Greatest Players of All Time - according to Tennis Abstract

JonH comes home · Tennis legend

Greatest Players of All Time - according to Tennis Abstract

GAMEOVER · Pro player

No.17 is Pancho Gonzalez. I had him at 23 and Jon you were closer with him at 13. Exre was closest at 19.

-- Edited by GAMEOVER on Saturday 19th of November 2022 09:46:06 PM

-- Edited by GAMEOVER on Saturday 19th of November 2022 09:47:56 PM

JonH comes home · Tennis legend

GAMEOVER wrote:
No.17 is Pancho Gonzalez. I had him at 23 and Jo you were closer with him at 13.

Exre was closer still with 19!

https://www.tennisabstract.com/blog/2022/11/19/the-tennis-128-no-17-richard-gonzalez/

seems strange seeing his name written as Richard though !

bizzarely , his most famous match was possibly losing toCharlie Pasarell at Wimbledon in that epic match.

ive not read the narrative yet, wasnt he somehow related to Agassi?

GAMEOVER · Pro player

JonH comes home wrote:
GAMEOVER wrote:
No.17 is Pancho Gonzalez. I had him at 23 and Jo you were closer with him at 13.
Exre was closer still with 19!

https://www.tennisabstract.com/blog/2022/11/19/the-tennis-128-no-17-richard-gonzalez/

seems strange seeing his name written as Richard though !

bizzarely , his most famous match was possibly losing toCharlie Pasarell at Wimbledon in that epic match.

ive not read the narrative yet, wasnt he somehow related to Agassi?

Wikipedia tells us that his last wife was Rita Agassi the elder sister of Andre Agassi.

JonH comes home · Tennis legend

GAMEOVER wrote:
JonH comes home wrote:
GAMEOVER wrote:
No.17 is Pancho Gonzalez. I had him at 23 and Jo you were closer with him at 13.
Exre was closer still with 19!

https://www.tennisabstract.com/blog/2022/11/19/the-tennis-128-no-17-richard-gonzalez/

seems strange seeing his name written as Richard though !

bizzarely , his most famous match was possibly losing toCharlie Pasarell at Wimbledon in that epic match.

ive not read the narrative yet, wasnt he somehow related to Agassi?
Wikipedia tells us that his last wife was Rita Agassi the elder sister of Andre Agassi.

Thats right it was - and of course he also beat pasarell as opposed to lose as I said above !

JonH comes home · Tennis legend

Out of interest - if Jeff reads this - what sort of ELO did Pancho have ? Presumably it was hard to calculate given his largely pro career?

JonH comes home · Tennis legend

Depending on the source, he was ranked world number one from 1952 to 1961

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_number_1_ranked_male_tennis_players

That is probably a record ?

Exre · Improver

JonH comes home wrote:
Depending on the source, he was ranked world number one from 1952 to 1961

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_number_1_ranked_male_tennis_players

That is probably a record ?

Probably depends on how you calculate it. Someone on another forum revealed that The Tennis Base (a subscription service) has I guess some kind of a retrospective calculation that gives Gonzalez 291 weeks at #1 while Bill Tilden gets a whopping 723 weeks. Rod Laver also gets 452 weeks and Tony Wilding - who is outside the scope of Jeff's project here - has 378 weeks.

But that 291 weeks for González seems low if he was generally considered to be the best pro player at the end of 10 consecutive seasons.

christ · Futures qualifying

To be number one at the end of the season one only needs to be number one for one week.

jsackmann · Social player

>But that 291 weeks for González seems low if he was generally considered to be the best pro player at the end of 10 consecutive seasons.

This is where pro tennis history gets messy. There were people who rated him #1 at the end of '52 and '53, but he really didn't play much. Imagine if the PTPA staged two tournaments, Tim Henman came out of retirement to win one and make the final of the other, and then the PTPA rated Henman #1 at the end of the year. That's basically Gonzalez in 1952. A little less extreme, but similar, in 1953.

1954-61 is legit, though my ratings don't quite agree. He was definitely the #1 pro for that stretch, except possibly a little while behind Hoad. *But* my ratings occasionally put the best amateur ahead of the best pro, like the end of the 1958 season when Ashley Cooper won three slams. There's a good argument to be made that the best pro was always ahead of the best amateur, but on the other hand, in those years, Gonzalez sometimes had a very small margin ahead of the #2 pro, while the top amateur was miles ahead of that pack.

