![]() ![]() Open, have had cachet nearly from the start, but the prestige of the other two Grand Slam tournaments, the Australian Open and the French Open, has fluctuated greatly. “I’m not sure I even knew exactly how many I had.” (He had 11 Grand Slam singles titles.) “We really weren’t concerned with the number,” Rod Laver, the red-haired Australian who completed Grand Slams twice in singles, in 19, once told me. “Nowadays, the Grand Slams are much more revered than they were in my time,” Navratilova said.Īchieving a Grand Slam, by winning all four majors in the same calendar year, was a clear goal after Don Budge became the first to do it in 1938, but a player’s total number of Grand Slam singles titles was not always a major talking point. ![]() While there are still formidable obstacles to fair comparisons, and though Williams’s 23 Grand Slam singles titles, an Open-era record and her signature achievement, loom like Mount Rushmore, the title count was not the coin of the realm in earlier eras. “Things change - power, technique, technology.” “It’s really difficult to compare one generation to another,” Williams once said. ![]() ![]() The game and equipment have improved drastically (Navratilova and her friendly rival Chris Evert once played with wooden rackets), and the measures of success have shifted, too. Tennis history is long for a modern sport: Wimbledon dates to 1877 and the U.S. ![]()
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