Category: The Tennis 128

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Beware of GOATs.

* * *

Maureen Connolly [USA]
Born: 17 September 1934
Died: 21 June 1969
Career: 1948-54
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1952)
Peak Elo rating: 2,348 (1st place, 1954)
Major singles titles: 9
Total singles titles: 46
 

* * *

By 1951, San Diego knew it had something special on its hands. Maureen Connolly, a five-foot, four-inch sparkplug with murderous groundstrokes, was climbing the tennis ladder at record speed. Only 16 years old, she had already won the national junior championship two years running.

Connolly’s first coach, Wilbur Folsom, thought in terms of a five-year plan. He figured that Maureen needed one more year of seasoning on the Eastern circuit. In 1950, she had picked up a minor title in Pennsylvania but fallen short at the season’s premier events. Grass-court tennis took some getting used to for youngsters trained on California cement. Opponents such as Doris Hart and Pat Todd had a several-year head start.

One man was more optimistic. Nelson Fisher, a sportswriter for the San Diego Union, had followed every step of Connolly’s progress. He couldn’t help but notice that in 1951, she simply stopped losing. When she secured the title at the Southern California Championships in May, it was her fifth consecutive trophy on the adult circuit.

At Palm Springs in February, she dethroned top seed Helen Perez, who had beaten her twice the previous year. At Pebble Beach in April, she upset another top seed, Nancy Chaffee. The two women met again for the title at both Ojai and the Southern California event–only now, Maureen was the favorite. The 21-year-old Chaffee, once a junior standout herself, had spun the rivalry into something of a feud. But the controversy didn’t have much in the way of legs. The younger player always won, and their final meeting in 1951 was the last time Chaffee took so much as a set.

Fisher had seen enough. Sure, Hart was a perennial favorite, and three-time Wimbledon champion Louise Brough ranked up there with her. But the local youngster brought even greater names to mind. Her groundstrokes recalled those of 19-time major champion Helen Wills Moody.

The sportswriter made his prediction. Folsom could stick to his five-year plan, but Fisher decided that 1951 was Connolly’s year.

Maureen continued to be flummoxed by veterans such as Hart and Todd on the East Coast grass, losing at Manchester and Maidstone. Those were just warm-ups, though. At Forest Hills, she handled the turf like an old hand. The 16-year-old progressed to the final without the loss of a set. She defeated Althea Gibson in the round of 16 and Hart in the semis. After falling to 0-4 in the first set against Doris, she found the range and won 11 of the next 12 games.

Fisher couldn’t rely on wire reports for this one. He ponied up the airfare himself and flew to New York for the final. “I’ve got to see her win with my own eyes,” he said.

He witnessed a championship match that heralded a new era in women’s tennis. In the semis, Connolly had pinned the normally attacking Hart to the backcourt. Shirley Fry, her opponent in the final, was a more natural defender. She took up her position well behind the baseline, better to handle Maureen’s drives once they had lost a bit of pace.

It was “strictly a battle of attrition,” according to the New York Times. “Both girls might as well have left the volley at home.” Connolly, with her net-skimming backhands, took the first set, 6-3. When the Californian lost some of her control, Fry seized the second, 6-1. The lapse, however, was temporary.

Maureen “could play five games missing the baseline by one inch,” Fry said, “but [she would] keep going for the lines and eventually find her range again.” With the crowd behind her, the 16-year-old took the final set, 6-4. The United States had its youngest champion since May Sutton in 1904.

Even Nelson Fisher, watching his city’s darling become a national heroine, had no idea how many records the San Diego teenager would set.

* * *

In the wake of Connolly’s breakthrough, the New Yorker captured the two sides of the appealing new champion. On the one hand, she looked like “a pretty, animated doll.” She gained the cutesy nickname “Little Mo,” a tag that emphasized both her petite stature and the weaponry that made her the equal of “Big Mo”–the USS Missouri, a Navy battleship.

There was nothing cute about the way she won tennis matches. “To judge from the exhibition of nerve control she put on after dropping the second set in the final,” the magazine continued, “she ought to remain a champion for a good many years.”

Little Mo was rarely spotted off-court without a smile on her face. Between the white lines, though, she was barely recognizable. Her focus was legendary. “You could set off dynamite in the next court and I wouldn’t notice,” she once said.*

* A construction crew across the street set off some dynamite as I was writing this. I noticed.

She learned her determination from the best. After Folsom taught her the rudiments of the game, Connolly passed into the care of Eleanor “Teach” Tennant. Tennant had guided the careers of Alice Marble and Bobby Riggs, and she proposed to do the same with Maureen.

Connolly and Tennant in 1952

Tennant was known for taking full control of her students’ lives, but she was remarkably flexible about their style of play. Marble had ridden a big-serving net attack to the top of the women’s game. Riggs was a brainy junkballer. Teach helped Little Mo become a better version of herself, “developing the dainty little baseliner into a hard-driving attacker,” in the words of Time magazine.

The veteran coach was less flexible about mental preparation. She took the notion of a killer instinct almost literally. She wanted her charges to be fueled by pure hatred. “You have to be mean to be a champion,” Tennant said. Before one big match against Hart, Teach concocted a story about Doris trash-talking Connolly behind her back. It was entirely invented, but it did the trick.

Even more than Marble had, Maureen internalized the Tennant approach. “This was no passing dislike, but a blazing, virulent, powerful and consuming hate,” she said. “I believed I could not win without hatred. And win I must because I was afraid to lose.”

* * *

Losing was never much of a problem. Connolly won her first adult title at age 13, at the tail end of a summer trip through the Northwest. In 1950, she scored victories over leading Californians Beverly Baker and Helen Perez.

After securing the national title in 1951, she hardly ever lost again. She went home to Southern California and picked up the title at the Pacific Southwest. In 1952, she reigned over the field. She won thirteen titles, including a championship in her debut at Wimbledon and a second straight victory at Forest Hills. Over the entire season, she lost just two matches, one apiece to Hart and Brough.

The Connolly attack was relentless. Her forehand was the best on the circuit. Her backhand was even better. She was a natural left-hander, but Folsom had demanded she play right-handed. As a result, there was no weak side of her baseline game.

Maureen’s foes settled on a plan to stop her. It just didn’t work very often. She could handle pace, and she would end all but the strongest forays to the net with a precise passing shot. Occasionally, though, she would lose her timing for a few games. The solution was to softball her from the back of the court, to make her play until she started missing.

The woman who came closest to executing this style of off-speed upset was Susan Partridge, a journeywoman Brit who played Mo in the fourth round at Wimbledon. Connolly was coping with a sore shoulder and reeling from a quarrel with Tennant that would end their relationship. Partridge, who had pushed the champion to 6-4, 7-5 at a match in the States two years before, hit one moonball after another down the middle of the court. It was all Maureen could do to advance, 6-3, 5-7, 7-5.

But even junkballing would trip up Connolly only on an off-day. Mo was known as “Twinkle Toes” for the constant motion of her feet. One of Tennant’s first tasks was to fix the young woman’s “atrocious footwork.” Maureen was sent to tap-dancing class, and her feet barely stopped moving for the next five years. She got herself in position for every ball–fast or slow–and usually sent it back within a few inches of the baseline.

A few days after the close call against Partridge, Little Mo drew Shirley Fry in the Wimbledon semis. Fry knew the book on Connolly, and she was as patient as anyone on the circuit. But the young American regained her focus and dispatched Shirley, 6-4, 6-3.

* * *

Little Mo was even better in 1953. She became the first woman to win a Grand Slam, dropping only one set en route to the four major titles. (The woman who pushed her to a decider was, once again, the pesky Partridge.) As in 1952, she allowed just two defeats to mar her season. Against twelve tournament wins, she lost once to Hart and once to Fry. After Doris beat her at the Italian, Connolly exacted her revenge in both the French and Wimbledon finals.

Hart felt that the 1953 Wimbledon final was her own peak: the best match she ever played. It just wasn’t good enough for Connolly, who beat her, 8-6, 7-5.

Shirley got the same treatment. Two weeks after Fry beat Connolly at the Pacific Southwest, they met again at the Pacific Coast Championships in Berkeley. Mo won the first set at love. The youngster beat her twice in a month.

“No one can duel with her at the baseline,” Shirley said. “Go up to the net against her? Ridiculous.”

The only remaining weakness in the Connolly game was her serve. At five-feet, four-inches tall, there was only so much she could do. And with so many other weapons in her arsenal, it didn’t really matter. Still, she hooked up with Les Stoefen, a towering former doubles champion, to give her opening salvos a bit more punch.

After losing a match to Beverly Baker in early 1954, Mo ascended to another level entirely. She won her next 41 matches, dropping only a single set at an exhibition-style team event in Germany. The streak included title defenses at Roland Garros and Wimbledon. Brough, in the Wimbledon final, was the only woman at either event to reach 5-all. At the US Clay Court Championships in July, Maureen stomped Karol Fageros in the semi-finals, 6-0, 6-0, then allowed Hart only four games in the final.

“She was so quick, accurate and competitive,” said Doris. “I know I never played anybody as good. You might be ahead 40-0, but she made you feel like it was 0-40.”

In 1978, Hart added, “There’s no doubt in my mind that Mo was the greatest player who ever lived.”

* * *

The 1954 US Clay final was the last competitive match Connolly ever played. Still only 19 years old, she suffered a nasty fall when a cement truck spooked the horse she was riding. Her right leg was severely injured. She recovered well enough to play a casual game and work as a coach, but no more than that.

At the time of the accident, Little Mo had won nine major singles titles–every one she entered since her initial triumph at Forest Hills in 1951. She ended her career with almost twice as many tournament victories (46) as match losses (27), even counting her first venture onto the circuit as a 13-year-old.

It is impossible not to speculate what might have been. Connolly intended to enter the US Championships in 1954, then defend her title at Wimbledon the following year. If there’s ever an instance in which we can say an absent player would have won a title, it’s this one. Hart won at Forest Hills in 1954 and 1955; Brough won the first Mo-less Wimbledon. Maureen had established her dominance over both of them.

After that, the plan was to turn professional. Some of the details emerged when Connolly sued the company that owned the offending cement truck. After all, it would’ve been difficult to assert a loss of income for an amateur tennis player, no matter how exceptional.

Maureen would’ve taken on the reigning champion, Pauline Betz, as part of the tour promoted by Jack Kramer. This is where history might really have taken a different turn. After the lopsided Betz-Gussie Moran tour in the early 1950s, there was virtually no women’s professional tennis. Little Mo had the celebrity cachet to draw crowds, and Betz might have been able to keep things competitive. Had a women’s pro tour proved financially viable, Connolly or Betz might have gone on to face Althea Gibson. Instead, Gibson’s pro career consisted of opening for the Harlem Globetrotters against an opponent chosen more for her face than her forehand.

We can only dream. Connolly was just two months older than Ken Rosewall, who turned pro in 1956 and was still contesting major finals in the 1970s.

On the other hand, Little Mo would have quickly exhausted the challenges in front of her. Arguably, she didn’t have anything left to accomplish when she was forced to quit at 19. It is unlikely she would have hung on as a part-time player. However easy her victories looked, her grim game face disguised a strenuous effort.

Connolly occasionally coached the British Wightman Cup team in the 1960s, and her influence was particularly valuable to 1969 Wimbledon champ Ann Jones. Jones struggled to remain motivated during long stretches away from home. “If you want to play tennis, play tennis,” Maureen told her. “If you want to go home and have kids, do that. But make up your mind and do one or the other and put your heart into it.”

The coach’s words carried extra weight because she had so clearly lived them. As a teenage champion, Connolly wasn’t forced to choose between tennis and family life. But unlike so many athletic prodigies, her focus never wavered. She could have coasted after winning the 1951 national title. She certainly could have rested on her laurels after securing the 1953 Grand Slam.

A careening cement truck may have deprived Little Mo of another half-dozen–or more–major titles. But her place in history doesn’t depend on mere what-ifs. Even at age 19, it was clear that she had the game of an all-timer and the mind of a champion.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Beware of GOATs.

* * *

Ivan Lendl [TCH/USA]
Born: 7 March 1960
Career: 1978-94
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1983)
Peak Elo rating: 2,402 (1st place, 1986)
Major singles titles: 8
Total singles titles: 94
 

* * *

At Roland Garros in 1981, Ivan Lendl reached his first major final. The achievement was not entirely a surprise. He was seeded fifth, and it was already his seventh final of the season. In January, he had played for the title at the season-ending Masters event.

At the same time, the hard-hitting Czechoslovak was gaining a reputation as, well, not a big-match player. In eight previous majors, he had reached only a single quarter-final. At the 1980 US Open, he lost that match to John McEnroe.

No one faulted Lendl for finishing second at the 1981 French. His final-round opponent, Björn Borg, had lost only one match in Paris since 1973. Lendl matched the reigning champion through four grinding, topspinning sets before wilting in the fifth, 6-1, 4-6, 6-2, 3-6, 6-1.

Expectations were higher when he reached his second slam final. Lendl opened 1982 by winning the January Masters. At the circuit’s signature indoor event, he spanked McEnroe in the semis and outlasted Vitas Gerulaitis in a five-set final for the ages. At the US Open, he scored another semi-final victory over McEnroe but fell short in the final against Jimmy Connors.

While the Czech was still only 22 years old, the pessimists had plenty to go on. Lendl had no equal indoors, where the conditions were at their most predictable. He went 41-0 on carpet in 1982 alone, winning nine titles on the surface. But he underwhelmed when faced with fresh air, wind, and stadiums full of partisans. As the second seed and favorite at the French that year, he went out in the fourth round to the then-unknown 17-year-old Mats Wilander.

Third major final: 1983 US Open. Connors again, another four-set defeat.

Fourth major final: 1983 Australian Open, Wilander. He won only nine games.

When Lendl turned 24 years old in March 1984, he was the number one player in the world. He had racked up 31 tour-level titles, including back-to-back Masters championships. In the eyes of the tennis world, though, the number that defined him was his victory count in grand slam finals: zero.

* * *

Lendl’s mailbox did not overflow with notes of support or sympathy. A few years later, with the grand slam monkey off his back, Sports Illustrated put him on its cover. Headline: “The Champion No One Cares About.”

Time magazine called him a “chilly, self-centered, condescending, mean-spirited, arrogant man with a nice forehand.”

For many fans, Lendl’s defining trait was his nationality. There weren’t many Eastern Europeans at the top of the game. Americans, in particular, still thought in Cold War terms. One tour veteran often yelled, “You Communist son of a bitch” between points.

Some Soviet-bloc stars managed to transcend the stereotypes. Martina Navratilova defected and embraced her new home in the West. She never became a popular darling like Chris Evert, but neither was she defined by her homeland.

Lendl, on the other hand, fit the preconceived notion of a grim, mechanical Eastern European to a tee. The official adjective for the Czech was “dour.” (Other acceptable options: drab, dull, and doleful.) He rarely smiled, on court or off. He never uttered a full sentence when a fragment would do. His game could be equally bland. He won points with a big serve and a bigger forehand, rarely venturing forward or departing from a clear plan. He lacked both the artistic gifts of McEnroe and the go-for-broke charisma of Connors.

