By Pete Bodo
So, with one rubber played so far in some precincts, I have to ask: does any nation come up as big in Davis Cup as Israel? Harel Levy just secured the first point of the tie, with an upset of Igor Andreev. And Fernando Verdasco certainly did his part to get this weekend off to a compelling start, winning the first rubber against Germany's Andreas Beck - after Verdasco, having won the first set, dropped the next two.
But let's leave that for now - I want to amplify a comment I made in my last post, The S Train, where, almost as an off-the-cuff observation, I suggested that the cutoff to greatness, among the women players, ought to be 10 majors or better (for the men, I floated the idea of six). A number of you picked up on this and challenged the premise. Ruth - and we all know how she burns for fairness - said the women and men should be judged by the same Grand Slam yardstick, as they play the same major tournaments.
Charles, who also objected to my baseline, did due diligence in the research department, identifying the only six women who won 10 or mores slams and were factors in the Open era. They are: Margaret Smith Court, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert, Steffi Graf and Serena Williams. He also pointed out that the list of "great" players who never hit double figures in majors included such luminaries as Monica Seles, Maureen Connolly (pre-Open era, but included for purposes that will become clear below), Evonne Goolagong, Maria Bueno, Justine Henin and Venus Williams.
I think Ruth is overlooking the fact that the great women outperform the great men by almost a factor of 2. Moody, Court, Graf, Evert and Navratilova each won 18 or more majors (Court leading the charge with 24), suggesting that it's simply easier for the best women to dominate. The degree of difficulty seems to me higher for the men; Roger Federer is the only male player who's even within shouting distance of the top four women. So while it would seem fair too apply the same standard to men and women, it's no more realistic than it is to expect men and women to compete against each on an equal footing on the court - or in the pool, boxing ring, or on a soccer pitch.
Charles, I think, made my point even better than I did while arguing against it. My baseline for greatness accommodates seven players. That seems like about the right number, if you want to create any kind of hierarchy of achievement. I'm sometimes of two minds about this; just how crowded should it be at the top? Any player who's won multiple majors is, almost by definition, a "great" player. But if the cutoff creates too big a tent, merely counting accomplishments becomes a silly exercise. Federer has 15 majors, Mats Wilander has 7, Yevgeny Kafenikov has two. Why bother to distinguish between them?
The debate this encourages is as old as Linnaeus himself, the father of taxonomy, the science (or is it art?) of naming and classifying living organism (that would include even Kafelnikov). The Linnean society embraces two constantly warring camps (some might even say two distinct types of individuals), the "lumpers", who tend to overlook minor distinctions and resist over-classification, and the "splitters", those whose tolerance for even seemingly insignificant differences between similar organisms is very low. My own view is that there are indeed "two kinds of people in the world (as in, those who can do math and those who can't)": those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't. But that's a digression. . .
By nature, I believe I'm a lumper (and you?). I don't have the requisite patience and love of hair-splitting to be a good. . . splitter. But this is one area in which, once I lump all great players together, I start splitting - simply because I think there are enough qualitative and quantifiable differences in play to demand it. Does anyone really doubt that winning one Wimbledon and one French Open is a better "two majors" record than winning two Australian Open titles as did Johan Kriek, during a time when the top players couldn't be bothered to play Down Under?
What I am, mostly, is hamstrung - torn by competing impulses to lump and split, and that's because of those aforementioned, clear differences.
Charles makes the point that Connolly was, arguably, the "greatest" player of all time, and we all know that a simply comparison of achievement-by-age suggests that Seles was on track to surpass all the other 10-plus champs. Unfortunately, both Connolly and Seles had their careers cut short - Connolly by virtue of a horrific equestrian accident that left her paralyzed, Seles by an unpleasant attack by a knife-wielding maniac (and Graf fan) that left her with a flesh wound and incapacitations that seemed overwhelmingly psychological (a subject I'll re-visit soon).
That Connolly and Seles were denied long and fully realized careers is a shame, but you can't quantify what they were unable to achieve. They did what they did, and doesn't everyone have a story? It may sound cruel, but as intriguing as the stories are, they don't add a single title to the record book, so they remain suspended in the ether of the "what if?" Had I chosen particle physics instead of tennis journalism, I might have been a Nobel-prize winner, right?
Ahem.
