Pictures of height, majors, aces, DFs

Gary Duane

Gary Duane

Talk Tennis Guru
I started another thread last week. No pictures. I was still collecting data.

The first picture is of all the slam winners of the last 25 years or so. I left one guy out, Gonzalez, because his career all but ended in 1991. But if I am missing anyone else, or if the number of slams is wrong, let me know.

Height is in centimeters, from the ATP site. Some we might all disagree with, but it's a start.

I don't look at data this way. Too many rows packed together, too many columns. But I'm a bit too tired to hide data.

Green is from 6'1" down. So green shows the smaller players. ATP rounds off cms, but it puts the height pretty much in the right order.

Slam winners are red.

Obviously the data is skewed towards Fed/Nadal/Sampras, because those three are all listed the same height. But total slams are well represented by players 6'1" and under.

Note that the really tall guys who won majors are pretty much one slam wonders.

This might be the most obvious and least interesting view, but I'll use it to start out.
 
In order, by number of majors:

Slam%20number.png
 
In my eyes there are three sizes and would be good to highlight them to demonstrate height differences.
Small - below 6'1" {or 6'0"}
Goldern - 6'1 to 6'3"
Tall - over 6'3"
There's no way 185cm is small, not only in tennis but general. So this is a bit misleading in saying tall players generally only win 1 major since Graphite Era. It would be more correct to imply other than Agassi, Wawrinka and Hewitt are the only short ATP players winning multiple majors.

Note : I thought Becker was 6'3" (I've stood close to him) and Lendl is touch taller 6'3.5" to 6'4". I've stood near many pros in 80-90 and few in 00+ and their heights seem reasonable. I'm about 187cm.
 
Great work but official ATP data is player submitted and often wrong.

Celebheights is usually very accurate with celebrity and athlete heights. Murray himself has said he is 187.5 cm on twitter and on another occasion claimed to be 6'3 in shoes. https://imgur.com/E0T1QEM They list him at 6'1.8 on celebheights. (The oddly precise figure is due to his own "187.5" claim) Djokovic is listed at 6'1.5, Federer at 6'1. and Nadal at 6'0.25. Being around 6'1 and having seen all of the players I can say that this pretty much accurate. There is no way in particular Murray is 6'3.

Around 6'0 to 6'2 is best for movement and power combination. I'd rather be "too tall" than "too small" though. In the past, it seemed it was better to be smaller and move well than big and bomb serves in terms of winning majors (Borg, Agassi etc) but currently I think there is a better shot of a 6'6 guy winning a few than a 5'8 guy. Maybe a 5'11 guy like Agassi or Borg could still win in the modern game with the requisite talent.

A little above 6 feet will always be best though. It is not a coincidence that Federer, Nadal, Sampras, Djokovic etc are all this height.
 
PMChambers said:
In my eyes there are three sizes and would be good to highlight them to demonstrate height differences.
Small - below 6'1" {or 6'0"}
Goldern - 6'1 to 6'3"
Tall - over 6'3"
There's no way 185cm is small, not only in tennis but general. So this is a bit misleading in saying tall players generally only win 1 major since Graphite Era. It would be more correct to imply other than Agassi, Wawrinka and Hewitt are the only short ATP players winning multiple majors.
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You can draw your own conclusions. I'd just say that winning one major is only a bit better than coming close to winning one major, and the heights are all over the place. But when you get to the guys who win a ton of them, the height in general seems narrow.

Obviously I didn't put all the names there, which we pretty much could do if we are not looking at the other data. Gonzalez is not there because I needed a cut-off. There is a generalization about players getting taller, but Laver and Rosewall were outliers. You do have a lot of guys around 5'11 or 6'0 from the past winning a lot of majors, Wawrinka and Agassi being recent examples. The fact that Sampras, Nadal and Fed are all very close to the same height may just be a coincidence.

