kiki
Banned
There have been GOATS, great champions, great players, can´t miss misses and there have been a select group of men and female that just took the sport higher, deeper than what they found when they started playing.
This is not a thread on who was the greatest in terms of peak play or achievements, rather on big bang influence in the course of tennis history.
To examine it, one neds to have a very long time wise perspective and try to select those moments, those years that made tennis depart from one stage and reach a new one
and those technical, mediatic or social issues that had the most overall impact.
For starting, we have the first truly student of this game whose personality was also so brilliant that himself tennis took another dimension; from the country clubs and poorly covered international competitions to the mass media new and exciting world and the normal people´s general interest.Of course, according to the reach and possibilities at that moment.Bill Tilden for the amateur game was this man, and Jack Kramer ( with the help of another star personality, Pancho Gonzales) was the man whose vision took pro tennis into another echelon.Kramer also accomplished a big technical revolution when he adapted % tennis and S&V and made a brand new mixture out of it.
Those guys had a global impact covering many aspects of the development of the game.And it was Bjorn Borg, in the middle 70´s the man who took the relay and put tennis into another dimension. Basically, the same dimension off which current players basically live from right now, even if 40 yrs later.And not only in terms of mere popularity but also in terms of the way the game changed, with top spin and two fisted BH.
So, we see that Tilden,Kramer and Borg´s influence is firmly established ON court and OFF court.
In the ladies, I think Lenglen, Connolly and King had that same impact, also considering the discriminatory situation that sportswomen had to endure through many decades.
Those are, IMO, the big influencers in global terms as well as historical eras.
Of course, there have been some others with a great impact as well, but more focused on minorities, be it racial (Ashe, who knows if La Nin ) or geographical ( Hoad and Rosewall with Court for Australia, Vilas for Latin America,Santana for Spain,The three Mousketters for France,Becker/Graf for Germany and, of course, Wills and later on Connors&Evert for the USA, maybe Kournikova for Russia).Social impact like the Doherty brothers in the very limited tennis world of their time.Or even, like it was the case of Navratilova and Lendl, their impact on modern training and diet.
This is not a thread on who was the greatest in terms of peak play or achievements, rather on big bang influence in the course of tennis history.
To examine it, one neds to have a very long time wise perspective and try to select those moments, those years that made tennis depart from one stage and reach a new one
and those technical, mediatic or social issues that had the most overall impact.
For starting, we have the first truly student of this game whose personality was also so brilliant that himself tennis took another dimension; from the country clubs and poorly covered international competitions to the mass media new and exciting world and the normal people´s general interest.Of course, according to the reach and possibilities at that moment.Bill Tilden for the amateur game was this man, and Jack Kramer ( with the help of another star personality, Pancho Gonzales) was the man whose vision took pro tennis into another echelon.Kramer also accomplished a big technical revolution when he adapted % tennis and S&V and made a brand new mixture out of it.
Those guys had a global impact covering many aspects of the development of the game.And it was Bjorn Borg, in the middle 70´s the man who took the relay and put tennis into another dimension. Basically, the same dimension off which current players basically live from right now, even if 40 yrs later.And not only in terms of mere popularity but also in terms of the way the game changed, with top spin and two fisted BH.
So, we see that Tilden,Kramer and Borg´s influence is firmly established ON court and OFF court.
In the ladies, I think Lenglen, Connolly and King had that same impact, also considering the discriminatory situation that sportswomen had to endure through many decades.
Those are, IMO, the big influencers in global terms as well as historical eras.
Of course, there have been some others with a great impact as well, but more focused on minorities, be it racial (Ashe, who knows if La Nin ) or geographical ( Hoad and Rosewall with Court for Australia, Vilas for Latin America,Santana for Spain,The three Mousketters for France,Becker/Graf for Germany and, of course, Wills and later on Connors&Evert for the USA, maybe Kournikova for Russia).Social impact like the Doherty brothers in the very limited tennis world of their time.Or even, like it was the case of Navratilova and Lendl, their impact on modern training and diet.
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