Players
Historically, there have been seven outstanding grass players in the open era: Pete Sampras, Steffi Graf, Martina Navratilova, Björn Borg, Roger Federer, Venus Williams, Serena Williams and Billie Jean King. All have won at least 5 Wimbledon singles championships; Navratilova won 9, while Sampras, Graf, and Federer each won 7. Other players who have been relatively successful at Wimbledon are Boris Becker, John McEnroe, Stefan Edberg and Chris Evert. Pete Sampras is lauded by many tennis analysts as the greatest grass-court player of all time. He has won 7 Wimbledon singles titles in 8 years from 1993 through 2000 losing for the only time in between in 1996 quarter finals. The most successful male player currently is Roger Federer, a seven-time Wimbledon singles champion. His variety in the shots, speed, footwork, and slices, are his biggest weapons. Before being beaten in 2008 at Wimbledon by Rafael Nadal, Federer had a 65-match winning streak on Grass, and 40 consecutive wins at Wimbledon alone. The most successful female players currently playing are Venus Williams and her sister Serena Williams, both with five Wimbledon singles titles. The former has won five out of her eight Wimbledon finals appearances (losing the remaining three to her sister Serena Williams) and achieving 5 titles in the ladies' doubles.
Read more about this topic: Grass Court
Famous quotes containing the word players:
“Will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them
be well used, for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“The whole idea of image is so confused. On the one hand, Madison Avenue is worried about the image of the players in a tennis tour. On the other hand, sports events are often sponsored by the makers of junk food, beer, and cigarettes. What’s the message when an athlete who works at keeping her body fit is sponsored by a sugar-filled snack that does more harm than good?”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)