OT: Is Serena the greatest female athlete ever?
Serena Williams won her 22nd Grand Slam today, straight sets over some other tennis player.
I've heard it debated before so I'll toss it out here. Is she she greatest female athlete ever (any sport)? She first attained the wold #1 ranking in 2002; and it's 14 years later and she's #1 again. Hasn't been there consistently, but over and over.
Is she the greatest woman tennis player ever? Given the longevity of her career--probably. I guess you can quesiton if she's had the rivals that prior players have had; or, you could say, she's been so dominant no one could match her. As the money in tennis keeps going up over time, and training and medicine improve, I find it hard to believe that the overall quality of tennis players has dropped. So I'd say, it's hard to argue she's the best female tennis player ever.
Is she the best woman athlete ever? Tennis players will tell you, their sports is the most gruelling and requires the most athleticism. It's hard to think of someone who's dominated her sport for as long as she has. But then again, most womens' sports haven't had the level of professional ranks like tennis, so it's hard to be a woman athlete and "dominant" into your 30s if yo'ure not a golfer or tennis player.
But I guess to me this is the proof: Who else would you say instead of Serena? I can't think of anyone, other than maybe tennis players, but since I think she's the greatest of all tennis players that means she has no other rivals from other sports.
She might well be the greatest female athlete, but she isn't even objectively the greatest female tennis player.
She is in 5th place all time in singles titles, with less than half of Navratilova's record of 167.
She is in 11th place all time in total title, over 250 behind Navratilova's record of 354.
She is in 5th place all time in winning percentage, having played considerably fewer matches than the 4 women abover her.
But she is way more athletic than any of the women I would point to as being better tennis players, which is why she is so comparable to them, because her athleticism plays right into her strengths as a tennis player.
If we go by things like total titles, then yeah, I think Chris Evert, Billie Jean King, Pam Shriver and a few others are definitely are ahead of her in the Open Era. Will anyone ever catch Navratilova in that respect though? Seems like it might be a while, but I could always bw wrong about that, of course.
Total Singles Titles
Navratilova - 167
Chris Evert - 157
Steffi Graff - 107
Serena - 71
She's way behind those three in winning percentag as well. They're all behind Margaret Court, but that's a different story.
No one will ever get close to Navratilova's title record. It's just completely out of reach for the forseeable future. Her record of 18 wins over a #1 is probably going to stand as well. Serena is at 16, and I don't see her sticking around long if/when she loses the #1 ranking.
Serena would kill all those ladies.
Really? Martina Hingis, who is way less athletic than those ladies, had a 6-7 record against Serena. So you think that those ladies, who are better tennis players and more athletic than Martina Hingis, would be "killed" by Serena? I beg to differ.
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Give me the 70's depth in players using era related crap equipment vs. Serena/Venus or the modern players and I'd be interested to see the results.
No. No she wouldn't. Good try though.
Slams are a much bigger deal than total singles titles, IMO
It's a convenient stat to use, since Serena has historically not played as many of the smaller events as most of her peers. She's been criticized for skipping so many, in fact. But I suspect that her winning percentage in the smaller tournaments is comparable to those other names, and would be curious to know (if anyone has that data handy.) Either way, she shows up to the majors, and generally rolls over everyone when she does.
All that said, I'm generally not a big fan of debating players from one era to another, because there are so many different factors at play that it's impossible to really know. I mean, back when some of those people were playing, tournaments played on carpet were actually a thing.
Serena is the most dominant women's tennis player of her generation. By far. That is the one thing we can say with a lot of confidence. There's no one else even worth mentioning in the same sentence. And that is pretty amazing all by itself.
In some sense, slams are a recent invention. Before the 80s most of the top players skipped the Australian--it was too far to travel for the crappy prize money on offer. A lot of players routinely skipped the French back then, too. It was tough for Evert to compile a big slam total when she was only playing two of them each year, and she can't be accused of skipping Paris because she couldn't play on clay, it's just that the tournament wasn't all that big a deal at the time. She won it pretty much every time she bothered to appear.
Winning percentage in slams:
- Graf .897
- Evert .889
- Williams .879
- Navratilova .862
Winning percentage in all other tournaments:
- Evert .903
- Graf .883
- Navratilova .865
- Williams .843
These comparisons tend to be a little flattering to active players because their end-of-career slide isn't included. It's especially harsh to Martina in that regard--if we stopped her career at 33 it would look better here.
This^
Winning percentage is the measure. You can't compare them to each other because of era/equipment. You can compare them by how they fared against their competition.
edit: Babe is the best overall.
Here's a comparison at their respective peaks. Best five-year span, all matches. (And before the inevitable response--Graf's five years here are from before the Seles stabbing.)
