On Sunday, Rafael Nadal won his 14th French Open in his 18th attempt at the title. He won his first one at 19 and this year's at 36. Think about how much changed in your life between your 19th and 36th birthdays. Now imagine winning one of the world's most prestigious sporting events essentially every year of your life over that span. It's unfathomable. It's also a testimony to him and his family that he remained focused and scandal-free (poorBorisBecker) despite success at such a young age.
Nadal now has 22 Grand Slam titles, the most of anyone ever. Roy Emerson held the record with 12 Slams until 1999 when Pete Sampras won his 13th. Pistol Pete retired after winning his 14th in 2002. So Nadal tied the old record just based on his work at the French Open alone.
Nadal is 112-3 at the French. Those 112 French wins are more than some Hall of Famers had in all their Grand Slam appearances combined, guys like Kuerten, Ivanisevic, Stich, Kafelnikov.
He is 8-8 in other Grand Slam finals. So if he never played in the French Open, he would have more Slams than McEnroe, Wilander, Becker, and Edberg; he would be tied with Agassi, Lendl, and Connors; and he would have as many as Ashe, Murray, Roddick, and Ivanisevic combined. All of those guys are in the Hall of Fame except for Murray because he's still playing. And those non-French 16 finals appearances would be more than anyone except four other players (and tied with Borg). And he always plays his ass off, even when he loses.
I feel like I've written this before--perhaps I have, just about someoneelse--so you're probably tired of reading my rants. Just realize that this age of preposterous tennis can't go on forever, so appreciate it while it lasts.
I started writing this post before Novak Djokovic lost to Sam Querrey in the third round of Wimbledon today. The loss makes it easier for me to distill my thoughts, although I'm sure Djokovic would prefer for me to have a harder time putting my thoughts together if it meant he was still playing.
Professional athletes are judged, rightly or wrongly, by how many titles they win. Golfers and tennis players are judged by how many majors they win, and both sports treat winning a Grand Slam as a cross between the Holy Grail, the White Whale, and the scene where Heather Graham takes her clothes off for the first time in Boogie Nights. In Andre Agassi's book Open, when Brad Gilbert wanted to stress how well Andre Agassi played in the four majors starting with the 1999 French Open and ending with the 2000 Australian Open, he noted that Agassi went 27-1 and that the only person to do better than that in a four major stretch in the Open era was Rod Laver. (And parenthetically, I think Djokovic is evolutionary Agassi, or what Agassi could've been if he really liked or wanted to play tennis.)
This influenced how I view a player's career over time. You have to win seven matches to win a major. If you win 20 matches in major play in one year, then on average you made the semi-finals in each tournament. That's pretty spectacular, and when you add in the fact that 20 is a nice round number I decided that a 20 win season is a good barometer for a tennis player's performance.
Why should you give a shit? Because Novak Djokovic is quietly putting together one of the best men's tennis careers of the Open era. I say quietly because he doesn't get nearly as much coverage as Tiger Woods or Mike Tyson in their primes, or Michael Phelps during the run-up to any particular Olympics, or Derek Jeter buying a grande Sumatra at Starbucks. Yet he's doing stuff just as impressive as what those guys did.
And the coverage he gets misses this point. When he lost today, ESPN posted an article stating that the loss "carried away Djokovic's Wimbledon title, his attempt to tie Rod Laver's consecutive Grand Slam win streak at 31 and his drive to try for a calendar year Grand Slam at the US Open." ESPN's tennis homepage said "Novak Djokovic was drowned in a sea of Sam Querrey aces and forehand blasts, thus failing to add another chapter to his legend."
Rather than look at what Djokovic failed to do, let's take a look at what he's accomplished ... over the past five years. It's really impressive. I don't care what Rakim says, I'd like to be a djoke.
To start with, Djokovic held all four major titles at once until today--a Tiger Slam or a Serena Slam, or a Djokovic Slam if you will. The only man to win all four tennis majors in one calendar year in the Open era is Rod Laver. Parenthetically, if you talk to an old tennis fan he or she will tell you that Laver is the best ever. From 1959 to 1962 he played in eleven major finals, winning six, including a Grand Slam in 1962. Then he turned pro and played in fifteen Pro Slam tournaments, reaching fourteen finals and winning eight. Then the Open era started in 1968. He played in three majors that year, reaching the finals in two and winning one. He won the Grand Slam again in 1969 (clicks). It's a preposterous performance timeline. Lord knows how many majors wins he'd have if he hadn't turned pro or if the Open era started in 1955. And the best sneaker ever is named after him.
