What's your number?
Grand slams determine tennis greatness — but it wasn’t always this way
Tennis is a sport of binaries: the ball is either in or out. This confers some obvious advantages. Umpires have to make fewer judgement calls1, while fans are spared the tedious debates over whether a particular penalty area incident was handball or ball-to-hand.
But the sport’s love of metrics — which extends to rankings, seedings and prize money — has curdled into something cruder, flattening entire career arcs and reducing greatness to a single, unforgiving question: how many grand slams2 did you win? And the weird thing is, it wasn’t always this way.
Slam Dunk (Da Funk)
To see how obsessed we’ve become, look no further than Sunday’s Australian Open men’s final, in which world number one Carlos Alcaraz defeated Novak Djokovic. The commentary, both prior to and after the match, was largely centred on what it meant in terms of the grand slam rankings.
To be fair, history was on the line. By winning, Alcaraz secured his seventh major title and in doing so, became the youngest man3 to complete the career Grand Slam. Djokovic, meanwhile, was aiming to become the oldest ever player to win a singles major, and a record-extending 25th title.
So as soon as Alcaraz fell to the ground in ecstasy, the recalibrations commenced. The Spaniard had now won as many major titles as all-time greats such as John McEnroe and Mats Wilander, more than Stefan Edberg and Boris Becker, and just one behind Jimmy Connors, Ivan Lendl and Andre Agassi. All by the age of… 22.
But there’s a problem, alluded to above. What we value above all else today — the number of major titles — wasn’t always the sole metric of success. Indeed, there was a time not all that long ago when some regular tour events and even team competitions were deemed equally important. The players were not living under some sort of false consciousness, just the 1970s.
