Future Tennis Stars

For all you diehard Andy Muray fans, I say buck up. The sun did rise this morning and it will be ok. Ask yourself this question, is Murray losing his first Grand Slam final THAT BAD? As it turns out, no, it isn’t.

I had a little time on my hands (bored) when the action was rained out on Saturday when the semifinals and women’s final should have been played. I thought I would hop in my DeLorean and take a trip back to the start of the Open Era and see how the men fared when they either won or lost their first Slam final. Note that although players like Rod Laver reached, then won, their first Major before the Open Era began, I am including players that did win Majors in the Open Era regardless if their first Slam came before 1968.

Of the 49 men that won Slams in the Open Era, 35 won their first Slam final and 14 didn’t.

For those that lost their first Slam final, first let’s take a look at the names: Rod Laver, John Newcombe, Ivan Llendl and Andre Agassi to name a few, did not win their first Slam. Some like Llendl and Agassi took a few finals before they were able to bag their first major and they each went on to win 8 Slams. Not bad.

Let’s take a further look:

Some pretty big names and some pretty good results. Some players like Korda and Ivanisevic won only 1 Slam and had a pretty long stretch between reaching their first final and winning their first title but that’s at the far end.

On average these players won 3.3 Slams and it took them 8.7 Grand Slams from when they reached the finals to when they won their first Major. Of the 14 players in this list, 7 won only one major title. Ferrero and Ivanisevic are pretty safe bets to not win another Slam but I am pretty sure we will be crossing Djokovic off this list soon enough.

Now, if you take off the one Slam wonders, the numbers increase quite a bit. On average, the 7 on the list that did win more than one Slam, won 6.1 Majors and it took them 6.5 Slams to do so. Not bad, not bad at all.

However, if you look at those who did win their first Slam…

Those are some pretty big names. Sampras, Borg, Conners, McEnroe, Federer, Nadal all won their first Slam final. Granted, you get more one Slam wonders in this group like Muster, Gaudio, Chang and others but in total, those 35 men won a total of 124 Slams, an average of 3.5 per player.

If you take away the 16 one Slam wonders the remaining 19 men won 105 Slams, an average of 5.5 per player and of those 19 less than half, only 9, won less than 5 Slams.

So be patient Andy Murray. Newcombe, Llendl, Agassi and Laver all won at least 7 Slams, that’s not bad company to be in.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Grand Slams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.