All this is to say that ESPN should pipe down about Djokovic failing to win a calendar Slam. Much like pimpin', it ain't easy.
Back to the Djokovic Slam, which is four majors in a row. The list of men who won four majors in a row in the history of tennis is Don Budge (six in a row from 1937-38), Laver (four in a row twice), and Djokovic. That's it. That's the list. So ESPN should lay off the "failing to add another chapter to his legend" nonsense. The Djokovic Slam is legendary.
In fact, Djokovic's previous five years have been legendary. I checked out the stats of everyone who won five or more majors in the Open era and made a table analyzing each player's five best consecutive years in major play. I picked five because that's a pretty long window of time in a tennis player's career and I wanted to analyze dominance over a significant period of time. I left off Laver and John Newcombe because their careers started before the Open era and that screwed up my comparisons. I also included Andy Murray because, well, you'll see.
Here's the table. The first column of numbers reflects the best five year span in the player's career in terms of wins at major tournaments, the next column reflects the losses, and the next column reflects the winning percentage. These three columns do not reflect the results of the 2016 season because the US Open wasn't held yet. The "best 1 loss streak" reflects the player's best streak in major play including one loss. For example, Nadal won the 2010 French, Wimbledon, and US Open (21 wins) then made the quarters of the 2011 Australian (4 wins) and won the 2011 French (7 wins). He then won 6 matches at Wimbledon in 2011. So that's 38-1 before his second loss (in the Wimbledon finals). I only measured streaks that started with a major win. The rest is self-explanatory. (And it might be easier to see if you click on the table.)
What does all this mean? Let me give you some context. Jim Courier is a Hall of Famer, was #1 in the world for 58 weeks, went 4-3 in major finals from 1991-1993 and won 62 major matches over that span. He won 118 matches at major tournaments in his career. Djokovic won 122 from 2011-2015. Only Federer was better over a five year stretch.
Speaking of Federer, he reached all four finals three times (2006, 2007, 2009). That's nuts. In 2006 and 2007 he won three finals and lost only the French (to Nadal both times). That's also nuts.
More context. Bjorn Borg played tennis for nine years but only played in one Australian Open. I guess he dislikes the southern hemisphere. Anyway, this means he amassed all his stats playing in only three tournaments a year so his two 20 win seasons are Herculean (or at least Federerean). Between 1976 and 1981 he played in seventeen majors and reached the finals fourteen times. Borg was good at tennis.
Similarly, McEnroe skipped ten Aussies, six French and two Wimbledons. Connors eschewed the Australian all but twice, winning once and losing the finals in the other. Connors also ignored the French ten times. If you filter the table by 5 year win percentage you get this:
This jibes with my sense of history a little bit more. Borg is on top, McEnroe and Connors move up, and Agassi/Edberg/Becker are at the bottom fringe. Djokovic is still in the top three. Interestingly, I remember Wilander as being a force of nature and expected him to be higher, but he had peaks and valleys in majors, aside from his mammoth 1988 season.
Djokovic's 122 wins over 5 years correspond to an average of 6.1 wins per tournament. This means his average finish at majors was a finals appearance. If Djokovic loses in the semis he had a below-average tournament. Federer averaged 6.35 wins and Borg 6.21 wins per tournament at their peaks. Again, these numbers are for periods of five years. That's inhuman dominance. Note that these averages reflect the actual number of majors each person played in their peak five years. If you just assume 20 games as the denominator Borg looks less inhuman.
What about the streak? Djokovic looks pretty good in that regard as well. Second-best after Federer's aforementioned gonzo run from 2006-2007.
Djokovic is also top-three in 20 win seasons, and he already has sixteen so far this year. [When I was almost done with this monstrosity I realized that Lendl had seven 20 win seasons, not six. I'm too lazy to fix it and it doesn't change the rank order outcome.]
