EPIC FAIL! How the US Massively Underperforms the World in Tennis Player Development

An expectation reducing mind-set has come out of the United States Tennis community trying to explain away the remarkable decline in US men’s tennis the past few years.  US tennis enjoyed a golden age of tennis where male professional players won more than 25 slams between Michael Chang’s 1989 French Open win and Andre Agassi’s 2003 Australian Open Championship.   Since then, the US has won no Men’s Grand Slam championships.  At the time of this writing the US has 9 players in the top 100 in the world today, five of those players are near 30 years old or above and are likely to drop out or retire from the top 100 in the near future (At the time of publication 2 players have dropped out of the top 100, down to 7).  Pro player development is at a standstill as “keystone cops” management fumbles Grand Slam wild cards substituting washed-up older players for younger players with potential.

USTA executive leadership or pro players have two lines of thought about the US cliff dive out of the tennis world elite.  First, US tennis fans are spoiled and they need to expect less.  Second, the US tennis public will need to wait 10 years for US tennis to bounce back.  Much of this is echoed by sportswriters like Peter Bodo who doesn’t expect things to get better any time soon or Peter Alfano who reports tennis is in a nose dive.  Greg Couch, in “From Spoiled to Rotten…”  covers the same territory as this article in a qualitative, Royko-esque fashion.

We wondered if there some way to assess and illustrate if American expectations for professional tennis should be abandoned?  Is this the end to American Tennis Exceptionalism?  Should we expect to be outperformed and viewed as another sport where American supremacy has been bypassed like Lebron and Dwayne watching Dirk Nowitzki driving to the hoop?

In response, we created a methodology called the Secada Population and Economic Country Tennis Efficiency Rating (SPECTER) with a formulation to measure a country’s tennis player performance vs others measured by youth population available to play tennis and by a country’s tennis economic power rating.  Note:  We’ll address the second, corrosive, 10-year wait line of thought in another post.

Our ratings  show the United States radically underperforms the market to the extent that any programs instituted have no impact on US tennis.  When adjusting for youth, the United States has more children of tennis playing age than all of its modern European rivals combined including Russia, Spain, France, UK , Switzerland and  Serbia.   Also, the U.S. is home to one of the grand slams, the US Open, which we have already analyzed as a $1.4 billion economic powerhouse worth $200 million to the cash flush USTA foundation which has $200 million of it’s own money already socked away.  When you factor in the economic capability for tennis development the US program is a catastrophe!

First we show the results.  We came up with a metric to measure tennis performance by country using number of players in the top 100, providing a power score for each ranking by adding up the difference between 100 and a players ranking.  So #1 Novak Djokovic would have 99 points, #10 Andy Roddick, 90 points.  When we add up these scores (based on mid July, 2011 rankings) by country, we can compare actual results by country reducing the impact of quantity focusing on total quality of rankings.  Note:  Tennis historian Phil Secada has done a similar study on power ratings for tennis.  

Tennis Players in Top 100 Rankings

Country	# of Tennis Players in top 100
Spain	14
USA	9
France	8
Argentina	6
Russia	5
Serbia	3
Swittzerland	2
Great Britain	1
Australia	1

Weighted Average Strength of Program by Country

Country	Total Weighted Rankings
Spain	815
France	519
USA	372
Argentina	334
Russia	268
Serbia	254
Switzerland	181
Great Britain	96
Australia	29

Total Tennis Economic Capability by Country

Country	Market Potential (Millions)
France	235.67
Australia	232.30
Great Britain	214.65
USA	210.00
Spain	38.11
Switzerland	16.50
Russia	9.29
Serbia	5.02
Argentina	4.41

Total US Power Efficiency Rating vs. Other Countries or Secada Population and Economic Country Tennis Efficiency Ranking (SPECTER)

Country	SPECTER
Serbia	48.27
Switzerland	10.47
Argentina	7.71
Spain	3.21
Russia	1.40
France	0.19
Great Britain	0.04
USA	0.03
Australia	0.03

As shown by the tables above the US appears to have a respectable tennis program ranking second with 9 of the top 100 players in the world after Spain which has fourteen players.  Drilling down a bit further even when adjusting for the cumulative rankings of all players by country, the US finishes third behind Spain and France, slightly ahead of Argentina.