Whereas I think we might be pretty safe saying that close to 6 feet tall or a little taller is perhaps going to continue to be the best for movement, power and overall game.
Note : I thought Becker was 6'3" (I've stood close to him) and Lendl is touch taller 6'3.5" to 6'4". I've stood near many pros in 80-90 and few in 00+ and their heights seem reasonable. I'm about 187cm.
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The ATP is obviously going on inches, then rounds off, and it's worse because some players are obviously giving their height in cms, which are then rounded.

There is a potential error here of 2.54 cm. That's a lot.

I've seen other players standing next to each other. Shapo, I think, is listed at 6 foot even, while ADM (Alex de Minaur) is listed as 5'11".

At the end of this, they look VERY close in height:


Add to that that people are notoriously apt to exaggerate. When someone asks me my height, I say 5'11" I'm actually 179 cm., which is almost precisely 5'10.5". Inches are really imprecise. I can't go on cms, because the ATP is obviously rounding inches. Very irritating.

But I'm wary about "improving" the data, simply because it is all imprecise.
 
The question of the importance of height in the modern game is an interesting one, and it's not as straightforward as it's sometimes presented. Pardon if the following is a bit besides the intended point of the thread.

One of the main conundrums is that on the one hand, the amount of very tall players in the top 100 has drastically increased since the 90s, and across the tour very tall players (e.g. 6'4"–6'6") win more than even players at 6'1". On the other hand, at the very top of the game things appeared to stay more stable, favoring the 6'1" range.

Not entirely clear how these two facts reconcile.

Since 1990, the median height in the top 100 has gone up about an inch. The amount of players listed at 6'5" or above has blown up from 3% to 16%. Courtesy of Tennis Abstract, here's the relationship between win % and height across tour:

height-winperc.png

So for pro tennis in general, being above even 6'3" seems the most beneficial. Yet when we look at multiple slam winners, it still seems to center around 6'1". Could be several reasons for this. Firstly, to become an ATG you need a once-in-a-generation kind of talent. The distribution of height in the population follows a bell curve, and the pool of men out there who stand 6'1" is much much larger than the pool of 6'6" guys, so the likelihood of such an off-the-chart talent coming along in the former group should be much bigger. This could explain some of it. Or it could be that being very tall is mostly advantageous up to a certain point, but that it carries a ceiling. Whereas being 6'1" could cary fewer advantages for most players, but allow a higher ceiling for those who are truly gifted, such as a Fed or Rafa.

Obviously, a problem in focusing on the ATG crowd is that it's such a small sample that we can't make valid generalizations from looking at them. The way the trend lines are going, we should probably expect to see a dominant tall player soon. Perhaps Zverev will be the first.
 
@Gary Duane, you've went to a lot of trouble to post a lot of stuff and now creating a new thread.

I'm really interested in what you are saying, but for the life of me, I can't figure out what conclusion/hypothesis you are eluding to with all of this work/posts you are creating.

Can you say in one or two sentences what your hypothesis is?
 
mightyrick said:
@Gary Duane, you've went to a lot of trouble to post a lot of stuff and now creating a new thread.

I'm really interested in what you are saying, but for the life of me, I can't figure out what conclusion/hypothesis you are eluding to with all of this work/posts you are creating.

Can you say in one or two sentences what your hypothesis is?
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1. Aces per game have not changed much in the OE. Stats given to me by @Moose Malloy and @krosero (points per service game) suggest that the only guys who are out acing earlier guys are the giants, like Isner and Karlovic. Other than that, frequency of aces has not changed much.
2. The guys who ace most often are the tallest, although there is a huge amount of variation between players who are the same size. In other words, if you take all the best servers around 6'4 and compare aces with guys 5'10, the tall guys as a group ace more. (This is really Captain Obvious level, so no surprises.)
3. I personally like tracking (aces-DFs)/games, because I think it shows something extra. There are guys who get a ton of aces who also default a lot more. Tracking a list of most aces/game against most aces/DFs per game does not change order much, but a few people change in the list. For example, Sampras is way above Fed in aces. Subracting DFs, Sampras is still higher, but it is a lot closer. That would indicate that IF they were playing in the same era, we might want to take a really careful look at that.
4. What has changed dramatically - and I mean REALLY dramatically, is the the ratio of aces to DFs. Back in the 80s, for example, it was not unusual to see good servers serving nearly as many DFs. Today that is not the case. In general, the ratio keeps going up and has done so even since the 90s. My conclusion is that it is racket technology and strings. Also probably pretty obvious.
5. An interesting stat, but one that I have no seen, is DFs/game. You get a very different list, because now you see guys who simply don't want to give away points, ever.

