Heavy Topspin

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

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Li Na [CHN]
Born: 26 February 1982
Career: 1999-2014
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak WTA rank: 2 (17 February 2014)
Peak Elo rating: 2,160
Major singles titles: 2
Total WTA singles titles: 9
 

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We tend to think of Li Na as a late bloomer. She didn’t crack the top ten until she was nearly 28 years old. Her first major had to wait another year beyond that, and she only added her second when she was a month shy of her 32nd birthday. So it’s true, the best player yet to come out of China didn’t reach her potential until very late in the traditional woman’s career trajectory.

On the other hand, Li was a highly regarded star as a teen in China, winning national competitions in addition to a whopping 14 ITF singles titles before her 20th birthday. It was hardly a guarantee that the Wuhan native would eventually achieve a single-digit ranking, but it was clear that China’s strongest prospect was poised to make a dent on a wider stage.

Then she quit.

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It’s tough to consider Li Na’s story from the vantage point of February 2022 without also thinking about Peng Shuai. After accusing Communist Party bigwig Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault last November, mentions of Peng’s name were censored online, and she immediately disappeared from public view. Her only public appearances since then–including with International Olympic Committee boss Thomas Bach–have reeked of government stage-management. She crossed a line that, in China, means that she may spend the rest of her life under the threat of further government retribution.

While Peng is a few years younger than Li, her doubles peak coincided with Li’s final season in 2014. In a 12-month span, Li won the Australian Open, and Peng grabbed doubles titles at Wimbledon, the French Open, and the Year-End Championships. The success of Li, Peng, and 2008 Olympic doubles medalists Zheng Jie and Yan Zi marked China as a rising force in the sport. After the Beijing games, these four women earned the unusual–for China–right to “fly solo,” managing their own careers and paying their own expenses, in exchange for keeping most of their earnings instead of kicking the majority back to the national federation. Before that, the federation controlled every detail of its players’ careers, just as other Chinese national organizations dictate things in nearly every other sport.

Last month, Chinese dissident architect Ai Weiwei offered some context for Peng Shuai’s position in China: “She is a sports person, which is like being a soldier in the army. Any person in sport is considered as property of the party.”

Li Na never fell afoul of the Party to the extent that Peng has, and one hopes she hasn’t experienced anything that would trigger an accusation as earth-shaking as Peng’s. Her iconoclasm was often embraced, even held up as an example of an emerging type of Chinese celebrity. But not for nothing did Li call her self a “bad-tempered, stubborn girl,” and lesser bursts of individualism angered both fans and functionaries. “Flying solo” or not, some degree of military obedience was expected of her.

In her late teens, Li began to recognize these limits to her freedom. At least in the eyes of the authorities, she was in fact a soldier. That wasn’t what she signed up for when a local coach spotted the aptitude of a seven-year-old girl and convinced her family that her future might lie in an unfamiliar game.

* * *

Li Na retired for the first time in 2002. With a world ranking that snuck inside the top 200 shortly after her 20th birthday, she gave up competition and went to Huazhong University to study journalism. She continued to play tennis casually, and over the next two years, her old teammates and coaches showed up more and more frequently, until she gave in to the pressure and returned to competitive tennis.

Her game barely suffered from the break. She went 34-3 with five titles on the ITF tour upon her return in 2004, including a tournament win in Mongolia on dirt (not clay–dirt) courts. All that changed was her mindset. In her telling, she began to play more for herself, and the shift worked well enough that she climbed into the top 20 within two years, setting new records for Chinese players every step of the way.

Only after a semi-final showing at the 2008 Beijing Olympics did the rules of the game change for Li. Given the rights and responsibilities of flying solo, she hired a personal coach–Thomas Hogstedt–for the first time, and she increasingly relied on medical care and rehab in Europe. Only then, at age 26, did she gain the individualized support that was taken for granted by the women ahead of her in the rankings.

Five years later, Li was a French Open champion and top-five player. Former WTA CEO Stacey Allaster called her “the most important player of this decade” in 2013, comparing her impact to that of Venus and Serena Williams. She flew solo, but the slipstream behind her was incomprehensibly vast.

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It’s hard to overstate Li Na’s impact on women’s tennis. If it weren’t for her success, Wuhan would have never have hosted a major tournament–or maybe any tour-level event. Nor would there be so much of a Chinese presence on the WTA schedule that the tour’s response to the government’s treatment of Peng Shuai would make headlines around the world. At the same time, the woman swinging the racket never wanted much to do with the symbolic global celebrity.

In her autobiography, Li reacted to those who proclaimed her French Open title as a triumph for China: “I can’t carry a nation … I can’t represent anyone else, nor do I want to. I only want to represent myself.”

Her on-court exploits are difficult to separate from her off-court story. There is probably no other all-time great who sat out a couple of years in her early 20s and only neared her potential at age 29. It’s worth looking closer at her record, if only to better understand what might have been.

Li’s two years at university were hardly the only span that delayed her career development. Nagging knee pain finally forced her to go under the knife in mid-2007 for the first of what would be three surgeries. Again she roared out of the gates upon her return, returning to the tour in January 2008 with a tournament win in Gold Coast, beating a teenage Victoria Azarenka in the final. But it would be 2010 before she finally felt confident in the repaired joint.

* * *

While there’s no precise moment when Li graduated from an also-ran to an elite player, a good approximation is her first grass-court title, a win in Birmingham in 2010 with a straight-set defeat of Maria Sharapova in the final. It moved her into the top ten (though she’d quickly bounce back out), and it presaged a quarter-final run at Wimbledon that ended with a credible showing against Serena Williams.

