Wimbledon started on Monday, which gave me—finally!—something to cheer about.
I’ve been a tennis nerd since my early teens, and unlike many sports, tennis only gets more interesting as you age because, along with baseball, it is the most philosophically beautiful sport. It combines the athleticism of basketball with the mindfulness of golf and the viciousness of boxing—with a dollop of Olympic patriotism, for measure.
However, we are currently mired in the nuclear winter of American tennis. There is only one American player of consequence and she is of the age where she should be fading. (The fact that, at age 34, she is not fading, and has the physique of a middle linebacker, is the great, usually unspoken, concern.) There are no elite American players coming up through the ranks and no one in tennis knows if this is (a) the quirk of a fallow generation; (b) the result of young American athletes having so many other sports options that the talent pool for tennis is, from now on, likely to be quite shallow; or (c) the consequence of the speed of the game having been slowed down to such a degree that American players, almost all of whom are raised on fast hard courts, are now at a structural disadvantage compared to players raised in the clay-court game.
But it’s not just the Americans. The entire tennis scene is in one big downturn. Men’s tennis is dominated by the most uninspiring and unlikable champion since Ivan Lendl. Women’s tennis is the opposite, with a landscape so flat that it looks like central Indiana. Which, it turns out, is also uninspiring.
The central disappointment in both the men’s and women’s games is that it feels as though an entire generation of players has basically failed to mature the way they should have: Richard Gasquet, Tomas Berdych, Jo Tsonga, Gael Monfils, Fernando Verdasco—elite men who have gotten to the age of 30 (or almost, in the case of Monfils) without winning a major. On the women’s side, the parity has been so extreme that over the last decade there have been moments when it seemed like none of the elite players even really wanted to win a major.
Most pure-tennis fans will be watching Wimbledon this week with the uneasy sense that the game’s best days may be behind it.
All of this is a wind-up for me to complain to you about ESPN’s big list of the top 20 players of all time. This is such a garbage list—such an obvious play for hate-clicks—that I don’t even want to give you the link.
(Okay, we’re all adults. And you can make your own life choices. So I’ll give you the link on the condition that you promise not to click on it. Deal? Okay. Here it is. Now remember, you gave your word.)
ESPN’s top two are solid: Roger Federer and Steffi Graf. I don’t think anyone else even merits discussion. With Federer, it isn’t just his record 17-major wins that stamp his greatness. There’s also the fact that he had runs of ten and then eight consecutive finals at majors. (The only other guy to come close made seven finals in a row, once.) And that pales next to his streak of 23 consecutive Grand Slam semifinals. (The number two player on that list had 14.)
If you’re not a tennis guy, let me give you an analogy: Imagine a baseball player who had Ruth’s home run record combined with Ted Williams’s batting averages combined with DiMaggio’s hitting streak. That’s Federer.
Graf is substantially similar except that she also changed the way the women’s game was played and won a golden slam (all four Grand Slams and an Olympic gold medal in the same year).
But after those two, the ESPN list gets ridiculous. Number three is Serena Williams, who is only in the argument for top three women of all time, and isn’t even a lock for that. Then there’s Martina Navratilova at #4. There’s just no way either of those two should be ranked ahead of Rod Laver or Pete Sampras—let alone Margaret Court, who clocks in at an insane #15.
And you know why Court is ranked so low? #Feminism. (Duh.)
Court is the women’s career slam leader, with 24 majors. Plus she won the Grand Slam. And she’s the all-time leader in singles titles, too. Court was basically the Michael Jordan of women’s tennis from 1960 to 1977.
But a funny thing happened to women’s tennis in the late 1970s—it became a hotbed of political posturing. And if you were a big name in women’s tennis, you were expected to be down with the feminist political project in a very public way. And boy, howdy, were Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova down with it. Margaret Court was not known for her feminism. She was known for her tennis.
Which is why, despite the fact that Billie Jean King—who has exactly half the number of major wins as Court—ESPN ranks BJK ahead of Court. Because, in case you hadn’t noticed, ESPN is down with the feminist project, too.
In other outrages, ESPN ranks Novak Djokovic ahead of Rafael Nadal, despite the fact that Nadal is second on the all-time Slam list—and he did all of his work contemporaneously with the GOAT, Federer.
They also put McEnroe and Connors at #11 and #12—which is, again, ridiculous. Connors has eight major wins, McEnroe has seven. This is media bias, pure and simple. Neither of them is fit to carry Roy Emerson’s (12 slams) jock. But McEnroe and Connors are outrageous! And were on TV all the time! So they must be better …
For the record, the proper ranking of top ten tennis players, all-time, goes: Federer, Graf, Laver, Court, Sampras, Nadal, Navratilova, Borg, S. Williams, Emerson.
And remember, you promised you wouldn’t click that link.
