The Greatest Tennis Players of All Time

Nobody in the Open era has won more major singles titles — twenty-three — and the last arrived at the 2017 Australian Open, beating her sister Venus in the final. Three months later she disclosed she was twenty weeks pregnant. The serve was the best the women's game has produced, and the second serve was nearly as unattackable, which is why the twenty-three never looked like an accident.

Nine Wimbledon singles titles is an all-time record, and the grass was only where she was most obvious. In 1984 she won 74 matches in a row before Helena Suková beat her in the Australian Open semifinals, which killed the calendar Grand Slam that year. Serve-and-volley against a modern returner would be a bloodbath now; she made it look like the only sensible way to play.

Third place here is deliberate, and it will annoy people: the record 24 majors, sealed at the 2023 US Open final against Daniil Medvedev, is exactly the kind of accumulated total this list demotes to a tiebreaker. What the ranking rewards instead is separation from the field, and his best years were spent inside a three-man traffic jam. Vote him to the top if you think counting should win.

The only player of either sex to have won each of the four majors at least four times, which is the single cleanest answer to the surface question. In 1988 she took all four plus Olympic gold in Seoul — the Golden Slam, and the first time anyone had assembled those five. The forehand was a wrecking ball and the sliced backhand was a dare nobody profitably accepted.

237 consecutive weeks at world No. 1 is the record, and that number matters here because it measures distance from everyone else rather than silverware. The 2009 French Open final against Robin Söderling completed the career Grand Slam and closed the one argument people had been using against him. Watching him play was the nearest tennis has come to making violence look like good manners.

Fourteen French Open titles is a record that reads like a typo, and clay is only half the case. At the 2008 Wimbledon final he beat Federer 9–7 in the fifth, play stretching through two rain delays until the light had almost gone. The forehand was a physical argument rather than a stroke, and it cost him years off the back end of the career.

Two calendar-year Grand Slams, in 1962 and 1969, and no man has managed one since. The border case has to be said out loud: the 1962 sweep came in the amateur game, and after he turned professional in 1963 he was barred from the majors until the Open era began, so his 11 major singles titles are not the same currency as a modern total. Best left-hander who ever lived, on the evidence available.

Twenty-four major singles titles, the most in the history of women's tennis, and the asterisk is structural rather than personal: from the 1962 Australian Championships to the 1966 edition she won 11 of the 17 majors she entered, all of it before tennis went open in 1968, so the totals do not convert. Her 1970 Wimbledon final against Billie Jean King ran 14–12, 11–9 with no tiebreak in sight.

A career singles winning percentage of 89.97, the second highest in the Open era for men or women, which is a strange way of saying she almost never had a bad day. Beginning in August 1973 she won 125 consecutive matches on clay and dropped eight sets in the entire run. The two-handed backhand was still faintly disreputable when she started; it is the default now.

Retiring at 25 is the fact that keeps him this high and no higher — eleven majors banked before most players peak, then nothing. The 1980 Wimbledon final is the one everybody replays: McEnroe took the fourth-set tiebreak 18–16 and saved five championship points doing it, and he still lost 8–6 in the fifth. That expressionless walk back to the baseline was more intimidating than anything shouted at him.

Six consecutive year-end No. 1 finishes is the record that actually describes him — not the trophy pile, the refusal to let anybody else own a season. His last professional match was the 2002 US Open final, where Andre Agassi took a set off him and lost 6–3, 6–4, 5–7, 6–4 anyway. Nobody since has hit a second serve that mean.

Twelve of her 39 major titles came in singles, and part of that career sits on the amateur side of the 1968 line — the first two Wimbledon titles, in 1966 and 1967, came before prize money existed — so the raw total needs the caveat. On 20 September 1973 she beat Bobby Riggs 6–4, 6–3, 6–3 in the Houston Astrodome, in front of a circus she had every reason to refuse. Best competitor here.

One singles loss in 288 matches after the First World War, which is the sort of number that makes you check the source twice. The comparability problem is severe and belongs on the record: the French Championships admitted foreign players only from 1925, so eight major singles titles sat near the ceiling available to her. At Cannes on 16 February 1926 she beat Helen Wills 6–3, 8–6, the only meeting they ever had.

Nineteen major finals, eight of them won, and the eleven defeats are why he sits here rather than higher — though getting to that many finals is its own kind of evidence. At the 1984 French Open he went two sets down to John McEnroe and won in five, which was the afternoon the grinding finally paid. He professionalised training, and everybody who came after inherited the gym.