The Six-to-Nine Club

Today, I want to talk about men's tennis, and from a historical perspective.

Unlike many watershed moments, the creation of the Open era in tennis has lived up to all of its promises, and in many regards surpassed them. For some of you young 'uns, who may not be familiar with tennis history, here is the short version:

Before 1968, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and its member nations (like the USTA or LTA) were resolute in allowing only amateurs to play in their official events, which included the four Grand Slam events (which are essentially the national championships of Australia, France, the UK and the US.).

This was a stance based on values and convictions about the role of sports in society. You were supposed to play sports as a hobby and avocation, not a profession. Sports was seen as a means, not an end - the end was not excellence in your chosen sport (and the rewards that might bring) but in your life as a citizen and productive member of society. In sports, you learned about things like teamwork, leadership, dealing with pressure, adversity, success and failure. Sports helped you build a healthy body, which helped you have a healthy mind. All in all, it wasn't a horrible idea by any means, and we may yet see it return to vogue. Stranger things have happened.

Because of that moralistic view, the "professional" tennis player was usually viewed with the same suspicion as a professional gambler - he was a bum, disinclined to work at something more productive than fun and games, hanging on to youth and an irresponsible, itinerant way of life. That all changed when the ITF, faced with a growing brigade of professional tennis players decided to "open" the game to pros (It seems that all of those pros emerged from the amateur ranksa, because all those pure-as-driven-snow amateurs much preferred to play tennis for a living than join the Clergy or help rule a subject nation). Starting in 1968, with a few start-up glitches that were quickly fixed, anybody who was good enough to gain entry into Wimbledon or the US Open was entitled to play.

This new, Open era turned out to be gasoline poured on a brush fire that became the tennis boom. The sudden interest in tennis began in the US, at a time when the world still took its cues, almost reflexively, from America. Tennis fever spread, and quickly. It was a cinch that the game would grow in nations (like France, or the UK) that had a strong tennis tradition. What was somewhat surprising was how rapidly it grew in nations that did not. It was remarkable, how swiftly skilled players from places like Spain, Argentina, Sweden, (the former) Yugoslavia and other outposts popped onto the international radar.

This was the promise of the Open era at work: the Lords of Tennis predicted that in the new professional era, the opportunities created by an energetic market would create an enormous, international tennis boom. Freed from its fuddy-duddy, old world morality and restrictive conventions, the game would grow by leaps and bounds. The number of great players, as well as the overall level of play, would go through the roof. Once the melodramatic "tennis bum" stigma was lifted, professional tennis players would be powerful evangelists, leading millions of kids (or at least the parents of millions of kids) to embrace and take up the game.

This has all come to pass. All the promises have been fulfilled. But, keeping all this in mind, the Open era has produced one trend that is positively mind-blowing because it is so counter-intuitive. That trend can be summed up in one sentence: Roger Federer is on track to become the Grand Slam singles title record holder, shattering the  record (14) established by Pete Sampras in 2002, in as few as 10 months.

Think about that: the Grand Slam singles title record that had been untouched for over 30 years when Sampras surpassed it probably will be eclipsed fewer than seven years after it was established. No matter how I try to wrap my mind around this fact, I have trouble. Here's why: If the number of great players has increased, and the overall level of play has gotten that much better (both of which seem inarguable), how can the game still produce such dominant players? I can accept one (Sampras) as simple chance, but two? There's got to be something else going on here.

Let's start here: Once the Open era got rolling, it was assumed that the degree of participation and the level of play would militate against anyone dominating the game. Logic dictated that we were forever leaving the era when a Rod Laver could ride herd over the game, and entering a phase when sheer diversity and a deep talent pool would ensure that the very best players would all win a similar number of slams (3? 5? Maybe 7?), and march lock-step into the hall-of-fame as equals.

I can attest that this was the conventional wisdom, because I was around when the first-wave of great players hit the ground running. Jimmy Connors was the first of the great champions who won all of his big titles during the Open era. When Connors swept three of the four Grand Slam events in 1974 (he did not play Roland Garros), then reached the same three finals the following year, there were whispers that we were watching the Greatest of All Time.

Then came Borg, and our GOAT pre-occupations shifted.