That's more than you asked for. I actually have more ideas, but that is sort of basic.
 
Sysyphus said:
So for pro tennis in general, being above even 6'3" seems the most beneficial. Yet when we look at multiple slam winners, it still seems to center around 6'1". Could be several reasons for this.
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I also think success as a junior has to do with a lot of these taller guys that we see (many of whom don't win slams).

As a 12 or 14-year old, it probably is a pretty huge advantage to be several inches taller than your opponent (serve, groundstroke power, etc), and the guys that end up at 6'8" are probably already over 6' as a young junior, playing boys that are mid-5' range. These tall junior champions are then the ones that then get sponsored, their families continue supporting their tennis development (lessons, etc), and they are disproportionately likely to end up as (middling) pro servebots.

Would be interesting to also track the height of young (12, 14, 16-year old divisions) junior champions over the last couple of decades, to see if this might (partly) explain the height increase of pros. i.e. the juniors act as a funnel, through which (generally) the tallest pass through to become pros. Food for thought...
 
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IowaGuy said:
I also think success as a junior has to do with a lot of these taller guys that we see (many of whom don't win slams).

As a 12 or 14-year old, it probably is a pretty huge advantage to be several inches taller than your opponent (serve, groundstroke power, etc), and the guys that end up at 6'8" are probably already over 6' as a young junior, playing boys that are mid-5' range. These tall junior champions are then the ones that then get sponsored, their families continue supporting their tennis development (lessons, etc), and they are disproportionately likely to end up as (middling) pro servebots.

Would be interesting to also track the height of young (12, 14, 16-year old divisions) junior champions over the last couple of decades, to see if this might (partly) explain the height increase of pros. i.e. the juniors act as a funnel, through which (generally) the tallest pass through to become pros. Food for thought...
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I did not track the same stats for people before 1991, and in fact I did not include F. Gonzalez, whose career was over in 1991, I think. So I'm missing about 23 years, with the exception of Lendl, Becker and Edberg. Edberg's stats are seriously messed up. I was looking at aces and DFs.

I have info that suggests McEnroe was amazing. He might turn out to be, hands down, the most dangerous server of his size, only 5'11. So that leaves a number other players to add, just looking at height. Off the top of my head, players we are missing: Rosewall, Laver, Connors, Borg, Ashe, Newcombe, Wilander, Nastase. I need to look up heights, but I think Ashe was the only pretty tall guy. There are some other guys who only won one slam that I'm leaving out. I'll get them all eventually in another list.

But I think maybe we over-hype 6'1 because of Sampras, Fed and Nadal. 6'2 is obviously a great height (Djokovic), 6 others since 1991, and although 6' is a bit rare over the last 25 years (I only have Wawrinka and Ferrero), there are 4 at 5'11, including Agassi who sucked up 8 majors. So I still think the "sweet spot" for top tennis players may not have changed much at all. People forget about Kramer and Pancho Gonzalez, both tall men.

I think you may be right about guys who are tall early. This does make me wonder why this was not true in the past - not many giants. We could ask the same thing about the NBA, but I think greater height there is a lot more obvious.

I think we will have more answers in another 10 years.

Who is going to break through next? Someone taller or shorter than average, for tennis players?
 
Gary Duane said:
Not sure what you are looking for.
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Exactly the statement below.

Gary Duane said:
Shorter: over the last few decades aces have not changed much, but DFs keep going down. And ATGs tend to have very low DFs per game.
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Although frankly, I'm not sure you'd need statistics to back up such a statement. At least I would take it as truth without much evidence. At least for the last 30 years.