From very early in her career, there was little doubt that Li could compete with the best. Her first encounter with a top-ten player was in 2004, when she qualified in Beijing and drew world #5 Svetlana Kuznetsova. She reached match point and pushed the Russian to a third-set tiebreak. Between 2007 and 2010, she won 17 of her 35 meetings with top tenners, six of the losses going to deciding sets. By the time she won Birmingham, she had scored victories over Serena, Venus, Kim Clijsters, Caroline Wozniacki, Jelena Jankovic, and Elena Dementieva.

At the end of that span, she was 28 years old, a contemporary of multi-major winners Serena, Clijsters, and Justine Henin. Yet she had really only played one full season, in 2009.

The lack of tour experience meant that she was still learning how to bounce back from tough losses. After Wimbledon in 2010, three of her next four events ended in defeats at the hands of Klara Koukalova, Yanina Wickmayer, and Kateryna Bondarenko. She reached the Australian Open final to start 2011… then failed to win a match until April. Her title at Roland Garros that year brought an even harsher hangover. She won only seven matches in eight events over the rest of the season.

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Li finally showed what she was capable of for a full season in 2012. She won just a single title–in Cincinnati–but limited herself only a pair of first-round losses. She fell victim to a particularly strong field and some bad draw luck in 2012, losing to Serena, Azarenka (three times), Sharapova (three times), Clijsters, Wozniacki, and Agnieszka Radwanska. But she rarely stopped fighting–10 of her 17 losses that year required a third set.

The Match Charting Project offers a glimpse into the strengths of the player she had become. Her serve was never a weapon, but her returns were as deep and deadly as any in the game. In the 2012 Montreal final against big-serving Petra Kvitova, nearly nine in ten of her returns landed beyond the service line, and half reached the backmost quarter of the court. When Petra served to her forehand, two-thirds of the returns came back to the deepest quarter, compared to a tour average of only 40%.

Kvitova wasn’t the only opponent whose serves triggered an immediate counterattack. Volunteers have charted 28 of her matches, including most of her finals. According to the Return Depth Index (RDI) statistic, Li ranks second only to Wozniacki among her contemporaries, evidence that she neutralized the serve as well as anyone.

Li’s newfound consistency stuck with her for the remaining season and a half of her career. She also proved able to develop new skills into her 30s, working with coach Carlos Rodriguez to bring a more aggressive game to Wimbledon. At The Championships in 2013, she lost in the quarters to Radwanska, yet came to the net 71 times. Match Charting Project data indicates that she over her career, she typically did so a mere 13 times per match, only about half of those by choice.

In 2014, she won the Australian Open, and a month later ascended to a new career-best ranking of #2. Four months after that, another knee injury would knock her off the tour for good.

* * *

Li retired at age 32, nothing out of the ordinary for a tennis star. Yet it’s hard not to wonder what might have been.

Her career trajectory would make more sense if it belonged to someone five years younger. Instead of a 22-year-old clobbering ITF competition and coming out of nowhere to nearly upset Svetlana Kuznetsova, imagine a 17-year-old doing so. 23-year-olds are more likely than 28-year-olds to establish an initial beachhead in the top ten. The five-year adjustment would make Li 27 years old in 2014, winning a second major and reaching #2 in the world rankings.

That fictitious, younger player would have had surgery and come back in 2015, ready to contend for more slams. She might still be competing on tour in 2022. In all likelihood, she’d be a few dozen places higher on this list. Not only did Li Na assemble an all-time great resume, she packed it all into what was essentially a partial career.

Half a career, yet one that changed Chinese tennis, altered the geography of the global game, and introduced hundreds of millions of new fans to the sport. Quite a feat for a “bad-tempered, stubborn girl from Wuhan” who played only for herself.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Jean Borotra [FRA]
Born: 13 August 1898
Died: 17 July 1994
Career: 1920-65
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1926)
Major singles titles: 4
Total singles titles: 80
 

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If any man physically embodied the energy of the serve and volley, it was Jean Borotra. For two decades between the World Wars, the Frenchman competed around the world and sparked his nation’s Davis Cup team while working long hours as a sales executive. His tennis commitments were carefully scheduled around his professional appointments, so he often found himself rushing to a match before he could don his trademark beret and begin charging the net.

He won Wimbledon for the second time in 1926, a year in which he spent 199 nights on a boat or a railway sleeper. He’s best remembered as one of the Four Musketeers, the elite French quartet that held the Davis Cup from 1927 to 1932, though he wasn’t quite up to the standard of Musketeers René Lacoste and Henri Cochet. The comparison attests to the absurd strength of the French contingent: Borotra’s four major singles titles rank him third among the members of the greatest Gallic generation.

Yet Borotra’s aggressive game made him one of the world’s best on wood, the speedy surface used for indoor events in Europe. For such a fierce patriot, the powers of his countrymen were more a source of pride than of frustration: the pinnacle of the sport was the Davis Cup, in which Lacoste, Cochet, and Toto Brugnon were his teammates.

To lose a grand slam final to a Frenchman, as he did four times to Lacoste and twice to Cochet, was almost as good as winning it himself. That notion was put to the test in the 1927 Wimbledon final, when Cochet appeared to double-hit a volley on Borotra’s match point. The umpire wasn’t sure, Cochet denied it, and Jean was too much the sportsman to protest. Cochet came back to win, denying Borotra his third Wimbledon title.

But all was not lost. With a personality even bigger than Centre Court, Jean would end up with the spotlight no matter how the match ended.

* * *

Everyone in European tennis from the 1920s to the 1960s had a Jean Borotra story. He spoke excellent English thanks to a year in south London as a 14-year-old, and he never missed a chance to put his language skills to use, whether intervening on behalf of the demanding Suzanne Lenglen or speaking for the French contingent at the annual Wimbledon dinner. During Jean’s first trip to Wimbledon in 1922, tournament referee Frank Burrows noticed that “he laughed so much in the middle of his own jokes that you couldn’t hear the end of them.”