But what happens when we adjust country ratings by population and then by the ability to commit economically to tennis development.  As discussed above, the US has more people of tennis player development age than all of its main European rivals combined.  In addition, the USA is one of four tennis economic super powers.  As we discussed in our prior article on the billion dollar US Open, the USTA is a remarkably wealthy not-for-profit with the US Open as its central cash cow.  It spends more than $15 million a year on player development and richly rewards their executive staff in total compensation ranging from $8 million in 2009 to $50 million in 2008 with a steady $10 million a year in travel expenses for those executives and others.  When factoring in these numbers as shown in our SPECTER Power Ratings, the US finishes dead last among the major tennis countries to an extent that it has a power rating less than 1% of world leader, Serbia.  Though Serbia may be a super-charged performance outlier; the US still rates less than 10% as effective as Switzerland, Argentina and Spain.

Demographics is Destiny Everywhere but the USTA Development Program

In providing this analysis, we took a deep dive into the demographics of tennis development age youth by country.  Our data came from the CIA factbook and 2010 US Census data.  Since detailed 18 and under Census data by country wasn’t readily available, we used CIA factbook data for 14 years and under population as a proxy.  Reviewing prior ranking data, we found that most top rated tennis players began playing professional tourneys at 16 or 17 year olds so for development purposes, the numbers aren’t divergent from population trends.

Country	Population Size  14 Years and Under (Millions)
USA	61.9
Russia	21.6
France	12
Switzerland	1.1
Serbia	1.1
Great Britain	10.8
Spain	7
Europe Total	53.6
Argentina	10.3
Australia	3.9

The chart below shows the US placing last among leading tennis countries based on population of potential tennis players.   Some may argue that the US has less temperate weather than Australia.  But we can eliminate all tennis regions with the exceptions of historical hotbeds California, Florida, Texas, Georgia and Arizona and the US potential population is still greater than every other country combined except Russia which has some bad weather of its own.

Realized Tennis Potential by Population

Country	Realized Tennis Potential by Population (higher ratings mean better)
Serbia	2309.09
Switzerland	1645.45
Spain	1164.29
France	432.50
Argentina	324.27
Russia	124.07
Great Britain	88.89
Australia	74.36
USA	60.10

But weather isn’t the only rationale for impact on tennis player development as Serbia worked its way through the breakup of Yugoslavia and a civil war, Spain suffers from massive unemployment and Argentina has had to work through two existential financial crises in the last decade.

Economic Potential for Player Development

After reviewing for population we next determined what is the economic potential for player development.   We looked at Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as an indicator but determined that GDP  represents a country’s entire economy and would overstate the US and European countries ability to commit to youth tennis development.  We also looked at GDP by potential player development population but determined that it would reflect negatively on a small country like Switzerland which has a large GDP/Capita and a small birth rate.  Likewise, low birthrate countries like Australia and Great Britain would suffer.

Eat What You Kill

Ultimately, we determined a better measure would be what we call Market Economic Potential (MEP).  MEP states that a tennis program can only spend money it has and no more to develop players.  We measure MEP  by the largest tennis tournament held in a country and the revenue it generates.  Though some may argue by purchasing power parity that one tennis dollar in Argentina or Serbia is worth more than a tennis dollar in the US we reviewed purchasing power parity GDP indicators vs country GDP indicators and found less than a 30% variation in real GDP vs. purchasing power parity GDP for any countries involved in this study.  So a dollar in Argentina may be worth more than in the US, but not more than 30% more.  Negligible since Argentina outperforms the US in tennis by a factor of 10 not .3.

