Disclaimer - if reading about the GOAT debate would be considered hazardous to your emotional well-being, please STOP READING THIS POST IMMEDIATELY.
I've been trolling the blogosphere lately getting into all manner of the GOAT debate. Let me tell you, there is something visceral about the debate that makes it the kind of thing that, if you want to enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner, you just don't bring up. The level of vitriol coming from debaters of many different perspectives on the topic is staggering. Having said that, I'm not going to pretend I don't understand why there is so much emotional involvement in something as, in the grand scheme of things, benign as the GOAT. At its core, the emotion is really just a deep love of the game - and honestly I can't argue with that.
But apparently, in the course of forging one too many times into the breach, a few people have been more than mildly irritated with the "majors won" argument as the only measure of greatness we need to consider, the conviction with which I make it and the conviction with which I dispute all other measures argued. Like everyone else who debates the GOAT, obviously I do love the game. I play it, I watch it, and I study its history for no other reason than I love it. The majors constitute the backbone of the tradition in the game, and the tradition is the only thing that links current players with the history, and as a result, I believe we can compare players across the history of the game by counting majors won. It is an imperfect measure - I never said it wasn't - but so too are the crowned jewels of the game, but because we love it, we accept those limitations.
To argue that head to head record, or proficiency on multiple surfaces, or talent, or any other specific measure of greatness is more important than majors won strikes me as both revisionist and cynical. A little bit like when Lucy yanks the ball away from Charlie Brown at the moment he's about to kick it. Everyone involved in tennis, from the players to the fans and everyone in between, follows the majors because they are what everyone follows. At its core, the most basic argument for the tradition of the game is, indeed circular, but somehow, it doesn't make that argument any less compelling.
All these other measures of greatness are either (1) encompassed in winning majors, (2) subordinate in value to the majors, (3) a means to achieving majors or (4) completely arbitrary. As such, I don't think it makes any sense to bother with any other measure of greatness than majors won. But one of the arguments that I find the most pernicious is that somehow there is something wrong with seeking to identify a GOAT, or even the possibility that a GOAT can be determined.
I mean, if you follow tennis, and the game is even remotely important to you, then you obviously have no problem with determining mini-GOATs like the best player in a match, the best player at a tournament, the best player over the course of a year, and ironically, the best player in an ill-defined period of time so fashionably referred to these days as an "era". I have no clue what an era is, but if you do, and you accept there can be a best of it, isn't it just a little disingenuous to somehow conclude that for the ultimate era (all time) the best cannot be determined? Why is that? If you use the same tools used to determine all these other mini-GOATs, which you accept, what on earth is the problem with determining THE GOAT?
Of course, that's a big if - and strangely, it seems the only way to dispute the most obvious candidate for the GOAT, is to dispute the validity of the measure used to determine it. My question is, in exchange for what measures? What measures are superior to those measures which we know, accept and already use for nearly every other competitive evaluation in the game?
What I have tried to guard against more than anything, in arguing majors won as the best measure of greatness, is the introduction of measures of greatness that contradict those that are already established by the game's traditions, because doing so would do the one thing that, as a tennis fan, I admit I simply can't bear to do - invalidate precisely that which makes me love the game.
If that happens, then what the hell is the point? If you're wondering, that's why it's so important to me.
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Showing posts with label GOAT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GOAT. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
FEDERER'S MENTAL BLOCK WITH NADAL
It's got to be mental - he has all the shots, and he's always cool as a cucumber, so if he has a problem with Nadal, it has to be a mental block. Right?
Wrong.
What exactly constitutes a mental block with someone on the tennis court? As it is described by the tennis punditry it is evidenced by one of two things - for some reason a player can no longer execute shots that he normally does against everyone else, or he tries shots against that player that he doesn't try against anyone else, usually because the guy is in his head and he's second guessing himself. But I would argue that these are both really just symptoms of the same problem, and it has nothing to do with psychology.
Wrong.
What exactly constitutes a mental block with someone on the tennis court? As it is described by the tennis punditry it is evidenced by one of two things - for some reason a player can no longer execute shots that he normally does against everyone else, or he tries shots against that player that he doesn't try against anyone else, usually because the guy is in his head and he's second guessing himself. But I would argue that these are both really just symptoms of the same problem, and it has nothing to do with psychology.
Federer's technique, like all players, is tied to his tactical patterns and vice versa. And against 999,999 out of a million possible opponents, that confluence of technique and tactics work perfectly. But if you try to change your tactics without commensurate changes to your technique, or change your technique without commensurate changes to your tactics, the two will fall out of sync, and suddenly everything your normally do easily and so well, are the exact things that get you beat. Thus the solution is a proper change to both technique and tactics that create a new paradigm, one that your bete noire does not have an answer to.
As evidence, I offer the third set tiebreak of their Australian Open semi-final this year because in this game, a full display Federer's inability to win critical points with errors that appear to be the result of some mental block vis a vis Nadal, lie the secrets - the lack of technical and tactical synchronization - to this mystery. Tennis is not chess, it is a physical endeavor that requires a set of skills consistently executed to near perfection, in order to maximize your tactics, compete and achieve at the highest level. If there was a God of tennis, it would definitely be in the details - the technical and tactical details.
So let’s take this game point by point:
0-0: That missed backhand volley was the result of coming in off a HIGH backhand up the line (a shot which he ALWAYS lands short) and having to cover the cross court pass, thus he was too deep to finish the point with his first volley and was dead long before he got to net. Had he flattened it out he may have had a chance, but I don’t know anyone who can take a shoulder height backhand approach shot and hit it deep, flat and up the line.
Had he sliced it deep up the line, which is historically the conventional backhand approach, he'd have more time to close the angles on passing shots, Nadal would have to hit his passing shot from a low height, and somehow get it up and down quickly enough to get past a simple put away volley. The last alternative would be a lob, but again, from a low slice, an offensive lob is difficult to execute, and Federer has a great overhead. As it were, Federer's short topspin approach didn't give him enough time to close the angle on the pass, and because it gets to Nadal quickly, so too does Nadal's passing shot arrive at Federer before he has a chance to reach the optimal position to put away his volley - hence the error.
0-1: Federer goes inside/in on the forehand (not nearly as effective as his inside/out forehand which is flatter and hit at a better angle) and it also lands very short - another common mistake he gets away with against most players because they lack the running cross-court reply on that side. It just so happens that Nadal’s cross-court backhand is one of the best in the game, and Federer’s short reply to it is rife for the drop shot, which Nadal hits well from inside the baseline. But it's important to note that when Federer goes cross court on the forehand from inside or at the baseline, he always puts a lot of top spin on the shot, and it always lands short - this is not something that is reserved for Nadal.
To be effective he also needs a better angle, but at this point he's not doing anything different against Nadal than what he does against everyone. It just so happens that against Nadal it is a high risk play because of his ability to hit passing shots on the run off both wings. So the tactic of taking the short forehand and approaching is correct, but the execution isn't there because Federer isn't accustomed to having to play that shot as close to the line as he would have to in order to be effective against Nadal, who moves and hits on the run better than anyone on tour.
1-2: Federer hits a solid backhand return, but his next two backhands land short (as usual) to Nadal’s forehand, which he easily pulls wider and wider with his next two successive shots. Federer tries to go up the line on the 3rd backhand to break the pattern, but he has problems with his backhand at shoulder height, and it’s even harder to hit up the line. Djokovic, for example, eats that for lunch because he takes that backhand higher, hits it flatter and changes direction a lot better than Federer.
Thus, the issue here is Federer's backhand - aesthetically appealing as it is, it is not as effective against that one shot from Nadal that pulls him to the left and stays up at his shoulders at his preferred court positioning. He could change his positioning and move further back, but that is not a shot a lot of players have - a deep flat backhand up the line with pace that puts Nadal in a defensive position (think Nicolas Almagro or Richard Gasquet). And if he did move back, it would expose him to an inside out forehand, a drop shot or even another cross court forehand pulling him further and further out of position. So the combination of Federer's preferred court positioning, and the technical inability to hit anything but a weak cross court backhand reply costs him this point.
1-3: From a high backhand (not even a forehand) up the line from Nadal, which lands short, Federer still has trouble stepping into the court, even though this time he's going to his preferred cross court backhand. Here the problem is again, that his best backhands are struck at waist level - it's just the way that his shot is produced. And against 99 out of 100 players, he can take that shot on the rise and at waist level at his preferred court position to the baseline and hit a solid cross court shot. But here against Nadal, at that distance from the baseline, the ball remains up around his shoulder - at the same height as the previous backhand…which he also shanked - although not as badly as this one.
Again, Federer could move back and wait for the ball to come into his optimal strike zone, but that alters his positioning and leaves him vulnerable to a lot of things. He could also step further into the court and hit more of a half-volley, but that's one of the hardest shots in tennis, and even the great Federer would have difficulty picking up the right point of contact and still hit it with pace and direction. Particularly difficult against a player who has been recorded as putting the most spin on the ball in the history of the game (according to this tennisplayer.net presentation ). Those numbers alone ought to dispel the myth that the problem is mental - it is clearly a physical challenge, and one that most players have against Nadal, not just Federer.
