Yup, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Jimbo fan. But I like to think I'm reasonably objective about his and the other early Open Era guys' standing among later generations of top dogs. Mac, Connors, Borg, Nasty, Vitas, Newk, Ashe, Vilas - those guys paved the road our latter day stat/records gobbling favorites are walking. They got a lot of modern players paid with their efforts before the sport started to make sense of itself and offer more stable bases for evaluation starting in the mid 80s, and in particular from 1990 onward.
Ha, I was only half being serious, my comment was made mostly in jest. I don't doubt your objectivity at all. As has become clear in our future debates since then regarding Nadal vs Djoker at USO (and both vs Agassi) and in the rivalries thread regarding Nole vs Fed or against each man vs Nadal we just have a slight difference in philosophy that tends to cause minor rifts in our otherwise very similar rankings.
When two players are fairly close in career, I tend to value body of work, consistency, and look at overall pure raw numbers vs the field to separate the two, while you tend to put a larger emphasis on isolated instances of big matches to see who did best when the lights were on brightest, and more heavily weigh head to head if in the same era. You also like to rate off court elements such as impact on the sport, cultural transcendence, value against the general public more so than I do.
I think you could sort of say we are a spectrum:
On one end you have Timenz who is purely 100% about raw numbers, body of work, and totality of accomplishments.
Next you have me who values most of that, but places a much higher degree of emphasis on wins (especially at slams) vs Runner-Ups as shown by his valuation of a Slam Final being worth 60% of a Slam Win. This takes into account a small degree of cultural significance/impact/perception, but more largely weights the actual numbers.
Next you have you who values wins in a similar manner to me, but everything else to a lesser degree than I do instead favoring some more of the mainstream tenants such as the big match, the head to head, and non-tangible elements like impact.
On the other end you have the mainstream community which pretty much values nothing besides Slam wins and head-to-head and even views Slam Final loses as actually a detriment against a player.
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