Borotra was every bit as energetic and extroverted on the court. Bill Tilden called him “unquestionably the most difficult man to play against,” and not just because of the Frenchman’s precise serves and relentless forward motion. He danced back and forth across the line between entertainment and gamesmanship, wearing down opponents psychologically before unleashing his trademark overhead smashes. The American’s feelings couldn’t have been any more mixed: “Borotra was the artist and charlatan of the French; undoubtedly, the greatest showman and faker in tennis history.”

Tilden and Borotra met for the 8th time in the 1930 Wimbledon semi-finals. The American had the edge in their head-to-head, but Jean had beaten Big Bill twice that season. Borotra raced out to a 6-0 first set, then traded the next two frames, 4-6 and 6-4. Jean was well-known for coasting through a set or two to save energy for the fifth, and it was evident to everyone present that he was doing so here.

And he was moving so very slowly. Drinks, towels, new berets–it was stalling like Tilden had never seen before.* Bill could hardly contain his frustration, appealing to the umpire to insist that Borotra play to his pace. Jean–surely loving the additional delay–did his foe one better. During all the squabbling, he prepped a couple of ball boys so that he could race to the service line, ready and toweled off with ball in hand. Argument abandoned, Tilden was hardly halfway back to his baseline when he heard a familiar voice cry out, “Beel … I am waiting for you.”

* Keep in mind, this is 1930, so the set probably took 25 minutes instead of the usual 18.

The antics weren’t quite enough this time, as Tilden took the final set 7-5. It was hard to stay miffed at the Frenchman for long, as his showmanship was usually just another way of expressing his love for the game. After all, this is the man who once said, “The only possible regret I have is the feeling that I will die without having played enough tennis.”

In one doubles match with Toto Brugnon–the fourth Musketeer–he chased down a smash and crashed into the crowd. While Brugnon single-handedly kept the point going, Borotra recovered, doffed his beret, bowed to the gallery, and made it back on court in time to hit a winner.

One more Borotra story will have to stand for the rest: In 1926, he played mixed doubles with Suzanne Lenglen in what would be her final Wimbledon. Annoyed by scheduling mixups and worn down by illness, she walked on court to jeering crowds. Lenglen was high-strung in the best of circumstances, and Jean could sense disaster looming. He served first, and with a pair of impossibly wild serves, he got the crowd laughing and allowed Suzanne to get down to business. Lenglen would withdraw from the tournament, but not before she and Borotra won their match, 6-3, 6-0.

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Galling as it was for opponents to face a man known for coasting and stalling, Borotra knew exactly what he was doing. He had a reputation for charging through the first two sets, letting the next two slide, then marshaling his remaining energy for a full-on net-rushing attack in the fifth.

The Musketeers have a mythical status in tennis, but the analyst in me notices an eyebrow creeping higher and higher. Did one of the best players of all time regularly tank multiple sets to save energy? Really?

A careful look at the data says: Not exactly, but… kind of, yes!

In best-of-five matches between 1920 and 1939, one player built up a two-set lead about 70% of the time. About four-fifths of those leads–79%–became straight set victories, and more than nine in ten–92%–were finished in four. Given a two-set lead, Cochet converted the third 82% of the time, and Tilden did so 87% of the time. They took care of business by the fourth set in 95% and 98% of such matches, respectively.

Borotra, by contrast, made a career of the scenic route. He won the first two sets more often than Cochet, who had a reputation as a slow starter. But once Jean built up a 2-0 lead, he lost the third set almost one-third of the time (32%)–well above the rate of the typical player of the era and almost double that of his fellow Musketeer.

The narrative breaks down in the fourth set. Given a 2-1 lead, Borotra finished the job in the fourth 78% of the time, well above tour average (61%), better than Cochet (69%), and about the same as Tilden (77%).

Jean got his reputation from a few big matches, as is so often the case. A handful of stars dominated the era, so there wasn’t much use in saving two sets’ worth of energy against most of the middling opponents he needed to defeat. But when it mattered, it appears that the Frenchman really was prepared to drop the third and fourth sets in order to have a better chance at the fifth.

Only twelve times in the inter-war decades did the Frenchman win two sets and lose the next two. He won eight of those matches, and a selection of those victories constitute quite the highlight reel:

Year  Event        Rd  Opponent      Score                
1922  Cannes       F   Morgan        7-5 6-4 2-6 3-6 7-5  
1922  Metropole    F   Cholmondeley  6-1 6-3 1-6 3-6 6-3  
1924  French Chps  F   Lacoste       7-5 6-4 0-6 5-7 6-2  
1927  Wimbledon    SF  Lacoste       6-4 6-3 1-6 1-6 6-2  
1928  Austr. Chps  F   Cummings      6-4 6-1 4-6 5-7 6-3  
1930  Paris Intl   F   Boussus       6-1 6-3 1-6 5-7 6-4

The first two wins sealed the reputation of a fast-rising 23-year-old, and the next two saw him upset another all-time great on the sport’s biggest stages. Tennis has more than its share of unfounded conventional beliefs, but this time history has the right idea. When the stakes were high, Borotra knew when to take it easy.

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Unlike more recent clown princes, Jean Borotra also knew when to get serious. His stunts were often just tactics in disguise, as in the Tilden match. And his occasional silliness–along with everything else–took second place when national pride was on the line.

Fred Perry once said, “Jean Borotra was always prepared to kill himself for France.” When he retired, Jean had played more Davis Cup rubbers than any other Frenchman, even though he was often relegated to doubles duty behind Lacoste and Cochet. He was also unusually committed to the twice-annual friendly International Club matches, which brought together leading players from France, Britain, and a growing number of other nations. When a business commitment forced him to send his regrets in 1968, the IC rescheduled its meeting rather than end Jean’s decades-long streak of appearances at Club matches.

