One of the subjects I plan to explore regularly in this space is tennis history. It's a subject I've explored to some extent already, generally through
the context of my Melog ratings. While I think the Melog system does a
creditable job evaluating tennis performance, it is not without issues.
One of those issues is that the system does not match the
evaluation of tennis players in popular opinion. I often find this to be an
asset; Melog places value on excelling throughout the year, not merely in big
tournaments. But it is inescapably true that most evaluators, including the
players themselves, put far more emphasis on Grand Slams than they do on
anything else; in fact, “career Grand Slams won,” which obviously ignores achievement in other events, is a commonly-used proxy for
all-time ranking.
There is another problem with the Melog system that
troubles me far more: It requires a great deal of time to compile the necessary
data to evaluate even a single year of tennis. And rewarding as I find that
process, it still means that I’ve only got the numbers for 2008-14 so far,
which leaves me without a ready means of comparing Roger Federer to Pete
Sampras and Bjorn Borg. That would be a nice capability to have.
As it happens, I’ve developed a method that addresses both
of those problems at once: it is based entirely on Grand Slam performance, and
it is readily calculable for anyone who’s played in the Open Era. And given the content
of these introductory paragraphs, you’ve probably figured out that I’m
presenting that method here.
The concept is simple. Pick a tennis player and look at his performance in every single Grand Slam he (or she, although I’ve only assembled a database for men so far) plays in his career. Count the titles, finals, semifinals, and everything else back to the first round losses and DNPs, and combine them all into a single number.
How? It probably sounds a bit glib to say “however you
want,” even if it is true. With the caveat that “however you want” is a valid
answer in its own way, I do have a couple of more specific options in mind.
The first is the simplest: Take the odds of the player
winning each Slam right before he’s eliminated and add them up. That sounds
more intimidating than it actually is, because I’m not talking about trying to
figure out everyone’s exact odds at every stage of the draw. Working under the
assumption that each match is a coin flip, you get the following values for
each round of a Slam:
Round
|
Odds
|
R128
|
.0078125
|
R64
|
.015625
|
R32
|
.03125
|
R16
|
.0625
|
QF
|
.125
|
SF
|
.25
|
F
|
.5
|
W
|
1.0
|
All you do from there is count up the number of times a
player earns each result, multiply, and add. So looking at, say, Andy Murray,
you get:
Round
|
Number
|
Score
|
R128
|
3
|
.0234375
|
R64
|
1
|
.015625
|
R32
|
4
|
.125
|
R16
|
6
|
.375
|
QF
|
7
|
.875
|
SF
|
7
|
1.75
|
F
|
5
|
2.5
|
W
|
2
|
2.0
|
Total
|
35
|
7.66
|
Murray’s score is, unsurprisingly, very good. To see how
good, we have to compare him to other people. The people I’ve chosen
fall into two groups: Everyone who has made a Grand Slam final in the Open Era
(beginning in 1968), and everyone who has appeared in the top 10 of the ATP
Rankings since they began in 1973. (Plus one other guy who we’ll get to
shortly.) Out of that group (which includes 174 players, and which I feel
easily covers the most noteworthy contenders of the last four decades), here
are the top players in order, with intermittent commentary:
1. Roger Federer 25.31
What, you were expecting someone else?
2. Rafael Nadal 18.66
(tie) Pete Sampras 18.66
This tie will be broken as soon as Nadal steps onto the court at the upcoming Australian Open. But for the last six months, Federer's nearest competitors have been precisely even, down to the smallest available fraction of a point. And neither of them is anywhere close to the top spot.
4. Roy Emerson
17.81
Here’s the aforementioned player who has neither been in the ATP top 10, nor
made an Open Era final. Emerson was the dominant presence in Slams in the
mid-1960s, winning a total of 10 from 1963-67, including all five Australian championships
played in that span.
This is the place in the rankings where we start discussing caveats.
This is the place in the rankings where we start discussing caveats.
The two biggest qualifiers to apply to these numbers are
amateurism and the Australian Open. Until the beginning of the Open Era in
1968, professional players were not permitted to play Grand Slams. Many of the
world’s best players were therefore restricted from entering the most famous
tournaments in the sport. As a result of this prohibition, the fields of the
Slams were artificially watered down, and the victories won in those
tournaments should be correspondingly discounted.
