Time to crown Novak the GOAT?

[Front242]

You gave a definitive number, so I wasn't sure what you are talking about. You listed a bunch of things, all of which have different time frames for when he surpassed Roger.

I don't see what applies to "6 years," though.

The 6 years part is easy. 6 years younger than Federer and barely able to beat him a lot of the time.

 

[Front242]

Nadal's above Federer already with the H2H in the Spaniards favor; mostly on clay of course! Now there would be more of a question with Djokovic who now has 6 Wimbledons to Roger's 8, but again the H2H overall is in Nole's favor, but even more so on grass with Roger dropping 3 finals to the Serb!

Dropping 3 finals at what age, and as I pointed in my last post, there's your 6 years claim?! 6 years younger and barely able to beat a geriatric 12-10 in the 5th and could easily have lost if said geriatric didn't play his 2 match points like crap.

 

[BratSrbin]

It’s still just an opinion of yours, for obvious reasons.

‎No. It is just my look at the facts.‎ Obvious.

 

[BratSrbin]

As is mine about the notion of ND being a "stronzo," but, rather than rub salt into the wound, I will wait to see if @BratSrbin is even still around tomorrow, because seems that a lot of Novak fans just show up around the last 2 rounds of gloating time, and disappear when that doesn't happen.

Ultimate Tennis Statistics - GOAT List

Open Era GOAT List (a.k.a. GOATometer) compares tennis player career achievements expressed by GOAT Points

www.ultimatetennisstatistics.com

 

[BratSrbin]

Ultimate Tennis Statistics - GOAT List

Open Era GOAT List (a.k.a. GOATometer) compares tennis player career achievements expressed by GOAT Points

www.ultimatetennisstatistics.com

 

[Fiero425]

During the amateur era, mind you. The best player in the sport at that time (1956) was a pro, mr Pancho Gonzales. He did beat some good players, including Rosewall, in some of those Slams, but it was a different era. Just as Laver's first CYGS was nothing comparable to his one in 1969.

But it's already on record that HOAD owned Laver early on, starting their "so called" rivalry 8-0 in Lew's favor! We've seen Rod come up short in those 2 WCT Finals on TV in '71 & '72 to Rosewall! But b/c he won 2 CYGS (1 Am., 1 Pro), shortcomings were overlooked! We gave the same considerations to Sampras who never had a sniff of a FO final! We were going to do the same for Fed before he finally took his lone FO Chp.! Djokovic has already surpassed Fedal in so many ways already, but "denial is more than just a river in Eqypt" as was said! It's desperate IMO to try and hold off the inevitable! I jumped off Fed's bandwagon; admittedly so, but there's a superior record still unfolding and it's hard to stay neutral! Sometimes riding the fence can have one pick up splinters! I'll keep it simple and just say it's akin to "'coming in/getting out' of the rain!" Do we really need to be convinced?

 

[Moxie]

This is a cop-out, Moxie. As you know, I prefer the three-headed GOAT, or herd of GOATs. Even back when Roger was ahead of the pack in terms of career accomplishments. But the whole premise of this thread and my approach to the question is not: Who is the singular GOAT, but if we had to pick just one.

I think it's unfair of you to call my position a "cop-out." The title of the thread is "Time to crown Novak the GOAT?" not "If you had to say One, gun to head...etc." I re-read your OP, and all you offered was your gun-to-head opinion, with no insistence that that was part of the price of admission to discuss on this thread. To keep insisting that we all conform to your conclusion, or even form one, is sort of bullying.

It is an impossible question, but it is just a hypothetical - and one you refuse to address, except by negating all attempts. So why not leave it at that? Refuse to play the game, but then don't insist on negating answers you don't like, which is sort of playing the game, but without taking a stance.

(Although re-reading your posts, I see that you did say "gun to the head, I wouldn't say its Rafa" - although that implies that you would say it is someone else? You know, if we want to make peace, we should all just agree it is Laver ;-))

I have in no way refused to address it. I have said I don't believe in one GOAT, which has always been my position. Does this exclude me from the conversation?

So we agree that GOAT is artificial, and that three-headed (or more) is better. But you refuse the "gun to the head" question, therefore...bang. The point of a "gun to the head" question is to answer a question you otherwise wouldn't, because you "have to." It is an "as if" scenario - as if you have to provide an answer, even if it is near impossible.

As I reminded you above about your OP, I don't think you made it clear that this was the requirement. As to your question if was it time to crown Novak the GOAT, my position is that a) there is no GOAT, and b) that no, it is before time. I'm not sure how much clearer I can be. I respond to individual posts, and debate points as they come up. I don't really know what more you expect from me.

