How do you measure the "greatest of all time"? Some would say, if you could transport all the players in time and have them compete against each other, who would win. That would favor modern players who hit harder than ever before. Heck, even a relatively unknown Gilles Simon would probably easily beat a Don
I'm not the kind of person that likes to predict Slams. These tend to be "wish for" exercises. You never know when, say, Rafael Nadal will get injured, and then all your Slam predictions go bye-bye. Instead, I'll try to look at the form of the top few players. Novak Djokovic 2011 was a great
Federer is bucking the Mayan calendar (which is probably misinterpreted) and putting out his schedule for 2013. With this schedule, he's taking advantage of an interesting rule that appears to be aimed at him. this is rule 1.08 Reduction of ATP World Tour Masters 1000 Commitment. It goes something like this: A player's number of
You know, it started as well as Federer could hope. He was hitting awesome, got an early break, and it looked like all the good play from beating Murray would carry over to Djokovic. But, just as he's accomplished similar feats against Nadal, his opponent, this time Djokovic, clawed his way back, some based on
Andy Murray's a bit of a chameleon. He seems to play a variety of different ways. If you saw him play, say, back in 2008, he would play patient ball, standing way behind the baseline, varying his spins and placement. He didn't hit harder than anyone else. Indeed, once he got to number 4, the
Well, it's come down to number 1 (Djokovic) and number 2 (Federer) in the year-end finals. Some had hoped that del Potro would have come all the way back and challenge the top players. However, Djokovic (and Murray, for that matter) had a good record against del Potro even when del Potro was at his
Federer had been hoping to get back on the winning track beating del Potro. Ever since del Potro returned to tour after nearly a year off from playing, he has slowly, but surely been ascending up the ranks. Federer has, in the meantime, been able to beat del Potro on a regular basis, biding his
Even as Federer passes 30, he still has more records to achieve and more to preserve. First, with a victory, he exceeded the number of wins Lendl had at year-end championships. Second, he's had never lost to Ferrer, and had not been broken by Ferrer since 2010. This is impressive given that Ferrer is one
Janko Tipsarevic was thrilled to be back in London. Sure, he needed Rafa to not appear at London, which Rafa guaranteed would not happen a few weeks ago. But this time, he is eligible to play all his matches. Alas, his first match was against Roger Federer, who is the top seed in Group B.
The year-end championship has gone through a lot of changes over the years. Initially, it was a round-robin event, but back in 1981, there was some gamesmanship by Ivan Lendl. Bjorn Borg had won enough in his group to qualify for the semifinals, so he took some strategic losses. This left the unheralded Gene Mayer
