The Best Ever…or the Best So Far? …The pitfalls of a rush to judgment

I did get up (actually I also stayed up all night waiting for it to begin) for every stroke of that amazing battle between the two most dogged and fit competitors in today’s men’s tennis. I was rooting for the Djoker all the way, not because I dislike the dynamic Rafa (the great tennis writer Mike Mewshaw describes him perceptively as “part bull, part bull fighter”)…but yet I cheered against him because I respect Roger and his approach to the game so much. Therefore it is important to my sense of the history of the game for Novak to maintain his recent mastery of Rafa, and the Serb was clearly the superior player for the middle three sets of that memorable marathon, even though he let the fourth one slip through his fingers in the face of a typical Rafa force-of-will tsunami at 3-4, love forty.  And Nole proved something very telling and lasting with his performance in the final three games of the fifth set. That phenomenal burst of tennis courage and flawless execution was one of the great achievements under duress in the history of any sport.  There were so few easy points given throughout the grueling night of withering competition, that neither man had time to catch his breath. It was the stuff of legends. The disparity in break points earned between the two (a ratio of about 3:1) showed how thoroughly Djokovic controlled the match.  It was wonderful theater that it lasted six hours and the situation forced both men to summon up ungodly reserves of strength and stamina, but realistically the match should have been over in 4 1/2 hours in four sets.
My motivation to root against the admirable Spaniard is to completely silence those experts who were beginning to intone, far too stridently for my taste, that “Rafa is the best of all time!”, pointing primarily to his impressive 18-9 lifetime dominance over Federer…mostly earned on clay (12-2) and all but one of the clay contests played before Roger’s recent quantum improvements in his game.  If Rafa could possibly be elevated at age 25 to “the best of all time”, such a king of the court would never, at the very zenith of his career, lose seven consecutive finals (including three majors on three different continents) to the same person.  But Rafa just did exactly that, a skein of painful defeats 11 months long, when Djokovic collapsed in exhausted ecstasy at the conclusion of Sunday’s epic in Melbourne!  Rafa and Novak are just one year apart, so there is no generational explanation involved.  In like manner, it is not a matter of crowning Novak as the “best ever”, of course, though some purveyors of instant hyperbole were quick to leap to that naive conclusion.  The best ever? At least not yet, and probably never.  He is a great but narrow player. And the way Murray played him in the semis plus the way Roger’s brilliant and improved game gives Djokovic fits, Novak is not a lock to waltz through Wimbledon and the US Open this year to duplicate the feat he achieved in 2011.  It is a matter of match-ups and surfaces and draws and weather and injuries and intangibles such as motivation.  Even then, the differences among the Top Four have become infinitesmal…with key points in their matches often decided by excruciating optical replays down to the millimeter.
Roger is sadly, I must admit, not able to claim the informal title as the best player of all time, although I love his game the best of anyone I have watched (on TV exclusively) in the modern era.  The difference is in the ability to play those crucial points with even more courage and skill than a player puts into the rest of the match.  And Roger is not as much of a street fighter at those moments as he should be.  If he had the same determination and nerves of steel that Rafa and Novak showed the world on Sunday (that same kind single-minded determination to win at any cost that Connors and Lendl and the mature Agassi had), Roger would have beaten Del Potro in the Open two years ago, he would have won one of the three match points on his own lethal serve against Djokovic in those two huge losses of nerve recently, and he would have won one or two of the French Open finals he lost against Nadal including last year’s, where Roger played so loose on the numerous break points he worked so hard to achieve…but that’s when Nadal dug in so tough, like a Japanese soldier in a cave on Iwo Jima, fighting to the death for the Emperor.
Yes, any talk of Djokovic as the “best” ever is hopelessly premature…and unrealistic.  Though the Melbourne final was extraordinarily gripping, I found myself becoming more and more frustrated by the tedious game-plan Novak executed…one that shows his tactical limitations.  He would pound relentless ground strokes into the deep corners, forcing Nadal to float back defensive slices on so many occasions from twelve feet behind the baseline.  But inexplicably to me as a tennis purist who loves to see the all-court game played to perfection, Novak would sit back and allow time for Rafa to regroup and then the superhuman Serb would launch another rocket to the other corner, or behind Nadal, ad nauseam.  A true all-court genius would win the point far sooner and at far lesser risk than the Djoker expended.  Could you imagine what Boris Becker or Rod Laver or Stefan Edberg or Pat Rafter or Pete Sampras or Johnnie Mac or any other great volleyer would have done with those skidding, stretched defensive digs by the preternaturally athletic Nadal?  They would have been all over the net in a heartbeat, slashing utter putaways, if they had the brutal power that Novak possesses to drive the ball with insane pace from almost any court position to set up such anemic returns.  This is no small task, for the ripped and lightning-quick Nadal is the most deadly and indefatigable counterpuncher in memory, as he channels Connors and Agassi in the way he only he can to whip winners from well behind the baseline unless he is etended to his limits on a fast court.