1-4: Federer is passed off a shallow cross court forehand - it’s important to note that unlike his forehand approach up the line which he hits flat, this one he comes over to keep it in the court, but is easily passed with Nadal’s crosscourt backhand, which I’ve already indicated is one of the best in the game. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Federer hit a flat forehand crosscourt - particularly as an approach - it's just a shot that he doesn't have. Complicating this shot is that the return from Nadal is a mishit that bounces on the center service line - either of which is very hard to deal with, and together nearly impossible to hit an optimal shot. Finally, the previous approach to the backhand elicited a backhand up the line - which you can see Federer lean towards slightly to cover, but Nadal trips him up and goes cross court.
The real question is tactically why Federer chooses to approach on this at all? The answer is that it's part of the patterns of play that he executes almost by rote. Most all-court players taking a forehand inside the baseline will approach the net no matter what - even if it's not optimal to do so - it just doesn't work out here for Federer, but this decision to approach is not unusual. In fact the problem with this decision is that it is too "usual". Despite the opponent and/or the special conditions of this particular shot coming at him, he doesn't alter his playing pattern. Because he doesn't do anything differently (not because he does - as you would expect if the problem was that his opponent is "in his head"), he gets burned.
1-5: Federer’s wide serve in the deuce is too deep and here you can say he choked a little, because he normally spots that serve much further up in the service court. But in this case, it's too deep and Nadal hits a solid return - deep and with pace - pushing him well beyond where he optimally likes to hit that forehand up the line. On grass or on a faster surface, that same serve may be effective, and the natural sequence is to approach on the next shot. But on a slow hard court, or a clay court, the serve sits up. Then from Nadal's well struck return, the change of positioning should force Federer to clear the net at a higher level than he normally does, but he doesn't alter his technique and he pays the price with a ball in the net.
This is normally his best approach shot because he’s usually hitting at a right hander’s backhand, typically takes it closer to the middle of the court (because the spotting of the serve is better), and doesn't have to clear the net at as high a point on the approach - if he were two feet to his left, that exact same shot would have easily cleared the net. But since he doesn't alter his technique here, the exact same tactic that he would employ in this situation requires a technique that he doesn't adjust to, and thus the error.
1-6: Federer hits a solid deep return which pushes Nadal back. From this Nadal hits a slow cross court forehand which lands at the service line, and although the point of contact is high, Nadal’s shot is so short and slow Federer can easily step in and go cross court (his best backhand by far), over the lowest part of the net, for a winner. It’s important to note here that the quality of Federer’s return forces Nadal back and elicits a weak reply, versus in a neutral rally where Nadal can step into the forehand, pull him wide and force a weak reply, as he did at 1-2, and generally always does against Federer.
But in this case, a change of tactics (to be more aggressive with the backhand return), with a commensurate change in technique (by coming over the backhand thereby hitting it with more pace and pushing Nadal back) elicits a return that he can easily hit for a winner. Against most players in the past, Federer would simply chip this backhand return and wait for a short reply, either from a player who can't handle a short slice, or at some point later in the natural course of a rally. But against Nadal, he must tactically force himself into control of the point, and alter his technique to do so, to excellent effect in this point. In other words, the winner got an assist from a tactical and technical change in his return of serve.
2-6: Off a short backhand up the line from Nadal, Federer easily hits his backhand at waist height with power and depth, eliciting an error from Nadal. But the key is Nadal’s shot before the approach. It is so short and weak that Federer appears to have no problems with a backhand approach up the line. Not immune to the pressure, Nadal is timid with his shot, and by playing a different shot to Federer's backhand, (and not Federer playing differently than he normally does) Nadal allows Federer to play the way we all expect him to. There is no change in either his tactic of approaching to Nadal's backhand, or the execution thereof, which he is able to do at waist height which is his optimal point of contact. The result - the same as it is against everyone else on tour - a forced error.
3-6: Federer hits (almost) the same shallow cross court forehand as at 1-4, off a backhand return from Nadal. This one Nadal hits flush on the strings, no where near a service line, but even shorter inside the service court. Federer could probably hit this shot with his eyes closed, and it doesn't matter who’s on the other side of the net because the return is short, weak and has a straight trajectory. But again, I reiterate that it is the change in Nadal's execution that elicits the shot from Federer that we see him hit easily with (almost) all other players, and not a change in Federer's tactics or execution.
5-6: This is a great (and classic) one-two combination from Nadal - a solid wide serve in the ad court (which is his favorite) and since Federer’s backhand return is not naturally aggressive (as Djokovic’s for example) he does little to prevent Nadal running around his own backhand and hitting a fairly standard inside out forehand winner. Nothing new from Federer and thus nothing new from Nadal. And while Federer has improved his backhand return, it’s still just an improvement over his chip return, and not nearly the weapon that it would have to be to consistently counter that particular serve from Nadal. Djokovic, on the other hand, devours this return because tactically he is almost always aggressive on the return, and he has the quickness and the racquet head control to execute. Federer clearly does not.
It's a long analysis, but at the end of the day, the elements of Federer's game that Nadal exposes, and exposes in general when they play, are problems with a high backhand, both as an approach shot or a shot in a neutral rally (resulting from an inability to step back and wait for the ball to come into his optimal point of contact, or step in and take it on the rise), a cross court or inside/in forehand which lands too short and/or has too much spin to be effective as an approach, and finally a wide serve in the deuce court that wasn't spotted particularly well for this surface. A few small things, but they made the difference in this game, set and ultimately in the match.
The most important thing to note from this tiebreak is that if Federer's problems with Nadal were strictly mental, you would expect him to do things differently against Nadal than he does against everyone else. Strange drop shots, ill-advised attempted winners from difficult positions, or strange serves that he normally doesn't spot well. As you can see from this game, he did none of those things. Patrick McEnroe goes to great length to point out that Nadal isn't doing anything differently in this tiebreak, but he fails to recognize the obvious - neither does Federer, and that is precisely why he loses it. As matter of fact, if Federer makes no tactical or technical changes against Nadal, why would Nadal, if his results have been so much better in the rivalry? Federer's patterns don't change against Nadal, and as a result, neither do his results - because Nadal is his bête noire. Everything Federer normally does well, Nadal has an answer for it. And everything Nadal does well, Federer has very few.
Not mental, but technical and tactical.
I think putting things down to Nadal being “in his head” is taking the easy way out, to be honest. In a round about way it’s saying, “Federer has the game to consistently beat Nadal, but because of his mental block he can’t execute”. But that, in my opinion, doesn’t do much in the way of analysis. If I were Federer, and a coach started delving into the psychology of beating Nadal, I’d fire him immediately, because there are shots he doesn’t have, that he needs, to consistently beat Nadal. Strangely, the psychology of beating Nadal is all anyone seems to want to talk about in the broadcast booth. There is some tactical analysis from McEnroe and Cahill (why does he approach the forehand, why isn't he more aggressive on the return), but a surprising dearth of technical analysis of why he can't make those changes.
It is also possible that Federer realizes the tactical changes he needs to make, and doesn’t want to re-engineer his strokes just for Nadal. For example he could take the racquet head back further away from his body on his backhand and force him to bring it forward through the point of contact (like Almagro and Haas) as opposed to across his body which causes a weak reply and inconsistent point of contact resulting in errors. He could also take a step further behind the baseline and really belt it (like Gasquet, who certainly has a better topspin backhand than Federer), but that would mean a big change in his court positioning that would make his forehand less effective. Also, he many not have the quickness to cover drop shots and short angles from further behind the baseline. And given that he may, or may not even have to face Nadal in a major (which he hasn't had to in any of his major wins since 2007), he could be tinkering with what works against almost everyone, in exchange for what may or may not work against Nadal, and could ironically cost him against everyone else along the way.
But I believe that if he doesn't make both technical and tactical adjustments he’ll always have the same problems against him, and unless Nadal's game changes significantly, will likely continue to get the same results.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
THE PRIVILEGE OF PRESSURE
Billie Jean King once said that, "Pressure is a privilege."
Aside from reading like catchy reverse psychology, intended to make players embrace pressure, rather than wilt under it, there may actually be a whole lot more truth to this. In light of the fact that Roger Federer has, in the span of two weeks, accomplished everything in 2009 that seemed so far from his grasp in 2008, the question becomes two: will he play the remainder of his career without pressure, and more importantly, is that necessarily a good thing?
When he won his maiden French Open, Federer was quoted as saying that he could play the remainder of his career pressure free because nobody would be able to say that he never won the French Open. I had my doubts – I thought he could play the French Open pressure free…maybe...but until he reached that magical number 15, the one that ends his obligation to anyone who was withholding his place in tennis history, I felt there would always be huge pressure on him to go 7 and 0 over a fortnight just one more time. The plot thickened when his nemesis exited stage left before the curtain was raised – after all, if Darth Federer couldn’t dominate the tennis galaxy when his personal Luke Skywalker was off in the Dagova system, then when would he?
Pressure indeed.
But what happens to a great champion when the pressure is off? What happens when the peaks have been scaled, the quiet questions answered loudly, and his face on Mt. Rush-the-net-More has been sculpted? On this question, history is a murky water way of let downs.