For a man born in 1898, patriotism meant more than just winning trophies. He joined the army upon his 18th birthday, eventually seeing combat in World War I. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre, and superiors encouraged him to pursue a military career.

Borotra chose business instead, joining a firm that sold petrol pumps. He rose quickly, expanding the company’s international reach, a move that conveniently allowed him to travel to places such as Wimbledon London and Forest Hills New York at least once a year.

When war struck again, Jean made a choice that was defensible at the time but would haunt him when the conflict ended. He threw his support behind the efforts of his personal hero, Phillippe Pétain, and served what would become the Vichy government. When he decided, in 1942, to make a run for North Africa and join the Allied cause, the Gestapo immediately picked him up. He spent six months in a solitary cell at the Nazi prison camp in Sachsenhausen before personal connections got him transferred to cushier confinement at Itter Castle. Tennis aficionado King Gustav of Sweden had enough pull with Hitler to effect the transfer and very possibly save Borotra’s life.

Collaborationists–perceived or otherwise–were unwelcome in Britain immediately after the war. Wimbledon feared protests, so the tournament didn’t give Borotra a place in the draw again until 1948. By then, he had recouped a long-abandoned title at the 1947 French Covered Court Championships, a tournament he won ten years’ running in his prime. He played as aggressively as ever, and on fast indoor wood, even a 48-year-old Borotra was unbeatable.

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It would be several more decades before Jean Borotra slowed down. He resumed his love affair with the Wimbledon gallery and continued to enter doubles events until 1964, when he won a match in the mixed with Isabelle de Lansalut. By then, The Championships included veterans’ events, so he switched over, still knocking out opponents 20 years his junior.

In 1973, his friend and biographer, Sir John Smyth, wrote that he seemed to be “still a young man in a hurry.” Aged 75, he kept a personal directory of dozens of tennis partners so that, despite his busy schedule, he could be sure to get on court several times a week. He missed a few more volleys with each passing year, but he never stopped rushing the net.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

* * *

Stan Wawrinka [SUI]
Born: 28 March 1985
Career: 2005-present (17+ seasons)
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak ATP rank: 3 (27 January 2014)
Peak Elo rating: 2,146
Major singles titles: 3
Total ATP singles titles: 16
 

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Stan Wawrinka has played 842 tour-level matches in his career. More than one in ten have come against Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, Andy Murray, or Rafael Nadal. He’s run into the Big Four in 13 of his 30 ATP finals–including, of course, all four of his grand slam championship matches.

No one outside of the quartet themselves has played the Big Four more often at majors than Wawrinka has. No other man has faced all four at least 20 times. Tomas Berdych tops the list of most total matches against the famous foursome–with Wawrinka a single match behind him.

The most important number for the perennial Swiss #2 reflects what actually happened in those meetings. He beat members of the Big Four 21 times, more than any other outsider. Richard Gasquet, Tommy Haas, and Gilles Simon combined for the same number of victories–and they collectively needed 53 more chances to do so.

* * *

Wawrinka was 27 years old at the close of the 2012 season. The ATP computer ranked him 17th, behind fellow 27-year-olds Berdych, Gasquet, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Nicolas Almagro, and John Isner. In eight years on tour, he had won three titles, all 250s, one of them a victory by retirement in the final against Djokovic. He had reached only two grand slam quarter-finals in 31 tries.

By that time, most of us had given up hope that Berdych, Tsonga, or Gasquet–or anyone else–would finally break the Big Four stranglehold and start winning majors. Even among that group, Wawrinka was an afterthought. He had lost 36 of his last 39 meetings with the Big Four, a run dating back to 2007.

Whatever he did to prepare for the 2013 season, it worked. He kicked off the campaign with a five-hour battle in the Australian Open fourth round, where he fought Djokovic all the way to 10-10 in the fifth set. He wouldn’t finally beat the Serbian until the following year in Melbourne, and he would endure another eight losses in ten meetings with the Big Four before the end of 2013. But he won 70% of matches that season for the first time in his career, battled Djokovic to another fifth set in New York, reached his first Masters final, and ascended to a new career-best ranking of #8, leapfrogging Tsonga and Gasquet and nearly closing the gap with Berdych.

Some of the credit belongs to his partnership with coach Magnus Norman, a former major finalist who joined his team in April of that year. Norman came on board after the breakthrough in Melbourne that year, but the uptick in Wawrinka’s fortunes coincides closely with the Swede’s arrival by Stan’s side. As early as November of that year, Wawrinka credited his new coach with both tactical assistance and–just as important–the tools necessary to stick with those tactics in tough matches.

In January of 2014, it all came together. Wawrinka beat Djokovic and Nadal to win his first major title, at the Australian Open. He was the first man outside the Big Four to win a slam since Juan Martin del Potro in 2009, and the first in Melbourne since Marat Safin in 2005. By the end of 2016, he had increased his grand slam tally to three, equalling Murray and making him one of only 20 men in the Open Era to win so many.

What changed? How did a man ranked as the fifth-best 27-year-old at the midpoint of his career become one of the best players of the last century?

* * *

I want to say it was the backhand, the sexy, overpowering one-hander that makes Gasquet look like an elderly coach feeding balls to a beginner.

It wasn’t the backhand–at least, it wasn’t a major improvement in the backhand. Coach and commentator Patrick Mouratoglou recently called Wawrinka’s shot “the most powerful backhand on the circuit,” while pointing out that it’s been a notable weapon since Stan was a junior. The backhand has improved as he has gotten stronger, but that doesn’t explain such a meteoric–and belated–rise.

The history of tennis is riddled with underachievers who couldn’t assemble a complete game to accompany one brilliant shot. Plus, if you’re going to build your game around one otherworldly stroke, a backhand isn’t the one to pick.