And I think this is an interesting statistic despite the fact that several great players only appeared in three tournaments a year. It's not like they had to swim to Australia. They could've gone.
Only Federer has appeared in more major finals than Djokovic. Again, these numbers are possibly skewed by the fact that several players didn't appear in four tournaments a year, but then again, why should we hold that against anyone who plays in all four?
Djokovic has won a major event in each of the past six years. Only four men have done better. Borg and Federer come up again because they're Borg and Federer. Sampras and Nadal have more because they dominated on one surface.
The only metric that puts Djokovic in the middle of the pack is finals win percentage.
Pistol Pete though! Note that he was 7-0 at Wimbledon and 7-4 everywhere else ... which by itself is still 64%, close to the top of this list.
This table also brings Andy Murray into focus. By almost every other measure, Murray is equivalent to Becker and Edberg, two all-time greats. But he's only 2-8 in major finals. You might thing it's because he "can't win the big one." I think it's because he has shit luck:
Murray appeared in ten major finals and faced Federer or Djokovic--the two guys at the top of almost all of the preceding lists--every time! It's hard out here for a Scotsman.
Also, Ivan Lendl was really really good. We, or at least I, forget about this. He was dominant in the mid-to-late 80s but for whatever reason is remembered almost entirely for failing to win Wimbledon. But the guy was a human metronome in multiple ways. His strokes were so grooved that he was criticized for being robotic and his power baseline game was sneered at as boring. As I type this I see that there's a fucking typo in my table but I'm too lazy to fix it now--Lendl had seven 20-win seasons and they were consecutive. Five of them were 20 wins right on the nose. Dude was consistent, and consistently good. He was also a workout fanatic. Some even said that Lendl wasn't that talented, he just worked his ass off to become a tennis machine--as if that's not admirable! Fast forward 20-30 years and everyone is a workout fanatic with a power baseline game. He was ahead of his time.
What's my point about Djokovic? In the 48 year history of men's Open tennis, only a handful of people have played at Djokovic's level of the last five-and-a-half years. Rather than focus on all the things he can't accomplish because he lost a third round match to the number 41 player in the world, we should look at everything he did before that and say "Holy shit, we just saw something special" or even better "Holy shit, we're in the middle of something special, we need to pay attention before it's gone forever!"
So watch more tennis and enjoy Djokovic while you can.
I got a free one week trial subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud and used it to do something I've wanted to try for a long time.
We have a logo. rob and his tireless colleagues at the North Pole are hastily silk-screening this image onto t-shirts as I type. It is, of course, a parody of Shepard Fairey's famous "Andre the Giant Has A Posse" sticker which was ubiquitous on New Jersey high school lockers, bathroom walls, skateboard decks, and Garden State Parkway toll booths in the early 1990s. In case you weren't fortunate enough to grow up in New Jersey in the 1990s ...
Feel free to tell me how much my logo sucks in the comments.
I've been watching tennis for over 30 years. It's the only sport about which I can speak with any valid authority. So don't try to argue with me when I say that Andre Agassi should have been the greatest tennis player of his generation, and that if he performed to his maximum potential, if he worked his ass off and exploited all the genetic gifts his parents gave him, he would have been mentioned in the handful of greatest players of all time. Up there with Budge and Borg and Tilden and Kramer, supplanting Sampras, not better than Laver or Federer but mentioned in the same breath. David Foster Wallace wrote the single best piece of sports writing ever in which he described Federer's transcendent game, better than Updike's piece about a lyric little bandbox. You should read it, and the footnotes. While you're at it, read Brief Interviews With Hideous Men; forgo the movie.