When Pete Sampras won his 13th major at Wimbledon in 2000, he appeared to collapse emotionally under the weight of expectations and the knowledge of the struggle and sacrifice his success required. For the first time that I can remember until then, Sampras cried at the victory ceremony. And for a man who scarcely showed his emotions (and when he did, seemed to do so begrudgingly) it seemed the last finger in the dyke could no longer resist, and when it broke there was no turning back. It would be another 2 years before Sampras won his 14th – along the way he showed some flashes of his former self – that 2001 US Open quarterfinal with Agassi comes to mind, only to then lose rather tamely to Lleyton Hewitt in the final. When he finally got to number 14, there had been questions for 2 years of whether he still had the game, but more tellingly, it had to be asked whether he still had the heart. He had both, apparently, because he won – so what was the difference?
That damn record, that’s what.
With his white whale slaughtered, his inner Ahab died right along with it. Sampras made no secret of his love of the history of the game, and never shied away from number 13. Having achieved it, he seemed less than enthusiastic about the daily slog that is the ATP tour, and with a wife and baby on the way, who could blame him. But most importantly – every question had been answered, and but for one moment of defiance when the press began to target his wife with their cynicism, Sampras had little to prove, and very little pressure...and his results showed it.
Interestingly, 2002 was the first year that the US Open went to 32 seeds, and as a result the 17th ranked player in the world (which happened to be Pete Sampras) received a seeding at the US Open for the first time. Had seeds been capped at their traditional 16, he may have faced Lleyton Hewitt in the first round, rather than Albert Portas. Maybe he would have won anyway, but it's interesting to ponder.
In 1984 John McEnroe went 74-2. He reached 3 grand slam finals, including his only final in Paris, obliterated Connors at Wimbledon, and then ran through the field at the US Open. With the exception of a late night semi-final, also against Connors, that ended Sunday morning, his path to the final was fraught with the potential for a Herculean collapse. In the end, he returned and promptly dispatched Ivan Lendl in the final, the only player who had beaten him that year, who himself had struggled to a 5-set win over Pat Cash on the last truly Super Saturday, and was in worse shape than McEnroe.
He held the #1 ranking for another year until he lost the US Open final in 1985 (also to Lendl, starting a string of 3 victories out of 8 finals in a row at Flushing) but tellingly that would be McEnroe's last grand slam final – afterwards family put the pressure of a tennis match in its proper perspective and lo and behold, McEnroe was never the same. He didn't turn 30 until 1989, and his run in the Australian Open in 1990 made it clear that he was still capable of brilliance, but when the pressure of expectation disappeared, so too did his best results.
Mats Wilander reached the #1 ranking in 1988 by winning 3 out of 4 slams that year – the only jewel missing from his crown was Wimbledon – an irony probably not lost on him given that he won 2 Australian Opens on grass. But after reaching the end of the rainbow that year, with his beacon obscured by the haze of success, his accomplishments did more than dwindle – he never won another tournament, let alone a slam, and only briefly ever moonlighted again in the top 10 after amassing a hefty tally of seven majors in the first 6 years of his professional career.
There is a huge psychological component to tennis – and players talk a lot about dealing with the pressure. It’s fascinating because of all the factors involved in a tennis match, pressure is the only one that is totally intangible, and as such, only exists in the mind if the player allows it. What’s even more fascinating is that pressure appears to be an essential element to keeping a player sufficiently sharp and motivated to succeed, and yet, it is most often cited as a reason a player fails.
In the Wimbledon final this year, it was clear that in a couple of key moments in the match Andy Roddick succumbed to the pressure – namely that backhand volley that floated wide at set point in the 2nd set tie-break. Both players would have been forgiven for feeling the pressure at the moment, and apparently Federer handled it better. It would seem to follow logically that a player playing without pressure would play more freely and presumably achieve more success.
But ask yourself this – when you’re playing tennis are you sharper and more accurate when you’re just hitting, or when you start keeping score? Sure you'll hit a couple of bombs that you wouldn't hit in a match, but you're probably just that little bit more precise when it counts - and it only counts in your head unless you're a pro, so imagine what they're feeling.
I certainly hope that Federer will prove me wrong – perhaps he will prove the anomaly that the absence of pressure makes a great champion even greater, but somehow it doesn’t seem intuitive to me. Now that he has his 15th grand slam, he will be without the privilege of pressure, but will he succeed?
It seems BJK, in this and many other ways, is onto something.
Aside from reading like catchy reverse psychology, intended to make players embrace pressure, rather than wilt under it, there may actually be a whole lot more truth to this. In light of the fact that Roger Federer has, in the span of two weeks, accomplished everything in 2009 that seemed so far from his grasp in 2008, the question becomes two: will he play the remainder of his career without pressure, and more importantly, is that necessarily a good thing?
When he won his maiden French Open, Federer was quoted as saying that he could play the remainder of his career pressure free because nobody would be able to say that he never won the French Open. I had my doubts – I thought he could play the French Open pressure free…maybe...but until he reached that magical number 15, the one that ends his obligation to anyone who was withholding his place in tennis history, I felt there would always be huge pressure on him to go 7 and 0 over a fortnight just one more time. The plot thickened when his nemesis exited stage left before the curtain was raised – after all, if Darth Federer couldn’t dominate the tennis galaxy when his personal Luke Skywalker was off in the Dagova system, then when would he?
Pressure indeed.
But what happens to a great champion when the pressure is off? What happens when the peaks have been scaled, the quiet questions answered loudly, and his face on Mt. Rush-the-net-More has been sculpted? On this question, history is a murky water way of let downs.
When Pete Sampras won his 13th major at Wimbledon in 2000, he appeared to collapse emotionally under the weight of expectations and the knowledge of the struggle and sacrifice his success required. For the first time that I can remember until then, Sampras cried at the victory ceremony. And for a man who scarcely showed his emotions (and when he did, seemed to do so begrudgingly) it seemed the last finger in the dyke could no longer resist, and when it broke there was no turning back. It would be another 2 years before Sampras won his 14th – along the way he showed some flashes of his former self – that 2001 US Open quarterfinal with Agassi comes to mind, only to then lose rather tamely to Lleyton Hewitt in the final. When he finally got to number 14, there had been questions for 2 years of whether he still had the game, but more tellingly, it had to be asked whether he still had the heart. He had both, apparently, because he won – so what was the difference?
That damn record, that’s what.
With his white whale slaughtered, his inner Ahab died right along with it. Sampras made no secret of his love of the history of the game, and never shied away from number 13. Having achieved it, he seemed less than enthusiastic about the daily slog that is the ATP tour, and with a wife and baby on the way, who could blame him. But most importantly – every question had been answered, and but for one moment of defiance when the press began to target his wife with their cynicism, Sampras had little to prove, and very little pressure...and his results showed it.
Interestingly, 2002 was the first year that the US Open went to 32 seeds, and as a result the 17th ranked player in the world (which happened to be Pete Sampras) received a seeding at the US Open for the first time. Had seeds been capped at their traditional 16, he may have faced Lleyton Hewitt in the first round, rather than Albert Portas. Maybe he would have won anyway, but it's interesting to ponder.
In 1984 John McEnroe went 74-2. He reached 3 grand slam finals, including his only final in Paris, obliterated Connors at Wimbledon, and then ran through the field at the US Open. With the exception of a late night semi-final, also against Connors, that ended Sunday morning, his path to the final was fraught with the potential for a Herculean collapse. In the end, he returned and promptly dispatched Ivan Lendl in the final, the only player who had beaten him that year, who himself had struggled to a 5-set win over Pat Cash on the last truly Super Saturday, and was in worse shape than McEnroe.
He held the #1 ranking for another year until he lost the US Open final in 1985 (also to Lendl, starting a string of 3 victories out of 8 finals in a row at Flushing) but tellingly that would be McEnroe's last grand slam final – afterwards family put the pressure of a tennis match in its proper perspective and lo and behold, McEnroe was never the same. He didn't turn 30 until 1989, and his run in the Australian Open in 1990 made it clear that he was still capable of brilliance, but when the pressure of expectation disappeared, so too did his best results.
Mats Wilander reached the #1 ranking in 1988 by winning 3 out of 4 slams that year – the only jewel missing from his crown was Wimbledon – an irony probably not lost on him given that he won 2 Australian Opens on grass. But after reaching the end of the rainbow that year, with his beacon obscured by the haze of success, his accomplishments did more than dwindle – he never won another tournament, let alone a slam, and only briefly ever moonlighted again in the top 10 after amassing a hefty tally of seven majors in the first 6 years of his professional career.
There is a huge psychological component to tennis – and players talk a lot about dealing with the pressure. It’s fascinating because of all the factors involved in a tennis match, pressure is the only one that is totally intangible, and as such, only exists in the mind if the player allows it. What’s even more fascinating is that pressure appears to be an essential element to keeping a player sufficiently sharp and motivated to succeed, and yet, it is most often cited as a reason a player fails.
In the Wimbledon final this year, it was clear that in a couple of key moments in the match Andy Roddick succumbed to the pressure – namely that backhand volley that floated wide at set point in the 2nd set tie-break. Both players would have been forgiven for feeling the pressure at the moment, and apparently Federer handled it better. It would seem to follow logically that a player playing without pressure would play more freely and presumably achieve more success.