Instead, Wawrinka massively improved the effectiveness of his serve. Take a look at his year-by-year percentage of serve points won (SPW):

From a mark below 65% in 2011 and 2012, Stan improved to 68% in 2014. His career average through 2012 was below 64%, and his career average since is close to 67%.

Three percentage points might not sound like much. Yet it’s an enormous difference. Every tour player of consequence sits in the range between 60% and 70%, with the occasional exception of a monster server who creeps into the low 70s. In 2021, three percentage points was the difference between the devastating serve of Daniil Medvedev and the middling one of Pablo Carreno Busta.

It’s a good thing Wawrinka developed his serve when he did, because after the 2013 season, his return game went the other way. After breaking serve between 24% and 25% of the time from 2010 to 2013, his break rate fell to 21% in 2014 and 2015. Apart from a small bounce back in 2016, it has never recovered.

Some of the return-game downturn is a mirage. Thanks to his improved results, he faced a tougher mix of opponents. Perhaps his return stayed roughly the same, while his results reflected the more challenging competition. If so, his leap in service effectiveness, against that same set of elite opponents, is all the more impressive.

It’s clear what improved as Wawrinka went from an outsider to the man who forced people to say “Big Five.” But why?

* * *

In 2014, Wawrinka hit aces like he never had before. He tallied free points at a rate around 8% until 2013, so his 2014 mark of 10.7% represented a huge step forward. He aced Djokovic 10% of the time at the 2014 Australian Open, compared to 7.5% at the same tournament the year before. And his first serve played a key role in his first major championship match, when Nadal failed to get a racket on nearly one in five of his offerings.

Yet the serve itself doesn’t tell the whole story. Since 2014, his ace rate has settled in around 9%, only a modest improvement on what came before.

Using data from the Match Charting Project, let’s see how Wawrinka won first serve points before 2013, in 2013, and in his three peak seasons from 2014-16:

Charted matches aren’t the complete record, nor are they a purely random sample, so the ace rates don’t match the overall numbers I mentioned above. For some reason, we chose to chart a lot of Wawrinka’s best ace days in his peak years, so the blue part of each bar shows a significant improvement in ace rate.

The orange portions reflect non-aces that still weren’t returned. That percentage stayed almost the same in each phase.

The gray segments at the top of each bar show points that Stan won with the third shot of the rally–his second swing–either by hitting a winner or inducing a forced error from his opponent. That number steadily increases, from 11% up to 2012, to 12.5% in 2013, to 14% in 2014-16.

The improvement in his second shots is even more noticeable when you consider that fewer balls came back in his peak years. You can’t hit a serve-plus-one winner if the serve doesn’t come back! If we consider how often he ended the point with his second swing as a percentage of opportunities, it’s 16% from 2005-12, 19% in 2013, and 23% during his three-year peak.

Wawrinka explained his change in tactics at the end of 2013: “I don’t wait for the other player to miss.” Against the defensive capabilities of Djokovic, Murray, and Nadal, all of whom had an annoying tendency not to miss, it was really his only option.

And it was more than just a tactical shift. A year after joining Team Wawrinka, Magnus Norman weighed in: “Technically, it’s his forehand that progress is the most significant. His margin over the net is now larger, and he now has more confidence in [it]. … Stan has always had an incredible ball hit.”

The forehand is a crucial part of the serve-plus-one game. For a player already armed with an elite backhand, it was the remaining weapon with the most potential.

* * *

Once again, these percentage-point increases–16% to 19%, 19% to 23%–may seem insignificantly small. But we have to remember that the difference between a top-20 player and a top-five slam contender is itself tiny.

The evidence here suggests that Wawrinka steadily became more aggressive on the first two shots of his first serve points in the exact time frame when his results went from good to great. It worked, and he’s never gone back.

Best of all, it works against everybody. Unlike Berdych or David Ferrer, Wawrinka never thrived in the year-long grind of second-tier events, so his ranking required that he show up against the biggest guns. Even before his breakthrough, Stan wasn’t overawed by his supposed betters. He pushed Murray to five sets at Wimbledon in 2009, then beat him at the US Open in 2010. He took at least a set from Djokovic on five different occasions before 2012, and won more than half the points they played in a two-tiebreak match in 2009.

By 2013, it was obvious that no one could beat Djokovic or Murray at their own game. Unable to out-grind the grinders, Wawrinka went hard in the other direction. From 2007 until April of 2013, he lost 38 of 41 matches against the Big Four. Since clobbering Murray at Monte Carlo in 2013, he’s beaten the quartet 14 times in 46 tries, and split 18 meetings at majors.

It’s rarely so impressive to emerge from the pack just to become the fourth or fifth best player in the game. Yet to accomplish what Wawrinka did in the mid-2010s, scoring his biggest victories over one all-time great after another, sets him apart from the fifth-bests that came before him. The sexy backhand is just icing on the cake.

In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!

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Beverly Baker Fleitz [USA]
Born: 13 March 1930
Died: 29 April 2014
Career: 1946-1959 (14 seasons)
Plays: Ambidextrous (two forehands; served right-handed)
Peak rank: 3 (1954, 1955, 1958)
Peak Elo rating: 2,204 (2nd place, 1955)
Major singles titles: 0 (1955 Wimbledon finalist)
Total singles titles: 60
 

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If you know one thing about Beverly Baker Fleitz, it’s probably that she was ambidextrous, hitting forehands off both wings. If you didn’t know that, boy am I excited to be the one to tell you. One of the best players never to win a major, this Californian won the 1948 national girls’ championship, beat Mo Connolly eight times, and reached the 1955 Wimbledon final as a mother, all without a backhand.