You've heard that Agassi was the best counter-puncher of all time. But you likely don't know why. Not really. I'll tell you. He had great power off both sides, and he had amazing foot speed. But what made Agassi special is that he could do two things better than anyone I've ever seen:
1. His ability to hit the ball on the rise was super-human. His ability to see the ball is probably Ted Williamsesque. Hitting the ball on the rise, or "taking the ball early," means getting your racquet on the ball immediately after it bounces, and before it reaches its vertical apex after the bounce. I was surprisingly decent at this at the high school level because I worked on my timing to compensate for my miserable depth perception, lack of power, and plodding foot speed. But Agassi could take the ball on the rise when it was served by Sampras. You can't time a pro serve, not against the best in the world who know how to mix up their pace like Pedro Martinez. Agassi simply had better vision, hand-eye coordination, and reflexes than anyone I've ever seen. This allowed him to crowd the baseline, or stand closer to the court than normal humans, and thus gave him angles that weren't available to mortals, and added extra pace to his shots. Agassi feasted on second serves, which sacrifice pace for accuracy by adding topspin, which in turn makes the ball kick higher. Standing closer to the service box made the ball kick into Agassi's wheelhouse and allowed him to hit outright winners off of second serves. Except for Sampras, whose second serve deserves its own 1,000 word analysis.
2. He held the ball on the racquet longer than anyone I've ever seen. I have no empirical data to support this assertion. But if you watched him enough, you could see that he could change his mind mid-stroke and take the ball cross-court instead of down the line, or hit a lob instead of a sizzling line drive, without changing his swing or even his grip. Opponents simply never knew what was going to come back at them after they hit the ball to Agassi's side of the net. But they knew that anything could happen, and that scared them.
These two skills in combination made his return game insanely dangerous, neutralizing all but the best service games. And this allowed him to completely disguise his shots during a point. He didn't have to drop the head of his racquet to lob or open his hips for a cross-court shot like normal players. You simply could not predict where the ball was going based on his pre-shot set-up, or even his mid-shot stroke. And he had several lobs in his arsenal, some of which made his lob as good as a passing shot. No one should have been able to come to the net against him.
I watched tennis religiously from 1988 to 1992, trying to pick things up to make my game better. I briefly adopted a foot-crossing tic on my serve a la Edberg (the most graceful player ever) but it didn't work for me (the least graceful player ever). Becker's deep knee-bend and back arch actually made my serve better (until I screwed up my back). As did Lendl's looping forehand and Graf's slice backhand. But I was physically incapable of doing the things Agassi did on the court.
Throw in Agassi's speed and power, and he should have been unbeatable. And he's American. With a gigantic chip on his shoulder. Swagger like Mick Jagger. Right up my alley, right?
I never liked Agassi though. The hair. The earring. Image is everything. Barbra Streisand. The Prince painted to look like a Donnay. Refusing to play Wimbledon. The periodic lack of dedication to his craft. And most importantly, the colossal choke-inducing mental weakness.
Even things about Agassi that I should like weren't quite right. Nike made cool kicks for him, but he wore the pink-and-black ones instead of the orange-and-navy ones. He liked to party but he drank margaritas. He collects cars, but they're all white and cheesy (e.g., mid-80's Vette, Hummer, '76 Eldorado convertible, Vector W8, Jeep Wrangler).
Simply put, he's a meathead. A preposterously gifted meathead, but a meathead nonetheless. And lazy too. I recently thought my opinion was too harsh. We actually have a lot in common. Like wasted talent. If I ever gave a shit in high school I might have gone to a real college with national street cred. If I ever gave a shit in college I might have gone to top-notch graduate schools. We both had failed marriages. We smoked pot (somehow Agassi's potheadedness gets much less press than his methheadedness, but he apparently smoked his fair shair at the Bolletieri Academy). We suffer from hair loss. Eventually we got our acts together and became successful at our chosen professions.
So I looked forward to his autobiography, Open. I thought it would illuminate the source of his failures in Grand Slam finals. Like his inexcusable loss to Andres Gomes in the 1990 French Open Final, which I watched with the same awe-struck gape-mouthed stupor as the final seconds of the Super Bowl following the 1990 NFL season. Or his loss in the 1990 U.S. Open Final in which Sampras won his first slam and all but played tinkle with Agassi. Or his collapse in the 1991 French Open to Jim Courier where he was up 2 sets to 1. I thought it would explain why he would work his way to a top 10 ranking, then plummet, then get back into the top 10, then plummet again, then surge again.
And I guess it did. But the answer is completely unsatisfying: as I suspected, the guy's a lazy meathead. He's like Nuke LaLoosh come to life, complte with the million dollar arm and 5 cent head.