We measure MEP using revenue generated by the largest tennis tournament run by each country’s tennis association.  Like the US Open that generates $210 million a year in revenue for the USTA which it then applies about $15 million to player development, most countries have a main tennis tournament which feeds resources into their player development program.  Though we don’t have the revenue for each tournament, assuming cost and profit ratios are the same as the US Open, we use prize money as a proxy for revenue and estimate it based on that prize money number which is easily available via the ATP web site.   As an aside this approach can only OVERSTATE, the ability of other countries to compete with the U.S.

The Grand Slam (dis) Advantage

Using these numbers, we see that any of the 4 hosts of the grand slams, Australia, France, Great Britain and the United States offer more prize money than the other leading tennis countries combined.  As a result we would expect that these countries would have outsized tennis programs with outstanding performance.   But outside of France, (with a potential tennis population a bit larger than California’s) with 8 players in the top 100 (4 players under 25), all the grand slam hosts radically underperform the market.   It’s as if the Anglo Saxon world forgot how to play tennis.  Assuming that all of these countries pay the same sort of $8 million in executive compensation as made by the top 8 or 9 USTA executives, The typical tennis fan sees pay for  non-player development and turns off the tv.  We can see the value of the prior USTA executives who fixed the broken US Open and doubled revenue from the tournament over the last 10-15 years, but existing programs are in “run the engine” mode with respect to their prized events.  The US Open already sells out every year, unless USTA adds seats, there isn’t much new work to be done.  But player development has gone into the abyss.

Country	Score / Market Potential
Argentina	75.67
Serbia	50.57
Russia	28.84
Spain	21.39
Switzerland	10.97
France	2.20
USA	1.77
Great Britain	0.45
Australia	0.12

It is easy to explain Great Britain’s lack of performance, they have bad weather, but the US has many states with moderate weather that historically have been suppliers of world class tennis talent and are still ripe for tennis player development as US population moves southward.  One of the negative statements about US tennis players has been that there are no clay court players coming out of the US.  How is this possible when we have Florida, the state that gave us Jim Courier and Chris Evert (Brian Gottfried, Eddie Dibbs and Harold Solomon)?

Fair Weather States	Potential Tennis Player Population (Millions)
Florida	4.12
California	9.51
Texas	6.98
Georgia	2.55
Arizona	1.68
	24.84

Perhaps the best explanation is that building a complex regionally centralized development program may not be terribly useful if developing players can’t afford the gasoline to get to those centers and don’t like being away from their parents.  At the same time there hasn’t been any substantial growth in USTA membership that exceeds US general population growth so it is hard to imagine where USTA dollars are going.  Let’s say there are 1,000 meaningful tennis centers around the country, then each center potentially could receive a $15,000 infusion to drive participation, pay the guys in the trenches more and lead more recruiting efforts.  But that doesn’t happen under the present regime’s model.  Likewise, the USTA web site offers no significant on-line tools for learning tennis or receiving coaching. ($15 million works out to about $15,000 a center.)

Regardless, we believe there are many ways to spend dollars on US tennis on a depth and breadth approach where players can be discovered and as they advance get the coaching they need without prejudice or obstruction.

If development dollars being spent are misdirected then what does work?  Serbia and Argentina have secret weapons.  It’s called “coaching”.  Serbia’s national ascendancy coincides with their usage of Niki Pilic as coach of their national team.  Pilic is the only person to win Davis Cup titles as coach of 3 different countries.   Marcelo Gomez has been the tennis development coach for US Open Champ Juan Martin Del Potro, Juan Monaco and a plethora of other top Argentinian talent.  We stole Jose Higueras from Spain, but so far his main response has been “Ay Caramba” to the broken development program.

And the US has great home-grown coaches who have developed top level talent, won Grand Slams, but are not associated with USTA tennis.  Their names, Brad Gilbert and Paul Annacone.  Between them they’ve coached players who have won far more grand slams than anyone presently involved with USA tennis.   Add in Michael Chang and Jim Courier you’ve got strategies for every surface category.