For your point regarding aces not changing much, it makes sense to me. Players earlier in the older era (save a few exceptions) served slower, but the non-clay surfaces were faster. Now, the surfaces are slower and more homogenized, but the players are taller, stronger, with better equipment. So they serve with higher pace and more spin -- overcoming the slower surfaces.

For your last point of ATGs not DF'ing much. I think that much be pretty obvious. It might be interesting to see if there is any ATG (even pre-Open era) who DFed a lot. I just can't imagine it. The margins are far too slim at the top of the game to have such a weakness.
 
Gary Duane said:
but DFs keep going down
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Could this simply be explained by less S&V than in years past?

When players S&V on both serves, there is likely more incentive to put a little extra on the 2nd serve.

One quick way to check this hypothesis would be DF% at Wimbledon from 1980-2000 (where many players came to net on 2nd serve), compared to DF% at French Open from same era (not much 2nd serve net rushing).

Food for thought...
 
IowaGuy said:
Could this simply be explained by less S&V than in years past?

When players S&V on both serves, there is likely more incentive to put a little extra on the 2nd serve.

One quick way to check this hypothesis would be DF% at Wimbledon from 1980-2000 (where many players came to net on 2nd serve), compared to DF% at French Open from same era (not much 2nd serve net rushing).

Food for thought...
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I don't think that has anything to do with it, by itself. Think about it. If guys are getting more and more aces/DFs, which is clearly true, then game% should go up and up and up. Fewer mistakes on serve. The game would be so serve dominant that no one would have a chance returning. Yet Nadal won 50% of his games in 2008, something that probably was all but impossible in the past, except on clay, and possibly also by Borg at times.

What is allowing returners to fight back? More spin and pace on return, which is the exact thing that is driving players back.

You have serves with more and more pace. Less time for servers to get into the net. If it's an ace, with more pace, even harder to get the serve back. If unreturnable, no problem. Weak return, put away on second shot, often no volley even necessary.

But if the ball is even playable, now you have guys with 2HBH hitting open stance lasars, with a ton of top spin, and you even see Wawrinka do that with the 1HBH. Look at some matches from the 70s. You won't see tweeners, you won't see players hitting open stance backhands with the old, heavy rackets. Less speed on most serves, but mainly less speed and control on 2nd serves, returns much weaker.

It's the equipment. It changed the game, and poly I believe was a huge change, as big or bigger than anything previous.

So long ago there were spaghetti strings, and they were around just enough for people to see how they could change the came. Then they were outlawed.

Poly changed the game just as much, and it's legal.
 
Gary Duane said:
I don't think that has anything to do with it, by itself. Think about it. If guys are getting more and more aces/DFs, which is clearly true, then game% should go up and up and up. Fewer mistakes on serve. The game would be so serve dominant that no one would have a chance returning. Yet Nadal won 50% of his games in 2008, something that probably was all but impossible in the past, except on clay, and possibly also by Borg at times.
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IowaGuy hypothesis: slowing courts and lack of S&V on 2nd serve = less incentive to hit killer 2nd serve. This is primary reason that DF in 1980's/1990's were higher than in today's era.

Imagine you're playing Wimbledon in 1985. It's your 2nd serve. Either you come in yourself (and face a pretty good return since they're geared up for your 2nd serve), or hit a floaty 2nd serve where your opponent is likely to try to come in. This gives an incentive to hit a hell of a 2nd serve. In fact, many 2nd serves at Wimbledon were slices (which were followed to the net), which is not nearly as common when watching today's tennis.

Now imagine your'e playing the French open in 2018. Court is slow as hell. Your 2nd serve is merely the first shot of a 25+ shot rally, and is unlikely to be attacked unless you're playing a very top player. So you simply hit a real spinny, slow 2nd serve which starts the point in a neutral position. Your biggest incentive is not to miss the 2nd serve, since it's unlikely to be attacked.