It turns out that Agassi was, like most people, a scared and insecure kid who was overwhelmed by life. His dad forced him into tennis, a sport that he hates to this day, actually hates, and was incapable of showing him love or affection or approval. He was lousy at school and dropped out after 9th grade, so he's also insecure about his brain power. All that he had was this amazing, borderline supernatural, ability to do something that he hates, with no desire to excel at it and nothing to fall back on. So he didn't work hard at tennis or conditioning and he melted down in big games.
Agassi's book doesn't paint a sympathetic figure though. He continued to melt down throughout his career, even into his 30's when he should have mastered the mental part of the game. He finally decided to get into shape towards the end of his career but only after surrounding himself with an entourage that supported his childish psyche (it's amazing to learn how many people, both on and off his payroll, it took to keep his mental and physical act together; it's also amazing that he doesn't seem to appreciate what a pampered schmuck he was, or how lucky he was to find so many people willing to make large personal sacrifices for his success). He wore a toupe, and blames his loss in the 1990 French Final on a toupe malfunction. He listens to Barry Manilow and Michael Bolton. Seriously. He said that shit like it's a legitimate musical preference.
What I found most frustrating was some time in his 30's, Agassi realized that Sampras treats tennis like a job, and that Sampras "does it with brio and dedication." Incredible! The guy was a pro athlete for just about half his life at this point, and he just realized that hard work and dedication pay off?! He never understood that giving a shit yields better results?! And that tennis was his job!? I shook my head for a good 15 seconds after I read that sentence.
The only thing I can personally relate to is his relationship with Brooke Shields. She told him the words she wanted to hear for her proposal, and that if he ever expected to propose he better damn well use those words. He had one closet for his stuff in their entire house. Their wedding was supposed to look like a fairy tale. Upon learning that they were going to South Africa to meet Nelson Mandela, she went out and bought matching safari outfits. It sounds like he wasn't really sure that he wanted to propose but was bullied and confused and the next thing he knew he was talking to caterers and wedding planners. Sound familiar? Like a guy you know who should have a radio show with The Teej? TR and Marlin are slowly nodding yes.
Agassi confirmed a number of my suspicions: Chang is a Bible-beating dork; Sampras is a tool and he's cheap; Jimmy Connors is a world-class asshole; Courier is a prick; Nadal is the fastest tennis player ever; Brooke Shields is lousy in bed (I made that up ... but if you read between the lines you can see it). The only person that received kind words from Agassi, outside of his family and circle of sycophants/employees, was Pat Rafter, confirming my suspicion that Rafter was the classiest tennis player of his era.
Some other worthwhile stuff came out of Agassi's book. It explains a series of insanely intense matches with Boris Becker, including the 1995 U.S. Open Semifinal match in which their hatred for each other was palpable, even on TV. It's also clear that Agassi found happiness in his second marriage, and I have to applaud him in that regard. Divorce puts you through an emotional wringer no matter how amicable it may be. So for some reason I have to root for other divorced guys (unless they're philanderers or wifebeaters) and I'm glad things are working out for him on the homefront. Agassi also found a sense of purpose, namely his school for poor kids in his home town of Las Vegas, which propelled him through the final two or three years of his career.
There's no reason to read Open unless you're really into tennis. You know he wore a rug. You know he used meth regularly for a while. You know he failed a drug test and lied his way out of a suspension. That's all the salacious stuff, nothing else really.
You probably read the book already if you're an Agassi fan. If you're like me, if you followed Agassi's entire career as a neutral observer and can't figure out for the life of you why he didn't win at least four more Slams, Open isn't completely satisfying. It confirms that Agassi suffers from deep psychological insecurity and mental fragility, and that he's not too bright. Amazingly, his preposterous reflexes are discussed once, in passing, in one paragraph on page 28, in which he describes hitting balls from a Lobster as a kid. His natural abilities deserve more full treatment, at least their own chapter. Wallace's article (supra) does a better job describing them than Agassi does.
What I took away is that Agassi was a tremendously gifted athlete who didn't want his gifts but was forced to use them, who was exploited to a degree, who purposely self-destructed several times in response but eventually made peace with his lot in life, and, despite his meatheadedness, despite all his efforts to the contrary, managed to find happiness and purpose within and outside of his talents. We should all be so lucky.
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