Wimpledon Redux 2011 – The End of the Short Game part 1

Another fortnight has passed and we have crowned Novak Djokovic  Wimpledon champion.  We coined the phrase, “Wimpledon” last year to decry the end of the short (serve and volley) game and the absence for the most part of the middle game in the Wimbledon championships.  With mostly a long (baseline) game on display for Wimpledon, one third the variety i.e. no middle or short game, has earned tennis one third the fans as tennis ratings have plummeted since the 1980 glory days.  With less fans there will much less money as ESPN has announced that “Breakfast At Wimpledon” will be a pay tv affair going forward and that Wimpledon will be tape delayed on ESPN on ABC.

As we know, Wimpledon adopted the 32 seed tournament format to reduce the number of early round upsets.  Draws no longer open up as they did for 18 year old John McEnroe in 1977, who got to the semifinals of Wimbledon without facing a seed until the quarterfinals.  Television ratings soared.  McEnroe’s tv ratings throughout his career were some of the highest ever.  Instead we have this anesthized version of the game without any risk.  In the last 8 years, the first seed has faced off against the second seed in the Wimpledon final 7 times as ratings go into the abyss.  With more predictability and less game diversity, no one is watching.  

What about the tennis?  Averaging about 20 net approaches a match during the tourney, many in reaction to dropshots, Djokovic routined the slowest grass surface tournament in history.  In his own version of “No Mas”, Nadal approached the net 9 times in the final. 

Roberto Nadal???

As we reasoned last year, Djokovic may have put up a barrier to Rafael Nadal taking our all time Number 1 ranking.  Though Nadal is solidly the top player ever on clay he remains a player with only 4 fast surface grand slams.  We doubt Nadal will win another hard surface slam as there are now several players, Djokovic, Tsonga, Murray, and Del Potro who can provide a difficult match against him.  We’ll know more as we get closer to the US Open where Nadal will be the defending champion.

Djokovic is having a dream season, the sort that only John McEnroe, Mats Wilander and Roger Federer have put together, defeating opponents with overwhelming force on their way to 3 slams in one year.  Only Federer has been able to put such a season together twice against lesser competition.  But Djokovic is no spring chicken.  He started as a pro at 17 year old and has played almost 500 matches.   As a point of reference, Lleyton Hewitt and Andy Roddick haven’t won a slam since well before their 300^th career matches and Marat Safin didn’t win a slam after his 500^th match.  Bjorn Borg and Mats Wilander, two other defensive players, were the  same age (24) when they won their final slams.

Because the title went to Djokovic and he has now won his third slam, our all time great SHOTS ranking of Nadal and Federer continues to improve as we award points for wins by peers in the same era.

Nadal’s Future on Faster Surfaces

As we predicted in our last blog post, there was a lot of uncertainty around Nadal winning another Wimbledon.  Djokovic’ dominance over Nadal this year is symbolic of the inevitable downturn of 2 handed players as they get close to and pass 25 years.  Worse for tennis, they have a glut of 2 handers in their mid 20s crowding out new-comers with the likes of Tsonga, Murray, Monfils and Berdych.

As seen in the loss to Tsonga and as we predicted before the tourney and here a year ago, Federer doesn’t have the gas to win a best of 5 sets tournament any more.  His points are too long and he doesn’t have the same volume of easy points as Sampras.  When Sampras played, his typical point was a big serve of which many were unreturnable or a net rush which was 3 steps to the net plus agility.  Either way, points ended quickly.  With Federer, it’s uncertain how long any of his points will last and as a result, he becomes ragged after a second set against tough competition in the later rounds.

As for Nadal, we think any future Wimpledon wins are less likely but aren’t counting him out as the only players to win Wimpledon’s after 28 years old have been left handers, Connors and Ivanisevic.

Goodbye Williams Sisters?  Goodbye Roddick?

We also wave an early goodbye to the Williams sisters.  No individuals have contributed more to the women’s game in the last 20 years.  Though most of tennis royalty viewed them as great “athletic” talents, they were questioned early and often on their discipline and knowledge of the game’s nuance’s.  Early on they suffered the slings and bows of Martina Hingis and an inherently elitist / country club tennis environment but look at them now.