How might we test this hypothesis with the data that is available? I think an easy test is compare DF at Wimbledon 1980-2000 with DF at French Open 1980-2000. Another test might be to test the speed difference between 1st and 2nd serve from the different eras. My hypothesis would be that the difference between 1st and 2nd serve in 1980-2000 (attacking tennis) is likely closer than in today's era where we commonly see a huge 1st serve but slow, spinny 2nd serves (defensive tennis).

For example, Sampras US Open 2002 against Agassi 1st serve speed: 115 mph, avg 2nd serve speed: 105 mph.
Take a look at the 2nd serve he hit when serving for the 1st set at 27:30 in the video below (DF). Again at 28:30 he goes for a huge 2nd serve (109 MPH ace this time). Again at 29:20 he goes for another huge 2nd serve (DF). Again at 30:50 he hits another huge 2nd serve (ace). Only at 32:15 does he hit a 2nd serve that is under 100 mph.

2 DF and 2 aces on 2nd serves in single game! Don't see many guys on today's slow surfaces going for big 2nd serves like that!

So, I think it is likely that it's the tactics, not the equipment, that are responsible for the trend you're seeing in Aces/DF. Because, as you said earlier, the aces are roughly staying the same. It's the DF that are decreasing. But, this can be (possibly) explained by the less aggressive 2nd serves in today's defensive tennis vs. the aggressive 2nd serves used in 1980's/1990's attacking tennis.

 
Sysyphus said:
The question of the importance of height in the modern game is an interesting one, and it's not as straightforward as it's sometimes presented. Pardon if the following is a bit besides the intended point of the thread.

One of the main conundrums is that on the one hand, the amount of very tall players in the top 100 has drastically increased since the 90s, and across the tour very tall players (e.g. 6'4"–6'6") win more than even players at 6'1". On the other hand, at the very top of the game things appeared to stay more stable, favoring the 6'1" range.

Not entirely clear how these two facts reconcile.

Since 1990, the median height in the top 100 has gone up about an inch. The amount of players listed at 6'5" or above has blown up from 3% to 16%. Courtesy of Tennis Abstract, here's the relationship between win % and height across tour:

height-winperc.png

So for pro tennis in general, being above even 6'3" seems the most beneficial. Yet when we look at multiple slam winners, it still seems to center around 6'1". Could be several reasons for this. Firstly, to become an ATG you need a once-in-a-generation kind of talent. The distribution of height in the population follows a bell curve, and the pool of men out there who stand 6'1" is much much larger than the pool of 6'6" guys, so the likelihood of such an off-the-chart talent coming along in the former group should be much bigger. This could explain some of it. Or it could be that being very tall is mostly advantageous up to a certain point, but that it carries a ceiling. Whereas being 6'1" could cary fewer advantages for most players, but allow a higher ceiling for those who are truly gifted, such as a Fed or Rafa.

Obviously, a problem in focusing on the ATG crowd is that it's such a small sample that we can't make valid generalizations from looking at them. The way the trend lines are going, we should probably expect to see a dominant tall player soon. Perhaps Zverev will be the first.
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Good poast.

I do think there's a lot of emphasis on height compared to other anthropometric measures are basically forgotten cause there's no data even when it can be pretty important. Many important things in tennis are very multifactorial. Then there's physiological stuff, muscle composition, and joint and muscle flexibility which all may interact somewhat differently with height and have distinct advantages and disadvantages in certain ranges of height. Body composition probably also partially determines which technique is most efficient. Think of the difference between Kyrgios and Gonzo forehands and their respecitve upper body development.

One thing that is also very overlooked is how height also means you have a huge degree of freedom, your swing radius is bigger, so the margin of error is also going to be bigger with the same timing differences. This is why shorter players are definitely more likely to be clean hitters.


My best guess is Monfils is about the tallest a player can be without having his ceiling compromised, and even Monfils isn't that fast on the first 2 meters.

