Modern Challenges

tennis tournaments

People often wonder what would happen if you took the best sportsmen from previous decades and placed them in the modern game. The challenge of comparing greats like Borg to Federer, or Nicholas to Woods is the subject of hours of what is essentially useless debate.

The only way of even coming close to judging how good an individual is in the context of history is how supreme he or she is over the rest of her sport. In certain sports this translates as how many majors, or opens has an individual won, in others it just means being one of the best in the world for as long as possible.

If you took any of the greats from yesterday and put them into the modern games they would all struggle, sport moves on, that's the point of sport. It's not a fair comparison, though, people would argue, because technology has moved on - tennis rackets have changed in composition, training methods have changed, diet has changed, all these things that go into making a sportsman perform at the very highest level.

It is due to sporting mentality, due to the mindset of the individuals involved that makes them great. If you put Cruyff into today's football teams he would still be brilliant because he was inventive, intelligent and had a brilliant footballing brain, and that won't have changed much. If you took Nicholas he'd adapt to the new technology and the demands of the courses and still win things, if you took McEnroe he'd be right up there - or would he?

Tennis is a difficult one because of the way the nature of the game has changed, McEnroe was never built to be a big hitter, and never really was. He was not weak, certainly, but didn't have anywhere near the power or physique of the likes of Nadal and Federer, and even to a certain extent Andy Murray. McEnroe, perhaps, would have been one of the greatest doubles players on the planet, but whether he could truly have stepped up to the mark it's difficult to say.

The whole debate, is, ultimately futile. Things have changed so much, but sport is all about tiny percentages and in a world where nearly every athlete is in the best possible physical shape, it comes down to the minds of the people involved and I don't think that has changed particularly over the last fifty years.

In today's world though, the major competition is between Federer and Nadal, and there is no other match like it in world sport. In the 2008 US Open, according to online betting site Blue Square, Nadal is tipped to take home the trophy (providing they both get there) but, despite his recent dip in form, you'd be foolish to write off Federer.