Colby Cosh on the tempest-in-a-teapot over John McEnroe’s rating of Serena Williams’ tennis skills:
McEnroe is in a familiar, mostly consequence-free sort of trouble for an interview he gave to National Public Radio that aired this past Sunday. McEnroe is flogging a book, and NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro read a quote from it, asking him why he had described Serena Williams as “the best female player” ever. Maybe, Garcia-Navarro suggested, Serena is just “the best player in the world.” “Why say female player?”
McEnroe immediately answered that if Williams played tennis on the men’s tour “she’d be, like, (number) 700 in the world.” He added that “That doesn’t mean I don’t think Serena is an incredible player: I do.” He specified that “700” was not an exact guess — “perhaps it’d be a little higher, perhaps it’d be a little lower.” And he noted that Williams’s supreme mental rigour would enable unexpected victories over male pros.
[…]
It so happens that when Serena was 16 and participating in the 1998 Australian Open, she and her sister Venus boasted that they could probably beat the 200th-best men’s player in the world. A German named Karsten Braasch, once number 38 in the men’s ranking, but by then a bit dissipated, stood 203rd at that moment. He got word of the Williams challenge. Indulging in his trademark habit of smoking cigarettes during breaks in play, Braasch beat Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2.
The sisters revised their claim to superiority over men outside the top 350 before deciding not to speak of the match again, nor to repeat it with a different male opponent. Braasch was quoted as saying “500 and above: no chance.”
It might be objected that Serena was “only” 16 at the time, assuming anyone had dared to mention Karsten Braasch at all this week, but female tennis players seem to experience pretty much the earliest chronological peak of playing ability outside gymnastics or thoroughbred horseracing. Being 35 years old, as Serena is now, doesn’t help anybody win in a sport involving strength and speed. McEnroe has clear justification for his belief that Serena would not be one of the 500 best players in a world of wide-open, all-genders tennis.
Megan McArdle agrees it takes nothing at all away from Serena Williams to say she’s not the best tennis player in the world:
“Best” is a relative value of course, not an absolute; Tyrannosaurus rex was one of the best in its field, 65 million years ago, but when conditions changed, poor T. rex went from industry leader to the ash heap of history. When we say that someone or something is “the best,” we always have to acknowledge that this judgment is highly dependent on the criteria we’re using to define excellence.
This is approximately the argument many of McEnroe’s critics seem to be making. Unable to refute his core point — that Serena Williams could not be a world champion if she were regularly competing against men — instead they’re asking why he would make that the standard for judging whether she’s the world’s best tennis player.
This leaves me just as confused as McEnroe was when the NPR interviewer asked him essentially the same question. Tennis, after all, is a court, a moderate amount of equipment, and some highly detailed rules for determining who wins. The best tennis player is the person who can most regularly defeat the other players under those rules. Unless some sort of terrible plague wipes out hundreds of top men’s tennis players, that person will never be Serena Williams.
[…]
We should all applaud Serena Williams for becoming the world’s best female tennis player. That’s a stunning achievement — a testament to her physical gifts and how hard she has worked to develop as a player. Williams has earned her titles, her money and her fame, and she deserves to bask in all of it. It is a compliment, and a true statement, to call her the best female tennis player. We won’t add anything to her achievement by subtracting “female” and turning the true accolade into false flattery.