This 1982 trophy ceremony (with McEnroe) might have planted the seed that it was time to start lifting weights

The outsider treatment from sportswriters and galleries triggered a vicious cycle. Lendl’s early standoffishness could be attributed to natural introversion and unfamiliarity with life on tour. By the time he might have opened up, though, the narrative was set.

Anyway, “Ivan the Terrible” wasn’t out there to make friends. After dropping a 40-minute, 6-2, 6-0 hammer on Hans Gildemeister in 1982, he said, “I don’t like to lose points, much less games.” If McEnroe-style arguments would help win matches despite alienating fans, he’d do it. He stalled so much between points that he’s responsible for the rule-book time limit–as well as the first attempt to shorten it.

Lendl was particularly uninterested in winning the affections of netrushers. Come in behind a playable shot to his right side, and he might reward you with the “Fuck you forehand”–a bullet aimed straight for your head.

Underneath the forbidding exterior, there was a pleasant-enough character, one with a sly, if off-kilter sense of humor. But by the time Lendl lost his fourth major final, only a handful of confidants ever saw that side of him.

* * *

Oddly enough, Lendl’s first slam title finally came in what would turn out to be his worst season of the decade. At the 1984 French Open, he straight-setted Wilander in the semis, then came back from a two-set deficit to topple McEnroe in the final.

After 15 titles in 1982 and eight in 1983, Roland Garros was one of only three he picked up in 1984. McEnroe’s career year played a large role. The two men met seven times in nine months, and the Paris final was the Czech’s only victory. Even on Lendl’s beloved carpet, McEnroe won eight of nine sets. Lendl reached his third straight US Open final, but McEnroe was even better at home than Connors had been in the title matches of the previous two years.

Up to this point in his career, Lendl had kept one foot in both East and West. He played Davis Cup for his native country, even as he paid only nominal taxes to its government. When he wasn’t on the road, he often crashed with his friend Wojtek Fibak in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was no life for a control freak who played his best tennis when everything around him was wholly predictable.

From our vantage point in 2022, it’s hard to imagine just how much Lendl’s finickiness caused him to stand out from the pack. We’ve grown accustomed to Rafael Nadal and his water bottles, personal racket stringers, and the general assumption that winning depends on doing everything in precisely the right way.

That level of micro-management is one of the many things that modern tennis owes to Lendl. The booming inside-out forehand–and a match strategy built around it–might be a more attractive foundation for the man’s legacy. But I suspect the long-range effects of Ivan-the-control-freak are even greater. In 1984, Lendl bought his own place in Greenwich. Every year thereafter, he famously hired the same crew that laid down the US Open courts to resurface his own. He could practice on identical courts–often with a young guest like Pete Sampras–without opening the gate at the end of his driveway.

Once the Czech transplant started down the path of precision training, he discovered just how much he could optimize. He not only hired a stringer, he requested rackets strung at two distinct tensions, one of which he used only when he started to get nervous. He got a full physical workup from Navratilova’s doctor and learned that he’d last longer on court with a low-carb diet. Like Martina, he had embraced the excess of the Western diet; unlike her, he somehow survived years on tour before realizing it slowed him down.

None of this made Lendl more likeable. But his new lifestyle kept him calm. He had always practiced as much as anyone; now nothing impeded his focus.

Ion Țiriac, then coaching Boris Becker, said of Ivan, “Deep down he is still very nervous because his talent is from work, not from God.” Maybe, but in Lendl’s mind the only solution was to work even harder. Now he could.

* * *

Lendl’s run from 1985 to 1987 is one of the most impressive three-year stretches of the Open era. He won eleven titles in 1985, ten in 1986, and eight in 1987, all while holding off the likes of Wilander and even younger prospects in Becker and Stefan Edberg. He won more than 90% of his matches in all three seasons.

Most importantly, five of the championships came at grand slams. He won the US Open for the first time in 1985 after three runner-up finishes, straight-setting McEnroe. Working with Tony Roche to improve his net game, he showed more variety than ever. The most devastating addition to his game wasn’t at the net, though. It was a new baseline weapon. After years of making his money with a down-the-line forehand, he was suddenly going cross-court for winners, too. He struck 21 cross-court forehands against McEnroe. 19 of them earned him the point.

In 1986, Lendl won both the French and the US Open, losing exactly one set at each event. One of his lapses came in the Paris quarter-finals, where Andrés Gómez eked out a first-set tiebreak. Ivan returned the favor in the second and ran out the match, 6-0, 6-0. He was even better at the year-end Masters event on carpet, where he beat five top-tenners–Gómez, Noah, Edberg, Wilander, and Becker–without the loss of a single set.

Capping the remarkable span, Lendl defended both his French and US titles in 1987. He held off a newly-focused Wilander in the two finals, each one a four-set marathon. The championship match in New York lasted four hours and 43 minutes–an astounding effort as the Czech transplant was recovering from the flu.

The only major that ultimately eluded him was Wimbledon. His deliberate game wasn’t well-suited to the speed or low bounces of the turf, despite his work with Roche and increasingly thorough preparation for the grass-court major toward the end of his career. He reached back-to-back finals in 1986 and 1987, where he lost straight-set decisions to Becker and Pat Cash.

At the Australian Open in December 1985, Lendl lost in the semi-finals to Edberg, 9-7 in the fifth. He didn’t care for the grass there, either–he declared that the old tournament venue at Kooyong “should be paved over.” He got his wish, at least figuratively, when the Australian switched to hard courts in 1988. That allowed him a bit more control, and after losing to Cash in the first hard-court edition, he won titles Down Under in both 1989 and 1990.

* * *

If we were talking about anyone other than Ivan Lendl, this would all make for one heck of an underdog story. The man lost four major finals… then went on to win eight. He fell short three years in a row at Flushing Meadow alone… then bounced back to win the next three.

Long before he began to reach major finals, Lendl overcame significant hurdles. He had two accomplished tennis players as parents–mother Olga was a long-time Czechoslovak number two–but he grew up in what was, at the time, a relative tennis backwater. When he was ready to compete at an international level, the federation controlled his schedule and often called him back home for meaningless club matches.

He had the benefit of size, as a height of six-feet, two-inches was still noticeably above tour average. But as Țiriac said, his physical gifts didn’t go much further than that. It’s easy to overstate this particular disadvantage–he was a greater natural athlete than 99% of us–but it took an enormous amount of work just to pull even with the likes of McEnroe and Connors. The two Americans rose to the top despite rarely practicing more than an hour a day.

The Lendl serve in 1986

Despite those initial losses and a nonexistent grand slam tally at age 24, Lendl rode sheer stubbornness to 19 finals and eight major championships. While both numbers have lost a bit of their magic in the intervening years, they were staggering achievements in the days before the Big Three. Only Borg won more slam titles in the first two-plus decades of the Open era. When Ivan reached his 19th title match, he was the first man–pro or amateur–to do so.

Yet no one will ever make a movie about the rail-thin young Czech who overcame the odds. His aloofness was part of the problem–he never showed enough of himself to attract a legion of admirers, even as fans eventually grew to appreciate his game.

The real obstacle, though, is that it has always been impossible to see Lendl as the struggling challenger. He beat Borg–twice!–and Guillermo Vilas–on clay! twice!–in 1980, just his second full season on tour. He upset McEnroe in seven of their first nine meetings, including six straight when the American was number one in the world. Even when a grand slam title seemed like an impossible dream, he turned the indoor circuit into his personal demesne.

So Ivan Lendl, underdog? Hardly. One man who lost to him in 1982 summed up the experience: “He makes you want to go home.”

The underdog was the guy on the other side of the net.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Beware of GOATs.

* * *

Pete Sampras [USA]
Born: 12 August 1971
Career: 1988-2002
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1993)
Peak Elo rating: 2,319 (1st place, 1994)
Major singles titles: 14
Total singles titles: 64
 

* * *

Pete Sampras played over 500 tiebreaks in his career. His record over 15 years at tour level was 328-194, a 62.8% winning percentage.

Sounds pretty good, right? I don’t expect you to know exactly how 62.8% rates among the game’s best. It’s one of the many tennis stats that sounds like it might be great, but it might also be the sort of thing that strong players do as a matter of course.

In fact, 62.8% rates fifth among all players in the Open era. Only Roger Federer, Arthur Ashe, Novak Djokovic, and, puzzlingly, Andrés Gómez did better. Now that we know Pete scores in the top five, we can pretend that it was obvious all along. One of the biggest serves of his (or any) era, plus imperturbability under pressure–what more could you need?

Forgive me as we dive straight into the weeds here. Tiebreak success isn’t as simple as it sounds. Yes, Pete and Fed (and the others) were great at the end of sets, but they were great the rest of the time, too. The win-loss percentage simply confirms that they were very good at tennis, not that they raised their games at 6-all.

A decade ago*, I introduced a stat called Tiebreaks Over Expectations (TBOE) to address the less obvious aspect of tiebreak success. We can take a player’s serve and return performance over an entire match and calculate the odds that he would win a tiebreak. Do that for all of his tiebreaks over an entire season, or a full career, and you can figure out how that won-loss percentage compares to his overall performance.

* Yikes.

What may surprise you is that most players converge on a TBOE of zero. Conventional wisdom says that big servers have an edge in tiebreaks. Nope. Apart from the self-evident fact that better players tend to win more breakers, it’s a coin flip. The only minor exception is that men who contest lots of tiebreaks–big servers or not–do a tiny bit better. Experience may count for something, but the effect is barely enough to register.

A few specific players manage to break the mold. When we rank ATPers of the last thirty years by TBOE, Sampras edges up to third place. John Isner leads the list by a wide margin: He plays tiebreaks constantly and ups his level when he gets there. Federer comes next.

Had Sampras played as well at 6-all as he did in the first twelve games of the set, his career record in shootouts would’ve been 299-223, a respectable but hardly newsworthy rate of 57.3%. Instead, he outperformed expectations by 29 tiebreaks. That might be luck, tactical soundness, or ice-cold water where the blood is supposed to go. Even if we can’t pin down the details, it’s clear that he was doing something right.

* * *

Pete got smarter throughout the 1990s. Tim Gullikson and, later, Paul Annacone taught him to use his range of weapons to play percentage tennis. While he never became as single-minded as, say, Jack Kramer in pursuit of that goal, it was clear that he learned to outthink his opponents, not just outsmoke them.

Sampras didn’t have much to say about tiebreaks in his 2008 memoir, A Champion’s Mind. He recognized that luck often dictated the outcome of such close sets, especially on fast courts. If he holds any secrets (besides “don’t choke!”) he isn’t telling.

Opponents learned that Pete was at his strongest at the tail end of a set. Mats Wilander told Steve Flink that Sampras “had a lot of guts in big time moments.” Wilander also noticed that Pete made sure his opponent would be off-balance when the crucial moment arrived. Over the course of a set, he would alternately push hard, relax, keep points short, force you into a rally–anything to prevent the man across the net from getting into a rhythm. For a player like the Swede, that was deadly.

The Sampras serve in 1991

Pete knew better than anyone that a match could hinge on just a few turning points. “To me,” he wrote, “a match with a lot of service breaks is as unsatisfying as a match with none, because a great match is only supposed to have a handful of decisive moments.” He aimed to be ready for those opportunities.

For Sampras, that’s the difference between an all-time great and the rest. He noted in his memoir that more “one-slam wonders” have broken through at Roland Garros than at Wimbledon. Men like Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg, and himself often squeaked through by the smallest of margins, but the narrow scorelines were deceiving.

Jim Courier, who lost to Pete 16 times in 20 meetings, could only nod in agreement. “You wonder what the heck just happened because you thought you had been outplaying him,” Courier told Flink. “That is what playing Pete felt like because he could summon his greatness late in a set. He just had that knack.”

* * *

Far be it from me to question the wisdom of Sampras, Courier, and the rest, but I find these sorts of explanations unsatisfying. The closer we get to the top end of the Tennis 128, the more we see champions described in nebulous terms. They were intimidating, mentally overpowering, cool under pressure. Maybe it’s true, but they must have been doing something, too.

Back into the weeds we go.

The Match Charting Project has logged 163 Sampras matches, which include 116 of his career tiebreaks. It’s a not a random sample; for our purposes, it’s even better. We’ve recorded every point from the most prominent matches–grand slam and Masters finals and semi-finals, head-to-heads with Andre Agassi, and so on. The dataset offers us a fairly complete look at how Pete played when the outcome really mattered.

Compared to his performance in the twelve games leading up to each tiebreak, Sampras did everything better in the breaker. He put 1% more first serves in. He won 1.3% more of his service points. 1.3% more of his serves didn’t come back. He even won return points at a better clip, though by the minuscule margin of 0.4%.

Small as these numbers are, keep in mind that they represent improvements on already strong statistics. Pete amassed them when his opponents cranked their own games up as far as they could go. Consider also that they dispel a common notion that may be true of more one-dimensional big servers. Sampras may have taken it easy on some unimportant return points early in sets. But his tiebreak magic derived more from upping his game on serve than return.

What’s more, a 1% improvement on serve is massive compared to the performance of the average tour player. The Match Charting Project doesn’t have a wide base of 1990s matches from which to infer tour averages, but we can assume that this part of the game didn’t change much in two decades. Using charts from the 2010s, I found that in the typical tiebreak, returners win 6.5% more points than they had in the twelve preceding games. Virtually every contemporary player of note sees their serve numbers decline in breakers.

Not Pete. He recognized that the luck of the tiebreak could go against him, but he also knew that luck favors the elite server playing the smartest percentages.

To see Sampras’s steeliness under pressure, look no further than the fifth-set buster against Alex Corretja in the 1996 US Open quarter-finals. At 6-7, Pete saved match point with a forehand volley winner. After missing his first serve at 7-all, he went big with his second, caught the Spaniard leaning the wrong way, and scored an ace. Corretja–who, incidentally, retired with a 51% career tiebreak winning percentage–double-faulted to end the match.

They didn’t call him Pistol Pete for nothing.

* * *

The irony of all this tiebreak talk is that Sampras’s career results hardly rely on a pile of clutch breakers.

Of the 14 major finals that he won, perhaps two can be scored as direct results of his tiebreak prowess. Pete beat Courier in 1993 for his first Wimbledon title, 7-6, 7-6, 3-6, 6-3. His second Wimbledon crown also involved two shootouts. In 1994, he blasted past Goran Ivanišević 7-6, 7-6, 6-0.

In two later Wimbledon finals, the luck of the tiebreak evened out. Sampras and Ivanišević played a five-setter to determine the 1998 championship, each winning a breaker in the first two sets. The title match in 2000, against Pat Rafter, started the same way. The Australian–owner of a pedestrian 54% career tiebreak mark–took the first set in a 12-10 shootout only to see Pete win the next one.

For Pete’s opponents, the threat of the tiebreak was more daunting than the event itself.

Courier won 9 of the 17 breakers the two men contested. But more often, he didn’t make it that far. Pete “wouldn’t be bothered by not playing well in your service games,” he said, “because he would just keep holding serve.”

