Should Sampras really be placed amongst the GOATs?

[World Beater]

Originally Posted by pc1

I have a question for you. You are throwing out some stats but what about the players that may have better stats than Federer like Bill Tilden for example. Below is the info on Tilden and Federer taken from a thread I started a few months ago. The information on Federer is should be correct since I edited it a few minutes ago.


Edit-Corrected the information on Federer. It should be up to date as of December 3, 2012.

So all of you. Please discuss. Do you go by simple accomplishments and stats or do you decide otherwise? I believe Tilden would have done extremely well today. He was a gifted athlete and perhaps even more than that he was a great tennis analyst and studied the game, always trying to improve.

I have viewed footage of tilden, but i dont find him particularly athletic or nimble, flexible compared to the athletes of today.

He seems a bit gangly and not as fast as say for example borg or laver on the court, or as agile/fluid as federer.

But that is besides the point.

Comparig either fed/samp to tilden is very difficult because the structure of global tennis landscape has changed significantly over many generations between these players. Also the technology, and the surfaces are different.

Comparin federer to sampras, however is not as difficult because you are really only talking about at most one generation in between the two players, if you can call it that.

Much of the criteria used to compare federer to sampras is quite valid given the fact that the structure of the ATP and ITF hasnt changed too much.

Therefore using numbers to compare leaves less room for interpretation because the variables havent changed as much between federer to sampras...as say federer/sampras to tilden.