{"id":9004,"date":"2014-10-27T18:39:42","date_gmt":"2014-10-27T22:39:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tennisfrontier.com\/?p=9004"},"modified":"2015-09-20T01:46:41","modified_gmt":"2015-09-20T05:46:41","slug":"best-players-never-to-win-a-slam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisfrontier.com\/archive\/blogs\/el-dude\/best-players-never-to-win-a-slam\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Players Never to Win a Slam"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Nikolay<\/a><\/p>\n

A couple weeks ago there was some talk about who was the best player ever never to win a Slam – people were using an acronym, which I can’t remember. I don’t quite have the time or patience right now to put it into an article, but I thought I’d at least do some cursory research and share it with this forum.<\/p>\n

I tried to look at all players who had been in Grand Slam finals and\/or been in the Top 5 during the Open Era – this gave me a group of just over fifty players.<\/p>\n

I then assigned points for Slam results and wins in other tournaments, using their total titles as a base and then adding points like so:<\/p>\n

Base: total titles
\nSlams: 3 Final, 2 Semifinal, 1 Quarterfinal
\nOther tournaments: WTF\/Cup 3, Olympics 2, Masters 2, ATP 500 1<\/p>\n

This was problematic because data is limited on a lot of older tournaments, but I did the best I could.<\/p>\n

I then sorted the total rankings and gave tie-breakers to the highest career rank (in parentheses). Here’s the list of players with at least 20 points.<\/p>\n

52 David Ferrer (3)
\n45 Nikolay Davydenko (3)
\n44 Tom Okker (3)
\n40 Marcelo Rios (1)
\n40 Alex Corretja (2)
\n37 Harold Solomon (5)
\n35 David Nalbandian (3)
\n35 Miroslav Mecir (4)
\n35 Raul Ramirez (4)
\n34 Brian Gottfried (3)
\n33 Tommy Haas (2)
\n32 Thomas Enqvist (4)
\n32 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga (4)
\n30 Andrei Medvedev (4)
\n30 Tim Henman (4)
\n30 Tomas Berdych (5)
\n29 Todd Martin (4)
\n27 Greg Rusedski (4)
\n25 Henri Leconte (5)
\n24 Robin Soderling (4)
\n24 Guillermo Coria (5)
\n24 Mark Philippoussis (9)
\n23 Brad Gilbert (3)
\n22 Guillermo Canas (3)
\n22 Cedric Pioline (5)
\n21 Magnus Norman (2)
\n21 Fernando Gonzalez (5)<\/p>\n

That’s about half of the total players. Just missing the cut are players like Jose Luis Clerc, Sebastian Grosjean, Kei Nishikori, and Gene Mayer. There were two players who played in two finals each that I didn’t have enough information to adequately rank – Steve Denton and Kevin Curren – but from what I could tell, both have points in the low 20s at most.<\/p>\n

Now I’m not saying that this definitely states that David Ferrer is the greatest player never to win a Slam. One thing I noted is that more recent second tier players tend to go deeper into more Slams than in past eras; I’m not sure why this might be. But looking at second week Slam results, Tsonga has 10, Ferrer 15, Berdych 11. Compare that to similarly great Thomas Enqvist 3, Alex Corretja 6, Marcelo Rios 5, etc.<\/p>\n

There are also specialist players, like Tim Henman–who is one of the very best Wimbledon players never to win it. Poor time made it to 4 Wimbledon SF, and 4 QF.<\/p>\n

One thing that this list does help us do, I think, is narrow the choices – it gives us a “first round” of candidates, so to speak. While I’m not ready to commit to the “second round,” I’m thinking that it would involve a closer look at weighing total titles won vs. big titles, as well as Slam results, H2Hs against top players, longevity, etc.<\/p>\n

What do you think? Who was the best player never to win a Slam?<\/p>\n

On yeah, what about the worst player to play in a Slam final? By ranking I came up with two names: John Marks, who never won a title in his career but lost in the 1978 Australian Open to Guillermo Vilas. Marks actually lost the first set of his 1R match to 2nd seed Jose Luis Clerc, but Clerc had to retire after the first set. Marks’ highest career ranking was #44.<\/p>\n

The other is Chris Lewis, who lost to John McEnroe in the 1983 Wimbledon final. Lewis’ highest ranking was #46, but he did win three career titles. I’d give the “honor” to Marks.<\/p>\n

Click here to discuss “Best Players Never to Win a Slam” in the discussion forum.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

[divider]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple weeks ago there was some talk about who was the best player ever never to win a Slam – people were using an acronym, which I can’t remember. I don’t quite have the time or patience right now to put it into an article, but I thought I’d at least do some cursory […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":8989,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[117,403,655,145,656],"class_list":["post-9004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-el-dude","tag-david-ferrer","tag-david-nalbandian","tag-marcelo-rios","tag-nikolay-davydenko","tag-tom-okker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisfrontier.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisfrontier.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisfrontier.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisfrontier.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisfrontier.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisfrontier.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisfrontier.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisfrontier.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisfrontier.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisfrontier.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}