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Apr-15-21
 | | saffuna: <While Williams has enjoyed enormous success, I have read of her performing below par because she could not get 'up' for lesser events during her career.> I personally judge players' careers primarily on the majors. And to a lesser degree on the Masters events like Miami, Indian Wells, Canada and italy. I pay almost no attention to the week-to-week tournaments. Serena may have played less than her best at a lot of tournaments, but more to the point, for many years she has played very few tournaments aside from the majors and masters. |
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Apr-15-21
 | | keypusher: <fabelhaft> Thanks, I knew nothing about Mo Connolly except that she played tennis long ago. What an unlucky life! Reinforces my belief that horseback riding is a terrible idea. <saffuna> Give us your top 10! (And any additional color you wish to provide.) |
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Apr-15-21
| | saffuna: The mother of a college friend of mine played on the amateur tour in the late 40s. Maureen Connolly was her ballgirl while training. |
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Apr-16-21
| | saffuna: Top ten women tennis players...
I'll make a list of post-1960 players, as I don't know enough about Connolly, Lenglen, Moody, etc. Also based on accomplishments, not an attempt to say who would win between different players. 1. Graf
2. Serena
3. Navratilova
4. Court
5. Evert
6. Seles
7. King
Then there's a large group including Henin, Venus, Davenport, Hingis, Clijsters, Goolagong and Sanchez-Vicario. I put Seles on the list somewhat arbitrarily, as she was winning everything except Wimbledon for three years, and then was stabbed. Without that she might have been the best player ever. Billie Jean King is an interesting case. She had a good serve and net game, but her ground strokes were average. She won primarily on pure will. |
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Apr-16-21
| | keypusher: <saffuna> Thanks, looks like a good list, which coming from me doesn't mean a lot. I appreciate the effort. But last year you <were> trying to rate tennis players on how they'd do using the same rackets and strings, right? |
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Apr-16-21
| | saffuna: Yes, but I find it much more difficult with the women. I recommend watching some Chris Evert matches. She doesn't hit the ball very hard, certainly not compared to today's players, but she hits it perfectly almost every time. Weight forward, racket out front, on the sweet spot. She was eventually overpowered by Navratilova. but her game was great. |
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Apr-16-21
| | keypusher: <saffuna: Yes, but I find it much more difficult with the women.> OK, you asked for it: what's the men's list? |
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Apr-16-21
| | saffuna: Oh Jesus.
1. Djokovic
2. Federer
3. Nadal/Sampras
5. Laver
6. Borg
7. McEnroe
8. Connors/Agassi/Lendl
11. Rosewall/Murray/Becker/Edberg
I find it difficult to rank Becker and Edberg, who played very well on fast courts. I may have Lendl ranked too low, especially given his great importance in the development of the game. |
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Apr-16-21
| | keypusher: <saffuna> Thanks! I'm not going to fight you about it, because I couldn't hold up my end, and your list looks sensible to me anyway. What's striking is how "present" the men's list is compared to the women's. Three of the top four men are playing today, and the fourth hasn't been gone all that long. While for the women, three of the top four are clearly retired, and one is close to retirement. In fact, in your entire women's list, only Serena is even arguably active. It's a little like chess. On the men's side, Magnus is clearly in the running for the GOAT. Among the women, the retired J. Polgar is clearly the best, and the only other candidate who is post-Polgar is Hou Yifan. An thoughts why that might be? |
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Apr-16-21
| | saffuna: I think it's just a fluke that the three best players of all time happen to be playing right now. And Murray would still be up there were it not for injuries. One of the great surprises of sports history is that Rafael Nadal is still at the top at age 34. Ten years ago few people thought he could last much longer. Though I see he lost to somebody named Rublev today at Monte Carlo, a tournament he has won eleven times. I really don't know what to do with the players from the wood racket era, beyond Laver and Rosewall. The games Newcombe, Stan Smith, Nastase, Roche, Ashe, Emerson, etc. played looks entirely different, almost like slow motion. I swear the top women today hit harder than those men did. Stan Smith, by the way, has gotten rich (or richer) in the past ten or fifteen years or so, as the original Stan Smith Adidas models became highly popular again. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in one of his books. |
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Apr-16-21
| | saffuna: Here's an oddity I've never found a reason for, aside from chance: The top Swedish players have had short careers as top players. All of them. Borg quit at age 26. Wilander won three majors at age 23, then never won again. Stefan Edberg's last year as a threat to win a major was at age 27. Anders Jarryd and Joachim Nystrom were top ten players at age 22 and virtually gone by age 25. Jonas Bjorkman is the only one I can think of who maintained his level into his thirties, but of course his level wasn't nearly as high. |
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Apr-20-21
| | keypusher: <saffuna> thanks for all this interesting stuff. < saffuna: Here's an oddity I've never found a reason for, aside from chance:
The top Swedish players have had short careers as top players. All of them.> See also: top American chess players (not all of them, though). Why are there no great American male tennis players anymore, incidentally? |
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Apr-20-21
 | | perfidious: <keypusher….Why are there no great American male tennis players anymore, incidentally?> Perhaps the answer to this is the reply Keres gave ca 1950 when asked why more strong players were not being produced in Soviet Union: <'There is more to do nowadays.'> |
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| Apr-20-21 | | valiant: <saffuna: The top Swedish players have had short careers as top players. All of them. Borg quit at age 26. Wilander won three majors at age 23, then never won again. Stefan Edberg's last year as a threat to win a major was at age 27. Anders Jarryd and Joachim Nystrom were top ten players at age 22 and virtually gone by age 25.> Hard-hitting Robin Söderling ...