Martina Hingis Mocks Venus Williams

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok3L5r5YxLM&feature=related

Watch the above video and Martina Hingis at the 1:19 mark taunting Venus.

In our ratings system, Serena and Venus rank 4 and 8 all time and if they hadn’t had to play each other in many slam finals, either may have been rated higher.  They’ve outlasted not just a generation entering against Steffi Graf and then Martina Hingis, but also outlasted all their peers such as Lindsay Davenport, Jennifer Capriati, then another generation in Justin Henin and Kim Clijsters but an entirely different generation heralded by Maria Sharapova and Ana Ivanovic.

The fact that they are still in the hunt when a fifth generation of tennis player plays i.e. Caroline Wosniacki, etc, shows what remarkable players they are and how different they are from their peers.  Though Sharapova and other tennis beauties take months to years off from the tour for their commercial and sponsorship endeavors, the Williams sisters are in movies, doing reality tv, pushing out a clothing line while reaching twice as many slam finals as any person who started on the tour at the same time or since they began.  All while mourning the early and unwarranted passing of a sibling.

Here’s hoping that as they retire a new generation appears on the tour with the same sort of mettle.

With a great serve, like Goran Ivanisevic, Andy Roddick will always be a darkhorse at Wimpledon.  But his forehand is no longer dominant and his movement continues to decline.  And for the other Americans, a bright spot is Ryan Harrison, the youngster who made it to the third round.  Despite Patrick McEnroe FLUBBING another wildcard entry, this one was squandered on James Blake a first round loser, much like he squandered his Roland Garros wildcard on Tim Smyczek another first round loser rather than the younger Donald Young, Harrison played tough.  He fought through 3 rounds of qualifying and lost in his 6th match of the tourney in a 5 setter to iron-man David Ferrer.

Welcome Back Chrissie!

Another bright spot was the addition of Chris Evert to the broadcast and her chemistry with Mary Carillo proved remarkable.   Whereas the McEnroe brothers are expert at the top flight aspects of the men’s game and Carillo with Pam Shriver are technically strong, Evert really addresses championship level psychology in a way the others can’t.

Though tormented as a teen tennis angel in all white, she was anything but.  Evert was tennis’ black mambo.  A cold assassin crushing all-time greats at will.  After being subjugated by Martina Navratilova on fast surfaces, she was able to make a final grand slam push and beat Navratilova in her mid 30’s on Australian hard courts to cap off one of the greatest tennis careers of all time.

Her personal life was just as climactic dating tennis playboy, Jimmy Connors, marrying Brit John Lloyd, dumping him for skier Andy Mills and then moving onto the Shark himself, Greg Norman.  She hasn’t had a life story, it’s been a saga.  Evert’s and Connors tv ratings were sky high and they ushered in a tennis golden age.

From her father’s old barbeques at Holiday Park to the Chris Evert tennis academy, anything that is associated with Evert and tennis benefits.  Keep her on tv.

And what of Wimbledon.  We typically watch Wimpledon with a sense of mourning of the short game and the end of the serve and volley style brandished by any all time great before 2002 who won the championship more than once, including Bjorn Borg.  We’ll cover this in our Wimbledon redux – Part II

How Serena Williams Loses to Navratilova on Every Surface

Serena and Venus still a Rung Below Navratilova and Evert.

A Jon Wertheim article in Sports Illustrated followed up by other blog postings argue that Serena Williams was the greatest tennis player of all time.  Numerous tennis writers from tennis magazines , other periodicals and websites posed their own opinions throwing out numbers like TARP money for union jobs.  Though we think the story of women’s tennis since the advent of the Williams’ sisters is about Richard Williams Zen-like coaching methods, we weigh in with our opinion on Serena.  We approach the greatest woman’s player by using the same methodology as our evaluation of men’s all time great players, the SHOTS framework.