But ask yourself this – when you’re playing tennis are you sharper and more accurate when you’re just hitting, or when you start keeping score? Sure you'll hit a couple of bombs that you wouldn't hit in a match, but you're probably just that little bit more precise when it counts - and it only counts in your head unless you're a pro, so imagine what they're feeling.
I certainly hope that Federer will prove me wrong – perhaps he will prove the anomaly that the absence of pressure makes a great champion even greater, but somehow it doesn’t seem intuitive to me. Now that he has his 15th grand slam, he will be without the privilege of pressure, but will he succeed?
It seems BJK, in this and many other ways, is onto something.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
WHY IS EVERYONE SO AFRAID OF GOATS?
It seems to me there’s been a awful lot of fear of the GOAT debate running around, and for the life of me, I can't understand why. After all, this is sports, and we do keep records: who won a match, who won a tournament and who won a slam. All of these elements are important to fans because it is this very context that gives meaning to sports that separates it from the arts. I may love dancing as much as the man standing next to me, but aside from a few technical arguments on the proper form of this step or that, we really have no context for discussing which particular dancer is better than another.
But that’s not the case with sports.
In sports, and in particular in tennis, it is precisely the context of determining who is the better player in a point, game, set, match, tournament, year and era, that makes it compelling for those who follow the game. After all, you can prefer the tenacity of Nadal over the artistry of Federer, over the pure power of Djokovic; but at the end of the day all those elements are merely means to an end of determining who is the better player by something that is indisputable – results.
Yet somehow results have become the least important element in the GOAT debate, and it appears to have become fashionable to invent new and improved ways to look past the obvious (i.e. results) to something else that is the truest measure of greatness. But in my opinion, and as they say in the south, this is a bit like reaching around your ass to scratch your elbow. Today, the GOAT debate, and more importantly, the fear thereof, has been rekindled by the exploits of one Roger Federer.
As often as the fearful argue against the concept of the GOAT, detractors today typically argue more specifically against Federer as the GOAT. Mostly, they don’t debate his results, although some try to (rather convolutedly I might add), but rather offer variations on the problems with the GOAT argument itself. There are so many variations on arguments against his results as the truest measure of greatness that it is difficult to address them all in a single post, but here are some of the more common ones that are currently a la mode.
THE GAME HAS CHANGED
The argument goes like this: tennis is played very differently in 2009 than it was in say 1929 or 1959 or even 1989, and as such it is not reasonable to compare a player in 2009 to a player from 1929 to determine who was the better player. I suppose if you’re asking if say, Bill Tilden went into a time warp and played Rafa Nadal today, who would win, I think the answer is obviously Nadal. After all, Tilden couldn’t hit 100+ mph winners from behind the baseline, or 140mph serves up the T. Enveloped in this argument is that equipment has changed the game fundamentally – and this is very true. Tilden’s shots probably spun, at the most, 500 times a minute, whereas Nadal’s do so at 3200 rpm on average, and peaks at 5000 rpm. And these changes certainly would make it difficult for Tilden to beat Nadal.
But what about the alternate argument: what if Nadal were transported to 1929 without his modern equipment? I would argue that Rafa would at the very least have to completely regenerate his game to play in full pants on grass (almost all the time) with a racquet half the size, twice as heavy and with strings that impart almost no unnatural spin on the ball at all. I'm sure in time he would figure out a way to beat Tilden...or would he? What about Tilden? If you transported him from say, 1925, and gave him modern equipment, nutrition and accoutrements for 5 years, I'm sure he'd still never figure out a way to beat Nadal...or would he?
The point - this is what makes this argument entirely moot - because who would beat whom is not the question the GOAT debate is trying to answer.
The GOAT debate is trying to determine, given their circumstances who more often emerged as the best player at the most important competitions in their respective careers. In that context, if (God forbid) Rafa’s career ended tomorrow you could hardly say his was better than Tilden’s – after all, the pinnacle of both their eras was winning slams and 10 slams is more the 6. But then again, we don’t know what will happen tomorrow and for all we know we have either already witnessed Rafa’s last slam, or the 6th of 20 to come, which in either case, the case would be closed.
So what matters is not whether Rafa could use a slice forehand effectively, or if Tilden ever came over his backhand. It doesn’t matter that Rafa takes 35 seconds between points, but Tilden only played 50 times a year. What matters is that when it mattered the most (namely at the slams) Tilden emerged the best player more often than Rafa, although I am pretty confident that in 5 years, that will no longer be the case. It is, in fact, a macrocosm of determining a tournament champion – we don’t care that my first round was easier than yours, or that I played with wind on one day while you played under the roof. What we care about is who won – and we would no sooner name Ivo Karlovic the Wimbledon champion because he hit more aces than Nadal, than we would consider Rafa the greater champion because he hits harder than Tilden.
At the end of the day, what the players do either in technique or in tactics, is a means to an end - to win as many of the most coveted titles they can, and it is that measure that makes different careers perfectly comparable by this measure, regardless of the fact that the manner in which they achieved that aim has changed.
WEAK COMPETITION
This one is most often cited when comparing Sampras to Federer – the argument is that Sampras' era was full of grand slam winners, and as such, he had more of them to overcome than Federer did, and as such, while they have the same number of slams, Sampras’ slams were harder (due to the competition), and thus he was the greater champion. On the face of it, this seems to be the most damning argument against Federer. After all, very few of his contemporaries have won slams so it seems to make sense that his era was weaker – of course there is a very big problem with this logic.
First, the measure you’re using is not abstract – tennis is a zero sum game – someone wins and someone loses every single unit of competition in the game – there are absolutely no ties in tennis. And when it comes to the measure that we use the most to evaluate players and their place in history, the number of slams won, it is even moreso a zero sum game (if that's logically possible) – because in this case one person wins a slam, and 127 other players who contended lose - hundreds more who didn't don't even show up on the books. And of course there are only 4 slams a year, so if you win 3 of them, your competition necessarily appears weaker because you’ve won more of them. But does this really speak to the quality of the contemporaries or that of the one who won more often?
Is Federer less of a champion because he won more?
His competitors necessarily won less often and by this logic qualify only as weaker competition? I would ask you this – which do you think Sampras would have preferred – to win 3 slams a year 3 times or 2 slams a year 4 times – I’m quite certain he’d prefer the former. Why? Not to sound condescending, but because in sports more winning is better. In the latter he'd have 8 slams, whereas in the former he'd have 9 - but his competition would be considered stronger in the latter because he, in fact, won less often.
That just doesn't add up.
There’s also another problem – using slams to measure the competition of a dominant player, but setting aside that same measure when evaluating the dominant player himself, creates two separate systems of valuation that are inconsistent, not to mention contrary to the idea of sports and competition. Furthermore, it assigns more value to a player for something that he didn’t do – in other words Sampras gets credit for Agassi winning more slams when he was a contemporary of Sampras. But isn’t there something Sampras could have done that he didn’t, (that Federer did) that would have made this argument moot? Of course there is; Sampras could have won the very slams that Agassi did; then he’d have more slams overall and Federer wouldn’t even be in the conversation.
At the end of the day, the competition is as strong as you let it be – never mind that Sampras never beat Edberg in a slam or Davis Cup, Edberg is still used to prop up the strength of Sampras’ competition. Another variation of this argument is that although Federer beat Agassi in slams, Agassi was older and weaker when Federer beat him than when Sampras beat him. So by this logic, was Edberg in 1995 better than Edberg in 1992 or 1990 for that matter? Was Becker in his prime in 1995 or in 1989? So why does Sampras’ competition get better, as they age, than Federer’s? For that you’ll have to ask those who support this argument - because I have no idea...well, I have an idea.
There are all kinds of variables on the competition even within a tournament – the Soderling that beat Nadal at Roland Garros was obviously not the same as the one who lost to Federer – but I give two arguments to the contrary – did Federer have anything to do with the quality of Soderling’s play in the final? Of course he did. And can anyone tell me honestly they think Acasuso, Haas or del Potro could have done in their first grand slam final what they did in the 3rd round, quarterfinal and semi-final? Probably not.
Wrapped up in this weak era argument is a microcosm thereof – Federer’s draws have been easier than his contemporaries. Because Federer always seems to wind up playing someone he’s beaten 10 times, you start to think that his draws are easy. But the rebuttal of this is so obvious that it’s easy to miss – if Federer’s draw is easy because he’s playing someone he’s beaten 10 times, doesn’t that speak to Federer’s greatness because he’s beaten so many players 10 times?
Is it a sensical criticism that you win too often to be considered that good?
It's more logical to say his draw is easy because he’s made it look easy, by beating his opponents over and over again in the past, and getting through the current one. At the end of the day, the draw is as easy as you make it look. Nobody thought Soderling would put up much of a defense against Nadal in Paris this year because Nadal had just beaten him in Rome 6-1, 6-0, and had lost to him 3 times. But suddenly his draw was harder in Paris – why? Because he lost. So in the aggregate, by winning more, your draw looks easier, and thus you’re not as good as you appear? But does that make sense?
Doesn't winning more often make you a better player?
