Not an entirely fair comparison, though, given that Murray and Williams are roughly as different in playing style as two tennis players will get. A more apt comparison would Raonic’s UE:W ratio with Serena’s, and Murray’s with Kerber’s.
Even so, I find matches with Angelique Kerber unwatchable regardless of the opponent. Her strokes and movement all look so terrifically stilted and awkward that while their effectiveness can hardly be disputed, I can’t stand looking at them for more than a few consecutive points.
Well as I say, I don’t know if UE are any indication of quality, I didn’t bring them up.
Not sure that there are any directly comparable stats seeing as they are two very different games.
Service %age and returns are not comparable as you would expect the slower serves of the women to be easier to land and to return.
All things being equal you would expect greater accuracy from the women because they are dealing with a much slower pace. You think there would be more UE’s from the men because they have to hit harder and more accurately in order to beat the greater athleticism, speed and size of the opponent. But I don’t know of any stats that show anything like that.
I don’t know how you would quantify the qualities of the two games they do appear to me as almost two different sports. I know which match I much preferred though. The womens game can provide entertainment but I consider it very much a second rate spectacle.
To the outside viewer, yes, you would expect fewer unforced errors from the women due to the lower pace of the women’s game. In practice, this is not the case for two very good reasons:
Consistency in tennis in the 21st century is dependent almost entirely on the usage of topspin. While a lot of topspin can be created with a fundamentally solid stroke, to hit both with power and topspin requires deceptive amounts of physical strength, and hitting topspin without power is essentially setting your opponent up for an easy winner. For this reason, the women generally hit a much flatter stroke that has similar linear momentum to that of the men, but nowhere near comparable angular momentum. The men are simply more consistent because they are able to hit balls with far greater net clearance than the women, and able to do so with very little risk of hitting the ball long or wide. This is particularly deceptive to the viewer that is not intimately familiar with the physics of tennis due to the angle usually used by TV broadcasts, in which the trajectory of the ball height-wise is almost impossible to follow.
Second only to spin is footwork. Not only do the men have better footwork (and thus positioning relative to each ball they hit) by virtue of greater innate athleticism, but they are also physically strong enough to compensate for non-ideal footwork to a far greater degree than the women. Take for example the backhand: hitting an open-stance backhand, with the hips parallel to the baseline, is a routine shot for men, particularly at the end of a slide on clay courts, but on the women’s tour only Serena Williams and her sister possess the raw strength to hit this shot with any sort of reliability.
I believe this applies to serving as well - where the vast majority of women don’t have as much strength to put enough kick on their second serve, forcing them to serve flatter, which in turn relinquishes control and increases the chances of a fault, hence the marked increase of double faults in women’s tennis, compared to men’s.
I watched a little of Wimbledon, but not much. I did, however, just run across a quote from Serena’s press conference after her latest grand slam title. (Congrats!)
A reporter asked her about being one of the best female athletes of all time, and Serena responded that she preferred the words “one of the greatest athletes of all time.”
Good on her for the girl power, but she is not even remotely close to being one of the greatest athletes of all time. She’s not even in the top 1000 greatest tennis players of all time, much less athletes in general. She is, in fact, the very definition of needing the “female athletes” qualifier, because she’s clearly one of (if not the) greatest female athlete ever. But she’d get demolished by run of the mill journeymen tennis players on the men’s tour, and that same generic journeyman would do much better on the women’s tour (like, never lose a single set to anyone, ever) than Serena did, provided he stayed healthy.
It would be like a reporter asking Tim Tebow about being one of the greatest college QBs of all time and Tebow saying he prefers “one of the greatest QBs.” Yeah, no, you’re not even remotely in the conversation.
which is a closed shop, a sport restricted to women, a second tier and a step down from the mens game. If she’d had to ply her trade in a open situation she’d accomplish nothing.
If her accomplishments are in womens sport then she can claim to be a great female athlete but anything else is a claim too far.
“Second tier” and “closed shop” are just ways to insult women for no reason whatsoever. As to the fact that men’s tennis players are, in a raw sense, superior to women’s tennis players, so what? This takes away absolutely nothing from her accomplishments. She’s a woman, and women have different (and generally inferior) athletic capabilities in the raw physical sense. Everyone knows that women are weaker and slower on average; rightly insisting that Serena’s accomplishments are as impressive as any man’s (and they certainly are!) takes nothing away from the natural advantages that men have. Calling her one of the greatest athletes in the world doesn’t take anything away from men or male athletes.