SHOTS is a simple and easy framework where we establish that there is no reason to hypothesize about who would win a match when there is actual data that shows who won those matches.  We look at winning percentage among all time greats, rank each grand slam tournament victory for toughness, provide a score and add them up.  We also normalize data throwing out bad data, only looking at players during their peak years, providing extra points for longevity.  Though Wertheim concludes that Williams would beat anyone on hard courts (her best surface), we look at every slam tournament on all surfaces and come up with a cumulative all-surface rating as well as a more granular rating per surface.

Our qualitative argument for Martina Navratilova vs. Serena is that there is nothing Serena could show Navratilova on a serve, volley or ground stroke basis that Navratilova had not seen before.  Wertheim argues that Serena’s first serve, which averaged 105 mph at the 2010 Wimbledon final, is something unlike anything seen in women’s tennis.  Yet Navratilova, the greatest mixed doubles player of all time, defeated big serve and volleyers Todd Woodbridge,  John Fitzgerald and Paul Annacone at fast surface grand slam mixed doubles championship.  (Special Note:  Paul Annacone was the serve and volley coach to Pete Sampras during his kamikaze run to 3 consecutive US Open finals in Sampras’ late 20s and early 30’s.  Annacone has now been hired by Roger Federer to provide a similar boost. )  And Navratilova looks like a pixie against those fellas too.  Likewise, Navratilova had an 85% winning record against master groundstroker, Evert, post 1980 on all fast surfaces.

Wertheim argues further that Serena has been thwarted in title matches by Venus, yet Venus and Serena have only played each other 23 times vs. 80 matches played between Navratilova and Evert.

Again, we don’t argue who would win one match between all time greats as it isn’t determinant but instead who would win more than 5 out of 10 matches between the players or who would win a tournament of all time greats.  With Navratilova we know we would get the fittest and fiercest competitor ever to play the game, hardened by losses to Tracy Austin at the US Open and her father’s suicide as a child.  She was able to beat then number 1 Graf, at the age of 35 to reach the US Open final before losing to Seles the next day.  In her late 40’s, within the last 7 years, she won two mixed doubles grand slams.  With Serena, we wouldn’t know who would show up, the great serving and fit player from the 2010 Wimbledon championships or the substantially overweight player from the Australian Open a year or so before.

Our own quality ratings of Navratilova’s cumulative wins against the field show at least a 2X advantage on every surface and at Wimbledon a 3X advantage vs. Serena.

SHOTS ANALYSIS

Martina Navratilova and her long time rival, Chris Evert, come out head and shoulders above the rest of women’s tennis via SHOTS analysis.  Serena Williams finishes in the top 6 using our SATERICCON metric.  Using SITDON analysis, Serena Williams finishes behind Martina Navratilova, and Steffi Graf, but ahead of Venus and Chris Evert though only playing 60% as many matches as Evert.

We give a special mention to pre-stabbing Monica Seles, who we consider one of the greatest champions of all time but was cut down in her prime by a crazed German fan.  Seles had won  8 out of 10 slams and her 9 out of 10 finals streak is unparalleled in women’s tennis where she had clearly ended the Steffi Graf era.   Seles missed 3 years of her prime tennis playing career where a continuance of her 80% winning approach could have resulted in 10 more slams.  Steffi Graf went on to win 11 more Grand Slams 7 of them while Seles was rehabilitating.   Graf never lost to Seles again upon her return despite being 2-3 against her in the years prior to Seles stabbing.

Women’s tennis lends itself well to SHOTS analysis as 84% of women’s open era grand slams have been won by 16 women, our Pantheonists.  We measure these top women’s play versus each other and hypothesize who would win a theoretical tourney based on real world match outcomes.  Slightly less than 3,000 matches have been played between grand slam titlists in the Open era.  More than 1,700 of these matches have been played between Pantheon players  and we looked at all of them.  The top 16 players are:

Steffi Graf	Justine Henin-Hardenne
Martina Navratilova	Evonne Goolagong
Chris Evert	Martina Hingis
Serena Williams	Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario
Margaret Court	Hana Mandlikova
Monica Seles	Maria Sharapova
Billy Jean King	Lindsay Davenport
Venus Williams	Jennifer Capriati

