We hear this phrase often, yet it always seems to be forgotten whenever we try to stack the sport’s greatest players up against each other. Typically, we see these legends ranked in order of their career accomplishments—how many major titles they won, how many weeks they spent at the top, how dominant they were at their best. That’s fine; if you’re creating a ranking list in which none of the players face each other, all you can do is tally up their statistics.
But as anyone who has ever picked up a racquet knows, tennis is not about accumulating stats. It’s not like professional golf, where players face a course, rather than each other, and the person with the lowest score wins. In tennis, you can’t just play well and let the quality of your shots carry you to victory. You must beat a living, breathing opponent who’s trying to do the same thing to you. That’s an entirely different ball game psychologically, and it’s this element of hand-to-hand combat that gives tennis its underlying edge of viciousness. The best players aren’t always the smoothest or prettiest hitters; they’re the ones who, when all is said and done, know how to make their opponents lose.
So we thought that, for TENNIS Magazine’s 50th Anniversary, rather than simply ranking the greats of the last 50 years, we would do our best to recreate the conditions under which they played. To that end, we’ve put together a Tournament of Champions. Entered are the 32 men (see bracket here)and 32 women (see bracket here)who have won the most Grand Slam singles titles, and at least one since 1965, the year TENNIS Magazine was founded. (The champions who won their Slams before ’65, from Suzanne Lenglen to Bill Tilden to Althea Gibson to Lew Hoad, aren’t included. These draws cover the TENNIS Magazine era, not the history of tennis as a whole.) They were then seeded by the number of career Grand Slam singles titles they won, as of December 2014. Ties were decided by a random draw.
