The Tennis Abstract Podcast

This year, I ranked the top 128 players of the last 100 years. I wrote long-form essays about each one, which I've published over the last eleven months. Carl Bialik joined me for a podcast episode to mark the end of the project. We solicited questions, and many of you came through--we ended up with a list of over 200 questions! Spoiler alert: Even after three hours, we didn't get through them all. I may write something in the next couple of weeks touching on some of the questions we didn't have time for. We talk about the algorithm, players with controversial rankings (or no rankings at all), reactions to the project, and much, much more.

Jeff McFarland is the proprietor of the analytics site HiddenGameOfTennis.com, and like me, he has tried his hand at various mathematical approaches to rank the best players of all time, in both tennis and baseball. We start this jumbo episode by talking about Jim Courier--#107 on my Tennis 128 list--a player with a reputation that outstrips his career record, though both are outstanding. Jeff weighs in on the Courier-Chang comparison, and we talk about how Jimbo's inside-out forehand changed the game. We consider whether the early 1990s were a deceptively weak era, how much weight the slams deserve, which current players are most like Courier, some possible limitations of Elo for GOAT rankings, and--in more than one and half hours of tennis talk--a whole lot more.

Serbian-American writer Ana Mitric joins me to discuss the latest entry in my Tennis 128, Goran Ivanisevic. Ana was a Goran fan even before she took a broader interest in tennis, and she is particularly sensitive to how the breakup of the former Yugoslavia affected players on all sides of the conflict. We talk about the state of Yugoslav tennis before the wars, Goran's status in his native Croatia, and how his attitude to the conflict differed from older players. We also discuss how Ivanisevic attracted so many fans despite a one-dimensional game that was often boring in less-mercurial hands, why his outspokenness didn't seem to turn people off, and what he now brings to Team Djokovic.

In 1973, New York Times reporter Grace Lichtenstein was approached to write a book about the fledgling women's professional tour. It turned out to be a pivotal season in the sport's history, and the book concludes with an in-person account of the famous Battle of the Sexes match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. The subtitle of the book is, "Behind the Scenes in Women's Pro Tennis," and Grace got to know the players--including Billie Jean--well enough to deliver exactly that. In our conversation, we talk about how the book came about, how it was received, and what press coverage was like for women's tennis in 1973. We also discuss how Billie Jean King has changed in the last half-century, the difficulty of covering tennis in such an intimate way today, and what it would take to write a behind-the-scenes look at a contemporary player such as Serena Williams.

We're up to #115 in The Tennis 128, my year-long countdown of the greatest players of the last century. Carl joins me to talk about #115 herself, Rosie Casals. We also do a book-club episode of sorts, discussing Grace Lichtenstein's 1974 book, A Long Way, Baby, which covered the 1973 WTA season, including plenty of great material on Casals. Carl and I talk about whether the 2020s game would allow for such an insider's account of a year on tour, why players seem less unique than Rosie and her peers did, and whether Casals's reputation does her justice. We consider whether today's game would be better off with top players who are more committed to competing week-in, week-out, whether 1970s-style barnstorming would open up new markets for tennis, and why Margaret Court got massacred on Mother's Day and Billie Jean straight-setted the same opponent a few months later. Also, Jeff answers a few questions about The Tennis 128 so far.