We normalize data only considering open era champions.  Though this does not give enough due to Margaret Court, we think the impact of prize money served to make the sport more competitive.  Though there is no “dream team” effect in women’s tennis as happened in men’s tennis .  (When admitted into  the grand slams in 1968 Rod Laver won a Grand Slam and an old Ken Rosewall challenged for Slams late into his 30s.)  We consider the lack of money prevented great female players from competing in the Australian Open and for a time in the French Open.   We also throw out Australian Open data for women’s play since it was regularly skipped on the circuit by top players such as Navratilova and Evert as well as Graf.

Our approach is supported by the fact that our metric, the Slam Triple, which has been accomplished 31 times in women’s open era was accomplished for the first time in Australia in 2001.  Instead, we substitute a Slam Yield Metric (SYM) for  the top 4 women which normalizes their data to consider how many slams they would have won if they had played every slam instead of taking breaks from slams as frequently has happened for everyone of the Pantheonists.    SYM is analagous to the NBA statistic for rebounds per 48 minutes played which looks at the rebounds of a player for the amount of time they play and then normalizes the data to a 48 minute framework.

SITDON Analysis and Serena Williams

Serena Williams finishes third using SITDON analysis.  Careful review of the Pantheon matches shows that it is hard for top players to beat each other consistently.  Serena’s 60% normalized winning percent is barely better than Hingis’ and Evert’s 57% and a bit better than Venus’ 55%.  Though Serena has a winning record over the overwhelming majority of Pantheon players she has played, she does not have an overwhelming advantage over her rivals as does every player before her.  Players like Navratilova who one year lost only 1 match and in a 3 year time frame lost only 6 matches clearly outperformed her vs. the field.  Evert who had clay winning streaks of 125 and 75 matches finishes far ahead of her in winning percent.

We have to leave it to conjecture as to what sort of winning percents Evert and Navratilova would have had if they did not have each other as rivals but it is possible they would have surpassed Graf even with Monica Seles sidelined.

Serena’s inability to get substantial winning percentages over Justine Henin who she lost to on Clay and Hard courts and her sister Venus on grass reduce her SITDON score.  Likewise an early rivalry with Martina Hingis was inconclusive on head to head matchups.

Interestingly, much of Steffi Graf’s winning percent for the SITDON analysis is generated by overwhelming winning records against Hana Mandlikova, Aranxta Sanchez-Vicario, Martina Hingis and Jennifer Capriati while she was only able to play the 13 year older Navratilova and Evert to a standstill breaking even against them in more than 30 matches long after their prime.   Both Evert and Navratilova would have had significantly better records (near 80%) in their era if one or the other had not played as they nearly split their matches with Navratilova winning 43 of their 80 matches played against each other, most in finals of tournaments.   Indeed, Evert and Navratilova, playing late into their 30’s played twice as many slam winners as Serena in their careers and had better winning percents even including play in their 30’s.

Yield Analysis and Serena Williams

Though the top 6 women’s players have won many Grand Slams they have frequently skipped slams.  Evert and Navratilova skipped the French Open 3 times each and the Australian Open several times in the period between their first slam title and their last slam title.  Steffi Graf, almost recognizing the lack of competition due to Seles absence skipped a whopping 11 slams, Serena has skipped 9 in the 11 years spanning her first and last slam victories.  We normalize the data by assuming that players would continue winning at the same rate they won their other slams.  From this we get a theoretical yield.

In the case of Graf, we calculate based on what would have happened if Seles had not been stabbed voiding her 11 slams but recalculating for a full 48 slams played.  Though Seles is clearly the second greatest clay court champion of all time based on just 3 years of data and had a 2-0 hard court record vs. Graf in Slams, we calculate Graf’s yield on a conservative 50% basis post Seles injury.  We post the results we think would happen below.

