Who's The Greatest Player To Date?

[Kirijax]

And what do we all say about Borg now? His place in history is not as high as it could have been. No one gives him bonus points for chucking it in early. Everyone applauds Connors for his longevity.. again.. I'm not understanding your point.

The way I see it tennis players, play for the love of the sport, they play because they know nothing they do afterwards is likely to compare. Why would you give up a sport early when less than handful of players on the planet are better than you. Not if you have a champions character and self belief

I agree with you on this, federberg. I don't see any benefit to "leaving on top," except that it leaves a good-looking corpse, as it were, and makes a good story. I don't seen anything that downgrades past accomplishments, even if the W-L percentage goes down a bit, which is an arcane statistic at best. As El Dude points out in discussing Connors, you can see the range of players across time that he played and beat. Obviously, Roger is still at the top of the game, so no need to get ahead of ourselves. And it's his records and amazing game that will be the top of the legacy, but longevity and consistency will be in there and count for something.

Well, put Moxie. That is one way to look at it! :clap

 

[GameSetAndMath]

The problem of how to deal with some players retiring early and some way too late, when assessing their greatness for the purposes of GOAT is nicely addressed in the article cited in the OP of the thread titled Another look at Most Dominant Player , where the notion of MDP (most dominant player) was defined to take the myth out of GOAT and make it a well defined notion.

p.s. The article is bit dated and so the data in it are not accurate as of today (but accurate at the time of the article); However, that does not change much of the conclusions reached in the article.

 

[isabelle]

Laver

 

[britbox]

Money has little to do with it at this point I WOULD HOPE! McEnroe and Connors could make money if they didn't mind getting embarrassed out on the court everyday! All athletes think they can still compete at the end, but sometimes someone needs to tell them to step down! The perfect scenario would have been in 2012, but getting back to #1 at the same time, it would have been ridiculous for Roget to retire, but when is the time? It's been 3 years since his last major; only playing in 3 finals in the last 4-5 years IIRC! I just don't want to see it get ugly like it is now with Rafa! :cover :angel: :dodgy:

I'm sorry but this makes absolutely no sense. For goodness sakes the guy is ranked number 2 in the world!! If he was outside of the top 10 I might get it.

Are you saying that Rafa should pack it in then? That is NOT what champions do

Based on Fiero's take, you'd suspect Federer and Nadal were reduced to playing challengers in Siberia.

Federer's still #2 and Nadal is realistically still top 5 despite the rankings. Be careful what you wish for Fiero old pal... who exactly is going to fill the void. Both players still have much to offer with or without grand slam winning tennis.

 

[Obsi]

One factor, often overlooked in the last decade, is the number of years being true No. 1. Pancho Gonzales has beem the real number one EIGHT times.