I think this dataset also shows some outliers in serving ability by height, and I think some data on serve speed may also be a decent thing to do and thus you may look at some technical similarities to see what allows for max serve speed, which I think is easier to attain than the Federesque accuracy which everyone is almost talking about it.
 
One last thing for now. Maybe it's better to look at data from HC matches only, as there's gonna be big differences between players in surface distribution of matches.
 
Red Rick said:
Where do you get the height data from? Richard Krajicek is way taller than 188 and all sources I see when I google have him at 196 or 198
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ATP, but that's no guarantee that I didn't mistype. 188 certainly sounds too low. I'm not as familiar with cm, only knowing that 185 is 6'1. 188 would be 6'2. That's too short. His at leat Kyrigios's height.

Yikes, thanks for catching that. Ivanisevic is listed as the same height as Kyrgios. Krajicek is about an inch taller.

Slam winners over 6'3 should be, in this order:

Cilic 198
DelPo 198
Krajicek 196
Ivanisevic 193
Stich 193
Safin 193

Let me know if I missed anyone else.
 
IowaGuy said:
IowaGuy hypothesis: slowing courts and lack of S&V on 2nd serve = less incentive to hit killer 2nd serve. This is primary reason that DF in 1980's/1990's were higher than in today's era.
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My data simply shows that Pete and Roger have a different way of playing. I don't know if it reflects differences in the two eras. I probably should add when all these players broke into the ATP, to give a better idea where they belong. I'm eyeballing it right now, probably not a good idea.

At this moment I'm thinking simply about one factor: How many times per game do these guys DF?

In the early 80s it was a LOT more. Ratio of aces/DFs is lower, without any doubt.

This is not pretty, but it gets at this one factor:

player DF/g%
Nadal 0.132
Federer 0.149
Bruguera 0.160
Chang 0.160
Roddick 0.161
Costa 0.170
Djokovic 0.179
Ferrero 0.182
Safin 0.184
DelPo 0.196
Kuerten 0.197
Agassi 0.201
Murray 0.201
Muster 0.202
Courier 0.206
Moya 0.206
Wawrinka 0.206
Lendl 0.217
Cilic 0.220
T. Johansson 0.232
Gaudio 0.257
Krajicek 0.282
Sampras 0.282
Hewitt 0.283
Edberg 0.299
Stich 0.312
Kafelnikov 0.329
Becker 0.368
Korda 0.379
Ivanisevic 0.386

The whole spread is from around .13 to .38, and I'm not sure if we are seeing something connected to era or to play style - or both?

Nadal is right at the top, Federer very close to the top, Sampras pretty far down the list. I'm guessing Fed would still DF less in the 90s, and Sampras would DF more today. Different personality, different style of play.

When we look at what I'm counting as true free points, where either it's an ace or a DF, when subtracting DFs from aces and dividing by games, Sampras is 4th on the list of slam winners. Fed is 10th.

If you DF a lot, that number goes down. Lots of aces, obviously it goes up. If you DF more per game, but your aces per game are very high (Sampras), you're doing fine. And if some of those DFs are tactical, no problem.

I do think that it's important that of all slam winners Roddick is absolutely at the top of this list, with a net free point in .75% of all games. I also think it's important that Fed and Sampras, of the top 10 guys, are the shortest guys, easily.
Imagine you're playing Wimbledon in 1985. It's your 2nd serve. Either you come in yourself (and face a pretty good return since they're geared up for your 2nd serve), or hit a floaty 2nd serve where your opponent is likely to try to come in. This gives an incentive to hit a hell of a 2nd serve. In fact, many 2nd serves at Wimbledon were slices (which were followed to the net), which is not nearly as common when watching today's tennis.