One number that stands out in the Yield Analysis is the stunning number of finals the all time great women reached while playing.  Each all time great player reached the finals of at least 69% of the slams they played with the exception of Serena who has only reached 46% of the Slams she has played.

Projected Grand Slam Yield Between First to Last Slam Titles
	Slam Chance Conversions	Slam Finals Reached	Slams Missed	Slams Played	Normalized Slam Yield Assuming Full Schedule
Monica Seles*	80.0%	90.00%	0
Steffi Graf*	59.46%	83.78%	11	37	24
Martina Navratilova	46.15%	69.23%	9	39	22
Chris Evert	45.00%	72.50%	8	40	21
Serena Williams	37.14%	45.71%	9	35	16
*  Only Consider Seles 10 Grand Slams after 1st win before stabbing
**  Normalize Graf’s slams for those missed and if Seles had not been stabbed

Serena Williams SATERICCON Analysis

Using SATERICCON analysis, we were able to rank each and every grand slam event won by a Pantheon player since 1968.   When we add up the scores we get the following rankings.

Much of Serena’s place in the rankings is based on the overall quality of the competition she played in the majors she won which is around the middle of the pack vs the other Pantheonists.  Both Venus and Billie Jean King won more difficult Wimbledons and US Opens.  Monica Seles won 3 of the top 5 most difficult French Opens.  Of the top 10 players, Serena has played the fewest Pantheonists, Navratilova playing almost 80 more such matches on a normalized basis.  Venus and Martina Hingis played more difficult slates as did Navratilova and Evert who faced each other 80 times.

Serena benefits from the passage of one of the greatest eras in women’s tennis which seemed to end around 2005-2007 with the retirements and semi-retirements of Hingis, Capriati, Davenport, Henin and Clijsters.  Serena has won 5 slams since 2007 and has benefitted from the sidelining of her competition.   By our measures, Venus and Serena have close to the same winning percentage and cumulative grand slam quality rankings.   Again our argument isn’t that Navratilova has a 2.6 times greater chance of winning a grand slam than Serena (though we think it is indicative of some sort of advantage) but that in a tournament 2.6 times more difficult than Serena’s average, she would be far more likely to win than Serena.

Measuring Eras with Slam Triples

In support of our thesis that Serena has benefitted from the retirement of one of the great generations of tennis, we look at the number of slam triples.  There were a few slam triples in the 1970’s and the 1980’s saw very few opportunities as Evert won 7 French Opens and Navratilova won 9 Wimbledons.  Evert and Navratilova won nearly 50% of the slams they played in the 12 years separating their first and last slam championships.  Even when they did not win they reached the finals roughly 70% of the time eliminating almost all chances for others to win slams in their era.

Slam triples increased dramatically as Evert and Navratilova’s retirement, Seles attack and later injuries to Graf opened the gateways for 8 different French Open Champions, 8 different Australian Open Champions and 8 different US Open Champions over an 11 year period.  No Slam Triple has been won in the last 3 years.  Though the Williams sisters win more than most, parity has been the rule of the post Graf era.  From 1975 to 1996 when Graf began to suffer injuries, only 7 women held the number 1 computer ranking.  Between 1997 and  2009, 13 women have held the ranking.  Serena has been number 1 less than half the time of Navratilova, Evert or Graf.

The most disturbing trend as exemplified by the slam triple chart is the shortened lifespan of the average top women’s tennis player.  Hingis, Henin and Clijsters seemed to have retired prematurely and Capriati, a child prodigy, was out of tennis more than in it during her prime.  Maria Sharapova and other attractive tennis players may be distracted by their sponsorships and seem to be playing in between commercial spots.

Richard Williams genius and why he has two daughters in the top 6 of all time players comes from his Phil Jackson-like coaching approach.  With his constant remarks that his daughters didn’t need the sport, by not burning them out on the children’s tennis tour or in tennis camps, and by deflecting criticism from them to him as the best coaches do, he has created a throw back group of players with longevity almost equal to Graf, Evert, Navratilova and the other all time greats.