Jon, I have his Elo topping out in the 2150-2200 range. Though the overall ranking algorithm adjusted that a bit because Elos in that era were depleted (because the best players couldn't always play each other -- amateur vs pro, etc.) He's a really, really tough player to judge, because his best level sounds like it was so outrageously high, but the only really GOAT-level player he faced a lot in his prime, and beat, was Rosewall. And Rosewall seems to have peaked later, plus it probably wasn't a great matchup for him.

JonH comes home · Tennis legend

jsackmann wrote:
>But that 291 weeks for González seems low if he was generally considered to be the best pro player at the end of 10 consecutive seasons.

This is where pro tennis history gets messy. There were people who rated him #1 at the end of '52 and '53, but he really didn't play much. Imagine if the PTPA staged two tournaments, Tim Henman came out of retirement to win one and make the final of the other, and then the PTPA rated Henman #1 at the end of the year. That's basically Gonzalez in 1952. A little less extreme, but similar, in 1953.

1954-61 is legit, though my ratings don't quite agree. He was definitely the #1 pro for that stretch, except possibly a little while behind Hoad. *But* my ratings occasionally put the best amateur ahead of the best pro, like the end of the 1958 season when Ashley Cooper won three slams. There's a good argument to be made that the best pro was always ahead of the best amateur, but on the other hand, in those years, Gonzalez sometimes had a very small margin ahead of the #2 pro, while the top amateur was miles ahead of that pack.

Jon, I have his Elo topping out in the 2150-2200 range. Though the overall ranking algorithm adjusted that a bit because Elos in that era were depleted (because the best players couldn't always play each other -- amateur vs pro, etc.) He's a really, really tough player to judge, because his best level sounds like it was so outrageously high, but the only really GOAT-level player he faced a lot in his prime, and beat, was Rosewall. And Rosewall seems to have peaked later, plus it probably wasn't a great matchup for him.

thanks Jeff! Given that relatively low ELO peak, was it longevity of being at the top that swung him into 17th?

JonH comes home · Tennis legend

I was wondering if, given their respective years (Nadal with 2 slams, Djokovic with 1 slam and a Tour Finals) whether either of their years had moved the dial on their ranking spat out by Jeffs algorithm? I guess we all expect them to be high up if not tops, might their results this season have cemented or even changed the positions Jeff calculated at the start of this exercise ?

jsackmann · Social player

>Given that relatively low ELO peak, was it longevity of being at the top that swung him into 17th?

Yep. And I adjusted the Elo slightly for the era. This is where things got complicated -- in some eras, due to limited data, or the fracture between amateurs and pros, it was basically impossible to achieve an Elo as high as other eras. I made an adjustment for that, but not so much that it erased all era differences entirely.

>might their results this season have cemented or even changed the positions Jeff calculated at the start of this exercise ?

If I answered this completely, I'd end up spoiling whether one of them was already #1 when I made the list :).

But... one of them was pretty close to the person in front of him, and he did pick up a spot. For the most part, though, the top ~10 ended up pretty widely spaced out, so that's the only change that happened because of this season.

JonH comes home · Tennis legend

jsackmann wrote:
>Given that relatively low ELO peak, was it longevity of being at the top that swung him into 17th?

Yep. And I adjusted the Elo slightly for the era. This is where things got complicated -- in some eras, due to limited data, or the fracture between amateurs and pros, it was basically impossible to achieve an Elo as high as other eras. I made an adjustment for that, but not so much that it erased all era differences entirely.

>might their results this season have cemented or even changed the positions Jeff calculated at the start of this exercise ?

If I answered this completely, I'd end up spoiling whether one of them was already #1 when I made the list :).

But... one of them was pretty close to the person in front of him, and he did pick up a spot. For the most part, though, the top ~10 ended up pretty widely spaced out, so that's the only change that happened because of this season.

Thanks Jeff, makes sense. Will wait with interest !

JonH comes home · Tennis legend

www.tennisabstract.com/blog/2022/11/21/the-tennis-128-no-16-venus-williams/

Venus is next - I had her 26 so was some way out and Gameover was similar? Exre had her 20th so was closest of us three. But we all under rated her compared to Jeff.

Its late so will read the narrative and comment further tomorrow