It was a walk in the park for Sampras, while the pressure kept building on the man trying to break him. Pete likened grass-court tennis to “an old-fashioned Western gunfight,” and he was rarely the one to blink first. Whether it was his own ability to raise his game or the pressure he put on opponents, he converted break points more often than he won other return points, just as he exceeded expectations in tiebreaks. His outstanding performance in breakers may have made only a modest impact on his career records, but it indicates how he was able to play his best tennis at just the right times.

* * *

All these numbers have a way of making the man sound colorless, and that was indeed the knock on Sampras for much of his career. He was shy, and he wasn’t equipped to handle the pressure or media attention when he won the 1990 US Open at age 19.

His tennis could be electrifying–especially if you liked your points short–but even as he matured, he left the tabloid headlines for Agassi.

Over the years, though, it became clear that his desire to compete was every bit the equal of more demonstrative Americans like Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe. In the 1996 match against Corretja, he became so dehydrated that he vomited between points of the fifth-set tiebreak. Tournament officials hooked him up to an IV after the match, and McEnroe told Pete’s girlfriend, “I don’t have that much guts.”

It wasn’t just one marathon match. By the time he outlasted Corretja, Sampras had gutted out nearly two years of his career. At the 1995 Australian Open, his coach and close friend Tim Gullikson collapsed from a seizure, the latest in a months-long string of health scares. He was soon diagnosed with brain cancer. Pete defeated Courier in the quarter-finals of that tournament with tears in his eyes. Gullikson battled the disease for another 16 months before succumbing. He was never far from Pete’s thoughts.

It was particularly difficult for Sampras to push aside his concern for his ailing coach when he played Davis Cup. The American side was led by Tim’s twin brother Tom. Pete’s exploits at the 1995 Davis Cup final made clear what he was capable of when his will to win was fully engaged.

The tie was held in Moscow, where the Russians laid down a glacially slow court designed to flummox the visiting Americans–the clay-phobic world number one in particular. Initially, the team planned to use Agassi and Courier in the singles. But when Andre pulled up lame, Sampras was forced into action on his weakest surface.

After a marathon five-setter against Andrei Chesnokov, Pete collapsed on the court from cramps–but he won. Leigh Montville wrote for Sports Illustrated that it “looked as if he might not play again for a long while.”

Yet the next day, he was back on court for the doubles. Yevgeny Kafelnikov was so dismissive of Sampras’s skills in the tandem game that he said the Americans had given the match away. “I guess they don’t know Pete,” Captain Gullikson said. “I would take him on my side for one-on-one tennis, two-on-two, three-on-three, any surface. I would take him for golf.”

Kafelnikov played six sets against Pete–three in doubles, and three in singles–and didn’t win a single one. On a surface chosen in large part to thwart him, Sampras won three rubbers to secure the 1995 Davis Cup for the Americans.

The higher the stakes, the more reliable Pistol Pete became. His typical attack was vicious enough to quickly dispatch most of his peers. When it wasn’t enough, Sampras was the one who could find another level.

When that wasn’t enough, it came down to sheer desire, a willingness to put his body on the line. Most opponents never learned how deep Pete was willing to dig. Push him to the brink, though, and they discovered that there was no limit to the amount of pressure he could handle. Sampras didn’t win every close match he ever played, but he never gave one away.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Beware of GOATs.

* * *

Don Budge [USA]
Born: 13 June 1915
Died: 26 January 2000
Career: 1932-53
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1937)
Major singles titles: 6
Total singles titles: 43
 

* * *

I’ll just come out and say it: Don Budge is overrated.

Before you fire off the hate mail, let me be clear. Budge was a great player–the 22nd best of all time!–a prince of a guy, and possessor of a backhand that rates among the most intimidating strokes in the game’s history.

It may help to modify my claim. Don Budge’s career is overrated. It wasn’t his fault–blame Hitler and an overzealous Army drill sergeant–but he didn’t play for that long, and his peak was rather short. Looking strictly at the results, even his peak is easy to overrate. He won the Grand Slam, but most of the men standing in his way that season were barely fit to hold his racket.

There are other rating algorithms by which Budge does better. Imagine we could poll every man he ever faced. What percentage of them would consider him to be the best player they ever shared the court with? There are plenty of flaws with this approach (for one thing, Djokovic, Federer, and Nadal would cannibalize each other’s ratings), but Budge would almost certainly land in the all-time top ten.

“He was so powerful,” said Bobby Riggs, “that everybody was afraid of him.”

Other peers from his playing days, notably Jack Kramer, spent decades telling anyone who would listen that Budge was the best of them all.

Asked to pick the strongest “on-a-given-day” player, men of Kramer’s generation would invariably name Ellsworth Vines. Yet their comments–both during their playing days and after–reveal that they gave the nod to Vines as a kind of consolation prize. Budge at his best was untouchable. He didn’t seem like an any-given-day player because his breathtaking form could last for weeks.

In a 1939 professional tournament at Wembley, Budge made quick work of Bill Tilden, 6-2, 6-2. While Big Bill was 46 years old, he remained competitive, even scoring a few upsets in 1941 when Don was off his game. But that night in Britain, the older man was reduced to a three-word review of his conqueror: “He is perfect.”

* * *

Some opponents counted themselves out before the first ball was struck. “He looked like Mr. Tennis,” said one. “He made you feel like you might be his ball boy.”

Budge sported long white trousers–“creams”–long after the rest of the circuit switched to shorts. No one wore them better. “Don is many wonderful things none of which is handsome,” wrote Kramer, “but in tennis whites he looked like a matinee idol.”

Discussions of Don’s game tend to start and end with his backhand, but there was so much more to it than that. By 1937, he simply didn’t have any weaknesses. He stood six-feet, one-inch tall, and he was fit enough to compete as hard in the fifth set as he did in the first. His racket, the “Ghost,” was the heaviest on the circuit.

His serve was no cannonball, but it was enough to keep returners at the baseline. Thanks to the “Paul Bunyan” racket, his groundstrokes were deceptively heavy. Venturing to the net was a low-percentage move at any stage of the rally. If Budge tried to pass you, one rival said, “you’d swear you were volleying a piano.”

That’s what you’d think, anyway, if you got a racket on the ball. Contemporary Julius Heldman wrote that he “could hit a placement from any spot on the court to any other spot on the court.” Sportswriter Al Laney marveled at his “almost inhuman accuracy.”

Budge generated such weight of shot that he often didn’t bother with the angles. He could hit sharp cross-court groundstrokes, especially with the backhand. But he often sent smashes straight up the middle of the court. It took a gifted defender to get one of those back in play; only the best of the best could return the shot and remain standing.

And, of course, there was the backhand. Don’s first love was baseball, which he played as a left-handed hitter. The Budge backhand was essentially a baseball swing, with the left hand leaving the racket just before impact. (He was mildly ambidextrous, in fact. On the basketball court, he shot right-handed but made most of his rebounds with the left.)

Writing in 1960, Heldman credited the backhand with “that extra flair, that great freedom of motion, which made it the envy of every player who ever lived.”

* * *

Opponents were awed, and rightly so. Budge was nicknamed the “Fire Dragon.” No player wanted to show up to a tournament and discover he would be an early-round sacrifice to the ruthless redhead.

Oddly enough, Don denied that he had any particular killer instinct. He told an interviewer in the 1980s:

If beating someone as badly and as quickly as I could is having a killer instinct, then, okay, you can call it that. But it takes discipline.

Discpline became a byword for the man from Oakland. In 1934, he walked away from his studies at the University of California to serve as a backup for the Davis Cup squad. Yet after a so-so performance at the US Open that year, the 19-year-old went back to the UC Berkeley tennis coach, Tom Stow, to rebuild his game.

Stow was one of the most influential coaches of his era, guiding the likes of Sarah Palfrey Cooke (and her husband Elwood), Frank Kovacs, and Margaret Osborne. Budge appreciated his blend of intensity and humor. It wasn’t just that Stow could identify a flaw in an instant, Budge said. “He had the gift of exaggerating in a comical way whatever particular thing you were doing wrong.”

Between 1934 and 1937, Budge and Stow systematically built the game of a champion. While Stow left the miraculous backhand as it was, he replaced Don’s Western-grip forehand with an extreme Eastern grip that would serve him better on grass.* They worked on tactics, making it second nature for Budge to move in behind any short ball.

* It’s not a coincidence that Alice Marble underwent the same transformation. Both players swung a baseball bat before a tennis racket, and the cement courts of Northern California didn’t expose the weakness of a Western grip the way that grass did.

A bit later in the partnership, the young man decided he was too vulnerable at the end of long matches. He added a morning run to his routine, and he swore off both fried food and his beloved chocolate milkshakes.

Ahead of the 1937 season, Stow told his student, “I am convinced that you are the best player in the world. Now you go out and prove that I’m right.”

* * *

Budge did as requested. He ascended to the top of the rankings in 1937, beating Gottfried von Cramm for the Wimbledon and Forest Hills titles. On the back of another memorable battle with the German, he helped the American Davis Cup squad regain the Davis Cup after the trophy’s eleven-year sojourn in France and Great Britain.

He was just warming up. It’s tough to accomplish much more on a tennis court than the Fire Dragon did in his Grand Slam season of 1938. In addition to the four major singles titles, Budge led the United States to a second-straight Davis Cup title. And with Gene Mako and Alice Marble, he won both the men’s doubles and mixed doubles at Wimbledon and Forest Hills.

(How good was the Budge/Marble team? Half a century later, a journalist asked if Don remembered any particular matches from their partnership. Nope–with Alice at his side, “we would waltz through those people, 6-1, 6-3.” Indeed, the Wimbledon final that year ended 6-1, 6-4. They secured the Forest Hills title, 6-1, 6-2.)

Budge sometimes gets credit for “inventing” the idea of the four-major grand slam. That’s not quite right: Journalists started talking about it when Jack Crawford came close in 1933, and even then, the concept was borrowed from Bobby Jones’s multi-major exploits in golf. Fred Perry made the long trip to Australia in 1934 and 1935, and while he fell just short of completing the set in a single year, he became the first man to win all four titles in his career.

The American probably did invent the notion of trying to achieve the feat.

By 1938, the Grand Slam was the only thing he hadn’t accomplished. With no Davis Cup commitments until the title defense in September, Budge could spare the travel time that the quest required. Sailing to and from Australia took six weeks all by itself. He convinced Mako, his friend and doubles partner, to tag along for company and a crack at the doubles Grand Slam.

Compared to the logistics, tennis was the easy part. In 25 singles matches at the majors, Budge lost just four sets. Stomach problems accounted for three of them, in the third and fourth rounds at Roland Garros. Even there, on the unfamiliar Parisian clay, he recovered with aplomb. No less a figure than Suzanne Lenglen warned him that on such a slow surface, he couldn’t be so aggressive on the return of serve. He ignored her advice and dispatched the big-serving, six-foot, three-inch Roderich Menzel in the final, 6-3, 6-2, 6-4.

Lenglen congratulated him and admitted, “I had to see it to believe it.”

In Australia, his final-round nemesis was the 19-year-old John Bromwich. At Wimbledon, it was Bunny Austin. At Forest Hills, it was Mako, in his sole career major final. Mako snuck off with a set, and Bromwich won a measly seven games. Austin managed only four.

As Budge and Austin shook hands at the conclusion of the Wimbledon final, Don asked, “What was wrong with your game? You were way off your form.” The Englishman disagreed:

I had been playing my best. But my best had not been good enough. Nor, I believe, on that day, would the best of anyone, past, present or to come, have been good enough…. [If] it was a poor match, as a match, the crowd were privileged to watch one of the greatest exhibitions of lawn tennis skill ever seen.

* * *

This is where we need to press pause on the lovefest. Everyone agreed that Budge was playing astonishing tennis. The problem, from the historian’s perspective, is the definition of “everyone.”

The amateur field in 1938–apart from the imposing redhead–had a distinct minor-league character. Von Cramm beat Budge in an exhibition Down Under, but he missed the rest of the season after the Nazis imprisoned him on a morals charge. The top five players in the world consisted of those two, Vines, Perry, and Hans Nüsslein. The last three were professionals, forbidden to compete at the majors.

Judging from assessments like Austin’s, it’s plausible that Budge would’ve beaten anyone. But in pro tours the following year, the results were less clear. Budge made easy work of a sometimes apathetic Perry, but Vines won 17 of their 39 meetings. At Wembley–the same tournament where Tilden declared that Don was “perfect”–Nüsslein pushed him to the brink in a 13-11, 2-6, 6-4 decision.

In retirement, Budge would occasionally hear from skeptics who argued that other men could’ve achieved a Grand Slam, had schedules permitted or the trip to Australia been more rewarding. His answer was usually the same: Yeah, but I did. His 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood had a custom license plate: G SLAM.

Both sides have a point.

I was stunned to discover just how few men played all four majors in the amateur era. Between 1925–when the French Championships opened up to foreigners–and the beginning of the Open Era 43 years later, only 70 different men ever entered all four in the same season. (Many of them, mostly Australians, did it multiple times. Roy Emerson completed ten full circuits before 1968.)

Only eleven played a complete Grand Slam season before World War II. Three of those–Crawford, Perry, and Budge–won all four or came close.

Of course, Don had a point. Many players didn’t try for a Slam because they didn’t stand a chance. The three-week sailings between Australia and North America may have been relaxing, but they were hardly good training for championship tennis. Vines went to Australia in 1933 and got dragged into one provincial tournament after another. By the time the national championships came around, he had his land legs but little else. The defending Wimbledon champion lost in the quarter-finals to a 16-year-old.

What 1938 proved–and what doesn’t come up often enough in lists of the man’s assets–was Budge’s ability to play his best when it mattered. He paced himself deliberately, avoiding Vines’s mistake of working too hard in the warm-ups. He lost six matches that year, falling short at all three tournaments he played back home in California. He saved himself for the 25 matches that earned him the Slam. He didn’t care about the rest, and he knew that posterity wouldn’t, either.

* * *

According to Jack Kramer’s imagination, Budge could’ve remained world champion until 1950. The only problem was that the wrong man picked up the 1940 Forest Hills title. Had Bobby Riggs won the national championship that year, he would’ve turned pro. Riggs would’ve challenged Budge on a pro tour in 1941, and the Fire Dragon would’ve won easily. Post-war pros–notably Kramer himself–would’ve been recruited at earlier ages. With less experience, they would’ve been mere cannon-fodder for Budge.

Instead, Riggs lost to Don McNeill. There was no credible pro challenger in 1941, so promoter Jack Harris put together a Budge-Tilden tour. While the result was never in doubt, both men could draw a crowd. Riggs turned pro after the season, but with the disruption of World War II, a proper Riggs-Budge tour had to wait.

More important than the 1939 Forest Hills final, Budge sustained an injury in the Army Air Corps that never fully healed. In 1943, he was sent through an obstacle course and, out of shape, he tore his right shoulder.

A healthy Budge probably would’ve handled Riggs in 1946. Instead, the challenger had a weakness to exploit. This being Bobby Riggs, he was unforgiving–some would say downright annoying–as he lobbed on point after point until Don’s overhead game finally gave way. Even with the physical edge, Riggs barely eked out the tour, winning 24 matches to Budge’s 22.

