it seems to me, is that the older Rosewall gave Laver all he could deal with in those later years, and who would rank Rosewall, great as he was, ahead of Gonzalez? Then there is with Laver the matter of grand slams. Your lead-in for your G.O.A.T. rankings professes that winning grand slams is not the only criterion; yet I fail to see (as per my above comments)that Laver deserves the #1 ranking based on any other criteria; certainly, and to repeat, he doesn’t deserve it because of his two grand Slams in comparison to his head-to-head play results against other immortals; his Grand Slams don’t count as much as his play against Gonzalez, Hoad and Rosewall.
But there is something much more fundamentally wrong with your G.O.A.T. rankings: failure to account for the difference in play between the wooden racket era and today’s period of play with high-tech rackets. Yesterday it was a little bit more finesse than power; today, it’s the opposite. Thank goodness for both eras. We tennis fans are lucky. Tennis’s centre has held, to trivialize a wonderful line from a great poet (though he probably wouldn’t have minded)while other sports–boxing and the NBA, among the most prominent–have degenerated greatly. Apropos: it isn’t sensible to compare tennis greats from these very different eras driven seminally by the technology of rackets. We’ve lost some of the beauty of the old wooden racket tennis but gained some glorious power dynamics in today’s play.
I can’t resist joining in the G.O.A.T. speculations, idle though they be, any more than many other tennis fans. Mine are:
WOODEN RACKET ERA
In order of greatness: Tilden, Kramer, Gonzalez, Budge, Vines/Hoad, Laver, Rosewall, McEnroe, Riggs, Perry.
The key chapter is the sum of those “informal” afternoon matches between the teenager Kramer (who hitchhiked from school to be there, I hear) and the aging Tilden on (I believe) courts at the West Side Tennis Club in L.A. in the 1940’s. I’m imagining the Big Game was born there when Kramer found that the Backourt Game had already been mastered and that as epitomized by its greatest master–the Old Master himself–demanded a new strategy of match play in a sequence of adaptivity Darwin would have described as, “Ah ha!” (Sounds also like the plotline of “The Karate Kid”: does art imitate life of vice versa?) A tennis version of the Bill Walsh/West Coast Offense vs. the Buddy Ryan/ChiBears defense, which still defines the opposing strategic camps in the NFL and, as has the strategic argument in tennis, never really been resolved as to which is best.
MODERN RACKET ERA
Sampras/Federer, Nadal, Agassi, Connors (the Wilson T-1000, fairly or not, puts him in this era)
Too soon to name any more.
And, of course, I’m right and everyone else is wrong.
Cheers,
Albert Clarkson
I agree with Laver as the GOAT. Nobody else could do two grand slams, and nobody else had so many titles, plus in his prime he had a positive head to head record against everyone.
I would put Gonzales before Federer though, because he was number one for eight straight years.
No one entries the difficulties of the day, like the rackets the balls the courts, speed of the serve, speed of the ground stoke, how good the opponents etc.
Was Lavers game/opposition easier than say Federer nows. Its easy to be the best if you have nothing much to play against or if the game is easier….
was the game easier then than now…..
Came across another excellent read on the Great GOAT debate…similar in that it too argues that using Grand Slam titles only — as the popular media typically does — is far too simplistic.
You can find the story here: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/119898-the-hall-of-goats