On the men's side, the best players who never got over the six major hump I've built include (in the Open era): Arthur Ashe, Jim Courier, Gustavo Kuerten, Stan Smith and Guillermo Vilas (let's not include Rafael Nadal, who has six but is still in the very early stages of his career). At first glance, the six-major boundary seems legitimate. Bumping it up to seven majors knocks a number of other worthy players (Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg) out of the most elite category. And that whittles the cream-of-the crop down to Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, John Newcombe, Bjorn Borg, Jimmy Connors, Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras, Ivan Lendl, John McEnroe, Mats Wilander and Roger Federer.
All in all, I like that list better, because it constitutes an Open-era Top 11. That's five more players than the women have at the top of my pecking order, which I believe reflects the "scale" of the respective games handily. But if you apply the seven-Slam template to the women, you wind up with 10 names. Is that too many, given the way the very best women dominated Grand Slam events? I think so: the achievements of Court, Navratilova et al are of a higher order than those of the seven-slammers - even if there's a nice symmetry between men and women if you embrace the seven-win template for the ladies.
In the end, though, you're more likely to avoid getting punched in the face in a bar if, instead of drawing the line at some arbitrary number of majors won, you just rank your all-time Top 10s by titles won. That would bump Goolagong, Seles, Venus Williams and Henin into the women's Top 10, as well as avoid the double-standard to which Ruth takes exception.
One other note on the title-bagger front: I see Rod Laver as the most legitimate challenger to Federer for the GOAT title (just what y'all want, another GOAT discussion!), although the circumstantial nature of my thinking prohibits me for giving him a benefit of doubt that I deny Connolly and Seles. Still, a few things about Laver's record aren't mentioned often enough, or not interpreted clearly.
Because Laver had one foot in each of the two eras, six of his majors (the ones earned in the amateur, pre-1968 period) are given short shrift. While it's true that the very best players turned professional after making their marks at the majors as amateurs, let's remember that the pool of viable pros - those who could actually make a living playing for pay - was woefully small, albeit impressive. It isn't as if everyone else still playing the majors was just another Chauncy Tipplehoffer III, having a go at Wimbledon while on summer break from Harvard. The tour, even then, was awash in tennis lifers - talented players who simply preferred to endure the hardships (all those parties in places like Newport, all those weeks spent sunning themselves between bouts of forehand-polishing on the Riviera) and uncertainties of the amateur touring player's way of life.
The amateur-only events were also the launching pad for professionalism, not a separate, minor league. If Open tennis had not arrived, any man with designs on the French Open title in 2005, and probably for at least one year later, would probably have to had to face Rafael Nadal. Players turned pro at various times during that era, depending on a vague combination of factors including commercial appeal. That is, a seemingly dour Czech like Lendl would probably have had to labor in the amateur ranks for far longer than did, say, the electric Pancho Gonzales. Laver's period of domination was launched soon after he was runner-up at Wimbledon in 1959 to Alex Olmedo. Laver was the runner-up in nine of his next twelve Grand Slam appearances before he turned pro (this included his swan-song Grand Slam of 1962).
Add it all up and it's fair to say that Laver was playing tennis about as well as he ever would for three years as an amateur, which somewhat deflates the simplistic idea that all the good players were pros. For two full years as an amateur, he probably would have held his own against the pros; an examination of his long-term record bears that out.
And there's also this: in his six years of exile, he missed 24 opportunities to win majors. This was undoubtedly at the height of his powers as a player, and if you just look at what Federer did at a comparable period in his development but in just half that time (8 majors between the beginning of 2005 and the end of 2007, you get a pretty good idea of just how much opportunity Laver missed). To me, being denied those chances is an even more telling fact than the over-devaluation of his record in his best amateur years.
In his 6:44 comment yesterday at S Train post, VC made a point that seems inescapble to me when you look at Laver's record: Look for a surprisingly large number of players in the coming years to challenge the 14-major record established by Sampras six years ago. Or, to put in another way, perhaps 18 or 20 will eventually become the "new 14.
Okay, everyone, after Wimbledon and this week just ending, I'm all wrote out. This weekend, I hope to finish Larry McMurtry's picaresque tetralogy known The BerryBender narratives - an often hilarious and sometimes touching tale of an imperious, mortifyingly grand English family afoot in the wilderness of the early American west.