From that point on, the redhead’s appearances on court became less frequent, his peaks even rarer. But when he did give it his all, spectators could see glimpses of the man who won the Grand Slam.

At the 1948 US Pro, he drew Kramer in the semi-finals. Jack was at the top of his game, and Budge matched him blow for blow. Kramer’s “Big Game” tactics involved serve-and-volleying to the backhand. Against Budge, he served in the prescribed direction, but he quickly discovered that netrushing was a fool’s errand. The veteran exposed the weakness in Kramer’s own backhand and took a two sets to one lead, opening up a one-break advantage in the fourth.

But at age 33, this was no longer the Budge who could play all day without losing the crease in his trousers. He was struck by leg cramps and didn’t win a single game the rest of the way. Many onlookers, including umpire Levan Richards, believed that without the cramps, Don would’ve completed his victory.

The most famous of Budge’s single-day performances had come back in 1937, when he outlasted von Cramm to secure the Davis Cup Inter-Zone tie for the United States. After the match, US captain Walter Pate proclaimed, “No man, living or dead, could have beaten either man that day.”

Later stars–Laver, McEnroe, Federer, you know the list–lasted longer and enjoyed more of those special days. But for a couple of decades, if you asked any tour player who they would nominate for a single match to decide the fate of the planet, they’d all pick Budge.

They might have been right.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Beware of GOATs.

* * *

Alice Marble [USA]
Born: 28 September 1913
Died: 13 December 1990
Career: 1930-41
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1939)
Peak Elo rating: 2,385 (1st place, 1941)
Major singles titles: 5
Total singles titles: 45
 

* * *

Leave it to Pauline Betz to capture Alice Marble’s 1939 and 1940 seasons in one pithy line. Just 20 years old, Betz took a set from Marble at the 1940 Maryland State Championships before losing, 4-6, 6-4, 6-0. They met again at the Essex County Championships in Massachusetts a month later.

I had another chance against Marble, and I thought that perhaps this time I could win–I did but only four games in two sets.

The rematch went to Alice, 6-2, 6-2. There was no shame in that. Betz was a rising star, but in those two years, no one beat Marble. Literally.

Marble lost to Helen Jacobs in the 1938 Wimbledon semi-finals. She missed one smash after another, put her frustration on public display, and got herself dressed down by not one but two prominent coaches. Jacobs herself had long admired the Marble game but doubted her “temperament”–a catchall term for focus, equanimity, and killer instinct.

A lesser woman would’ve fallen into a slump. A younger Alice had done just that. There had been any number of wake-up calls over the years, like when Marble overheard Clark Gable saying, “She’s a real nice person, but she doesn’t have it.”

Marble would never lack for “it” again. She won her remaining 20 matches of the 1938 season. She went undefeated in 1939, collecting two narrow victories against Jacobs. She was unbeaten again in 1940, now conceding only six games in four sets to her aging rival. At the same time, she and partner Sarah Palfrey Cooke were just as good on the doubles court. They didn’t lose for four years. At the last Wimbledon before World War II, in 1939, Alice won the triple, coasting to a mixed doubles title with Bobby Riggs along with her singles and women’s doubles crowns.

After the 1940 campaign, with nothing else to prove on the amateur circuit, Marble went pro. She toured alongside Don Budge and Bill Tilden, playing a series of matches with English star Mary Hardwick. She beat Hardwick 58 out of 61 times.

Her dominance killed any interest in the one-on-one tour, but it capped a run for the ages. Counting both amateur and professional competition, Marble won 128 consecutive singles matches. All told, in the four seasons from 1938 to 1941, she tallied 193 wins against just 5 losses.

Alice’s victim in the 1939 Wimbledon final was Kay Stammers, a left-hander who often represented Britain in the Wightman Cup competition. Stammers had played the great Helen Wills Moody three times, even beating her when Helen was rounding into form in 1935.

How good was Marble at her peak? Stammers lost that championship match 6-2, 6-0. She said she would have preferred to play Wills Moody.

* * *

Alice made those victories look effortless. She served as big as anyone else on the circuit, forehands exploded off her racket, and she covered the court “like a man”–back when it was a compliment for sportswriters to say such things.

Staying on top was easy in 1939 and 1940. Getting there had been the tricky part.

Women’s tennis history is full of prodigies, each one seemingly younger than the last. Suzanne Lenglen won the World Hard Court Championships when she was 15. Helen Wills was a national champion at 17, an Olympic gold medalist at 18. Even Jacobs, who played so much of her career in the shadow of the other Helen, reached her first Forest Hills final when she was 20.

At those tender ages, Marble was full of little more than promise. When she made her first trip to Europe at age 20, in 1934, journalist Al Laney was struck by her “potentiality, which may been the greatest ever seen.” Her game was raw, very much a work in progress.

Jacobs first faced her on the doubles court in 1932:

[R]obust and attractive as Alice’s game was, it was too easy to counter. Her service looked far better than it was. She put too much topspin on the ball. Instead of skidding away from the receiver, it took a high bound and the forward spin of the ball, easily nullified, enabled the opponent to return the shot with safe margin. Her forehand drive, upon which she relied for the most forcing placements, carried the same top-spin, giving the opponent plenty of time to get to the ball.

Pure athleticism had gotten her this far. Her first love was baseball, and she was good enough to work out with the minor league San Francisco Seals. Joe DiMaggio said, “She had a pretty good arm.”

Top-level tennis was more demanding. Her strokes came from watching other players at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, plus the occasional lesson with local pros such as former Davis Cupper Howard Kinsey. Her family never would have dreamed of paying country-club dues, so she improvised. She picked up the game relatively late, and her big-swinging forehand was more Babe Ruth than Bill Tilden.

Few native talents had greater need of a coach. Fortunately, fate–along with local boosters who couldn’t help but notice Alice’s gifts–pushed her into the path of Eleanor Tennant. Few coaches have ever had greater confidence in an unproven athlete.

* * *

The Alice Marble story is, in large part, the Eleanor Tennant story. Tennant was a promising Bay Area player during World War I. In 1920, her one full season on the national circuit, she won 43 of 51 matches against top-flight competition. Her last three East Coast tournaments ended only when she collided with the country’s then-top player, Molla Mallory.

By then, Tennant was 25 years old, and she had long fended for herself. After a spell as a traveling saleswoman, she landed a job as a teaching pro in Beverly Hills. When US tennis tightened up its rules regarding professionalism, she found herself banned from amateur tournaments. Unfair as it was, it was hardly a tragedy. There were more than enough outlets for her substantial energy. When she wasn’t giving lessons to her growing movie-star clientele, she kept a lookout for future stars in need of her help.

“Teach” Tennant was aware of Marble soon after Alice’s debut on the state junior circuit in the late 1920s. They joined forces after the 1932 season, one in which the young woman won three tournaments but lost in the second round at Forest Hills.

Alice in 1933

The coach, influential as she was, had a knack for embellishing her own contributions. Later, she said Marble was “fat and heavy” and that she had “little to commend her game but bad temper.” That is hardly fair. One sportswriter described her serve at the time as “the most severe in the business.” Another compared her to Ellsworth Vines, though it was not an unalloyed compliment: “Easy shots she flubbed and tough ones she tucked away.”

Former champion Bill Johnston, who arranged Marble’s out-of-state trip in 1930, considered her “a better prospect than Miss Moody was at her age… with seeming greater natural ability.”

However we divvy up the credit, Tennant was close at hand–very close at hand–for the rocky road of the next half-decade. The pair lived together, and the coach found her a new wardrobe. For years, Marble didn’t even have a bank account; what little money came her way went through Tennant first.

More importantly for Alice’s fortunes on court, Tennant also helped her develop a new forehand. Another advisor, Harwood “Beese” White, showed Marble how to switch from the inefficient, uppercutting Western grip to a more conventional, flat-hitting Eastern grip.

When the Californian took her revitalized game back East in 1933, she looked ready to achieve the heights that Johnston, Tennant, and the rest envisioned for her. But like I said, it wasn’t going to be easy.

* * *

Starting in May of 1933, Alice won 23 matches in a row. She bulldozed the field at the California State Championships, then won a pair of titles on grass courts in Massachusetts. She was clearly one of the top players in the nation. Still, she was expected to do even more to earn a place representing her country in the Wightman Cup, the annual competition between the United States and Great Britain.

American tennis was an insular, snobby world. Some of the players–and even a few of the officials–sought to open things up, or at least to reward the outsiders who developed into stars. But the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) was run by well-heeled men from the East who preferred to mingle among their own kind. Most of the major regional associations had the same flaws, even if their leaders weren’t quite as stuffy as the federation functionaries in New York and Boston.

Some youngsters from California navigated that world just fine. The Southern and Northern California associations were sizable, and they produced one future champion after another. But once Alice threw in her lot with Tennant, she became a bit of a wild card. Teach was well-known and well-respected but not necessarily well-liked.

All of this is just background; it’s hard to know exactly why Marble was treated the way she was. In July 1933, she went to the Maidstone tournament on Long Island, where she was expected to play both singles and doubles–singles as a final audition for Wightman Cup, doubles as a gate attraction with Helen Wills Moody. Weather backed up the schedule, and Alice ended up playing four matches–108 games of tennis–on a single day. She lost 12 pounds grappling in 100-degree heat, and back at her hotel that night, she fainted.

The final insult: A doctor ruled her out for Wightman Cup. She ended up playing, but only in the final match, a dead doubles rubber.

Two weeks later, Marble returned to action at Forest Hills. She wasn’t entirely recovered, and she lost to Betty Nuthall in the quarters. It wasn’t a bad showing, but it paled next to the hopes she had brought from California just a couple of months before.

* * *

1934 was even worse. Alice went to Europe as part of that year’s Wightman Cup group. Shortly after arriving in Paris, she felt ill. She went on court to play a team match at Roland Garros anyway, possibly under excessive pressure from Jacobs. Stories differ. Either way, she fainted during the match. The initial diagnosis was anemia, the same ailment that triggered her collapse the previous summer.

It turned out to be tuberculosis. The doctor who came to that conclusion said that her tennis-playing days were over. He was wrong about that, but it would take two years before she’d be a factor again on the international scene.

Back at home, Tennant proved her devotion to her young charge. The coach paid for Alice’s stay at a sanitarium and visited daily–at least until the pair decided she would be better off on the outside. With a semblance of a normal life and support from a few of Tennant’s movie-star friends, Marble steadily improved to the point that there was no longer any sign of tuberculosis in her lungs.

A year after her collapse in Paris, Alice entered the California State Championships. She won ten straight sets and the title, sealing the crown with an easy defeat of the young Margaret Osborne.

But her outsider status struck again. No invitation to play in the East was forthcoming. The USLTA fathers were, at least nominally, concerned about her health. They wanted assurance from their own doctor that she was fit to play. Marble stayed home instead.

Player and coach forced the issue in 1936. Alice continued to cruise against California competition; Eastern authorities kept insisting on elaborate proofs of her health. Finally, Marble demonstrated her readiness by playing a series of practice matches against second-tier men. One of them quit after seven games. He told Julian Myrick, Alice’s chief adversary among the mandarins, “If she’s sick, I’m at death’s door.”

Marble didn’t play Wightman Cup that year, but she did enter five tournaments on the Eastern circuit. She reached four finals and won three. At Forest Hills, she met top seed Helen Jacobs for the championship. Jacobs was playing with a strapped right thumb, the result of an injury incurred earlier in the tournament. Marble nearly gave away the match away, dropping the first set in a flurry of errors. But in the second and third, she beat the veteran tactician at her own game. Alice opened up the court with her forehand, drew her opponent to the net, and waited for Jacobs to make mistakes. She won her first national championship, 4-6, 6-3, 6-2.

* * *

The 22-year-old champion was an instant hit. Typically, an injured player, especially one as well-liked as Jacobs, would be the crowd favorite. But on the day, the gallery at Forest Hills cheered Alice to victory. Her story–the comeback kid, the scrapper rose up from nothing–was something that Tennant’s Hollywood pals might have put on the big screen.

That wasn’t all Marble had going for her. Later, the New York Daily News wrote, “If they paid off on curves instead of points, the beauteous Alice Marble woulda won Wimbledon.”

Despite everything she’d been through, Alice wasn’t yet a complete player. After all the time she missed, 1936 was something of a rookie season. 1937 turned out to be a sophomore slump.

Jadwiga Jędrzejowska said of Marble that season, “She plays so beautiful tennis–like the artist’s picture.” The cheerful slugger from Poland could afford to be magnanimous. She had already beaten Marble three times that year–including at Wimbledon in the semi-finals, and she would do so again in the States. Jaja posed a problem Alice had never encountered before: an opponent who could hit even harder than she could.

Marble limped out of the US National Championships in yet another quarter-final, this time to Dorothy Bundy. Bundy was described by a contemporary as “not a great tennis player,” and the roller-coaster upset at Forest Hills is a good representation of Alice’s season. She entered eight tournaments and won only two. The consensus was that a woman with her talent should’ve done more. Neither Marble nor Tennant could disagree.

In 1938, Alice got her revenge on Jędrzejowska, straight-setting her at a Wimbledon warm-up. But as we’ve seen, Marble dropped out in the semi-finals of the main event, losing her focus after missing one too many smashes against Jacobs. The correspondent for the New Yorker felt that an in-form Marble could’ve beaten either of the finalists. But that was little consolation to the player who had let yet another laurel slip away.

* * *

And that was it. Something finally clicked. Maybe it was Hazel Wightman’s harangue after Alice gave away the Wimbledon semi-final. Maybe Eleanor Tennant’s belief that it was Marble’s birthright to become a champion finally infiltrated the younger woman’s psyche.

Alice never lost another match as an amateur.

The Streak ran to 128 straight. Marble settled all the scores and made sure that a new generation–Betz, Osborne, Louise Brough, Doris Hart–didn’t get any ideas, either. The only notion the youngsters seized on was to play like Alice. Betz, one of the few holdouts, thought that the pendulum swung too far in the direction of Marble-worship. The Californian was the first woman to play an aggressive brand of all-court tennis, and her acolytes practiced volleys at the expense of their baseline games.

Among all those wins, there were a few close calls. At Forest Hills in 1938, Sarah Palfrey held match points, and the two women each tallied exactly 122 points in their three-set semi-final contest. A year later, Jacobs won a 10-8 second frame to force a third set for the American championship. But it was more common that the extremes went in the other direction. Before Marble clobbered Kay Stammers in the 1939 Wimbledon final, she wholly shut out Hilde Sperling. She allowed the German only 14 points en route to a 6-0, 6-0 semi-final victory.

Just halfway into The Streak, Alice’s invincibility was already a cultural reference point. The New Yorker announced in 1939 that she had finally lost a match–of ping-pong.

Two years after the Jacobs debacle, the discussion was no longer about whether Marble had what it took. Now the pundits debated whether she was the greatest of all time. Al Laney, a leading voice who rarely deigned to cover women’s tennis, made an exception for Alice. He spent several pages of his book, Covering the Court, measuring Marble’s case against the most towering of her predecessors, Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills Moody.

