Quote:
Originally Posted by Lawnmower Man
The argument would be they aren't playing the same game. Federer was GOAT of a relatively short and awkward transition period where 80s/90s era rackets were still largely in use but people started switching to hybrid strings (c.2002) while court surfaces were made slower to produce "exciting rallies." He dominated for several years but was eventually overtaken by the biggest beneficiaries of these changes, i.e., the power baseline spinners who could run down every ball. There's a reason why Agassi (1999) was the first male player to win a career slam since Roy Emerson in 1964 and it's not because there were no good tennis players. It's because the surfaces played far more different from each other compared to today where they are more homogenized. If those changes aren't as extreme and tennis plays more like the late 90s era, Nadal is merely a guy who wins French Opens and Federer runs deep into the 20s on slams. Djokovic is probably a better version of Agassi or Agassi / Chang hybrid. Serve & volley is extinct, the Pro Staff 85/90 are extinct, and the 1hbh is an endangered species. Totally different games which is why this debate is pointless.
This is a good post. The idea that Federer/Nadal/Djokovic are the three best players ever by a lot because they won so many grand slam tournaments is mostly nonsense that ignores the context. Their extended dominance has a lot to do with 1) court homogenization, 2) improvements in court quality more generally reducing variance and favoring baseliners and 3) slowing changes in the game itself, which favors older players.
The reality is that older generations of tennis players had to deal with much larger differences between grass/hard/clay courts, which makes it much more difficult succeed across different types, worse and inconsistent court conditions, especially grass, which increases variance, as well as much faster changes in the evolution of the game, which historically led to older players not being able to adjust to new conditions.
Federer likely benefitted from this in the early part of his career, but less so than others because he was already highly versatile to begin with and as a function of when he started, he's had to change his style and equipment significantly over the course of his career. Nadal and Djokovic were never particularly versatile and never really had to change their style of play, as the only changes in the game made things easier, not harder, as they have historically done for older players in past eras.