The same was true to a lesser extent (and for different
reasons) of the Australian Open even as the Open Era progressed. For the first
couple decades of open play, many of the world’s best players habitually
skipped the inconvenient trek to the Slam of the Southern Hemisphere. John McEnroe played only five
Australian Opens in his 16-year Slam career – and he showed more interest than his best contemporaries. Jimmy Connors appeared down under only twice, Bjorn Borg
just once. Even into the early ‘90s, Australia was sometimes bypassed by some
of the game’s best; Andre Agassi didn’t play there until 1995 (and then went on
to win four of the next nine editions of the event).
Roy Emerson benefits hugely from both of those factors. He’s
not the only player from before 1968 to be helped by the amateur-only rules,
but the other great ones of that group (who we’ll see shortly) have a
counterbalancing factor: they went pro after some amateur success, and
therefore missed out on years of Slam participation. Their triumphs against
weaker opposition than they might have otherwise faced can be weighed against the
victories they might have secured in later events had they been permitted to participate.
Emerson, on the other hand, retained his amateur status
throughout the divided period, and therefore has the diluted draws working
unabashedly in his favor. And as an Australian, Emerson always played the
Australian national championships (as the event was then known), and was
further helped by the fact that many of the world’s best amateurs didn’t make
the then-laborious journey around the world to face him.
None of this means that Roy Emerson wasn’t an extraordinary
tennis player. But it probably does mean that he wasn’t quite as extraordinary
as his ranking here would imply.
5. Ivan Lendl 17.24
6. Jimmy Connors 17.12
Lendl and Connors strike me as two of the more underrated
players in men’s tennis history. They won eight Slams apiece, which is a
remarkable total – but it’s also responsible for less than half of each of
their scores. Lendl famously lost his first four Slam finals, and went 8-11 in
finals overall; Connors eked out a winning record in finals (8-7), but was below .500 in semis (15-16).
The thing is, finals and semis are still great results, and
these two deserve more credit than they get for reaching as many of them as
they did. So I’m giving it to them here.
7. Andre Agassi 16.15
Kind of fits into the Lendl-Connors group, but without
having a losing record at any stage. His records in semis and finals are both
creditable (15-11 and 8-7), but they don’t quite measure up to those of his
most celebrated contemporary; Sampras went 18-5 in semis and 14-4 in
finals. But Agassi made more semis, and quarters, and… well, everything else.
Sampras was probably still better. But these rankings at least imply that the difference between them is smaller than might be commonly thought.
8. Ken Rosewall 15.36
9. Rod Laver 15.30
Ken Rosewall made his Grand Slam debut in the 1951
Australian championships at the age of 16. One year later, he played all four
Slams and made quarterfinals in two of them. The year after that, he won the
Australian and French titles. Over the next three years, Rosewall augmented
his trophy case with two more titles (’55 Australian, ’56 US), four finals, and
four semis, and then, at age 22, he went professional. As a result, he did not
play another Grand Slam until 1968, when he joined the field for the inaugural
French Open at age 33.
He won. The next year, he made the French Open final at 34.
Age 35 brought a Wimbledon final and a US Open title. 36 and 37 both saw Australian Open trophies. And in 1974, at age 39, Rosewall made the finals at
both Wimbledon and the US Open. He restricted his schedule after that, but
still made semis in Australia at ages 40 and 41.
Ken Rosewall was a great young player, and he was likely the
greatest old men’s singles player of all time. In between, there is a gap of
over a decade in his Grand Slam career.
Rod Laver, Rosewall’s countryman, contemporary, and
sometimes rival, is generally more celebrated; given that he won calendar Slams
in both 1962 and 1969 (separated, of course, by six years of professional
play), his plaudits are well-deserved. But in an alternate, pros-always-allowed
universe of tennis, I might be more curious to see what Rosewall would have
done in his prime years.
10. Bjorn Borg 14.55
11. Novak Djokovic 14.05
Djokovic’s scores for the last five years have been 1.0,
3.25, 2.25, 2.25, and 1.875. Barring severe injury and/or unforeseen collapse
in ability, he’s passing Borg later this year – possibly as early as the end of this
month. And given that virtually all of Emerson’s work came before 1968 (and much
of Laver’s and Rosewall’s as well), Novak is pretty clearly a top-10 player of
the Open Era at this point – and climbing.