The range of variation from stroke to stroke versus from era to era is immeasurable. What remains the same is this – whoever Sampras played in his grand slam final victories, whether it was Andre Agassi or Cedric Pioline, they won 6 matches in a row, but couldn’t win the 7th. And whoever Federer played in his grand slam finals, whether it was Marcos Baghdatis or Rafael Nadal, they won 6 matches in a row, but couldn’t win the 7th. After all, isn’t 7 wins in a row what everyone was trying to do all along? Does the rest of it really matter?
THE #1 RANK
There is no doubt that earning the #1 ranking is a measure of consistency over the period of time the rankings are calculated. Therefore, how many years you’ve finished #1 seems to be a good measure of greatness. I wouldn't entirely disagree with that and would use that as a tie breaker between two players on equal terms in majors won. But give any great player a choice between being #1 or winning slams and they’ll all choose slams. That’s because there are so many variations from one tournament to the next, in terms of effort, tours, commitment, etc., that the #1 ranking has a lot of holes in it in determining greatness. Slams, on the other hand, are the only pure competitive pursuits in the game of tennis - everyone covets them equally, and everyone comes to play. But there are other problems with the #1 ranking as compared to slams.
First off all, you can be ranked #1 without winning a slam – the list of players who have been ranked #1 without winning a slam is short, but damning nonetheless - Ivan Lendl in 1983, Carlos Moya in 1997, Marcelo Rios in 1998. Lendl and Moya eventually justified their ranking, but have the rankings always reflected accurately the relative value placed on various titles? If so, then how could the non-slam winning #1 be possible? At best, even though it often convenes with winning slams, the #1 ranking is a calculated reflection that has only existed since 1973, and has always been heavily weighted in favor of ATP events - even to this day (you could win the calendar slam, but if another player wins 6 Masters 1000s and 4 500s, by the ATP ranking you're on equal terms - that doesn't make sense).
Before the ATP rankings, rankings were arbitrarily determined by various individuals based on a myriad of considerations that included foremost the number of the most important tournaments won but also included factors that changed as the game changed - namely before the game was unified under the single umbrella of the ATP organized tour in 1990.
Even so, there have been cases of players who have won fewer slams than their nearest rival, but still somehow finished the year ranked #1: Jimmy Connors in 1978 won the US Open – it was his only slam that year – Bjorn Borg, on the other hand won Wimbledon and the French Open – guess who finished the year ranked #1.
And on January 3rd, 1983 John McEnroe, who hadn’t won any slams for more than 12 months, somehow usurped Jimmy Connors to the #1 ranking despite Connors having won Wimbledon and the US Open in the previous year. Nobody considers the anomalies as problematic because the second best player at the time and since retained considerable gravitas – but the rankings made little sense then and as such, are not a reliable measure of greatness in the aggregate, because the ranking system has been so clearly flawed and more importantly inconsistent. The same cannot be said of the majors.
HEAD TO HEAD AGAINST HIS GREATEST RIVALS
This one goes like this: at the end of his career, Sampras had winning records against all of his major contemporaries, whereas Federer appears to have a losing record to many of his major contemporaries – so how can you be the greatest of all time when you’re not even the greatest of your own era?
To this I give two names – Richard Krajicek and Michael Stich. Both players had winning records against Sampras over the course of their careers, and both played him often enough for those records to “matter” in the abstract (10 and 7 times respectively). So who was the better player Sampras or Krajicek? Sampras or Stich? Nobody in their right mind would argue the latter in either case and the reason is because they both won 13 fewer slams than Sampras did. In other words, when it comes to Krajicek and Stick, although their head to heads against Sampras were considerably better, clearly the measure of greatness was slams. But when it comes to Federer, somehow the measure of greatness turns to head to head versus Nadal, and Murray (of all people). So why use slam totals to propel Sampras past those whom he lost to more often than he beat, and not do the same for Federer?
In the case of Murray there is no good explanation. In the case of Nadal there are only two good ones – first Nadal has 6 majors himself, and thus is considered an all-time great. But Federer has 8 more majors than Nadal, and if he were the better player in this era, shouldn't he have more majors? That brings us to the other argument: that Nadal will eventually surpass Federer. Well, then when Nadal surpasses Federer, he will necessarily be the GOAT – until then SPECIFICALLY AS COMPARED TO THE CAREER OF FEDERER he’s just like Krajicek and Stich to Sampras - he just happens to have a few more slams to his name.
The funny thing is, the one player who loses out in this discussion despite years of dominance that exceeds just about any other player in history, is Pancho Gonzales – whereas slam totals is the basis for Sampras’ and Federer’s GOAT candidacy, it is entirely head to head competition that is the basis of Pancho Gonzales’. But that doesn’t do anything for Sampras, who is most often cited as a more worthy claimant to being the GOAT than Gonzales. In fact you won’t get any argument from me if you suggest that Gonzales was greater than Federer – but you will if you say Sampras was – for now they are even, and if Federer gets #15, that’s one more than Sampras and in my view that makes him greater...by 1 slam.
NOT EVERYBODY PLAYED ALL THE SLAMS
It is historically ironic that the championship of the country that has produced more great champions in the history of the game than probably any other (with the exception of the United States) was for so long considered the red-headed step-sister of the slams. There are a lot of reasons for this that are not germane to the GOAT question, so I'll leave that to another post. What is germane is whether this matters to the GOAT argument.
Basically it goes like this - if all the greats always played the Australian Open, they would have won more slams and thus would look better historically. Ironically, one of the other legitimate GOAT candidates, Laver, played every Australian Open he could, so that argument is not necessarily applicable to him (more on that later). But what about Connors, Borg and McEnroe - since they won so many slams on grass, they would surely have won the Australian Open more often, right?
Well, if that's the case, then Sampras and Federer should have won 5 Australian Opens, since they've both won 5 US Opens - oops...they've only won 2 and 3 respectively. In fact, Connors won 3 slams in 1974, and then proceeded to reach the final in 1975 of each slam he won in 1974 - the result - he lost all 3 finals all to players that he had easily beaten the year before, and generaly bettered in his career.
The point? There are no guarantees in tennis, so you can't argue that a player who won Wimbledon 5 times would have won the Australian 5 times, just because the surface was the same - why did Laver go 4, 3 and 2 in Wimbledons, Aussie's and US Opens? They were all on the same surface when he played, so he should have gone 4, 4 and 4 for that argument to hold.
There's another side to this argument - all the slams that were not available to professionals would have added to their career totals. This is mostly an argument to pad the accomplishments of those that suffered the most during the schism between amateur and professional tennis before the open era began. The most common example given is usually Laver, who finished his career with 11 slams, but supposedly would have had a lot more if he had been able to play as a professional. But there's a problem with this argument - if Laver had been able to play majors after turning professional, so too would Hoad, Rosewall, Gonzales, Trabert, etc. Thus they would all have been in a position to add to their totals as well, and more importantly prevent Laver from winning more. At the very least, we must discount Laver's total of 11 by the 6 he won as an amateur and start from there in this hypothetical slam total. He may very well have won 10 more majors, but it would have to be added to the 5 he won as a professional, rather than the 11 people normally use as the jumping point to arrive at his hypothetical total of 20+.
In fact even if he won half the majors from which he was banned from 1963 to 1967 he goes from 5 to 15. Speaking of which, Laver won 9 out of 15 of the 3 biggest professional tournaments he entered during that period (those tournaments considered the professional slams), which takes his total from 5 to 14.
We measure who is the best player on a surface by how often they win the biggest titles on that surface. Vilas may have a better record on clay, but few consider him greater than Borg because of their starkly contrasting records at the French Open. We measure who is the best player in a year by how often they win the biggest titles in a year – Connors may have amassed more arbitrarily assigned points in 1978 than Borg, but would anyone say he was the better player that year? No. Why? Because of Borg’s results in slams – 2 wins and a final, versus 1 win and 1 final for Connors. We measure who is the best player in an era by how often they’ve won the biggest tournaments in the game – so nobody considers Connors a better player than Borg even though he won 30 more titles – why? Because many of those were rinky-dink titles contested by rinky-dink opponents. But when everyone equally pursued the same title, Borg won more – namely 3 more.
So the question is – why are so many afraid to anoint the player who wins the most slams ever as the greatest player ever? One thing is for certain – it has nothing to do with results. And isn’t that more than mildly ironic when it comes to sports?
But that’s not the case with sports.
In sports, and in particular in tennis, it is precisely the context of determining who is the better player in a point, game, set, match, tournament, year and era, that makes it compelling for those who follow the game. After all, you can prefer the tenacity of Nadal over the artistry of Federer, over the pure power of Djokovic; but at the end of the day all those elements are merely means to an end of determining who is the better player by something that is indisputable – results.
Yet somehow results have become the least important element in the GOAT debate, and it appears to have become fashionable to invent new and improved ways to look past the obvious (i.e. results) to something else that is the truest measure of greatness. But in my opinion, and as they say in the south, this is a bit like reaching around your ass to scratch your elbow. Today, the GOAT debate, and more importantly, the fear thereof, has been rekindled by the exploits of one Roger Federer.
As often as the fearful argue against the concept of the GOAT, detractors today typically argue more specifically against Federer as the GOAT. Mostly, they don’t debate his results, although some try to (rather convolutedly I might add), but rather offer variations on the problems with the GOAT argument itself. There are so many variations on arguments against his results as the truest measure of greatness that it is difficult to address them all in a single post, but here are some of the more common ones that are currently a la mode.