What she’s achieved is incredible and worthy of the same regard as the achievements of any male tennis player. Insisting that “female” or “women’s” be attached to any recognition she receives is just an insistence on diminishing her, as if doing what she has done is lesser than what a man has done.
It’s a way to play up the physical advantages of men as if men somehow deserve these advantages, and have earned these advantages, and any accomplishments by women must necessarily be diminished to preserve the imagined superiority of men.
I call bullshit. What she’s done is absolutely incredible and worthy and will go into the history books as one of the greatest accomplishments in sports history.
Insisting that Serena can’t rightly claim to be one of the greatest athletes of all time is just a way to diminish women and women athletes. Rightly honoring women athletes who have worked just as hard, achieved just as much, and overcome just as much adversity as any man, takes nothing away from male athletes in the least. No one will suddenly start to believe that women are as strong as men, or that Serena could beat Djokovic or Federer, just because people recognize that what she’s done is one of the most impressive athletic feats of all time.
not an insult at all. Not intended as one either. It is an accurate description of the situation.
well…that’s sort of my whole point.
What you’ve written here is just as belittling and condescending as anything I’ve written. I don’t say she is not a great female athlete, just that her raw ability is not a patch on the vast majority of men.
well fell free to play with words if it suits you. She is a great female athlete, that prefix seems important to me when those accomplishments are in a gender segregated sport.
it is, compared to other women she is brilliant, compared to the men…an also ran.
the superiority that you’ve already admitted?
Women’s sports history? yes.
One of my own sporting hero’s is Dame Ellen McArthur, her accomplishments speak for themselves without any need of me referring to her gender.
“Serena Williams is the greatest tennis player the world has ever seen” is not a statement I can agree with
“Serena Williams is the greatest female tennis player the world has ever seen” is arguably true.
I think the prefix matters, you think it belittles her. I suspect we aren’t going to agree on this
It’s also accurate to call her one of the greatest athletes of all time.
It’s irrelevant. One of the greatest athletes of all time, or one of the greatest tennis players of all time, doesn’t imply that she could beat great male tennis players. It just rightly celebrates her accomplishments as as impressive as any man’s.
What was belittling or condescending? And how is her raw ability compared to men relevant?
Would you prefer tennis to be non-segregated by gender? Would it somehow be better or more pure if there were no professional woman tennis players?
So what? Why must female tennis players be compared to male tennis players? Why does this matter so much that it must be specified any time she is celebrated?
Raw physical advantages don’t equal superiority in athletic accomplishments when comparing male and female athletes.
What possible harm is there by saying that she is one of the greatest athletes in history? What does this take away from anyone? How is it wrong to call someone who has dominated their sport like almost no other human ever one of the greatest athletes alive? How is it wrong to use this measure – domination of their sport – as the criteria for evaluating one’s overall athletic accomplishments?
I’ll agree that Serena is not the greatest tennis player in the world. How about “Serena Williams is one of the greatest athletes in the world”? Why is that incorrect, if athletes are being evaluated in their dominance of the sport they compete in?
She is definitely one of the great female athletes, she has dominated womens tennis.
You’ve made up a definition of greatness (domination of their chosen sport) and applied it to her. I’m not bound to accept your definition unreservedly. Otherwise we’d be in the ludicrous position of saying that someone dominating another restricted version of a sport also gets to have the tag “Greatest Athlete Ever” without any qualifying prefix.
Why is she bound to accept your definition unreservedly? Why are you criticizing her for having a different definition?
You must realize that your definition means that no woman tennis player, soccer player, runner, weight lifter, basketball player, etc., can ever aspire to be one of the world’s greatest athletes? Are you absolutely okay with that?
I much prefer a definition that allows women in any sport to aspire to be one of the world’s greatest, whether or not the sport is divided between men and women.
There isn’t an agreed definition so everyone is free to use what works for them. She was the one criticising someone else’s definition and terminology.
They can call themselves whatever they like.
which is fine if that works for you, you’ve already make the distinction in your own head between women and men and set a lower bar for female athletes and you merely leave out that distinction from your writing and speech. Whatever floats your boat.
The simplest way would be to accept that appending the prefix “male” or “female” to the phrase “Greatest Athlete” is perfectly reasonable and diminishes neither sex. I sincerely doubt that Roger Federer would complain if he was called “one the greatest male athletes”.
Glad to hear it – this seems to contradict with what you said earlier.
The two aren’t the same – Federer wouldn’t mind because there’s no history of denigrating the accomplishments of male athletes. There is such a history for women athletes.