The Marble serve was the best of the bunch; Laney called it “hard as a man’s [with a] kick that many men would envy.” Marble’s volleys and smashes were better as well. Laney rated Alice’s forehand the equal of Lenglen’s.

Alice “made too many loose shots after working up a rally to a climax,” but:

If Miss Marble’s development had been normal and uninterrupted from girlhood onward, I do not doubt that we all would be forced to acknowledge her as the greatest.

Alice’s five major titles seem like a light haul for a player of her stature. But she was not only stripped of opportunities by illness and 1930s tennis politics, she also missed chances when World War II wiped out the game in Europe. She was able to enter Wimbledon only three times.

We could ponder the what-ifs, or we could do as her contemporaries did and simply admire “Alice Marvel.” She should never have made it as a tennis player. She wasn’t supposed to recover from tuberculosis. Her own national federation worked against her.

Then, at age 24, she simply stopped losing. Tennis hasn’t seen anything like it since.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Beware of GOATs.

* * *

Jimmy Connors [USA]
Born: 2 September 1952
Career: 1971-92
Played: Left-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1974)
Peak Elo rating: 2,364 (1st place, 1979)
Major singles titles: 8
Total singles titles: 109
 

* * *

Few men have ever approached the longevity of Jimmy Connors. He reached his first Wimbledon quarter-final in 1972, when he was 19. He thrilled New York crowds with his most memorable performance, a semi-final US Open run in 1991, the week of his 39th birthday.

He won 1,274 matches and amassed 109 tour-level titles. Both have stood as Open era records for thirty years. With Roger Federer’s retirement, they may last another thirty. Rafael Nadal, currently the active leader in matches won, needs another 208 to catch up.

You’d think 1,274 victories would be enough. Yet there are still more that don’t count toward the official tally. To me, two of those unofficial matches are the best exemplars of the peak Connors experience–his capabilities, his attitude, his appeal to millions of fans amid America’s 1970s tennis boom.

Jimbo, as much as any superstar of his era, padded his bank account with exhibitions. Except not all of these clashes were casual hit-and-giggles. In 1975, his manager Bill Riordan–son of a boxing promoter–hit on the idea of a “Heavyweight Championship of Tennis.” No mere tour stop could contain the ballyhoo of a Riordan production. Whenever Connors played at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, it was a one-off of epic proportions, a prizefight from the baseline.

The two “challenge matches” Riordan staged in 1975 set a new standard for tennis spectacles. Two years after the Billie Jean King–Bobby Riggs Battle of the Sexes, television networks recognized the enormity of the potential audience for tennis. CBS ponied up $650,000–about $3.5 million in today’s dollars–for rights to the second of the pair. Much of that money went straight to the players.

Riordan, with his unorthodox background, might have been the only man in tennis capable of dreaming up such a thing. While Connors was hardly the only drawing card in the game, he was the sport’s biggest name by early 1975. Jimbo won three of the four majors in 1974. (He didn’t play the French Open.) At Forest Hills, he brushed aside Ken Rosewall in the final, 6-1, 6-0, 6-1. He stepped on court 100 times that year, and only once did he lose in straight sets.

There was just one question mark regarding Connors’s supremacy. He was the only top player who skipped Lamar Hunt’s World Championship Tennis (WCT) tour. Instead, he played a Riordan-managed circuit of minor events. In February, Connors won a cheap title in Birmingham, Alabama. The same week, Arthur Ashe, Björn Borg, Rod Laver, John Newcombe, and Stan Smith duked it out at WCT events in Long Island and London.

But Riordan could play that to his advantage, too. His client remained an unknown quantity. Even as Jimbo put the finishing touches on his third major title, he had yet to face many of the top players in the game.

Connors knew what he had to do to prove that he deserved to be number one. After clobbering Rosewall at the US Open, he had three words for his manager.

“Get me Laver.”

* * *

Okay, maybe that’s what he said. It’s too good to be true, right? And anyway, who says that after a match? That’s not how tennis works.

Gene Scott, a former American top-tenner and magazine publisher writing in the New York Times, was certain: “Of course, Connors said no such thing.” Many in the press corps were willing to believe he said it–but only because Riordan coached him ahead of time.

Jimbo himself insists it was spontaneous. It makes for a good story, anyway.

No matter what Connors uttered in his moment of triumph, the match was on, set for a purpose-built arena at Caesars Palace on February 2nd, 1975. There was even a backstory to justify bad blood between the two. Laver, the 36-year-old who had won the Grand Slam in 1969, said in early 1974 that Jimbo “probably thinks he’s the next best thing to 7-Up.” Not exactly Don King, but you weren’t likely to get the Australian gentleman on record with anything spicier than that.

Riordan billed the first challenge match as a $100,000, winner-take-all showdown. In truth, there was little at stake except for pride. Both players got substantial guarantees. The manager gave Laver sixty thousand reasons to make the trip to Vegas.

No one would ever mistake Rocket Rod for a pugilist, but Connors played his own part to a tee. With Riordan, mother Gloria, and coach Pancho Segura in tow, he bickered over the balls, the umpires, the ground rules–anything to fuel the fire and, not coincidentally, feed the press. He went on court with a custom-made warm-up jacket emblazoned with his catchphrase for the day, “Better Than 7 Up.”

* * *

Jimbo’s preparation for the match reflected his sky-high confidence. He told the Times two weeks before the big day:

I’ve never played Laver, in fact I’ve never really watched him play. When he won the Alan King tournament in Vegas last year, I watched him play two games on TV, then I turned it off. I’m not one for watching.

It hardly mattered. In his corner was Segura, one of the smartest tacticians in the game. Pancho was always watching. The old pro advised Connors to attack Laver down the middle and to minimize the impact of the Aussie’s heavy topspin by moving forward at the first opportunity.

Segura got into the spirit of the spectacle, too. He probably had money riding on his pupil; at the second challenge match later in the year, rumor had it that he bet $11,000 on Jimbo. As the players took the court, he passed on his final advice: “Kill him, kill him, kill him!”

Connors needed little urging. The prime $100 seats were packed with Laver supporters, celebrities like Johnny Carson and Clint Eastwood among them. The American revved himself up further, yelling “Fuck you! Fuck you!” to the glitterati.

The clash wasn’t sanctioned by any tour, but this was no exhibition.

Laver said, at least for public consumption, that his advanced age was no hindrance. He trained hard, won a tournament in preparation, and felt he could go toe-to-toe with the 22-year-old for a single match. On the day, though, it took him two sets to get going. Connors took the first two sets, 6-4, 6-2, following Segura’s game plan and neutralizing the Rocket’s serve with his aggressive, flat returns.

The Australian found his groove in the third. He got on the board, 6-3, as his deep forehands found the range. On the offensive, he could show off the variety that once made him the best player in the world. The men traded holds for the first nine games of the fourth set. With Laver serving at 4-5, they played a single game that nearly justified their paychecks. Rodney’s fifth hold of the set required 22 points. He saved five match points, two of them with clean aces.

Finally, the age difference told. Laver was spent, and Connors was as fresh as ever. At 5-6, Jimbo broke to love. The match was his.

* * *

August sportswriter Red Smith called it “the most grossly opulent match ever played.” Riordan called it a job well done. Connors–not to mention the good folks at CBS–agreed.

Connors said in 1978, “I peak every time I play.” He was indeed the king of his realm. He wouldn’t lose a match until June. But he always soared to his greatest heights when he had something to prove.

Conveniently enough, Jimbo had started his 1975 season with a loss at the Australian Open. His conqueror there was John Newcombe, another veteran Aussie, a mustachioed six-footer with an arrogance to match Connors’s own. Who better for the American to battle in Heavyweight Championship II: Electric Ballyhoo?

The Laver match established that the audience was there. Now Riordan and his client really cashed in. Connors-Newcombe was billed as $250,000, winner-take-all. In fact, both players took home more than that. Newk even juiced the match for a bit of extra promotion. The ball kids sported his own clothing line.

The sequel was just as serious as the original. As soon as the date was announced, fans told Newcombe, “I don’t want you to beat him, I want you to kill him.” The Aussie was puzzled by the animosity. He put it down to Connors’s refusal to play Davis Cup for his country. After all, the Laver match had taken place the same weekend that a lackluster United States side lost to Mexico. One of Riordan’s many feuds was with the men in charge of the Cup squad, so avoiding such a scheduling conflict was never a concern.

For his part, Newk recognized that the rewards were ridiculous, the incentives out of whack. There were no ranking points to earn, and tennis had already made him a rich man. “You want to win a match like this,” he told Leonard Koppett of the New York Times, “because you want to be the winner.”

Hard to argue with that.

* * *

Laver-Connors was a match of contrasts. While both men were left-handed, it was a clash of age versus youth, variety versus brute strength, netrushing versus passing shots.

The second showdown at Caesars Palace was power versus power, a monster serve against the sport’s most devastating return. Newcombe had one of the most ferocious attacks in the game. Segura told Jimbo to take advantage of Newk’s size and middling movement by hitting low backhand slices.

The pre-match machinations were, if anything, even more convoluted for the second challenge match. Connors came down with mononucleosis the month before. As the date approached, he needed live tournament practice. Newcombe was scheduled to play a WCT event in Denver the week before Las Vegas, and he thought the sides had agreed that Connors would stay away. Jimbo disagreed. As a last-minute entry, the number one player in the world went through qualifying and won the tournament. Newk withdrew.

It was a promoter’s dream. One of the contenders had fled in fear of the other.

The Australian was more annoyed than afraid. It probably didn’t matter. Regardless of his mood, he wasn’t strong enough to beat Connors. He served big for two sets, putting something extra behind his second serves, but that only earned him a split. He didn’t have any more in the tank, and Jimbo cruised to victory, 6-3, 4-6, 6-2, 6-4.

“Serving to him is like pitching to Hank Aaron,” said Newcombe after the match. “If you don’t mix it up, it’s going out of the ball park.”

* * *

After Connors beat Newcombe, Leonard Koppett explained what he saw as “the limitation of challenge matches: matches like the one with Laver don’t come up frequently.” The traditional tour structure had the advantage: “[I]n regular tournaments at least there is a context.”

What Koppett missed–understandably, since the tennis world was still coming to grips with the young Connors–was that Jimbo was the context. The street-smart underdog, the scrappy counterpuncher, the unlikely champion with a signature strut could draw enormous crowds without any need for a historic venue, or even a worthy foil.

Problem was, the Jimbo-versus-the-world model laid an enormous amount of pressure on the hero. After putting an exclamation point on his number one position by beating Newcombe, his motivation sagged. He put on weight and took advantage of the social perks available to a celebrity like himself. He couldn’t help but play the underdog, and it was more comfortable to do that without also reigning over the entire circuit.

Circumstances sped his descent to mere almost-greatness. He lost the 1975 Wimbledon final to Arthur Ashe, a veteran he had beaten in three previous encounters. Segura stayed home–a result of a spat with mother Gloria–and Connors hyperextended his knee in the first round. The injury got worse throughout the fortnight. At a lesser event, he would have withdrawn. His defeat was understandable, but his perch at the top was punctured nonetheless. The man who had pasted Rosewall, Laver, and Newcombe was no longer untouchable.

By the end of the year, Connors had lost to Vijay Amritraj, Eddie Dibbs, Adriano Pannatta, Raul Ramirez, and Manuel Orantes. The Orantes match was a particular disappointment: It was the Forest Hills final, a match he suddenly couldn’t muster the discipline to win.

The good news? Losing to Orantes gave Riordan an excuse for another challenge match. Back in Vegas in February 1976, Connors obliterated the Spaniard for another (purported) $250,000 prize. The score was 6-2, 6-1, 6-0, and Jimbo proved that on a favorable surface, he was superior to the fifth-best player in the world.

He split with Riordan, but the manager retained the rights to the challenge match concept. Before Ilie Năstase finally beat him in April 1977, Connors won 13 straight matches at Caesars Palace.

* * *

While Jimbo’s career still had 15 years to run, his days at the top were numbered. He held off Björn Borg in the 1976 US Open, but once the Swede caught up with him, Connors managed only two victories in 14 meetings.

According to the official rankings, Connors held on the number one position–with a single one-week break–until April 1979. My historical Elo ratings aren’t so rosy. Though Jimbo was always near the top, he split time in the late 1970s with Borg, Ashe, and Guillermo Vilas.

By 1978, fellow players noticed that the American had mellowed. His practice routine also held him back. He was famous for short, high-energy hitting sessions, but all the sweat disguised the fact that he rarely worked on his weaknesses or sparred with his equals.

An unchanging Connors was still plenty good, just not good enough to dethrone Borg at Wimbledon or, a few years later, hold off John McEnroe. He remained a top-five player until the mid-1980s, including a resurgence in 1982 that gave him his second Wimbledon crown.

And finally, 1991. At age 38, he summoned all the wiles, all the daring, and all the sheer stubbornness of his 20-year career to make one last run at the US Open. His first-round match took four and a half hours. His fourth-rounder, against Aaron Krickstein, lasted 4:41. With a computer ranking of 174th in the world, he gutted out a quarter-final against Paul Haarhuis. It’s a cliché to say that Connors played with his heart on his sleeve. That night against Haarhuis, Jimmy’s heart was on everyone’s sleeve.

One last time, as Sports Illustrated put it, “Jimbo was the only thing in tennis anybody cared about.” It didn’t matter that he lost in the semi-finals. When Connors was at his slugging, pugnacious best, you simply couldn’t look away.

New Yorkers claimed the veteran as emblematic of their gritty hometown. But really, Jimbo’s last stand turned every match into a one-night only performance worthy of Las Vegas.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Whee!

* * *

Jack Kramer [USA]
Born: 1 August 1921
Died: 12 September 2009
Career: 1937-54
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1946)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 35
 

* * *

In his 1979 book, The Game, Jack Kramer reviewed the era from 1931 to 1967. He had personal experience of those years of the amateur-professional divide, as a fan, competitor, and promoter. He imagined an alternate world that put the amateurs and pros in direct competition, one where the best players–regardless of the source of their income–competed every year at Wimbledon and Forest Hills.

For each of those 37 seasons, he named “Kramer’s Open Champions” for the two major tournaments–including himself, where appropriate. In reality, Jack won three majors: the US Championships in 1946 and 1947, and Wimbledon in 1947. In the alternate history, he won ten.

That’s the first thing you need to know about Jack Kramer. He was unfailingly confident, whether playing for a championship, promoting a pro tournament at Madison Square Garden, or plotting the course of Open tennis. He grew up in Las Vegas and learned probability from dealers who boarded with his parents. His was the attitude of a gambler who always knew the odds. Friends called him Big Jake, after gambling slang for the jacks in the deck.

The second thing you need to know about Jack Kramer is that he was right.

There was no false bluster in claiming all those titles, placing himself between Don Budge and Richard “Pancho” González in the pantheon of the game’s greats. He dominated the amateur game for two years after World War II, then comfortably handled anyone a pro promoter could put in his way: González, Bobby Riggs, Pancho Segura, Frank Sedgman. The one time he played Budge in a match that counted, at the 1948 US Pros, he won in five.