Borg is one of the players you sometimes see considered for
Greatest of All Time status, so his ranking here may not sit well with some.
Just remember that this is a career total, and Borg played his last Grand Slam
at age 26, and only played the Australian Open once. There are ways of looking
at these numbers that make Borg look much better, and we’ll discuss those
later. (In-a-different-post later, not in-a-few-paragraphs later.)
12. John McEnroe 12.48
13. John Newcombe 12.22
14. Stefan Edberg 12.17
15. Boris Becker 11.30
16. Mats Wilander 11.20
This group is composed entirely of guys who won 6 or 7 Slams, and
makes a pretty clear boundary line between all-timers and guys who were
“merely” extraordinary. Nobody below these guys on the list won more than four
Slams – which is obviously still an impressive feat. It’s just not going to do
quite as much to make you a well-known name among casual tennis fans 20 years
after you retire. (Even these guys struggle to reach that level – McEnroe gets
there because he was an American and had the rivalry with Borg and threw
tantrums, and Becker had the big serve and the Wimbledon title at 17. I was not
terribly familiar with the other three before I started paying close attention
to tennis.)
17. Guillermo Vilas 8.76
18. Arthur Ashe 8.18
19. Jim Courier 7.75
20. Andy Murray 7.66
As with all active players, Murray’s total is “and
counting.” If he makes the quarterfinals in Australia, he’ll pass Courier; if
he duplicates last year’s performance at all four Slams (a semi and three
quarters), he’ll pass Ashe by the end of the season. But he’s got a lot of
ground to cover if he wants to join the group ahead of this one, and I suspect
the distance will overcome him rather than the other way around.
21. Tony Roche 6.84
22. Lleyton Hewitt 6.34
Also “and counting,” just not counting nearly as fast as the
active guys ahead of him. Hewitt last made a Slam quarterfinal at Wimbledon
2009, and he’s lost in the first round 7 times in the last 3 years. But he’s
still going, and I like that about him quite a bit.
23. Andy Roddick 6.12
Roddick made 5 Grand Slam finals, which is an excellent
total. He won one of them. The other four times, he played Roger Federer.
If people thought Andy Roddick didn’t live up to
expectations, I submit that it may be their expectations that needed
recalibrating. He’s right at the edge of being one of the 20 best players of
the last 50 years by this metric, and that’s plenty of accomplishment for
anyone.
24. Jan Kodes 5.51
25. Ilie Nastase 5.34
Kodes may have had worse timing than Roddick. He won three Slams, but two of them were the 1970 and ’71
French Opens, which occurred just before the ATP rankings debuted. As a result,
he ended up with a relatively undistinguished-looking career high ranking of
#5, a mark he almost certainly would have exceeded in ’71 (French Open title,
US Open final) if anyone had been officially counting at the time. By comparison, Nastase won the ’72 US Open and ’73 French, and
as a result, was #1 in the first-ever rankings, which cemented him in popular
memory to an extent.
Kodes is also the highest-ranked player on this list to have taken a
career-long pass on one of the Slams; he never tried Australia. Nastase played
it only once, losing in the round of 64 in 1982 when he was half a decade
removed from his last semifinal in any Slam.
26. Michael Chang 5.19
27. Goran Ivanisevic 4.97
I absolutely love the fact that these two guys ended up next
to each other. They’re incredibly similar in some ways, and complete opposites
in others.
Chang and Ivanisevic were born within 5 months of each
other, in September 1971 and February 1972, respectively. They both reached a
career high ranking of #2 (behind Sampras in each case), and ended up with
relatively similar career win totals (599 for Ivanisevic, 662 for Chang), and
as you see, very similar Slam scores. Both of them had records of 1-3 in Grand
Slam finals. Chang led in their head-to-head matchups by a slender 6-5 margin. And both of them are now coaches of top-10 players – in fact, their charges faced off in the 2014 US Open final, with Ivanisevic's pupil bettering Chang's on that occasion.