THE GAME HAS CHANGED
The argument goes like this: tennis is played very differently in 2009 than it was in say 1929 or 1959 or even 1989, and as such it is not reasonable to compare a player in 2009 to a player from 1929 to determine who was the better player. I suppose if you’re asking if say, Bill Tilden went into a time warp and played Rafa Nadal today, who would win, I think the answer is obviously Nadal. After all, Tilden couldn’t hit 100+ mph winners from behind the baseline, or 140mph serves up the T. Enveloped in this argument is that equipment has changed the game fundamentally – and this is very true. Tilden’s shots probably spun, at the most, 500 times a minute, whereas Nadal’s do so at 3200 rpm on average, and peaks at 5000 rpm. And these changes certainly would make it difficult for Tilden to beat Nadal.
But what about the alternate argument: what if Nadal were transported to 1929 without his modern equipment? I would argue that Rafa would at the very least have to completely regenerate his game to play in full pants on grass (almost all the time) with a racquet half the size, twice as heavy and with strings that impart almost no unnatural spin on the ball at all. I'm sure in time he would figure out a way to beat Tilden...or would he? What about Tilden? If you transported him from say, 1925, and gave him modern equipment, nutrition and accoutrements for 5 years, I'm sure he'd still never figure out a way to beat Nadal...or would he?
The point - this is what makes this argument entirely moot - because who would beat whom is not the question the GOAT debate is trying to answer.
The GOAT debate is trying to determine, given their circumstances who more often emerged as the best player at the most important competitions in their respective careers. In that context, if (God forbid) Rafa’s career ended tomorrow you could hardly say his was better than Tilden’s – after all, the pinnacle of both their eras was winning slams and 10 slams is more the 6. But then again, we don’t know what will happen tomorrow and for all we know we have either already witnessed Rafa’s last slam, or the 6th of 20 to come, which in either case, the case would be closed.
So what matters is not whether Rafa could use a slice forehand effectively, or if Tilden ever came over his backhand. It doesn’t matter that Rafa takes 35 seconds between points, but Tilden only played 50 times a year. What matters is that when it mattered the most (namely at the slams) Tilden emerged the best player more often than Rafa, although I am pretty confident that in 5 years, that will no longer be the case. It is, in fact, a macrocosm of determining a tournament champion – we don’t care that my first round was easier than yours, or that I played with wind on one day while you played under the roof. What we care about is who won – and we would no sooner name Ivo Karlovic the Wimbledon champion because he hit more aces than Nadal, than we would consider Rafa the greater champion because he hits harder than Tilden.
At the end of the day, what the players do either in technique or in tactics, is a means to an end - to win as many of the most coveted titles they can, and it is that measure that makes different careers perfectly comparable by this measure, regardless of the fact that the manner in which they achieved that aim has changed.
WEAK COMPETITION
This one is most often cited when comparing Sampras to Federer – the argument is that Sampras' era was full of grand slam winners, and as such, he had more of them to overcome than Federer did, and as such, while they have the same number of slams, Sampras’ slams were harder (due to the competition), and thus he was the greater champion. On the face of it, this seems to be the most damning argument against Federer. After all, very few of his contemporaries have won slams so it seems to make sense that his era was weaker – of course there is a very big problem with this logic.
First, the measure you’re using is not abstract – tennis is a zero sum game – someone wins and someone loses every single unit of competition in the game – there are absolutely no ties in tennis. And when it comes to the measure that we use the most to evaluate players and their place in history, the number of slams won, it is even moreso a zero sum game (if that's logically possible) – because in this case one person wins a slam, and 127 other players who contended lose - hundreds more who didn't don't even show up on the books. And of course there are only 4 slams a year, so if you win 3 of them, your competition necessarily appears weaker because you’ve won more of them. But does this really speak to the quality of the contemporaries or that of the one who won more often?
Is Federer less of a champion because he won more?
His competitors necessarily won less often and by this logic qualify only as weaker competition? I would ask you this – which do you think Sampras would have preferred – to win 3 slams a year 3 times or 2 slams a year 4 times – I’m quite certain he’d prefer the former. Why? Not to sound condescending, but because in sports more winning is better. In the latter he'd have 8 slams, whereas in the former he'd have 9 - but his competition would be considered stronger in the latter because he, in fact, won less often.
That just doesn't add up.
There’s also another problem – using slams to measure the competition of a dominant player, but setting aside that same measure when evaluating the dominant player himself, creates two separate systems of valuation that are inconsistent, not to mention contrary to the idea of sports and competition. Furthermore, it assigns more value to a player for something that he didn’t do – in other words Sampras gets credit for Agassi winning more slams when he was a contemporary of Sampras. But isn’t there something Sampras could have done that he didn’t, (that Federer did) that would have made this argument moot? Of course there is; Sampras could have won the very slams that Agassi did; then he’d have more slams overall and Federer wouldn’t even be in the conversation.
At the end of the day, the competition is as strong as you let it be – never mind that Sampras never beat Edberg in a slam or Davis Cup, Edberg is still used to prop up the strength of Sampras’ competition. Another variation of this argument is that although Federer beat Agassi in slams, Agassi was older and weaker when Federer beat him than when Sampras beat him. So by this logic, was Edberg in 1995 better than Edberg in 1992 or 1990 for that matter? Was Becker in his prime in 1995 or in 1989? So why does Sampras’ competition get better, as they age, than Federer’s? For that you’ll have to ask those who support this argument - because I have no idea...well, I have an idea.
There are all kinds of variables on the competition even within a tournament – the Soderling that beat Nadal at Roland Garros was obviously not the same as the one who lost to Federer – but I give two arguments to the contrary – did Federer have anything to do with the quality of Soderling’s play in the final? Of course he did. And can anyone tell me honestly they think Acasuso, Haas or del Potro could have done in their first grand slam final what they did in the 3rd round, quarterfinal and semi-final? Probably not.
Wrapped up in this weak era argument is a microcosm thereof – Federer’s draws have been easier than his contemporaries. Because Federer always seems to wind up playing someone he’s beaten 10 times, you start to think that his draws are easy. But the rebuttal of this is so obvious that it’s easy to miss – if Federer’s draw is easy because he’s playing someone he’s beaten 10 times, doesn’t that speak to Federer’s greatness because he’s beaten so many players 10 times?
Is it a sensical criticism that you win too often to be considered that good?
It's more logical to say his draw is easy because he’s made it look easy, by beating his opponents over and over again in the past, and getting through the current one. At the end of the day, the draw is as easy as you make it look. Nobody thought Soderling would put up much of a defense against Nadal in Paris this year because Nadal had just beaten him in Rome 6-1, 6-0, and had lost to him 3 times. But suddenly his draw was harder in Paris – why? Because he lost. So in the aggregate, by winning more, your draw looks easier, and thus you’re not as good as you appear? But does that make sense?
Doesn't winning more often make you a better player?
The range of variation from stroke to stroke versus from era to era is immeasurable. What remains the same is this – whoever Sampras played in his grand slam final victories, whether it was Andre Agassi or Cedric Pioline, they won 6 matches in a row, but couldn’t win the 7th. And whoever Federer played in his grand slam finals, whether it was Marcos Baghdatis or Rafael Nadal, they won 6 matches in a row, but couldn’t win the 7th. After all, isn’t 7 wins in a row what everyone was trying to do all along? Does the rest of it really matter?
THE #1 RANK
There is no doubt that earning the #1 ranking is a measure of consistency over the period of time the rankings are calculated. Therefore, how many years you’ve finished #1 seems to be a good measure of greatness. I wouldn't entirely disagree with that and would use that as a tie breaker between two players on equal terms in majors won. But give any great player a choice between being #1 or winning slams and they’ll all choose slams. That’s because there are so many variations from one tournament to the next, in terms of effort, tours, commitment, etc., that the #1 ranking has a lot of holes in it in determining greatness. Slams, on the other hand, are the only pure competitive pursuits in the game of tennis - everyone covets them equally, and everyone comes to play. But there are other problems with the #1 ranking as compared to slams.
First off all, you can be ranked #1 without winning a slam – the list of players who have been ranked #1 without winning a slam is short, but damning nonetheless - Ivan Lendl in 1983, Carlos Moya in 1997, Marcelo Rios in 1998. Lendl and Moya eventually justified their ranking, but have the rankings always reflected accurately the relative value placed on various titles? If so, then how could the non-slam winning #1 be possible? At best, even though it often convenes with winning slams, the #1 ranking is a calculated reflection that has only existed since 1973, and has always been heavily weighted in favor of ATP events - even to this day (you could win the calendar slam, but if another player wins 6 Masters 1000s and 4 500s, by the ATP ranking you're on equal terms - that doesn't make sense).
Before the ATP rankings, rankings were arbitrarily determined by various individuals based on a myriad of considerations that included foremost the number of the most important tournaments won but also included factors that changed as the game changed - namely before the game was unified under the single umbrella of the ATP organized tour in 1990.
Even so, there have been cases of players who have won fewer slams than their nearest rival, but still somehow finished the year ranked #1: Jimmy Connors in 1978 won the US Open – it was his only slam that year – Bjorn Borg, on the other hand won Wimbledon and the French Open – guess who finished the year ranked #1.
