There is no need to go back 50 years, and I don’t believe that slower conditions (humoring for a moment the notion that they are a lot slower now) should be a hindrance to longevity. If anything, I might believe the exact opposite. Long term stamina does not go down appreciably at 30, and in many cases it may even increase with respect to early 20s, which is why endurance sports like marathon running and cycling often feature 30+ year old athletes doing very well. It is reaction time and reflexes that go down first, and these are much more necessary in faster conditions than in slower ones. Vilas continued playing with some success until his mid 30s, almost exclusively on clay, the slower the better. And in the early 90s you may still remember Lendl at the age of 32 beating none other than Bruguera on clay, but also occasionally beating guys like Becker, Edberg or Sampras at 30 and 31 on faster surfaces. Or Connors still playing on tour into his 40s. Or Sampras winning the USO a few months before his 31st birthday. That wasn’t 50 years ago. These are just examples I can think of right away, I am sure if you dig into tennis records you will find plenty of other examples to conclude that a 30 year old tennis player is often perfectly capable of beating younger players ranked above him.
You can find isolated examples of 30+ year old playing great but overall you'd have to go as far as 1969 to find a (relatively early blooming) tennis great who was playing at a level comparable to his youth for a substantial period of time, not a few tourneys/matches in a year.
Also I don't give a crap whatsoever how cyclicst, marathon runners etc. do in their 30s (and beyond), why should I base my expectations of how a given
tennis player would do at the age of 29-30 on how cyclist and marathons do at such an age when I have plenty of examples from you know
tennis to draw conclusions from and make comparisons to.
In what sense the game is slower today is also unclear to me, considering that players are dealing with balls that come at them a lot faster than they did in, say, 1970. Would the 30 year olds today do better if the courts and the balls further enhanced the effect of the much harder hitting we see today?
The conditions today are slower and tougher on the body than they were in 1970, again:
-Most tournaments today are on played HC which has been slowed down considerably, can you think of any surface more damaging/grueling to players than a slooow HC? A medium-fast HC is a different matter entirely as the points are usually short but
-Carpet is out as a surface
-Grass has been slowed down
-They use heavier balls
So basically you have CC style long drawn out rallies (no first strike tennis, no serve and volley, no short rallies etc.) on freakin HC for most of the year, if that isn't a recipe for disaster to player's bodies then I don't know what is.
Could 2011 Federer beat 2006 Federer? Not very often, but sometimes. Maybe 20-25 percent of the time. It should be clear I am not speaking of any frozen version at a particular level of play, but of any random version of a player taken on a random day in 2011 and 2006, which is how real tennis matches are played. They are not played between idealized versions of players.
I'd wager 2011 would beat 2006 Federer 10-15% of the time since he would be playing a better version of himself which can be one of the most lopsided match-ups in tennis (like say Becker-Sampras when Pete came into his own).
Again, I agree that Fed can still play great tennis occasionaly but these days he struggles to keep up his level not just from tourney to tourney but heck in the same match from set to set.
And that is why no sweeping conclusions can be drawn from the fact that this player at this age, on a given day, had match points or beat another player at another age, if only because this player at this age could also beat himself at another age, on a given day, as we all know.
I didn't draw a sweeping conclusion, as I said too many variables come into play in any given match, especially matches between top players.
I claimed however that if a 30 year old Fed beat Novak in a slam match and had MPs in another one then saying that a 24-25 year old Fed wouldn't stand a chance against a 24-25 year old Novak is beyond stupid, I still strongly maintain that.
The other notion, the one that assumes tennis spent about 100 years in paleolithic prehistory and then underwent a sudden technological transformation, coupled with a kind of mutation of human physical capabilities that changed its essence and makes it impossible for 30 year olds to remain competitive, is also something I have a hard time understanding, but that is a different topic, on a par with many other bizarre but widespread beliefs, like the belief that human beings today are vastly more intelligent than, say, 300 years ago.
That never was my argument, I said
conditions have changed not what it takes to succeed in pro tennis. If Laver, Rosewall, Gonzales, Mcenroe, Borg etc. grew up today(in modern tennis) I could see all of them being mutliple slam winners, reaching #1 etc. With their talent/skill/dedication/mental strength they would have been great in any era they grew up in.
However do I think they could play at such a high level in 30 and beyond as they did (Laver winning a Calendar Grand slam and Pancho being competitive into almost his 40s? IMO no, modern tennis is just too grueling to allow that kind of longevity.