"His career highlights include reaching two consecutive finals at the French Open in 2009 and 2010, and an ATP World Tour Masters 1000 title at the 2010 Paris Masters. He was the first player to defeat Rafael Nadal at the French Open. Soderling played his last professional game at only age 26 after contracting a lingering bout of mononucleosis." |
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| Apr-20-21 | | areknames: <The top Swedish players have had short careers as top players> Let's not forget Mikael Pernfors who came out of literally nowhere - he had been playing college tennis in the US - to reach the final in the 1986 French Open at 22 before gradually reverting back to relative obscurity. |
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Apr-20-21
| | saffuna: Hard to say. There are promising players, then they don't quite make it. Sampras and Agassi were of course great players into the early 2000s, Agassi a few years more than Sampras. Andy Roddick looked like he would be the next one when he won the 2003 US Open, but after that he continually came up just a bit short. He had a couple of clear weaknesses that he never corrected, otherwise he might have won a couple more majors. Donald Young and Sam Querrey were supposed to be great players, but Young went nowhere and Querrey didn't get very far. The other top American today, John Isner, is more an overachiever. He's gotten far by working hard despite not having great talent (aside from his serve). At the same time, Canada has several good young players. |
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Apr-20-21
| | saffuna: Soderling was a good player, his career cut short by injury or illness. He was very different from the other Swedish players, prickly and confrontational instead of quiet and imperturbable. |
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Apr-20-21
| | saffuna: Pernfors just had that one moment at the French Open in 1986, rolling over Boris Becker before getting rolled by Lendl in the final. |
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Apr-20-21
| | perfidious: <saffuna....Andy Roddick looked like he would be the next one when he won the 2003 US Open, but after that he continually came up just a bit short. He had a couple of clear weaknesses that he never corrected, otherwise he might have won a couple more majors....> This brings Mecking to mind: won an Interzonal twice running, but got nowhere at Candidates level and never quite overcame a weakness in positional play enough to consistently win top-level tournaments before being forced out of chess for many years by myasthenia gravis. |
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| Apr-22-21 | | valiant: <areknames: <The top Swedish players have had short careers as top players> Let's not forget Mikael Pernfors who came out of literally nowhere -> Thomas Johansson, the winner of Australian Open 2002. Magnus Norman and Thomas Enqvist ... |
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Apr-22-21
| | saffuna: I thought I mentioned them. In any case, they were second-tier players, not on the Borg/Edberg/Wilander level. Jonas Bjorkman is another one. Johansson did play the best set of tennis I ever saw. No errors of any kind, if he touched the ball it went in. The only points he lost were on clean winners. |
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| Apr-27-21 | | valiant: I forgot Magnus Larsson, the Davis Cup hero.
<Some of the most significant highlights of Larsson's career came in 1994. He won that year's Grand Slam Cup, defeating World No. 1 Pete Sampras in the final in four sets 7–6, 4–6, 7–6, 6–4. Larsson also reached the semi-finals of the 1994 French Open, and was part of the Swedish team which won the 1994 Davis Cup. He won singles rubbers in the Davis Cup final in Moscow in December against both Yevgeny Kafelnikov and Alexander Volkov, as Sweden defeated Russia, 4–1.Larsson played in the final of the Davis Cup again in 1997. And again he won both his singles rubbers – against Pete Sampras and Michael Chang – and was on the winning team as Sweden thrashed the United States 5–0.> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnu... |
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Apr-27-21
| | saffuna: As I remember, Larsson hit the ball great and with power. I mean overpowering. But he was slow, couldn't cover the court well enough. |
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| Apr-27-21 | | areknames: <Thomas Johansson, the winner of Australian Open 2002. Magnus Norman and Thomas Enqvist ...> I'm faintly aware of all those guys, but since I lost all interest in tennis about 30 years ago I'm more concerned about another long-forgotten player like Henrik Sundström who won a series of titles in 1984, reached a #6 ranking and defeated McEnroe and Connors to help give Sweden a 5-0 win in the Davis Cup final. After that, at the age of 20, he practically disappeared from the stage. |
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Apr-27-21
| | saffuna: Right. As did several of the Swedish players.
I watched him roll over McEnroe on the slow clay in that Davis Cup. |
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