Like El Dude said above ^ though, Brother Kieran, what some of those guys did back in the 1950s and 1960s was incredible. Some of them played each other hundreds of times if I recall correctly. I mean they were brutal contests and they played back to back all over the place and to see that he dominated the way he did against that level of competition (many great Hall of Famers like Rosewall, Roache, Laver, Segura, a young Newcombe), you have to think he is one of the greatest to ever to lift a racquet.
I've tried to come up with some sort of system to weigh pre-Open Era stats with Open Era...it is really hard, especially when there isn't a good database since The Tennis Base site closed up shop. And it isn't as much comparing across long periods of time as it is the difference in the way the schedule worked. Once the pros and amateurs split in the 1920s, you have an era of about 40 years in which the Grand Slams weren't so grand...all the best players cut their teeth on the amateur tour, then went pro once they hit their prime, and on the pro tour the overall level was a lot higher and you tended to play a lot of matches against the same guys. There were a lot of shlubs on the pro tour too, but the top players always ended up meeting each other in later rounds, with no real gaps where there wasn't another top guy across the net in a final, at least in the larger pro tournaments.
This is why Roy Emerson is probably the most overrated player in tennis history, because he won most of his 12 Slams after his better peers went pro. To be fair, he did beat a very young (and green) Rod Laver for his first two Slam titles in 1961, but then he lost to Laver in three finals in 1962. After that, Emerson won 10 more Slams, including one over some Frenchman named Pierre Darmon, Fred Stolle five times, and Arthur Ashe three times. Stolle and Ashe were really good, even lesser greats (especially Ashe) - but they weren't Laver or Rosewall. While Emerson was in his early 30s when the Open Era began, the drop in his level was significant: he went from winning 2 Slams and 11 titles in 1967, to never going past a Slam QF and winning only seven more titles, all minor ones, despite playing full time through 1973. Compare that to Laver who, while two years young, was probably the best player of the Open Era thorugh 1971, and Rosewall (two years older than Emerson) probably the 2nd best player.
In a way, the Open Era was for Emerson what joining the pro tour was for Gonzales, Rosewall, Laver, and others who went from the amateur to pro tours: they experienced a rough patch for a year or two, before adjusting. But Emerson never adjusted; he went from being the top dog on the amateur tour one year, to a borderline top 10 guy for the first few years of the Open Era. Manolo Santana shared a similar fate.
Back to Pancho, he won 113 titles in total (not sure if this includes pro tours) - only Laver (198), Rosewall (147), Jaroslav Drobny (147), Josiah Ritchie (139), Bill Tilden (138), and Anthony Wilding (118) won more...and several of those guys mostly played in the early decades of tennis history. Pancho is also one of only five players to play over 2000 matches (along with Rosewall, Tilden, Laver, and Segura)...by comparison, Roger played in 1526 matches, Novak 1346, and Rafa 1308...Rosewall's 2521 is about 1000 matches more than Roger! But his most impressive feat is winning the World Pro Championships seven times...more on that in a minute.
I personally consider Gonzales top 10 all-time - though in the bottom half after Tilden, Laver, and the Big Three. I'd probably have him #6, with Rosewall #7, ahead of the next group that includes Budge, Sampras, Borg, Lendl, etc. Jeff Sackmann of Tennis Abstract/Heavy Topspin Pancho ranked 9th among men of the last 100 years, like so:
Jeff Sackmann's Top 20 Male Players of the Last Century
- Rod Laver
- Novak Djokovic
- Roger Federer
- Bill Tilden
- Rafael Nadal
- Bjorn Borg
- John McEnroe
- Ken Rosewall
- Richard Gonzalez
- Ivan Lendl
- Pete Sampras
- Don Budge
- Jimmy Connors
- Jack Kramer
- Andy Murray
- Boris Becker
- Ellsworth Vines
- Fred Perry
- Andre Agassi
- Stefan Edberg
Sackmann's ranking is entirely based on Elo - balancing peak, career, and best seven years. There are lots of controversial bits - like Lendl over Sampras, or Murray over a bunch of other guys, or down further he has David Ferrer over Jim Courier, Andy Roddick and Lleyton Hewitt; and he has Stan Wawrinka near the end of his list of 60ish men...behind Kei Nishikori (!). But I think he just remained faithful to his formula. Elo tends to penalize inconsistent players like Wawrinka, and likes consistent players like Ferrer and Nishikori. He did those rankings two years ago, but I heard him say in a podcast that Laver was so far ahead of anyone else, that unless Novak or Rafa had like five more peak years, they wouldn't catch him. I assume his rankings are the same now as they were two years ago, considering Rafa didn't really play much and Novak, while having that great 2023, still wouldn't have caught up to Laver.
Anyhow, the pros had a range of tournaments, but the big ones were the
pro tours. The Pro Slams were big, but they were usually just 3 or 4 rounds, and pretty similar to the Open Era WCT Finals and Grand Slam Cup in terms of difficulty and level...sort of between a Masters and the Tour Finals. A lot of pro tournaments were like that: short, but fierce in competition. Take the Wimbledon Pro in 1967, for instance. In the last year of the pro/amateur split, it was the first time pros played on Centre Court at Wimbledon. Laver won it, defeating Fred Stolle, Andres Gimeno, and Ken Rosewall in three rounds. Stolle and Gimeno were top 10 guys, and Rosewall was the second best player in the world at the time.
But the pro tours were almost like "seasons within seasons" - some just a few matches, but many involving dozens, even over 100 at times. The biggest pro tour was the World Pro Championships, which was a series of head-to-head matches between the champion from the previous year and a challenger (or sometimes, a pool of challenger). The challenger was often the top amateur who just went pro. In a way, it was THE "grandest Slam" of the pro tour.
In the World tour held from October of 1949 to May of 1950, Jack Kramer won it, demolishing a virginal Gonzales 94-29. Meaning, they played each other 123 times over a seven month period! For this and other reasons, Pancho almost retired - he was semi-retired in 1951-53, focusing on running a tennis shop, playing only short tours. Evidently he was a bit of an outcast from the Riggs/Kramer tennis illuminati. But his game grew, and by 1952 was one of the top pros. Kramer eventually relented and signed hiim to a pro contract in late 1953, and for the next eight or nine years, it was all Pancho - he won all seven World Pro Championships from 1954-61.
As another side note, it is also interesting to note that there were no gaps in the "reigns" of the players who won the World Pro Championships; it was played 24 times from the first in 1928 to the last in 1963 (with a lot of missed years, mostly due to WW2). But Tilden won the first three, Ellsworth Vines the next five in a row, before Don Budge took the reins and won the next three. After three missed years, Bobby Riggs won it in 1946, then Jack Kramer took over and won the next four. But then Pancho came into his own, and won the next seven, before Ken Rosewall won the last (so Laver didn't really have much of a chance to win it).
OK, enough of the tangent! Bottom line: Pancho is an inner circle great and one of the top 10 players of all time.
