winning a grand slam where most of the world's best players are not in attendance means less than winning one where the top ten seeds are the top 10 players in the world
Likewise winning a doubles or mixed doubles grand slam where most of the world's best players are not in attendance means less than winning one where the top ten seeds are the top 10 players in the world.
but the olympics had most of the top players playing for their countries. The Williams sisters won that event three times IIRC the Williams sisters were 21/22 in finals. and it is dubious if the best singles players are actually the best doubles players. The Bryan brothers did pretty well in Davis cup when smaller countries with a couple top single players sent those to oppose the Bryans. I have seen dozens of interviews of top players. Daniel Nestor and Peter Fleming were really good singles players but never top ten IIRC. ask anyone who played doubles in the 80s=2010 and they will note how good those two were. Max Mirnyi is an another guy who was as good a doubles player as any of the top singles players-maybe better. In women Gigi Fernadez is in that group.
Oh come on, the Olympics you are talking about one event every four years. The exact same force that you describe and laud for singles enhanced competition in the modern ere slame, is not worth nothing now that we are talking doubles and mixed. These players played doubles in virtually tournament they played in, and virtually ALL of them showed. The idea of a 'doubles specialist' was foreign to tennis from the 1920-1970's. Of course they were driven to be better with those deeper fields.
I wasn't aware that any Grand Slams were played on carpet - they are what I was focussed on. While I am sure the different grass courts had different characteristics, I am not convinced the diversity of surface was as great or greater than the clay, grass & two types of hard court Serena has won on. In any case, that was a minor point to me. Serena has played during a period of greater depth and Court racked up 11 of her 24 singles titles in Australia at a time when the quality of fields in those tournaments was lacking relative to the other Grand Slams. I rate Serena the greater singles player (Court second, Navratilova third and Graf fourth) but Court the better overall player given her 64 titles.
While I have already stated that Serena was a better singles player, most of your points don't really land. First, Court only won 11 AO singles titles out of 24 in total - less than half. The AO made up an even smaller percentage of her overall wins, with 22 out of 64. I agree about the lesser quality of AO fields, which is one of the key reasons I put her behind Serena. Given that it was a home Grand Slam and given her record elsewhere it seems likely she would have won 6-8 AO titles had the competition been better. That still puts her in rare company for singles titles. The start of the open era coincided with Court getting older and starting a family, so it should come as no surprise that she won fewer tournaments. That said, she won 11 of her 24 singles titles during the open era, racking those up between 1969 & 1973. She took off the whole 1972 season to have a baby & managed to win an Australian Open 9 months after giving birth (and then the French & US later that year). Oh, and she also won her only calendar Grand Slam in the open era (1970) and also a 'Grand Slam Boxed Set' (singles, doubles and mixed at every GS) during tghe open era to match the one she picked up earlier in her career. So, I think it is safe to say that she rose to the occasion when the open era began. Had she put off having children for a couple of years she would likely have ended up with 26 titles or more. Court changed the game at least as much as Serena. She was a power player at t time when women were supposed to be more delicate. She was the ultimate professional well before the game was and she won 64!!!! Grand Slam titles. Court laid the groundwork for a player like Navratilova, who herself changed the way the game was played. I say none of this to diminish Serena's record. She was the better singles player and she had a profound impact on the game, but the idea that 'there is no comparison' is most charitably treated as an excess of recency bias.
You are right I was referring to who showed that they could win on the greatest variety of surfaces in their era. I definitely believe that was a great a difference between how Australian and English/American grass, as there is now the Australian Open and US Open hard courts play whether on Deco-turf, or Plexicusshion, or Rebound Ace. While its hard to fault Serena for not winning many indoor carpet events, when there was no indoor carpet events to play, it would raise some eyebrows in the 1960- early 90's if she avoided them, or never managed to win many. Likewise if Court could not, for the life of her, squeeze more than a couple hard court tournament wins, when there were 10 hard court events on the calender every year all through her career, that shows a problem. But Margaret can't strut her stuff on deco-turf at the US Open, before there was deco-turf at the US Open and Serena cannot master the traditional English grass court when those courts are no longer on English lawns. Everyone here so far has yet to recognise that there are other tournaments but 4, in the tennis calendar or decided that being the GOAT, ought to have no connection to what they do the other 36-44 weeks of the year, which is a shame because the WTA puts great emphasis on playing those other venues to ensure there was a healthy, and strong tour full of stops. which sells the sport locally, provides consistent media attention, provides income and revenue on which the entire sport depends. Nobody is paying any attention to who won the German or Italian championships, Birmingham, or Eastbourne, all those Virginia Slims and Avon events, the Canadian Open, or Amelia Island despite the fact that is the bread and butter for the WTA. I just don't see how we can discuss a womens GOAT and completely ignore most of those women accomplished. It was critical to the new tour in the first two generations, that celebrity names like King, Court, Goolagong, Evert, Navratilova and Austin etc spread themselves out, and play as many Non slam events as they could, to ensure ticket sales, and television ratings so that sponsorship deals and prize money continue to feed the tour and players that were NOT in the top ten could make a decent living even if that meant some of them taking a well deserved vacation during the Aussie circuit of December-early January. In the Seventies, if both Evert and Martina both said 'no' to a given tour non slam event for two or three years in a row, that event might never recover! That was a lot of pressure on their shoulders to show up. The reason the both the amateur tour and the early pro tour saw doubles and mixed as so important, was there were fewer players in the singles draw, and fewer rounds to watch. For fans to get their money's worth per ticket, those 'name' players had to be on court for more than just singles. In effect those doubles and mixed events accomplished the same goal then as those extra rounds and seedings do today. You have to stop applying todays 'Slams are everything' mentality to eras where slams clearly were not everything, just as if you put too much emphasis on doubles and mixed slams of yesteryear to the detriment of todays players, you do modern players an injustice. If you prioritize computor rankings and 'weeks at number 1', then what was Evert, King and Court supposed to do when part of their time at the very top, preceded that computor system. Evert was deemed best player of the world, two years before there was any computor telling her so.