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Baker Fleitz was, to some extent, naturally ambidextrous. The young Beverly Baker (Fleitz was her married name) threw righty and wrote lefty, so when she first picked up a racket, it came easily for the tiny 10-year-old to use her left hand on what would typically be her backhand side. A couple generations later, she would’ve been a natural proponent of the increasingly popular two-handed backhand, but developing her game in the 1940s, a double-hander would’ve been just as weird as her pair of forehands.

It wasn’t completely unprecedented to play with two forehands. The Australian Davis Cup player John Bromwich was a natural lefty who served right-handed, and he would hit one- or two-handed strokes at various times from both wings. He was part of the Aussie squad that traveled to Los Angeles for the Pacific Southwest tournament in 1938 and 1939, and he won the tournament the latter year.

The example of Bromwich, well-known to tennis aficionados in Southern California, may have given her father and coach, Frank Baker, the assurance to let Beverly do things her own way. It worked: She hit both forehands hard and deep. The only drawback of her unorthodox technique showed up at the net, where it took too long to switch hands. But like most of her peers, she was content to stay back, and her game thrived.

The novelty itself made life more difficult for opponents. She won the 1947 Los Angeles Metropolitan tournament before her 17th birthday and made her first trip East that summer. At the prestigious Eastern Grass Court Championships in Orange, New Jersey, she reached the final four before falling to the reigning Wimbledon champion, Margaret Osborne (later Osborne duPont), and won two matches at the national championships at Forest Hills.

Osborne’s 6-2 6-3 victory was hardly a close shave, but the veteran recognized her opponent’s potential. She described Baker as one of the game’s “coming players” and said, “Her ambidextrous style can be so confusing that at times you don’t know which way the ball is coming from.” While Osborne would win their next three meetings, Baker turned the tables when they clashed in a 1951 Wimbledon quarter-final.

The 17-year-old solidified her status as a player to watch in the fall of 1947, grabbing the title at the Pacific Southwest, the same event where the similarly unorthodox Bromwich had triumphed eight years earlier. Reigning national champion and SoCal product Louise Brough skipped the event due to illness, so it was left to the rest of the strong West Coast contingent to stop the teen with two forehands. They failed. In the final, Beverly lost only five games to top-tenner Pat Canning Todd.

As Baker’s results improved, the media quickly recognized the teen as more than a novelty act. Her small stature, at 5-foot-4 and under 120 pounds, left onlookers shocked by her power. Columnist Braven Dyer was awestruck by Baker’s performance against Todd: “Wham! How she socked home her drives, first with the right and then with the left.” Two years later, a writer for American Lawn Tennis claimed that he couldn’t recall a female player hitting harder than Beverly did.

One late-career assessment would’ve fit the young player just as well: “Her service is weak, her volleying indifferent and her overhead a chore that she shirks at all costs. She doesn’t need them. … The formula [is] simple: rifle the ball down a sideline and if it dared to come back, slam it down the other.”

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Baker arrived on the American scene at a tough time for would-be stars. Brough’s 1947 Forest Hills title was the first of her six majors, and Osborne won the second of her own half-dozen at Wimbledon that year. The seemingly endless supply of elite American women would win Wimbledon and the US Nationals every year from 1938 to 1958, tacking on nine French Championships and four Australian titles in the same span.

The woman who would finally displace Brough, Osborne, and Doris Hart was still a few years away from her peak, but Baker spent the summer of 1948 getting a sneak preview of the future, facing off repeatedly against 13-year-old Maureen Connolly.

Baker and Connolly were among the small group of Californians sent to tour the West that summer. They played state and regional events in Salt Lake City, Denver, Tacoma, Seattle, and Vancouver. Baker won all five tournaments, and as Connolly also outclassed the provincial competition, Beverly and Little Mo met in a semi-final and four finals. (After the first stop in Salt Lake City, no one else made the mistake of seeding them in the same half of the draw.) While Connolly would eventually surpass her elder, Beverly remained a thorn in her side for years.

Baker went East again in 1948, winning the national junior title and excelling in adult tournaments, losing only to Brough and the now-married Osborne duPont. She reached the final again at the hometown Pacific Southwest, this time losing to a healthy Brough.

Her season tally of at least 48 wins against 9 losses was good for a national ranking of #5. My Elo ratings concur, placing her behind Brough, Osborne duPont, Hart, and Todd. In 1948, the top five Americans were all better than anyone the rest of the world had to offer.

With another decade to run on Beverly’s career, she had already nearly reached her peak. The cast of characters would shift, but she would remain a few rungs from the top.

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There’s no shame, of course, in slotting in behind the likes of Brough, Hart, and Connolly. That’s particularly true for a person like Beverly Baker, who refused to let amateur tennis dominate her life.

As she ascended the ranks in early 1948, she told a reporter, “Tennis means everything to me right now, except school. So long as I’ve started playing, I want to reach the top, or as close to it as I can get, before anything else.” That included romance–a resolution that lasted barely a year.

In late 1949, she eloped to Las Vegas with Scotty Beckett, a fellow Southern Cal student and former child star from films such as “Our Gang.” Less than six months later, Baker filed for divorce, citing mental cruelty and bodily injury. She testified at trial that Beckett was “insolent, arrogant, abusive, belligerent and jealous.”

Her tennis bounced back from the ordeal. In the second half of 1950, she went 27-4, losing only to Hart and Osborne duPont. Baker didn’t sour on marriage, either. She wed John Fleitz in 1951, and the couple would have two children within five years.

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After a 1951 season that included a trip abroad, a Wimbledon semi-final, nearly 100 singles matches, and six titles, family life slowed down Beverly Baker Fleitz’s playing schedule. In the amateur era, most women hung up their rackets upon their first pregnancy, and many quit as soon as they walked down the aisle. Beverly couldn’t see why: she missed less than a year for the birth of her first child, and sat out only 14 months for the second.

