July 19, 2013
Roger Federer, Pete Sampras and the true meaning of the World No. 1 ranking
By Douglas Perry
Forty years ago, a computer took over tennis.
At the time, fears of a real-life version of the sci-fi classic "Colossus: The Forbin Project" no doubt swept through the players' ranks. Who knew what would happen to the tour if its shiny new IBM mainframe, with its flashing switches and huge, whirling discs, took on a life of its own.
In a sense, it did. The computer irrevocably changed the sport. Like the sentient military supercomputer in "Colossus," the ATP computer shaped the action and became the center of all activity. Before the tour embraced the machine in 1973, rankings were subjective, with various tennis organizations and journalists putting out lists every year. Many considered the Wimbledon champion to be the de facto world champion. Others waited until the Davis Cup Finals to choose the year's king.
No more. The computer made a bloodless decision based not on one or two high-profile wins but on performance data gleaned from the entire season.
Which doesn't mean it has never made a mistake. The ATP's Hal 9000 spit out Jimmy Connors' name at the end of the 1977 season. Jimbo failed to win a major title that year, while Guillermo Vilas claimed two (the French and U.S. championships) and won seven consecutive tournaments over the summer.
Vilas' inability to earn the computer's love reminds us that the Grand Slam tournaments aren't the be-all and end-all of tennis glory anymore, no matter what TV ratings tell us. The computer has made the entire season matter. And the fact is, becoming number-one in the ATP or WTA computer rankings is much harder to accomplish than winning a major tournament. Harder still: finishing a season as World No. 1.
Here's one example of how difficult it is to achieve: Andy Murray is the reigning Wimbledon and U.S. Open champion, and he's reached the final of the past four major tournaments he's contested. And yet he's a distant World No. 2 to Novak Djokovic.
Vilas not only wasn't the year-end number one in 1977, he never reached the rankings' summit.
Three-time Wimbledon champion Boris Becker never finished a season at number one. Eight-time major champion Andre Agassi did it only once.
Over 40 years, only 25 men have claimed the top ranking --- the same number of men that won major singles titles in just the 20 years of the 1970s and '80s. Only 16 men have finished a season at No. 1 since 1973.
The WTA started using computer rankings in 1975, two years after the men. Eleven women have finished the year as queen of the computer. Seven-time major champion Venus Williams is not one of them, even though she dominated the tour's two biggest tournaments in 2000 and 2001. The major-less Jelena Jankovic and Caroline Wozniacki are on the list of year-end number ones (in 2008 and 2010-11, respectively), primarily because Venus' sister Serena has often had trouble staying fit and focused for 12 straight months. Twenty-one women have held the No. 1 ranking at some point during a season.
Considering this delicious added complexity the computer has given us, it is worthwhile to take note of the 40th anniversary this year of the ranking system's arrival. And, as it happens, this very week offers us another important anniversary involving the ATP's electronic abacus: it's been one year since Roger Federer broke Pete Sampras' record of 286 weeks at No. 1 in the rankings.
So now that we've laid out some of what the computer has wrought, we must pause and ponder the meaning of it all. What is the true value of being tennis' World No. 1?
"It is a huge deal to have achieved the things that my heroes, people like Stefan Edberg and Pete Sampras, did," Federer said for an ATP publication celebrating the computer ranking system's anniversary. He added: "World No. 1 doesn't just come to you. You have to go and get it, and that's what I did."
And there it is: the self-possession, the confidence. You can't make it to number one without them. That's why so many great athletes are thundering jerks. But in this regard, as in so many others, the 31-year-old Swiss great stands apart. There are no stories of him being rude to waiters or directing his bodyguards to push away an autograph seeker. His amiable, pleasant public persona seems very much to be the real thing. This is not because he's unnaturally immune to the pleasures of wealth and public adulation. He clearly enjoys the perks. It's chiefly because he's never looked at money and fame as his due, as the inevitable by-product of having a talent for hitting a ball over a net. He's aware that he lives in a world that in many respects defies common sense.
"I constantly have to remind myself where I come from and who I am," he said last year after winning Wimbledon for the seventh time. "I still like normal life, to go back to reality, to be peaceful with family and friends. Then, sometimes, I dive in the incredible life I have."
Perhaps this is why the peripatetic existence of a touring pro, the sometimes suffocating demands of being a public person, and the hard-fought losses on court as his skills begin to fade, do not grate on him. He has an incredible life, and he went out and got it.
Agassi, too, thrived as a player in his thirties because he had found perspective, something that had eluded him early in his career. It helped that his nemesis, Sampras, was not as motivated to stay at the top into his fourth decade. In his memoir, Agassi would write that his demanding father caused him to "hate" tennis, but really it was Sampras who prompted the bile to rise in Andre's throat. Year after year, Sampras was always there at Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and the year-end championship to stop Agassi cold, to deny Andre what he and his father believed was his due.
But let's go further back than the 1990s' heydays of Pete and Andre. What of Ilie Nastase, the Romanian magician who was the computer's original World No. 1? Like the early-career Agassi, the extravagantly gifted Nastase struggled with the emotional aspects of the sport. Tennis is a lonely game. Out on court, there's no one to help you, no one who can take the pressure off. In the final of the 1972 U.S. Open, Nastase was on the ropes against Arthur Ashe, down two sets to one and coming mentally unstrung. Then, his mind drifting between points, he caught sight of a man in the stands, a stranger, who was urging him on. He started to look over at the man after every point. The fan was dying with every swing of the racquet, so desperate was he to see Nastase find a way to win. It was exactly what the Romanian needed to buck himself up. He charged back into the match and won in five sets for his first major singles championship. "He changed my life," he later said of the fan, "but I never met him."
It was the beginning of a fantastic nine-month run for Nastase, who previously had been best known for his on-court temper tantrums and joking around. He won that U.S. Open on slick grass, then triumphed at the year-end tour championship by gaining revenge on Stan Smith, his conqueror at Wimbledon, and then won the 1973 French Open on slow, high-bouncing clay. He was the very best in the game, and the inaugural computer rankings codified what everyone knew.
But that was as far as Nastase could go. That summer of 1973 his Soviet Bloc overseers forced him to play at Wimbledon, despite a boycott by the fledgling players union over the authoritative excesses of national federations. He crashed out early. His fragile psyche couldn't take what he figured was coming his way in the locker room the rest of the season. What would his fellow players think of him for knuckling under to the Man and showing up at SW19? He was never the same again.
Nastase finished 1973 at number one in the new computer rankings. It was an impressive achievement, proof that he'd been the best in the world not just for one weekend or one tournament but for a whole year. Yet it wasn't enough to jolt him back to life. It provided him no comfort, no burst of confidence. Tennis' Colossus, heartlessly processing information that kept endlessly coming in, hung over him like the sword of Damocles. He would soon tumble down the rankings and would never win another major singles title.
Nastase would soldier on for another 12 years on tour, increasingly viewed as tennis' clown prince rather than its king. This was too bad, though hardly a tragedy. He may not have lived up to his potential, but he can take comfort in the words of a later champion who did. "Being No. 1 is iconic," said Pete Sampras. "There are not a lot of us around."
Nastase wasn't at the top long, but he was there.