On the other hand… Ivanisevic is a 6-foot-4 Croatian who
relied on a booming serve; he is the all-time leader in aces as recorded by the
ATP (since 1991). Chang is a 5-foot-9 Chinese American who scampered all over
the court and wore opponents down. All four of Ivanisevic’s appearances in Slam
finals came at Wimbledon; he made only one semi at any of the other three
events, compared to six total at the All England Club. Chang, meanwhile, never
made it out of the Wimbledon quarterfinals, but made at least one final at each
of the other three Slams.
So, naturally, their lone Slam victories were also similar,
as they both came almost completely out of nowhere… and apart from that, they
were utterly opposite. Chang won the 1989 French Open, beating the top 2
players in the world along the way; his win over #1 Ivan Lendl is particularly
noteworthy because Chang spent much of the match battling cramps, at one point
resorting to an underhand serve, but still rallied from two sets down for the
win. He was 17 years, 3 months old at the time, making him the youngest men’s
Grand Slam champion ever. The early success spurred him on to the
aforementioned exemplary career, but he never did win another Slam.
Ivanisevic, meanwhile, seemed well on his way to strong contention
for the mantle of “best player never to win a Slam,” having lost Wimbledon finals in 1992,
’94, and ’98, while at least making the quarterfinals of all three of the
others, reaching #2 in the rankings, and winning over 20 titles. And then, in
2001, when he hadn’t won a title of any kind in 3 years and was ranked #125 in
the world, Wimbledon gave him a wild card into the main draw, and he cut
through Carlos Moya (ranked #22 at the time), Roddick (#33), Greg Rusedski (#40), and Marat Safin
(#3) to reach the semis. Once there, he narrowly edged past hometown hero Tim
Henman (#11) in five sets, then took another five to beat Patrick Rafter (#10) in the final,
with the fifth set going to 9-7. He was the most experienced first-time Slam
champion ever, having come up empty 48 times before finally nailing down his
Wimbledon title; he was also the first wild card ever to capture a Slam. And
after this astonishing triumph, he never hoisted another trophy in any singles event.
28. Stan Smith 4.91
29. Marat Safin 4.88
30. Yevgeny Kafelnikov 4.76
31. Patrick Rafter 4.48
We’re clearly into the realm of abbreviated brilliance now.
Kafelnikov, Safin, and Rafter all spent time at #1, but it was less than 10
weeks in each case (Rafter managed the startling feat of holding the top spot for exactly
one week late in the 1999 season). Smith would likely have been in a similar
boat if the rankings had existed a year or two earlier; he won the US Open in
1971 and Wimbledon in ’72, then never made another Slam final.
32. Vitas Gerulaitis 4.30
33. Johan Kriek 4.16
34. Gustavo Kuerten 4.13
Caveats all over down here. Kriek’s two titles were in
back-to-back Australians in the early ‘80s, when most of the best players still
weren’t attending. Kuerten, meanwhile, won a trio of French Open titles, and
never made it as far as the semis in any other Slam (including the other times
he played Roland Garros). That makes him a good test case for how important you
think titles are in comparison to any other noteworthy result, which is a topic
we’ll revisit later.
35. Juan Carlos Ferrero 4.12
36. David Ferrer 3.90
Ferrer's appearance brings us to the answer to the last question I was
hoping to answer in this initial post: Who is the best player never to win a Slam? The
answer, at least as of now, is Ferrer. It’s “as of now” because, of course,
someone could pass him (Tomas Berdych, for instance, is #4 on the no-titles list), but also because
Ferrer’s career is not yet over – and while he’s not likely to win a Slam at
this point, he’s probably likelier than Goran Ivanisevic was in 2001.
Next up in Slam scores: An alternate set of weights for each round, along with a look at the differences in how both options evaluate players. That will be followed by breakdowns of the rankings Slam by Slam, a fuller listing of the best players without a Slam title, and a variety of other ways of looking at these results. Oh, and a post-Australian Open update once Melbourne finishes up in a couple of weeks. There's a lot we can do with these numbers, and I plan to do just about as much as I can think of.
Next up in Slam scores: An alternate set of weights for each round, along with a look at the differences in how both options evaluate players. That will be followed by breakdowns of the rankings Slam by Slam, a fuller listing of the best players without a Slam title, and a variety of other ways of looking at these results. Oh, and a post-Australian Open update once Melbourne finishes up in a couple of weeks. There's a lot we can do with these numbers, and I plan to do just about as much as I can think of.
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