Wimbledon 2013 Notes
Yesterday was, by far, the weirdest day of grand slam tennis I’ve ever seen. Injuries, walk-throughs, Federer out in the 2nd round. Maybe the craziest stat of the day: Seven players who have held the #1 ranking–seven of them!–lost in one day. That’s nuts.
Looking at the draws the rest of the way in, Djokovic and Serena are obviously the favorites. But one quick thought about Serena:
Win or lose, she’s top three women ever, right? Court, Graf, and no one else is close. One of the remarkable aspects of her career is that she was dominant both early and late.
But I wonder about this late-stage dominance. A lot of it is Serena, of course. She rebuilt her body and decided to take tennis seriously again. Yet at least part of this story is the total implosion of the generation of tennis players behind her.
Serena was born in 1981 and didn’t become a dominant singles player She succeeded a generation of top women including Lindsay Davenport (1976), Mary Pierce (1975), Jennifer Capriati (1976). All of them won majors. Serena’s own generation includes her sister Venus, Kim Clijsters (1983), Justine Henin (1982), and Martina Hingis (1980). This is probably the Greatest Generation of women’s tennis because it features four players who were legitimate, long-time #1s with multiple majors. It’s an unbelievably loaded cohort. And interestingly enough, Serena didn’t fully dominate them until most of them had cleared the field.
Look at the list of women’s major champions and you see generational waves coming in every seven years or so. But that never really happened for the group of players that came after Serena’s generation. You have Maria Sharapova (1987) and Victoria Azarenka (1989) as multiple major winners. But that’s it. Ana Ivanovic (1987) won one French. Petra Kvitova (1990) picked up one Wimbledon. (Most of the freak, one-off winners, they’ve come from Serena’s generation with wins from journeyman such as Fancesca Schiavone, Li Na, or Samantha Stosur.) No other women born after 1987 have won majors. No woman born after 1990 has won one. Heck, only one woman in today’s top 25 was born after 1990.
That’s amazing.
The crop of women tennis players born after 1983 has been an incredible bust (with the sole exception of Sharapova). The failure of the generation of players including Wozniacki, Radwanska, Kirilenko, Cibulkova, Radwanska, etc. is, to my mind one of the great untold stories of tennis. And you can’t really talk about Serena’s late-career success without taking account of it.