Then came McEnroe, and who ever saw anything like that? It was Cubism following Impressionism, and a fair number of pundits asked, "Is McEnroe the greatest, ever?"  Well, it turned out that McEnroe's own window of Goathood was roughly five years, and then Lend entered the debate. Never mind. You get the point. This wanton willingness to engage the GOAT debate every time some new quick-draw artist showed up was understandable. These guys did raise the ante, year by year. And the trend to premature canonization was driven by the underlying conviction that in this new Open era, a guy who won four or five Slams at a relatively early stage of his career had to be something exceptional.

But, by definition, he couldn't be. Hail, it's impossible that all those guys are the GOAT, right?

The quandry, of course, was that this was not supposed to happen in the open era; the swift, upward arc of so many players flew in the face of all wisdom and logic. And it only got crazier. As the Open era matured and fulfilled its promises, McEnroe and company established the Six-to-Nine Club as a new a baseline for, well, let's call it Group Goathood. Fine. It was kind of fun to anoint every potential seven-Slam winner the potential GOAT, until he ran out of steam and joined the other Six-to-Niners on the sidelines. A kind of detente was achieved.

But along came Sampras, and all those GOATS suddenly started to look like the proverbial chopped liver.

Once Sampras joined the Six-to-Nine Club, I decided to ask the Big Question that nobody thought relevant any longer in the new, Open era. Could Sampras break Emerson's singles title record? Of course not, I was told, time and again. Too many good players. Too many different surfaces. Too much travel, blah-blah-blah.

The responses I got to my question convinced me of one thing, and one thing only: That if Sampras did not complete the task, it would be just as much because the mission was seen as impossible as because it actually was impossible. My inquiries convinced me that everyone had bought into a self-perpetuating myth of what was - and wasn't - possible in the new Open era. And only one man (Bob Brett, who did time as the coach for Andres Gomez, Goran Ivanisievic, and Boris Becker) believed that anything was still possible - in fact, he thought that the advances in the game and its support structure (including simple things like easy, first-class jet travel) somewhat compensated for the drawbacks. Bob knew that what was possible had more to do with what people thought possible than with the controlling realities of the day (How strange it was, years later, to hear Justine Henin famously say, "Impossible is Nothing").

Sampras did not win the Grand Slam, but the way he shattered Emerson's mark proved Brett right. And just as Sampras shoved the Six-to-Nine Club into the background, so The Mighty Fed now threatens to push Sampras into the shadows. There are only two possibilities here, folks: either the Open era is producing a greater, rather than lesser, number of prolific champions, or we just happen to be in the midst of a unique historical moment - a brief and shining time when two of the only four or five men on the GOAT short list are here to entertain and inspire us.

I can think of only one counter-argument here, and it goes roughly like this: the Six-to-Nine Club is an overrated group of champions and as the Open era advances we should expect more, rather than fewer, champions who are capable of winning 15, 20, 25 Grand Slam singles titles, thanks to these two related facts:

1 - As the game goes on, it becomes that much easier for a potentially great player to maximize his potential. That is, the chance that the Nigerian kid who may be the "next Roger Federer" actually becomes the next Roger is better today than every before.

2 - Tennis is, and always has been, about dominant players lording it over their rivals, and a player is not dominant in relation to the number of rivals he has, or the skill of those rivals; he is simply dominant until someone more dominant comes along.

So it's possible that the Six-to-Nine Clubbers earned their reputations in a period of transition, when an awe of the Open era and typical generational self-infatuation led us to overvalue them, one after the another, until Sampras exposed the error of our ways - and The Mighty Fed went him one better.

Here's something else to support that idea. The Six-to-Niners were part of the first and second wave of the Open era. As such, their records were judged against the records of men like Laver, Emerson and Ken Rosewall - all of whom missed numerous Grand Slams because they were pros before the dawn of the Open era. The simple fact is, the Six-to-Niners played a heck of a lot more Grand Slam tennis at the peak of their careers, and therefore look better than they really were.

You think TMF is not just a genius, but one standing head and shoulders above his peers? Consider this: Laver (11 majors) achieved a calendar-year Grand Slam in 1962.  Because he turned pro before the Open era, he did not compete at majors for the next five years. He reached two Slam finals in Year One of Open tennis (winning one), and completed another calendar-year Slam in 1969. So lets go right down the middle and concede Laver two majors for each of the five years he was out - which is not an outlandish concession by any stretch. That means Laver would have finished his career with 20 Grand Slams, which is precisely the kind of number that TMF is on-track to bag.

No matter how you cut it or interpret it, the idea that the changes wrought by the Open era have led not to parity, but its opposite, is an astonishing jumping off point - the kind of fact you would find in that recent best-seller, Freakonomics.