The greatest tennis player of all time - Part III

The Rocket

Back in the 60s -well actually before 1968- professional tennis players couldn't compete in Grand Slam events. Professional tennis players would engage in a tour with several other tournaments without having the privilege of playing in the really big ones. However this little setback didn't prevent Rod Laver, a sharp and quick Australian known as "The Rocket", winning a total of eleven Grand Slams, eight of those hold a special distinction.

In 1962, when Rod Laver was still an amateur tennis player, he had nothing better to do in his agenda than to win all four Grand Slams. When he became a pro he couldn't compete again, so a lot of sources agree on the fact that he probably missed winning at least four or five more slams. Fortunately for him and like I mentioned before, the pro ban was lifted in 1968, so the following year -1969- Laver decided enough was enough and he once again repeated his achievement of winning all four slams during the same year.

Let's put this into perspective: out of Laver's 11 Slams, eight were won twice during the same year. Also, since turning pro, Laver also missed competing in about sixteen of those events. He became a dominant professional player around 1965 and held on to that spot for about four or five more years, so I think it is not a bold assumption to speculate that he may have won four more slams, maybe five or six, which would have brought his total to equal Federer's 16. However there is another consideration we have to make that some people miss. What if Grand Slam tournments would have allowed pros to play from the beginning: would have Laver still won those four titles in 1962 competing against pros? That would bring down the total from 16 to 12 or back to 11 again. Then we have to throw in the extra ingredient: back in the day, all Grand Slams except for Paris were played in grass, Laver's favorite surface. Would he have faced the same fate under today's condition? Well, I think that after winning Paris twice, he wouldn't have had a problem. We can spend all day dreaming about this scenario, but the reality is that none of them  happen.

The only other tennis player who has won all four Grand Slams in the same year

What we have is the fact that Laver won eleven grand slams, four of them in the same calendar year 1962, and he repeated that in 1969. Do you know how many tennis players have been able to achieve that? None. Don Budge is the only other tennis player who won four grand slams in the same year in 1938, but that's it, he didn't do it twice. Nobody else has done it... once or twice. Jimmy Connors came close but couldn't, Roger Federer came close but couldn't, Mats Wilander couldn't, and more recently Rafael Nadal in 2010 and Novak Djokovic last year couldn't. All of those men won three grand slams the same year in the open era.

Novak Djokovic wants to win Roland Garros in 2012. Will he also want to win the other two slams?

Moreover, there hasn't been a tennis player who has actually held all four grand slam titles at the same time -meaning say, he won the last two of a year and the first two of next year-. Rafa Nadal came close of doing so but couldn't when he lost at Australia, missing the chance of the "Rafa-Slam." Novak will have the chance of becoming the first in completing a "Novak-slam" if he wins this year's Roland Garros; still he would have to win Wimbledon and the US Open to equal Laver's achievement of winning all four the same year.

So let's talk about what Laver did against what he couldn't do. How can one balance which achievement is better or harder. Laver's four Grand Slams in the same year... twice? against Roger's total of sixteen Slams, against Pete ending as #1 player for six years in a row. The way I see it, it's impossible to come up with an answer. Think about it this way: it's hard already to win a Grand Slam, yet two, what about three? or.. anything above ten?  What about becoming #1 player in the world? Out of the tens of thousands of tennis players that have graced the ATP Tour, how many were ranked in the top spot? Less than twenty?

And yet we haven't discussed about the guy in the picture from my previous blog who is also worth mentioning in this conversation.

The man many referred as "God patrolling his personal heaven"