And on January 3rd, 1983 John McEnroe, who hadn’t won any slams for more than 12 months, somehow usurped Jimmy Connors to the #1 ranking despite Connors having won Wimbledon and the US Open in the previous year. Nobody considers the anomalies as problematic because the second best player at the time and since retained considerable gravitas – but the rankings made little sense then and as such, are not a reliable measure of greatness in the aggregate, because the ranking system has been so clearly flawed and more importantly inconsistent. The same cannot be said of the majors.
HEAD TO HEAD AGAINST HIS GREATEST RIVALS
This one goes like this: at the end of his career, Sampras had winning records against all of his major contemporaries, whereas Federer appears to have a losing record to many of his major contemporaries – so how can you be the greatest of all time when you’re not even the greatest of your own era?
To this I give two names – Richard Krajicek and Michael Stich. Both players had winning records against Sampras over the course of their careers, and both played him often enough for those records to “matter” in the abstract (10 and 7 times respectively). So who was the better player Sampras or Krajicek? Sampras or Stich? Nobody in their right mind would argue the latter in either case and the reason is because they both won 13 fewer slams than Sampras did. In other words, when it comes to Krajicek and Stick, although their head to heads against Sampras were considerably better, clearly the measure of greatness was slams. But when it comes to Federer, somehow the measure of greatness turns to head to head versus Nadal, and Murray (of all people). So why use slam totals to propel Sampras past those whom he lost to more often than he beat, and not do the same for Federer?
In the case of Murray there is no good explanation. In the case of Nadal there are only two good ones – first Nadal has 6 majors himself, and thus is considered an all-time great. But Federer has 8 more majors than Nadal, and if he were the better player in this era, shouldn't he have more majors? That brings us to the other argument: that Nadal will eventually surpass Federer. Well, then when Nadal surpasses Federer, he will necessarily be the GOAT – until then SPECIFICALLY AS COMPARED TO THE CAREER OF FEDERER he’s just like Krajicek and Stich to Sampras - he just happens to have a few more slams to his name.
The funny thing is, the one player who loses out in this discussion despite years of dominance that exceeds just about any other player in history, is Pancho Gonzales – whereas slam totals is the basis for Sampras’ and Federer’s GOAT candidacy, it is entirely head to head competition that is the basis of Pancho Gonzales’. But that doesn’t do anything for Sampras, who is most often cited as a more worthy claimant to being the GOAT than Gonzales. In fact you won’t get any argument from me if you suggest that Gonzales was greater than Federer – but you will if you say Sampras was – for now they are even, and if Federer gets #15, that’s one more than Sampras and in my view that makes him greater...by 1 slam.
NOT EVERYBODY PLAYED ALL THE SLAMS
It is historically ironic that the championship of the country that has produced more great champions in the history of the game than probably any other (with the exception of the United States) was for so long considered the red-headed step-sister of the slams. There are a lot of reasons for this that are not germane to the GOAT question, so I'll leave that to another post. What is germane is whether this matters to the GOAT argument.
Basically it goes like this - if all the greats always played the Australian Open, they would have won more slams and thus would look better historically. Ironically, one of the other legitimate GOAT candidates, Laver, played every Australian Open he could, so that argument is not necessarily applicable to him (more on that later). But what about Connors, Borg and McEnroe - since they won so many slams on grass, they would surely have won the Australian Open more often, right?
Well, if that's the case, then Sampras and Federer should have won 5 Australian Opens, since they've both won 5 US Opens - oops...they've only won 2 and 3 respectively. In fact, Connors won 3 slams in 1974, and then proceeded to reach the final in 1975 of each slam he won in 1974 - the result - he lost all 3 finals all to players that he had easily beaten the year before, and generaly bettered in his career.
The point? There are no guarantees in tennis, so you can't argue that a player who won Wimbledon 5 times would have won the Australian 5 times, just because the surface was the same - why did Laver go 4, 3 and 2 in Wimbledons, Aussie's and US Opens? They were all on the same surface when he played, so he should have gone 4, 4 and 4 for that argument to hold.
There's another side to this argument - all the slams that were not available to professionals would have added to their career totals. This is mostly an argument to pad the accomplishments of those that suffered the most during the schism between amateur and professional tennis before the open era began. The most common example given is usually Laver, who finished his career with 11 slams, but supposedly would have had a lot more if he had been able to play as a professional. But there's a problem with this argument - if Laver had been able to play majors after turning professional, so too would Hoad, Rosewall, Gonzales, Trabert, etc. Thus they would all have been in a position to add to their totals as well, and more importantly prevent Laver from winning more. At the very least, we must discount Laver's total of 11 by the 6 he won as an amateur and start from there in this hypothetical slam total. He may very well have won 10 more majors, but it would have to be added to the 5 he won as a professional, rather than the 11 people normally use as the jumping point to arrive at his hypothetical total of 20+.
In fact even if he won half the majors from which he was banned from 1963 to 1967 he goes from 5 to 15. Speaking of which, Laver won 9 out of 15 of the 3 biggest professional tournaments he entered during that period (those tournaments considered the professional slams), which takes his total from 5 to 14.
So by this analysis, the best you could extrapolate from Laver's banishment is a total of 14 majors. Remember that the first US Open was in 1968 and the final was contested by 2 amateurs (Arthur Ashe and Tom Okker), even though professionals played that tournament (Laver lost in the round of 16), so there's no guarantee of how many he "would" have won had professionals played. But the best you can assume is that he is on par with Federer...for now.
CONCLUSIONWe measure who is the best player on a surface by how often they win the biggest titles on that surface. Vilas may have a better record on clay, but few consider him greater than Borg because of their starkly contrasting records at the French Open. We measure who is the best player in a year by how often they win the biggest titles in a year – Connors may have amassed more arbitrarily assigned points in 1978 than Borg, but would anyone say he was the better player that year? No. Why? Because of Borg’s results in slams – 2 wins and a final, versus 1 win and 1 final for Connors. We measure who is the best player in an era by how often they’ve won the biggest tournaments in the game – so nobody considers Connors a better player than Borg even though he won 30 more titles – why? Because many of those were rinky-dink titles contested by rinky-dink opponents. But when everyone equally pursued the same title, Borg won more – namely 3 more.
So the question is – why are so many afraid to anoint the player who wins the most slams ever as the greatest player ever? One thing is for certain – it has nothing to do with results. And isn’t that more than mildly ironic when it comes to sports?
Monday, December 10, 2007
GOOD-BYE TO THE BLOGOSPHERE
I'm tempted to say good-bye to the tennis blogosphere, and I'll tell you why. Just take a look at this post at "All Court Game Tennis Forum".
At issue here is whether Roger Federer is genuinely a nice guy, or whether he's just being nice to these ball kids in case he has to play them one day.
That's right - he's looking for an edge his game doesn't give him by being (fake) nice to ball-boys.
It's hard to take this medium seriously when you see comments like this, but this is merely the tip of the iceberg. I can take it if someone doesn't like Federer - a lot of champions have been considered to be contrived or pre-meditated in their antics, and it's not out of the realm of possibility that Federer's antics, while cloaked in niceties, is in part intended to make him everybody's the nice guy on tour.
My point: big deal.
The last time I checked, unless we're talking about figure skating, you don't get points for personality in sports. There's a Nancy Kerrigan-esque phenomenon at play here, because a lot of athletes paint themselves to be more likeable than they really are.
But you still have to hit straight. You still have to have game. And you can't fake it for 4 years. You can get a few victories here and there, but you can't dominate one of the most competitive sports in the world by cheating/cajoling/faking your way to 12 grand slam titles. It just doesn't happen. Eventually, somebody better than you, who just doesn't give a rat's ass about your image, comes along and beats you. And typically sooner, rather than later.
I think the most interesting thing going on here is the common traits of all the Fed-haters out there:
Mass suicides have been committed this way.
It's not hard to imagine that these people are little more than mentally imbalanced losers, who have nothing better to do than to commiserate with like-minded losers. But then again, I am knee-deep in the blogosphere myself...so that just can't be right!
But I know enough to know that no matter how you cut it, no matter what excuse you come up with, Federer is an extraordinary tennis player, and has been for 4 years. I've always wondered why athletes are always saying, "...they can't take that away from me." Now I know - when you win something, the only thing they can't say about you is that you didn't win - but they can say a hell of a lot more - good and bad - and if you get too caught up in the good, one day, the bad will replace it, and in a sense they've "taken away" the good things they used to say about you.
But if you win, you win, and they can't take that away from you no matter how hard they try. But boy are they trying hard to take it away from Federer.
I like Roger Federer as a tennis player - I learn a lot from watching him play, from his shot making to his shot selection to his movement and versatility. I think he's a great player. And for saying this, I'm castigated in the lunatic fringe of the anti-Federer blogosphere because to appreciate these qualities in Federer is to have been duped by the Federer religion.
I came to the blogosphere to see if I could find intelligent discussion on tennis topics, but it turns out that you have to look carefully, because sometimes what you'll find, in the dark recesses of the internet, where most dare not go, is a collection of anti-Federer enthusiasts, with misplaced energy, and a pathetic dedication to reveling in their own sorry, and deranged view of the tennis world.
