To celebrate TENNIS Magazine’s 40th anniversary, we’ve chosen the 40 best players of the last four decades. Here are numbers 32 through 29.

32. Tracy Austin
Photo by Michael Cole/Getty Images

Tracy Austin appeared on the cover of World Tennis at age 4. At 16, she earned almost half a million dollars on tour—while still collecting an allowance of a buck a week from her dad. By the end of her truncated career, she had provided the sport with a definition of the word “prodigy.”

The youngest of a tennis-mad California clan, Austin wore pigtails as a pro, but her blond locks, two-fisted backhand, and steely nerves led many to dub her a Chris Evert clone. In truth, she was feistier and more aggressive, unnerving her role model and, for a period, everyone else in women’s tennis. Austin was 14 when she first locked backhands with Evert, at Wimbledon in 1977. Evert steamrolled her that day, but it didn’t take Austin long to exact revenge.

On a rampage in 1979, she snapped Evert’s famous 125-match clay-court win streak and won her first major at the U.S. Open, ending Evert’s four-year reign in New York. In 1980, Austin became the only woman to wrest the top ranking away from Evert or Martina Navratilova between 1975 and 1987.

Austin’s career could easily be summed up with the phrase “youngest ever.” She’s still the youngest woman to win a professional title (14 years old) and a U.S. Open title (16), and she was the youngest to become No. 1 (17) until Monica Seles outdid her in 1991. Sadly, Austin was also among the youngest champions to retire. A lower-back injury effectively ended her career when she was 20. Her star burned for just six seasons, but it burned with an intensity rarely seen before or since. — PETER BODO  

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS:
> 1979 and ’81 U.S. Open titles
> Spent 22 weeks at No. 1
> Youngest to make International Tennis Hall of Fame, at 29  

31. Justine Henin-Hardenne
Photo by Michael Cole/Getty Images
 
Celine Dion is one of her favorite singers, but don’t let that fool you. Pound for pound, the 5-foot-6 Justine Henin-Hardenne is more hard rock than easy listening. Oh, early in her career people called Henin-Hardenne mentally fragile, a choker, you name it. But the lithe native of Belgium adopted a grueling fitness regimen that fueled her confidence and put the final touch on her transformation into one of the toughest competitors since Jimmy Connors.

Henin-Hardenne showed her moxie at the 2003 U.S. Open. In the semifinals, she battled Jennifer Capriati for 3-plus hours before winning 7-6 (4) in the third. Less than 24 hours and one IV drip later, she returned to Arthur Ashe Stadium looking fresh, and beat her compatriot Kim Clijsters for the title.

But it would be a mistake to think of Henin-Hardenne as just a gutsy fighter. She’s also an artist on the court: Her footwork is balletic and fluid, her inside-out forehand is as potent as any woman’s, and no less an authority than John McEnroe has called her backhand the best in the business. That combination of killer instinct and beautiful shot-making is what sets Henin- Hardenne apart. —JAMES MARTIN  

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS:
> 2003 Roland Garros, ’03 U.S. Open, and ’04 Australian Open titles
> No. 1 in 2003 > Reached 7,626 WTA ranking points in March 2004, a record  

30. Arthur Ashe
Photo by Jean-Loup Gautreau/Getty Images

It’s easy to take the measure of Arthur Ashe: He was the tennis player who mattered. The images of his big serve, his whiplash backhand, and that silver canoe-paddle racquet are growing faint, and even the highlights of his shocking win over Jimmy Connors in the 1975 Wimbledon final look a little dated. But the one part of Ashe’s career that isn’t fading is his legacy.

Born in July 1943 in Richmond, Va., Ashe suffered a heart attack in 1979, contracted HIV through a blood transfusion in 1988, and died of AIDS in February 1993. At a time when athletes were increasingly self-centered, he set a new standard for the sportsman as role model. He was a latter-day Virginia Gentleman—an exemplary sport, a social and civil rights activist, a scholar, and an author. And he made it seem that he was all those things partly because he was a tennis player, rather than in spite of it.

Ashe represented a breed of tennis pro that has since become extinct. He graduated from college (UCLA), served in the Army, and dropped everything when Davis Cup duty called. Straddling tennis eras, he won the U.S. amateur and open championships just weeks apart in 1968, Year One of Open tennis. He also won 27 Davis Cup singles matches, but the capstone of his career was the 1975 Wimbledon final, a strategic masterpiece in which he upset the heavily favored world No. 1, Connors.  — PETER BODO  

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS:
> 1968 U.S. Open, ’70 Australian Open, and ’75 Wimbledon titles
> In 1975, won eight tournaments and was ranked No. 1 by the USTA 

29. Lindsay Davenport
Photo by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images
 
There’s never been anything historic about Lindsay Davenport. She hasn’t racked up lots of major titles or brought new fans to the game. To the general public, she may end up as a footnote to a WTA era notable for its controversial media darlings. But while the gawky California girl isn’t a subject for Us Weekly, she’s firmly lodged in the sport’s record books, where it’s clear that she has the two defining characteristics of a great champion: the focus to win week after week and the ability to rise to the dramatic occasion.

Coming into 2005, Davenport had reached the fourth round or better in 24 of her last 25 majors. But she’ll make the Hall of Fame because of how she’s gone toe-totoe with the game’s legends on its biggest stages. Davenport has 14 wins over No. 1 players, second only to Martina Navratilova. That fearlessness was on display in the 1999 Wimbledon final, where she met a sentimental favorite, 30-year-old Steffi Graf. Davenport, unfazed, outhit one of tennis’ strongest players and sent her into retirement.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise, because few can slug with Davenport. Her other signature characteristic is the wallop of her ground strokes—she doesn’t just make clean contact, she makes heavy contact. The players who followed Davenport down the path to today’s power game can attest that her contribution to women’s tennis was, if unpublicized, historic in its own right. —STEPHEN TIGNOR  

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS:
> 1998 U.S. Open, ’99 Wimbledon, ’00 Australian Open titles
> One of five women to be ranked No. 1 in singles and doubles simultaneously