Podcast Episode 109: Joe Posnanski on the Australian Open and GOAT Lists

The podcast returns for 2022 from a long layoff to welcome back Joe Posnanski, author of the Baseball 100 and many other wonderful books. Joe covers all sports on Substack, where you can subscribe, even if he doesn’t write about tennis as much as he ought to.

We start by talking about all things Australian Open–what it means for Rafa’s case as the greatest of all time, if we’ll ever forget about the saga that kept Djokovic out of the tournament, how Daniil Medvedev stacks up against the rest of the field, whether Ashleigh Barty is pulling away from the WTA pack, and which other women we’re expecting to see emerge to challenge her.

We also dive into the general subject of Greatest-of-All-Time lists, the subject of Joe’s book, his current American football project, and my just-launched Tennis 128. We consider how tennis greatness differs from that of other sports, how to handle career gaps such as wars and injuries, and balancing algorithms with gut feelings. We wrap up by giving Joe a speed round of tennis GOAT questions, one toughie after another asking him to untangle the trickiest debates in the sport’s history.

Thanks for listening!

(Note: this episode is about 91 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use the feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.

Music: Everyone Has Gone Home by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2020. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: spinningmerkaba

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