Between layoffs, she played the best tennis of her career. From her comeback in June 1953 to Wimbledon in 1956, when she withdrew due to her second pregnancy, she racked up 112 wins against only 6 losses, conceding defeat only to Doris Hart (twice), Louise Brough, Shirley Fry, Dorothy Knode and Barbara Breit. While she stuck close to home, playing the majority of her tennis in Southern California, she nonetheless piled up victories over the best of her peers: Connolly, Hart, Brough, Osborne duPont, Althea Gibson, and Darlene Hard.

The highlight came at Wimbledon in 1955. She cruised to the final with the loss of only 21 games in 6 matches, including a 6-3 6-0 dismantling of Hart. Baker Fleitz finally upset her old nemesis, winning the last nine games in a row. In the championship match, she faced Brough, who Beverly had beaten four times since her comeback, including once on grass.

Thanks to her performance in the semis and the recent results between the two women, Baker Fleitz entered her first major final as the favorite. She very nearly lived up to the billing. Brough was forced to deploy every trick she knew, occasionally suffering through passages like Beverly’s 10 consecutive points won early in the second set.

Baker Fleitz pushed her long-time rival to the limit, finally losing serve at 5-5 in the first set, allowing Brough to take it, 7-5. Both of Beverly’s forehands were firing, while her opponent barely had the stamina to survive another long set. Finally, with Baker Fleitz serving at 6-6, Brough secured a break with the shot of the match, a lunging stop-volley winner. Six points later, the former champion lifted the trophy again, defeating the woman with two forehands, 7-5 8-6.

The runner-up didn’t dwell on the defeat. She blitzed the field at the Irish Championships the next week in Dublin, then rushed home to take her daughter Kimberley to the beach.

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Baker Fleitz retired from top-level tennis at the end of 1959, though the mother of two had hardly lost a step. She departed the scene as the two-time defending champion at the Pacific Southwest, having beaten top seed Maria Bueno in her final match at that event, two months after defeating British stars Angela Mortimer and Christine Truman in Wightman Cup.

Even then, she wasn’t quite done unleashing her power on the Los Angeles tennis elite. At the Southern California Sectional Championships in 1966, she entered the mother-daughter doubles with Kimberley and the wife-husband event with John. She and Kimberley won a match before losing in the quarters. With her spouse, she did a bit better.

You might have heard of their opponents in the final: Billie Jean King and her husband Larry. It wasn’t easy, but the Fleitzes came out on top, 5-7 8-6 6-3. I can only suspect that the husbands faced the brunt of the abuse that day. Beverly’s two forehands had been too much for a generation of women on tour. Larry King didn’t stand a chance.

Scroll down or click here for the list of players published so far.

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You know what tennis really needs? More arguments about the greatest players of all time.

Really! I could take or leave the Djokovic-Federer-Nadal debate, and I don’t need to read another word about Serena versus Margaret Court. But the quest for greatness is what defines elite athletics, and the appreciation of elite performance is an essential part of what it means to be a fan.

Too much of tennis history has been lost, forgotten, or caricatured. The 150-year story of lawn tennis is full of larger-than-life figures, underrated champions, and local heroes. I don’t know about you, but I want to know a lot more about those players. I wish I had a deeper understanding of earlier eras, especially those that came before the dawn of the Open Era in 1968.

That’s why I’m writing the Tennis 128.

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In a couple of days, I’ll begin counting down the 128 greatest tennis players of all time. The list includes men and women, and it takes into account more than a century of play, from 1919 to the present. I’ll publish an essay about each one. We’ll dive into who they were, what they accomplished, and how they fit into the overall arc of tennis history. 

(Why 1919? It’s a convenient starting point. It was the first full season after World War I, and it gives us about 100 years to work with. There were great players before the war, of course, and there’s no clear dividing line between pre-modern and modern tennis. But the game has changed so much that while I can just manage a comparison of Helen Wills to Billie Jean King or Serena Williams, it’s a much bigger stretch to somehow consider Lottie Dod.)

This may all sound familiar. In 2020 and 2021, Joe Posnanski wrote a similar series for baseball, counting down his top 100 players. He published it a few months ago as a giant book, The Baseball 100, which you should buy. Joe’s project is the inspiration for this one. I’m not as good a writer as he is, so I’m giving you 28% more players to make up for it.

If you think it’s audacious to the point of silliness to try to rank 100 years’ worth of tennis players, you’re right. It’s ridiculous. There are short careers and long careers, number ones with no slams and multi-slam winners who never reached number one. There’s the amateur era and the Open Era, and there were separate professional tours during the amateur era that meant some of the best players on earth went a decade without playing each other. There are at least 20 players with some plausible case for the #1 spot.

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Any best-of-all-time list is subjective. Still, I tried to make mine as objective as possible. The ranking is primarily based on an algorithm that incorporates three things: a player’s peak, their five best years, and their entire career. Those components are measured by Elo ratings. I only considered seasons above a fairly high threshold, and there are no negative values for bad seasons. I’m interested in how good players were at their best, not whether they stuck around for too many seasons at the end.

The ranking is almost entirely based on singles performance. Doubles used to be more prominent than it is now, but greatness has always been defined primarily as excellence on the singles court. In a few instances, I’ve broken ties in favor of the better doubles player. I’ve also moved a (very small) handful of players toward the top of the list because of their off-court contributions to the game.

In general, I follow Roger Federer’s edict that you can only compare players to their own eras. Objectively speaking, today’s players are better than those of the past. They take advantage of personalized training and nutrition, technologically advanced rackets and strings, high-quality coaching from younger ages, and all the tactical knowledge developed by their predecessors. In that sense, Novak Djokovic is unquestionably better than Bill Tilden, and so is Adrian Mannarino. That’s not a very interesting way of approaching the problem, though. The Tennis 128 reflects the fact that there have been strong eras and weak eras, but the ultimate test of any player is how they performed against their peers.