Anyhow, I don't claim to be "dispassionate." What I claim is that I'm more interested in approaching the question as objectively as possible, than I am in defending my guy. What I have found is that whenever I try to do that, I end up arguing with people who are defending their guy.

As for me choosing the criteria, that isn't entirely fair. I'm happy to discuss the criteria, I just bring forth facts that I personally think are relevant. As I have said, we have to look at all factors, and a variety of perspectives. I'm not discounting the context that you and Kieran provide, I just don't entirely agree with the framing of it, or at least think it needs to be weighed with other factors.

So you don't have to convince me that they're all great, or that three-headed GOAT is a truer answer. As I've said countless times, I agree! If you refuse to play the "gun to the head" game, fine, I can't force you. But then might as well not negate any answers that others come up with, because then you're kind of playing.

Well, you rather do claim to be dispassionate, though I know you try to be objective. And I see you getting crap from trolls like monfed saying you're backing Novak, which I know not to be true, of course. And I know that your real feeling is that, in this era, it's a 3-headed. Or, as you like to call them, the Holy Trinity. It's true that you've been clear about your criteria, and you stand firmly on them. I thought that discussing the fine-points was partly debating the criteria, not just others being fannish. I don't understand your last bolded above. Is debating an answer the same as negating it, to you?

 

[Andy22]

He won 12, and he’s clearly the cautionary tale against being too reliant on numbers, and less reliant on detail. There’s no criteria that can place Emerson as a greater player than Pete Sampras or Roger Federer. As I said above, he’s not even at the same table as John Newcombe. He was good, but only up to a point. That point was the point where great players step in. Little surprise that Emerson stopped winning slams as soon as the sport went professional…

I was thinking of Laver pro slams that he won wrong player of course Laver real slam court is about 20 because of his pro tour. Sill I would have Roy.emerson slams over most of Federer slams not saying his greater or anything.

 

[Jelenafan]

Oh my god, really?

Roy Emerson is a bit like a major league baseball player goes over to Japan and dominates.

Or maybe a more apt comparison is if Roger, Rafa, Novak, Andy, and Stan all retired in 2011, and David Ferrer dominated the tour for five years. Maybe that's a tad harsh, but at best, Emerson is more in the John Newcombe, Andy Murray, Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg range of "lesser greats" than the true inner circle.

IMO It’s tough to gauge Roy Emerson. He is a weird anomaly in more ways than one.

While I don’t disagree that Emerson’s 12 Majors are a bit suspect as a barometer of his greatness versus his contemporaries like Laver, Rosewall, etc at the same time you can't dismiss all his achievements outright. He won 10 straight Major finals an an Amateur from 63-67. In 1962 he lost 3 of 4 Major finals to Laver in Laver's first historic CYGS.

Emerson remained an amateur because apparently it was lucrative enough for him. Supposedly he was offered 100K to turn pro in ‘66 and famously replied he couldn’t afford the pay cut. OTOH, Laver who won the Grand Slam in 1962 was younger than Emerson and turned pro by 1963 so there is the counterargument that Emerson just didn't want to challenge himself versus the pros.

From most accounts I’ve read his salad days were 1963-66, so what if he had turned pro then? Who knows, I would imagine he might have been competitive with the likes of Laver, Rosewall, etc.

Even the argument that because after open tennis in 1968 he never won another Major his record is tainted doesn't quite pass muster. By 1968 he was 31, and if you look at the record of champs from the 60's and 70"s , Laver, Ashe, Stan Smith, Illie Nastase, all the way through to Borg and Jimmy Connors, most of them were done by age 31/32 as far as winning Majors. (Laver certainly was). The only exception was Ken Rosewall. So it's a bit unfair to say that he couldn't win because of open tennis, it was more that his peak years were behind him by 1968. (Laver won the CYGS in 1969 and never won another Major for the rest of his career)

 

[Jelenafan]

Pre-open tennis, especially during the 50’s & 60’s had a surreal air to it. Many thought the professionals were the “better” players but they were excluded from Majors.

Just a side note; the aging Pancho Gonzales came back to the pro tour in 1964 and bested Rod Laver in headtohead matches over the course of the year, he won more often than not over the 25/26 year old Laver who was 2 years in as a pro and 3 years removed from his Calender year Amateur Grand Slam.

Speaking of that Calender year Grand Slam in 1962, that year Ken Rosewall won 10 pro tournaments and by most pundits was the best male tennis player, but of course was excluded from playing Wimbledon, US champs, etc.

