CONCLUSIONS
There are some assumptions that can be made from the analysis of total score and average points, especially from a synchronic point of view, as some trends can be spotted within the specific historical periods. While Nadal’s figure is so off-chart in terms of victories that his average score is also extremely high (he won 38 of the 50 events considered in which he reached at least the quarters), in other situations it is possible to make some distinctions. Looking at the top of the scores, we note that two similar versions of his domination, albeit on a much lower scale: one is that of Borg (14 wins out of 19 events considered, 15/19 with at least one point), which is not surprising – hadn’t the Swede stopped playing at 26, perhaps he would have gotten closer to Rafa (and the fact that his average is the highest ever somehow proves this, although we cannot know how much his burn-out would have affected on his performances); however, the other belongs to the player who benefited the most from the exeunt of the 11-time Slam champion is Ivan Lendl. This is a surprise.
Despite having lower scores in both categories, “Ivan the Terrible”, at his peak, was dominating the competition, and impressed for the efficiency with which he collected trophies: out of the 19 major clay tournaments in which he reached the semi-finals, Lendl won 11 titles, and by adding also the two lost finals in Paris, in 13 circumstances he made at least one point valid for this special ranking. By looking at the Czech’s time, a clear duopoly emerges that reflects the Roland Garros wins between 1982 and 1988, since Mats Wilander has high values on both features as well – 14.5 points with an average of 0.763.
As for the others with a score similar to Borg, like Djokovic, Vilas and Federer, decidedly lower averages can be noticed, a sign of their historically subordinate role to the Swedish Bear (Vilas) and the Manacor’s Bull (Federer and Djokovic). By widening the sample over the eras of the two rulers, low averages emerge for all their historical opponents. Looking back to the Seventies, and coming back to the initial question about that decade, it can therefore be assumed that Vilas score is a little inflated by the large number of events on clay of that time (after all, his only victory in Paris happened when Borg elected not to show up, in 1977), and the same can be said of Orantes, Connors, Panatta and Nastase, with the first one having success in both Europe and North America, the second only in the USA, and the last two only in the Old Continent – it was not only the multiplicity of events favouring their victories, but also the variety of schedules that this caused, since each player could be present at one event but absent at another, giving way to other winners.
Considering the contemporary period, the explanation lies exclusively in the domain of the Spanish Southpaw, who really hasn’t left any openings except occasionally. In fact, Murray, Wawrinka, Ferrer, champions who have performed well on clay, own low averages. Perhaps an emblematic case relates to Thiem. Over the last three, maybe four seasons, the Dominator has probably been the real deuteragonist on clay; nevertheless, he has not yet won a big title on this surface, losing three times in a row from Nadal at the Bois de Boulogne, seven times in total when looking at the Grand Slams and at the Masters 1000 events.
After commenting the post-Borg period, perhaps the most interesting conclusion can be drawn by analysing the following decade, which could be considered as an interregnum spanning from the end of the Lendl-Wilander diarchy to the beginning of the Nadal era. Two factors can be clearly inferred: first of all, a trend towards more qualitative performances than quantitative, with many players (Kuerten, Ferrero, Bruguera, Muster, Courier, to a lesser extent Chang and Medvedev due to low totals) who own not very high scores but with averages ranging from remarkably high to exceptional (especially those of Courier and Kuerten). This phenomenon could be explained as emblematic of the typical wear of the clay play during the 1990s and the early 2000s, meaning that there could have been dominators, but only for a short duration.
Secondly, the presence of many more specialists, given that almost all the aforementioned players have performed with varying degrees of consistency almost exclusively on clay. In summary, the evolution of some aspects of the game (injury prevention, surface speed, type and brand of ball particularly) had not yet reached that of racquets, and this, in addition to early retirements, caused a level of hyper-specialization related to the surfaces and styles of play, a discrepancy that can be translated into the numbers.
