The Maroon 2

It's pretty hard for me to pick against Jelena Jankovic during these WTA Championships in Doha. Among all the entrants, she's the one who seems most in the groove - she's played consistently, and consistently well, through the fall, she's riding the emotional high of having sewn up the year-end no. 1 ranking (another way to put that is that she's playing Doha with house money), and her game travels well by surface and continent. But. . .

Watch out for Venus and Serena Williams, Jelena.

Going into this tournament, Venus was 4-2 in WTA Championships play, and her best result was a semifinal. It's astonishing that she hasn't managed to win at least one of these things, although it isn't as if Serena has set the house afire either. She's got "just" one WTA YEC title to her name, and her overall record going in was 9-4. Given that each of the sisters has won a major this year (something none of the other women who have a realistic shot at the semis has achieved), we're set up for a grander finale that we might have expected to see.

The sisters are undefeated so far in Doha, and thanks to the way the semifinal pairings are made (the top finisher in the "white" group meets the no. 2 player from the "maroon" group, and the maroon 2 meets the white 1 - man, these round robins are complicated, if sensible!), they can meet in the final even though they're both in the same (maroon) group. If you didn't know better, you might think the round robin format was invented specifically to resolve the "Williams problem", which is having the two dominant women placed on the same side of the draw. Now, they can meet before a final and still end up playing the final. It's a beautiful thing, inn't it?

If either Venus or Serena wins the YEC, the claim that Jankovic was the no. 1 woman in tennis for 2008 will ring a little hollow, even though there's no arguing with a points-based ranking system. We've had cases like this before; the one I remember best occurred on the men's side of the game in 1977. That was the year Guillermo Vilas won the French and U.S. Opens, while Bjorn Borg skipped the Australian Open and Roland Garros, won Wimbledon, and pulled out of the Open with a bum shoulder during his fourth-round match with Dick Stockton.

At the time, there was no computer ranking system, which means you had no "interim" number ones based on weekly rankings. The player perceived as the best (with surface coming into play) during any given week was awarded the no. 1 seeding. The year-end no. 1 ranking probably enjoyed greater prestige at the time, although tennis had no official ranking body. Our own Tennis magazine annual rankings and those of now-defunct World Tennis magazine probably had the most heft. I'm not sure how WT did their rankings, but ours were based on a vote by an international panel of journalists (including yours truly).

Vilas had a brilliant '77, above and beyond his two-Slam performance. He won a record 17 tournaments, and earned more in prize money ($800,000-plus, which is still  less than he would have earned for winning the 2008 US Open) than he had in his five previous seasons as a pro. He played the heaviest schedule of any pro, accumulating a 145-14 record (that includes Davis Cup duty - Vilas led the Argentines to a 3-2 upset of the US, which earned his squad it's first-ever semfinal round appearance). And then there was that 53 match clay-court streak, which stood until Rafael Nadal shattered it (with 62) in 2006 (Nadal extended that streak to 81 in 2007) . Can y ou say, Iron Man?

It was one of the all-time great years, but. . .

There was also this little matter of Bjorn Borg. In terms of this discussion, Borg made a critical error in choosing to play World Team Tennis instead of the French Open, leaving the title for Vilas (clearly, second only to Borg as a clay-court player) to claim. Beyond that, Borg won 13 of the 20 tournaments he entered, and had the best winning percentage on the year (he was 81-7, for .920). Most significantly,  he was 3-0 over Vilas for the year (although one of those wins was the Masters tournament played in early 1978, which was YEC for '77 under the Grand Prix system I wrote about the other day). Borg also was 2-1 over the other player in the rankings mix, Jimmy Connors.

Borg's career H2H with Vilas was 17-5, and in '77 he was in the midst of an 11-0 run against Vilas, beginning in 1976 and lasting all the way until their last match in a minor event in the spring of 1980. The naked truth was that Borg owned Vilas - on every surface, on every continent.

The debate over the '77 rankings for Tennis was fierce, and I landed in the minority by going with Vilas. My argument was simple: You couldn't punish Vilas for Borg's decision to skip the French Open or having to pull out of the US Open. Nobody else won two Grand Slams that year, and the majors to me have always been the first consideration in subjective rankings. My point-of-view was shot down, and Tennis gave Borg the no. 1 ranking. Meanwhile, WT declared Vilas the no. 1.

That episode really fueled my skepticism about subjective rankings, although even in that era I (and a few others) operated less by feeling and a random examination of the record than by a set of priorities (or, in the case of my Italian colleague, Rino Tomassi, a complex and elegant points system of his very own). In my mind, performance in Grand Slams was the no. 1 criteria, followed by winning percentage for the year, and then H2H numbers. Others took the liberty to be subjective in the most fundamental way - awarding their no. 1 spot to the person whose game they most liked, from an aesthetic perspective (thankfully, that voter at least restricted her consideration to top five-grade players).

Having been through those rankings wars a number of times, I welcomed a points-based ranking system and am willing to live with the shortcomings that pop up now and then. Now imagine if we wouldn't have a points-based ranking system today - rather, next Monday, after the YEC is over. In my mind, Jankovic's failure to win a major would immediately knocks her from the top rung, and unless Venus and Serena flame out badly in the coming days, I probably would go with one of the sisters.

Hail, I might even co-rank them no. 1, which in a bizarre way might represent an interesting poetic truth about those girls, and their impact on the game - highlighting the irony, seeming inequity - and perhaps glory? - of such an individualistic game.

Now, if Jankovic goes on to win the YEC, I might have to re-think that theoretical scenario.

[[Correction: hat tip to GVGirl for pointing out in an email that there was in fact a weekly computer ranking in '77, but it was still in its nascent phase and nobody looked to it as the final authority on year-end ranking or even seeding issues at the time.]]