More than any other great player since the war, we don’t really know how good Kramer was. Frank Deford, his co-author for The Game, wrote:

[T]he one thing Jack was never given in tennis was the proper foil. He never had any unforgettable matches. He beat everybody to pieces. Kramer was such a superb match player that there is no telling to what heights he might have risen had he had someone to push him.

So, ten majors? Sure. Plus however many Australian titles he chose to contest. Maybe even a French or two. The reality–three majors and a handful of pro tours–is tough to rate, so it takes some imagination to understand where he falls on the all-time list.

* * *

The third thing you need to know about Jack Kramer is that he was not Bill Pullman. Not exactly, anyway. Pullman-as-Kramer was the villain in 2017’s Battle of the Sexes, a male chauvinist who single-handedly drove Gladys Heldman and Billie Jean King to start their own tour.

One detail from the film is completely accurate: King disliked him so much that she refused to play the famous match against Riggs if Kramer was in the commentary booth.

“I have been tagged an ogre by the girls,” Kramer complains in his book, “and that is going to stick.” (Correct!) He offers his own side of the story, which isn’t so much an absolution as an illumination. “I’m not a crusader against women’s tennis,” he writes. “I’m just a businessman.” You can see where this is going:

The only prejudice practiced in tennis against women players is by the fans, who have shown repeatedly that they are prejudiced against having to watch women play tennis when they might be able to watch men play.

Kramer didn’t see the vicious circle of lower prize money, less promotion, and fewer talented youngsters attracted to the sport, nor would it have ever occurred to him to try to break the cycle. He had lost money from the Pauline Betz-Gussie Moran pro tour in 1951, seen some crowds head to the concession stands during women’s matches in the decades since, and that was that.

On the other hand, just-a-businessman Kramer suggested to Billie Jean as early as 1968 that there should be an independent women’s tour. He wasn’t the dictator of the Pacific Southwest, the tournament that so infuriated King and Rosie Casals that they walked away mid-match, double-defaulting the 1972 final. He claimed that, as just one member of the tournament’s board, he lobbied to increase women’s prize money, though only by a modest amount that would still leave the men with the majority of the pot.

Kramer and Pauline Betz in 1947

Public battles are always easier when you can fight them against a convenient villain, and Kramer fit the bill. Jack had been public enemy number one in the eyes of the amateur establishment back when he poached the best players for his pro circuit. He was a perfect target in 1973 as well. As executive director of the fledgling ATP, he led the 81-player Wimbledon boycott, losing his gig as a BBC commentator in the process.

Kramer was no more an ogre than any number of other 1970s country-club conservatives. He didn’t crusade against women’s tennis; he mostly ignored it. He held female champions in high regard. Even if the women’s tour would never count him an ally, his efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to put more money in the pockets of tennis players indirectly aided the cause.

* * *

Before Kramer became the face of pro tennis and the man who Bud Collins called “the most important figure in the history of the game,” he was an amateur champion who rose to the top with tactics that no one had ever seen before.

He called it the “Big Game” or the “Power Game.” A later commentator suggested that “Pressure Game” would be a more fitting label. Players such as Bill Tilden, Ellsworth Vines, and Budge had hit hard, serve-and-volleyed, and forced their opponents into mistakes, but Kramer took aggressive tennis to a new level.

Big Jake always credited Cliff Roche, a retired engineer and weekend hacker, with the underpinnings of the Big Game. Roche taught him “percentage tennis”–positioning and strokes designed to cut off the other man’s angles and pressure him into mistakes. That meant coming in behind every first serve and most second serves. Kramer saw the second serve return as an opportunity as well.

“If you don’t come in on your second serve,” he said, “your opponent will.”

Before Kramer and Roche, points were to be constructed. Earlier champions could and did serve-and-volley, but they were more likely to wait for a weak shot–often the return of serve–before they attacked and set about ending the rally. Kramer recognized that the longer his service points stretched out, the more his advantage ebbed away. His goal was to finish every exchange with his first volley.

“I win fast,” he liked to say, “or I lose fast.”

The other prong of Roche’s strategy was energy management. Big Game proponents rarely lost their serve, so they took it easy on return. Jack wrote:

[E]arly in a set I let a guy have his serve unless he got behind love-30 or love-40 off his own mistakes. I would just try and keep him honest–go for winners off his serve, try something different–whatever I could do with the least loss of energy. Then when it got to 4-all, I played every point all out.

Tiebreaks were far in the future. When two big servers got together, the resulting scorelines could be eye-popping. At a tour stop in Seattle, Kramer and González once traded blows for 56 games until Jack finally broke to take the set, 30-28.

* * *

There were no secrets at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, where Roche taught Kramer the Big Game. The first wave of champion serve-and-volleyers all came from Southern California: Ted Schroeder, Joe Hunt, Bob Falkenburg, and González.

When Kramer and Schroeder went to Australia to reclaim the Davis Cup in 1946, their tactics revitalized tennis Down Under. 19-year-old Frank Sedgman was one up-and-comer who took notice, and he soon became the first of a long line of Aussie serve-and-volleying champions. Kramer believed that the visit sent a different message to Australian coach Harry Hopman: the value of stamina. Hopman eventually became the leading proponent of fitness training for tennis players.

Jack was the best player in the world when he made that trip, but his Big Game had taken years to develop. In 1941, the year he turned 20, he failed to win a tournament in 17 tries, dropping repeated decisions to Riggs, Frank Kovacs, Frank Parker and Don McNeill. When Riggs and Kovacs went pro at the end of the season, Jack’s results improved, but a bout of appendicitis kept him out of the 1942 Nationals at Forest Hills, the only major not halted by the war.

1943, too, could have been his year. He reached the finals at Forest Hills only to fall ill with food poisoning and lose to Joe Hunt in four sets. He spent 1944 and 1945 aboard a Coast Guard vessel in the Pacific. His earlier bad luck was compounded: Had he won a national title, he probably would have spent his time in uniform playing exhibitions. Instead, he saw combat and rarely touched a racket at all.

Misfortune trailed him into the first post-war season. Kramer was the second seed and betting favorite at Wimbledon, selections that he justified by losing only five games in the first three rounds. But he developed such painful blisters on his right hand that he had to wear a glove for his fourth-round clash with Jaroslav Drobný. Drobný won, 2-6, 17-15, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3.

Back home, though, his talent finally paid off in the victory column. He was nearly undefeated Stateside in 1946, picking up titles at Seabright, Forest Hills, the Pacific Southwest, and the Pacific Coast Championships. He was just as good in 1947, picking up the Wimbledon crown with the loss of only one set, then defending his United States title as well.

Cruising the Pacific during the war, Kramer had had plenty of time to think. He decided then that he would cut out distractions and redouble his efforts to get the most he could out of tennis. He was always straightforward about his intent to turn pro; he might have done so at the end of 1946 had he won Wimbledon on the first attempt. It took only one year longer. After Forest Hills in 1947, he took a $50,000 guarantee, and by December, he was on court at Madison Square Garden against the reigning pro champ, Bobby Riggs.

* * *

He may not have known it before he signed his first pro contract, but Jack Kramer was built for professional tennis. He was able to keep his competitive juices flowing night after night, and he remained effective even while nursing minor injuries. Even more, crowds recognized that he was there for them. A couple generations earlier, Bill Tilden had given the impression that he was doing his fans a favor by showing up. Confident as he was, Kramer was never a prima donna.

Above all, he wanted to win. Pancho Segura recalled in 1986:

Kramer was the toughest competitor I ever played, mentally. He was ruthless. He’d beat you love, love and love if he could. His concentration and determination were as tough as anybody’s.

Riggs learned the hard way. The Kramer-Riggs tour started on even terms: Bobby won the MSG opener, and after 28 stops, Jack led the series 15-13. But while the veteran exhausted his bag of tricks, Kramer continued to polish his game, solidifying groundstrokes and adding bite to his second serve.

Kramer won 54 of the last 61 matches between the two. Before an appearance in Fort Worth, Riggs pleaded: “Look, you gotta give me a break. Carry me a bit. Make it look it competitive. Your winning streak is killing interest in the tour, not to mention costing us a lot of money.”

Kramer beat him that night, 6-0, 6-0.

Big Jake didn’t have the biggest serve, but he served hard, with dazzling variety. He wasn’t the fastest player around the court, but he was more than quick enough to execute his tactics. “Kramer did his killing smoothly and quietly,” according to Harry Hopman. The pressure was relentless, and players who couldn’t handle it were simply steamrolled.

* * *

The knock on Kramer was that he made it look too easy. Generations of boys watched him (and successors like Sedgman, and Tony Trabert, and Lew Hoad) and concluded that with a booming serve and a willingness to rush the net, they too could reach the top of the game.

Big Jake knew what made him so effective, and it wasn’t what his acolytes thought it was. His serves–first and second–were both precise and varied. He could hit every serve in the book, and the money-maker was a deuce-court delivery that sliced wide. Film circulated of Kramer on the practice court, knocking down ball boxes with his accuracy and sending serves through small hoops placed above the net.

The difference between the amateur game and the pros, according to Kramer and innumerable other stars, was the second serve. You could win Wimbledon without a good one. But on a 100-stop barnstorming tour against Kramer or González, a powder-puff second ball was an insurmountable weakness.

Jack’s other distinctive asset was his forehand approach shot. Plenty of players could control points from the baseline with their forehands, much as they do today. Everyone knew how to approach with a backhand slice. But from the backcourt, it isn’t as natural to move up behind a forehand. Kramer could. He considered it his secret weapon, the shot that “busted up all the usual percentages.”

It all came back to pressure. There was nowhere to hide. Kramer didn’t give you a break with his second serve. You couldn’t pin him to the baseline by feeding him forehands. You could only take your chances trying to pass him–and that was exactly what he wanted you to do.

* * *

By 1949, Big Jake was already coping with injuries. Cortisone shots kept him in the game until 1954, when he wrapped up a successful tour against Sedgman and arthritis forced him to move to the business side of the pro game.

My historical Elo ratings confirm that he was every bit as good as he thought he was. He was the year-end number one by that formula every year from 1946 to 1951. Only one man–Frank Parker in his career year of 1946–even came close.

He was the face of professional tennis for another decade. Kramer swooped in to seize one standout after another from the amateur game, a circuit he unabashedly called his “farm system.” He was the most persistent voice in favor of open tennis, a development he believed could’ve come about in the 1930s, if only “some dumb sonuvabitch like me” had been around to force the issue.

Critics often painted him as a self-aggrandizing money-grubber. But in the early 1960s, he recognized that his own prominence–and his unpopularity among amateur officialdom–made open tennis less likely to come about. He handed off the tour to Tony Trabert and stepped away.

Herbert Warren Wind wrote in 1962:

[T]he very people who came to deplore his freewheeling business operations have always been quick to acknowledge that there is no one they would rather watch a match with, talk tennis with, or, for that matter, spend their time with.

By the 1970s, it was easy to castigate Kramer for his role in the Wimbledon boycott or because he failed to do more for the women’s game. But tennis of the 1970s–even women’s tennis–was the world he made. He essentially invented the concept of a pro tournament circuit; a points-based ranking system was his idea as well. The dominant strategy on the men’s tour was still his own Big Game.

“Believe me,” he said, “John McEnroe plays exactly the way I used to play.”

He might have been a dinosaur. But among the dinosaurs, he was a Tyrannosaurus rex.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Whee!

* * *

Lindsay Davenport [USA]
Born: 8 June 1976
Career: 1993-2008
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1998)
Peak Elo rating: 2,447 (1st place, 2000)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 55
 

* * *

Lindsay Davenport was so untouchable in the junior ranks that other players dubbed her “Bagel.”

This might be my favorite single detail I’ve learned in researching 100-plus profiles this year. Most all-time greats ruled the competition as youngsters. Yet Davenport, alone of the whole lot, got a nickname out of her habit of dropping 6-0 sets on helpless opponents.

The level of competition changed, but Davenport’s ability to take over a match never did. She recorded 125 bagel sets at tour level as a pro. The rest of the circuit returned the favor only nine times, and she won one of those matches. The American bageled Martina Hingis when the Swiss player held the number one ranking. She shut out Elena Dementieva in a Fed Cup final. She six-loved Conchita Martínez three times. When the tennis world was atwitter over the 17-year-old Maria Sharapova, Davenport beat her 6-0, 6-0.

As good a junior as Davenport was–she won the 1992 US Open girls’ title without losing a set–her teen years couldn’t have been more anonymous. She was just a few months younger than Jennifer Capriati, who won the same junior title three years earlier. By the time Davenport became a factor on tour, Capriati was on her first extended break. She was four years older than Hingis, who won four adult majors before Lindsay won her first. “I was never a prodigy,” she said in 1998.

The characteristics that made Davenport such a force on the junior circuit didn’t immediately translate into success against adults. The product of two volleyball players, she towered over her peers. She sprouted to her full height of nearly six-feet, three-inches in her mid-teens. It wasn’t a smooth physical transition, but few players in the juniors knew how to cope with a giant across the net, especially one with the brains to match her brawn. Adults, by contrast, immediately took advantage of her questionable movement.

Lindsay also tried her best to remain “normal.” She looked up to Mary Joe Fernández, who had managed to get her high school diploma at the same time that she gained a foothold on the circuit. Davenport would do the same. That meant a limited schedule and a balanced approach to training.

“Balance” wasn’t a word you heard around the locker room much in those days. If some snarky sportswriters are to be believed, it had one more syllable than many of the young women could manage.

So while Davenport’s peers trained at the Bollettieri Academy and learned the ropes on tour, she beat up on the juniors, did her schoolwork, and ventured only gradually into deeper waters. At the 1993 US Open, Lindsay reached the fourth round, where she forced Gabriela Sabatini to three sets, saving five match points along the way.

Sabatini’s post-match report tells you all you need to know about the 17-year-old American’s game. “She likes to hit the ball hard into the corner,” said Gabi. “Very, very hard.”

* * *

Not everyone called Lindsay “Bagel.” That nickname hints at a good-natured relationship between the queen and her subjects. On the WTA circuit of the late 1990s, interpersonal interactions tended to be spicier.

Hence Davenport’s other, behind-the-back nickname: “Dump Truck.”

Her body filled out, and since her game depended on power, not court coverage, she could get away with carrying around some extra weight. As a teenager on the catty, clique-ish circuit, she was plenty insecure about her appearance. But the results started to come anyway. She cracked the top ten a month before her 18th birthday and she climbed as high as sixth in the world, defeating Mary Pierce and Jana Novotná to reach the title match at the 1994 year-end championships.

18-year-old Lindsay at the 1994 Slims Championships

The American press, accustomed to teens who rocketed to the top of the rankings, chose to focus on the negative. A year after nearly upsetting Sabatini at the US Open, Davenport crashed out in the third round to 44th-ranked Mara Endo of Japan. Far too many people opined, in print, that she lost because she was too fat.