- Navratilova .968
- Graf .953
- Evert .940
- Williams .923
From 1982 to 1986, Navratilova won 12 slams and won 70 of the 84 tournaments she entered. She also won 15 doubles slams in those five years, making at least the semis in all 18 she entered and the finals in all but one. Oh, and she won three mixed doubles slams too.
That's dominating the competition.
You can only play who they send out there. It's not Graf's fault others weren't better. You still have to beat them. Was Douglas better than Tyson?
Looking through Graf's slam finals opponents I see Navratilova six times, Seles six times, Sanchez Vicario seven, Sabatini three.
Is that worse than Williams's list? Venus x7, Sharapova x4, nobody else more than two. I met somebody at a tournament once that thought Sharapova was the greatest of all time but I think general consensus would put her quite a ways behind Navratilova and Seles.
And it wasn't as if Navratilova was washed up when Graf came on the scene. She was still in that incredible stretch where she won 97% of her matches, when Graf broke it up and started winning slams.
Or here's another way to look at it: who did they lose to in slams, during their best 5-year stretch?
Navratilova: Evert, Shriver, Horvath, Sukova, Evert, Mandlikova, Evert.
Graf: Navratilova, Navratilova, Sanchez Vicario, Seles, Sabatini, Garrison-Jackson, Sabatini, Novotna, Sanchez Vicario, Navratilova.
Williams: Makarova, Razzano, Stephens, Lisicki, Ivanovic, Muguruza, Cornet, Vinci, Kerber, Muguruza.
One of these lists is not like the others. If we know all the names on it, it's another form of recency bias.
Navratilova was winning 97% of her matches, winning 77% of her tournaments, playing at a level Serena's never come close to. She went 89-3 in 1986--admittedly a drop from a couple of years before but still one of the best seasons anyone's ever had. (She was still at the 90% level, better than Serena's career mark, for the four years from 1987-1990 when Graf was winning everything.)
Graf then ran off three years at the same level, winning 97% of her matches and 84% of her tournaments. Serena's never had a single season that could match that rate, much less three in a row, or five. The Seles stabbing is entirely irrelevant to this point, since it was still in the future. If you want to argue that Seles also would have had a peak better than Serena's top, I'll grant the possiblilty.
But Graf's records are crap and she was nothing compared to Navratilova, Evert, or Serena. Her only competition was a much older Navratilova. Every one else, besides Seles, was two tiers below. The level of play today for players in the top 20 is much tougher.
And let's talk about how Seles' career would have affected Graf's records. Seles came onto the scene and beat Graf in the French at 15 when Graf was in her prime. By age 17 Seles dominated tennis for two years from '91 to '93 when she was stabbed. In '91 she beat Navratilova in that same US open in the Final. If Seles wasn't stabbed she would have continued to dominate Graf until Graf's retirement. Graf's record is overrated. Seles would have dominated her but was stabbed. If you don't believe me ask Navratilova. She is quoted as saying that if Seles wasn't stabbed we wouldn't be talking about Graf. We'd be talking about Seles. Navratilova thinks Seles could have over taken Court's record.
So Navratilova>Serena>Evert>>>>>>Graff
Navratilova's bitterness and jealousy towards Graf isn't news--there are stories of her in the Wimbledon locker room in 1988 telling her other players that somebody needed to beat Graf. CBS fired her as a commentator for being so obviously and unprofessionally anti-Graf during the '95 Open. If you want to enter her rancor as "evidence," OK.
Most tennis pros would say Martina or Court were the greatest of all time. I assume from your comments you would chose Graf?
It is common knowledge Graf didn't have the competition Evert, King, Navratilova, and Serena had....
It's also common knowledge that Navratilova didn't have the competition Graf and Serena had. I've heard it said many times that the early 80s was the nadir of women's tennis, that Evert was old, Mandlikova slumping, everyone else over-hyped, that Navratilova had the advantage of being an early adopter of the new graphite rackets.
It's also common knowledge that Serena doesn't have the competition Navratilova and Graf had, that the inability of any of her peers to even consistently stay in the top five is a sign that none of them are all that good.
Everyone that has an axe to grind uses this argument. I think it's all bull. There might be some analytical way to distinguish eras this way but nobody bothers, they just spout whichever BS would confirm their particular favorite as the greatest.
Certainly the argument that there was a sudden and utterly calamitous collapse in the level of women's tennis precisely in the fall of 1986 or the spring of 1987, on the precise boundary of Navratilova's and Graf's respective runs, seems nonsensical
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If you really want to know:
I don't think Court's top three, but I could be wrong. Her majors records are warped by the fact that she was the only top player bothering to play in the Australian for most of her career, I'm also inclined to draw a line at the start of the open era, sort of like the line a lot of people draw for baseball at 1901 or 1903. The rise of professional tennis grew the talent pool immensely.
But Court did have a massive run from '69 to '71. Maybe I should give that more credit than I do.
