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By D. W. O’Dell
ESPN on-line recently had a poll asking who was the greatest men’s tennis player of all time. The choices, in alphabetical order, were Andre Agassi, Bjorn Borg, Roger Federer, Rod Laver, and Pete Sampras. The winner, to probably no one’s surprise, was Pete Sampras, who got approximately 55% of the vote. Agassi was second with around 15%. Rocket Rod Laver, a victim of young fans and short memories, only got 5%.
But what if I were to tell you that I could prove that the greatest men’s tennis player of the modern era wasn’t even one of the choices in that poll? That I could name a tennis player whose number of titles was well over double that of Sampras? That the male tennis player with the most titles in the modern era, while remaining famous, is largely unrecognized as the best there ever was?
Wikipedia’s entry on Pete Sampras lists 64 titles. Very impressive. But there is a male tennis player with 77 single titles and 78 doubles titles (including one mixed doubles title), for a total of 155, easily eclipsing Sampras’ total. That player’s name is John McEnroe.
154 is a record for most career titles that no one will come close to for a long time. Roger Federer won’t touch it. Agassi, the current player with the highest number of titles, has only 61 and probably won’t get many more. McEnroe’s number of titles compared to other players is comparable to Babe Ruth’s home run totals compared to other players in the 1920s and 30s. No one is even close.
Why? The answer is obviously doubles. Sampras didn’t play doubles. Federer doesn’t play doubles. Agassi only won one doubles title (although if he and his wife Steffi Graf wanted to make a run, they could probably still compete). The question isn’t “who is the greatest men’s singles tennis player of all time,” but greatest tennis player, period. That includes doubles, and McEnroe was the master of doubles (and he was pretty good at singles, ranking third all time behind Connors and Lendl).
McEnroe played doubles. He was ranked number one in doubles for 257 consecutive weeks. Mark Woodforde, with whom he won a US Open doubles title in 1989, said that before teaming up with McEnroe, he thought he knew everything there was to know about doubles strategy; after playing with McEnroe, he realized he knew nothing. His longtime partner, Peter Fleming, once said that “the best doubles partnership in the world was John McEnroe and anybody else.” Seemingly to prove that point he even won a mixed doubles title playing with childhood friend Mary Carillo, who is far better known as a commentator than a player.
In an era where almost no player has the stamina to play both singles and doubles, McEnroe did it at almost every tournament, and was good enough at both to go deep into each draw. The greatest men’s tennis player of all time? No one else is really close.
Let the debate over the greatest men’s singles tennis player of all time proceed.
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