I have never met a serious tennis player who will argue Court was a better athlete than Serena. And I know a bunch of really good players who all were on the tour. Court was a great player but the only argument-from some-(not many) that she is the GOAT was more grand slam titles.
Court was by far the greatest athlete of her day, not disimilar for Navratilova being the best athlete of her day, or Graf being the best athlete of her day, or Serena the best athlete of her day. But you can't just shove Court into the 2020's to compete with Serena or drag Serena back to the 1960's and 70's to compete with Court. Serena would never be the athlete she is in 2020 in 1960 or 1970. She would not run as fast as she does, or hit the ball nearly as hard as she does. If she tried, it would not work out very well for her! Remember I am not arguing for or against specific players, so much as I am playing devils advocate against most of these views. The problem with Serena's case is that she was more inconsistent even in those slams than Evert, Court or Graf at those slams. I will quote my own post "Serena entered 81 majors between 1998-2022 (25 years) and won 23 with an 87% win/loss match ratio. That means she won 28.4 % of those 81 and reached the finals 40.7% of the time. Serena reached the semifinals 49.4% of the time she entered a slam and the QFs 66.7% Serena's underbelly: I am just putting aside what happens in the fourth round, and looking downwards now, Serena lost in Rds 1, 2, or 3 of a major 21% of the time she played one, with 2 1st Rd losses, 3 2nd Rd losses and 11 Rd 3 losses" These are not particulary impressive numbers,Turtle among this select group. Where Serena ( and Graf) get real good real fast, is in converting those semis and finals into actual wins, but she is not so great at getting to the semis and finals. What she has over Graf is those doubles and mixed titles she earned, which Evert and Graf are mostly bereft, but then when you look at Martina and Margaret, those titles aren't as impressive as theirs. The only one of these champions who was not seen as the greatest athlete of her day was Evert, but she too has a fine GOAT case, even without being the strongest or fastest or most agile on the tour. Evert managed to have the best armour of any of them against an attack from 'below'. Serena could really be her own worst enemy sometimes when her timing was off, or she was playing flat or rusty after a layoff.
weaker fields=more consistency. in all fairness, these sort of discussions-such as who is the greatest guitarists-are nothing more than jerk material for what ends of being mental masturbation. I have seen thousands of hours of live tennis of the highest level and I believe Serena was the best I ever saw. I don't claim to be a great player-was a college squash and table tennis player: was good at one, very good at the other and got much better in squash after college while peaking around 2150 in table tennis with two wins over 2500 level players at major league events. In tennis, I was merely good enough to beat the top woman on the college team where I was a grad student and coaching squash. But I have a pretty good appreciation of tennis excellence and Serena's the best I have ever seen-
Serena's best standard of play IS better than anyone we have ever seen before. You are 100% right on that. . There is no doubt about that. By the standards you are applying, each of the top 10 or maybe 20 women playing TODAY are all producing better tennis than Graf, Navratilova, Evert, or Court. They are all better players than anyone that preceded them. Its because they are better trained, better conditioned, with better diets, and a scientific quantifiable approach to every aspect of their lives. They are 'programmed' to be athletes who play tennis now. But Serena would not be the machine you saw but for the benefits of being a 21st century athlete. There is absolutely no reason why Serena cannot be as consistently solid in early rounds as any prior champion. There is as much distance between her best game and her unseeded or low seeded opponents best game, and there was been Graf and her opponents or Evert and her opponents.
