Preamble
While I’ve followed tennis in a very casual way going back to vague memories of Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, it is only in the last half decade or so that I’ve become a serious fan. I mark the beginning of my interest in tennis back to a vague memory of liking Bjorn Borg and disliking this new young upstart named John McEnroe who seemed to have his number. While I was only around seven years old at the time and cannot pinpoint the exact date, I imagine that this was due to either of McEnroe’s defeats of Borg at Wimbledon or the US Open in 1981. My favorite players in the 1980s and 90s were Ivan Lendl, Stefan Edberg, and Pete Sampras; I remember enjoying Edberg’s defeat of Jim Courier in the 1991 US Open, memorable because my friend and classmate (this was senior year in high school) had played with Courier and was cheering for the American.
My tennis fandom remained casual until just a few short years ago. There isn’t an exact moment when I went from “casual” to “serious” fan, as it was a gradual transition over a year or two, but it happened sometime in the 2008 to 2011 range. While I had been a (casual) fan of Roger Federer, my all-time favorite player, since early on, it is interesting (for me, at least) to consider that during my tenure as a diehard tennis fan—someone who follows all of the big tournaments and some of the smaller ones—I have only really truly loved the game while my favorite player has been past his highest peak. In fact, it could be the legendary 2008 Wimbledon final that drew me into a greater interest in the sport, the match that saw the baton of greatest player passed from Roger to Rafa. So I cannot be accused of being a fair weather fan!
Anyhow, the reason I offer an overview of my tennis biography is to lay the groundwork for what is to follow – to provide context and perhaps a sense of why I am writing what I’m writing, and why I write this blog at all, for that matter. It is simply this: I write these articles to share my own learning experience. I am very curious and autodidactic by nature and because I’ve only followed tennis closely for about half a decade, I am constantly researching this or that tidbit from the past. In a way I’m both trying to fill in my own limited (but growing) knowledge of the sport’s history, but also enjoy taking variant angles using statistical analysis to better understand the game. This blog is my sharing my journey with you, the reader.
And now for the caveat: I am not a tennis player, not an expert on the game itself or its history. I am, first and foremost, a fan of the game. None of these statistics are meant to be definitive in any way; a common misunderstanding about statistical analysis in sports—particularly in baseball, if only because no other sport is as statistically analyzed (and fetishized) as baseball—is that statistical models and advanced metrics are somehow meant to replace firsthand knowledge of the game and/or be definitive. Now some “statnerds” might take this a bit too far, but for the most part it is generally understood that statistics are secondary and complementary to real knowledge of the game.
That said, statistics have their uses and are neglected in the tennis world. There are a few pockets on the internet where tennis is analyzed statistically, but it is rare.
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Generation Theory
So what’s this all about, you might be asking? Well, I’m going to be starting a series on tennis generations, using what I call “Generation Theory,” which is a tool or lens that is quite useful for understanding tennis history. The theory is based upon the idea that a generation is roughly five years in length, that once you have two players that are more than a few years apart they are of a different generation.
This begs a couple questions: One, where to draw the line between generations? This is pretty arbitrary. At first I was going to use half-decades, neatly dividing each decade into two generations. But I soon found that it wasn’t the optimal way of grouping players. I then decided to use Roger Federer as a baseline. Federer was born in August of 1981, so I asked what would happen if we used him as the middle of a five-year generation? That made Generation Federer those players born between January 1, 1979, and December 31, 1983. This also lined up well with Rafael Nadal, born in May of 1986 — the midpoint of the next generation, 1984-88. It was almost too perfect, but what better two players to center Generation Theory on? I then went forward and back and found that players grouped well within those parameters, with few exceptions.
Again, generational divisions are arbitrary. In this model Juan Martin del Potro and Kei Nishikori are of two different generations, which may seem strange considering that they were born in consecutive years; in this system, del Potro is of the same generation as Robin Soderling, who was born in 1984. We could look at “Generation del Potro” as being those players born within a couple of years of him, thus 1986-90. So in that sense we could use a five-year tennis generation: in a player-centered way, that is spreading out a five-year umbrella centered on an individual player’s birth-year, or in a static way, which is based upon Federer (and, conveniently enough, both Nadal and Pete Sampras) and spreading the generations out from there, each generation beginning with the year that ends with either a 4 or a 9 (e.g., 1974-78 and 1979-83). This series is based on the static approach, although at different times and in other articles I might use the player-centered approach.
This series will be focused on the Open Era, beginning with the 1968 French Open, which has technically seen 16 different generations play in it. The oldest player that I could find who played in an Open Era Grand Slam was Pancho Segura, who was 49 years old when he played in the 1970 US Open. Segura, if you’re not familiar with him, is a lesser great of the 40s and 50s – who we could call “The Other Pancho” after the greater Pancho Gonzales. Segura had one of the longest careers in tennis history, being a top college player in the mid-1940s before going professional in 1947, and then playing his last professional singles match at the 1970 US Open, at 49 years old, although he played doubles until 1975 when he was 54 years old. A different era, no doubt!
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Thirteen Generations of the Open Era
For the sake of this study, I am going to focus on those generations that made a significant impact in the Open Era. My criteria for the first generation will be a Slam title within the Open Era, which would be the great 1934-38 generation that included Ken Rosewall and Rod Laver, two of the very greatest players in tennis history. So 1934-38—bookended by Rosewall’s birth in 1934 and Laver’s in 1938—is the First Generation of the Open Era, with the youngest generation of players on tour born in 1994-98 the Thirteenth Generation (although as of this writing there are actually a few ranked players from the 1999-03 generation, including Canadian Felix Auger Aliassime ranked No. 751 as of August 24, 2015; Aliassime was born in August of…wait for it…2000).
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This Series
After this introductory piece, each article will be dedicated to a different generation, with the first briefly discussing older generations and then focusing on the First Generation of the Open Era, those players born between 1934 and 1938. I will probably do a summarizing piece, so this means that this will be in fifteen parts and likely spread out over two or three months. It will be my intention to publish one or two articles a week, so stay tuned and I hope you enjoy joining me on my journey through the thirteen generations of Open Era tennis!
Author Note (9/2/2015): I timed this series poorly, starting right before the US Open, so with my apologies I’ve decided to push it back until after the US Open is finished. Look for the next part in this series a day or two after the US Open finals. Best regards ~JN.
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Cover Photo (Creative Commons License): wallyg