I can imagine that within fifteen years there will emerge a crop of players, perhaps from some unexpected region of the world, who will have developed the complete baseline game of Djokovic…coupled with a far better and more accurate serve ala Federer but with Roddick-ulous pace; a volley as laser-like as those of Sampras or Roche or Laver; a choice of one or two-handed backhands on any shot, perhaps even a two-hand forehand; maybe 140 mph first and second serves of equal speed and accuracy; speed and quickness directionally even more blinding than the top four men now display; height of 6’5″ or above like Del Potro but quicker afoot; a variety of wicked chops and screeching slices and heavy Nadalian topspin to confound their opponents and prevent anyone from grooving on their waist-high ground strokes; a deft touch ala Nastase or Murray with the drop shot and lob and an overhead like Pete’s to prevent their counterpunching opponent from just living behind the baseline…and then we might live to see the best player ever. At least up to that point in time. For as Loren Huxley once wrote about evolution, “There are still things coming ashore.”
The so-called “best player of all time” is always an amalgam of what we have seen or at least imagined in the past.  That is true in any sport.   So an Elgin Baylor morphs into a Julius Erving who gives way to a Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant at least makes an effort to surpass that seemingly unreachable standard…but he doesn’t quite get there, in spite of his one-on-one wizardry.  Perhaps the player who ultimately passes MJ will be blessed with a body like LeBron’s, the strength of Wilt Chamberlain, the leaping ability of a David Thompson or Dwight Howard, the competitive desire of a Bill Russell, but the unyielding and hitherto ummatched creativity and intensity of a Jordan, as well as the guile and touch of a Larry Bird, and the ball-passing genius of a Magic or a Stockton.
Of all the people I have watched play tennis from Gonzalez and Seixas in the early fifties to date, Roger, even with all his flaws in tight matches on big points, has come the closest to mastering all the shots and angles and possibilities inherent in the game.  If he had the kind of superhuman focus that Nadal and Djokovic have manifested, Roger would have more than twenty grand slams in his pocket right now.  But even with sixteen, a total more than any other man has ever won (although Laver probably would have done so in a less competitive era), he has a record of dominance at his competitive peak that is unprecedented among the men…and a five year span of incredible wins at the pinnacle of his career (2004-2008) that neither Rafa nor Djokovic is likely to approach.  Rafa has held the French trophy forever but for one slip-up against Soderling, and one Wimbledon was among the remarkable wins he scored in 2010, Fed’s most recent year at the top of the ladder.  Novak had the amazing run in 2011. But there is no certainty moving forward in spite of his gutty triumph down under.  Nadal is still the #1 seed at the French and any other clay tournament, whether the officials on the committee agree or not.  That is the perfect surface for him, for it slows down the greater serves and flatter ground strokes of the greatest all-court players, even as it robs them of their chances to come to commanding positions at the T or all the way to net against his fusillade of vicious passing shots.  And he can use his peerless topspin almost as a trick shot to kick up above the shoulders of his opponents.
Surely Roger’s game matches up far better with Djokovic than does Nadal’s.  Roger does not wait for Djokovic to get into that demonic corner-to-corner rhythm that he does even better than Agassi, the quintessential “punisher”, ever did.  Roger beat Djoker solidly at the French, and was an inch away from winning from the Djoker at the US Open.  And with Murray coming on, I do not expect any one of the Big Four to win more than one of the three remaining grand slam titles this year. Much depends on whether the All-England Club continues to ruin Wimbledon by turning it into an ugly, worn out, hard dirt court that plays like a high-bouncing cement surface without a skid.  Those high bounces play right into the hands of the extreme topspinners with way-beyond-Western grips like Nadal, and hurt Federer’s elegant but difficult to hit one-handed backhand.  But real grass, with the low bounces and the natural slippery qualities that enable players to skid the serves and booming forehands through the court, are right up Fed’s alley, so to speak.  Or Andy Murray’s cup of bitter British tea.  Djokovic would of course be favored at the US Open, but either Fed or Murray, and even Rafa on an errorless day, would have a good shot to knock him off there as well.  However, I promised my friends I would give up on the fool’s game of prediction, so please ignore all of what I have written.  I know, you have always ignored my predictions, so I think I doth protest too much!