Anyway, and leaving Court out of it because I really don't know where to put her:
Career value:
- Evert
- Navratilova
- Graf
- Williams
Peak value:
- Graf
- Navratilova
- Evert
- Williams
If you use a five-year peak instead of three, like I did in my stats in some other posts here, I'd swap #1 and #2.
Chris Evert: "[Monica] then really got cheated out of a lot of Grand Slams. She was really dominating women's tennis, dominating Steffi Graf. As I said before, she won seven out of eight Grand Slams and then got stabbed and was out for 27 months. Her assailant got his wish, that Steffi Graf be Number One, and sure enough, Steffi regained the Number One position when Monica was out of the game. So he got his wish."
Dick Enberg: "Who knows how many titles she would own had she remained in full health?"
Chris Evert: "Well, a lot more than nine Grand Slams, I'll tell you that. That's so not fair, when you look at Steffi's 21 (22) and Monica's nine, it's very unbalanced, and it shouldn't be."
Sure, she might have won a few more grand slams and Graf might have won fewer. Who really knows? Navratilova also predicted after Seles came back that she'd win ten more slams. Maybe her perceptions weren't all that accurate?
But the point is that it doesn't matter to anything I've said anywhere in this thread, except for a small decline in Graf's career winning percentage. Every other statistic I've used as evidence is from before the stabbing. What happened in 1993 is logically irrelevant to a discussion of 1987-1991.
Pretty much this. Also, the women's game is hot trash at the moment. A serious lack of formidable competition. Graf and Navrattilova's eras were much more competitive. Serena's two best competitor's retired pretty much in their prime (Clijsters and Henin). Navratilova also dominated in doubles and led to her playing way more matches, making what she did accomplish that much more impressive (given the wear on her body).
Williams had her sister as competition. She had to split titles with her older sister for quite a while before Venus faded.
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Definitely top ten of all athletes, male or female...not sure if she's the greatest female athlete, but she's close. She and Venus go for the doubles title today.
But she also exposes just how uncompetitive female tennis is and always has been.
Women's tennis was way more competitive than men's tennis within the last decade. It goes in cycles. When Navratilova and Evert were battling, women's tennis was arguably more exciting than men's tennis. The late 90's and early 00's were great years to watch women's tennis. You could watch great tennis from someon as old as Steffi Graff and as young as Martina Hingis.
Greatest female tennis player athlete yes.
In the grunting era. Agreed.
Totally disagree. Gymnasts are flexible, have great upper-body strength, tend to be graceful. But a gymnast doesn't maximize her upper leg strength, nor endurance. Gymnasts aren't adept at throwing or catching etc. (my daughter gymnast says, "I don't like any sport with a ball"). Gymnasts also are skilled at perfecting a routine -- repeating something until it's right. Extremely impossibly difficult routines, yes. But a gymnast does not have to strategize, or change the game plan, anywhere near as an athlete competing head to head or in a team environment. So a gymnast doesn't experience the pressure of having to think and change the game plan when the pressure mounts.
When I first saw this post, I thought 'no way'. But then... Babe Didrikson came to mind - she won at everything she ever tried. But she was probably the first legitimate tomboy playing professional woman's sports, too! Not a lot of top-shelf competition for her. Steffi Graf, Chris Evert, Billie Jean, Martina, etc - all great players that may be Serena's equal in tennis. But I don't know if they could get beat her head to head, everyone being in their prime. Classic conundrum - if todays Serena could play Martina (or any of the others) in her prime day, who wins? I think Serena would due to today's strength, conditioning, and her overall athletic ability.
Serena would easily win. But 25 years from now there will be somebody that would easily beat Serena. That's just the way it works. It's hard (and futile) to compare across eras.
Serena would not "easily" win. Given the current level of competition isn't very strong, she's used to walking all over everyone she plays. Graf and Navratilova would certainly be able to (and would) beat her. No question.
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No. Just no.
...is compare their dominance over their peers. Nobody seriously argues that an ordinary modern MLB player, let's say Steven Moya, is a greater baseball player than Babe Ruth, even though with the improvements in training and nutrition over the decades it might very well be true in the time-machine thought-experiment sense. Nobody compares Jim Thorpe or Jesse Owens to a modern track star and says they sucked because their results wouldn't be competitive today.
Football's an even better example. Drop a player from the 60s into a college football game today and they'd be in trouble--a typical OT then was almost 100 pounds lighter, and most of that change happened in just a quarter of a century or so. Time travel that same 60s player at age 12 and let them get today's training and you'd have a completely different story.
in 25 years Serena will be alot older.
/s
Navratilova is the best female tennis player I have ever seen, especially at her peak. Love Serena's game but Martina was better. Serena would certainly not easily beat her or Graf in their prime. They would be good matches with interesting matchup problems/skill set differeneces.
can you slip serena a wooden tennis racket to use too?
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that the Williams sisters are greatest women's doubles team of all time.