Now imagine your'e playing the French open in 2018. Court is slow as hell. Your 2nd serve is merely the first shot of a 25+ shot rally, and is unlikely to be attacked unless you're playing a very top player. So you simply hit a real spinny, slow 2nd serve which starts the point in a neutral position. Your biggest incentive is not to miss the 2nd serve, since it's unlikely to be attacked.
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Here I'd like to look at clay vs. grass. I can give you some data on that later, but I'll tell you already that aces are highest on grass, game% is highest on grass, ratio of aces/DFs is highest on grass. DFs per game will not change much, but with aces going down, and games going down, the big picture is pretty obvious.
How might we test this hypothesis with the data that is available? I think an easy test is compare DF at Wimbledon 1980-2000 with DF at French Open 1980-2000. Another test might be to test the speed difference between 1st and 2nd serve from the different eras. My hypothesis would be that the difference between 1st and 2nd serve in 1980-2000 (attacking tennis) is likely closer than in today's era where we commonly see a huge 1st serve but slow, spinny 2nd serves (defensive tennis).
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All interesting ideas, but you'd have to find the data.
So, I think it is likely that it's the tactics, not the equipment, that are responsible for the trend you're seeing in Aces/DF. Because, as you said earlier, the aces are roughly staying the same. It's the DF that are decreasing. But, this can be (possibly) explained by the less aggressive 2nd serves in today's defensive tennis vs. the aggressive 2nd serves used in 1980's/1990's attacking tennis.
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I think it's both, because there is a huge difference between the early 80s and the 90s, but there was a lot of attacking tennis in both eras.

Not so much difference between the 90s and today, but probably some.
 
@IowaGuy
@Gary Duane

I came across a stat which sort of summarizes how different clay and grass tactics used to be.

Chang, the champion at the 1989 French Open had 6 aces and 9 double faults for the entire tournament.

Becker, the champion at 1989 Wimbledon, had 89 aces and 60 double faults for the entire tournament.
 
@Gary Duane
Good info! I categorized each player as either a basliner or S&V.
B Nadal 0.132
B Federer 0.149
B Bruguera 0.160
B Chang 0.160
B Roddick 0.161
B Costa 0.170
B Djokovic 0.179
B Ferrero 0.182
B Safin 0.184
B DelPo 0.196
B Kuerten 0.197
B Agassi 0.201
B Murray 0.201
B Muster 0.202
B Courier 0.206
B Moya 0.206
B Wawrinka 0.206
B Lendl 0.217
B Cilic 0.220
B T. Johansson 0.232
B Gaudio 0.257
S&V Krajicek 0.282
S&V Sampras 0.282
B Hewitt 0.283
S&V Edberg 0.299
S&V Stich 0.312
B Kafelnikov 0.329
S&V Becker 0.368
B Korda 0.379
S&V Ivanisevic 0.386
 
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Chang and Bruguera might be the exceptions that prove the rule. They both have very low DF, yet were in an era of non-poly strings. Therefore, IMHO this is support of the hypothesis that style of play affects DF more than poly/non-poly.

Chang and Bruguera had very little incentive to hit aggressive 2nd serves. On the other hand, a guy like Ivanisevic doesn't want to get into a baseline rally on his 2nd serve and is likely coming in behind it, therefore he hits it more aggressively.
 
Moose Malloy said:
@IowaGuy
@Gary Duane

I came across a stat which sort of summarizes how different clay and grass tactics used to be.

Chang, the champion at the 1989 French Open had 6 aces and 9 double faults for the entire tournament.

Becker, the champion at 1989 Wimbledon, had 89 aces and 60 double faults for the entire tournament.
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Exactly! Chang (defensive player on slow surface) has no incentive for aggression on 2nd serve. Becker (aggressive player on fast surface) has large incentive to hit aggressive 2nd serve. This is true regardless of era.

DF stats can therefore be skewed by faster surfaces in previous era (AO, USO, Wimbledon) and more S&V play versus today's slow courts and more defensive play.
 
People always talk about Sampras 2nd serve being so great, but it doesn't come out that high. Nadal being top of the list naturally means ground game is more important for that stat, but Sampras wasn't a slouch from the back of the court either so you wouldn't expect him to be up there with the likes of Richard Gasquet. He's far behind Roddick even though he had a better game to back it up.
 
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