The greatest tennis player of all time - Part V

In preparation for this week's Miami Master Series, the likes of Nadal, Djokovic and Federer are playing at full steam once again to pave the route for what may be another tense year of rivalries and breath taking confrontations between the three major dominant players in the tour. This brings me to today's entry: How close are other players of being as dominant as the likes of Sampras, Laver, Gonzales and of course Federer and Nadal themselves?

At this point we have talked about the different accomplishments and feats all these legends have achieved through the course of their career, and how unique each of these records are, distinct and different from each other, increasing the degree of unfairness of picking one tennis legend over another. Bjorn Borg is a no-brainer example of this, as the swede retired from tennis at the young age of 25 years old, having conquered eleven grand slam titles: five straight Wimbledon titles and six Roland Garros crowns. The real fascinating statement of Borg's greatness comes when you compare what he did against the other tennis players I have nominated in my GOTA blogs.

Let's see how many slams did other tennis players had at age 25:

Roger Federer had seven
Pete Sampras had eight
Rod Laver had six
Pancho Gonzales had three
John McEnroe had seven
Ivan Lendl had two
Roy Emerson had four
Only Rafa Nadal comes close with ten titles before the quarter of a century.

Keep in mind Borg had won 11 slams without competing in Australia, so while all the others had played around 28-35 Grand Slam events before the age of 25, Borg had only played in 20.

Another example I like to bring to the GOTA discussion is one of my favorite players, John McEnroe. The guy looked like anything like a tennis player. He didn't even have nice, elegant strokes. He didn't even train regularly like his peers. Instead, he relied on playing doubles to train his singles performance. Well, let's not say "relied on playing doubles"; let's go with becoming the greatest doubles tennis player of all time. No other tennis player has come close to matching John's 77 titles in singles, plus another 70 in doubles.

John also helped the US to win five Davis Cup trophies, and he amassed one of the greatest tennis seasons of all time with a whooping 82-3 record. Ironically, like his nemesis Borg, John also went a little away from tennis too early at 26 and started to lose his winning way at a young age. In my mind, if there is a guy who dominated the tennis scene as a whole (Singles AND Doubles), the pick is a no-brainier obvious choice and it's John McEnroe.

So let's kind of create a summary of what we have so far and see if we can come up with a reasonable answer in the next entries. My candidates include: