In bombing around the internet following the great cheating scandal in chess, I fell upon an interview with Garry Kasparov which I'd loved when it came out first. The interviewer is Lex Fridman, whose podcast is really worth checking out. But the topic here is what Garry thinks of Magnus Carlsen, and it segues into inevitable comparison territory. Kasparav is really interesting in this, but where I think he's relevant to what we're discussing here is around the 3 minute mark, when he discusses comparisons in other sports across lengthy time spans, and he says a really true and interesting thing: that Garry Kasparov at his best, in 1989, wouldn't compare with Magnus of 2019 because Magnus just knows so much more, that chess knowledge has accumulated in the meantime since 1989 - but if you equipped Kasparov of 1989 with that same knowledge, he would no longer be Garry Kasparov, he'd be someone else.
It's worth a listen, takes only about 3 minutes:
I like Lex Fridman, first saw him on Joe Rogan, I believe. He's sort of "Rogan for Nerds" ;-).
Anyhow, it is a good point and well explained - something we've talked a lot about on this forum over the years, in different ways. I've often said that while you can't easily judge, say, Federer vs Laver on raw statistics, you can also look at
comparative dominance - that is, how dominant each player was during the time they played. But even that is fraught with problems and has no clear formula or way to get around the intangible, historical and contextual issues.
Of course this may be a bit too subtle for those who only look at raw GS totals. I mean, stats are funny like that - and people assign importance to specific numbers, or leading the field. Right now, in baseball, Albert Pujols is closing in on 700 HR -- he's at 698 now, and has said he's retiring at the end of this year. He'd be only the fourth player in baseball history to reach 700 (along with Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron, and Babe Ruth). But is his career lesser if he only gets 699? Of course not. "700" is just a nice number to look at. And is he a lesser player than those who have more HR? Well, we need more info: we need to look at his batting average, his on-base percentage, WAR, etc, and also understand the context in which these guys played. But home runs are sexy, so a lot of emphasis is put on them, maybe more than they deserve.
Similarly with the Big Three and their final Slam counts. Ultimately it just comes down to bragging rights. They're all at 20+, which is 6 more than anyone else during the Open Era. They're all among the very best players to ever play the sport. But not only is there the fact that Slams aren't everything (e.g. was Jan Kodes as good as Andy Murray? Was Wilander greater than Edberg or Becker? Etc), so we have to look at a player's total resume, but even then we get into the problems of context that Kasparov is talking about. Kieran, you like to cite Borg and his "mere" 11 Slams as an example of this.
This is not to say that Nadal or Djokovic shouldn't be excited to end with the most Slam titles, or shouldn't be lauded for it. But given the complexity of the matter--and questions that are probably forever unanswerable--in the end, it mostly boils down to bragging rights. The three of them have already set themselves apart from every other player in tennis history, with the possible exception of Rod Laver.
I will say, though, that the three together and as individuals have been as dominant as anyone that I've seen, and from what I grasp of tennis history; and what sets them apart from players like Sampras and Borg, is that they did it for a longer period of time and across the entire sport. As I said earlier, all of them did what Sampras didn't do: came back from what looked like a winding down and imminent retirement, and returned to the top of the sport. And even that Rafa was far weaker on grass and Roger far weaker on clay than the other two, they both became elite players on their "weak" surface, even if only for part of their careers. Again, something Sampras (for instance) didn't do.
So they have clearly set the new bar for inner circle greatness, at least in the Open Era, and young players will be inspired by and modeling themselves after them for decades to come.
