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You know I like my charts - I find them enjoyable to make while listening to a podcast or something, and useful to better understand different aspects of tennis history. Anyhow, here's a visual depiction of the Big Four Era, with commentary below.
My goal is always to make them easy to read and illustrative. I think it is mostly self-explanatory - above the year bar are big titles, with Slams getting three cells, Tour Finals two cells, and Olympics and Masters one each. Below are small titles - ATP 500s getting two small cells, and ATP 250s getting one. The color coding is simple: red for Roger, orange for Rafa, purple for Novak, green for Andy, and light blue for everyone else.
At first i was tempted to exclude Andy, but I wanted to show him both relative to the bigger three, but also because he's a solid step ahead of everyone else and really drives home their collective dominance.
2011-13 is the collective peak - they won every big title those three years, with the lone exception of the 2012 Paris Masters, which is also David Ferrer's lone big title. But I'd say the era of utter dominance began in 2004 and ended in 2019 or possibly 2020, after which they--or at least Novak and Rafa--still were quite dominance, but not to the same degree.
This chart also illustrates how they really dominated the big titles, but not so much the lesser titles - simply by virtue of the schedule (i.e. there are only so many small tournaments that they can humanly play, but those they played in they tended to dominate).
I'll probably put together a similar chart for different eras: The early era of Laver and Rosewall and others; the Golden Age of Connors-Borg-McEnroe; the 80s era of Lendl and supporting cast, and the Sampras-Agassi era. Or maybe I'll just show them all together, so we can compare (or so I can compare!) the relative dominance of different all-time greats, or cohorts of all-time greats.
Having looked at and made similar charts, I can safely say that no era was quite so dominated by all-time greats....
...and I'm glad its ending!
My goal is always to make them easy to read and illustrative. I think it is mostly self-explanatory - above the year bar are big titles, with Slams getting three cells, Tour Finals two cells, and Olympics and Masters one each. Below are small titles - ATP 500s getting two small cells, and ATP 250s getting one. The color coding is simple: red for Roger, orange for Rafa, purple for Novak, green for Andy, and light blue for everyone else.
At first i was tempted to exclude Andy, but I wanted to show him both relative to the bigger three, but also because he's a solid step ahead of everyone else and really drives home their collective dominance.
2011-13 is the collective peak - they won every big title those three years, with the lone exception of the 2012 Paris Masters, which is also David Ferrer's lone big title. But I'd say the era of utter dominance began in 2004 and ended in 2019 or possibly 2020, after which they--or at least Novak and Rafa--still were quite dominance, but not to the same degree.
This chart also illustrates how they really dominated the big titles, but not so much the lesser titles - simply by virtue of the schedule (i.e. there are only so many small tournaments that they can humanly play, but those they played in they tended to dominate).
I'll probably put together a similar chart for different eras: The early era of Laver and Rosewall and others; the Golden Age of Connors-Borg-McEnroe; the 80s era of Lendl and supporting cast, and the Sampras-Agassi era. Or maybe I'll just show them all together, so we can compare (or so I can compare!) the relative dominance of different all-time greats, or cohorts of all-time greats.
Having looked at and made similar charts, I can safely say that no era was quite so dominated by all-time greats....
...and I'm glad its ending!