There are those-the curmudgeons, the logicians, the irritatingly level-headed - who will tell you that we "can't compare tennis players from different eras." In their minds, the sport has been so thoroughly transformed over the decades that each generation's greatest champion lives alone on his own island of excellence. To which the majority of sports fans, whose heads are rarely level about anything, might come back with a two-part retort. First, tennis is still tennis; whatever athletic and cosmetic changes it has undergone, you still use a racquet to hit a ball over a net. Second, and maybe more important, we have no choice in the matter. even if the logical half of our minds were to grant that the game Bill Tilden played in the 1920s is not precisely the game that Roger Federer plays today, the fanatical half will go ahead and pit their careers against each other anyway. We're sports fans because we want to know who's going to win, even if the matches play out only in our daydreams. Why should we rob ourselves of that pleasure?Logical or not, "Greatest Ever' parlor games are an enduring staple of all sports. But this summer in particular was a boom season for them. That's because Federer, after 5 years of near-total domination and peerless consistency, made a double-barreled assault on the record books by winning his 1st French Open and his 6th Wimbledon. In a month and a half, he passed two landmarks on the road to tennis immortality: In Paris, he became the 3rd man in the Open era, after Rod Laver and Andre Agassi, to win all four Grand Slams; and at Wimbledon, he broke Pete Sampras' record for most major titles among men by taking home his 15th.
With irrefutable proof of both his versatility on all surfaces and unmatched proficiency at the biggest events, the question can now be asked: Is this 28-year old Swiss with the goofy smile and penchant for cheesy fashion gimmicks the greatest player in history?
The conflicting responses to this question start right at the top, among the three men who are most often mentioned alongside Federer in this debate. Sampras conceded that after Federer's victory at the French Open-the one major the American failed to win-he deserved to be called the greatest in history. But when asked to make a similar pronouncement at Wimbledon, Laver and Bjorn Borg demurred, saying there could be no definitive answer.
1. Federer hasn't wont a calendar-year Grand Slam, the ultimate achievement in tennis. Don Budge won one, and Laver won two. There's no denying that winning all four Slams in one year is the sport's Holy Grail, and that Federer came up one match short of it in both 2006 and 2007. Nevertheless, this is a single season achievement rather than a career achievement, and we're measuring lifetime accomplishments. If you believe that Laver's two Slams-he won the first as an amateur in 1962 without having to face professionals like Lew Hoad, Pancho Gonzalez and Ken Rosewall, who were banned from the majors-alone make him untouchable, you must ask yourself this: If Laver hadn't won a single match in any other season, would his career still be greater than Federer's? The answer, obviously, is no.
2. Speaking of the Rochet, Laver won 11 majors, but as a pro he wasn't allowed to play them from 1963 to '67, the prime of his career. He almost certainly would have ended up with more than 15 if he hadn't missed those five seasons. It is more than reasonable to think so. Laver won four straight majors before his ban, and five of the first seven that he entered upon being reinstated in 1968. But remember again that the first four came against amateurs only, and that if he had been allowed to play the majors throughout the '60s, his rivals on the pro tour would have been battling him all the way. More important, however, is the "if" in the question above. No one knows what would have happened to Laver in those events. That's a topic for another parlor game, "What If." In the greatest-ever debate, the only thing we have to go on are the statistics in front of us. Once we allow for an if, where do we stop? Do we have to consider the fact that Borg, who also finished with 11 Slam titles, only played the Australian Open one time?
3. That brings up another point: In the past, top players didn't sit around counting their Grand Slam trophies. Borg played the Australian Open once, Jimmy Connors played it twice. Why are majors the be-all and end-all in this debate? True, the Slams have gained significance in the last 20 years. Sampras elevated them to their current Olympian status by saying they were essentially all that mattered. Still, from Tilden on down, players have always focused their efforts on the Big 4. More to the point, the Slam-title record is hardly Federer's only claim on history. Here's a short list of others: From 2004 to '08 he was ranked No 1 for 237 straight weeks, a record; in 2006, he recorded a season for the ages, finishing 92-5 reaching 16 finals in 17 events, and winning 12 titles; he's tha all-time prize-money leader, having earned nearly $50 million by age 27; from 2005 to '07 he reached a record 10 straight Slam finals (Laver's best was six, Sampras' three); and coming into the U.S. Open, he had reached 21 straight Slam semifinals, a men's record that will likely stand longer than Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak in baseball.
4. Ok, forget the past: How can we call Federer the best ever when he has a 7-13 record against his primary rival, Rafael Nadal, and has won only two of their seven major finals? You might say every Superman has his kryptonite. While Nadal has owned the Swiss for long periods-he beat him five straight times from the spring of 2008 to the spring of '09-their head-to-head record seems more damning to Federer than it really is. In one sense, he's been punished for doing better on Nadal's favourite surface, clay, than Nadal has done on Federer's best surface, hard courts. Federer is 2-5 against Nadal in Slam finals because he has lost to him in the championship round in Paris, on clay, three times. Nadal has never reached the final on hard courts at the U.S. Open, and thus never faced Federer where he's the five-time defending champion. While the 23-year-old Nadal leads their head-to-head and is ahead of Federer's Slam-title pace, all this proves is that in five or 10 years we may be talking about a new greatest of all time. But not yet. The best players compete to win prestigious tournaments, not to beat certain opponents, and that's how they should be judged.
The curmudgeons and logicians have it right in one way: The only method for ranking players from different eras is to compare the coldm hard stats. There's nothing to be gained from looking at old clips of Tilden and Budge and thinking that Federer would wipe the court with them. All you can ask is that a player beat the guy across the net, not a theoretical opponent of the future. Still, the particular brilliance of a champion can't be fully captured by numbers. From Tilden's theatrical authority to Laver's razor-sharp explosiveness to Borg's icy calm to Sampras' ruthless pragmatism, each maps out a unique path to mastering the sport.
Is this also true for Federer? A few years ago he recalled his reaction to a bad loss early in his career. He was outraged because he had been beaten by a player who couldn't approach his "beautiful technique." Federer linked the aesthetic quality of tennis technique with results, something rarely done in the power era. He was onto something about himself.
Watch him watch the ball so carefully onto his strings. Watch him extend his backhand swing without letting his body come out of its stance. Watch him transition forward without stopping to set up for the ball, yet without running through it. More than any other player in history, Federer makes elegance, which in tennis means playing with stylish correctness, a formula for dominance. At a time when the law of raw force seemed undeniable, he has reconnected tennis with its origins in aristocratic gracefulness and made power tennis safe for traditionalists. Call it a new ideal for the sport: Federer has shown us that the most beautiful technique can create the most explosive, the most effective, and, yes, the greatest player that tennis has ever seen.-STEPHEN TIGNOR
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