The Australian Open proved that we now have a legitimate Big Four at the top of the game. I never feared Murray before, but his new coach Ivan Lendl has apparently instilled in him the intensity to stick with his game plan and control his primal yawps and self-destructive juvenile stalking fits.  The key thing for Fed or Murray to avoid is getting into a baseline duel with either one of the robotic corner-blasting ground-stroking pit bulls who hold the top two slots in the rankings.  The all-court players have to do anything possible in and around that 27×78-foot rectangle to mix things up and shorten the court in order to disrupt the terminator-like rhythms of the two mesomorphs:  slices, short chops, body serves, variety of slice and kick serves, flying saucer serves (seriously!), Mansour Bahrami-like deceptions, serve and volley often but randomly interspersed, half-volleying the serve returns, unpredictable changes in depth and spins and pace, etc.  If it becomes a battle of blasters for ten or more shots per rally, the edge swings inexorably to the two tireless athletes with the more programmed strokes.
It should be an interesting year.  Go Roger! And please, let me hear no more talk of who in any sport is the “best ever.” In tennis the discussion and judgments are moot because the racquets, string, training, size and strength of the competitors, sweet spots, money, coaching, and so many other factors have changed so radically that is renders absurd any meaningful comparisons over different eras. Give Nadal and Djokovic mint condition Wilson Jack Kramer wooden sticks from the fifties, strung with nylon or synthetic gut, and watch what would happen to their shots….and very quickly to their racquets, in a matter of a few savage super-topspin drives.  All of a sudden, as they realize how tough it is to hit near an elusive spot on the heart of a heavy wooden club, and the frame splinters and the spongy strings snap, their respect for Tilden and Budge and Laver should take a quantum leap. The players of the modern era are so much taller and stronger than the earlier generations. The racquets and strings so much lighter, stronger, and more forgiving of off-center contact that all sorts of unprecedented pace and spins are attainable today that would have been unthinkable in the prior era. So more so than in sports that have evolved somewhat more slowly such as football and basketball and baseball, comparisons of talents across vast stretches of time are rendered almost meaningless. Tilden was a great player for his era. Peerless, relatively tall for the times, incredibly skilled in his shotmaking and strategic abilities… but no statistics nor trophy counts nor grainy footage from the old days ninety years ago can provide a clue as to how great he would be with today’s equipment, strings, training methods, coaching, etc.
I often expand my thinking about the “best ever” to other arenas of human endeavor. In the arts, the yardstick is more subjective than in statistics-obsessed sporting venues, but true genius can be recognized by the intensity of the human reaction to the enduring works such people have created. A work of art can stand on its own without any asterisks for the level of competition the artist faced. The measure of an athlete, whether it be a Nicklaus or a Woods, or a Federer versus a Sampras, is always locked into the specific short-term period, rarely overlapping, when they were at the top of their game. But art is potentially eternal…or as close to that ideal as one can imagine in a world that is so fragile and finite. A second Great Dying, similar to the Permian-Triassic cataclysm 252 million years ago that destroyed 96% of oceanic species and 70% of the vertebrate species, and the delete/total reset button will have been pushed on all that humanity has ever achieved…unless by then mankind has gone out to colonize other possibly safer planets or satellites or built permanent etra-terrestrial stations. And these things need not come slowly. The extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was probably also caused by the impact of a huge asteroid. And we all know this will happen again. It is just a matter of time and blind luck. And at this point in human history, there is no defense against it and no escape from it. By the year 2100, homo sapiens may become immortal.
Regarding our homocentric conceit of the anointing of the “Best Ever”, In some cases, I cannot imagine anyone going beyond a few of the earlier masters: Will anyone ever surpass Shakespeare’s prolific and incalculable contributions to the English language, the exploration of the human soul, and the world of drama? After four centuries, I doubt anyone has even come close. Will Tennessee Williams be taught and enjoyed and appreciated all over the planet and solar system in the year 3000? No way. But Shakespeare’s tragedies surely will be. (Okay, this is a little unfair to Sophocles, for 93 of his 100 plays were wiped out…and even the seven that survived give him a claim to the title, even though they were Greek to me!) Will anyone ever write operatic arias that touch the human heart as deeply as the lifetime work of Puccini in the nineteenth century? If you suggest Andrew Lloyd Webber, give me a break. And will anyone ever take a gigantic hunk or marble and sculpt it into anything as magnificent as what Michelangelo created six centuries ago? The Greeks and Bernini and Rodin had their moments, but tell me exactly what you would place ahead of the David and the Pieta? A plastic “Kiss” on the dashboard?
We could go on with this ad nauseam, into the realms of classical music and painting and other genres. But the main point is unmistakable: The “best ever” is a hyperbolic term we should use with great care. And perhaps we would be wiser to change our myopic expression from “the best ever”, at least from our Anglocentric vantage point, to the far more prudent and humble expression, “the best so far.” Or even the “best so far that we have heard of.” Meanwhile, let’s leave it to others to debate whether Steve Jobs exceeded Thomas Edison as the inventor who changed our lives more significantly; whether Thomas Jefferson was a greater influence on democracy than Plato; and whether Albert Einstein surpassed Sir Isaac Newton in explaining the fundamental laws of motion and energy and matter across the universe. Maybe this is some of the best food for thought…so far.

RVT