Second, he also plays faster shots towards his opponents so this “disadvantage” is nullified.

In fact, there were many more big servers in the Sampras era than they are now. Ivanisevic, Becker, Krajicek, Phillipoussis, Rosset, Todd Martin, etc, etc.

It was really really hard to break these guys on fast indoor courts or on grass. Sampras even said in his autobiography that playing on grass those days was the most mentally tough tennis of all – just one small lapse of concentration and you lost your serve and “the set was gone”.

There are not many big servers in the top 10 at the moment besides Roddick.

So I don’t really see any tougher conditions actually – while the play is somewhat faster, the average serve speed of a top 10 player is probably lower.

What they do better now is that they are able to serve at let’s say 180-190 km/h with higher percentage than they used to – thanks to the Luxilon string mostly.

I understand about “who had a tougher competition”. You have to read the rest on my response.

Once again.

You also said that there have been so many advances in racquet technology and training systems that modern players have.

Having you said that, don’t you think that Federer has a tougher job since he has to deal with faster balls and super fit/strong players ?

Very easy to explain: we’re not comparing Federer and Sampras but their competition. This is all about the players they faced and comparison between those.

We cannot compare Federer and Sampras realistically since they are 10 years apart.

You can do some brain gymnastics and share your best guess on this hypothetical Federer vs Sampras comparison.

What I want you to explain is why Sampras himself said:

“Regardless if he (Fed) won there(French Open) or not, he goes down as the greatest ever. This just confirms it,” Sampras told the Guardian newspaper.

Tomaz, what’s the point of comparing the two ?

You also said that there have been so many advances in racquet technology and training systems that modern players have.

Having you said that, don’t you think that Federer has a tougher job since he has to deal with faster balls and super fit/strong players ?

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SPORT/06/08/federer.great.tennis.sampras/index.html

As for your idea of the greatest tennis player who would win all Grand Slams (so no one else would) – you’re looking at things in theoretical mathematics and not in realistic world.

My system (of just counting the GSW or using a common divider) works well and explains why Federer won 14 Grand Slams in just 6 years.

Feel free to develop a mathematical model that works in all possible theories and show it here.

If someone feels that GSW are really not the right measure (since how can someone win a GS if Federer wins them all?), then one could count the tournament wins of Sampras’ and Federer’s main opponents in their careers.

Define 10 main competitors in the years they played and add the their tournament wins (like I added the GS wins of competitors). That would be another very realistic way of assessing their competition. (Again, it would break down in theoretical mathematics but I am sure pfus will come up with an equation to solve it all. )

You say: “We can ONLY compare both players in this system if they BOTH have the exact same number of wins of Grand Slams.”

Well, the Avg GWS could be used to compare players even if they don’t have the same number of GS. Not a bad idea but it probably only “works” for players who won a small number of GS (but then we would have a reliability issue). As soon as someone wins too many GS, especially in too short a time, it is easy to see that the criterion is flawed: it becomes a logic fallacy. And that is all I am pointing out.

You say it comes down to this:
How come Federer has managed to win 14 GS in 6 years and how come Sampras needed almost 12 years for 14 GS?

That is not the initial question but the system does not answer that question either. The absolute greatest tennis player, one who would win all GS, would necessarily look, using your system, to have had a very easy job. In fact the greater the player, the worse will he look on that scale.

Now the question might be: can we improve on it? It’s an academic exercise, nothing more. I have a few ideas actually but if I cannot even convince anyone of the current problem then I will be wasting everyone’s time anyway

My only objective was to show the shortcomings in the “logic”. That said, and it’s irrelevant to my arguments, just the numbers above show some counter intuitiveness. In 93-95 and 03-05 both players faced, according to the criterion, their toughest challenge. Together, on average, they won 2 GS a year. During 97-98 and 07-08 both should have had an easier job (apparently) and yet they do not win more often. On average they actually win a little less often.

I am afraid I still don’t know who is the best player and who had the toughest job. I guess it could very well be Nadal

We can ONLY compare both players in this system if they BOTH have the exact same number of wins of Grand Slams.

Otherwise the comparison would not be needed – someone would have a higher number of Grand Slams (like Roger has at the moment I am writing this – 16 already) and that is not really comparable.

So again – if you do any kind of assumptions like: if Fed had lost, if Fed won more etc… then you’re missing the point of the article and the system I used.

The fact is – both HAD 14 Grand Slams wins. This factor cannot be changed.

Now compare both players and their competition using that fact.

Now it comes to logical question:

How come Federer has managed to win 14 GS in 6 years and how come Sampras needed almost 12 years for 14 GS?

There are two possible answers:

1. Federer is the GOD of tennis and he is so much better than anyone else at any time in history of tennis. Even if you had him compete with the best players of the past in their prime (Sampras, Agassi, Courier, Becker, Edberg, Rafter, Kuerten, …) he would still have obliterated them.

2. Federer is facing players who are not at the same level of greatness as the players Sampras faced.

I have been closely following tennis for over 20 years. I have been playing and coaching tennis for the same amount of time.

I have seen the great players of the past play their best tennis. I have seen their mental toughness and tenacity when it mattered most.

When Becker, Edberg, Sampras or Agassi were in their prime and 100% focused and determined to win, they were in a league of their own.

I am not talking about tennis technique or the speed of shots. This was 10 years ago and tennis training has evolved.

I am talking about the mental and tactical mastery.