In general, another piece of information confirms the end of specialization in the last 15 years, or perhaps more precisely highlights the current need to be able to perform on clay in order to be among the best, for the simple reason that the playing style on different surfaces is not anymore as varied. The multi-Slam winners of the contemporary or immediately preceding era have scores above 5 (Wawrinka and Murray in addition to the Big Three) with few exceptions. The case of the Brit is particularly meaningful since he initially wasn’t a clay natural – the lack of weight on his shots had always precluded great achievements on clay, but he was probably among the three best performers between 2014 and 2017, owning a score of 7 with an average of 0.5, a low tally due to the lack of many scores higher than 1 (victories in Madrid 2015 and Rome 2016 plus a final in Paris in 2016).
Conversely, in past eras the top players did not necessarily score many points on all surfaces: just consider McEnroe (5 points and 0.556 on average, although Genius’s peak belongs to a slightly earlier era), Becker (5.25, a remarkable score for someone who has never won a tournament on clay, and 0.404), Edberg (3.5 and 0.5) and Sampras (2.75 and 0.393). The eternal question is always the same: are current players more complete or is it easier nowadays to compete everywhere? The answer is probably somewhere in the middle between the respective causal reversals.
Having discussed who the most successful clay-courters are, a definitely more transversal category is that of the “runner-up specialists” as they were previously called, referring to those who consistently reached the latter stages of tournaments but are almost entirely missing from the champions’ lists. The members of this club can be considered players who own an average of less than 0.5 with a score above 3. In the first chart, the only players in this category are Solomon (6 and 0.5) and Murray, while others with a lower score are: Chesnokov, Pioline, Berdych, Okker, Edberg, Clerc, Leconte, Kafelnikov (a champion in Paris in 1996 but always defeated in the Masters Series), Ramirez, Becker, Dibbs, and Ferrer.
Finally, a small consideration relating to the length of matches, namely to the athletes who claim a significantly higher score either in the 1000s or in the Slams, a figure which has been mentioned with the totals of the first rankings shown but which is more easily visible through the original dataset published on Google. For most players, this distribution lays in a range from 40 to 60 percent one way or the other, but more players tend to fare better in the 1000 events, as there are three events per year against just one Slam (for example, the distribution percentage for Nadal is 54,9- 45,1 in favour of the shorter tournaments), but who are those markedly more gifted in the two out of three or in the three out of five specialties?
Among those who are more biased towards short tournaments is to be found Djokovic, who has a ratio of 61.6-38.4 in favour of the Masters 1000 events, as well as Orantes (67.3-32.7), Nastase (66-34), Muster (71.1-28.9), Medvedev (69.6-30.4) and Coria (73.9-26.1); on the opposite side of the spectrum can be found Wilander (39.7-60.3), Bruguera (38.9-61.1), Courier (25.8-74.2), Agassi (22.6-77.4), Kodes (32.1-67.9) and Wawrinka (38.5-61.5). Once again, we note a huge presence of players from the Seventies and from the Nineties, suggesting differences between the game then and today, respectively vis-à-vis the different priorities of the former (many of them stated that Grand Slams were often not among the main objectives of their season) and the different technical milieu of the latter. The following chart sums up this final point, with the abnormal weight of Nadal’s tally warping and enlarging the graphic:
So, there we have it. The hope is that these figures may have shed some light on how tennis has evolved on clay from 1968 onwards, and above all that they have been clear, exhaustive, and not too boring to be read. Fortunately, the art of anomalous forehands, drop shots and paroxysmal perspiration is back, and the numbers are giving way, albeit in a shortened and less gladiatorial version due to the lack of a crowd, to the actual game. The canonisation and the debate are mainly for fans and professionals, and we have missed it nevertheless, but the fact that we can start talking about records and victories again is only a contingency of the return of the actual sport, made up of people who for the most don’t compete for the story but because that’s their job and calling, and to be honest that’s perfectly fine, because for us viewers the game goes way beyond champions and trophies as well, and we can only be happy for it to be back.
Translated by Andrea Canella