Even afterwards, it wasn’t until the late 80’s & early 90’s that all the top men figured it was imperative to play all the Majors. Andre Agassi ended up #3 for 1988 and “chose” not to play the AO or Wimbledon that year just because. (Didn’t play W for 3 straight years) The AO was on a Hardcourt yet Agassi a top 10 player opted not to play it from 1988 until 1995, a whopping 7 years. Can you imagine that happening today?

Federer, Nadal and Djokovic have played under the luxury that the Majors are their top focus and the ultimate barometer, so comparing Majors make sense for them but pre -Sampras all bets are off.

 

[monfed]

yea i mean who can go against the highly intelligent and mighty 'el dude'

no wonder this tennis forum hasn't grown...The Napoleonic complex is hard to miss, it's like one big circle jerk in here.

Anywho ontopic, it's between Fed and Laver as it's always been since the get go. For me it's Fed but then again I haven't lived through Laver's prime so I'm not qualified to assess him properly. I do think the grand slam is the greatest accomplishment in tennis and that was confirmed last week and the player who has it should automatically get GOAT status.

 

[Kieran]

I was thinking of Laver pro slams that he won wrong player of course Laver real slam court is about 20 because of his pro tour. Sill I would have Roy.emerson slams over most of Federer slams not saying his greater or anything.

But…all of Emersons slams were won against amateurs. The best players of the time were absent. There’s absolutely no way they can compare favourably against Federer’s achievements. This isn’t a subjective feeling I’ve got here, it’s a definite fact..

 

[Kieran]

IMO It’s tough to gauge Roy Emerson. He is a weird anomaly in more ways than one.

While I don’t disagree that Emerson’s 12 Majors are a bit suspect as a barometer of his greatness versus his contemporaries like Laver, Rosewall, etc at the same time you can't dismiss all his achievements outright. He won 10 straight Major finals an an Amateur from 63-67. In 1962 he lost 3 of 4 Major finals to Laver in Laver's first historic CYGS.

Emerson remained an amateur because apparently it was lucrative enough for him. Supposedly he was offered 100K to turn pro in ‘66 and famously replied he couldn’t afford the pay cut. OTOH, Laver who won the Grand Slam in 1962 was younger than Emerson and turned pro by 1963 so there is the counterargument that Emerson just didn't want to challenge himself versus the pros.

From most accounts I’ve read his salad days were 1963-66, so what if he had turned pro then? Who knows, I would imagine he might have been competitive with the likes of Laver, Rosewall, etc.

Even the argument that because after open tennis in 1968 he never won another Major his record is tainted doesn't quite pass muster. By 1968 he was 31, and if you look at the record of champs from the 60's and 70"s , Laver, Ashe, Stan Smith, Illie Nastase, all the way through to Borg and Jimmy Connors, most of them were done by age 31/32 as far as winning Majors. (Laver certainly was). The only exception was Ken Rosewall. So it's a bit unfair to say that he couldn't win because of open tennis, it was more that his peak years were behind him by 1968. (Laver won the CYGS in 1969 and never won another Major for the rest of his career)

The argument against Emerson is basically that the best players were the pros, and he won all his titles against the second best field. This was always shown to be the case, because when amateurs turned pro, generally they struggled at first and we can assume the same would be true of Emerson. There’s certainly nothing in his amateur record that suggests he was the greatest player in the world at the time, though I’m glad you pointed out the sham and hypocrisy of the amateur era, where dodgy payments were selectively made to try queer the pitch for the professionals.

This was Emerson’s gain financially, but became his loss when it comes to reckoning on his career, because he’s never been really included in the mix of truly great players, and I think that this is done for good reasons. I’m cutting the guy no slack!

Pre-open tennis, especially during the 50’s & 60’s had a surreal air to it. Many thought the professionals were the “better” players but they were excluded from Majors.

Just a side note; the aging Pancho Gonzales came back to the pro tour in 1964 and bested Rod Laver in headtohead matches over the course of the year, he won more often than not over the 25/26 year old Laver who was 2 years in as a pro and 3 years removed from his Calender year Amateur Grand Slam.

Speaking of that Calender year Grand Slam in 1962, that year Ken Rosewall won 10 pro tournaments and by most pundits was the best male tennis player, but of course was excluded from playing Wimbledon, US champs, etc.

Even afterwards, it wasn’t until the late 80’s & early 90’s that all the top men figured it was imperative to play all the Majors. Andre Agassi ended up #3 for 1988 and “chose” not to play the AO or Wimbledon that year just because. (Didn’t play W for 3 straight years) The AO was on a Hardcourt yet Agassi a top 10 player opted not to play it from 1988 until 1995, a whopping 7 years. Can you imagine that happening today?