ONLY Nadal is at this level when it matters. Murray, Djokovic, Roddick and Del Potro (main opponents of Federer) are just good players and have NOT demonstrated the GREATNESS when it comes to mental toughness and tactical mastery of the game.

They have almost ALWAYS crumbled against Federer or Nadal. RARELY has Federer has to beat one of these players when they were playing their best and didn’t not break under pressure.

Del Potro’s US win last year was an example of not breaking down under pressure and so was Nadal’s win at Wimbledon and Australian Open against Federer.

But that’s about it.

That’s the toughest Federer had to face in the last 6 years when it comes to mentally battling it out.

There are just no legends out here at the moment.

Federer is a legend and he is a master of the game. But he has only one real opponent (Nadal) and even that one is getting more and more injured and has lost his edge in the last year.

So that’s my personal view of things. To make a more realistic point besides my personal opinion, I tried to measure the competition’s quality.

The system is perfectly logical to me and it shows what I had in mind with real numbers.

Legends win Grand Slams and good players don’t. (or very few) They reach semi-finals or even finals and stay in the top 10 and provide excellent training partners for the legends to acquire even more Grand Slams.

(Remember Federer – Tsonga semi-final of the AU 2010? It was an afternoon practice session for Federer.)

Again, go back to the question of: “Why could Federer have won 14 Grand Slams in half the time Sampras needed?” and use common sense and logic to answer it.

You’ll come to the same conclusion as I did.

I wondered how you had done it and decided to try to replicate Wimbledon 93 and USopen 93. It turns out I am not reaching the same numbers actually. Instead of 25 and 18, I am getting 24 and 17.

Not that it matters much because first I may be wrong and if not then similar small errors can occur everywhere anyway. Still it allows to show the variability in the measure (i.e. the Avg GSW criterion) because assuming I am right, by just correcting those two numbers then sampras avg GSW goes from 12.3 to 12.1.

The reason I am bringing this up is that whatever criterion we want to use we would ideally want to see how precise it is. I may try to show you more FACTS on that later using some sensitivity analysis.

So I may try to replicate it all but really I would like to go back to the very first comment that is addressed above (from David). I quote: “Part of the reason that the GSW count that Federer had/has to deal with is relatively low (in comparison to Sampras’) is precisely because Federer has largely dominated his peers.”

So first let’s assume Federer was even better than he already is and say he would have won all the French Open from 2004. Even better say he would have won all the GS that Rafael Nadal currently owns. That’s obviously an even far better Federer than the one we know. Yet that “super Federer” would have a criterion (Avg GSW) of around 7.3 to 7.4.

Better yet, take the reverse and say Federer was less dominant than he has been. Say he could not win those first 4 GS where his competition was (assuming the numbers above): 13,11,13 and 14. Now “worst Federer” has a better criterion and sits around 10.75.

We can also create another worst Federer, one that would not win Wimbledon 06, US open 06 and Australian Open 07. Note that in terms of his carrier our “worst Federer#2″ is actually more comparable to Sampras. I mean comparing number of GS won, year by year, 10 years apart. This “worst Federer#2″ has a criterion of 11.8.

Summary: A “far better Federer” gets down to 7.4 and a “worst Federer” can go up to 11.8.

I think it shows what David said but using numbers and the conclusion is that this criterion is not necessarily all that great to rank our tennis players. It may even show the reverse of what we want it show.

That said, going along with that idea and trying to improve on it, it would probably help to consider not only those players who WIN but those who reach the FINAL. Such a criterion would still be biased (for exactly the same reason as above) but not as much… Anyway, anyone wants to go through those calculations?

In my view, the reason why Federer can do that is because his competition is much worse than the competition Sampras had to face. This is the cause.

Most you mix up the cause and effect. The cause is poor competition – players not at the same level as Federer – and the effect is that Federer is by far the best.

You could also say the Federer is a much better player than Sampras but since they play in different decades, we cannot compare them realistically.

So we need to compare the competition. In my view, the best players win Grand Slams. They were able to win LOTS of Grand Slams in the time Sampras played and yet he was still #1 for 6 years and was clearly dominant.

Now the players cannot win many Grand Slams – neither the previous generation (Safin, Hewitt, …) who are not able to extend their careers in the way Edberg and Becker had.

Safin and Hewitt both posed some problems then for Federer but quickly fade away and the emerging generation like Djokovic and Murray just cannot keep it up. They are both capable of beating Federer and have done it a few times but not on Grand Slams.

The only “legend” in the Federer era is Nadal and now even he seems to fade away. It’s a walk in the park for Federer.

Again, it’s because the lack of really great players and not because there are great players and he is even greater. That’s the whole point.

In Sampras era there were great players and Sampras was even greater – if we count Grand Slams – because that counts towards tennis “greatness”.

In Federer era we have one great player Nadal (and we had Agassi in the beginning) and the rest are just top class tennis players (Djokovic, Roddick, Murray, Del Potro, …) but FAR FAR from great.

So in my view, this is the cause of Federer’s dominance and not because he is 10 times better then any other player ever. If Fed was born 10 years earlier and would face the same competition as Sampras (together with Sampras at his best), he would probably have 6 to 8 Grand Slams in 6 years (and now he has 16 in 6+ years).

And please be polite and share your views without saying who is right or wrong. This is just an interesting discussion and not a political battleground. No one is right or wrong here – we just flex our brains a little bit. There are much more important things in life which require your full attention and effort than figuring out why Fed has so many Grand Slams.