I, for one, am done with them.
At issue here is whether Roger Federer is genuinely a nice guy, or whether he's just being nice to these ball kids in case he has to play them one day.
That's right - he's looking for an edge his game doesn't give him by being (fake) nice to ball-boys.
It's hard to take this medium seriously when you see comments like this, but this is merely the tip of the iceberg. I can take it if someone doesn't like Federer - a lot of champions have been considered to be contrived or pre-meditated in their antics, and it's not out of the realm of possibility that Federer's antics, while cloaked in niceties, is in part intended to make him everybody's the nice guy on tour.
My point: big deal.
The last time I checked, unless we're talking about figure skating, you don't get points for personality in sports. There's a Nancy Kerrigan-esque phenomenon at play here, because a lot of athletes paint themselves to be more likeable than they really are.
But you still have to hit straight. You still have to have game. And you can't fake it for 4 years. You can get a few victories here and there, but you can't dominate one of the most competitive sports in the world by cheating/cajoling/faking your way to 12 grand slam titles. It just doesn't happen. Eventually, somebody better than you, who just doesn't give a rat's ass about your image, comes along and beats you. And typically sooner, rather than later.
I think the most interesting thing going on here is the common traits of all the Fed-haters out there:
- Invariably their favorite player is either Sampras, Agassi or Roddick, and they are motivated either by a disdain for the quickness with which their idol has been replaced in the tennis world as best/favorite player on tour or the iron grip Federer has over their preferred combatant.
- Invariably they seek to point out all of Federer's supposed faults - that he's arrogant, selfish, manipulative, etc., in order to (continue to) convince themselves that someone else is a more worthy champion. As if the above three "other" favorites were angels.
- This is the kicker: if you don't agree with them whole heartedly, then you're a sap who's been played by the tennis media and the Federer PR machine - they are, in fact, the only keepers of the truth!
Mass suicides have been committed this way.
It's not hard to imagine that these people are little more than mentally imbalanced losers, who have nothing better to do than to commiserate with like-minded losers. But then again, I am knee-deep in the blogosphere myself...so that just can't be right!
But I know enough to know that no matter how you cut it, no matter what excuse you come up with, Federer is an extraordinary tennis player, and has been for 4 years. I've always wondered why athletes are always saying, "...they can't take that away from me." Now I know - when you win something, the only thing they can't say about you is that you didn't win - but they can say a hell of a lot more - good and bad - and if you get too caught up in the good, one day, the bad will replace it, and in a sense they've "taken away" the good things they used to say about you.
But if you win, you win, and they can't take that away from you no matter how hard they try. But boy are they trying hard to take it away from Federer.
I like Roger Federer as a tennis player - I learn a lot from watching him play, from his shot making to his shot selection to his movement and versatility. I think he's a great player. And for saying this, I'm castigated in the lunatic fringe of the anti-Federer blogosphere because to appreciate these qualities in Federer is to have been duped by the Federer religion.
I came to the blogosphere to see if I could find intelligent discussion on tennis topics, but it turns out that you have to look carefully, because sometimes what you'll find, in the dark recesses of the internet, where most dare not go, is a collection of anti-Federer enthusiasts, with misplaced energy, and a pathetic dedication to reveling in their own sorry, and deranged view of the tennis world.
I, for one, am done with them.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
THE GREAT SAMPRAS/FEDERER DEBATE
A strange thing is happening in the tennis blogosphere: a brewing war in tennis heaven between the supporters of Federer and Sampras over who is the fairest champion of them all. In case you haven't heard it, the debate goes something like this:
Sampras is the king of tennis history with more grand slams than any other male player in history, but even if Federer surpasses his record, Sampras will still be the greatest because he did it against better players, for longer, and he did it quietly without the paparazzi or IMG.
Fed-heads counter that, Sampras may have more, but 1) not for long and 2) he's so much better than the competition he's doing it even better than Sampras did.
Along the way there are a few silly arguments about whether their single match in 2001 is an indicator of who was the better player, but I beg to differ. One match does not really give a basis for who was the better player. Sampr-assers will argue that Pete was not in his prime, but Fed-heads will counter that neither was Roger. Both points have merit, the only time head to head comes into play is as a tie breaker when the two players in question played in the same era, against the same pool of opponents with similar results. At that point we can start to ask how they fared against each other, but until then there are far more representative measures of superiority.
For me the most important is the number of grand slams they've won. Sampras has 14 and Federer has 12 - as far as I'm concerned the argument ends there. Of course, if Federer scores another trifecta in 2008, I can't say the debate doesn't reopen - and why shouldn't it? Years at #1 are a factor, but to me, less so than grand slams because even Marcelo Rios was ranked #1 at some point and he never won anything even remotely important. For that matter Nadal is, for me, a much better player historically, and he's never been ranked #1.
So if Federer can overhaul Sampras, I'd give him the edge.
Interestingly, the debate is almost as much about how they've gone about amassing their grand slams as how many they have. A lot of people have referred to Sampras' battles, and the pedigree of players he overcame to win his titles, like Chang, Courier, Agassi, Becker, Kafelnikov, Kuerten, etc. For me, this is a strange argument - because in a round about way it sounds a little bit like this:
Federer wins all the time, so he's the best, but it's not that impressive because he wins all the time. Implicit in this is a couple of things that call into question Federer's pedigree against that of Sampras:
This strikes me as something of a cynical argument, however, because in order for Federer to be adjudged the equal of Sampras, he'd actually have to do worse against his contemporaries than he has (thus improving their collective pedigree). So in order to be considered the greatest, he has to have lost to some of his contemporaries along the way. That sounds counter intuitive to me, and as such I cannot endorse it as a good measure of Sampras' superiority - I think Sampras' record is enough for that, and if you throw in the number of years he's been #1, and his longevity, (the time between his first and last grand slam was 12 years) a good case can be made that he's the greatest, even if Roger gets to 15 or 16 in 2008.
Another knock against the both of them is that they've never won the French. Of the two, I think Roger has the best chance because he's been in 2 finals already, and many have questioned his tactics at the French. Perhaps if he can employ a more attacking version of his game on clay, he just may find the way to break his duck at Roland Garros.
Ultimately these questions are primarily aesthetic. Whether you prefer the one or the other, it's pretty clear that objectively Sampras is the greater champion...for now.
Sampras is the king of tennis history with more grand slams than any other male player in history, but even if Federer surpasses his record, Sampras will still be the greatest because he did it against better players, for longer, and he did it quietly without the paparazzi or IMG.
Fed-heads counter that, Sampras may have more, but 1) not for long and 2) he's so much better than the competition he's doing it even better than Sampras did.
Along the way there are a few silly arguments about whether their single match in 2001 is an indicator of who was the better player, but I beg to differ. One match does not really give a basis for who was the better player. Sampr-assers will argue that Pete was not in his prime, but Fed-heads will counter that neither was Roger. Both points have merit, the only time head to head comes into play is as a tie breaker when the two players in question played in the same era, against the same pool of opponents with similar results. At that point we can start to ask how they fared against each other, but until then there are far more representative measures of superiority.
For me the most important is the number of grand slams they've won. Sampras has 14 and Federer has 12 - as far as I'm concerned the argument ends there. Of course, if Federer scores another trifecta in 2008, I can't say the debate doesn't reopen - and why shouldn't it? Years at #1 are a factor, but to me, less so than grand slams because even Marcelo Rios was ranked #1 at some point and he never won anything even remotely important. For that matter Nadal is, for me, a much better player historically, and he's never been ranked #1.
So if Federer can overhaul Sampras, I'd give him the edge.
Interestingly, the debate is almost as much about how they've gone about amassing their grand slams as how many they have. A lot of people have referred to Sampras' battles, and the pedigree of players he overcame to win his titles, like Chang, Courier, Agassi, Becker, Kafelnikov, Kuerten, etc. For me, this is a strange argument - because in a round about way it sounds a little bit like this:
Federer wins all the time, so he's the best, but it's not that impressive because he wins all the time. Implicit in this is a couple of things that call into question Federer's pedigree against that of Sampras:
- It's harder to win close matches than it is not to drop a set for 2 weeks
- It shows more character to win in the fifth, than it does to win in straight sets
This strikes me as something of a cynical argument, however, because in order for Federer to be adjudged the equal of Sampras, he'd actually have to do worse against his contemporaries than he has (thus improving their collective pedigree). So in order to be considered the greatest, he has to have lost to some of his contemporaries along the way. That sounds counter intuitive to me, and as such I cannot endorse it as a good measure of Sampras' superiority - I think Sampras' record is enough for that, and if you throw in the number of years he's been #1, and his longevity, (the time between his first and last grand slam was 12 years) a good case can be made that he's the greatest, even if Roger gets to 15 or 16 in 2008.
Another knock against the both of them is that they've never won the French. Of the two, I think Roger has the best chance because he's been in 2 finals already, and many have questioned his tactics at the French. Perhaps if he can employ a more attacking version of his game on clay, he just may find the way to break his duck at Roland Garros.
Ultimately these questions are primarily aesthetic. Whether you prefer the one or the other, it's pretty clear that objectively Sampras is the greater champion...for now.
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