Federer, Nadal and Djokovic have played under the luxury that the Majors are their top focus and the ultimate barometer, so comparing Majors make sense for them but pre -Sampras all bets are off.

I just bolded a bit there because the professionals being excluded from the slams meant that winning slams then wasn't a way of measuring greatness. It was a lovely achievement but really, in practical terms for the players, it was a way to leverage a better contract as a pro. When Lew Hoad chased the CYGS in 1956, he didn’t even know it was a thing. Only when Laver achieved it again in 1969, as a pro, was he considered to have done something so special. His amateur CYGS was a bargaining chip for the pros.

But yeah, it was a terrible thing, that the pros were excluded from the slams. They had their own pro slams but these were like imaginary slams, just other tournaments the pros played against each other, and never really attained the historic level of the traditional slams in people’s imagination.

The Australian Open almost ruined itself by scheduling its tournament for late December, which was the reason so many great players avoided it. Had they kept it in January, they all would have played because the CYGS was the ultimate in currency when it came to deciding greatness then. But for some foolish reason the Australians shifted their slam in the calendar and most players didn’t want to be travelling over Christmas. As soon as they moved it back to January, it was indispensable, but even before that in the early 80’s we see the roll of champs there improved.

Agassi was very unprofessional for certain stages of his career, and skipping slams was the ultimate in hubris or cowardice, both of which can be selectively applied to him. The worst offenders for skipping slams were the dirtballers who cited Lendl’s dodgy edict that “grass is for cows”, until he felt he really wanted Wimbledon and so then he began to skip the French instead.

But this shows that back then, The difference between clay and grass was much greater than it is now, in terms of difficulty. Bizarrely, it was Agassi who won both, and his style being the one which has endured into the new millennium, with great success.

I agree with your last paragraph but I’d even say that tennis in Pete’s day was a different sport to what it is now.

I love reading about the old days in tennis history, thanks for those posts!

Have you ever read Gordon Forbes A Handful of Summers?

 

[shawnbm]

Picking up on the above about Laver, we must recall three of the four majors were played on grass (Paris the exception) back then. So, I like having the three surfaces and would even prefer one be indoor hard. If three of the four were clay, Rafa would have thirty plus. Obviously, Roger would have won three out of four more years than he did and likely Novak too.

 

[Kieran]

Picking up on the above about Laver, we must recall three of the four majors were played on grass (Paris the exception) back then. So, I like having the three surfaces and would even prefer one be indoor hard. If three of the four were clay, Rafa would have thirty plus. Obviously, Roger would have won three out of four more years than he did and likely Novak too.

If even two slams were on clay, who knows what the totals might look like? The USO flirted with clay for two years in the mid-70's, and I often think of how unlucky it was for Borg in the late-70's when he peaked, an unparalleled 3 Channel Slams in a row, but the USO went to an alien surface, from his perspective, in 1978. Had it remained on clay, it's not difficult to imagine Bjorn heading even once on a long slow boat trip to Australia, to try complete his destiny.

But a slight caveat on the grass surfaces back then - they each had subtle differences, which were big enough to influence things. We saw Mats Wilander win 2 Australian Opens in 1983 and 1984 on grass, beating McEnroe in 4 sets in the 1983 semi, but we know that Mats never got beyond the quarters at Wimbledon, and John McEnroe is considered to be among the very best who ever played on grass. Its probably analogous to the difference between the HC at Melbourne, and NYC. It still favours HC players, but the differences are evident in the results..

 

[shawnbm]

Good points there Kieran. Slainte!

 

[Moxie]

Have you ever read Gordon Forbes A Handful of Summers?

Appreciated all the background in that post, Kieran. And I especially wanted to second your recommendation of that book. I read it years back when you suggested it. Funny, beautifully written (by an ex-player,) and has the loveliest title of a sports book ever.

 

[Kieran]

Appreciated all the background in that post, Kieran. And I especially wanted to second your recommendation of that book. I read it years back when you suggested it. Funny, beautifully written (by an ex-player,) and has the loveliest title of a sports book ever.

I never read his sequel did you? It's called, Too Soon To Panic, which is another great title...

 

[Moxie]

I never read his sequel did you? It's called, Too Soon To Panic, which is another great title...

I know of it, but I haven't. I do steal the phrase, though.

 

[Kieran]

I know of it, but I haven't. I do steal the phrase, though.

Oh I use it regularly, in vain...