Billie Jean King, who had also once struggled with her weight, disagreed:

I would say that she needs to lose ten pounds, at most…. Weight has nothing to do with her speed. That’s genetics. Who cares? The good thing is that she doesn’t have an eating disorder. Be thankful for that. I say, leave her alone.

It took another year, with a back injury and a spell outside the top ten–before Davenport got serious about her fitness. After the 1995 season, she hired a new coach, Robert Van’t Hof. The pair focused on her movement, which Van’t Hof believed had a carryover effect on the rest of her game. “[Y]ou get more balls and you stay in points longer,” he said. “Opponents notice that and they start to feel they have to do more.”

Ultimately, Davenport dropped 30 pounds. Her attitude changed. Her results improved immediately. Midway through the 1996 season, she beat Arantxa Sánchez Vicario for the gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics, then upset world number one Steffi Graf at Manhattan Beach two weeks later.

Another two years with Van’t Hof, and Lindsay became a grand slam champion.

* * *

The first thing everyone noticed about Davenport was her height. Even as the tour got bigger, there weren’t many six-footers around. Almost as unusual was her undeniable air of normalcy.

When the era’s teen queens weren’t sniping at each other, their parents–Stefano Capriati, Jim Pierce, Richard Williams–were doing it for them. Just not Lindsay’s.

“I think Lindsay Davenport’s parents are terrific,” said Pam Shriver. “You know why? I’ve never met them. Of all the teenage wonders I’ve known, she’s the first one whose parents weren’t hanging around all the time. I’m crazy about the Davenports.”

Lindsay studiously avoided controversy, and she was one of the few players able to remain friendly with standoffish stars like Martina Hingis and Monica Seles. She gave good interviews, even after the Australian press blew her “hits like a man” comment about Amélie Mauresmo wildly out of proportion. Her cooperation flagged only when the cameras came out. She rarely posed for a picture that wasn’t absolutely necessary.

The surprisingly chummy Hingis and Davenport

It was easy to come to the conclusion that Davenport was the “sweet” one on a cutthroat circuit. While she didn’t mind the misconception, she could be as merciless as any of the spoiled daddy’s girls she faced in finals.

The 125 bagels were just the start. Her parents, Wink and Ann, usually got credit for staying out of the way. Yet a pre-teen Lindsay was at least partly responsible. At a match when she was 10 or 11 years old, she heard Wink groan after she made an error. She told him then and there, “Dad, if you do that one more time, you’ll never get to come watch me again.”

Off court, she was indeed the normal one. But no one who played her was fooled. “Even when I’m playing a friend and she hits a winner,” Lindsay said, “I’m like, ‘Who the hell do think you are?’ That’s how I think, I can’t help it.”

In 2002, Davenport said, “Most of the great players are assholes or bitches.” She didn’t exclude herself, though she did once refuse to wear a t-shirt that said “Bitch” for a magazine cover shoot. Like Hingis, Anna Kournikova, and the Williams sisters, she had an image to maintain. It was just a different image.

* * *

Even with her gold medal, the rangy American flew under the radar. In 1997, she climbed as high as number two in the rankings, finishing the year at number three. She recorded her first win against Hingis in two years and won six titles, including the crown at Indian Wells.

The majors took a bit longer. She seemed to be limited to two bites at the cherry each season. She never cared for European clay, and her movement on grass lagged behind her ability to cover a hard court.

Davenport knocked down the last domino in 1998, the year she turned 22 years old. At the Australian Open, she double-bageled Ruxandra Dragomir and held off Venus Williams before falling in the semi-finals, her first final four appearance down under. That moved her back to number two on the ranking table, and she immediately backed it up by upsetting Hingis for the title in Tokyo.

She made the semis in Paris, as well. A quarter-final exit at Wimbledon to Nathalie Tauziat equaled her best showing there, but it ensured fans would be looking elsewhere in New York. With all eyes on Hingis and Venus Williams, Davenport won ten straight sets–two of them 6-0–to reach the semis. She knocked out Venus 6-4, 6-4, then dispatched Hingis 6-3, 7-5. How much had Lindsay’s movement improved? Against the tactically ruthless Hingis, 44 points went seven strokes or longer. Davenport won 30 of them.

The US Open victory all but guaranteed her the number one spot in the WTA rankings. She made it official in October. Concluding 1998 with a title in Zurich (defeating Venus again), a final in Philadelphia, and a final at the season-ending championships, she recorded her first of four year-end number one finishes.

Davenport handed the top ranking back to Hingis in early 1999, but her self-belief remainded as high as ever. At Wimbledon, she bulldozed qualifier Alexandra Stevenson in the semi-finals, 6-1, 6-1. Then she cheered for Graf to get past upstart Mirjana Lučić. “I thought I was going to win,” she said, “and I wanted to beat the best player.” That she did. In a tight final, Steffi gave her one break chance per set, and she converted both.

* * *

The rankings battle remained a seesaw, appropriate for an era with several strong players, none of them able to fully solve the others. Between October 1998 and May 2000, Davenport snatched the top spot from Hingis four times. After Capriati crashed the party, Lindsay grabbed it a fifth time in late 2001.

The second half of Davenport’s career, after the turn of the century, was largely the Venus and Serena show–at least when the Williams sisters chose to play. Lindsay reclaimed the number one ranking in October 2004, battling Mauresmo, Sharapova, and Kim Clijsters for the distinction.

Across eight separate spans, she sat atop the ranking table for a total of 98 weeks, including the ends of the 1998, 2001, 2004, and 2005 seasons. After recording her third major title at the 2000 Australian Open, she never won another. Her status on the WTA computer was more dependent on consistency than dominance.

My historical Elo ratings are a bit more skeptical of players who maintained their position by racking up second-tier titles. The Elo formula gives Davenport only a couple dozen weeks at number one, including a single year-end crown, in 1999.

This isn’t a criticism; it’s just a bit of a reality check. When Elo disagrees with the WTA point tally, it knocks Lindsay down only one spot. At the end of 1998, she trailed Hingis by a modest 40 Elo points. The 1999 year-end list was even closer. Davenport clung to a five-point lead over Hingis, who held the same minuscule advantage over Serena Williams.

At the end of 2000, Davenport fell to fourth, but once again, there wasn’t much breathing room at the top. Behind Hingis and the Williams sisters, she was only 80 points away from the top. When the curtain fell on 2004, Elo rated Davenport one point behind Mauresmo–a tie in all but name.

It was a brutally tough era. Some of the best players of all time were at or near their peaks. If it looks like they weren’t, it’s only because the field was so crowded. Apart from 2002, when she was sidelined by a knee injury, Davenport was in the thick of it for a decade.

* * *

With different priorities, better luck, and a healthy appetite for rehab, Lindsay could have lasted even longer.

In 2005, she pushed Serena to a third set in the Australian Open final. At Wimbledon, she held a championship point before falling to Venus in the final, 4-6, 7-6, 9-7. A back injury slowed her down late in that match and kept her off the circuit for most of the two months that followed. She still managed four more titles before the end of the year along with a semi-final showing at the year-end championships.

Alas, the back problems lingered. They limited Davenport to only 29 matches in 2006. She didn’t win any titles, only her second season-long drought since 1992. But there was no doubt she was still capable of astounding tennis. 3 of those 29 matches ended 6-0, 6-0 in Lindsay’s favor, one of them against top-20 player Elena Likhovtseva.

Only 30 years old, she could have rested her back and ultimately returned to the top of the game. Instead, she followed the “normal” path she had always sought and had a baby.

Still, life as a suburban mom could wait. She returned to the tour after a break of only twelve months. In a stop-and-start comeback slowed by a knee injury, she won 37 of 43 matches.

In the 2008 Memphis quarter-finals, Davenport drew the top prospect of a new era. 17-year-old Caroline Wozniacki would become the greatest retriever of her generation, but the American’s power was too much. After six games, the teenager sat down, wondering how to turn the tide in the second set. Even with a baby in tow, against a player barely half her age, Davenport could still dish out a bagel.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Whee!

* * *

Arantxa Sánchez Vicario [ESP]
Born: 18 December 1971
Career: 1986-2002
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1995)
Peak Elo rating: 2,419 (1st place, 1994)
Major singles titles: 4
Total singles titles: 29
 

* * *

Things were not looking up for women’s tennis at the beginning of 1994. The tour lost Monica Seles when she was stabbed in April 1993. Jennifer Capriati flamed out and went back to high school. 37-year-old Martina Navratilova was embarking on her final season.

The WTA tour had no title sponsor. One official admitted, “Everyone thinks women’s tennis is in trouble.”

Steffi Graf ran roughshod over the tour while Seles was sidelined. She hogged the last three majors of 1993, and she won her first 54 sets in 1994. Stop me if you’ve heard this song before: When there’s a single dominant player atop the rankings, it means the field is weak. When an untouchable pair battle for number one, it means the rest of the field can’t compete. When there’s no clear top player, it means that no one is good enough to seize the opportunity. Naysayers have been practicing their spiel on women’s tennis for a century.

Prognosticators figured Graf might well go undefeated until the 21st century, or at least until Seles came back. While they waited, the public would get bored, the tour would wither away. Management firm IMG even went so far as to lay the groundwork for a rival circuit to replace the WTA entirely.

Allow me to skip ahead a bit. The women’s game was fine in 1994, just like it was fine in 1984 and 1974. Barring nuclear war, a Golden Slam for Alexander Zverev, or an international pickleball league headlined by Roger Federer and Serena Williams, it will be fine in 2024, too.

By the end of the year, fans would know the names of Lindsay Davenport, Martina Hingis, and Venus Williams. Mary Pierce, once on a path parallel to Capriati’s, would upset Steffi and reach the French Open final. Graf’s results, in the end, would look about as good as they did in each of the previous three seasons.

The German would not, however, repeat her three-major haul of 1993. She’d win the Australian and no more. Pierce surprised her in Paris, Lori McNeil knocked her out in the first round at Wimbledon, and she fell a few points short of a fourth US Open title.

Seles was sorely missed, to be sure. But the level of competition was just fine.

* * *

The woman who filled the gap was Arantxa Sánchez Vicario. She hardly emerged out of the blue. The Spaniard had shocked Steffi to win at Roland Garros in 1989, and she finished ’89, ’91, and ’92 in the top five of the world rankings.

At the same time, her second-place finish at the end of 1993 felt a bit hollow. She won four titles, none of them in the second half of the season. (Her fourth was at Hamburg, the event where Seles was attacked.) She lost multiple matches to Graf, of course. She also dropped decisions to Amanda Coetzer, Natalia Medvedeva, and Helena Suková–twice.

Arantxa took her number two ranking much more seriously than the rest of the tennis world did. Chris Evert came the closest to giving Sánchez Vicario a suitable amount of respect. “Unless Martina is on a grass court or Arantxa on the clay courts,” she said, “I don’t see anyone out there who can beat [Graf].”

An Arantxa forehand at the 1989 French Open

Evert was one of the first players to learn not to look past the diminutive Spaniard. Evert’s last career match at Roland Garros was a 1988 third-rounder against the 16-year-old Arantxa. The newcomer beat her in a straight-set slugfest. The average rally required more than twelve strokes. Sánchez Vicario got so many balls back that Evert–one of the steadiest players in the game’s history–piled up more than 50 unforced errors.

Sánchez Vicario wasn’t afraid of Evert in 1988, she wasn’t intimidated by Graf in the 1989 French final, and she was hardly about to concede the entire season to the German in 1994. After losing to Steffi twice in the early going, she spent time with both sports psychologist Jim Loehr and Pete Sampras’s trainer, Pat Etcheberry. “They know what it takes to be a champion,” she said, and it was starting to look like she did, too.

Arantxa won three straight events in April 1994, beating Navratilova and Gabriela Sabatini at Amelia Island, Iva Majoli at home in Barcelona, and Graf in Hamburg for the second consecutive year. The title match at the German Open showed just how tough the Spaniard could be. She trailed 5-2 in the second set, saved a match point, and ultimately pulled out a 3-hour, 3-minute, 4-6, 7-6, 7-6 victory. It was Steffi’s first loss of the season.

The French Open was a breeze by comparison. Pierce knocked out Graf in the semis, but Paris’s adopted daughter didn’t hold up under the pressure of the final. Sánchez Vicario won that one, 6-4, 6-4.

“It is hard to beat me,” Arantxa said.

* * *

Many of the warnings about the imminent death of women’s tennis weren’t really complaints about the level of competition. Even though Sánchez Vicario’s pesky, defensive style of play didn’t appeal to everyone, she forced Graf to raise her own game. The Hamburg final was just one of many classics contested by the two women.

What pundits–and, alas, sponsors–griped about was the supposed lack of personalities. Seles had the potential to be the greatest of all time, and she knew it. She had the charisma to pull off a sometimes breathtaking level of self-assurance. Capriati’s precociousness was a front-page story in itself, and tabloid coverage made the game more visible, at least as long as she was competing.

Seles and Sánchez Vicario at the 1991 French Open

Arantxa didn’t have any assets that compared, at least in the eyes of the English-speaking media. Her family, including men’s tour players Emilio and Javier, was almost freakishly well-adjusted. She was friendly and well-liked by most of her peers. She was confident but rarely arrogant.

Yawn, right?

As late as February 1995, when Sánchez Vicario was trading weeks atop the rankings with Graf, the Los Angeles Times could call her “the least known No. 1 ever.”* Sportswriters wrote columns about how no one wrote about her.

* In fairness, she was only the seventh number one in WTA rankings history, and at the time, people thought she was the sixth. (It wasn’t recognized that Evonne Goolagong had held the position for two weeks in 1976.) You could be awfully famous and still come in behind Evert, Navratilova, Tracy Austin, Graf, and Seles.

In late 1994 and 1995, Arantxa accepted more and more press commitments to support WTA events. She was often the top seed, if not the main drawing card. “I like for people to know me off the court,” she said, “as a person with interests, who goes to museums and the theater and listens to music.” Pleasant as she was, international celebrity required a bit more color than that.

* * *

For serious tennis fans, there was plenty to like, no matter how many column inches the Spaniard did or didn’t get.

Bud Collins dubbed Arantxa the “Barcelona Bumblebee.” An early coach, Juan Núñez, called her a rabbit. She liked that one, buying a stuffed Bugs Bunny for her racket bag.

Sánchez Vicario summed up her strategy in 1990: “I wait, and the opposition of me exhausts herself with aggression. She must then do things my way.” Graf served for the 1989 French Open title at 5-3 in the third set. Arantxa’s belief never wavered: “I was gonna run down everything.” She did just that, winning 16 of the last 19 points.

The rabbit metaphor was a good one. Arantxa’s energy was the stuff of legend. She played a record 167 matches in 1993. Of the eight 1994 tournaments where she won the singles title, she added the doubles crown at seven of them.

All the talk about her indefatigability was true, but it left the Spaniard feeling a bit underappreciated. “I would like people to see me as a complete player,” she said in 1995. “I have shots, I go to the net, I can serve. No one sees this. I am sad and wonder why the only thing people say is that I am fast.”

