It seems like Serena has been winning titles forever. Over a decade right? Poor Maria Sharapova has got her ass kicked so many times there’s a permanent boot mark on her derriere. Serena has dominated so strongly that many great players will never have the career legacy that they really deserved. Look at women’s tennis in the 2000’s and there’s two names. Serena and Venus Williams. But Venus usually gets beat too when she plays Serena.
It’s like being a boxer when Muhammad Ali was in his prime. You just as well say “fuck it” and throw away your gloves. Same thing with tennis. Just burn your racket and find another sport because there’s no stopping Serena.
I guess she’ll retire someday and let somebody else win a few championships. I enjoy seeing a great champion too, but come on, once in awhile can’t somebody beat her (when it matters)?
I think Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Ayrton Senna, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, John McEnroe, Michael Schumacher, and Diego Maradona might disagree: among others.
I don’t think they dominated for so long. That’s what makes Serena so incredible. Serena and Venus have been doing this since the late 1990’s. There for awhile it was like they tossed a coin to see who’d win the championship this time. My torphy case is full, you win it this time.
Jordan doesn’t really count. He was on a team. It took more than one guy to win those Bulls championships.
John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors balanced each other out. They dominated mens tennis together. But not for the number of years that Serena has. Other men came along and dominated the sport. Pete Sampras, Bjorn Borg and Boris Becker.
Just consider that - undefeated over a 16 year period. In the last 10 years of that, no-one got closer than 9-5 (once), then 9-4 (once), then 9-3 (three times). The other 25 games were all 9-0, 9-1 or 9-2.
Steffi Graf, who won her last title in the same year Serena won her first.
Jahangir Khan in squash.
Imran Khan in cricket. 21 years.
Lothar Mattius in soccer.
The breadth of his domination in cycling is astonishing. Others have come close to matching aspects of his career (Hinault in grand tours, Kelly in classics) but no one else has ever run roughshod over the entire pro cycling race calendar the way Merckx did.
In other sports, fans argue about who was the Greatest Of All Time. Cycling fans argue about who was the second greatest of all time.
Depends on what you mean by “dominated.” Very dicey trying to compare golf majors to tennis majors, esp. on the women’s side. That the top women have won more majors than the top men is strong evidence that the level of competition there has typically been tougher on the men’s side. Bring golf into the equation and the apples and oranges become apples and radishes. It is true that the top tennis men’s major list is very comparable to that of golf (Nicklaus with 18; Federer with 17, maybe 18 before the day is over; Tiger 2nd with 14; Sampras and Nadal also 2nd with 14) but like I said tough to compare, esp. since no golf major has been contested in match play since 1958. As far as rubs of the green are concerned (i.e. luck) I think that plays a much greater part in golf than it does in tennis, making it easier to dominate all other things being equal.
Anyway, Jack dominated for about the same length of time as Serena. It is true that it is virtually unprecedented for any tennis player, male or female, to dominate like she has at her age, but how do we gauge the level of competition there? Even harder in tennis than it is in golf. Federer kicked tons of butt-until Nadal and Djokovic came along, at which point he stopped winning majors like he did.
Senna was still a’ight - he was good, but not *too *good which made for an ongoing and captivating rivalry with Prost.
Schumacher OTOH just obliterated Formula 1 from 92 to 2006, because there was no point in watching while he raced. You knew he was going to win, and you knew he would do so with zero flash - just machine-like precision, forever. The only way he didn’t end on the podium was when his car broke, pretty much, and that stopped happening as soon as he started driving for Ferrari. 142 races, 91 wins. Two out of three. The man was a beast.
From 1960 to 1977, there were exactly two kinds of boxers faced by Muhammad Ali: guys he went undefeated against, and guys he beat two times out of three. (1978 is the year he lost the title to Spinks – and the year he won it back in the rematch.)
Since racing apparently counts, Steve Kinser owned the World of Outlaws (founded in 1978, Kinser has 20 championships) and John Force completely dominated NHRA Funny Car (16-time champion). To this day both of them are competitive and neither of them can be discounted for another championship even though they are both past their primes.
In billiards, Willie Mosconi won the World Straight Pool Championship 15 consecutive years.
Team-wise, US Basketball won every gold medal from the inception of basketball as an Olympic sport until 1972, only losing the gold medal 3 times total since 1936, the Boston Celtics won 8 NBA titles in a row and 11 in 13 years, UCLA won 88 consecutive games, 8 consecutive NCAA championships and 10 in 12 years, and Oklahoma football once won 47 games in a row.
And, of course, Rocky Marciano retired undefeated with a 49-0 record, still unmatched.
Serena isn’t quite that unstoppable. Justine Henin won 7 slams between 2003-07, Serena managed just 4 in those years. She was stopped just fine.
Serena’s late career surge has a lot to do with the lack of any decent opposition. In her last four slam finals she’s been up against three slamless punching bags. (Wozniacki, Safarova, Muguruza).
Michael Jordan does not belong in this discussion. He had the benefit of an amazing multitalent at small forward, who stuck with the team through thick and thin, even during Jordan’s vacation in '94 and ‘95, despite being underpaid for nearly his entire career (think Lebron James could’ve used someone like him?), and a rock-solid power forward, and later an even better power forward who pretty much just fell in the Bulls’ laps, AND a genius coach with the absolute perfect mindset and gameplan for the team. That plus his team lost in the second round of the '95 playoffs. The idea that he won everything all by himself apparently comes from the need for sports fans to pin everything on one guy…y’know, like how Bill Buckner singlehandedly blew both a three run lead and the entire game 7, or France would have absolutely massacred Italy if Zinedine Zidane didn’t throw that headbutt.
Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer played in the same era, therefore neither was an unstoppable juggernaut. Diego Maradona’s period of dominance was too short for consideration, nowhere near the long-term success of, say, Pele.
From everything I’ve heard of Wayne Gretzky, he is a true hockey megastar; sadly, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen him in action, so I can’t judge. I would be interested in a discussion of how he stands up to the hockey greats of the past.
Anyway, since I grew up following sumo and never completely stopped, I’d like to offer this.
He’s 30. He’s had to withdraw from a grand total of two tournaments in his entire career. He’s never had any health problems and is in fantastic shape. His grip power and forward charge are just about unstoppable. He knows all kinds of tricks and techniques from his Mongolian wrestling background. He already is two championships clear of Taiho’s record, a mark once thought absolutely unassailable. He’s on pace to break the Makuuchi division wins mark sometime in 2016.
His dominance has become so crushing that, reportedly, someone in the Sumo Association begged him to ease up on opponents, just to give the fans some hope…and he was so legitimately worried about killing the sport that he agreed to it! But favors don’t last forever, and when he’s in the twilight of his career with nothing to lose, expect him to be utterly merciless in increasing his already mountain-sized stamp on history.
