Serena Williams' case as the women's tennis GOAT isn't as airtight as you think | Opinion

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Serena Williams may well be the greatest women's tennis player of all-time. But treating it as a settled matter unworthy of further debate, which will largely be the case as she says farewell at the U.S. Open beginning next week, isn’t merely disrespectful to the all-time greats that came before her. It completely disregards the history of the game. 

We have this problem in pretty much every sport these days. It’s not just recency bias that makes GOAT arguments impossible to get our arms around, it’s the fact that there’s no way to contextualize achievements from bygone eras within the framework of how sports work now. 

It doesn’t matter if it’s Williams, LeBron James or Tom Brady. If you could transport them to the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, they would seem like athletic aliens to even the greatest competitors of those eras. But the inverse of that hypothetical is almost certainly true as well: If the dominant athletes of prior eras played today’s game with the same modern training methods and technology, they would have adapted stylistically and enjoyed longer careers. 

We will, of course, never know for sure. That’s what makes GOAT debates both fun and fruitless. But there needs to be a careful examination of the facts. In the rush to canonize Williams’ career now that it’s on the verge of ending, it has been strangely absent. 

To be clear, the 40-year-old Williams deserves every syllable of praise that will come her way over the next week or so as she plays her final U.S. Open. Given where she came from, how she dominated her era and the off-court impact she had around the world as a businesswoman and icon, it has been one of the most remarkable careers in the history of sports. 

With Williams battling a balky knee and winning just one of four matches during her farewell tour, expectations are low in New York. One more good run would be electric, but adding to her Open Era record of 23 Grand Slam titles is the longest of longshots. 

That will leave Williams one shy of Margaret Court's 24, a record hardly anyone takes seriously as the sport’s standard because seven of those titles came at the Australian Open when tennis was still an amateur sport. Because there was no money involved and travel was so much more difficult, few of the world’s top players at the time even bothered to make the trip, which left Court to beat up mostly on her fellow Australians as opposed to the top international fields that played Wimbledon and what was then known as the U.S. National Championships.

But even then, reducing the GOAT debate purely to the number of Grand Slams won — which is effectively the strongest argument for Williams — doesn’t present a complete picture of what all-time greatness looks like in tennis. 

As Chris Evert said during an appearance on “The Tennis Podcast” in 2020: “The greatest of all time (debate) seems to be only Grand Slams, and I’m like, ‘Whoa.’ I think when it comes to that, measuring somebody’s (entire) career, it's Grand Slams and tournament titles and percentage of wins. There’s a little more involved than just Grand Slams.”

You wouldn’t know that if you just started watching tennis because of Williams or her three contemporaries on the men’s side in Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, who have made racking up Grand Slam titles and chasing records the top and sometimes only priority in their careers.

It wasn’t always that way in tennis. Before the late 1980s, the four Grand Slams were not equal, as they are largely perceived now. Wimbledon and the U.S. Open were the two tournaments that mattered most, while many top players skipped the Australian Open altogether. For a multi-year period in the 1970s, many of them competed in the more lucrative World Team Tennis events rather than the French Open. It was a totally different landscape, and it undeniably impacted the Grand Slam counts. 

Moreover, on the women’s side, the priority in those early years was fighting for relevance, viewers and paychecks after Billie Jean King and eight of her colleagues organized the first pro tour in 1970. Even by the time Evert and Martina Navratilova started to dominate the sport, they had to pour a massive amount of energy into simply building up the tour.

The Williams sisters had their own obstacles, of course, and arrived in a sport that had far more depth of talent than those early years. But they also had the luxury of playing mostly when and where they wanted, which pulled their focus more toward the Slams than the week-in, week-out grind of the tour.  

“Martina and I had to be in every tournament the whole year or else the promoter wasn’t happy so we'd have to do our schedules almost together,” Evert said in that same Tennis Podcast interview. "And I remember the WTA would come to me after I made my schedule and they'd go, ‘OK, there's two weeks here they need either you or Martina, which one do you want?' We were plugging tournaments in for the tour even though we didn’t want to play. At that time, it was needed.”

None of that diminishes what Williams achieved. Her 23 Slam titles in singles should be considered the record. She held all four trophies at once on two occasions. She reached four Slam finals after giving birth to her daughter. Adding 14 Slam doubles trophies with her sister and two more in mixed doubles adds to the legacy. 

But if you widen the focus beyond just Grand Slam titles, Williams’ GOAT case isn’t at all a slam dunk. In fact, you could make a strong statistical argument for any of four players: Williams, Evert, Navratilova or Steffi Graf. 

Evert, who is often forgotten in this mix because Navratilova won their head-to-head rivalry 43-37, actually eclipses them all on career consistency. She has the best overall career winning percentage at 89.9 and the most Grand Slam finals appearances with 34, winning 18. Most remarkably, Evert reached the semifinals in 52 out of 56 Grand Slams she played and finished top-three in the rankings for 17 consecutive years — achievements of sustained greatness nobody will come close to touching. 

Navratilova easily wins the argument on overall trophy case. Her 167 singles titles — more than double Williams’ 73 — is a record unlikely to be broken. She’s also pretty comfortably the most decorated doubles player with 31 Grand Slam trophies in women’s doubles and 10 more in mixed. She also won the most year-end championships with eight, finished inside the top-five for 19 consecutive years and posted an 86.4 winning percentage over a very long career.

Graf was the most dominant in a shorter period of time than the other three, achieving 21 of her 22 Slam titles in a span of just 10 years and walking away at 30 as her body started to break down. She was the year-end No. 1 a record eight times with 107 overall singles titles. Her 888-107 career record puts her just a fraction of a percentage point behind Evert, but perhaps the most impressive stat in Graf’s favor: She won exactly 50 percent of the tournaments she entered. 

There is a perception that Graf had been left in the dust by Monica Seles in the early 1990s and that she only reached 22 Slams – one behind Serena – because of the horrific on-court stabbing attack that altered the course of Seles’ career. But the reality is that from 1990-93, they only played seven times with Seles holding a slim 4-3 edge. Had Seles not had her own all-time great career interrupted, it's possible Graf might have finished with fewer. But we'll never really know. 

What we do know is that all of Graf's achievements were topped off by winning the calendar Grand Slam in 1988 — with an Olympic gold medal that same year — which nobody else has done. That's a significant point in her favor that Williams nearly matched in 2015 before falling short against 43rd-ranked Roberta Vinci in the U.S. Open semifinals. 

The best way to make the case for Williams is that she was the unquestioned best player of a 15-year era in which the depth of competition in women’s tennis grew at a rapid pace. Her records against some of her top contemporaries, like 20-2 against five-time major champion Maria Sharapova or 10-1 against former No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki, were laughably lopsided. 

But there were also periods of her career when Williams performed inconsistently and many more Grand Slams where she suffered shocking early-round losses to players who were not in her class. Despite all that, had Williams been able to dodge a few injuries, she would have certainly been year-end No. 1 more than five times and put even more distance between herself and Graf in the Slam haul. 

As things stand, though, it's a very close call among those four. It at least deserves a debate. 

In the end, the what-ifs, the way a sport evolves and the stark differences between eras makes ranking all-time greats so difficult. But anointing Williams the unquestioned GOAT or not allowing for the possibility that someone else might have a better overall résumé isn’t fair to what her predecessors did in their own time under their own circumstances.

Ultimately, we’ll never be able to settle it for sure. Recognizing that lack of clarity feels more appropriate than handing out the GOAT title like just another trophy.

Follow Paste BN Sports columnist Dan Wolken on Twitter @DanWolken