Pundits could underrate her strokes, but no one questioned Arantxa’s heart. Natural as it was to associate her with speedy, undersized creatures, people around the game converged on another animal when they described her.

“She’s feisty and fiery and laughs back at the public when she misses an easy shot,” said longtime tour gadfly Ted Tinling. “But beneath all the fun and the giggles, she’s a lion.”

Opponents knew they were up against someone at the top of the food chain. “Arantxa loves to intimidate,” said Pam Shriver. “Her aura can be scary out there. Inch for inch, I think she gets more out of her game than any competitor. If she was a pitcher, she’d throw the brushback at your head.”

Pam would know. She faced Sánchez Vicario once–on grass, the Spaniard’s weakest surface. Shriver lost, 6-0, 6-1.

* * *

After winning the 1994 French Open, Arantxa went into her typical mid-summer swoon. She lost in the fourth round at Wimbledon to Zina Garrison, then dropped hard-court finals in North America to Graf and Conchita Martínez.

She wouldn’t take over the number one ranking until the following year, but a run of tournaments at the close of 1994 made it clear she belonged at the top of the list.

Sánchez Vicario and Graf faced off for titles in Toronto and at the US Open, high-caliber clashes that could revivify the deadest of tours. In Canada, Arantxa saved four match points–one of them with a 20-shot rally–before outlasting Steffi in a third-set tiebreak. In New York, the Spaniard won what Sports Illustrated called “the finest U.S. Open women’s title match in a decade.” It took a 14-point final game to finally put away Steffi for a 1-6, 7-6, 6-4 victory.

She had proven she could win on hard courts, and two months later, she did the same on carpet. In Oakland, she held off a cast of once and future greats–Navratilova, Garrison, Lindsay Davenport, and Venus Williams*–to win her eighth title of the season. The final was another nailbiter, as she overcame the 38-year-old Martina, 1-6, 7-6, 7-6.

* This is the Venus-Arantxa match portrayed–with ample artistic license–in the recent film King Richard.

After Arantxa reached her second-straight Australian Open final, where she lost to Pierce, she finally claimed the number one ranking in February 1995. She struggled to defend her position, failing to win a tournament until Barcelona in April. When Graf beat her for the French Open title, Sánchez Vicario lost her precarious perch at the top of the ranking table.

* * *

The Spaniard was never one to go down without a fight. She had always neglected the grass court season, echoing Manolo Santana’s famous line that “grass is for cows.” She saw Martínez break through at Wimbledon in 1994, and her own hard-court major suggested she could compete on any surface. At Wimbledon in 1995, she easily beat Garrison–her conqueror the previous year–and edged past Conchita in the semi-finals.

Waiting in the final, of course, was Steffi Graf. It was their 34th career meeting. The one previous time they faced off at the Championships, Graf won in straights.

The pivotal game of the match took place at 5-all in the third, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But I’m more struck by Sánchez Vicario’s previous service game, at four games apiece. She won that one at love. Graf didn’t get a single ball back in play. A decade into her career, the pesky dirtballer had finally gotten herself in a proper grass-court mindset. She sealed her 5-4 advantage with a clean ace.

5-all was a different story. Sally Jenkins called it “arguably the best single game ever played on Centre Court,” comparing it to the famous Borg-McEnroe tiebreak 15 years earlier. It spanned 20 minutes, requiring 32 points and 13 deuces.

Graf earned her first break point on the 12th point of the game; she didn’t get the serve back. Next break point: Arantxa got to net first and saved it with a backhand volley winner. Break point number three: Sánchez Vicario won a battle of crosscourt forehands.

The Spaniard showed off her aggressiveness, but she wasn’t quite aggressive enough. On the sixth break point, Graf finally beat her with an inside-out forehand. At 6-5, Steffi held to love to win the title.

Somewhere in the middle of that marathon game was probably the peak of Arantxa’s career. Long a force to be reckoned with on clay, she had beaten the best player in the world on hard courts. She was inches away from doing the same on grass, something she couldn’t have imagined just one year earlier.

No, she didn’t pull out the victory. Even the heart of a lion doesn’t beat forever. Win or lose, though, it was a standard Sánchez Vicario performance. Nobody ever gives Arantxa credit for saving the ailing women’s game, but while experts grumbled about the lack of compelling personalities, she delivered one thrilling match after another.

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Whee!

* * *

Billie Jean King [USA]
Born: 22 November 1943
Career: 1959-83
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1966)
Peak Elo rating: 2,321 (1st place, 1972)
Major singles titles: 12
Total singles titles: 129
 

* * *

You’ve probably seen Billie Jean King lately. Maybe she was calmly looking on during the US Open, sitting in prime seats at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. Perhaps she had a quick spot on the TV news, explaining her latest initiative. Or maybe she was giving an acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award. She’s made a lot of those speeches.

There have been several Billie Jeans over the years. You might also be able to picture the 1973 version, or at least Emma Stone’s portrayal in Battle of the Sexes. At age 29, King knew she was fighting battles on a vast scale. She had led the charge for the Open era of professional tennis, and she had threatened to boycott the US Open until it offered men and women equal prize money. When she faced Bobby Riggs at the Astrodome, she felt the weight of half the world on her shoulders.

By then, she wasn’t just a tennis player. She was a symbol. And symbols are serious.

Billie Jean was always serious, but not world-historical serious, not New York Times op-ed page serious. She fed on pressure. She lived to compete. Her campaigns for equal rights and recognition eventually took center stage, but for a decade, winning came first. She knew she had it in her to become a champion, and by god, that’s what she set out to do.

The only obstacles in her path were the standards of her era. She married young, and for a few years she played tennis only part time. It is particularly jarring to see headlines from the mid-1960s shouting that King might give up the game if her husband asked. Billie Jean and Larry King were mismatched in many ways, but ultimately, they agreed on one thing. If someone has the potential to become the best in the world at something, she ought to pursue it. Odd as it is to say about a gay icon, Billie Jean King married the right man.

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Frank Brennan, one of King’s early coaches, once listed his student’s assets. Number one: “Singlemindedness.”

Nice as it was to have Larry’s support, it was even more important for Billie Jean to establish in her own mind that she could discard everything that wasn’t tennis. She told Frank Deford in 1975:

I was brought up to believe in the well-rounded concept, doing lotsa things a little, but not putting yourself on the line. It took me a while before I thought one day: who is it that says we have to be well-rounded? Who decided that? The people who aren’t special at anything, that’s who.

For the young tennis player, that meant she could abandon her studies and spend long spells away from home and husband. This shift in mindset is generally dated to late 1964, when the 21-year-old Billie Jean went to Australia to work with Mervyn Rose.

While the trip marked a new focus on the game, it’s easy to overstate how much of a gamble it was. She won the Wimbledon doubles championship with Karen Hantze on her first trip to the tournament in 1961. A year later, she upset top-seeded Margaret Smith (later Court) in the second round, and she reached the title match in 1963. By the end of that season, according to my historical Elo ratings, she was one of the top five players in the world.

Billie Jean at Wimbledon in 1962

Plenty of work remained. Smith was just one year older, and she was improving rapidly, too. Between Billie Jean’s upset in their first meeting and her 1964 Australian trip, Smith beat her five times in a row. The rangy Aussie would add another three victories during the 1964-65 swing Down Under.

Rose helped King rework her serve, a crucial step in the development of her relentless serve-and-volley game. Exposure to an Australian-style fitness regimen was also valuable. Time magazine had called Billie Jean “the chunky, bespectacled little Californian” in 1962, and it would never be easy for the self-proclaimed “sugarholic” to stay in fighting form.

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Billie Jean’s singlemindedness might imply a tennis-playing automaton, a dullard who thinks of nothing beyond her shaky down-the-line forehand.

Hardly. Crowd-pleasers in the amateur era were often willing to sacrifice competitive fire for showmanship. King proved you could have it both ways. The New York Times wrote in 1963 that she was “the liveliest personality to hit the international circuit in years. She has courage and she has color.”

More a decade later, Deford put it simply: “What fun she is!” The sportswriter was struck by her unflagging enthusiasm and positivity about everything she encountered.

Once she got going, she was the easiest interview in the business. Grace Lichtenstein caught up with her after the 1973 Wimbledon final. Billie Jean “giggled like an insane eleven-year-old” as they drove away from the scene of her victory.

[S]he bubbled like a percolator, talking the way she played–fast, instinctively, the words running together, the ideas bouncing scatter-shot from one subject to the next, her light-blue eyes staring with a near-hypnotic urgency. … Listening to her, I felt as if I were watching a manic Aimee Semple McPherson* on an amphetamine high.

* This was a dated reference even for 1973. Allow me to burrow down this rabbit hole until we get back to tennis. McPherson was a celebrity evangelist before World War II and the model for the character of Sharon Falconer in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Elmer Gantry. Before Lewis took on fundamentalism and won a Nobel Prize, he ghost-wrote 1912 and 1913 United States champion Maurice McLoughlin’s book, Tennis as I Play It.

King was so focused on the court that she could seem unglued off of it. 1970s tour player Julie Anthony told Lichtenstein, “I have heard Billie Jean at times just absolutely babble incoherently.”

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Everything came together for King in 1966. After losing to the young and equally colorful Rosie Casals to start the season, Billie Jean ran off 41 straight victories. She took the US National Indoor title in Boston, then went to South Africa where she recorded her first win against Court in four years. She even threw in a clay-court title at an invitational event in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The streak reached its apex at Wimbledon. King met Court again in the semi-finals. She didn’t just beat her. She did it in straight sets, and she made it sound easy: “Just chip the ball back at her feet.” A three-set victory over Maria Bueno secured her first Wimbledon singles title.

The galleries at the All-England Club loved her. They had supported the stubborn, animated underdog since she first upset Court back in 1962. No one ever forgot the experience of seeing Billie Jean in a tight match. When she wasn’t staring down a linesman, she was barking at herself: “Hit the ball, you big chicken!”

Or, in extreme duress: “Peanut butter and jelly!”

The only thing King ever did to alienate the Wimbledon faithful was to win too much. It’s hard to back an “underdog” when she’s finishing up a 6-0, 6-1 rout of Evonne Goolagong, as she did in 1975 for her sixth singles title.

In 1976, Billie Jean was (temporarily) retired from singles. She held 19 career Wimbledon titles, a tie with pre-war standout Elizabeth Ryan, so she was back to enter both doubles events. In the second round of the mixed, fans got behind the South African pair of Bob Hewitt and Greer Stevens, a longshot to knock out King and Sandy Mayer. At one point, the crowd groaned at a line call that went to the Americans. Billie Jean hammed up her disappointment, flopping down on the court before delivering her next serve. She lost the match but won back the crowd.

(History has not been kind to the spectators who cheered for Hewitt, now a convicted rapist, over Billie Jean effing King.)

King finally surpassed Ryan for the all-time record in 1979, when she partnered Martina Navratilova for her 20th Wimbledon title. She would sit atop the list for 24 years, until Navratilova herself equaled the mark in 2003.

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By the end of 1966, Court had stepped away from the game. King was the undisputed number one, despite a shock second-round loss at Forest Hills.

Now Billie Jean was free to start speaking out. While she had “opinions on just about everything,” according to Sports Illustrated, her first signature issue was open tennis. Everywhere she looked, she saw hypocrisy: well-heeled players who pretended tennis was a part-time lark; top men players with no-show jobs; Europeans who collected so much expense money that going pro would mean taking a pay cut; tournament organizers who collected gate receipts then pinched pennies when it came to compensating star attractions like herself.

“What they ought to do,” she said in 1968, “is throw out all the officials and start again.”

In 1967, King won the triple–singles, doubles, and mixed–at both Wimbledon and Forest Hills. She was the best player in the world, yet the only reason she could get a credit card was because of Larry’s career prospects as a law student.

Everything changed in 1968, and Billie Jean was at the forefront. She signed a two-year, $80,000 contract to headline the women’s portion of a professional troupe organized by George MacCall. King, Casals, Ann Jones, and Françoise Dürr would compete alongside long-time pros such as Ken Rosewall and Richard “Pancho” González. In between tour stops, they could enter grand slam events, which were finally open to both amateurs and professionals.

At the first Wimbledon with prize money, King won her third straight title. She nearly matched the feat at Forest Hills, coming in second to Virginia Wade at the inaugural US Open.

* * *

Billie Jean was well on her way to becoming a symbol. Summaries of her career after the dawn of the Open era tend to shift their focus to accomplishments on a larger scale, feats that can’t be measured in rankings or titles.

In 1970, she and Casals double-defaulted at the misogynistic Pacific Southwest, then launched the women-only Virginia Slims tour. In 1973, she proved that a top woman could beat the pants off of a 55-year-old male hustler. In 1974, she introduced World Team Tennis, her attempt to take the sport out of country clubs and give it to the masses. In 1975, she signed a two-year, $200,000 contract to do television work for ABC.

For someone who was so much bigger than tennis, she still played an awful lot of tennis. Injuries slowed her down in 1969, and Court hogged the laurels when she won the Grand Slam in 1970. In 1971, though, King played more than 125 singles matches–winning 113 of them–as she headlined the nascent Slims tour.

If Billie Jean weren’t so famous for everything else, we’d spend a lot more time talking about her 1972 season. After an indifferent start, she rounded into form in April, winning consecutive tournaments on outdoor hard courts, indoors on Sportface, and then the big one, on clay at Roland Garros. She defeated Goolagong in the Paris final, her sole career title there.

King beat Goolagong again for the championship at Wimbledon, and she ousted Court in the US Open semi-finals before coasting past Kerry Melville for the title there as well. She won three-quarters of the Grand Slam, and as far as Billie Jean was concerned, that was all that mattered. “I could have won the Grand Slam,” she wrote, “but the Australian was such a minor-league tournament at that time.”

(Translation: They offered me more money to play in New Zealand.)

Measured by wins, 1972 didn’t quite stack up with the marathon 1971 campaign. By winning percentage, King had several better seasons. But the three major titles put her back at the top of the rankings. She defeated Court in three of five meetings, once each on grass, clay, and hard. As Billie Jean tirelessly promoted the tour and began converting her multitude of opinions into concrete causes, she somehow also psyched herself up for victory 88 times.

* * *

King set herself on the path to greatness when she realized she didn’t need to be well-rounded. Her ability to focus never wavered. “I’m used to working hard, giving 100% to whatever I do,” she said in 1976. “I don’t know any other way.”

Except, obviously, she took on more responsibility than any star player in the history of tennis. She gave 100% to her game, 100% to the Slims tour, 100% to the circus with Bobby Riggs, 100% to World Team Tennis, and on and on.

The day after beating Riggs in the highest-stakes match of her life, in front of 30,000 fans, she won her quarter-final match at the Virginia Slims of Houston.

The day after.

In 1984, King mused:

My only regret is that I had to do too much off the court. Deep down, I wonder how good I really could have been if I [had] concentrated just on tennis.

It’s a fair question. Margaret Court (among others) might not like the answer. I suspect, though, that the white lines of a tennis court never could have contained all of Billie Jean’s energy. She may not have given 100% to the sport, but she came closer than most. No one has ever put more into her game while simultaneously changing the world.