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!)
Music: Everyone Has Gone Home by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2020. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: spinningmerkaba
A few contenders for the top spot, posing with the husband of another contender
Scroll down or click here for the list of players published so far.
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You know what tennis really needs? More arguments about the greatest players of all time.
Really! I could take or leave the Djokovic-Federer-Nadal debate, and I don’t need to read another word about Serena versus Margaret Court. But the quest for greatness is what defines elite athletics, and the appreciation of elite performance is an essential part of what it means to be a fan.
Too much of tennis history has been lost, forgotten, or caricatured. The 150-year story of lawn tennis is full of larger-than-life figures, underrated champions, and local heroes. I don’t know about you, but I want to know a lot more about those players. I wish I had a deeper understanding of earlier eras, especially those that came before the dawn of the Open Era in 1968.
That’s why I’m writing the Tennis 128.
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In a couple of days, I’ll begin counting down the 128 greatest tennis players of all time. The list includes men and women, and it takes into account more than a century of play, from 1919 to the present. I’ll publish an essay about each one. We’ll dive into who they were, what they accomplished, and how they fit into the overall arc of tennis history.
(Why 1919? It’s a convenient starting point. It was the first full season after World War I, and it gives us about 100 years to work with. There were great players before the war, of course, and there’s no clear dividing line between pre-modern and modern tennis. But the game has changed so much that while I can just manage a comparison of Helen Wills to Billie Jean King or Serena Williams, it’s a much bigger stretch to somehow consider Lottie Dod.)
This may all sound familiar. In 2020 and 2021, Joe Posnanski wrote a similar series for baseball, counting down his top 100 players. He published it a few months ago as a giant book, The Baseball 100, which you should buy. Joe’s project is the inspiration for this one. I’m not as good a writer as he is, so I’m giving you 28% more players to make up for it.
A few more all-time greats we’ll be talking about
If you think it’s audacious to the point of silliness to try to rank 100 years’ worth of tennis players, you’re right. It’s ridiculous. There are short careers and long careers, number ones with no slams and multi-slam winners who never reached number one. There’s the amateur era and the Open Era, and there were separate professional tours during the amateur era that meant some of the best players on earth went a decade without playing each other. There are at least 20 players with some plausible case for the #1 spot.
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Any best-of-all-time list is subjective. Still, I tried to make mine as objective as possible. The ranking is primarily based on an algorithm that incorporates three things: a player’s peak, their five best years, and their entire career. Those components are measured by Elo ratings. I only considered seasons above a fairly high threshold, and there are no negative values for bad seasons. I’m interested in how good players were at their best, not whether they stuck around for too many seasons at the end.
The ranking is almost entirely based on singles performance. Doubles used to be more prominent than it is now, but greatness has always been defined primarily as excellence on the singles court. In a few instances, I’ve broken ties in favor of the better doubles player. I’ve also moved a (very small) handful of players toward the top of the list because of their off-court contributions to the game.
In general, I follow Roger Federer’s edict that you can only compare players to their own eras. Objectively speaking, today’s players are better than those of the past. They take advantage of personalized training and nutrition, technologically advanced rackets and strings, high-quality coaching from younger ages, and all the tactical knowledge developed by their predecessors. In that sense, Novak Djokovic is unquestionably better than Bill Tilden, and so is Adrian Mannarino. That’s not a very interesting way of approaching the problem, though. The Tennis 128 reflects the fact that there have been strong eras and weak eras, but the ultimate test of any player is how they performed against their peers.
Suzanne Lenglen and Bill Tilden, pretending not to despise each other
The ratings for amateur-era players rely on the exhaustive women’s tennis database I’ve assembled that goes back to the 1910s, as well as the impressive records put together at TennisArchives.com and in Chris Jordan’s book, The Professional Tennis Archive. These datasets aren’t perfect, nor are they complete, especially for men’s tennis before World War II. But they are more than enough to allow us to compare the greatest players of all time.
Some details you might wonder about: Several active players made it on the list, which I finalized before the 2022 season began. However, if someone has a great year before I unveil their ranking, I will move them up to reflect that. Something to keep in mind when Andy Murray wins the next three majors.
A few notable players don’t fit neatly into a pre-1919 or post-1919 bucket. If their post-1919 performance gets them on the list, I use their entire career to give them a ranking. If they weren’t good enough after World War I, they’ll have to wait for another list.
Many players lost years’ worth of opportunities to World War II. I’ve made minor adjustments in some of those cases, but in general, players are rated based solely on what they accomplished on court. It isn’t quite fair to those who hit their peak years in the early 1940s, but it’s hard enough to accurately measure players based on what they did achieve, let alone what they could have done. The same reasoning applies to injuries that altered or ended careers, unfair as many of them were.
It’s engrossing–at least for me–to dig into the mechanics and edge cases of rating systems, but I don’t want to distract from the main purpose here. There are several dozen more outstanding players who missed the cut and wouldn’t be out of place on the list. If your favorite player doesn’t show up, don’t fret: It’s not because he or she isn’t good enough, it’s just because I personally dislike you. There’s not much of a difference between #97 and #127, or between #50 and #80. The closer we get to the top, the more likely that a single place on the list really means something, but even there, differences between eras–not to mention men and women–allow for no final answer.
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Ready? I’ll unveil #128 on Thursday. The plan is to reach #1 in December. If all goes well, it’ll be December of 2022. You can expect three new players each week, usually on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
I can’t remember the last time I was so excited to embark on a new project. I hope you’ll join me and follow along.
