While I acknowledge that Federer's game is truly spectacular and arguably better rounded than Pete Sampras', I think that we need to consider the level of competition that they played against. Sampras played against HOFers Ivan Lendl, Agassi, Stefan Edberg, Boris Becker and Courier. There were also a lot of other Grand Slam-winning players like Michael Chang, Gustavo Kuerten, Sergi Bruguera, Thomas Muster, etc. In contrast, Federer is dominating an era devoid of serve-and-volleyers and with just three double-major players (Agassi, Hewitt and Safin). While Federer is responsible for holding back the rest of the field, there are simply no great players out there to challenge him. So, given his competition, Federer would need to win a lot more than 14 Slams to surpass Sampras' career accomplishments. (Of course, winning all four in one year would change things.) -- Allan Hee, Berkeley, Calif.
I'm surprised at how often this critique gets raised. There's something tautological about this whole discussion. If one player is swooping up Grand Slam trophies like Halloween candy (please be kind enough to note the seasonal imagery), obviously the list of other active winners will be a small one.
In the case of Sampras, by the time he was cooking in 1990, Lendl, John McEnroe and even Becker were definitely on the decline. And Kuerten, Bruguera, Chang and Muster won their only Slams on clay, a surface on which Sampras was all but a non-entity, so is it really worth counting them? In the prime of his career, Sampras' best contemporaries (we don't dare call them rivals) were whom? I say Edberg and Courier early on. Agassi, Patrick Rafter, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, maybe Goran Ivanisevic throughout. Maybe Hewitt and Safin at the end? Compare that to Federer's "supporting cast" of Hewitt, Roddick, Rafael Nadal, Safin, Agassi and maybe Juan Ferrero, and I don't see such an enormous difference.
