June 27th, 2013
Yesterday was, by far, the weirdest day of grand slam tennis I’ve ever seen. Injuries, walk-throughs, Federer out in the 2nd round. Maybe the craziest stat of the day: Seven players who have held the #1 ranking–seven of them!–lost in one day. That’s nuts.
Looking at the draws the rest of the way in, Djokovic and Serena are obviously the favorites. But one quick thought about Serena:
Win or lose, she’s top three women ever, right? Court, Graf, and no one else is close. One of the remarkable aspects of her career is that she was dominant both early and late.
But I wonder about this late-stage dominance. A lot of it is Serena, of course. She rebuilt her body and decided to take tennis seriously again. Yet at least part of this story is the total implosion of the generation of tennis players behind her.
Serena was born in 1981 and didn’t become a dominant singles player until 2002. She succeeded a generation of top women including Lindsay Davenport (1976), Mary Pierce (1975), Jennifer Capriati (1976). All of them won majors. Serena’s own generation includes her sister Venus, Kim Clijsters (1983), Justine Henin (1982), and Martina Hingis (1980). This is probably the Greatest Generation of women’s tennis because it features four players who were legitimate, long-time #1s with multiple majors. It’s an unbelievably loaded cohort. And interestingly enough, Serena didn’t fully dominate them until most of them had cleared the field.
Look at the list of women’s major champions and you see generational waves coming in every seven years or so. But that never really happened for the group of players that came after Serena’s generation. You have Maria Sharapova (1987) and Victoria Azarenka (1989) as multiple major winners. But that’s it. Ana Ivanovic (1987) won one French. Petra Kvitova (1990) picked up one Wimbledon. (Most of the freak, one-off winners, they’ve come from Serena’s generation with wins from journeyman such as Fancesca Schiavone, Li Na, or Samantha Stosur.) No other women born after 1987 have won majors. No woman born after 1990 has won one. Heck, only one woman in today’s top 25 was born after 1990.
That’s amazing.
The crop of women tennis players born after 1983 has been an incredible bust (with the sole exception of Sharapova). The failure of the generation of players including Wozniacki, Radwanska, Kirilenko, Cibulkova, Radwanska, etc. is, to my mind one of the great untold stories of tennis. And you can’t really talk about Serena’s late-career success without taking account of it.
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Not sure I would put Serena in the top 3. Court and Graf clearly above her, I’d add Navratilova as well. I’d probably rank Serena fourth, Evert fifth.
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I’d rather hear Kournikova’s grunt than any of theirs.
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Hederman: Serena had no dominant rival? You mean other than her sister, Venus, who won 7 Grand Slams? Venus is a top-15 (could be talked into top-10) all-time. Or Justine Henin, who also won 7 Grand Slams and is probably top-10 all-time as well. JVL’s entire point is that Serena’s generation is the greatest of all-time, and I’m inclined to agree.
Serena is top-3 all-time, and if you had to take any female tennis player to win a match at their prime against any other female tennis player, I think Serena in her prime beats anyone else in a singles match. -
“The crop of women tennis players born after 1983 has been an incredible bust (with the sole exception of Sharapova).”
I disagree — I believe Ms. Sharapova does indeed have an incredible bust.
And I say that because personally, I don’t much care to talk about Ms. Williams’ late-career success. Or her early-career success. Or her mid-career slump. But I’m of the group that thinks the only thing better than a women’s tennis match with one Williams sister is one with no Williams sisters, so you may not want to pay my remarks any mind.
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Go to Google.com and type in
Is Serena
and see what the Google prompts are. You can do it with other prominent athletes.
Hederman June 27, 2013 at 4:03 pm
Not sure I’d put Serena in top 3. She’s handicapped by the fact that she has no dominant rivals. Even if she wasn’t playing, it’s hard to see anyone else winning more than a handful of titles. It’s comparatively easy to see Chris Evert winning a bunch without Martini or Graf winning even more without Seles. And w/o those Seles/Graf, how many more Slams does Sanchez-Vicario win? 3, 5 more? (BTW, does Graf make top 3 without the Seles stabbing? Seles was clearly better than Graf at the time and almost pulled off the grand slam in ’92. Then the stabbing and Graff whens 7 slams while Seles was absent or a shell of herself. Where does alternate history go?)
Serena is probably the most dominant player since Graf in the pre-Seles days. But as you point out, there’s a huge benefit to the fact that there is no compelling second best. Sharapova is closest but not a worthy rival