ATP Finals
Image courtesy of ATP Tour
By GEORGE ROSE ‘21
The Nitto ATP Finals, an elite competition in London between the top eight singles players and top eight doubles teams of 2019, demonstrated once again that the ATP “Next Gen” players can compete with any veteran player on the planet. But one of these young players’ winning a “major”-- either the U.S., French, Australian Opens or Wimbledon-- remains to be unseen, as the “big three” (Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic) have not allowed another man in on that party in three years. Federer, 38, Nadal, 33, and Djokovic, 32, often considered to be the three greatest tennis players of all time, have spent a combined 784 weeks at the top of the rankings. They have won 53 out of the last 62 major tournaments (there are 4 major tournaments each year). If Federer were to win another major, he would be the oldest ever to do so; Nadal and Djokovic, too, are at the age where most players start thinking about retirement. However, for the 3rd straight year, none of the big three were crowned champion at the ATP finals. And, for the second year out of three, none of the big three even contested the final.
Instead, the 21 year old Greek Stefanos Tsitsipas triumphed over 26 year old Austrian Dominic Thiem in an epic two and a half hour plus match. A third set tiebreaker decided the match, meaning that the margins could not have been much tighter. At 4-4 in the third set tiebreaker (tiebreakers are the first to seven points), Thiem missed three consecutive forehands. In this tiebreaker, probably the biggest of both their careers, Tsitsipas, despite his being five years Theim’s junior, won. Tsitsipas, who at the 2019 Australian Open recorded an epic 3 hour and 45 minute victory over Federer, is 6’4” and dynamically athletic, with a powerful forehand and clean one-handed backhand. Even at 21, he has no fear of showing the world who he considers himself to be. In fact, he often vlogs about his tennis life, sharing tidbits of his travels around the world.
Thiem beat both Federer and Djokovic in the round robin stage to make the semi-finals, and Tsitsipas beat Federer in the semifinals; in other words, both have proven their capability of playing at the level of the “big three.” And yet, even with players like Thiem, Tsitsipas, German Alexander Zverev, and Daniil Medvedev all proving that they are able to compete with any of the big three in non-major tournaments, the “big three” have won the last twelve majors.
Daniil Medvedev, the 23 year old Russian, has come the closest out of the group to winning a major. This September at the U.S. Open, it looked like he was about to complete a miraculous comeback-- until Rafael Nadal showed us once again why many consider him to be the greatest competitor in the history of the sport.
Thiem, whom for a long time many considered to be a clay-court surface specialist, has gotten the next closest after Medvedev to winning a major, making the French Open final in 2018 in 2019 before losing both times to Nadal.
Zverev has won every level of tournament except for a major; last year, he won the ATP Finals. Many thought that his ATP finals victory last year, where he beat Federer in the semi finals and Djokovic in the finals, was surely a sign of a great 2019 to come for Zverev; instead, his 2019 was filled with ups and downs. At the Australian Open, Zverev’s first tournament since his triumph at the ATP finals, he suffered a straight sets defeat in the round of 16 to Canadian Milos Raonic.
As a general trend, players other than the big three have, in the last three years, not come close to maintaining consistency across the whole season or even the fortnight of a grand slam. Grigor Dimitrov won the 2017 ATP tour finals and finished the year at #3 in the world, and he then went on to finish 2018 well outside of the top fifteen. Only the big three have consistently managed the pressure of being at the top of the game.
Tennis fans have talked about a “changing of the guard” for so long that an entire generation of players now in their late 20s (Raonic, Dimitrov, and Kei Nishikori, among others), are now called the “lost generation” because they failed to win majors. Even though the “big three” continue to defy odds, set records, and then break them, in order to keep their stranglehold on the sport this next year, in the beginning of the third decade of their dominance, they must take their greatness to a whole new level.