The ratings for amateur-era players rely on the exhaustive women’s tennis database I’ve assembled that goes back to the 1910s, as well as the impressive records put together at TennisArchives.com and in Chris Jordan’s book, The Professional Tennis Archive. These datasets aren’t perfect, nor are they complete, especially for men’s tennis before World War II. But they are more than enough to allow us to compare the greatest players of all time.

Some details you might wonder about: Several active players made it on the list, which I finalized before the 2022 season began. However, if someone has a great year before I unveil their ranking, I will move them up to reflect that. Something to keep in mind when Andy Murray wins the next three majors.

A few notable players don’t fit neatly into a pre-1919 or post-1919 bucket. If their post-1919 performance gets them on the list, I use their entire career to give them a ranking. If they weren’t good enough after World War I, they’ll have to wait for another list.

Many players lost years’ worth of opportunities to World War II. I’ve made minor adjustments in some of those cases, but in general, players are rated based solely on what they accomplished on court. It isn’t quite fair to those who hit their peak years in the early 1940s, but it’s hard enough to accurately measure players based on what they did achieve, let alone what they could have done. The same reasoning applies to injuries that altered or ended careers, unfair as many of them were.

It’s engrossing–at least for me–to dig into the mechanics and edge cases of rating systems, but I don’t want to distract from the main purpose here. There are several dozen more outstanding players who missed the cut and wouldn’t be out of place on the list. If your favorite player doesn’t show up, don’t fret: It’s not because he or she isn’t good enough, it’s just because I personally dislike you. There’s not much of a difference between #97 and #127, or between #50 and #80. The closer we get to the top, the more likely that a single place on the list really means something, but even there, differences between eras–not to mention men and women–allow for no final answer.

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Ready? I’ll unveil #128 on Thursday. The plan is to reach #1 in December. If all goes well, it’ll be December of 2022. You can expect three new players each week, usually on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

I can’t remember the last time I was so excited to embark on a new project. I hope you’ll join me and follow along.

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128. Beverly Baker Fleitz

127. Stan Wawrinka (podcast)

126. Jean Borotra

125. Li Na

124. Betty Nuthall

123. Michael Stich (podcast)

122. Ashley Cooper

121. Angela Mortimer

120. Kei Nishikori

119. Adrian Quist

118. Bill Johnston

117. Darlene Hard

116. Ted Schroeder

115. Rosie Casals (podcast 1 | podcast 2)

114. Andrea Jaeger

113. Karel Koželuh

112. Shirley Fry

111. Goran Ivanišević (podcast)

110. Frank Kovacs

109. Anita Lizana

108. Molla Mallory

107. Jim Courier (podcast)

106. Sarah Palfrey Cooke

105. Petra Kvitová

104. Vinnie Richards

103. Tony Roche

102. Jadwiga Jędrzejowska

101. Ashleigh Barty

100. Dorothy Round

99. Tom Okker

98. Zina Garrison

97. Frank Parker

96. Elena Dementieva

95. Vitas Gerulaitis

94. Kitty McKane Godfree

93. Simona Halep

92. Gottfried von Cramm

91. Ann Jones

90. Caroline Wozniacki

89. Michael Chang

88. Mary Joe Fernández

87. Juan Martín del Potro

86. Margaret Osborne duPont

85. Svetlana Kuznetsova

84. Lleyton Hewitt

83. Jack Crawford

82. Maria Esther Bueno

81. Budge Patty

80. Andy Roddick

79. David Ferrer

78. Simonne Mathieu

77. Henri Cochet

76. Pam Shriver

75. Virginia Wade

74. Lew Hoad

73. Elizabeth Ryan

72. Stan Smith

71. Tony Trabert

70. John Bromwich

69. Nancy Richey

68. Manolo Santana

67. Mary Pierce

66. Vic Seixas

65. René Lacoste

64. Bobby Riggs

63. Ora Washington

62. Amélie Mauresmo

61. Ilie Năstase

60. Frank Sedgman

59. Evonne Goolagong

58. Pancho Segura

57. Louise Brough

56. Tracy Austin

55. Roy Emerson

54. Jana Novotná

53. Hilde Krahwinkel Sperling

52. John Newcombe

51. Hana Mandlíková

50. Mats Wilander

49. Helen Jacobs (Part 1 | Part 2)

48. Arthur Ashe

47. Jennifer Capriati

46. Victoria Azarenka

45. Conchita Martínez

44. Jaroslav Drobný

43. Guillermo Vilas

42. Althea Gibson

41. Doris Hart

40. Stefan Edberg

39. Kim Clijsters

38. Andre Agassi

37. Fred Perry

36. Maria Sharapova

35. Pauline Betz

34. Ellsworth Vines

33. Justine Henin

32. Boris Becker

31. Gabriela Sabatini

30. Martina Hingis

29. Andy Murray

28. Billie Jean King

27. Arantxa Sánchez Vicario

26. Lindsay Davenport

25. Jack Kramer

24. Jimmy Connors

23. Alice Marble

22. Don Budge

21. Pete Sampras

20. Ivan Lendl

19. Maureen Connolly

18. Margaret Court

17. Richard González

16. Venus Williams

15. Ken Rosewall

14. Suzanne Lenglen

13. John McEnroe

12. Björn Borg

11. Monica Seles

10. Helen Wills

9. Chris Evert

8. Rafael Nadal

7. Bill Tilden

6. Serena Williams

5. Roger Federer

4. Novak Djokovic

3. Martina Navratilova

2. Steffi Graf

1. Rod Laver